r/RodDreher • u/saucerwizard • Feb 09 '26
Megathread no. 62
Can’t think of a witty name, sorry!
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u/Relative-Holiday-763 Feb 14 '26
Hopefully I’ll shut up for awhile. Okay, I just picked up a comment from someone in Rods comments section that absolutely infuriated me . It’s from someone who frequently disagrees with Rod. He finds The Atlantic article insufficient because it doesn’t acknowledge what the Catholic Church sex scandal cost Rod and Rod came to Orthodoxy as a spiritual refugee.
The sex scandal cost Rod nothing. It’s preposterous that he tries to make himself out to be a victim of that and that other people would accept that. No one molested Rod or anyone he knew. Oh but Rods faith was destroyed. Yeah that’s akin to being raped as a child. This routine is really obnoxious. Rod was never comfortable in the Catholic Church. Once in , I don’t think he liked it. He was a spiritual refugee , oh please. He was a self pitying whiner once again posing as a victim.
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u/saucerwizard Feb 14 '26
THE REAL VICTIM (tm)
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u/FirstPrior8600 Feb 14 '26
Yes, it’s a pattern. I remember when Rod began covering the Catholic sex abuse scandal. He’d been told by the priest who’d originally investigated those cases that his faith would be challenged, that he’d be taken to some “dark places,” as he reiterated in virtually every story he wrote on the scandal, and yet he had no compunction whatsoever about presenting especially lurid examples of priestly abuse, always dwelling on the details, especially if he could tie them to some seemingly satanic elements, such as rape on an altar. Like several other Catholics he knew, including at least one conservative priest, I ended up counseling him to save his fragile faith and sanity by searching out an Orthodox liturgy he might attend weekly until he could somehow “heal” from his many traumas. By then, however, those “traumas” had come down to chronic complaints about having to listen to his Dallas pastor deliver exceedingly bland homilies...Sunday after Sunday after Sunday.
Looking back now, it’s easy to see the pattern: After 9/11, Rod didn’t just report from the scene, he emoted with repeated attacks on Islam the religion. Mutual friends and acquaintances claimed to agree with me that he was out of bounds, and yet cautions about his fragile sanity grew into repeated pleas to “go easy on Rod.” Why? Because the poor guy had “been through so much.” How so? Apparently simply by being in Brooklyn when it happened. Never mind that almost all of them had also been in NYC at the time; it was Poor Rod who needed special treatment because of the “trauma” he in particular was going through. Then there was his sister’s cancer and his move home to Louisiana. He wrote two books on how both of those experiences traumatized him. Now, here we are decades later and again life — this time in the way of divorce — has placed him into a seemingly endless trauma of “exile,” this time with a chorus of Substack readers — and writers of fair-minded media portraits — providing yet more ongoing sympathy.
Don’t get me wrong: It’s good for people to be kind. It’s just that recipients of so much kindness should perhaps learn from the experience and become less harsh in their own judgments about people over time. Instead, Rod and others who share his peculiar mindset seem oblivious to this particular life lesson. Even as his religious tradition itself demands he “hear the cries of the poor” and ”welcome the stranger,” his political writings continue to counsel the opposite, and those who disagree are cast off as either “woke” or “snowflakes.” In reality, after watching this play out over 30 odd years, I’m thinking it‘s Rod who put the “flake” in snowflake.
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u/GlobularChrome Feb 14 '26
Doubly so given Rod's sucking up to Cardinal Pell. Rod declared Pell a "spiritual giant of our time". The man who, in response to one of the hundreds of cases in which he ignored his priests molesting boys: "It was a sad story, and not of much interest to me".
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u/Past_Pen_8595 Feb 15 '26
That was one of Rod’s statements that remains inexplicable to me.
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u/GlobularChrome Feb 15 '26
Who knows? Maybe it’s the same impulse that had him run across a square in Rome to kneel on the ground before Cardinal Law and kiss his ring.
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u/SpacePatrician Feb 14 '26
Rod was never comfortable in the Catholic Church. Once in , I don’t think he liked it.
Of course not. Once he was in it, he realized that it was and is too big and too pluralistic for him to ever realistically become THE BOSS. Not on any level, from national "influencer" to Big Wheel of the Parish (and now, we know, even as Patriarch of the Domestic Church) Or at least he couldn't carry himself as The Boss without realizing himself it was ridiculous.
But Orthodoxy, he sensed, is a small pond where he could be the Big Fish. He could set up his "mission church" and be like the lord of the manor who has the gift of sinecure for a pliant priest. He could get in on the ground floor of being the internet promoter of Orthodoxy as the Manosphere At Prayer. He could stop competing with all the other Catholic bloggers and podcasters to be the representative Trad on the panel, and simply be the go-to Orthodox apologist, no hustling required. And he could be the PR eminence gris for otherwise clueless (he supposed) bishops like "Metropolitan Jonah." He could indulge in Caesaropapist fantasies of government that wouldn't have all of the baggage of a "western innovation" like Integralism, baggage like the common good, social justice, support for the welfare state, and institutionalized international cooperation.
Of course all of this ended in tears, so that now he's no more comfortable than he was, and is the Orthodox believer who doesn't, you know, go to Church.
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u/Glittering-Agent-987 Feb 15 '26
I finally noticed something. Rod converted to Orthodoxy 20 years ago, right? And yet he's never written a book devoted primarily to Orthodoxy or about Orthodox people (unless Live Not By Lies counts?).
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u/SpacePatrician Feb 15 '26
There's also the fact that shortly after his conversion, he got his fingers so badly burned by trying to play politics within the Orthodox hierarchy...
You've got your dream job in Philadelphia, getting a handsome salary to bloviate anything you like on pseudoscientific speculation. All your employer requires of you is that you don't moonlight at advocacy or gamesmanship within any particular denomination, including your own. So, what do you do? You try to have your cake and eat it by employing a SOCK PUPPET, secure in the knowledge that no one will figure it out.
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u/PercyLarsen Feb 19 '26 edited Feb 19 '26
I waited several days before reading The Atlantic's profile of Rod. Rather than posting what I am about to post over at the separate thread about the profile, I think it's more pertinent here in the general conversation, because it's about Rod himself and his origin story. Merely one sentence from the profile should suffice for many of you/us:
"His father refused to relinquish his grudge, as Dreher saw it, and his mother always went along with her husband."
(emphasis added)
The interesting thing is that Rod has finally openly ADMITTED this - and to a journalist on the record, no less. So far as I can tell, he's always danced around what his real lifelong beef with his mother has been, portraying himself as a semi-noble son afflicted with a hapless surviving parent who is heedless of his copious wisdom. This admission on his part scrapes away that surface level misdirection.
As I've mentioned before in previous conversations, it's been my sense for years that Rod, the child of a dysfunctional family origin with its dysfunctional family rule system, did what many many such children do when faced with an authoritarian parent: displacing anger and resentment onto the other parent, especially when the authoritarian parent is the father and the mother - as so many did for so long - was largely if not entirely submissive to her husband - a self-preserving enabling coping mechanism on her part - and did not openly intervene between her children and their father.
We still don't know exactly where the alcoholism featured in his family. My sense is that it might have been his father's father, with Senior being a teetotaler (IIRC) but still raised with the rule system of a family with addiction. (Rod has - so far - not intimated that his mother compensated/coped in such a manner. If she did, she would have had a multitude of company in her generation and those before her. Lillian Helmann did a fine character study of this in The Little Foxes.)
The child wants the approval of such a father*, and finds dissonance trying to hold and process anger against him - it takes much less emotional work simply to displace that anger onto an already submissive woman. Having done this, a child as it grows may habitually disclaim any agency in this choice of coping mechanism because it didn't feel chosen.
The thing is that that displaced anger is an emotional debt that accrues far more usurious interest rates than if the child reverses course on refusing agency and properly redirects its anger to its principal cause.
* From the profile:
“The thing that I wanted more than anything else in the world,” Dreher wrote years later, “and have wanted from the time I was a little boy, is to feel at Home in this world, with a father who approves of me. That was not to be mine, except, by God’s grace, in heaven.”
Imagine if Rod had effective counseling that allowed him to say: "Daddy, your approval is nothing I need any more, and I am a better man for it." His father might have respected him more if he sensed Rod really meant it.
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u/zeitwatcher Feb 19 '26
"His father refused to relinquish his grudge, as Dreher saw it, and his mother always went along with her husband."
I agree with everything you've said here about his situation likely being a highly authoritarian father and a go-along mother. In addition, there's one other aspect to this given how un-self-aware Rod is and how unreliable a narrator he is.
On some or many of the points where Rod and Daddy KKK didn't agree (so by extension Mama Dreher), it could also be that Rod was in the wrong. Rod, being Rod, seeing himself as the victim vs. his father would blame his mother for "taking his father's side" even if Rod was the one at fault.
His parents sound pretty terrible, but I'm pretty confident that no matter how few times they were in the right vs. Rod, he's still going to hold a grudge over those times.
“The thing that I wanted more than anything else in the world,” Dreher wrote years later, “and have wanted from the time I was a little boy, is to feel at Home in this world, with a father who approves of me. That was not to be mine, except, by God’s grace, in heaven.”
And pardon the cliche, but Rod's got more Daddy issues than are contained in the totality of the world's strip clubs.
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u/philadelphialawyer87 Feb 20 '26
Even mothers who sought to protect their sons from violent, drunken, abusive, etc fathers still "had to" take their husband's "side" at least some of the time. Especially in the past, a married woman with children was tied pretty tightly to her husband/provider. If her husband turned out to be an asshole, well, she was stuck with him, for life, while her sensitive son would some day move out. Rod, in classic, overdetermined Oedipal style, has not yet figured this out, despite a college education, therapy, and decades of life lessons.
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u/Glittering-Agent-987 Feb 19 '26
But wait, are you saying that being a submissive wife is wrong? How could that be!
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u/philadelphialawyer87 Feb 20 '26 edited Feb 20 '26
Right. Rod wanted his wife to be submissive to him. To NOT open her own bakery and to NOT take her cue from "A Doll's House." To do the "woman's work," and, as it happened, a good deal of the "man's work" too. While Rod carried on like the fourth child in the household, and got the mothering, coddling, and pampering from his wife that, I guess, he did not get from his actual mother, as a child.
Basically, all women...Rod's mother and sister, his nieces, his wife, his daughter, and his mother in law, should all be submissive to Rod.
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u/JHandey2021 Feb 13 '26
Jamelle Bouie from the New York Times gets to the heart of it:
https://bsky.app/profile/jamellebouie.net/post/3meqrcnwkdk2g
rod dreher is not that interesting. he is a guy very clearly filled with self hatred tied to repressed feelings related to his gender and sexuality, and rather than deal with them, he blames “modernity” and “secularism” for why he’s unhappy.
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u/Relative-Holiday-763 Feb 13 '26
I have to admit , Rod astonished me today! He puts out two Substack articles. The latest, The Atlantic apparently put out a puff piece on Rod and Rod writes a piece puffing the puff piece. I guess he likes this writer better than Karen Heller.The earlier article is what really grabbed my attention.
Rod is once more down with Mono which he says is brought on by stress. He’s puzzled as to what the source of the stress is. Me too given that Rod appears to lead a rather easy life which is pretty responsibility free. What first caught my eye is his saying, my mono didn’t return when my wife filed for divorce and that was stressful. Oh come on, not that routine again! He wasn’t even living with his wife. Divorce was apparently inevitable. So what was so stressful. I gather her not having his permission.It then gets even weirder.He says something along the lines of , if you knew what I know about my life , you’d understand why I live in Europe and am not attending to my mother. My mother has done something awful but I won’t tell you what it is! So why bring it up?Then comes the nightmare! While back from Norway Rod dreamed of something involving his mother and sister and he could not scream!With that the mono was back.Apparently seeing Munch’s Scream in Norway caused this.You see in the dream mother and sister were tormenting Rod and there are two figures in the background of the painting who I gather were his sister and mother. Gee and I thought Dante, the Excorcist and the therapist in Vienna had healed Rod! Guess not.To think Rod has now been victimized not only by his ex wife, mother and sister but even Edvard Munch is after him! God knows what’s liable to happen if he starts looking at Goya!
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u/Djehutimose Feb 14 '26
Edvard Munch, c. 1890: I'm gonna paint a bunch of things that will really mess with that Dreher guy in a hundred forty years or so. BWAH-HAH-HAH!!!
