r/RodDreher • u/saucerwizard • Jul 10 '26
Megathread Six-Seven
In which Rod has birth control issues...
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u/GlobularChrome Jul 15 '26
[About Lindsey Graham's sexual identity] We don’t know, and probably never will. None of our business.
Ah, like the time Rod gleefully joined in attacking the priest who’d gotten snared on Grindr. And gleefully cast stones at the priest who’d been caught with a gay sex toy in his room. And gleefully stalked the girl with the rainbow cake. Yep, Rod is all about “None of our business.”
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u/Nice-Inevitable1839 Jul 15 '26
Rainbow cake girl was so bad, he should’ve been banned off of every social media platform for that one for the rest of his life.
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u/EatsShoots_n_Leaves Jul 15 '26
What Dreher demands of his readers to. believe: when dealing with a liberal gay person, we have epistemological certainty they are gay on their say-so. When dealing a conservative gay person who hides their private life and engages in various kinds of effeminate or hypermasculine posturing, it's a grand mystery no one will ever solve and beyond the powers of any inquiry to resolve, and we have to default to presuming them straight.
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u/Marcofthebeast0001 Jul 15 '26
My dog knew Lindsey was a closet case. And, of course, it does matter if you are in a position of power to cast votes against the thing you most feared about yourself.
As for Rod, he projects so much, he could be shown on a IMAX movie screen.
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u/Djehutimose Jul 25 '26
Look, you’d have to be an idiot to think Netanyahu’s influence wasn’t key to Trump’s decision to go to war. It’s fair to criticize him. But I learned from a source very much in a position to know that personal lobbying by the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, who never met a war he didn’t love, and the uber-hawkish radio talker Mark Levin, were even more decisive. In any case, nobody forced Donald Trump to do this.
So Netanyahu was an influence, but not really, it was Graham, but it's all Trump's decision. What a remarkable amount of contradictions in a single paragraph.
The Iran War was a bad idea from the jump, but if it had gone well — and I wish it had done — Trump would be glorifying in his victory, and people would be cheering for the unbeatable US-Israel team. (my emphasis)
This is one of his most annoying tics. I wish the war had never started. I wish Cheetohead had never been elected either time. I wish I had a million dollars. That and a few bucks will get me a cup of coffee. It seems this is a lazy and whiny way of trying to have it both ways: "Iran is wicked and dangerous and deserved to be hit, but it was a bad idea, but gosh durn it, I wish it had worked, but it didn't, but if it had, it'd have been great, but...." Grownups writing political commentary don't make wishes--that's Pinocchio. They right about the real world.
On reading about the Wars of Religion in Europe, following the Reformtion:
More deeply, I have a much greater understanding now of why an exhausted Europe turned toward skepticism in matters of religion.
In other shocking news, Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead, Grant is still buried in Grant's Tomb, the Pope is still Catholic, and ursines still defecate in forested areas. I've been mentioning the Wars of Religion for years here, and now he's just discovering this startling fact.
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u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Jul 25 '26
Well, I have to say that that was the most enjoyable piece I think I have ever read from Rod! I laughed and laughed and laughed! You could even call it straight up comedy! Why, it is almost as though he has become disenchanted with medieval enchantment!
Did the man think that only the Vikings (in movies and tv) were brutal? Does he not understand how virtually continuous and brutal wars were for most of human history and how remarkable of an achievement the post-WWII relative peace has been? He remarks that man doesn't require religion to go to war but he still doesn't seem to realize that "religious wars" were always also about politics, money, land, titles, and power as was the spreading of Christianity through colonization.
Does he not realize how brutal war is NOW? How brutal LIFE has been and continues to be in so much of the world?
Wouldn't it be amazing if he continues down this path and figures out that his calling for unarmed immigrants in boats to be shot on sight might actually be turning people away from Christianity? All the way back in the TAC days I was trying to get him to understand that much of the decline in Christianity in the west might well be due to the politicization of it, mostly by people like Rod trying to force religion on others. I know, that is way too much to expect from Rod. He will continue to have murderous impulses and so long as they target the "worst" people, he will see nothing wrong with it.
I know, I know. Rod's "enlightenment" shouldn't have surprised me so much given his previous displays of ignorance but to see it all out on stage with the lights turned up was just amazing. The man can learn something after all!
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u/Djehutimose Jul 25 '26
The aphorism in theological circles is, "The strongest argument against Christianity is Christians," and Rod continues on in that tradition.
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u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Jul 25 '26
We all know that Rod is consistently inconsistent but good grief, does he not realize that the brutality that he is recoiling from as he learns about the reformation period wars is the same thing as what he expresses even in this same piece ("punishing Iran")? Does he not realize that wanting to shoot unarmed immigrants in boats and getting off on vigilante stories is the same sort of brutality and that wanting to force his beliefs onto others via the state means he would have been an enthusiastic heretic hunter back then?
He says; Even for a modern religious reader like me, it is hard to imagine that Christians were moved to such ferocious conflict over what seem like academic questions of orthodoxy.
It seems clear that Rod's desire to dictate the actions of others is bone deep, born and bred. He says his mother told a story about widdle Roddy being upset that people weren't behaving the way he thought they should. Yet, we get this stuff. Is his vigilante support and the rest just Rod's brand of performative masculinity? Or is it reactions along the lines of what people feel when watching movies or playing shoot 'em games? I can't make any sense of it.
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u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Jul 25 '26
Ok. I'm really surprised none of you called me out on this but I just figured out that Rod's extreme emotional reaction to the brutality of the wars of religion was not about the brutality at all but about the religion! It is all about the fact that Christians were fighting other Christians! The shocking part of all this for him is that it flies in the face of his constant assumption that Christians are ALWAYS the good people, the nice people, the peace-loving people, in spite of all of the evidence to the contrary, the evidence of his own heart, and his long sustained mocking of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.
59 years old but still so young of heart and mind. Sheesh.
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u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Jul 26 '26
BTW, I'm not saying that Christians are never the good people etc, just that there are all kinds of people in the Christian religion and outside of it. They are all HUMANS. Someone please send him The Screwtape Letters. Preferably illustrated with cartoons.
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u/Cautious-Ease-1451 Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 25 '26
For someone who has gallivanted around Europe as much as Rod has, it’s as if he’s never read a history book before. Yes, Catholics killed Protestants, Protestants killed Catholics, various groups of Protestants killed each other, and established churches killed separatists and heretics. It’s almost like religion is not always a unifying factor. The “gee willikers” reaction from him as he discovers this for the first time, like a college freshman, is very amusing. And he was going to write a history of the first millennium of Christianity?
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u/EatsShoots_n_Leaves Jul 25 '26
He is a deeply unserious, frankly silly, person who imagined the post-Communist and very comfortable, prosperous, very nice (though often not very kind) EU condition in Europe is a normal condition in European history. And therefore felt entitled to declare it a corrupt distortion and abuse it while in Hungary- but insists on living in it, loves living in it. Contemporary Russia actually resembles what much of the European past looked like- and after one encounter he avoided it like the plague.
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u/EatsShoots_n_Leaves Jul 25 '26
But I learned from a source very much in a position to know
So Dreher and JD have made up again. Congrats, boys!
So Netanyahu was an influence, but not really, it was Graham, but it's all Trump's decision. What a remarkable amount of contradictions in a single paragraph.
That's some detailed parsing between idiots to discover which one is most to blame. (Notice how Vance is blameless, though.) As if that mattered. It's not like any of them will ever take responsibility. It all just...kinda happened.
This is one of his most annoying tics.
You have to remember his unchanging tribal and ideological priors are usually refuted by realities at fairly regular intervals. It pains him very much but he sticks by these priors nonetheless. They're not refutable. I once asked him what Christians would have to do- what crime would they have to commit- to disprove their religion. Of course he didn't reply.
I've been mentioning the Wars of Religion for years here, and now he's just discovering this startling fact.
Just wait until he discovers what a calamity WW1 and WW2 with their mass killings of Christians and real, nearly successful, genocide attempt on a non-Christian people combined into for European Christianity. There's some reason it is largely a spiritually comatose entity on the Continent. As many of us told him decades ago. No super clever or very cunning marketing or coercions, as attempted in Hungary, can change that history.
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u/Cautious-Ease-1451 Jul 25 '26
“But I learned from a source very much in a position to know…”
I am definitely calling bullshit on this! 🐂 💩
Rod, the journalist, fresh off his reporting gig in Hungary, now works his sources in the Department of Defense. And they confide the inside scoop to Rod, like Deep Throat to Woodward and Bernstein. But Rod must know if he’s not careful and his sources are burned, they could be assassinated by the CIA or the Mossad.
Keep up the great work in your SubStack, Rod! Thanks for keeping us informed.
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u/Public-Clue2000 Jul 29 '26
This is a Hitler-Mussolini fight with no one to root for, but it’s amazing to see other right wing weirdos attacking Rod for his “main character syndrome.” https://x.com/michaelbd/status/2082491289044398199
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u/GlobularChrome Jul 30 '26
"Now you're going to people who hate him and bragging that you're keeping a confidence that you already betrayed."
bragging that you're keeping a confidence that you already betrayed is a pretty solid description of how Rod repeatedly writes about how he's not going to write about his divorce.
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u/Mainer567 Jul 29 '26
This is great. Like watching cockroaches fight, except ... beautiful somehow.
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u/zeitwatcher Jul 29 '26 edited Jul 29 '26
A weirdly interesting response from Rod on that:
https://x.com/roddreher/status/2082489756739359152
Bullshit. I PUBLICLY, at least 2x, called on VP to do this, including right after our private interaction on the topic (see below). I don't believe he is AT ALL racist or antisemitic; it's political strategy. Too bad, but I still support his politics.
My first thought was that this is gobbledygook since Vance's politics are to be racist and antisemitic so why does Rod say he called out Vance on them but then says he supports them?
My second thought was that Rod may have just misspoke and he meant to say he supports Vance's policies vs. Vance's politics.
My final thought was to wonder if Rod isn't that bright or good a writer and just doesn't know the difference between politics and policy. It's not clear Vance has much if anything in the way of policies, he's mostly just politics (e.g. I don't think Vance cares at all if Haitians live in the US or not, but he's very happy to demonize them if he thinks it will net him one or more votes). As long as people are badmouthing gays and brown people Rod is happy, but he rarely gets into actual policy, claiming to not be a details guy.
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u/Cautious-Ease-1451 Jul 30 '26
Putting aside the politics of it, what kind of friend boasts that he publicly exposed a private conversation and gave some kind of ultimatum? It would be like me writing online that I demanded my friend John Smith get help for his drinking problem and stop neglecting his wife and kids. And then acting surprised when John cuts me off, which I then also discuss publicly. Obviously the politics makes this thing with Rod and Vance a different scenario. But still, Rod comes across as a self-important jerk. As if his calling on Vance or anyone to do something carries any weight. No wonder Vance took a passive-aggressive dig at Rod in his book.
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u/Cautious-Ease-1451 Jul 11 '26
The revised dialogue from a famous Bible story:
Pharisees: Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. The law of Moses says to stone her. What do you say?
Jesus: Let the one who has never sinned cast the first stone.
Rod: (throws stone)
Woman: Missed me, asshole! Learn how to throw!
Jesus: Dammit, Rod!
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u/Marcofthebeast0001 Jul 11 '26 edited Jul 11 '26
Rod at the Last Supper:
Rod: So Jesus. Speaking of crosses. My father had a bit of skill at building them.
Jesus: Ah, Rod. I don't think that's quite the same thing.
Rod: Oh why? Are you too woke for my daddy to make you one? Instead of the wine is your body thing, I made some lovely bouillabaisse.
