Rod Dreher discusses his book Live Not by Lies, dedicated to Father Tomislav Kolakovich, who organized underground Catholic resistance against Nazi and Soviet regimes. Dreher argues the West faces a similar totalitarian threat from wokeness and critical race theory, with only 10% of Christians aware of it. He calls for building underground networks now, before persecution arrives.
You dedicate your book— I always look at dedications— to Father Tomislav Kolaković, 1906 to 1990. Who was he?
He was a Croatian Jesuit priest who was doing anti-Nazi work in his own city, home city of Zagreb, in 1943 when he got a tip-off that the Gestapo was coming for him. So he escaped, went to his mother's homeland, Slovakia, and adopted her last name, Kolakovich. And he began teaching in a Catholic university in Bratislava. He told his students, the good news is the Germans are going to lose this war. The bad news is the Soviets are going to be running this country when it's over, and the first thing they're going to do is persecute the Church. So we have to be ready. So what Father Kolakovich did was organize small groups of dedicated young Catholics who would come together to talk about very earnestly what was happening in their society and what they should do about it as faithful Catholics and patriots. And they would also, Dennis, learn things like how to withstand an interrogation. His group spread all over the country within 2 years. The Catholic bishops chastised him. They told him, Father, you're scaring people, you're alarming people, it will never happen here. But he understood the Soviet mindset, so he kept doing his work. Sure enough, when the Iron Curtain fell over Czechoslovakia, the first thing the communists did, they came after the church. And because Father Kolakovich had prepared people, the Slovak underground church was one of the strongest in the entire Soviet bloc. So I dedicate the book to Father Kolakovich because I believe that we are in a Kolakovich moment now in the West, and Christians, Jews, everyone of good will who can see, who can read the signs of the times, need to start organizing now for the resistance.
So here's a question for you: how many Christians would agree with you? What percentage?
Well, I have to say, Dennis, and it depresses me to say it, I think probably only a small number, about 10%. But let me tell you this, this book of mine, the Live Not by Lies, where I lay all this out, it has been by far my best-selling book. I've sold about just shy of 120,000 copies. With zero press attention from the mainstream media, with the exception of Tucker Carlson. And that tells me that there are a lot of Christians who recognize that something bad is coming and they want to get ready for it. And believe it or not, I've had people like secular left people like Bret Weinstein, his wife Heather Hying— they're both secular leftists— they read from my book on their radio show because they've been right on the front lines battling wokeness. They recognize it as totalitarianism, as I do, and they say we have to be allies. Barry Weiss, secular lesbian Jewish, she said the same thing. She said, if you told me 2 years ago that Rod Dreher and I were going to be on the same side of an issue, I wouldn't have believed it, but here we are.
I know them both. It's a very important thing you said. I just want my listeners to know they could learn the whole Brett Weinstein story in No Safe Spaces. Dennis Prager, the movie made with Adam Carolla and myself. And there's the largest single segment of the movie is the Bret Weinstein story. The professor of biology who would not leave the campus when all whites were told to leave for a day. His life had been spent on the liberal left and he was cursed at and his life was such danger he could not show up at his campus. Lest he be hurt or even killed. So he's the definition, and I admire the man tremendously, this is not to put him down, but there's an old dark definition of a conservative: a liberal who was mugged. And that is what happened to him. And I give him great credit because of his courage. So I agree with you, 10% sounds like an operative figure of Christians who are awake to the threat of the left. Why are 90% not?
Because it's too frightening for them, Dennis, to be honest. People want to believe that the threats they see out there from wokeness, from, you know, critical race theory, from transgenderism and the rest, is a passing fad, and that they We don't have to do anything about it. Just sit tight and wait and this too shall pass. But it's not gonna happen. And I was warned when I went to Central Europe, Eastern Europe to interview for this book, people who had been dissidents under communism. They told me, you shouldn't expect that most of the Christians in our countries stood up to the communists. Everybody conformed because it was easy to conform. Keep your head down, don't say anything. These people stood up. And they weren't— it wasn't only Christians who stood up. There were Jews, there were secularists who, some of whom were on the left, but they did not want to live with totalitarianism. One of the great—
hold on, remember where we're at here. They didn't want to raise their heads. America Today. The book is up at DennisPrager.com, Live Not by Lies.
Life, Legacy, and a Dangerous Mission in the Soviet Union | Sunday Fireside Chat