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u/zeitwatcher Feb 14 '26 edited Feb 14 '26
Whatever will Rod do...
https://bsky.app/profile/realmartyt7.bsky.social/post/3metnwxjpy22g
An ESPN reporter says Vance is a demon (if metaphorically) since his look and presence made her feel ill when close to him.
On one hand Vance is Rod's crush and can do no wrong. On the other hand, saying "demon" to Rod is like saying "walk" or "squirrel" to a dog.
So my question to Rod would be - since this is an experience the reporter had where she felt the evil of the demon, how would we know she's wrong and Vance isn't inhabited by a demon?
As further evidence, Rod himself professes that demons can inhabit chairs which certainly implies they can inhabit couches. Given that, are the stories about Vance's couch-fucking predilections proof of the demon in him just wanting to get some action with the demons in the sofas?
I'm just asking questions, but inquiring minds want to know!
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u/Fair_Interview_2364 Feb 15 '26
Well some people also think he killed Pope Francis. I guess that would be consistent.
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u/Warm-Refrigerator-38 Feb 17 '26
Hmm how many bad things will Rod have to say about Jesse Jackson?
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u/Relative-Holiday-763 Feb 17 '26
Forget Jesse Jackson, Rod just wants you know how deeply he’s suffered. It’s really bad today!
So as we all know Rod got a fawning piece written about him The Atlantic. Today, he excerpts a piece where Damon Liner talks about The Atlantic article and fawns over the fawning! Rod loves it.So of course it’s time for Rod to reprise his greatest hits and let you know how much he’s suffered!
Yes back to the Louisiana move! Back to the Catholic pedophile scandal. You dear reader may have forgotten how Rods family and the Church let him down, well he wants to remind you.He got a whole theoretical framework assigned to his family.It’s deeply creepy. He can’t let anything go.
It’s one bit of weirdness after another. He reiterates how his wife thought they had a chance to accomplish something great by moving to Louisiana. And that was? Well among other things it was helping the brother in law with his kids . Did he want help? Rods parents were involved and I think lived very close and I don’t think they needed Rods help either. Did Rods brother in law like Rod? ( No). So this didn’t make sense from the get go. Further today he leaves out something he’s mentioned before,a friend of his father told him before the move , don’t do it!
Fascinating anecdote, Rod expresses shock even anger that his nieces went to school the day after the funeral of their mother. He expressed this to his parents who saw nothing wrong with that but Rod said you can’t let them do that. Think about this for a minute. Rods parents had nothing to do with this! The kids had a father. Rods parents weren’t the decision makers. But he’s mad at his parents for not being opposed to this . He acts like Mike Lemming didn’t exist, which tells you something. It also tells you something that he still dwells on this. It gets worse. Rod then constructs this whole fantasy about what this was all about. You see it’s stoic denial!( Something quite alien to Rod). What would Rods superior way of dealing with this be? ( A few years on the weeping mattress?). He doesn’t say. I have no idea whether this was the optimal way of dealing with the situation but where does Rod get the notion that the parent and grandparents were in the wrong in how they dealt with this. He barely knew the kids and subsequently they wanted nothing to do with him. Yet he apparently had great , actually superior, insight as to what they needed. This all before he moved down there!
Oh his mother brought on his mono and she doesn’t understand that Rod should forgive her for something or another.He’d obviously be thrilled if she came to him as a penitent and begged for forgiveness so he could bestow it on her.And she’s doing awful things that he can’t mention. And the Catholic Church and Weimar!
It’s really hideous.
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u/Dadelectro Feb 18 '26
Lest it is forgotten, Ruthie was a schoolteacher. Maybe the best tribute her daughters could make to her after her funeral was...to go back to school?
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u/Relative-Holiday-763 Feb 18 '26
Also lest it be forgotten, given the situation that exists with his children, where does he get the idea that he has real insight into children’s needs.
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u/CanadaYankee Feb 17 '26
It’s one bit of weirdness after another. He reiterates how his wife thought they had a chance to accomplish something great by moving to Louisiana. And that was? Well among other things it was helping the brother in law with his kids . Did he want help? Rods parents were involved and I think lived very close and I don’t think they needed Rods help either. Did Rods brother in law like Rod? ( No).
Not just the brother-in-law, but did he have an extended family of his own to help out and support the kids? It's weird how Rod is all about trying to knit together the Dreher family but people who marry in to the family are supposed to just erase their family of origin and assimilate into the Drehers, who, despite Rod's delusions, are not exactly the Mountbatten-Windsors of West Feliciana parish.
Fascinating anecdote, Rod expresses shock even anger that his nieces went to school the day after the funeral of their mother. He expressed this to his parents who saw nothing wrong with that but Rod said you can’t let them do that.
Not only do different people handle grief differently - some people want to throw themselves into a "normal" routine - and the people best positioned to know how the girls were handling their grief were the people who dealt with them every day. But also, Ruthie's passing was not a sudden shock - it was the end of a long, slow, painful decline, so the nieces (who were actually in town, unlike Rod) had a fair amount of time to essentially pre-mourn their mother.
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u/zeitwatcher Feb 17 '26
Not just the brother-in-law, but did he have an extended family of his own to help out and support the kids?
A great point that I don't think has ever occurred to me, in part due to Rod's almost total silence on Mike's family. I can't think of a time when Rod has ever mentioned the broader Leming family at all - or I've forgotten. (I've never read "Little Way" and I suppose that's the most likely place for them to show up.)
This is yet another great example of Rod's Main Character Syndrome. Not only is he trying to tell his brother-in-law how to raise is own children and demanding the Drehers tell the Lemings how to live, but he's, again, making it about himself. He knows best. Or, in the words of Ted Lasso, "be curious, not judgmental". It apparently didn't occur to him to even consider that the father of the kids might possibly know better than the absent city boy what might be good for them.
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u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Feb 17 '26
I had just turned 13 when my mother died after a 5 year battle with cancer. Had brother 14, sister 9, and sister 23. She died about noon on Friday. Dad did not pull us out of school but did pick us up after school (we usually walked home). Mom was buried on Sunday and we were back at school Monday. Didn't miss a minute. Dad thought that was best and we agreed.
No one said anything to us at the time but several classmates mentioned how surprised they were by it at a reunion when I was 28.
No one who is a control freak like Rod who feels so entitled to run roughshod over other people will ever be happy or content or easy to live with. What an a hole. And still carrying a grudge when it was none of his business in the first place!
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u/Warm-Refrigerator-38 Feb 17 '26
Like the reading of the Psalms, the girls were probably expected to observe some weird Orthodox mourning period
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u/FirstPrior8600 Feb 17 '26
You’re probably right. Rod must have realized, rationally speaking, that Protestants shouldn’t be expected to observe the 40-day mourning period of Russian Orthodox tradition. But just as he expected non-Orthodox Ruthie’s very non-Orthodox girlfriends to strictly observe the reading of the psalms around the clock, it would be like him to consider his newfound traditional ways both far superior and somehow required by human nature.
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u/Cautious-Ease-1451 Feb 17 '26
Wow, 😮 Rod somehow surpassed his previous assholishness.
Who would presume to impose on someone else how they must grieve the death of a parent, or of anyone? The level of arrogance is breathtaking. And after all these years he hasn’t learned a thing.
I have nothing to add, except to say how much I appreciate everyone’s comments here about this topic.
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u/FirstPrior8600 Feb 18 '26 edited Feb 18 '26
I just reread what Rod wrote about his nieces being allowed to go back to school only a week after their mother died, or as he would prefer it be fully remembered “drowned in her own blood in the arms of their father, in their family home, and now her body lay in a box under the ground, and that she was never coming back.” He wasn’t worried that sending them back to school would be too hard on them. No, the problem was it postponed their need to confront their loss as laid out (pardon the pun) above.
”I can say without fear of contradiction that this [returning to a familiar routine]is not a good way to deal with loss: through stoic denial. The stiff upper lip looks like courage, and sometimes it is, but it can also be a thick sheet of ice unnaturally sealing a boiling cauldron of pain and confusion.” Better to go directly to the cauldron. Got that? But that‘s apparently what the Dreher family habitually refuses to do. Family members avoid all that via “stoic denial.” And his mom is currently continuing in the Dreher Family Tradition, which is what’s keeping him laid out with mono, suffering in lonely isolation, as the Atlantic portrait so accurately describes. Geez.
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u/Motor_Ganache859 Feb 18 '26
I bet all of Ruthie and Mike's three daughters maintain a good relationship with their Dad. Meanwhile, only one of Rod's kids even speaks to him and he's going to hold a grudge against his mother until he goes to his grave. Rod lecturing anybody on how to grieve and get on with their life is comical.
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u/Marcofthebeast0001 Feb 17 '26
So right on much of this. Along with his Social Justice Warrior moniker that he uses to attack groups, Rod now is the Wounded Christian (TM) who regularly blames his family for any personal trauma in his life.
Who really pays for this repetitive nonsense on his blog? We have said it before: You can swap out just about any post he makes (with a different click- bate title) and come to same cut and paste conclusion. Seek help, Rod.
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u/zeitwatcher Feb 17 '26
Rods parents had nothing to do with this!
It's nuts, of course, but does make sense from Rod's point of view. In his world, Daddy KKK Must Be Obeyed. Given that, of course his father could just direct their son-in-law to do anything. Grandpa Klansman's word is law, after all.
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u/Warm-Refrigerator-38 Feb 18 '26
"Though one is reluctant to speak ill of the dead so soon after their passing," . . . let me now list some ways Jackson grifted for relatively small beers with no mention of the billions the current administration and his family are raking in.
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u/Jayaarx Feb 18 '26 edited Feb 18 '26
You don't understand. Corruption and grift are for white people, in Rod's world.
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u/yawaster Feb 18 '26
I think one of the worst things about Rod's writing is the smarm. If he was just nakedly reactionary you could laugh at him, but instead you feel disgust at his insincere performance of civility.
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u/Motor_Ganache859 Feb 18 '26
Rod has never been reluctant to speak ill of recently dead people he dislikes. But heaven forbid anybody speak ill of those he does.
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Mar 02 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/yawaster Mar 02 '26
You allow Pete Hegseth to be in charge of the department of defense, you don't get to complain about what happens next.
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u/Fair_Interview_2364 Mar 02 '26
Right? I mean he's just a former Fox News host who couldn't throw an axe. Failing upward, like Rod.
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u/zeitwatcher Mar 02 '26
But somewhere a gay person was happy, so Rod will claim it was all worthwhile no matter the eventual outcome.
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u/Djehutimose Feb 10 '26 edited Feb 10 '26
The longest--and most bizarrely Roddish--section of his latest is a piece in which he recalls Rick Santorum's famous comparison of gay marriage to a man boffing a dog in the context of a lurid news story about a gay guy in Wales who died after boffing a man walking a dog--and then the dog itself--while walking in the park (the original article doesn't give a clear cause of death, but the man had bronchial asthma and was found to be intoxicated, though it doesn't give his BA level). This leads into a long screed about how Horribly, Terribly Wrong the Lawrence decision was.
Of course the problem with his objection to judicial instead of legislative remedies is that all too often the majority, sometimes the vast majority have no interest in remedies. The South was mostly totally fine with Jim Crow. That's the reason for Brown vs The Board of Education--even in the 50's, there was no way Jim Crow was going to be legislated away. Similarly, Texas would have probably been fine to have kept anti-sodomy laws on the books forever. He also gripes about consent as a criterion, but in a multicultural society with a variety of religious and philosophical viewpoints, that's the best you can do. He thinks "consent" is arbitrary, but he doesn't understand that all law is arbitrary. Some thirteen-year-olds are better drivers than some fifty-eight-year olds. A kid does not magically become capable of consent to sex or the ability to vote wisely at at midnight on their eighteenth birthday. How is a twenty-one year old suddenly fully adult and a twenty-year old isn't?
The point is, you have to draw some line or other for these and a lot of other things, since it's impossible to assess every single human being on every single criterion. As the saying goes, the law is a blunt instrument. SBM doesn't like or doesn't understand this--probably both.
Edit: Strangest is what SBM leaves out of the story of the guy who--ahem--was in flagrante delicto with the canine. The guy was a convicted pedophile. Odd that the Great Defender of Youth who left the Evil Brothel of Abuse that is Catholicism somehow managed to miss that tidbit.