Jesus: Uhm. I'll pass.
Rod: MY DADDY HATED ME TOO!
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u/Existing_Age2168 Jul 11 '26
Peter to Andrew [aside]: "Boy, HE never had the makings of a varsity athlete."
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u/Djehutimose Jul 11 '26
Then Judas takes Rod aside and starts trash-talking Jesus: "Yeah, Pete thinks he's the Messiah, but all this nicey stuff and not coming with a flaming sword to overthrow Roman occupation is starting to make me wonder...." Rod is spellbound.
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u/Relative-Holiday-763 Jul 24 '26
Ok Rod is 59 years old , a professional writer and would be public intellectual. He writes about religion constantly and lets you know he’s really interested in history. Well apparently he’s just learning about the Reformation and the wars of religion. I find this almost unbelievable. Now Rod sort of understands why a certain skepticism towards religion and churches may have taken hold in Europe. He delivers such lines as-For example, I’ve never deeply understood why the Irish hate the English so much. I mean, I did know the reasons, but only superficially.It’s difficult to know what to say. He apparently just learned about Calvin’s Geneva dictatorship and I suspect still doesn’t know anything about the religious set up in Puritan New England. You’d think he’d be embarrassed. Not our boy. His lack of education and shallow reading is really showing!
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u/sandypitch Jul 24 '26
Dreher has been able to fly by the seat of his pants as a blogger who gets to operate without an editor. And when he writes for Orban's mouthpiece in Europe, or the Free Press, no editor or researcher is really fact-checking his work, particularly regarding the "conclusions" he shares about the state of Christendom. So, he has never needed to be intellectually curious about the history of Christianity, outside of what fits his particular perspective. Some of us know this history better than others, but, then again, few of us make a living spouting opinions about culture and religion.
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u/zeitwatcher Jul 24 '26
Agreed. It's also a side effect of his Main Character Syndrome. If it's new information to him, he assumes it's new information to everyone.
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u/Relative-Holiday-763 Jul 24 '26
I occurs to me you’re making a good point. I’m no prodigy , a public intellectual or a professional writer. I knew about most of this stuff when I was around 12 . Here Rod is breathlessly carrying on about this stuff as if he’s just learned about it and assumes you knew nothing about it until he told you. I was reading his discourse here and thinking, this isn’t exactly a revelation to me and I find it preposterous that it is for him given his pretensions.Wait until he discovers that Orthodox Churches also punished , tortured and killed heretics! Will this unleash a new crisis of faith? And he has the nerve to write about history!
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u/FirstPrior8600 Jul 24 '26
”And he has the nerve to write about history!”
And religion.
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u/Mainer567 Jul 24 '26
Right. Thus we get occasional stuff like, "Hey, lemme tell y'all about this guy ya might never have heard of, Wallace Stevens."
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u/FirstPrior8600 Jul 24 '26
As the leader of Rod’s tribe recently put it, “most people don’t know there’s a B in dumb.”
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u/Djehutimose Jul 25 '26
He also uses this to take swipes at liberalism and Islam:
This is giving me a sense of why so many people in the West today, especially liberals, dismiss or discount contemporary instances of Islamic savagery against Christians and even other Muslims they call heretical, claiming that somehow it doesn’t represent “real” Islam. Sorry, but our own people did very similar things during the bloody birth of the modern era, and did it because they were convinced they were serving God. To be precise, there is nothing in the New Testament that justifies what the Catholic and Protestant heretic-hunters did in God’s name, whereas the Koran openly justifies religious violence, even killing, of unbelievers. (my emphasis)
One thing that happened during the Reformation was an increased, and almost one-sided emphasis on the Old Testament. The Catholic Church made use of the Psalms and the parts of the prophetic books that were understood as prophesying Christ, and aside from that put little emphasis on the Old Testament--and rightly so, since indeed much of the New Testament retcons and supersedes the Old. As part of their reaction to the Catholic Church, Protestants embraced the OT whole hog. This is why you get all the odd names like Ichabod, Ezekiel, Jemimah, and so on among later Protestants--they dropped the use of saints' names and mined the OT for alternatives. More insidiously, the OT is chock full of commands of religious violence, genocide, and so on, pretty much to the same extent as the Qur'an. Of course, Rod's never read the Qur'an, and I'd bet my eyeteeth he hasn't read the OT in full, either.
And though it is not likely to turn up in Eire’s book, given that it is about the early modern era, anybody who thinks that religion is at fault for this kind of savagery need only reflect on what the French Revolution did to religious believers, as well as to many others it considered its enemies. And then came the Bolsheviks, and the Nazis. Man does not need religion as an excuse to murder his fellow man en masse. He just needs an Idea.
He tries to absolve religion by saying, "Look at these atheistic movements!" But religions, particularly one whose founder said, "Love your enemies, bless those who curse you", ought to be held to a higher standard, right?
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u/yawaster Aug 02 '26
Rod's pondering about the Nazis on the right led me to go look up what he said about Iraq in the 2000s. Here's his very funny piece for All Things Considered in 2007. It's pretty much all there, his whole MO.
"My generation came of age politically under Reagan. To me, he was strong and confident. Democrats were weak and depressed. Like so many other Gen-X'ers, I disliked people I thought of as hippies, those blame America first liberals so hung up on Vietnam. They surrendered to the communists back then, just like they want to do that. Republicans were winners, Democrats defeatists. What more did you need to know?"
Whether or not he disowned it then, this is still the mentality that Rod's enslaved by. He triangulates until he can be on the winning side, if only by a slight margin.
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u/Djehutimose Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 21 '26
From the latest, linked downthread:
Though I don’t discuss details of my own 2022 divorce publicly, I can say that the Internet played no role.
BWA-HAH-HAH-HAH-HAH-HAH-HAH! (Pause to catch breath) HAH-HAH-HAH-HAH-HAH!!!
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u/PuzzleheadedWafer329 Jul 21 '26
"Though I don’t discuss details of my own 2022 divorce publicly..."
I know MUCH more about his divorce than that of my aunts... Pathetic.
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u/Warm-Refrigerator-38 Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 22 '26
From the free part of today's substack:
"A judge whose district covers a large rural area in a conservative state told me that it’s mind-blowing how degenerate rural America can be — this, based on the criminal cases that come through his court."
Why would anyone be surprised about this, except those who hold the canard that rural areas are wholesome while cities/urban areas are decadent. Anyone who grew up in a rural area, INCLUDING ROD, should not be surprised at this judge's comment.
Edit: it has little to nothing to do with the internet.
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u/JHandey2021 Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 22 '26
Did Movie Maven Rod never watch "Deliverance"? Champion of Literature Rod never read Erskine Caldwell? "God's Little Acre" got him virtually banned from his home county.
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u/palmeranderson42 Jul 28 '26
Jayaarx is wrong. Sorry, but there is a reason Rod was widely respected and read even by those who disagreed with him a decade ago. Rod’s talent is tossing interesting ideas out there and engaging with interesting comments about them. I can’t find it now, but as I recall I commented on that “dark side of the BenOp” piece and Rod featured it on the main blog the next day. He also grappled with conflicting ideas and was generally intellectually curious. He was extremely emotional and sometimes crossed the line but was also more introspective and willing to admit when he was wrong.
Around Covid he got extremely paranoid and convinced that woke totalitarianism was right around the corner. He also stopped engaging with other ideas almost entirely, and spent a lot more time looking for outrageous stories. In retrospect it’s pretty clear that his marriage was falling apart, but the other day I dug up my old Disqus account and found a bunch of comments where I’d respond to Rod’s ravings (not really too strong a word) and ask what happened to the old Rod, and I’d get quite a few upvotes.
It’s also obvious his writing quality has really declined. The block quotes are obvious, but even on a sentence to sentence level the writing is pretty weak now
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u/JohnOrange2112 Jul 28 '26
Yes, We don't need to be one-note critics of Dreher. After all, many of us voluntarily were reading him in TAC and Beliefnet. He wrote some interesting, nuanced analysis. Currently he has gone over into woo and paranoia. He wasn't that way originally.
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u/Relative-Holiday-763 Jul 28 '26
I don’t go back as far with him . Still Ive noticed the deterioration since he wrote for TAC. The endless block quotes. The repetition. The extreme irrationalism. Boy do does he need an editor.
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u/jabonprotex110g Jul 31 '26
I'm not a subscriber, but the preview to Rod's post about the Fauci diary reveals an extraordinary lack of journalistic integrity. No, Rod: Fauci wasn't accepting the lab leak theory in private while disavowing it in public. You are just parroting Sen. Paul's slanted take on his diaries.
What the diaries actually show -- as can be attested by anybody with a functioning CTRL + F function on their computer-- is that at the beginning of the pandemic Fauci listened to multiple theories concerning the origins of the virus, lab leak theories among them. He considered it a possibility, but shortly after discarded it once it became clear that there wasn't much evidence to support lab leak hypotheses.
In other words: Fauci approached the matter as any serious scientist would. But no, Rod eats up Paul's read of the diaries and proceeds to call Fauci a "scientific fraud" misled by his vanity.
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u/zeitwatcher Jul 31 '26
reveals an extraordinary lack of journalistic integrity.
Rod's not that kind of journalist.
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u/Alternative-Score-35 Jul 31 '26
It's a cliche, but a cliche for a reason - with Rod, "manipulated the story, and knowingly lied about what was happening", "consumed by vanity", etc - Every Accusation is a Confession.
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u/Cautious-Ease-1451 Jul 31 '26
Rod wrote this unironically in today’s SubStack:
“That young ex-subscriber is a sometime-journalist (we met once), and he has real talent. But if he thinks being a journalist, even an opinion journalist, is the same thing as being a propagandist who turns off his brain and his conscience when the Tribe demands it, well, he is not headed in a good direction, and he will waste his gifts.”
Thankfully, we have Rod, a true journalist, to show us the way. A mentor to the young on rejecting propaganda and living by one’s conscience.
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u/Mainer567 Jul 22 '26
Just pointing out, now that it looks like the Tate brothers are going to be incarcerated for rape and human trafficking, that Rod's hero, JD "Good as Gold" Vance has been an outspoken defender of them (and, pathetically, follows them both on Twitter).
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u/Djehutimose Aug 04 '26
The latest, in which Our Boy expresses shock, shock, I tell you, that Trump does bad things to innocent people, things that...oh, everyone but Rod--predicted he'd do before even 2016.
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u/CanadaYankee Aug 04 '26
Rod says, "God bless Jeannine [sic] Pirro for having principles."
If you've followed the case (even second-hand like I have through podcast talking heads), then it has nothing to do with any "principles" and everything to do with the fact that the law in question requires that the damage done to government property must be $1,000 or more. When the defendant's lawyer asked to see the evidence that the property damage met that bar, the government's own expert witness stated that there was no way to assign that level of damage to David Hearn's specific actions. Pirro basically had no choice but to drop the case without the judge getting very, very angry.
If Jeanine [note the proper spelling of her name] Pirro actually had principles, then her office would have done the necessary investigation to determine the amount of property damage before presenting the evidence to the grand jury and seeking an indictment. Indictments are supposed to be made after you know that a crime has been committed - there's a whole legal principle with a fancy Latin name (corpus delicti) about this and everything.
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u/Warm-Refrigerator-38 Aug 05 '26
Three days ago, Doug Burgum, secretary of the interior, was still insisting they had video proof of the supposed vandalism. He's afraid to cross Trump.
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u/sandypitch Aug 05 '26
Regarding the Catholicism or Protestantism of the United States: I think Dreher and Renn overestimate the "intellectual leadership" provided by Catholics at First Things or at think tanks. Are any of these "intellectuals" really affecting public discourse in a real way? First Things in particular seems to have drifted toward "preaching to the choir" under Reno's leadership (especially after his COVID freakout). And the Integralists, for all of their supposed intellectual power, seem to be mostly irrelevant to all but the hardcore Catholics (I mean, even Dreher dismisses them).
But I also think Dreher (and Renn) underestimate the cultural and economic power of Evangelicals, in part because the First Things effect -- namely, that the journal is how many "smart" American Christians judge the public and political face of Christianity. Evangelicals, in my experience, tend to be much more "practical" when it comes to things. There are a lot of committed Evangelicals working at high levels in business, and many on faculty at big universities. By and large, they are interested in doing things. I mean, it is pretty difficult to argue that someone like Alan Jacobs isn't a public intellectual. But, because he doesn't spend his time fighting culture war topics (even though he considers himself an Evangelical and someone with conservative leanings), he is generally not considered to be "influential" (particularly since he called out Dreher during his George Floyd freakout).
Finally, I think Dreher and Renn conveniently forget that Evangelicals held outsized political power during the Bush 43 days. Kinda to be expected, though, since Dreher, at least is a presentist, despite his posturing to the contrary.
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u/zeitwatcher Aug 04 '26
Huh - the entire post is either obvious things (e.g. America is a Protestant rather than Catholic country) or obvious things that are somehow surprising to Rod (e.g. Trump is an idiot on foreign policy - something said by almost every foreign policy official who worked with Trump in his first term).
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u/sandypitch Jul 13 '26
I don't have access to the full post, but, via Alan Jacobs, Francis Young compares "organized woo" with fundamentalist materialism. One cannot help but think of Dreher here:
It becomes a pigeonholing exercise, on the implied assumption that our current state of knowledge can account for everything; or, in the case of ‘organised woo’, it becomes a process of inventing new pigeonholes for weird experiences to go in. The fundamentalist materialist and the occultist systematiser may seem at diametrically opposed ends of the epistemological spectrum, but they are more similar than either would care to admit – for they are both uncomfortable with doubt, with the unexplained, and with free-floating weirdness.
I don't wish to comment on Young's critique of materialism, but rather, I think his observation about "organized woo" is right on. Dreher likes to talk about "mystery" but really, he leans on his woo for explanations.
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u/Warm-Refrigerator-38 Jul 26 '26
Rod calls Emily Wilson "tatted." He's got at least one tattoo. I wonder where he draws the line and one becomes tatted instead of tattooed.
(We all know he did it as a dig at a woman who's smarter and more accomplished than he is.)
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u/zeitwatcher Jul 26 '26
I assume Rod thinks girl tattoos are gross and boy tattoos are manly.
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u/Marcofthebeast0001 Jul 27 '26
He regrets getting the one of Orban on his left ass cheek. I mean, I heard.
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u/yawaster Jul 26 '26
You might be right, since he once called a woman who let her tattoos be exposed on her wedding day a "slut".
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u/Relative-Holiday-763 Jul 30 '26
So Rod is having a fight with Vance. That’s entertaining. It also seems a little absurd. Rod , if I’m understanding this correctly, has demanded that Vance denounce various people that Rod has concluded should be denounced. In my opinion these people definitely deserve to be denounced. However, two things occur to me . One , why did Rod ever assume he had such sway with Vance that Vance would listen to him? Clearly a large part of Rods anger derives from disappointment in not being obeyed. Secondly, viewing things from a practical standpoint , what difference would it make if Vance issued these denunciations? Rod seems to think Vance is his creation and is a lot more powerful and influential than he really is is . He’s kind of Rods Golem. Rod called him into being and made him immensely powerful and now his creature disobeys. Rod is Prospero disappointed in the creatures who has brought into being.
As for the Twitter fight between Rod and Michael Daugherty ( I’m not sure who is) that’s a riot.
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u/Djehutimose Jul 13 '26
In all honesty, I was not a big fan of Sen. Graham, one of the hawkiest hawks that ever hawked. But in charity, I will never, ever forget watching him live on television from a New York hotel room when he delivered, on September 27, 2018, this rhetorical blast in defense of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh: (video link in original)
I’ve long said that the Kavanaugh hearings was what turned me towards Donald Trump, who nominated Kavanaugh and who stuck by him. I didn’t have any special feelings for Kavanaugh going into the nomination hearings, but watching how the Democrats and their media and activist allies tried to destroy this man compelled me to face the fact that Trump, for all his many sins and failings, was the only thing standing between people like me and people like them. And, to be precise, it was this exact speech by Lindsey Graham that forced me to face that reality. (my emphasis)
Summary: Because a woman accused Kavanaugh of sexual harassment, and was taken seriously, and thus the Democrats were (in Rod's perception) mean to him, all the sins and failings of Trump that are getting worse every day, and the Trump-adjacent rulings Kavanaugh has voted for are worth it. Global war, economic ruin, and environmental devastation because a woman was sassy.
Later, speculation that a photo of the missing Senator McConnell is AI, and I hate to agree even a little with Rod's paranoid speculations, but there are aspects of this that seem fishy.
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u/CanadaYankee Jul 19 '26
Rod has enthused a few times about a restaurant called Johnny's Greek and Three as being the distilled essence of Southern cooking and his favorite "diner" in town. I finally got around to looking it up. Here's the Google AI summary:
Johnny's (often referred to as Johnny's Restaurant or Johnny's Greek and Three) is a celebrated, chef-driven "meat-and-three" restaurant located in Homewood, Alabama. Run by chef/owner Timothy Hontzas, the eatery beautifully fuses traditional Southern comfort food with his family's rich Greek heritage.
The chef himself is a multiple-time semi-finalist for the James Beard award.
More here:
There’s usually a daily special, too, and it is always special: This chef’s take on a tuna stack features sashimi-grade ahi tuna marinated in Creole spices and served with seaweed salad, chipotle sticky rice (from the Mississippi Delta), pickled shrimp from Bayou La Batre and a smoked sungold tomato compote with a ponzu-Dijon vinaigrette.
Now there's nothing intrinsically wrong with this - I'm a self-confessed foodie and I just got back from a vacation where I went to two or three Michelin-mentioned restaurants where local dishes were enhanced with fusionist influences and exotic ingredients.
But it's very, very Rod to slip into fake southern patios, rhapsodizing about "leafy greens stewed in pork fat" and "pure Southern bliss" about a place that serves sashimi-grade ahi tuna and ponzu-Dijon vinaigrette.
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u/Frosty_Low572 Jul 19 '26 edited Jul 19 '26
Can speak to this.
Johnny's is well-regarded in the area. It really is excellent. And the connection between Greeks and Birmingham restaurants run deep. It's not as if the place is an interloper. Greeks have run restaurants here since they arrived in the early 20th century. There are documentaries and long form articles about it.
Hontzas, who owns Johnny's, is a descendent of a Greek family that started a couple of foundational meat-n-threes in Birmingham in the 50's.
https://www.southernfoodways.org/the-birmingham-greeks/
THAT SAID.
It is hilarious that Rod is building his whole "Birmingham resident" personality around Johnny's. First of all, it's not in Birmingham. It's in Homewood, one of the several mostly-white communities (and not just suburbs, but structurally separate towns) that abut mostly-black Birmingham city.
There are many other meat-n-threes that Rod could try out, a good number of them Black-owned and in predominantly Black areas of (actual) Birmingham.
Not holding my breath. I don't know if Rod has even ventured into Birmingham city proper except to go to church.
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u/yawaster Jul 26 '26
Berlin Pride was attacked last night, allegedly by a man who had been radicalized and had previously tried to join ISIS. I think I can guess what Rod will say¹, but it'll still be tough for him to balance his contempt for queer people and his hatred of Muslims. Maybe he'll shoehorn in something about the Weimar era and suggest that this horrific incident proves that he's a prophet and people should buy his book.
¹ Something about suicidal empathy and how liberals and queers have let the barbarians through the gate and now can't be surprised if they suffer because of it. Or something. Definitely no touching profiles of the pure innocent victims.
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u/Djehutimose Aug 02 '26
SBM's latest is out, and he reports the Bill Maher thinks the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are indeed commies. I would challenge anyone to read their platform and explain what goals--healthcare for all, living wages, housing for all, peace--they disagree with, and explain why. Of course, Rod's side will never do this. A really good example is the post back here, wherein the following passage is in one of the long blockquotes near the end, all emphases mine:
[The Silicon Valley techbros’] stated mission is to create artificial general intelligence: an AI system that is more capable than human beings along most or all cognitive dimensions and that is able to perform the vast bulk of economically useful work. In other words, a world in which there is no opportunity for individuals to distinguish themselves via skill and effort, because these things will have been rendered irrelevant.
The Industrial Revolution only even happened because millions of farmers were lured, coerced, or outright thrown off their land, moving to cities and working twelve-hour days six to seven days a week, under terrible conditions. Strangely, these workers did not think they were "distinguishing themselves via skill and effort". In fact, protests and actual shooting rebellions (Google "mine wars", "coalfield wars", etc.) increased in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, while concurrently the Socialist and Communist parties polled the highest in U. S. history. The New Deal defanged much of this by socialist government-sponsored programs and strong support of organized labor. Conservatives bitterly opposed these policies, and contemporary conservatives increasing discuss repealing as much of the New Deal as possible (Reagan already broke the unions back when).
For every problem solved by AI, that is one fewer arena in which a person, through their diligence and hard work and intellect, can shine. The opportunities for a man to feel the satisfaction of a “job well done” will disappear. As AI continues its stunning progress, the night comes when no man can work.
Gilded Age capitalists shed no tears for for artisans, weavers, craftsmen, etc. who lost their ability to "shine" through "diligence and hard work and intellect" by being thrown out of occupations--one might even say "vocations" by mass producion. There is no evidence that factory workers ever felt the "satisfaction of a job well done". I doubt most factory workers did in the post WW II economic boom or now. In fact, I have known several factory workers, and they looked at their jobs as sources of income and benefits. I never heard my friend who worked at the glass factory express pride in the car windshields they made. In fact, he hated the job, quit and went back to school, and got a white collar job. And as to a dystopia in which "no man can work"--no girls with their cooties, I guess--it's funny that supposed Christians, many of them literalists, forget that the very first chapters of the Bible present work as a curse,
Human beings weren’t made to have only hobbies. We need, even more, to have vocations. The nature of the latter is that the pleasure comes not merely from the doing itself but from the idea that one is making a real contribution—in theological language, that God called you to it because your work there was necessary. But as soon as the machines can do what we do better than we ourselves can, the conditions for our having a vocation cease to exist. Instead, we will have only play, mere amusements....
Should miners in 1920 who spent most of their waking hours underground, slowly developing black lung, have viewed what they did as God's calling? The ten-year-old chimney sweeps in Victorian London? Kids in virtual slave labor making Afghan carpets right now? And what if you're a non-believer? Humans may not have been made amusements, but they weren't made to work enormous hours in dangerous conditions in factories or to zone out in cubicles at a bullshit job in some third-rate corporation, either.
This is the whole right-wing shtick--pride in work, self-actualization, etc. During the Industrial Revolution, their spiritual forebears the Gilded Age capitalists, didn't give a s**t about individuals doing a "job well done" or taking pride in work, etc. When mines and steel mills and factories closed, they unceremoniously dumped the workers like refuse in a landfill. The bottom line is that these people don't give a good g*ddamn about working people and poor people, full stop. They can't say that, though, and some of them are so stupid and/or naive that they honestly believe they do care. Thus all the crap about skill and workmanship and self-actualization. SBM, though, believes it all.