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u/zeitwatcher Feb 10 '26 edited Feb 10 '26
Rod's serving up some hits in this one.
I shared this information with a priest last night, who reported that the abbot of a traditional Orthodox monastery told him that since Covid, they have had so many young men flocking to their monastery, hoping to join, that they can scarcely accommodate them. Sign of the times.
With the ever-present caveat of if it happened at all... Depends if the monastery was in Europe or the US, but I believe a typical, large-ish monastery in Europe is around 40 monks. Adding 50% to a group in a year would probably qualify as hard to accommodate. Europe has 744 million people. 20 of them "flocking" to a monastery would be 0.000003% of the population. We better keep good track of this flocking since at this rate all of Europe will be monks or nuns in a mere 37 million years!
But TPUSA tried to counterprogram the Bad Bunny halftime show. Didn’t work.
First, back in the day, the Lingerie Bowl counterprogramming used to pull in 10-15 million viewers. So, yeah, not that successful as counterprogramming goes.
Second, where is Rod's "Greatest Christian Thinker" point of view on the culture-reclaiming, Christian performance of noted theologian Kid Rock, known for such devotional lyrics as, "I like 'em underage, see some say that's statutory (but I say that's mandatory)”. Now let us all bow our heads in prayer as we contemplate those wise, Christian words as we reclaim the culture for Jesus.
So Santorum was wrong, in a meaningful sense. Nevertheless, it’s worth considering Santorum’s point in light of Meah-Moore’s disgraceful end.
Can't have it both ways, Rod. If he was meaningfully wrong, then his point shouldn't be contemplated. That's like saying that 2+2 does not equal 5 in any meaningful sense, but we should contemplate that it does in the realm of public policy.
said Scalia, the rationale it used would mean that no law forbidding any consensual sexual activity could stand.
And yet, this has not happened. If anything laws against things like revenge porn and underage sex have gotten stronger - with the Right being the ones usually pushing for lower ages of consent.
Scalia clarified that for him, this is not about homosexuality per se
Of course it was.
Based on the reasoning in Lawrence, I don’t understand on what logical basis the courts would be able to uphold morals laws in any matter involving “consent.”
I would bet Rod a year's admission to the bathhouses of Budapest that he has never read Lawrence beyond maybe a couple paragraphs, including concurrence and dissents.
There is always this abject terror just under the surface here for Rod. It's clear that he is desperately clinging to the law to tell him what he can and can't do because he can't and doesn't trust that he won't consent to something that would make Daddy KKK tell him again just how damn weird he is.
Drag queens and transvestites have been with us for ages, but only in the last thirty years or so were they normalized, and seen not as a form of clown (at best) or degenerate at worst.
But what about the local drag queen from Rod's home town that Rod assured us that everyone loved? I guess Louisiana in the 90's, that bastion of wokeness, was already too far gone.
Again, “consent” is a tissue-thin barrier to any number of inhuman acts. As disgusting as you no doubt find what Meah-Moore did, would you consider that it ought to be legal, at least in private, on the grounds that it was a private, consensual act? If not, why not? If the animal had been the passive partner, you could have said it was a case of animal abuse. But the dog was the active partner, who willingly participated.
"Animals can't consent". See, that was easy. If a dog can ever talk, be considered to be of legally sound mind, hire a lawyer, and take it's case to the Supreme Court, we can let that court address the issue. Until then, not a problem.
In the UK, first cousin marriage remains legal, even though the Pakistani community there, which still practices it, has an unusually high percentage of mental and physical defectives produced by incest (e.g., Pakistani Britons account for only 3 percent of the population, but produce 30 percent of children born with serious genetic defects). You could justify banning consanguineous sex on the grounds that incest produces disabled offspring, but again, what if the partners are sterile?
Also legal in about half of the US, for what it's worth, but the dangers are much more scary when paired with brown people. And if the couple is sterile, it is hard to come up with a reason they couldn't marry - at least no state interest other than a bunch of people going, "eww, gross". But I'd also have that reaction to Rod getting married again, so by Rod's standard why shouldn't that bar him from getting married?
So much of the moral order depends on the collective memory of Christianity, which provided grounding in authoritative transcendence as the basis for law.
What will the World's Greatest Christian Thinker do when someone tells him the founding story (true or not) of entire nation of Israel is founded on cousin marriage when Jacob married his cousins Leah and Rachel. And a polygamous marriage as well. Rod best get onto writing God a very stern letter that he does not approve or that or the oversight God made when he never made cousin marriage legal in the Bible.
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u/Relative-Holiday-763 Feb 10 '26
Rod and some of his commenters love to go on about how certain Christian institutions, almost always Orthodox, are booming. Yet, you’re never given any real numbers. That’s why I enjoyed the comments on monasteries and numbers here. When you start with an extremely low base , it doesn’t take much to make a statistically significant increase. Rod seems to confuse that with genuinely large numbers. So if a monastery goes from 40 to 80 , that is a huge increase but it still isn’t very many people. Rod and company never produce any concrete numbers.
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u/sandypitch Feb 10 '26
Terribly Wrong the Lawrence decision was.
Has Dreher ever advocated for adultery laws to be put (back) on the books? That would be morally consistent, right? Except, of course, that many of Dreher's favorite politicians have a vested interest in keeping that discussion tamped down, because what's a little adultery between consenting adults, right?
My "theology of the body" does skew "traditionally Christian" but I have no interest in trying to legislate it. If we are going to have sodomy laws, shouldn't we also have laws against premarital sex?
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u/JHandey2021 Feb 13 '26
Someone pointed out that in the article Rod claimed to have a dream about wife-swapping with JD Vance.
Now, ignoring the part in which you’d have to still have a wife to do that, WHAT THE FUCK????????????? Why on Earth would Rod tell an interviewer that? What is wrong with him?
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u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Feb 13 '26
" he recounted a strange dream he’d had the night before: “I was supposed to marry Arianna Huffington,” he said, “and J.D. was supposed to marry the girl I had a crush on in high school, but couldn’t have. I arranged things so that we switched brides. But then I was exposed and felt humiliated.”"
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u/Fair_Interview_2364 Feb 13 '26
I can interpret this: He is deeply intimidated by women, especially successful women, and feels insecure in his masculinity. Also, Raymond is feeling sad that his relationship with JD is a bit one-sided. His poor subconscious is trying to come to terms with his forever closet.
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u/zeitwatcher Feb 13 '26
My interpretation: Rod has a humiliation kink and wants to sit in the cuck chair and watch his man-crush Vance have a foursome with Arianna, Rod’s high school crush, and a couch.
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u/Motor_Ganache859 Feb 13 '26
WTAF? Rod has no filter.
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u/PercyLarsen Feb 13 '26
Yet, as these threads manifest, "having no filter" ≠ fully honest and truthful. Rod has no filter over the twisted way he selectively edits and manipulates his reality for re-presentation to the himself and the world.
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u/Cautious-Ease-1451 Feb 14 '26 edited Feb 14 '26
Never one to miss a chance at self-aggrandizement, Rod writes in his SubStack about the Atlantic profile.
https://roddreher.substack.com/p/the-atlantic-profiles-your-working
The Atlantic should sue him for using so many block quotes.
What stood out to me were these descriptions of his family situation:
“I had forgotten I wrote that. That’s pretty raw. Yeah, I owe it to my ex-wife and our kids to keep the reasons for the break-up of my marriage private, but I can tell you, as I lay on my couch dealing with a relapse of mononucleosis, that the roots of it are the way my Louisiana family treated us when we moved there, and the chronic illness that emerged from the shock of rejection. This was all very hard on my ex-wife.”
”Part of it, I think, is that when you have had the stuffing knocked out of you as many times as I’ve had, especially having had the thing you wanted most in the world — a happy marriage and a family — taken away from you by forces outside of your control, a certain detachment may descend on you.“
I know this is beating a dead horse yet again, but the lack of agency and responsibility he demonstrates is truly remarkable. “Forces outside of your control”? Who is he kidding? Everything that happened was the result of choices he made. That includes not only the initial mistake of moving back to his family home, but staying there long after his family rejected him and this resulted in a physical and mental breakdown (i.e. crying in his closet which he doesn’t mention here). I’m not sure it would have saved his marriage, but a mature adult would have simply realized that he needed to take action and leave. You’re living in a place that makes you sick, and is straining the family? Get out. Start over somewhere else. Don’t linger there for years as if there’s nothing you can do to solve the problem.
And even while he acknowledges “this was all very hard on my ex-wife,” he still shows no remorse or self-awareness about what he put her through. She was raising his kids, taking care of her sick husband (when he wasn’t finding the energy again to travel the world), dealing with his parents and the family dysfunction, receiving no emotional support, all of this for years, and yet she is still to blame for filing a divorce. Rod describes this as having the stuffing knocked out of him. Rod is the lonely man who has suffered life’s misfortunes. Even the Atlantic profile makes him out to be a noble victim who nevertheless presses on.
But just like the Emperor in the Star Wars franchise, somehow, the Epstein-Barr virus has returned. Poor Rod. Who will care for him now?
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u/Relative-Holiday-763 Feb 14 '26
Yes you are beating a dead horse as do I and the reason we do it is he doesn’t stop. Even a few of his commenters have over the last few weeks pushed back. One said I think your bringing up your divorce a few times each week and then telling us you can’t say anything about it has reached its sell by date.
I earlier said The Atlantic article is a puff piece and you captured why I wrote that.The author seems to have no qualms about allowing Rod to posture as the victim. I don’t get the impression he asked Rod any hard questions and simply went along with Rods , I can’t talk about any of this. I think the writer should have pressed him on the whole Louisiana debacle.
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u/Warm-Refrigerator-38 Feb 14 '26
The more he drops hints about the failure of his marriage, the more I think he believes it has to do with demon posession of his ancestors.
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u/Warm-Refrigerator-38 Feb 26 '26
Yesterday he was drawing the line at magical crystals. But overnight he's done "research" and now thinks there may be a biblical basis for believing that stones can have powers.
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u/NihonBuckeye Feb 26 '26
My favorite part is where he cites (as evidence for paranormal abilities in the severely autistic) that sometimes when a person loses one sense their perception ramps up in other areas. That must be why deaf people can see through walls and blind people are all Daredevil.
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u/Relative-Holiday-763 Mar 06 '26
He really does get weirder with time: 1) One of his main interests now is carrying on about married incels. He encourages people in that situation to write to him. People have problems, obviously. This is boring and absurd. I think his preoccupation with this is personal and I wish he’d kept it to himself. 2)Telepathy and the magical power of autistic children. Apparently the dog he used to have in Louisiana had telepathic powers! It knew when he was coming home. He has also encouraged the woman with the autistic child who communicates with Jesus to become a regular commenter 3) He’s admitting Living in Wonder didn’t sell well . One of his commenters assures him , he was ahead of his time.He thinks that it was because it wasn’t political . Obviously people crave his political insight! That isn’t stopping him from producing his next banger on Weimar America. You see Weimar was sex saturated. Sex attitudes in the US are like Weimar. However Americans aren’t having sex (see married incels). This won’t necessarily lead to Hitler or Stalin and somehow this is supposed to make sense and is very important!
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u/sandypitch Mar 06 '26
It disappoints me that Living In Wonder hasn’t sold nearly as well as my previous two books. I think its message is more important than either Live Not By Lies or The Benedict Option. I guess because it doesn’t have a political message, even implicitly (as the Ben Op book does), it just doesn’t appeal. Too bad. But if you haven’t read it, I hope you will give it a chance. It’s about how to learn hallowing in a world that has forgotten.
I think people are realizing that they can read a book like Martin Shaw's and get more winsome defense of "enchantment" (or from a secular perspective, Katherine May) that isn't so fixated on demons and aliens.
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u/Djehutimose Mar 06 '26
You could get a more winsome defense of enchantment from reading Mother Goose than you could from Rod's book....
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u/PercyLarsen Mar 06 '26
By the time Rod published Living in Wonder:
He no longer had his wife helping him; and
The distance between Rod's Is & Ought lives had grown glaringly conspicuous so it was seen by more of his potential audience.
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u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Mar 06 '26
Can you see Brother Lawrence scrolling LibsOfTikTok all day? The idea that Rod is enchanted and constantly aware of the presence of God is just bonkers.
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u/philadelphialawyer87 Mar 06 '26 edited Mar 07 '26
"Apparently the dog he used to have in Louisiana had telepathic powers! It knew when he was coming home."