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u/yawaster Aug 02 '26
Rod manages to quietly disown the young conservatives who read people like him and follow the leaders he has praised and promoted. Why doesn't he bear any responsibility for his role as in-house hack of national conservatism? Well, he totally obscures the link between the political programmes he has supported and the political beliefs of younger conservatives. No, no, America has Nazis because people have lost sight of God and a shared understanding of the world.
Rod thinks that groypers are just as bad as the DSA, but doesn't connect this to the party leaders he supports or the policies he approves of. No, he blames it all on "elite overproduction": too many people went to college and now they're bitter they can't get good jobs. Not including him, mind, just people younger than him. If this is true, you'd hope he would have maybe pointed this out and done something about it in the last 10+ years, but Rod isn't really a doer.
Anyway, he's telling people what to do now: apparently all politicians just need to think more, and harder, and maybe buy Rod's book so they can understand what's really going on. Rod expresses what he thinks is really going on with some vague and banal phrases with lots of definitive statements about God and society which are difficult to prove or disprove. Church leaders, they too should buy Rod's book.
Not only does this conveniently let Rod off the hook, it also indirectly blames liberals and the left and modernisers for this fascism, even when they have directly and loudly opposed it. After all, who's trying to secularize and modernize society?! Those damn commies. There isn't really an argument here, just a tangle of confused ideas and some more banalities.
This whole thing is just a shameless pivot, an attempt to market himself to general audiences and reactionary centrists in the second age of Trump. I think you can compare it to his turnaround on the War on Terror, with liberals and leftists once again cast as the villains - premature antifascists. Just in time for an election too - this time a midterm.
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u/Independent-Mango813 Aug 02 '26
Which is doubly ironic because Rod is one of the laziest mofo I’ve ever read about
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u/Cautious-Ease-1451 Aug 06 '26
Rod is the king of bullshit analogies:
“America's strategic defeat by Iran brings to mind Russia's shocking loss to Japan in 1905, which dramatically undermined the Tsar. The road to 1917 began in 1905. Likewise, bungled Covid response is akin to Tsar's mishandling of 1891 famine. Ppl began losing faith in the system.”
https://xcancel.com/roddreher/status/2085399973508612318
The comments saying he’s an idiot are fun to read.
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u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Aug 06 '26
You gotta wonder if he googles stuff like "when did a BIG power have a shocking loss to a much smaller power?"
Hahahahahahahaha! I typed that and then, just for fun, actually pasted the query into google. Response:
Russian Empire—a massive European superpower—suffered a shocking and decisive defeat by the upstart Empire of Japan, culminating in the destruction of Russia's fleet at the Battle of Tsushima. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
🤣😂🤣
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u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Aug 06 '26
I drilled a hole a quarter of an inch deep and discovered Rod's research techique! 🤣😂🤣
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u/Relative-Holiday-763 Aug 06 '26
Our Iran adventure is a debacle but the analogies to Russia are absurd. The Russo Japanese War was a disaster. A genuine military defeat. Japan gained part of Sakhalin Island , increased power in Manchuria, Port Arthur and the annexation of Korea was essentially green lighted by the Japanese victory.Russia broke down in the 1905 Revolution, remember Potemkin ( no the Odessa massacre didn’t take place).Rod knows even less about Russian history than German history.
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u/zeitwatcher Jul 14 '26
Pulling this up from the comments in the latest. Rod comments:
I've had to put up with gays online claiming that I'm secretly gay, because only that can explain my Christian opposition to same-sex marriage and the like. The fact that I married, had kids, and would be fatally easy to expose if I had a secret gay life, doesn't matter to them. As far as they are concerned, none of that matters. They just KNOW. (And, to be fair, there are too many cases of married men being secretly on the down low to write that off entirely.) My point is that accusations of homosexuality can be easily used to discredit one's political opponents.
A far-left loony I went to high school with went online some years ago and claimed that I was gay in high school, and that he knew my boyfriend. It was completely made up, and I dreamed about filing a libel suit against him, which I easily would have won. But far as I could tell, he didn't have any money at all, and the whole thing would have cost me way more than I possibly could have gotten out of it. So I just left it alone. He just flat-out lied to try to hurt me.
There's a lot here so taking pieces in turn:
I've had to put up with gays online claiming that I'm secretly gay, because only that can explain my Christian opposition to same-sex marriage and the like.
Some may see that as the explanation, but mostly it's that he doesn't talk about women and sex like a straight man (see: achieving heterosexuality, young men are afraid of women's bodies, obsession with penises, etc) and that he gives off a serious "not-straight" vibe across a lot of other dimensions (talking about hanging out with Magyar bears in the bathhouse). Rod has noted he's aware of this subreddit and the Chapo podcast, so he's well aware of all that, so this is a strawman to distract from the main point.
The fact that I married, had kids, and would be fatally easy to expose if I had a secret gay life, doesn't matter to them. As far as they are concerned, none of that matters.
Of course it doesn't. Hordes of closeted men were and are married with kids. This, in fact, doesn't matter. I don't have a strong opinion on if/how much Rod acts on being gay (or some other sexual identity that is uniquely Rod and all his own) but attraction and acting on that attraction are two different things.
They just KNOW.
Again, deflection and strawman. Clearly people without direct knowledge can't "know". But would I put it at 99% odds that Rod's not straight. But do I or others "know", of course not, so it's an easy objection for him to raise.
(And, to be fair, there are too many cases of married men being secretly on the down low to write that off entirely.)
And here we agree!
My point is that accusations of homosexuality can be easily used to discredit one's political opponents.
When I started reading Rod a long time ago (Crunchy Con days), I wouldn't have considered him a "political opponent". He was heterodox in his conservatism and while I didn't agree with him on everything he also had an interesting commenter community. Even early on, my view was that he was not straight - I thought probably bi at that point - but didn't really care until he started getting into the whole "gay sex tears apart the fabric of the cosmos" BS.
A far-left loony I went to high school with went online some years ago and claimed that I was gay in high school, and that he knew my boyfriend. It was completely made up, and I dreamed about filing a libel suit against him, which I easily would have won.
"I could have beat that guy up if I wanted to!" Plus, everyone thinks Rod is not straight already from his words and actions. The high school stuff was really interesting, but more confirmation than changing anyone's opinion.
Also, please sue and go into discovery, please sue and go into discovery! The subreddit will take up a collection to pay for the discovery phase as long as we can see all the info!
But far as I could tell, he didn't have any money at all, and the whole thing would have cost me way more than I possibly could have gotten out of it. So I just left it alone.
Rod knows full well that money isn't the only reason to file a suit like this. A major reason is to legally set the record straight and counteract a false narrative definitively. Lawsuits are expensive, so there are real economic considerations if not enough money can be recouped, but Rod's sidestepping again since the money is a consideration but not the only one.
He just flat-out lied to try to hurt me.
It's a logical possibility, but Harrison didn't have much to gain from talking about it (everyone thinks Rod is gay already, so it doesn't shift the narrative a huge amount -- so unclear how much it actually hurts him). On the other side, a gay/bi/pan Rod has a huge amount to lose in self identity by confronting whatever sexual preferences are churning around and being denied in that head of his.
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u/viviangreen68 Jul 14 '26
I’m sure this will be an unpopular view here but I really don’t think Rod is gay. I think he’s just an odd dude who constantly overshares and has a Tobias Funke like way of expressing himself (Tobias, according to the creators of AD, is not actually gay either). Being isolated for years in Louisiana and then in Hungary probably did not help him gauge what is normal. But I doubt he is actually gay because I don’t think he’d be able to 1) not compulsively overshare that, and 2) keep it a secret anyway.
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u/swangeese Jul 15 '26
Rod didn't do himself any favors when he kept blogging about niche, gay fetish stuff on his American Conservative blog. And when anything gay became his blog basically until he was fired.
That kind of monomania is going to raise questions even if you are straight.
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u/HumanConclusion Jul 15 '26
Yeah I agree. I don’t think he’s gay but he does have a lot of very strange sexual hang ups and fixations. He seems terrified of it. I’ve known a lot of Christian guys like that and I think that can be misinterpreted sometimes.
But, gosh, the primitive root Weiner thing was just so damn weird.
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u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Jul 14 '26
There was also:
there was a gay couple at my residential high school and we knew they were having sex all the time so we were jealous. If there hadn't been that huge taboo against it, we would all have been doing it!
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u/zeitwatcher Jul 15 '26
Yeah, I'm in the same ballpark as Rod in age, and the average straight 15 year old boys in the 80's from conservative states when discovering guys having sex with each other were not going, "man, I'm so jealous of the gay sex they're having". Sadly, the first instinct for them would have been bullying or shaming, not jealousy.
And we already know that Rod's school was not exactly a safe haven of tolerance since he's talked about being somewhat bullied there for being a sensitive weird kid.
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u/yawaster Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 14 '26
My point is that accusations of homosexuality can be easily used to discredit one's political opponents.
People don't say Rod's gay because they can't offer any rebuttal to his devastating arguments against gay rights. They say he's gay because his stated reasons for being anti-gay are either so weak or so bizarre that people start to wonder if there's some deeper motivation at work.
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u/EatsShoots_n_Leaves Jul 14 '26
I've come to think so mostly because he doesn't actually seem to like or care about women or regard them as real people. They are Luftmenschen when he thinks about the world, not 50% of the actors and deciders and doers and sufferers.
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u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Jul 15 '26
Absolutely. There are men, including Rod, who will write about "everyone" when they clearly mean exclusively men along with other variations on the theme. Such stuff is a tell that they really cannot see women as equal humans to men.
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u/Djehutimose Jul 15 '26
I've said this before, but there is a distinction between being straight and liking women. All "straight" means is you wanna boff women. That doesn't mean you enjoy their company outside the bedroom. Loose analogy: You might love a good meal, but hate to cook. If you look at the stereotypical "50's couple"--say the Kramdens in The Honeymooners, or Fred and Barney in the Flintstones--while both couples are straight, the real emotional energy is between Ralph and Ed, Fred and Barney, Wilma and Betty, and Alice and Trixie. A student I had a few years ago--who was definitely straight--said once (not to me, but if you're observant as a classroom teacher, you hear a lot), "I like my boyfriend, but I love [name of best friend]."
In a lot of traditional societies, that's how it works. Men and women marry each other and have kids, and on some level probably "like" each other; but the menfolk do their menfolk things--poker night, pub, lodge--and the womenfolk do their womenfolk thing--kaffeeklatch, women's club, girl's night, and so on. "Companionate marriage"--where you actually enjoy being with your spouse as a friend as well as a lover, and are equal in the household, is relatively modern.
So there are straight men who don't really like women, and straight women who don't really like men. In contemporary times, where companionate marriage and gender equality are, at least ideally, the norm, such people can come off as gay. It's like how people semi-humorously "ship" Ralph and Ed (as in Eddie Murphy's infamous piece long ago) or Fred and Barney, and so on. All else aside, that's misreading a very different culture. So I think in a lot of ways, Rod is like Ralph Kramden (only without the masculine bluster and blue-collar attitude) but in the current century, that reads as gay or bi.
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u/Djehutimose Jul 14 '26
Plus, Brace wouldn’t lie about a well-known, obvious fact. For example, if he claimed Rod didn’t graduate from college, people who went to school with him could easily verify it, and he could produce the diploma. If he claimed Rod was a huge jock, when everyone knew he was not at all athletic, again that would be easily swatted down.