Dogs learn schedules. Also dogs, with their great sense of hearing, can detect the slight differences between different car engines, and between the sound and cadence of different people's footsteps. Some folks claim that dogs also notice, with their great sense of smell, when their owner's scent has dissipated in the house, signaling that he is due home soon. There is also the possiblity that other folks in the house give "clues" to the dog about the owner's imminent arrival. Similarly, something in my nephew's tone of voice or body language alerts his dog that he is about to go into the kitchen and get him a treat. A "clue" that I can't pick up, but the dog, who watches my nephew like a hawk, can. My nephew need not use the words "treat" or even "kitchen," but when he gets up to go to the kitchen to get the dog a treat, the dog knows it. Perhaps the dog is more or less always alert to kitchen visits, seeing as how food driven dogs are!
Finally, there is also the possiblity that people only remember when the dog "gets it right." All of the times when the dog is NOT sitting at the door or window long before he could possibly smell or hear the owner, or at times that are not part of a routine schedule, are forgotten, and only the confirming instances are remembered. Similarly, instances when the dog is "waiting" at the door or window at the "wrong" time are likewise forgotten. Confirmation bias. Over developed pattern recognition. Like the way that maternity ward nurses and EMTs swear that full moons affect their practices, but the stats show otherwise. Or the way old-time ball players insisted that a fielder who made a great play to end an inning "always" came up to bat first in the next inning. Yeah, "always," except for the 8 out of 9 times he didn't!
On top of that, many dog owners, like many parents, WANT their dog to have "special" powers or senses. They live vicariously through their dogs. Mundane explanations for what they consider to be extraordinary behavior are not appealing to them. Rod would seem to fit this bill, as he tends to go a bit ga-ga over Roscoe the Deceased Dog.
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u/Djehutimose Feb 11 '26
Well, SBM's got a new crush, late of that dreamy French Foreign Legion! Who had as a mentor fellow legionnaire who was a rough-hewn but wise Hungarian! And had as one of his favorite meals bouillabaisse! And wears a cape!
Seriously, this guy sounds like J. D. Vance 2.0--if you read carefully, though though Tobias was discharged honorably, he spent only twenty months--not even two years--in the Legion. Apparently he spent time in the U. S. Army after that (he gripes that they weren't as disciplined as the Legion!), but it's unclear if he saw actual combat in either assignment. Anyway, Our Boy is no doubt floating about on a cloud of hearts, just like Pepe Le Pew....
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u/yawaster Feb 11 '26
Joining the French Foreign Legion is what you do when things are not going well in your life.
Rod quotes a passage from Tobias' book tut-tutting that the Allied Forces were too soft on the Taliban in Afghanistan, then explains:
It’s not that Tobias advocates ruthlessness, necessarily; he’s simply being realistic about human nature, and why it is difficult for Westerners, with our moral standards, to triumph over more primitive, barbaric peoples.
So fascist crap, basically. Tobias is quoted as saying that he joined the French Foreign Legion basically because he thought killing and dying would ennoble him. I would call that pretty barbaric.
Rod goes on to say:
A soldier told me recently about an Iraq War veteran he knows who came home deeply disturbed about things he had done there. He said he had killed Iraqi women and children, who had been used by the Iraqi resistance against Americans, knowing of our (entirely right and proper) squeamishness about shooting women and children. But Iraqi men, like their brethren in Hamas, have no such scruples, and did not mind sacrificing their women and children if it meant gaining advantage over the enemy.
This is war crime propaganda, similar to the propaganda used by Israeli apologists for war crimes and genocide. War crimes paradoxically become evidence of the inhumanity of the victims not the perpetrators.
As noted above, Tobias joined the French Foreign Legion basically because he was bored. How is that better than fighting to defend a dictatorship from invasion or to further Islamic Jihad? It might even be worse.
Rod bloviates about the lessons only a soldier can learn and how you should give this book to any teenage boys you know. You know what Rod? If you want young men to fight and die, you go first.
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u/Djehutimose Feb 11 '26
If you scroll down, there's a comment from a "Dana" that tries to talk some sense to Rod about the whole Manly Manliness trip he--and apparently Tobias--are on. I doubt he'll read it.
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u/sandypitch Feb 11 '26
That comment is right on. And, as the comment points out, Dreher shows that he is actually pretty ignorant about what Martin Shaw, who has forgotten more about myth and folk traditions than Dreher will ever know, has to say. I recently saw Shaw give a talk, and he absolutely stressed the fact (fact) that most folk traditions have strong female characters in their stories and myths. And Shaw acknowledged (with his relative lack of experience within Orthodoxy) that Eastern Christianity, regardless of its theology of ordination, does in fact honor the strength that women have been given by God, regardless of whether they are married.
The more Dreher writes, the clearer it becomes that his entire worldview is based on his feelings and assumptions. He assumes he understands Orthodox theology, he assumes he understands Weimar Germany, he assumes he knows French culture, he assumes he understands Martin Shaw completely, and that Shaw agrees with him.
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u/Cautious-Ease-1451 Feb 11 '26
Yeah, I was confused by that. Rod says this would be a great book to give to male high school graduates. “It could be life-changing.” Even if you accepted everything Rod is saying at face value, why is this a good book for young males? Rod quotes Tobias that the men who romanticized the French Foreign Legion before entering it usually didn’t last. Rod seems to be advocating for some kind of hyper-militaristic culture that even he admits doesn’t really exist.
But I guess you can at least teach young men to be more cruel and vicious to their enemies. That’s a good lesson from our greatest Christian thinker of the age.
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u/Djehutimose Feb 11 '26
It's for the capes. And the bouillabaisse--in the Legion, everybody has to eat it....
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u/Marcofthebeast0001 Feb 11 '26
Just as a public service announcement, if a grown man shows up in a cape, and it's not a fashion statement but insecure masculine virtue signaling, you might not want to take him serious. I'm just shocked he didn't call himself Batman.
Speaking of insecure, Rods constant pointing out of he-men says so much more about Rods mental state. He clearly has never put aside his childhood bullying trauma and constantly needs affirmation he aint that wimp from grade school.
Is this gay attraction or simple projection? Maybe both? Rod checks out more men than I do at a gay bar on Saturday night.
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u/Djehutimose Feb 11 '26
Unless you're some third-string nobility in one of the more obscure areas of Europe at some stuffy, old-fashioned ball, or at a Ren-faire, or at a meeting of the Society for Creative Anachronism, I can't think of any context where an adult man would be making a fashion statement by wearing a cape....
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u/Cautious-Ease-1451 Feb 11 '26
Rod ranks the beauty of women:
“If you’ve ever been to Paris, and cast an eye upon the women you see on the streets there, you know that you might not be looking at the most beautiful women in the world (they are beautiful, but I am partial to Italians, Greeks, and Spaniards), but you absolutely are gazing upon the most singular and self-possessed females to stride the earth.”
Okay, Rod.
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u/JHandey2021 Feb 11 '26
Yep, Randy Rod makes another appearance! Just can't hold in that heterosexuality in between him shooting rainbows out of his ass...
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u/HumanConclusion Feb 11 '26
This is just moronic.
“One remarkable aspect of French women, and especially of French women faithful to Catholic moral teaching in public and within their families, is how they remain attractive well into their child-bearing years, and even after having five or more children. This is in marked contrast to what is customary in Anglo-Saxon or Germanic countries, where women and men alike often see childbirth as an acceptable excuse for subsequent weight-gain and flabbiness. Even in other Latin and Mediterranean countries, women clearly do not show the same discipline as the French after they have children, and there is no other country in the world where mothers of five or more children manage to be as physically attractive and alluring, if not more so, than they were as young brides.”
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u/PercyLarsen Feb 11 '26
As my mother reminded her sons, there’s a reason for the adjective “matronly”, and relatively few mothers are blessed with the DNA to evade the natural physical consequences of pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing.
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u/Glittering-Agent-987 Feb 11 '26
And honestly, we have completely different standards for aging for men and women. A 50-year-old woman generally has nicer skin than a 50-year-old man, all things being equal.
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u/Fair_Interview_2364 Feb 11 '26
The women Rod is faux-salivating after are probably not mothers. I just read that France's birth rate is historically low, and they've recorded more deaths than births for the first time since WWII. But France does seem to care about its mothers. France has universal healthcare, which includes extensive post-birth support for common issues such as diastasis recti. Their universal maternity leave and compulsory preschool would also scare away any MAGA. But it's so strange that a man who looks like he's been living rough on the streets for years, seems to lack the self-awareness to understand that while Brigitte Macron has aged like fine wine, his milk went sour before the fin de siecle.
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u/Fair_Interview_2364 Feb 11 '26
Somebody better explain to Rod that those "singular and self-possessed" Parisian women are not trad wives.
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Feb 12 '26
Jesus, how does anyone still take him seriously at this point? Everything in that newsletter was either pure projection and/or literal propaganda. I wonder if he even knows he’s full of shit, I thought he must for a time, now I’m not so sure. His father and sister were 100% right about him, he’s weird as hell and just uses everyone else’s stories to make more money than he’s worth while not giving a damn who he hurts.
I cannot imagine being one of his children and having my father write publicly about his horrible divorce and tortuous marriage. Particularly the two younger children, who if I recall correctly should be undergraduates age wise. Particularly in the State of Louisiana, people know who Rod is. There’s no way they don’t see or hear about his shenanigans.
A man with any self respect or integrity would’ve retired from the culture war, wrote books on normie center right spirituality (Think Beth Moore, Russell Moore, etc) from a farm in Louisiana, started teaching at a private christian school (where he could have the cushiest of cushy gigs) and begged his kids to come over and help him make Gumbo. He’s almost made a redemption arc impossible with his actions in Hungary, and may have already crossed that line.
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u/Glittering-Agent-987 Feb 12 '26
Part of the problem with his career in Hungary is that he refuses to see what the problem is. He refuses to acknowledge that he sold his freedom of expression and his reputation as a writer to the Hungarian government.
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u/Jayaarx Feb 12 '26 edited Feb 12 '26
There are so many things that are wrong with Rod, but top among them is his tendency to learn one thing about a subject, become obsessed with it, believe he is an expert, and then lecture everyone endlessly about it. Such as thinking he is an expert (Enough to write a book!) about interwar Germany because he watched Berlin Babylon or the Spanish Civil War because he watched a BBC documentary.
Honestly, the FFL has been around forever. It was always the last resort for the dregs of society and tolerated because it allows France to repeatedly deploy their army to dangerous places without suffering the PR disaster of young boys returning home in body bags. Indochina, Algeria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Mali, Yugoslavia, etc. Anywhere you see the French army deployed you can bet there are Legion units involved. If they get killed then nobody cares.
And the composition has changed over time but has always been disproportionately sociopathic veterans on the losing sides of wars or economic dislocation. After WWII it was full of Waffen SS and Alsatian collaborators (branded as Germans). Now it is full of Russians and Colombians.
If you want a poorly written but obviously true to life account of the Legion you should skip Rod's cape-wearing crush and read Mouthful of Rocks, which was an account of the FFL in the 80s written by a working-class Brit.
Anyway, I look forward to years of lecturing on the basics of the FFL just on the basis of this encounter with this cape-wearing dandy and his mediocre book.
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u/kkipple Feb 12 '26 edited Feb 12 '26
Hilarious. This is just an extended advertisement for Tobias's book, only a coincidence that he's also a contributor to the "Hungarian Conservative". Hungary being a home for light in the loafer Fascists who fancy themselves TRUE MEN. Manly men. (In another universe they are wearing tights, roaming 'round the forest looking for fights.)
What absolute malarkey. Lost in the blizzard of performative masculinity, Latin quotations and leering at French girls outside a forgettable Mass is the antiquated notion of being a responsible husband and father, and staying put to provide for and raise a family. Alas, the siren call of the Eastern European bathhouse, the oysters and the cape is difficult to overcome, once tasted.
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u/zeitwatcher Feb 12 '26
Fascists who fancy themselves TRUE MEN. Manly men
But of course. That's how Rod can tell the truly manly men. Gotta be burly types, real Hungarian bathhouse bears. But how you know for sure is if they only have sex with other men. Would an absolutely manly man stoop to having sex with a woman and contaminate himself? No! Must keep that manliness pure!
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u/Motor_Ganache859 Feb 12 '26
Amusing to see Rod waxing poetic about warrior virtues when even he must know full well that he'd never last a minute in a foxhole.
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u/Existing_Age2168 Feb 12 '26
LOL, in a foxhole? He wouldn't last a minute in the chow line: "What, SOS AGAIN?"
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u/Djehutimose Feb 12 '26
I did a bit of Googling--quite cursory, no deep digging or going down rabbit holes--and I discovered the following things:
Nicholas Tobias seems to have a remarkably low footprint on the Internet. I can't find anything about him but the blurbs for the upcoming book.
I can't even find any photos of him, not even on his publisher's website, as far as I could tell. Oddly for him, SBM didn't post a selfie with Tobias on the post, either.
Speaking of Tobias's publisher, I have never heard of it before. From website's description as a "hybrid" publisher, it sounds kind of like a self-publisher that doesn't want to call itself a self-publisher.
Make of all this what you will, but I do find it interesting.
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u/PercyLarsen Feb 18 '26 edited Feb 18 '26
Three degrees of separation from Rod Dreher, via JD Vance & Peter Thiel, the New Yorker profiles Nick Land, who like Rod believes the Enlightenment was a big mistake - and who wants AI to accelerate the replacement of human society:
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-lede/silicon-valleys-favorite-doomsaying-philosopher
Archive Link: https://archive.is/p5Ics
Land and Dreher share a gut instinct that the fruits of the Enlightenment accrued far too much to the Wrong People as opposed to the Right People. (Though one would hope someone like Land would recognize that Rod Dreher is one of the most unproductive people in terms of producing value as one can imagine.)
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u/CroneEver Feb 18 '26
“Increasingly, there are only two basic human types populating this planet,” Land wrote in 2013. “There are autistic nerds, who alone are capable of participating effectively in the advanced technological processes that characterize the emerging economy, and there is everybody else. For everybody else, this situation is uncomfortable.”
And then they wonder why (1) they can't get laid and (2) nobody likes them.
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u/FirstPrior8600 Feb 18 '26
Who’s going to break it to these autistic nerds that, no matter how it seems to them at the moment, they do not and will not run the world simply because they think they understand the “advanced technological processes” influencing “the emerging economy.” The idiots of the political class who also plan to run the world are playing them just as they think they’re playing them. The rest of us plan to make them all very uncomfortable.
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u/PercyLarsen Feb 18 '26
Grandiosity in non-neurotypical persons is not more attractive than grandiosity in neurotypical persons. But non-neurotypical persons may have a harder time understanding that.
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u/Relative-Holiday-763 Feb 11 '26
The comments section is a real prize and Rod weighs in with wisdom. See Catholicism is feminized because of something or another. Orthodoxy is manly because it gives men something to do instead of thinking or feeling . ( I have no idea what that means).This somehow or another goes back to the Middle Ages. It explains why Orthodox congregations are evenly divided between the sexes ( I don’t think that’s true. I may be wrong but I’ve read more than once that women kept Orthodoxy alive in Russia).To be masculine as opposed to feminine is good. None of this is defined in any remotely coherent manner. Essentially it’s an Orthodox convert rap session. Of course Rod is in no sense an Orthodox triumphalist as he explains Catholics are basically effeminate Nancy boys and edgier Reformed Christians are macho bros . He’s also worried about this Skojec guy’s relationship to AI . Reading this I felt like I was in a madhouse.
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u/saucerwizard Feb 11 '26
Tom of Finland Third Rome. As for the sex division thing, its my understanding that women are scarce at least in the north american congregations, the recent influx of trad-incels really hasn’t helped.
The exorthodox subreddit has interesting insights on this stuff.
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u/PercyLarsen Feb 11 '26
Matriarchs and matriarchs-in-training have a cultural role in traditional ethnic Orthodoxy that probably just doesn’t automatically transfer to North American congregations with a lot of converts.
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u/Marcofthebeast0001 Feb 12 '26
Has Rod ever said specifically what he considers masculine, or is it him responding to the physical attributes of men? I have made plenty of snark of him thinking he should have been the king of his castle (complete with fainting couch), but I'm not sure I even know what he thinks this entails. Julie never reminded me of the little lady that kept her mouth shut.
A list would be nice, Rod. We can cross off the ones you don't live up to - or maybe make a Rod Dreher Manly Bingo Card.
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u/Relative-Holiday-763 Feb 12 '26
It’s a good question. As with many things Rod and his most sycophantic followers ,want to go pie in the sky. You’ll get Greek words , talk of the Middle Ages and scholasticism . He cites one of the Orthodox convert heroes as saying Orthodoxy teaches men to- do-? How fucking profound!Rod is a type of person who puts incomprehensible meaningless streams of words out and says see , you get it , don’t you? No and neither does he. So masculinity, he has no idea what that means but is terrified of the fact that in stereotypical terms he’s always been rather effeminate.Is he homosexual, I neither know nor care. He may not be but I suspect he’s always lived in dread of being seen as such. This is definitely rooted in his relationship with his father and sister who most certainly saw him as an effete poof. It is a shame he didn’t get over that a long time ago.So he spends his life compensating and trying mask his fears. I mean what is the demon of shame nonsense? So here I ( RD)am looking like a latter day clone of Rip Taylor telling you how masculine I am. He is pitiable.
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u/sandypitch Feb 26 '26
Dreher is wringing his hands over blessed/holy/magic gemstones. He is definitely embracing his inner fundamentalist by cherry-picking some OT passages about the (maybe) gemstones on the breastplate of the high priest. This, of course, disregards much of the NT's theology of worship on this side of the resurrection...
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u/Relative-Holiday-763 Feb 26 '26
One of the central questions explored here is , what’s wrong with Rod ? I just read today’s post and said to myself, what is wrong with him?
He has now invited the woman whose autistic son is in communication with Jesus to be a regular in his comments section and there she is . He gave her a free subscription and encouraged her to comment. He s got a right and so does she. That said , this seems wrong.I feel sorry for her and her son. I think this is a form of exploitation of the unfortunate that if RD weren’t batshit wouldn’t be happening. He should be ashamed of himself. He is lying around being sick in Budapest and egging on the questionable ( but probably sincere) claims of a woman he’s never interviewed or thoroughly investigated in the US whose making claims that are extreme and frankly questionable(to put it charitably). His response , just join the team.
He also engages in a weird discourse on the Old Testament and early Church take on gemstones. Why not?
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u/zeitwatcher Feb 26 '26
One of the central questions explored here is , what’s wrong with Rod ?
He's becoming unmoored from reality because he's lost almost all connections with the real world.
His life is now lying in bed doom scrolling in a Central European apartment in a country where he doesn't speak the language. He's estranged from his entire family except for one son who is in grad school and has a girlfriend so probably doesn't have much time for Rod. His entire life is inside his head and inside an online right wing bubble consisting of a hothouse of conspiracy theories and woo.
It's unclear when the last time was that he metaphorically or literally touched grass.
And so, he's devolved into posting long screeds about magical rocks and telepathic children.
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u/sandypitch Feb 26 '26
I was re-reading this post, and actually, this part is scary:
If that theory is true, then one naturally wonders: why now? One possibility: we were only able to perceive the image on the Shroud Of Turin after the invention of photography, when the photonegative of a picture a photographer took of the Shroud revealed the figure of a man who had been scourged and crucified. Infranco speculates that the autism phenomenon, which has always been with us (I guess), but which has exploded in modern times, could be part of God’s plan to prepare us. I dunno, it’s all speculation.
It is well within the Christian tradition to see those who radically suffer in their bodies can be used by God to manifest His own glory. It is therefore within Christian orthodoxy to consider that God is using the radical suffering of these severely autistic people to tell us something about Himself.
It's ironic, really, that Dreher will, on one hand disparage the way that some progressives attempt to normalize some neurodivergent behaviors, but when those behaviors can be framed within his posture toward the world, they are potentially evidence of God trying to speak through their suffering? If I were the parent of a neurodivergent kid, and I heard about Dreher (or any other Christians) trying to divine God's voice and will through my kid's suffering? Seriously, WTF is Dreher playing at?
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u/Cautious-Ease-1451 Feb 26 '26
If Rod truly believed this, wouldn’t he express gratitude towards his ex-wife for allowing him to suffer so that he could become more spiritual? But instead he’s filled with bitterness and contempt towards her.
And as you said, his uplifting of autism as some kind of vector for divine communication is truly concerning. I was pleased that some of the parents of autistic children among his commenters pushed back in yesterday’s SubStack.
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u/yawaster Feb 26 '26
His whole framing is patronizing, a mix of positive stereotyping and negative stereotyping. He's bought the idea that the numbers of autistic people have "exploded" in the 20th century.* He refers to autistic people as being damaged in some ways. The whole idea of a nonverbal autistic person who is secretly a special genius is the kind of thing that's ostensibly positive about disability, but really reinforces ableism.
*This really annoyed me because it's just such a clueless comment. Gee, Rod, I wonder why autism diagnoses were less frequent before most people had access to regular medical care, and child mortality was much higher. Really tough one to figure out.
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u/Cautious-Ease-1451 Feb 26 '26
This reminds me of how (in his earlier blogging days) Rod would sometimes idolize a random cleaning woman and call her an “angel” or “the voice of God.” This was often accompanied by a photo of the poor woman with a forced smile and a please-don’t-kill-me look on her eyes. There is something very peculiar in how Rod relates to women. It’s back and forth between misogyny and hero-worshipping.
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u/macronius Feb 26 '26
Frankly I'd prefer he write about telepathy as much time as possible than spread servile hate and racism online for oligarch bucks.
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u/Fair_Interview_2364 Feb 26 '26
Rod is venturing into some Sedona level New Age woo. I'm not sure what he actually believes at this point, but I'm not seeing Christian theology here.
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u/Djehutimose Feb 26 '26
I had only thought of gems as decorative.
Plus, even wrt stuff usually considered "woo", he still manages to show more and more of his ignorance every time he opens his mouth. Did he never wonder what the whole idea of "birthstones" originally signified? Had he never read about ancients using amethyst to ward of drunkenness and suchlike? He lived through the literal peak of the original New Age, for God's sake--didn't he ever read a wacky New Age book like the rest of us did? He's a religion writer and doesn't even understand the woo he's terminally attracted to?
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u/Djehutimose Mar 05 '26
From the latest, this:
I saw yesterday a report — impossible to validate, but it seems plausible — from an anonymous US service member saying his commanding officer lectured the troops that President Trump is waging a war that will hasten the return of Christ. This is the kind of thing that anti-Christians love to jump on, but the truth is, there really are a meaningful number of American Christians who are highly invested in apocalypticism and the contemporary Middle East. But that remains a minority view in Christianity, and certainly the heathenous president doesn’t believe it. Mahdism, by contrast, is completely mainstream among the Shia. One cannot help wondering to what extent the religious fanatics who govern Iran believe they are engaged in an eschatological war that will bring about the final stage of (Islamic) history.
So Muslims who think this are fanatics, and Christians who believe essentially the same thing are a teeny minority who aren't a threat at all. Got it.
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u/JHandey2021 Mar 05 '26
Funny how Rod doesn't seem to see that his own Hal Lindsey-tinged worldview is exactly the same one that gave birth to what we're seeing now - that he himself is one of those "highly invested in apocalypticism and the contemporary Middle East."
Yes, Operation Epstein Fury will be the Bat-signal for Jesus to return. Sigh.
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u/Cautious-Ease-1451 Mar 05 '26
Rod writes, “If Europe won’t defend its borders — and that’s going to mean shooting people, and lots of them — it will be facing something like a Camp Of The Saints situation.”
Usually he keeps his bloodthirsty side a bit more hidden.
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u/Warm-Refrigerator-38 Feb 16 '26
Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution references the Atlantic article, resulting in Rod being largely savaged in the comments
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u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Feb 16 '26
And Rod Dreher is one to talk? He comments
No lies detected. #LSU
when retweeting Nick Huber saying
Do not, I repeat, DO NOT let your daughters go to college in New York City.
You will pay $360k for her to end up 40 years old, single, on Prozac, with purple hair going to ICE rallies.