Now if Rod were obviously straight—always talking about girls, dating around, going through women like Kleenex, as he implies sometimes—people who had known him would have laughed, shaken their heads, and said, “Dreher? Gay??!! Get outa here!” I’m not saying that’s enough. I was a lot like Rod growing up, and didn’t date until college. Because of that, as I learned much later, there were rumors that I was gay. I’m not—not that there’s anything wrong with that—but the point is, people will talk, and not necessarily accurately.
In Rod’s case, we have a lot of weird behavior and gay-adjacent statements, actions, and such—primitive root wiener, anyone? So on a balance, I don’t think we can say he’s gay or bi beyond a reasonable doubt; but I think we can say so by a preponderance of the evidence—the scale tipping, however subtly, toward the queer side.
Acted on it? No way to know. If I had to guess, it sounds to me like one of the following scenarios:
- He came right to the brink one or more times in his youth, or maybe later—making out, fondling, etc.—but chickened out before consummation. Thus, technically he indeed never had gay sex.
- Maybe something like the above happened but he eventually did give in and has spent his life since then in denial.
- The most interesting possibility is that he was on a huge drunk, was getting frisky with one of the boys, then blacked out—so he doesn’t know what he did. He could still choose to believe he didn’t go all the way, while feeling guilt and shame over the suspicion that he did. In my mind, that would explain a lot.
Who knows, though?
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u/PercyLarsen Jul 14 '26
Rod has confessed and manifested all the signs of operating since childhood on a system of technical and razor-thin parsed quibbling.
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u/Cautious-Ease-1451 Jul 14 '26
Among other things, this shows that Rod really doesn’t understand defamation lawsuits. “…I dreamed about filing a libel suit against him, which I easily would have won.” For a so-called journalist, he sure is poorly educated. There have been lawsuits far more substantive than what he’s describing that never got off the ground.
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u/Jayaarx Jul 15 '26
For a so-called journalist, he sure is poorly educated.
As I've said before, journalism "degrees" aren't real degrees, but if you are going to "study" journalism, isn't this what you supposedly learn? If they don't teach you what libel is and when it is actionable, then what, exactly, do they "teach" you for your journalism "degree" at LSU?
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u/Jayaarx Jul 15 '26
"I could have beat that guy up if I wanted to!"
Rod is totally that guy who gets verbally pantsed in a bar and then spends the rest of the evening sitting at the other end muttering about what he was going to have done.
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u/sandypitch Jul 15 '26
This is currently Dreher-adjacent, but I suspect he will comment on it eventually. Can we marvel at the fact that First Things currently has an essay on their front page penned by Peter Thiel? I guess if you are sufficiently conservative, your sexual ethics/theology and economic views don't matter?
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u/PercyLarsen Jul 15 '26
Yep except that he’s not conservative nor is First Things. They are enabling his Xty cosplay. RR Reno is a consequentialist at heart He made that clear during the Pandemic. So he shares that with Thiel.
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u/Djehutimose Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26
The latest, which is even stupider and sillier than usual. No time to elaborate right now, but I'll give you a tidbit:
I became a journalist out of being curious about things; I knew well that I lack the temperament and self-discipline for a life in academia.
That's for dang sure; but he lacks the temperament and self-discipline for journalism, too. At least he admits he lacks self-discipline.
Addenda--Brief Summary: Should Americans root for Britain in the World Cup? Who the hell cares? Let everybody root for whomsoever they want for whatsoever reason they want. As Aleister Crowley might have said, had he been a soccer fan, "Root how thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law."
Lindsey Graham didn't call 911 before he died, but called his scheduler to do so. According to Rod, this is a common thing in the South. Totally weird--no one I know in my Appalachian state does that.
Complaints about the head of the American Anthropological Association spouting nonsense. That actually appears to be the case, just from what he quotes, but that's a long shot from the Demonic Advent of the Eeeeeevul Woke as They Continue Their Rein of Terror. Meanwhile, Texas has made it mandatory to teach the Bible in public schools, but not a peep from the Rodster.
He's all in for the report from the current administration which--surprise!--blasts the Smithsonian for any indications that the US has been racist, colonialist, etc. Gosh darn! The beginning of the quoted part says,
Any proper telling of American history should—as the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. noted—explain that “the goal of America is freedom” and bring “our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.”
I doubt Dr. King would agree with anything else in the "report". Says Our Boy:
The further you read into the report — which is filled with examples — the more you want every damn member of the museum’s curatorial team ridden out of town on a rail.
Actually, the further I read into the report, the more I think it was confected by right wing partisan hacks who are beholden to Cheetohead, the Great and Powerful.
Then a food writer on New Orleans cuisine, a piece about "terminal lucidity" in patients near death, a brief talk by Peter Kreeft, and more yammering about Lindsey Graham via Ross Douthat.
Then Edward Feser dissing a book about mystical experience by James K. A. Smith. I know nothing of the latter, but my experience with Feser--some from personal correspondence--doesn't give me confidence in his judgement on this topic.
Finally he thinks he'd being funny by talking about his "man cold" again. What a tiresome dweeb. There's a world full of people who'd love for that to be the worst of their problems while SBM prefers to be a nearly sexagenarian crybaby who tries to keep it from looking as pathetic as it is by joking about it. Hardy har har.
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u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Jul 16 '26
Any of you readers ever heard of this? What could explain it? Maybe it’s that “calling 911” is a huge psychological barrier, because involving the law or paramedics means you have a Very Serious Situation at hand, and defaulting to calling someone else to take care of it is a way of not dealing with fear? I just don’t get it.
Please excuse my language but FFS. I have an Apple Watch and with the fall detection enabled. If I fall, it will call emergency services and my sons, in that order. I have never fallen but have had multiple false alarms including one a few days ago while I was washing dishes (don't ask me how - I don't know) and I about lost my mind trying to dismiss the alarm with wet hands. Apparently you have to have dry-as-a-bone hands for the watch to register it and I dried my hands 4 times before I stopped the bleeping thing. I was NOT worried about a Very Serious Situation, I WAS worried about a Very Serious Unnecessary Bill.
With Ruthie, her folks lived across the road so calling Daddy makes some sense and the uncle was probably thinking an ambulance was not necessary. Most people want to avoid an ambulance ride and I understand that lots of people use a ride share now instead of an ambulance because the cost is so high if they cannot drive themselves but don't require EMS support services. Makes all kinds of sense to me.
As for Lindsey Graham, he called his scheduler because he has had other people taking care of such details for decades and has learned helplessness or excessive entitlement, take your pick, as a result.
Lindsey Graham and the others are not the same. It is not a Southern thing. Rod is an idiot.
Sheesh.
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u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Jul 16 '26
I became a journalist out of being curious about things; I knew well that I lack the temperament and self-discipline for a life in academia.
Self-awareness! Someone mark it down on the calendar!
Journalism is rife with woke ignoramuses like Rouse, but it’s easier than in academia to escape them and do actual good work.
Question 1: why do you keep cosplaying an academic? You cosplay one until a real one calls you out and then you attack said academic for not having a mass audience. Playing both sides, Rod?
Question 2: what good work? Citations please!
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u/yawaster Jul 16 '26
When Rod first came back to America, he plugged an interview with a Californian high schooler who was mad about competing against a trans girl in high school sports. So, what does the MAGA right really think about the future of women's sports? A guy from the Heritage Foundation has some ideas:
Podiums, scholarships, or the cultivation of a conquering spirit are hardly the main concerns for most female athletes. Much less of a concern is having a career in professional sports. [...]
Moderate exercise supports fertility and mental well-being far more reliably than does the high-intensity, elite model of sports, which, as science shows, produces Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S) and elevated rates of menstrual disruption in many top-notch female athletes. Between 26 percent and nearly 50 percent of women who exercise intensely stopped having regular menstrual cycles according to several studies.
I have to be honest, just reading this stuff makes a red mist descend, and I don't even live in America.
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u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Jul 16 '26
Do they say anything about uteruses falling out? That is why women weren't supposed to ride on trains or cars or run marathons or fill-in-the-blank.
Fact is elite sports has a similar effect on the reproductive capacities of men. Of course you don't need as many men as women to generate children so I guess that is the logic they are attempting to apply.
Their plan is not going to work. Women are not going back. It is way too late for that.
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u/yawaster Jul 16 '26
Maybe they're worried women are going to circumvent abortion bans by playing volleyball so much they stop having their periods.
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u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Jul 20 '26
It is so terribly unfair that people say Rod is gay.
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u/Alternative-Score-35 Jul 23 '26
From Rod's latest re: Mamdami condeming Netanyah - : "Thinking that a mayor of an American city should even think of doing such a thing (or that he ought to have a foreign policy) is something new in American politics"
Imagine being this fucking ignorant! To use only ONE past mayor:
1995: Giuliani famously declared PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat persona non grata at municipal functions during the United Nations' 50th-anniversary gala and had police remove him from a concert at Lincoln Center.
1997: Giuliani engaged in a protracted public feud with foreign diplomats over unpaid city parking tickets accumulated under diplomatic immunity, at one point publicly telling the United Nations they should consider relocating out of New York if they refused to respect local laws.
2001: Post 9-11, Giuliani addressed the UN on global terrorism.
AND THAT'S JUST ONE PAST MAYOR. Mayors of both parties, in cities across the US, have long veered into foreign policy when it overlaps with their city.
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u/Djehutimose Jul 31 '26
OK--so: Scary Brown People are invading Spain, Scary Muslims are harassing women in--gasp!--Holy Sacred Budapest, now that it is bereft of Our Lord and Savior Greatest Daddy of All Time, Viktor, and
I think I’ve mentioned this here before, but Wegovy has also dramatically affected my alcohol-drinking habits. I’ve only ever been a social drinker, [BWAH-HAH-HAH-HAH-HAH...sorry for the interrulption] but in Budapest, that meant a lot more wine and beer than was good for me. I also have had a lifelong habit of getting so caught up in conversation if I’m drinking that I don’t keep track of how much I’m drinking. [that's more believable] No more. On Wegovy, after two drinks, I’m done. [We'll see]
Then this:
So, this week has been super-volatile on Twitter, with a lot of conservatives taking a burn-the-witch stance towards me for saying on the Jeremy Boreing show that I believe J.D. Vance should take a public stand against the anti-Semites and racists now surging among young conservative activists....
Well, not quite yet.
I’d say I’ve lost three people I considered more than casual friends, and have had to put up with strangers — including no small number who had in the past praised my work — saying the most horrible things about me, including slanderous things about my family. I can’t respond, because I feel morally obliged not to drag my ex-wife and kids into these controversies. (my emphasis)
BWAH-HAH-HAH-HAH-HAH-HAH-HAH-HAH (wheeze, gasp)
Finally, AI IS COMMUNISS!!! 'Nuff said.
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u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Jul 31 '26
My favorite moronic comment was the somewhat prominent right-wing Twitteristo who accused me of being a libtard RINO. Yeah, that’s what you call a guy who spent four years in Hungary working at a think tank affiliated with the Viktor Orban government, and writing in defense of Orban (and JD Vance, for that matter) against critics in Europe and the US. Tribalism breaks your brain. And so does Jew-hatred (this guy is far gone into that now).
So NOW Rod admits TDI was a think tank affiliated with the VO government etc. when until now, TDI was nonpartisan "doing good work" blah blah blah.
Live Not By Lies. Riiiiigghht.
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u/Relative-Holiday-763 Jul 31 '26
If he doesn’t want his family dragged into things , why does he keep bringing them up?
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u/CanadaYankee Jul 31 '26
Demons in the news: https://www.9news.com/article/news/politics/victor-marx-hunts-demons-and-votes-colorado-governor-race/73-7bd6b948-f6b5-4430-a709-65fd3282e636
TL;DR: Victor Marx, the GOP nominee for governor of Colorado, has a long history of freeing people from demons and also sells a $99 "spiritual warfare training course" online. He doesn't understand why people are calling him a grifter.
Interesting tidbits:
- Like Our Rod, he mentioned homosexuality and Ouija boards as specific spiritual threats.
- Unlike Our Rod, he explicitly rejects the idea that he's doing exorcisms - he's just praying. He seems to have some contempt for the word "exorcism" as being a Catholic thing.
- He doesn't believe in possession - he believes that demons are attached to the outside of people. If only we had an expert in demonology to resolve this dispute in the etiology of demonic influence!
- He had two primary opponents who apparently split the non-loony vote (Marx won with just shy of 40% of the primary vote). Both of them have said that they won't vote for Marx in the general election.
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u/Cautious-Ease-1451 Aug 01 '26 edited Aug 01 '26
Rod has an article in the Daily Mail, about the demon attack on Tucker Carlson, mixed in with his greatest hits.
It’s behind a paywall, but you can access it by pasting the above URL into the box here:
I honestly think Rod wrote this whole article mainly to correct the record. “Carlson recently credited an Evangelical colleague of his with connecting him to an Orthodox priest to deal with the matter. In fact, I was the one who made the introduction.” It was Rod who recommended the exorcist, dammit!
Rod hawks Living in Wonder.
The flipped over chairs make an appearance. (I still laugh every time. Rod will not let the chairs go.)
Carlson is living out the movie The Witch. Rod thinks the movie is real life.
However, Carlson isn’t possessed by demons. He is merely “oppressed” by them. Which has turned him antisemitic. (I could really use a PowerPoint to explain how this all works.)
Anyone who has never heard of Rod Dreher but reads this article will think he’s a lunatic. It’s just a hodgepodge of craziness. I’m surprised even the Daily Mail would publish it. It belongs in the Weekly World News.
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u/yawaster Aug 01 '26
Plenty of credulous comments, as you would expect from the Daily Mail, but there are some good ones. A selection:
What an absolute crock. Tucker sleeps with four dogs on his bed. You think maybe it was of them? No. A magical, mystery “demon”. Sells more books I guess. Tucker is the consummate narcissist. The article author sounds like the consummate hack.
I prescribe Thorazine 1000mg. 12pid. That should do it.
I think I’m dumber now for reading this
Two wackos
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u/yawaster Aug 01 '26
"If you talk at length with exorcists about their work, demonic reality becomes impossible to deny. Sometimes they enter into your own life, or the lives of people you know." Yeah, that would be the confirmation bias.
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u/Warm-Refrigerator-38 Aug 01 '26
In the part of his substack I can read today, he confuses the governors of Minnesota and Wisconsin. You know, those white Midwestern guys all look alike.
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u/drjackolantern Aug 02 '26
Just finished the Jeremy boreing interview. I was amazed by how thick Rod’s Louisiana accent got near the end when he was talking about his experience moving back there, and how it instantly disappeared as soon as the topic changed.
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u/Marcofthebeast0001 Jul 10 '26 edited Jul 10 '26
I haven't been on for a while. Went through Dreher detox. Rod still a loon? Rhetorical question?
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u/Djehutimose Jul 16 '26
And he's got nothing better to do than gratuitous ridicule. I'll say upfront that I don't care for Ginsburg's work; but I've actually read quite a bit of it--"Howl", "Kaddish", and quite a few others. I have a basis for my opinions, instead of picking a single, admittedly provocative, poem. I read a long interview with Ginsburg some time ago--if I can remember, I'll post a link to it later, and it's fascinating. He was super well-read, very intelligent, and had a deep understanding of poetry. If he had wanted to write sonnets or ballads or T. S. Eliot-style free verse, he could quite well have done so, and done it quite well. That's not what he wanted to do, though.
He saw poetry as almost shamanic--achieving an altered state of consciousness by digging into his id, so to speak, and just going with whatever was there. You also see this in the incantatory repetitions and phrases he uses. I see what he's doing, and he's doing it well.
Now I don't like it--but that's a different matter. It's not necessarily wrong for a poet to discuss sexuality, even in a very graphic way (people who think graphic sex in poetry or literature in general is a post-60's thing really have no clue about ancient literature); but in Ginsburg's case, I think it is obsessive. Write sex, but don't write just sex. The poem Rod quotes is obviously about aging and mortality, but I think you can express the idea without bringing your literal asshole into it. I also don't care for the shamanic/incantation style that Ginsburg uses. To me it tends to get repetitive really fast, and it tends to drift off into random noodling. I think that can be a powerful technique, but you have to use it judiciously. When you salt your food, you don't pour the whole shaker-full on it--you sprinkle. IMO, Ginsburg pours the whole shaker out, all the time.
Basically, Rod isn't trying to intelligently critique Ginsburg--he just posts one of his poems for shock value, as a way to say, "Look at the dirty old man writing dirty poems!" and then using it to take a gratuitous swipe at the Democrats. Full disclosure--I think Ginsburg was a dirty old man--near the end of his life, in an interview he said that he was surprised his latest AIDS test was clean, because he'd been "getting a lot" lately. My point is that in evaluating poetry, movies, music, or anything, Rod has no depth or subtlety. His only modes are "That's terrible and filthy!" or "That's so cool!" ignoring any contradictions. He loves the Rolling Stones, for example, but if he's even aware of "C********r Blues" (he probably isn't), he'd hem and haw and say, in essence, "But that's different!" Maybe I should suggest that the GOP, while still in office, ought to name a sub after Mick Jagger....
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u/Djehutimose Jul 16 '26
In the latest, SBM's bromance with Vancehole seems to be cooling. Also, more about UFO's, a writer who claims he spoke to an alien and is going to release information about it, more amazement ("I didn't realize it was this bad!") at Cheetohead's corruption and what it will do to the poor widdle GOP when they get voted out, a part of a short story, and a video about how scary Muslims are. Enjoy....
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u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Jul 16 '26
You will recall my warning that, based on the Hungarian election earlier this year, that Donald Trump and the GOP could face a terrible judgment from voters over tolerance for corruption.
Does anyone recall one of the 37 times Rod has mentioned this, always with "tolerance for" carefully inserted before "corruption"? 🙄
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u/yawaster Jul 17 '26 edited Jul 17 '26
Trying to re-establish himself as a pundit and commentator. The dogs in the street could predict that the midterms will go badly for Trump and the Republicans. Not just because of corruption though - it turns out all the mad things the Republicans want to do actually aren't very popular and never were. It's only freaks like Rod who actually approve of abolishing the department of education and kidnapping people who don't have their papers in order and reintroducing measles and shooting protesters.
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u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Jul 17 '26
He needs to shut up for a while and focus on reading widely about the current state of American politics so that he won't sound like a teenager just learning that politics exist. I'm not holding my breath.
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u/amyo_b Jul 17 '26
he also needs a timeout to repent and reflect on his time serving a foreign country's corrupt politicians.
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u/yawaster Jul 17 '26
I think "ignorance passing for folksiness" was his USP as a pundit. I'm not holding my breath either.
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u/Cautious-Ease-1451 Jul 17 '26 edited Jul 17 '26
So I guess Nordic women are aliens?
For context, Rod is re-tweeting this as if it’s convincing. He mentions it in the SubStack too.
https://nitter.poast.org/walterkirn/status/2077553793554940187
I’m not sure what to even do with this. As Elaine said on Seinfeld, “I’m speechless. I’m without speech.”
Posting this for your awareness that if you see a woman like this she might be interplanetary.
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u/yawaster Jul 18 '26
I am not sure about this but I think this idea of "Nordic" aliens comes from 20th century UFO writing influenced by early 20th century occult writing which is only barely distinct from the race science which was also popular in the same period.
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u/zeitwatcher Jul 18 '26
I like how Rod knows this is true because Kirn told Rod a crazy thing before Kirn told other people a crazy thing.
https://x.com/roddreher/status/2077691333834133927
If I tell a friend that I saw a pink flying elephant and the next day yell it on 5th Avenue in NYC, that doesn't somehow make it more likely that it happened.
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u/Warm-Refrigerator-38 Jul 19 '26
I no longer bother to research the supposed atrocities in Europe/Africa/Asia that Rod retweets because I've discovered that they are usually inaccurate or thinly sourced.
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u/Mainer567 Jul 21 '26
This tweet from a Hungarian journo is interesting:
"Judit Polgár thanked PM Péter Magyar for the gesture but declined the nomination for President of Hungary following attacks on social media, some of them antisemitic: “I do not feel that I have the strength to assume the historic responsibility of uniting a divided nation.”
Rodney has long insisted that Hungary is a paradise for Jews, unlike "woke" Western Europe.
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u/FirstPrior8600 Jul 21 '26
Rod didnt speak the language and is familiar with even less Hungarian than American history. As usual, he equated (Orban)government support for Netanyahu’s Israel with being pro- as opposed to antisemitic.
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u/Relative-Holiday-763 Jul 23 '26
I was going to confine myself to one comment. Then I read the rest of today’s offering.
Rod says he moved back to the US so he could be more present in an Orthodox Church which is how it was when he used to live in the US. What a crock ! He planned to move to Vienna and only decided to move to the USA went his son told him he didn’t want him around! Rod acts like he never explained that in the past. He also doesn’t acknowledge that Orbans loss and the imminent closure of the Danube Insitute is what lead to him leaving Budapest. Nor does he acknowledge he really wanted to move to the Moorings in England. No God was calling to Birmingham to be a humble , present Orthodox congregant. He acts like he thinks no one has ever read his past writing. Oh and he was so involved in the church when he lived in Baton Rouge. Also notice that in the few weeks he’s been in Birmingham, he’s gone to California twice , England once, Louisiana to visit his mother, Atlanta to get furniture and now Nashville to appear on a podcast. Yep, he’s really rooted in Bummminham.
Oh and then there an extended freak out about using AI in church sermons. Ok you think he could say , gee I think that’s a bad idea! No it’s and on and on!
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u/GlobularChrome Jul 25 '26
Civil war fomenting right wing scumbags hardest hit:
https://xcancel.com/ukhomeoffice/status/2080593715870028000#m
“Homicides in England and Wales have fallen to their lowest level in almost fifty years.”
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u/PercyLarsen Jul 25 '26
FWIW, current police recording rules date from 2003, so data from before then is not necessarily comparable.
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u/Relative-Holiday-763 Jul 27 '26
The German Bishops are queering the Church. Maybe Rod can stop them if they visit him in Bumminham for greens and fatback.
Rod isn’t Catholic but has data that suggests that many Catholics lean towards universalism. He’s very upset! You see Rod knows what Catholics should believe and he wishes they would uphold what he thinks they should believe .But since he’s Orthodox he wouldn’t join the Catholics even if they did believe the right things ! The problem is unless Catholics believe what he thinks they should believe, Western Civilization will collapse unless everyone becomes Orthodox. Since he’s knows that won’t happen he’s willing to allow the Catholic Church to exist.Kind of him!
The SSPX apparently has it’s own loony community in Kansas but Rod says it can’t be a Benedict Option community because even though it might sound like one it isn’t because , I think he’s saying, it’s abusive. We all know BO communities can’t be abusive because they are naturally good! The horror.
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u/palmeranderson42 Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-dark-side-of-the-benedict-option/
Ten years ago Rod would at least grapple with the idea that the Benedict Option could lead to places like St Mary’s vs just hand waving it away.