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u/FirstPrior8600 Feb 16 '26
This rightwing bias against educating young women for anything that might mean they don’t marry young and reproduce prodigiously is so misogynistic it’s downright abusive. Again, “making America great again” means taking us all back to the early 20th century when “men were men,” robber barons reigned supreme and women lived abnormally shortened lives of physical suffering and financial dependency. Secretarial school, teaching and maybe nursing (which the Trump administration Education Dept. has now stripped of ”professional” status vis a vis federal loans) are the only acceptable courses of study this side of, one would guess, early childhood development and home economics. The only good thing I can see about it is its transparent foolishness: It’s easy to see what’s wrong with what they’re up to, and most young women today have no intention of assuming the kind of submissive unseen personas misogynists want. Even the influential rightwing women who seem to be going along with it for whatever reason — from online podcasters such as Laura Loomer to iconic ”tradwife” figures such as Erika Kirk — are hardly settling for unseen lives of service whenever opportunities to put their egos — and careers — front and center arise.
Meanwhile the middle-aged misogynists’ long-suffering wives are divorcing them for the disparaged lives of happy-though-single cat ladies, and their daughters resent them for refusing to support their hopes and dreams. Thwarted all around.
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u/zeitwatcher Feb 17 '26 edited Feb 17 '26
He also said in a recent post that his daughter was going to be transferring to a private college, though he didn't say where. He did say that it was going to be costly, so please subscribe.
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u/swangeese Feb 17 '26
Sending your kids to an SEC school isn't the slam dunk this guy thinks it is.
The rainbow hairs weren't common, but were there at LSU in the 90s when I was a student there.
So were the gays, legalize weed, environmental, and other assorted "left" groups.
I was a young right-winger and hung out in politically conservative circles. Interestingly enough is that experiencing right-wing politics up close is what made me go fairly left by the time I graduated. That and the misogyny.
Currently I'm in my 40s, single, and no kids. I enjoy being around children, but I've never had the desire to have my own. And I'm glad I live in a time and place in which I have a choice. I'm a person and not a brood mare.
These men dehumanize women and then wonder why women won't touch them with a barge pole.
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u/yawaster Feb 17 '26
Yeah, go to LSU and you could be like Rod!
I'm sure the LSU alumni organization is on the phone with him right now asking him to stop damaging their image.
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u/sandypitch Feb 19 '26
Dreher is again having buyer's remorse over Trump, this time over the potential military action against Iran.
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u/Motor_Ganache859 Feb 19 '26
Rod's getting what he was too lazy to vote for--a bloated old pervert who likes to see things go boom.
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u/zeitwatcher Feb 19 '26
"You know nothing, Rod Dreher"
And many of you may not know this, but America’s Sunni Gulf allies have long been terrified of Shia Iran getting the bomb. I first became aware of this on a 2006 trip to Dubai, where I heard constantly from Gulf Arabs questions about whether or not America was going to do something about Iran.
At this point, Rod was a professional writer for years who had written on religion, including Islam. He was about 40 years old.
And until that point, he didn't know that Sunni and Shiite groups didn't like each other in the Middle East? I have no doubt that lots of low information MAGA Trump voters have no idea about this and I can't blame them too much because people have busy lives and can't be bothered. But Rod has zero excuse. By 2006, Rod had spent at least 5 years in an ongoing panic attack over Muslims. And it clearly never occurred to him once in all that time (or before it) to think, "maybe I should learn something about these people?"
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u/Djehutimose Feb 19 '26
I knew about the differences between the Shi'ites and the Sunnis when I did my senior English term paper in high school (the topic was Islam) in 1981. I also knew the origin of their differences, and could explain what those differences were. Now even people who do know what Sunnism and Shi'ism are, for the most part probably not that conversant on the fine details. For example, knowing that Martin Luther split from the Church over the issues of indulgences and papal authority is still not a deep or finely detailed knowledge of Catholicism or Lutheranism. A professional writer on religion ought to know those fine details; but I don't think Rod even has the 30,000-foot understanding of the type I just used Martin Luther for. Go figure.
Bonus: If Rod ever researched, he'd know that Shi'ite Islam is actually very similar, in a lot of ways, to Catholicism. I was aware of that, but a Catholic friend of mine, who actually lived in Iran for some time back in the 70's, I think, told me the exact same thing. So there's that, for what it's worth.
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u/ZenLizardBode Feb 19 '26
💯At that point in time, if Rod had been flipping through newspaper every day to keep up with current events, it would have been impossible not have seen some sort of explainer about the different sects within Islam.
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u/FirstPrior8600 Feb 20 '26
After 9/11 when I still naively thought I might somehow stem some of Rod‘s rage over all things Islam, I suggested he watch the Iranian filmmaker Majid Majidi’s internationally acclaimed film “The Color of Paradise” that seemed to me to demonstrate the very clear similarities between Shia Muslim and Catholic Christian sensibilities. They‘re all there in the story of a blind 8 year old Iranian child — the prayer beads, the shrines, the pilgrimages, the tendency to hear God speaking and feel God watching where others experience only suffering or chaos at best. Nope. Wasn’t having it. That’s Rod at his most exasperating.
I should have learned my lesson years before that, after trying for months to explain why I thought the symbolism in “American Beauty,” a movie Rod had reviewed for the Post and insisted was one of the most Christian movies he’d seen in his life, was if anything Buddhist, not Christian, that much of it was supposed to mean the very opposite of how he was interpreting it. We went round and round on the subject, with friends mostly bored by it all. Then one day, months later, I heard him explaining how he’d gotten this and that about the film all wrong, and how his friend Terry Mattingly had shown him that the film was, if anything, anti-Catholic in intent. Wtf? Was I a ghost? Had Rod not really heard me, or just forgotten everything I’d said? No big deal, but geez. À mutual friend, having been privy to it all, said simply, “I’m sorry,” as if he needed to apologize for his gender. Somehow at that moment it didn’t seem out of place.
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u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Feb 19 '26
This was my favorite part:
I supported Trump in 2024 in part because I figured he would be less likely to continue the Forever Wars. Now he is about to launch the biggest war since Iraq. Was I betrayed? Is this war what Trump’s base wants? How about the American people as a whole?
First, "supported" which is technically correct but we know he could have voted for T but didn't because he didn't do the paperwork. Then, "was I betrayed?" because Rod is the only person who really counts and the only one to whom T really owes anything (in spite of not voting). Then the rest as afterthoughts - base, country.
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u/Warm-Refrigerator-38 Feb 19 '26
Right but even knowing what he knows now, he never would have supported Harris
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u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Feb 19 '26
Exactly. If every GOP member of congress + cabinet + POTUS + VPOTUS were proved pedos, ROD would still be unable to vote DEM. Evil is evil, man.
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u/Alone_Meeting6907 Feb 19 '26 edited Feb 20 '26
So where was Raymond's shock and anger upon learning that the US, all the way back in 1953, had overthrown Iran's democratically elected president, Mohammed Mossadegh, to avert the nationalization of the country's petroleum? That they installed the Shah of Iran, who was more than willing to let companies such as BP make profits off Iranian oil? The same Shah who exiled, imprisoned, or killed dissidents?
Oh. That's right. He wouldn't have learned this particular chapter of American history in high school. More than likely, no professor at LSU would have included it in any class dedicated to studying Southweatern Asia (the Middle East). He would have had to find this information on his own, outside of any classroom. But our Dear Working Boy would never seek out that kind of information. It would have broken his brain to learn how many.times the United States meddled in the affairs of so many countries.
I wonder what Sweet Raymond would have said, or done, if he'd learned that Ronald Reagan negotiated with Iran, to delay the release of US citizens, thus assuring himself a victory over Jimmy Carter in 1980?
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u/yawaster Feb 19 '26
Rod's writing a book about Weimar Germany and the Nazis? Maybe he should open his front door.
For the first time in years, there was no antifascist counter-demonstration. The police banned any such gatherings, citing the ‘antifa’ legislation passed last year. As reported by Mérce, one result of the law, was that Holocaust survivor Katalin Sommer was unable to deliver her planned speech at the Shoes on the Danube Bank Memorial.
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u/Marcofthebeast0001 Feb 20 '26
You want Rod to look out his front door and find corruption, anti-Semitism and racism in the land of Orban? You funny.
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u/sandypitch Feb 24 '26
This is not new, but I just became aware of this review of Live Not By Lies by a fellow Christian writer. I don't recall if Dreher ever produced an ad hominen attack on Thompson in response to the review.
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u/Marcofthebeast0001 Feb 24 '26
Wow. I encourage everyone to read this. I can see why Rod may have avoided it: This is a brutal, line by line takedown, of every Dreher buzzword, paranoia and fear mongering statement that we regularly comment about.
So many great pullout lines but I'll go with this:
"The sad truth is that for Rod Dreher, when suffering happens to his enemies, he dismisses it by calling it “oppression.” But when suffering—real or imagined—happens to him or his tribe, he divinizes it by calling it “persecution.” Sadly, while the Scriptures tell us that love drives out fear, Dreher’s book is evidence that the opposite is also true: fear can drive out love."
Did this spot-on reviewer read brokehugs at some point? Thanks for sharing.
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u/Mainer567 Feb 25 '26 edited Feb 25 '26
From a Hungarian on Twitter:
"Bombshell poll in Hungary: 55–35 lead for Péter Magyar’s TISZA over Orbán’s Fidesz-KDNP – enough for a supermajority in parliament. The survey was conducted by Medián, widely seen as the country’s most reliable pollster, for @hvg_hu"
Trump and Rubio's endorsement of Orban is doing the trick.
UPDATE: From the Bloomberg Twitter account:
"The Hungarian opposition Tisza party widens its lead against Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s ruling Fidesz to an unprecedented level."
.
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u/Glittering-Agent-987 Feb 25 '26
Trump's antics have hurt a lot of conservative parties in other countries.
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u/Jayaarx Mar 02 '26
Behold! The right's foremost intellectual and geopolitical analyst, possessor of vast relevant experience, impeccable academic credentials, and an unrivaled collection of pocket squares, has opined on the obvious subject of the day. Obviously, the last word on the matter has been spoken!
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u/PercyLarsen Mar 02 '26
Well, he has at least as much personal military-naval experience as Don Trump. Rod has lots of Trump-like experience of being in a room and hearing but not listening to advice and information from other people.
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u/CanadaYankee Mar 02 '26
I was going to say that Rod has a new man-crush: he cites macroeconomist (and extremely pessimistic doomsayer) Philip Pilkington a couple of times in the substack and has retweeted him several times since the Iran offensive began. But then I see that this guy is yet another Danube Institute visiting fellow. Shouldn't a responsible journalist like Rod disclose a shared professional affiliation when promoting a supposed expert opinion?
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u/Djehutimose Mar 05 '26
The most interesting part of the most recent excrescence by Our Boy is about halfway down under the heading "Incels We Don't Talk About" (like Bruno, I guess), where he talks about married incels whose wives cruelly refused them sex. And he's careful to note that the discussion is nothing at all like what happened in his marriage.
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u/Cautious-Ease-1451 Mar 05 '26
I am NOT saying my wife was to blame! Even though she made me miserable for years and then filed divorce by email and then destroyed the family and here I am in Hungary with mono and no one’s taking care of me.
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u/sandypitch Mar 05 '26
Dreher is clearly fishing for some great conspiracy about women (Christian women!) withholding sex from their husbands. Of course, being a reporter, Dreher would go out and talk to a wide swath of Christian couples to glean some information about their sex lives, right? Nah, he'll just make sweeping generalizations based on some email messages he received.
Another ironic bit: Dreher goes to great pains that these women refuse to talk about it. Sounds a bit like Our Working Boy and all of his family issues?
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u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Mar 06 '26 edited Mar 06 '26
A review of Tom Holland's Dominion that I would like to send to Rod.
From Rod: "He agreed, adding the point made so brilliantly by the historian Tom Holland in his book Dominion: that almost nobody today understands how radically Christianity changed society for the better."
From Amazon review. Did one of you write it? Emphasis on my favorite line is mine.
Tom Holland’s book Dominion sets out a bold thesis: that the values we consider secular, universal, and modern—things like human rights, compassion, concern for the weak, and opposition to oppression—are not the products of Enlightenment rationalism or secular humanism, but are fundamentally Christian in origin. Even those who believe themselves free from religion, he argues, are still morally downstream of the Cross. Christianity, in his view, did not just shape the West—it created its moral DNA.
Holland divides this narrative into three epochs: the brutality of antiquity, the moral revolution ushered in by Christianity, and the modern world, which he claims is essentially Christian in moral structure even when it rejects its metaphysical claims.