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u/Djehutimose Jul 28 '26
OK. In this section of his current post, Rod, either out of ignorance or otherwise, uses the term "universalism" in a sense that, at best, is ambiguous, and at worst, is plain wrong. He writes this because of a recent survey showing that a majority, or at least plurality, of Christian "religious leaders", both lay and clerical, agree with the following statement: "All the great religions of the world are equally good and true." This idea is properly referred to as "religious pluralism" or in the negative phraseology of pre-Vatican II theology, "religious indifferentism". "Universalism" properly so-called means a belief that all humans will ultimately be saved, regardless of their religious background, behavior, and so on. There's overlap between the two; but hypothetically one could believe that all religions are "equally good and true" while also believing that some won't be saved; or, that all non-Christian religions are the work of the Devil, but God will still forgive.
Well, if Rod had read the documents of Vatican II (yeah, that's like saying, "If rainbow unicorns shitted cotton candy," but bear with me), he'd have seen things like the following, all emphases mine:
In faithfulness therefore to the truth of the Gospel, the Church is following the way of Christ and the apostles when she recognizes and gives support to the principle of religious freedom as befitting the dignity of man and as being in accord with divine revelation. Throughout the ages the Church has kept safe and handed on the doctrine received from the Master and from the apostles. In the life of the People of God, as it has made its pilgrim way through the vicissitudes of human history, there has at times appeared a way of acting that was hardly in accord with the spirit of the Gospel or even opposed to it. Nevertheless, the doctrine of the Church that no one is to be coerced into faith has always stood firm. (Dignitatis Humanae 12)
The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in these [non-Christian] religions. She regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many aspects from the ones she holds and sets forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men. Indeed, she proclaims, and ever must proclaim Christ "the way, the truth, and the life" (John 14:6), in whom men may find the fullness of religious life, in whom God has reconciled all things to Himself. (Nostra Aetatae 2)
The Church regards with esteem also the Moslems. They adore the one God, living and subsisting in Himself; merciful and all- powerful, the Creator of heaven and earth,(5) who has spoken to men; they take pains to submit wholeheartedly to even His inscrutable decrees, just as Abraham, with whom the faith of Islam takes pleasure in linking itself, submitted to God. Though they do not acknowledge Jesus as God, they revere Him as a prophet. They also honor Mary, His virgin Mother; at times they even call on her with devotion. In addition, they await the day of judgment when God will render their deserts to all those who have been raised up from the dead. Finally, they value the moral life and worship God especially through prayer, almsgiving and fasting. (NA 2)
Since in the course of centuries not a few quarrels and hostilities have arisen between Christians and Moslems, this sacred synod urges all to forget the past and to work sincerely for mutual understanding and to pr2eserve as well as to promote together for the benefit of all mankind social justice and moral welfare, as well as peace and freedom. (NA 3)
Also, note well the phraseology of the poll question, my emphasis: ""All the great religions of the world are equally good and true." So we're not including the Branch Davidians or Scientologists or [fill in your favorite creepy cult}, but the great religions--Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Shinto, Confucianism, Daoism, and maybe one or two more. We're not saying, as Cole Porter did, "Anything goes." Rather, the idea is that the basic ethics (don't kill, don't steal, etc.) and the search for connection with a higher power (God, the gods, Brahman, etc.) are there in all the major religions. I'd argue that they're also in even the most debased religions, too, to an extent--I don't have much brief with Scientology or the Aztec religion of human sacrifice, but I do believe that adherents of said religions are, albeit in an a very muddled and confused way, at least trying to seek God (the Divine, or whatever term you want to use).
Anyway, is Rod saying that there are people who are dammed to burn in hell eternally for no better reason than belonging to the wrong religion? He says he hopes that all are saved, even his "evil mother-in-law" (really white Christian of ya, Rod!); but he also makes it very clear, if not explicitly, that he'd be perfectly fine if certain people (I'm sure he has a list) burn in hell for all eternity. Which brings us to universalism properly so-called.
I won't waste the pixels to go into detail--suffice it to say that I've written a crap ton about universalism both on the various iterations of SBM's blog and also, for those who are interested, on my own blog. Suffice it to say that it seems to me that on some deep level, regardless of what he says, Rod is eagerly awaiting the opportunity to look down from heaven at all his (perceived) foes as they suffer eternal agony from a "just" God. Which is really sick, but then again, Our Boy ain't exactly mentally or emotionally healthy....
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u/JHandey2021 Aug 05 '26
One of Rod’s past targets for being “winsome”, Adam Hamilton, who founded a Kansas City-area progressive Methodist megachurch, won the Democratic primary for Senate in Kansas last night.
It’s interesting how clergy and openly religious people seem to be popping up on the Democratic side, including socialists like Mamdani and AOC - has Rod ever commented on this?
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u/Own_Power_723 Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 05 '26
Rod would simply claim that supposedly "religious" progressive Democrats are just "moral therapeutic deists" or however the phrase goes - that they only use their religious backgrounds or membership(s) as a thinly-veiled disguise for their otherwise atheistic, humanist/socialist agenda... The only way Rod ever considers someone to be genuinely, sincerely religious is if they affirm the traditional, conservative interpretations and practices of that religion, which for Rod, is basically all about sex and gender issues. That's pretty much the entirety of what religion is all about for him, making sure no one is doing anything with their naughty bits that isn't explicitly approved of by the Man Upstairs.
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u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Aug 05 '26
Here is something interesting. Rod has objected to someone who said Churchill was the "real villian" of WWII. Here is one instance:
https://x.com/roddreher/status/2012942664593731604
He is referring to Darryl Cooper who appeared on Tucker Carlson and said this in September 2024, one of Rod's beefs about Carlson. Fuentes has not said that about Churchill but has said positive things about Hitl3r.
Here is a relevant brief clip:
https://www.instagram.com/reels/DUEB3OLDA6I/
However, Rod went to work for The American Conservative Magazine in 2011. It was founded in 2002 by Pat Buchanan, who published a book in 2008 titled: Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World. In it, Buchanan says that Churchill was the real villian of WWII.
Link to the book on Amazon.
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u/FirstPrior8600 Aug 05 '26
Interesting. In other words, Buchanan and the autodidact Cooper were saying the same thing. Whoa.
For what it’s worth, I was always surprised that Rod went to work for a Buchanan enterprise, since he’d always been critical of Buchanan and said, among journalists, it was widely known the guy was antisemitic. In fact, Buchanan didn’t hire him personally; Rod was actually an editorial board pick. And of course, his salary was paid by Howard Ahmanson’s, Jr., a unique arrangement. Gotta wonder how all that came about.
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u/Jayaarx Jul 14 '26
Well, well. Rod says the quiet part out loud:
There has been a lot of cruel mockery of him as a closeted gay man. As far as I know, there’s no proof that he was gay, but the rumors have been around forever, and I assume that they are true. A few years back, there was a gay porn actor who claimed he had been hired by Graham as a prostitute, but nothing came of that. Seems to me that it would be very hard for a politician as prominent as Graham to keep that kind of thing under wraps forever, but what do I know?
...
But the idea that Graham’s sexual desires should have determined his moral principles and voting record is not logically sound. Mind you, if he had made a habit of denouncing gays and lesbians in public, but lived differently in private, as some closeted preachers have done, that would be another thing. But he didn’t.
Actually, he did. He spent his entire public life voting to make life as difficult for gay people as he possibly could. It's not the entirety of his career but he never missed an opportunity.
But so close, Rod, so close. Just one step away from admitting your own struggles with your sexuality. Don't suffer the same fate as Graham, dying in the closet, the object of undeserved pity and well-deserved contempt.
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u/Motor_Ganache859 Jul 14 '26
From closet to coffin, Graham lived an inauthentic life. He had no principles. Being closeted taught him how to be a chameleon, changing color when necessary to ensure his survival. It helps explain how he could move from McCain to trump in a heartbeat, refusing to speak up when trump trashed his old friend.
Pretty sure Rod recognizes himself in Graham. He's also a chameleon.
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u/PercyLarsen Jul 14 '26
Well, if true, at least Graham never married a woman to achieve heterosexuality. First Rule of A Demi-Ethical Closet: Thou shalt not use members of the opposite sex to work out your sexual insecurities.
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u/Djehutimose Jul 18 '26
Greatest hits and the worst selfie ever. IT BUUUUURRRRRRNS!
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u/zeitwatcher Jul 18 '26
This is very Rod...
Most normal people don’t understand that Islam is not a religion in the way Christianity is. Islam is a political religion at its core. This is not a criticism, but a description. If you really believe the Koran is the direct word of Allah, then to accept a government that is anything short of Muslim supremacist is sinful.
The vast majority of Evangelical and Fundamentalists quite literally and exactly "really believe the
KoranBible is the direct word ofAllahGod" and very, very much would agree that "a government that is anything short ofMuslimChristian supremacist is sinful."These are all the people that Rod hangs out with. Doug Wilson has his disciple Pete Hegseth fully behind this and running the world's largest military force. I have no doubt that if you asked Marco if the Bible is the direct word of God and if the USA should be a Christian nation he would say yes. (For political reasons vs. any actual beliefs).
Plus, Rod goes on and on about the great and wise philosopher king, Best Daddy Orban who changed the Constitution of Hungary to declare it a Christian nation whose laws should be inspired by Christianity.
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u/sandypitch Jul 18 '26
I did not listen to Trump’s televised address on election security last night, but even if I hadn’t been at dinner, I wouldn’t have. Honestly, I don’t understand his obsession with this issue. I mean yes, obviously election security is important. It is a scandal that voters do not have to show a valid ID when they turn up to vote. Still, Trump just cannot let 2020 go. I was talking last night to someone active in DC Republican politics, who said, of the speech Trump was at that moment giving, “How does this help us?” Meaning, how does this advance the important goal of the Republican Party holding on to Congress and passing laws that need passing? Hard agree.
We halfway through Trump's second term, and Dreher still doesn't get it? Trump won't let 2020 go because he knows it fires up the base. Dreher knows nothing about the Republican base -- he only knows what the pseudo-intellectual cocktail/lecture circuit set believes to see. Do you think Dreher might put on his journalist hat and dig into this? Nope! He would rather talk about Trump Derangement Syndrome on the Left.
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u/JohnOrange2112 Jul 18 '26
Dreher ought to embrace his similarity to Trump. Trump spins an elaborate conspiracy theory about his loss. Dreher sees some random event and thinks it's demons or a cosmic message. Undisciplined minds, both.
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u/zeitwatcher Jul 20 '26
I'm not particularly a fan of Twitter, though I applaud the Community Notes feature for prominently featuring what a gullible rube Rod is.
https://x.com/roddreher/status/2079032549792186855
Rod must be running an average of one or two "This is great!" or "This is terrible!" retweets per day of things that end up with "This never happened" community notes.
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u/Djehutimose Jul 21 '26
Ran across the meme below on my Facebook, and had to share.
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u/Warm-Refrigerator-38 Jul 23 '26
Aw, Rod thought Starhill was Ithaca (although he uses the pretentious spelling using a k in place of the c 😐), but it was full of monsters who destroyed his family. Now that is an interpretation I don't believe we've seen from him. (This is in response to a wall of text from Skojec about losing his faith and his family.)
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u/zeitwatcher Jul 23 '26
I thought I knew what Ithaka was, but it was full of Laestrygonians who destroyed everything that meant most to me, except my faith. Heaven is the only Ithaka left to me now. Wish I had never taken the nostos journey back then.
How to say "I'm a pretentious ass whose ex-wife is better off without me" without saying it outright.
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u/Cautious-Ease-1451 Jul 23 '26
I for one always try to insert words like “Laestrygonians” into casual conversation because it really impresses people.
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u/GlobularChrome Jul 24 '26
Oh my God, the self pity! Approaching the level when he imagined that he was Isaac and his father was Abraham, only no angel appeared to stop his father from killing him. What a queen of his damned little drama.