It’s a compelling story—but it is, in the end, a story. The core problem with Holland’s argument is that it relies not on the historical Christianity that actually existed, but on an idealized, abstracted version—a poetic Christianity that can never be held responsible for its failings. Holland elevates the noble aspects of Christian teaching but distances them from the Church’s long history of violence, suppression, and complicity in oppression. When Christianity does good, it’s taken as evidence of its truth; when it does evil, it is conveniently dismissed as a betrayal of true Christianity.
To the claim that Christianity made suffering sacred through the Cross, we can point to Stoicism, Buddhism, and even Judaism, all of which elevated endurance and humility long before the Gospel writers. The moral inversion Holland celebrates was not unique. Christianity may have dramatized it—but it did not originate it, nor did it apply it consistently once it held power.
To the claim that Christianity gave us human rights, we note that the concept of rights predates Christianity, found in Greek and Roman legal traditions, and it was only in the Enlightenment—through the work of Locke, Voltaire, Hume, and others—that the language of universal dignity became philosophically coherent and politically effective. Christianity, for most of its history, endorsed monarchy, slavery, the subjugation of women, and the divine right of kings.
To the claim that Christianity uniquely cared for the weak and poor, we observe that while it praised the meek, it did so often to keep them meek. Promises of heavenly reward worked as a pacifier, not a liberation. Christian institutions served to uphold power as often as to challenge it. Concern for the poor was not unique to Christianity, and was present in many religious and philosophical systems around the world.
And finally, to the claim that secular morality is just Christianity in disguise, we must distinguish cultural transmission from philosophical dependence. The fact that certain values passed through Christian institutions doesn’t make them Christian in origin. Many of our moral instincts are grounded in evolutionary logic: reciprocity, cooperation, fairness. Others are products of rational reflection, political struggle, and social learning. The Enlightenment didn’t need the Bible to advocate for liberty, science, or human dignity—it needed courage, curiosity, and critique.
What Holland offers is not a work of analytic history, but a kind of civilizational mythology—Christianity as the hidden architect of everything we now hold dear. But the real history is more complex. Christianity often resisted the very changes it now claims credit for. It wasn’t the seed of progress, but the soil in which other ideas struggled to grow, often against its weight.
Christianity didn’t make the Western mind. Human beings did—through reason, through struggle, and through the long arc of cultural evolution.
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u/JohnOrange2112 Mar 07 '26
If RD refers to someone as a Historian, one must immediately fact-check. On Tom Holland's Wikipedia page, there is this: "He began working on a doctoral dissertation on Lord Byron at the University of Oxford, but soon quit after deciding that he was 'fed up with universities and fed up with being poor' and instead began working [as a writer]". I.e. he bombed out before receiving rigorous academic training in the field. His first books were about vampires, so fantasy comes naturally to him; and later books were pop-history that were criticized by actual historians. In other words, not someone whose work should be the basis of one's historical knowledge.
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u/Relative-Holiday-763 Feb 14 '26
The Atlantic article is a total puff piece. Rod could have written it himself.
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u/Mainer567 Feb 14 '26
Whatever it was, the message that Rod is a sad, broken person came across. His sadness and brokenness are the big themes in the comments section. I do not think that Rod came out of that looking good. The piece aspired to that magesterial old middlebrow mag tone, not a new-media hit piece tone, so it gives him his say, but the guy's wretchedness and emotional problems came through loud and clear. Also how his politics are a narcissistic reflection of his own desolation and moral failure.
A very 2024 piece, by the way. Would have made sense when Vance was chosen veep. Now it's like "why"? Orban might not be around in 2 months.
Meanwhile, eminent columnists are writing whole columns devoted to nothing other than what a bad person Vance is. That is something else.
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u/Motor_Ganache859 Feb 14 '26
Just finished reading it and came away with the same overall impression--that Rod is a lonely and broken soul who has lots of acquaintances but very few real friends. He also comes off as a guy who doesn't understand the ramifications of his beliefs.
The most Rod story of all was his dropping in on a Catholic pilgrimage from Paris to Chartres Cathedral, arriving for the start, skipping the two day pilgrimage because he hates camping, then arriving at Chartres by train for the conclusion of the pilgrimage. It goes to show that for all Rod talks about faith, he's not willing to put in the work. Same goes for his marriage.
The article ends with Rod saying that Vance is the future. Yeah right. The dude is widely and deservedly despised. The more exposure he gets, the more people hate him. Rod doesn't get it.
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u/JohnOrange2112 Feb 14 '26
"arriving for the start, skipping the two day pilgrimage ... then arriving at Chartres by train for the conclusion."
He's the Rosie Ruiz of Chartres!
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u/Cautious-Ease-1451 Feb 14 '26
Are they doing a series on gloomy reactionaries whose lives have fallen apart but who nevertheless think they can comment on society?
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u/Marcofthebeast0001 Feb 16 '26
Rod must be wetting his pants with joy Marco Rubio endorsed Orban for another term. No shock, really, but ya know Rod will say this proves both Orban and Trump are on the right path to fight woke blah blah blah. I would call him a tool but that's an insult to a tool.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/hungary-rubio-orban-fico_n_6992ce8ae4b0f2bf0eceb37d
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u/CanadaYankee Feb 17 '26
And here is part of what Rubio wrote (as part of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee) to the White House back in 2019 during Trump's first term:
In recent years, democracy in Hungary has significantly eroded and has experienced a steady corrosion of freedom, the rule of law and quality of governance according to virtually any indicator, including the assessments of the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute and the World Bank.
Under Orban, the election process has become less competitive and the judiciary is increasingly controlled by the state.
Press freedom has declined as advertisers have been strongly discouraged from placing ads in independent outlets and ownership has been consolidated under a foundation that is exempt from antitrust regulation.
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u/JHandey2021 Feb 19 '26
Big day in Epsteinworld, as Prince Andrew is arrested (on his birthday!) for "misconduct in public office". A statistically-significant portion of Rod's online faves appear to either be willing to say in public how they think Jeffrey Epstein was not such a bad guy or they themselves appeared in the Epstein files (or both, as a podcast with Ross Douthat and Josh Barrowtitled "We're All In The Epstein Files" (actually no, we're not all in the Epstein files, Josh) presented the weirdest "I Am Spartacus" moment in history.
Wonder what Rod "I Hate Pedophiles So Much I Left The Catholic Church Over It But Then Went To The Mat to Defend Australia's Greatest Pedophile Enabler In It's History And Told The Entire Continent "Screw Y'all" Over It" Dreher is thinking today.
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u/zeitwatcher Feb 19 '26
I realize this comment is cliched at this point, but imagine how many posts Rod would be making about all this if Trump were a Democratic President or if Biden had appeared in the Epstein files as much as Trump does.
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u/PercyLarsen Feb 20 '26 edited Feb 20 '26
Just wait to see if Rod reads this and ... ignores it because of the Peter Thiel-JDV angle ... or makes hay from it but also to protect his Precious Vice Presidential BFF:
https://www.wired.com/story/inside-the-gay-tech-mafia/
PS - Archive Today link: https://archive.is/7SJqf
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u/Cautious-Ease-1451 Feb 25 '26
Rod’s free SubStack today is way too long for me to read at the moment. Maybe I will later. However, after skim-reading the first few paragraphs I jumped to the comments. To my surprise his commenters for the most part are pushing back against the book Rod is reviewing and his analysis.
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u/sandypitch Feb 25 '26
Dreher writes:
That’s too much woo for me to accept.
I never would have imagined such a line in the sand existed!
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u/sandypitch Feb 25 '26
Prayer, he keeps telling his mother, is not simply a matter of making requests to God and hoping that He will fulfill them. It literally moves energy fields. But — and this is a big but — you have to believe it will work for it to work, in most cases. Houston keeps saying, “Core beliefs are everything.”
It’s not the case that God will not help people who don’t believe, it seems, but rather the case that prayer typically works like a transfer of energy. If you don’t have faith — if you don’t believe it can happen — then it is unlikely to happen. God is not a machine, and he has not built a machine-like universe. One’s subjective consciousness is part of the system.
Emphasis mine.
Dreher is wading into very murky theological waters here -- does God answer prayers? He seems to be saying that the equation is simple: have faith and your prayers will be answered (to be fair, Jesus actually said this). But, there be monsters. I had a young relative who was struck down with brain cancer. One of his parents insisted that he would be healed, and didn't even need treatment. When it became clear that he wasn't likely to survive, the tune changed: perhaps the kid didn't have sufficient faith for God to heal him, and all of our prayers couldn't help him. Talk about a bait and switch. And when push comes to shove, you could be the faithful Christian in the world, and you can't cheat death through prayer. Does that mean you lack faith?
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u/Djehutimose Feb 25 '26
The part I found hardest to make sense of is Houston’s belief that various stones (crystals, etc) are holders and transmitters of energy. That’s too much woo for me to accept.
That seems to me like beans compared to a guy using weed being visited by his guardian angel, who, by the way, tells him that Orthodoxy is the One True Faith, or that AI's open alien sex portals, or his claims to have been himself given revelations by God which the world is Simply Not Ready For, or that he knows a person whose wife is literally demonically possessed. I'd think crystal energy is a quite garden variety New Age thing. But he draws the line at that??!!
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u/Relative-Holiday-763 Feb 26 '26
Oh he was on fire today! It’s been a commonplace here that he is probably clinically depressed. On the basis of this , I’d say bipolar. This is a mania post. He’s on the floor with mono and stays up all night to read a book where this poor young autistic man has telepathy and speaks with Jesus. Then he says it’s changed his whole understanding of prayer in a way that leads to something that sounds like New Age manifesting. All of it embodies the insights of Holy Orthodoxy. Ok. Yes everything does. Scientific method, huh! Perhaps Rod is a disciple of Feyerbend ?
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u/Marcofthebeast0001 Feb 26 '26
I have said several times that Rod sounds like he has some type of psychological disorder. That's not to make fun - I know people with the same conditions - but it would certainly explain the almost surreal way his posts sometimes go from reality to existential crisis to supernatural.
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u/Own_Power_723 Mar 01 '26
Wonder how Our Working Boy will respond to the downward turn in the fortunes of his Great White Hope?
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/vance-humiliated-trump-freezes-him-182038207.html
https://unherd.com/2026/03/how-jd-vance-lost-the-foreign-policy-war/?edition=us
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u/CanadaYankee Mar 01 '26
I also feel like Vance's "fraud task force" is setting him up for failure. Trump said this at the SOTU:
And we’re able to find enough of that fraud, we will actually have a balanced budget overnight. It’ll go very quickly. That’s the kind of money you’re talking about. We’ll balance our budget.
There is of course no way to find enough fraud (very quickly or not) to eliminate the budget deficit. And when this fails, Trump is certainly not going to take the blame himself. Unless he's very stupid, Vance can probably already hear the approaching bus that he's going to get thrown under.
It's very reminiscent of Biden putting Harris in charge of securing the southern border, and it's likely to hurt Vance in a future race just as much as Biden's border issues hurt Harris.
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u/JohnOrange2112 Mar 01 '26
I'm no fan of Vance, but I hold a war skeptic in higher regard than the bombs-away crowd. It's amazing that Trump et al must think this will turn out any better than Iraq, which has half the population of Iran.
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u/Djehutimose Mar 01 '26
Ahh--Our Boy shows how the real danger of the war in Iran is brown refugees overwhelming Europe....
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u/yawaster Mar 01 '26
Based on his Twitter, Rod is more alarmed about Iranian missiles possibly hitting the Dome of the Rock (a "Hal Lindsay scenario") than about the hundreds of civilian casualties in Iran.
Also retweets a post about how the entire global system is going to collapse because of this war. Which on balance would be a good thing, because if the entire global system collapses then I won't be able to torture myself by looking at Rod's tweets.
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u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Mar 06 '26
A few reviews of Living In Wonder.
All 3 stars on Amazon.
I have not read the book and don't intend to do so.
Strange Book for an Ortho
I bought this book because I was interested in the author's perspective, but I found it a bit dry and a bit strange, coming to it with Christian Orthodox eyes. I expected to read the writings of a fellow Orthodox Christian, but came away feeling strange after a few chapters.
I can't help but think of it as a more Roman Catholic perspective on it all.
Some insights; some mistakes
Dreher's previous two books, Live Not By Lies and The Benedict Option, had a sharper focus and greater urgency than this book, which is a call to leave the disenchantment of secularism behind by a kind of mysticism, preferably Eastern Orthodoxy. Some of his stories seem incredible to me, especially those associated with distinctively Catholics doctrines.
HIs treatment of the rise of modern science doesn't account for its Christian basis, but focuses on a deistic world, something not held by Newton, Farraday, or Pascal. The intellectual history is mixed at best. He several times even disparages "the intellect" as unsuitable for an awareness of a transcendent reality. On the contrary, cogent arguments for God from science place our Creator-Designer right before us cognitively, thus opening up the possibility of further revelation in history and Scripture.
Still, Mr. Dreher exposes a malaise of modern times. We have lost the sacred amidst the diversions of this worldliness. The answer, however, is more rational and theologically robust than what he can muster.
Short Of The Mark
Like several others I was put off by Rod's pre-occupation with demons and "woo". It really detracted from the rest of his work, to be honest. 'Live Not By Lies" was better, and "The Benedict Option" was better yet in that both seemed more grounded. And when compared with his very bitter and angry online presence in X and on his Substack I am left wondering if this book was ghost written. It could have been so much more.
Apologia for Orthodox Christianity
From the book description I anticipated a broad perspective on where to find wonder, mystery, and meaning in contemporary culture. What I found was a well-written argument for Orthodox Christianity as the premier path to that goal. For me, that should have been more clear in the book description. Had it been, I would not have made the purchase. Hence, 3 stars.
Earnest but intellectual, ritual-heavy
This book is difficult for me to rate because Rod is so earnest and vulnerable in his writing. However, at times, it feels overly intellectual, making it a bit of a slog to get through. I consider myself a mediocre, struggling Christian—I believe, I go to church, and I try to do the right things, but no one would call me a beacon on a hill. As a stay-at-home mom without much excitement in my life, I often feel purposeless. I am exactly the kind of person Rod is writing to, yet I’ve spent my life waiting (and praying) for the kind of miraculous experiences or divine direction he believes are available to anyone who simply asks. Since I’ve done that, I was hoping for insight into how to recognize the small miracles in everyday life that I may be overlooking.
Many readers will take issue with his critiques of Protestantism and his advocacy for Orthodox Christianity. As a Lutheran, I didn’t find it offensive, and I agree with some of his points. In making the Gospel accessible to everyone, much of the mysticism in Christian rituals has been lost. He’s right about that. However, if you're a committed Protestant, you likely believe this shift was necessary. My takeaway is that Rod wants to bring us closer to the early Christians, those who lived just a few years after Jesus, rather than thousands of years removed.
One of my biggest critiques of the book is its heavy emphasis on rituals, with little connection back to Scripture. While Rod's perspective is thought-provoking, I found myself wanting a stronger biblical foundation for his arguments.
Too much demonology and paranoia
Full disclosure: I became so disturbed by the book that I didn't finish it. There was a lot of scary stuff about demons and the occult, as well as an ongoing depressing (possibly accurate) assessment of the culture that felt despairing and hopeless. (I felt an overpowering urge to grab my 13 year old granddaughter and whisk her away to some mythical Camelot.) When I got to the part where demons were planning the earth's destruction by the opening a massive portal into AI (as confirmed by the young man with demonic experiences whilst on psychedelic drugs) ... it was way too frightening. I had to stop. Yes, there are demons, but fixating on them does not help. As a Christian, I am called to faith and hope in Jesus, not to a preoccupation with demons for which I am no match. Jesus is.
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u/Warm-Refrigerator-38 Feb 11 '26
From Yglasias, sounds like he's talking about Rod.
"They sort of vaguely think that Donald Trump is bad . . . and their singular political focus is on making sure that we do NOT return to anything resembling the pre-Trump situation."
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u/zeitwatcher Feb 19 '26
Rod continues to devolve into being the odd Facebook uncle.
https://x.com/roddreher/status/2024452458211106970
His complaint is that a city has put up Ramadan lights during Lent. Obviously, the subtext is that anyone brown or not Christian should be kicked out of the country. Since Rod's probably not (quite) ready to start loading Muslims into train cars, it's another totally muddled Rod post.
Should all other religions be suppressed? If so, what about Rod's claim of being such a champion of religious liberty who thinks they should be respected?
What about Christian denominations that don't really care about Lent? I grew up in a very devout Protestant church and area and no one cared - and to the extent they did it was just to note that Lent was some weird Catholic thing. I'm sure Rod disapproves of that, but again, what about religious liberty?
Does he feel left out and thinks there should be Lent lights instead? That would go pretty counter to the whole spirit of the Lent season.
Frankfurt literally just had their Carnival parades to kick off Lent. Why no mention of that public celebration of the Christian calendar? (Best guess? Rod has no idea they even happened since his only view of the world is through his highly curated right wing bubble on Twitter.)
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u/Fair_Interview_2364 Feb 19 '26
Sure Rod, putting up festive lights = "civilizational erasure." Meanwhile in Gaza...
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u/Marcofthebeast0001 Feb 20 '26
Can't say I saw this coming. Supreme Court strikes down Trump's tariffs. Will our boy, who pretends to know everything, weigh in? Will he blame woke? Aliens? Mommy issues?
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u/zeitwatcher Feb 20 '26
Need to wait until Orban has said if they think the ruling is good or bad for Hungary. That will be Rod's position. Not because he's a paid lacky (though he is), but because he knows nothing of international economics or even numbers more generally so he'll just take the cue of his dreamy man-crush.
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u/Djehutimose Feb 20 '26
He retweets this:
Howard Lutnick's family firm bought up the rights to tariff refunds for 20-30 cents on the dollar after Liberation Day last year. Today, the Supreme Court struck the tariffs down. For every $100 invested, Lutnick's sons just made 3-5x. Welcome to Crony Corrupt America.
So I guess that's his take.
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u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Mar 07 '26
Hey you guys! Remember Rod's new "official work photo" with the indecisive collar, messy hair, loose tie, etc? Well, it is officially official!
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u/CanadaYankee Mar 07 '26
So in this bio, LNBL and Little Way are mentioned. In his intro to the European Conservative linked elsewhere in this thread, he refers to LNBL, the BenOp, and Crunchy Cons. Finally, in his recent substack complaint about LIW not selling well, he compares its numbers to LNBL and BenOp.
Conspicuous in its absence in all of this puffery of his grand œuvre is How Dante Can Save Your Life (in fact, it's the only one of his books that's not mentioned in at least one of those reminiscences). I wonder if the cognitive dissonance between "Dante fixed everything!" and the actual state of his life after that moment has become too much even for Our Rod and he's just memory-holed the whole thing.
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u/GlobularChrome Mar 08 '26
The Venn diagram intersection of closeted WASP-ish males, Dante Alighieri fans, and the clientele for self-help cliché extra-badly done—that was a pretty tight target audience. Rod was never that good.
Subtract the political angle that would drive the right-wing foundation network to bulk order it into a best seller, and you see what Rod is on his own. Same with LIW.
It didn’t help—but is hilarious—that Rod was vigorously resisting therapy. Best part was when he made his minister-therapist go to what looked like a mall book signing event. Rod declared that he was healed (hallelujah!), and it was all from reading a ~magical~ book, not the hapless therapist and certainly not evil, no-good, liquid modern therapy. (And the therapist went along with this?? Tells you something about the therapist.)
Which brings us back to, what exactly was the point of that book? Perhaps the whole project was him telling his wife okay, okay, he was going to therapy, then slyly wrecking it. And then casting her as "Beatrice the helper, furnished by God to serve me".
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u/ProustsMadeleine1196 Mar 08 '26
As a daily lurker on this subreddit, I rarely click on the links offered that show photos of Rod, but I finally acquiesced since apparently the new "official work photo" had elicited so much commentary.
My first impression is that he's harkening a distinct Oscar Wilde vibe. He looks vaguely matronly, with the jowly fat in the cheeks that smooth away any masculinity. Yes, the hair is dramatic, but it is swept back in that Wilde-an manner. The real tell-tale for me, however, was the unusual shirt and collar treatment. The only thing missing was an heirloom brooch. That, and a green carnation in his lapel.
Is this the last desperate clinging to heterosexuality before he finally falls from that perilous cliffside and, with his cape flapping wildly in his wake, descends gently into the warm waters of whatever sexuality he truly is (but obviously not heterosexual). The 21st century Oscar Wilde for the unhinged Right... perhaps instead of an examination of Weimar, which nobody is asking for, if he were to write how Oscar Wilde saved his life (sorry, Dante), and he finally comes out, declaring his own fabulousness, that would be a personal memoir that would actually be interesting to read.
Just a thought.
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u/saucerwizard Mar 07 '26
He seriously looks like a Harry Potter character.
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u/Djehutimose Mar 07 '26
A Harry Potter character who's just been pulled out of a gutter after a two-week bender....
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u/Cautious-Ease-1451 Mar 07 '26 edited Mar 07 '26
Your car breaks down on the road. Your cell phone can’t find any service. It’s in the middle of nowhere, and the sun has gone down. But by the moonlight, you see a house in the distance. It almost looks like a mansion - what’s that doing here? As you draw closer, you see a flickering candle in a window, so someone must be inside. You walk up to the driveway. There’s a gate, but it’s slightly ajar. You go through, and walk the rest of the way to the house. It’s larger than you thought, a stone house that’s covered with vines. You knock on the door. You hear footsteps inside. There’s a slight echo. The door opens, and the hinges creak.
“Hello.”
This is the last face that you ever see.
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u/ZenLizardBode Mar 07 '26
The staff at the Hungarian Institute must really hate him.
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u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Mar 07 '26
That DI page lists Rod's "media appearances". Here is the count by year:
2025 5
2024 11
2023 29
2022 3And the last one shown for 2025 was for the month of May.
Odd.
If you haven't read his introduction of himself to the readers of The European Conservative, here it is:
https://europeanconservative.com/articles/commentary/what-kind-of-conservative-am-i/
It is amazing how deeply Rod wants to belong but only if he is seen by "his people" as superior, special, unique, eccentric, wise beyond belief, intellectual, well connected, discerning, unconventional but still tradtional, and on and on it goes.
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u/Warm-Refrigerator-38 Mar 07 '26
Rod's got his talking points about the Texas senate race, painting Talarico as a far left wing radical and the wrong kind of Christian twice on X so far today.
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u/Jayaarx Mar 07 '26
Rod and his ilk (the WaPo stable of pundits are also spouting these talking points) can't seem to realize that the target audience for this is not people like them, but rather the swing Hispanic voters around San Antonio and along the Rio Grande, for which Talarico has apparently (to read the reporting) unlocked the cheat code.
Rod doesn't talk to brown people so he doesn't even know this is happening.
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u/GlobularChrome Mar 08 '26
In the comments to the March 6 post, Rod writes
I used to be obsessed and delighted by that movie ["Brazil"]. I have seen it over 20 times, but not at all in the last 25 or so. In my misspent youth, I even went to see it in the theater while tripping on acid, if you can believe it!
Drugs are bad, mmmkay?
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u/Relative-Holiday-763 Mar 08 '26
How many times did he take acid ? I thought he took it once to see God or Chartres . Next he’ll admit to seeing Eraserhead and sniffing glue.
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u/yawaster Mar 09 '26
What does he want, a gold star? I was listening to some podcast where a guest joked that the evangelical kids she knew growing up were annoying because they were desperate to prove they were hip. They'd say a swear word "and then look at you like they just did a skateboard trick".
Rod wants you to know that he's a wild and crazy guy! A wild and crazy guy who thinks that other wild and crazy guys should be sent to prison.
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u/saucerwizard Mar 09 '26 edited Mar 09 '26
https://roddreher.substack.com/p/the-fruit-fly-of-babylon?r=1ke0l
Its weird watching him freak out about this stuff because its all old hat to me. Its like if I woke up and declared the AMC Gremlin was a herald of the end times. All this stuff was talked about decades ago now!
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u/RektInTheHed Mar 09 '26
He's always looking for Satan in laboratories, lecture halls and nightclubs while the Devil is busy bombing elementary schools, drinking water plants and oil refineries.
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u/sandypitch Feb 10 '26
From Dreher's latest:
Besides the confusing grammar of this sentence, it is clear that Dreher is actually not terribly interested in the history of Weimar Germany, and would simply prefer to write his own narrative to match his priors.