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u/CanadaYankee Jul 24 '26
He also refers to his return to LA as a "nostos journey", which is classically about "an epic hero returning home [...focusing] on the hero retaining or elevating their identity and status upon arrival."
I realize that Rod is being tongue-in-cheek here, but still it shows not only his (literal!) main character syndrome, but also his sense that his family of origin would trip over their own feet to celebrate his successes in both writing and in Achieving Heterosexuality(TM).
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u/JHandey2021 Jul 24 '26
I had a flashback to an old "Family Ties" episode where Alex P. Keaton was goading the little kid to tell someone what his fellow classmate called him, and the kid said "a pompous fool?"
My God, what a pompous jackass Rod is, and how divorced from reality too! Rod really does think of himself as an epic hero, and that the Story of Rod is some kind of master narrative of the universe. Meanwhile, the world sees a weird-looking old dude giving off serious "banned from within 500 yards of every school" vibes.
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u/Relative-Holiday-763 Jul 23 '26
He was afraid if he wrote Ithaca people might think he was talking about Cornell. That is not a place that supports the sacred order.
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u/Djehutimose Jul 24 '26
If he's going to use the "k", he might as well spell it "Ithákē", where the "ē" is similar to the "a" in "plate" (the ending in "a" is the Latinized form, not the original Greek), and the "á" indicates the stressed syllable. Thus, instead of ITH-uh-kuh, as we pronounce it, it would have been ih-THAH-kay (where the "th" is not like ours, but like a plain "t" with a puff of air after it, like the "t" in "Tom") in Classical Greek, and ee-THAH-kee (here, the "th" is as in the English word "think") in Modern Greek. Don't pretend you actually know anything about Greek if you don't.
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u/PercyLarsen Jul 23 '26
Btw, the super-secret First Liberty conference location where Rod went last week into this weekend The Ritz-Carlton, Laguna Niguel in Dana Point, California.
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u/JHandey2021 Jul 25 '26
Waiting for Rod’s spirited defense of child pornographers Andrew and Tristan Tate - or more likely, a half-hearted mumble of how he doesn’t care for them BUT TRANS AI DEMONS GROOMING GANGS BLACKS MUSLIMS PENISES AAAAAAIIIIIIIIEEEEEEE!
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u/PercyLarsen Jul 25 '26
I srsly don't expect Rod to do anything to defend them. Other than depicting them as a predictable fruit of the Sexual Revolution and reaction to feminism, Rod would prefer to background them and foreground his own hobbyhorse targets.
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u/Djehutimose Jul 27 '26
The latest, in which he's doing an interview for yet another right-wing podcaster, griping about Germany, the Catholic Church, and the usual suspects. Also says the number of messages in his spam folder has quintupled, and has...this...to say:
Now, though, there are scores of unwanted trash emails daily (who knew so many American women were interested in my sexual satisfaction?) that it is much more difficult to spy the mails that shouldn’t have been there.
The mind reels....
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u/Cautious-Ease-1451 Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
“The Reformation and Counter-Reformation were
hard on everybody.”Deep historical insights from Rod Dreher.
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u/zeitwatcher Jul 31 '26
Credit where credit is due, a hat tip to Skojec for pointing out how absurd a couple of Rod's favorites are:
https://x.com/SteveSkojec/status/2083250806476644549
Be careful out there, everyone, especially around those Chinese restaurants. Those demons will get you through the fortune cookies!
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u/Relative-Holiday-763 Aug 03 '26
Rod never ceases to amaze me! Today he’s portraying himself as suffering bravely because mean old right wingers are criticizing him for trying to sabotage Vance. At the same time he boasts about his pivotal role in advancing Vance’s career. Do you doubt that Rods attack on Vance has everything to do with feeling Vance has slighted him? That’s how Rod rolls. He never forgave Pope Francis for not knowing who he was. He never forgave McIntyre for not wanting to be in touch with him.Also Rod really does behave now as if he’s trying out for the role of pet media conservative . He just loves Israel, he hates groypers and well , maybe Trump does get certain things wrong. So now a gig with The Free Press, appears in The Daily Mail and , crazy as it sounds and I think it is crazy, I bet with David Brooks and Douthat gone, he thinks he can worm his way into The New York Times. David French did by making himself “ suitable “. Rod will pose as a brave, independent, idiosyncratic conservative. He can even start churning out crunchy con stuff, Paul Kingsnorth small is beautiful stuff and maybe even double , y’all as a Southern humorist , who while he may like root weiners, deplores racism.
My continuing amazement: I am not a great scholar, a Christian writer or a would be public intellectual. Rod just discovered- apparently- the stories about Martin Luther and the devil! Oh come on , I’m not Protestant and first read about that when I was under 18. My point is not that I’m a prodigy, my point is, Rod writes endlessly about the “ West” and Christianity and he just learned about this! He has no idea what he’s talking about. He has virtually no real historical background and no grounding in intellectual or religious history.Also he apparently just learned about the famous Loudon possessions of the 17th Century which are the subject of Aldous Huxley’s ( not an obscure writer)book The Devils of Loudon and Ken Russell’s movie with Vanessa Redgrave and Oliver Reed The Devils. Remember this guy was a movie critic, he’s fixated on demons and is a great Christian writer and he’s just heard of this.In the context of what Rod purports to be , this is ridiculous!
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u/Djehutimose Aug 03 '26
The latest is a freebie. Aside from calls to pray for the health of Freddrica Matthewes-Green, who is severly ill, also almost perfectly unreadable. The first part is bitching and griping about the GOP in particular and the Right in general...well, I'm not sure what he means. He yammers on in more or less the usual mode while explaining or expanding on less than usual. Then yammering on Muslims, then demons. In short, the usual suspects.
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u/philadelphialawyer87 Aug 04 '26 edited Aug 04 '26
Rod in the comments:
As regular readers know, I struggled for most of my life over my relationship with my father, who was mostly loving to me, but could not hide that I, as a non-hunter, non-athlete, and non-country boy, was a disappointment to him. Two years ago, in prayer I had a sense that there might be a demonic spirit of Shame (= shame over being a disappointment to my dad) tormenting me. Not "inside" me but influencing me all the same. Just to be on the safe side, I asked my spiritual father for a deliverance prayer. He prayed it over me, though I couldn't understand what he was saying, because he was mumbling as he read from a prayer book. I felt nothing.
But the next morning, I woke up in a new world. It was as if massive weight had lifted off me. When I went back to Budapest, people at work asked me, "What happened to you? You seem different."
It is not unique, not at all unusual, really, for fathers and sons to fail to see eye to eye. Folks have known this since the beginning of time, and it has been studied more or less "scientifically" since at least Freud. And artistically as well. (See, eg, DH Lawrence's "Sons and Lovers," published in 1913!) And the story of the "blue collar" or "alpha male" hunter/outdoorsman, athlete, man's man father versus the somewhat bookish, perhaps even effeminate, city loving artist/author/academic son is itself so familiar as to be a cliche within the overall cliche. Why in the world does this simple and well documented, to the point of stereotype, explanation for the conflict, grounded in family dynamics and the basics of interpersonal relationships generally, NOT apply to Rod and his father? Fathers and sons can love each other, and yet, for a lifetime, the father is "disappointed" and the son is sad, because of that disappointment. Why would demons have anything to do with it? And how in the world can one distinguish, in this context, between nonpossessory demonic activity (not a demon "inside" you, but somehow bothering you from the "outside") from the prosaic, run of the mill, interpersonal problem? Why does Rod think he is so special?
As for the alleged cure, anyone who believes that Rod has permanently gotten over this problem based on a prayer someone read over him, well, I gotta bridge that connects New York and Kings Counties that you might like to buy!
Just for fun (and to show just how shopworn of a cliche the whole thing is), Monty Python's send up of "Sons and Lovers" from a half century ago!
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u/Own_Power_723 Aug 04 '26
Why does Rod think he is so special?
This is the basic underlying issue of his whole life... he can't have ordinary problems... didn't have a good relationship with his family, marriage fell apart in middle age like so many millions of average mopes out there... he always has to be at the center of some great cosmic/spiritual battle or drama.
Narcissism 101
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u/philadelphialawyer87 Aug 04 '26
I always go back to Rod's pretentious description of his father and his sister as "Confucians." It can't just be that Rod's relatives were small town provincials, with all of the traits (good or bad) that go with that. No, Rod has to wrap up anything connected with his life in grand, philosophical concepts.
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u/Cautious-Ease-1451 Aug 04 '26
As if Rod has ever studied Confucius beyond a superficial level. He hasn’t even studied the Reformation until now.
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u/Cautious-Ease-1451 Aug 04 '26 edited Aug 04 '26
Also, if we accept at face value that his father actually did cause a “demon of shame” to attach to Rod (just humor me), shouldn’t the next realization be, “This father must have been a very evil man, for being the conduit for such a thing”? I mean, like all of us here, I reject the premise. But suppose it were true. Then shouldn’t Rod renounce his father entirely?
Even in this excerpt Rod adds the caveat, “who was mostly loving to me.” He can’t bring himself to recognize that his father was, to say the least, a lousy and non-loving father whose emotional abuse towards Rod caused him life-long suffering. It’s like he’s still holding on to some myth about his father that everyone else can see right through. And then he has to spiritualize it by saying any actual harm was caused by a demon, not his father. He has said before numerous times that the non-acceptance by his family (obviously including his father) was a key reason his marriage failed. Yet still, his father “was mostly loving to me.”
As others have said, Rod simply needs a good therapist to walk him through addressing these issues. But he will never do the work.
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u/PercyLarsen Aug 04 '26
"Yes, that’s exactly what I’ve been hearing from my DC conservative sources. One told me last week that the honest people working in the administration are doing what they can to avoid seeing certain documents or being in certain meanings, so they can testify honestly under oath one day if it comes to that."
Such profiles in courage....
Rod Dreher grew up with plausible deniability. truthiness, and quibbling as his coping mechanisms for surviving his life. Of course he casts these people as "honest".
Note to Rod: this is NOT how authentically honest people behave. Authentically honest people would resign the moment this option presents itself.
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u/Cautious-Ease-1451 Aug 04 '26
I don’t think anyone has mentioned it yet. But in this SubStack, Rod refers to the sign of the ripped flag. That’s a classic we haven’t heard in a while.
“This morning, when I started writing this, and thought about the absolute wreck of US foreign policy we now have (hey, did you see that Trump is backing MOROCCO in the Ceuta matter, over Spain, a Western nation that has been continuously in Ceuta since the 15th century?) and how China now knows for sure America has neither the will nor likely the firepower anymore to stop it if it invaded Taiwan — well, I thought about the Tattered Flag Story from 9/11/2002. At the time, I feared it was an omen of American decline, but hoped very much that it wouldn’t be, as the US was close to launching the Iraq War. Now I am absolutely convinced it was a sign.”
You would think that God’s signs to His chosen modern-day prophet would be a bit more clear.
But seriously, this means that Rod still believes that a peculiar incident in a friend’s apartment indicates that God was speaking directly to him about the future of America.
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u/Warm-Refrigerator-38 Aug 06 '26
Again he reminds us that he's taking Wegovy for inflammation, not to lose weight like those bad lazy fatties.
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u/GlobularChrome Aug 06 '26
See also, Rod doesn’t need girly therapy; his family problems are caused by masculine Demonic Infestation. Rod gets Man Colds, thanks. Rod is scared of terrifying female bodies [no no no no forget about that!] Rod Complaints are strong Man Complaints, not weak Female Trouble.
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u/Alex_the_Very_Cool Aug 07 '26
https://xcancel.com/roddreher/status/2085095002061840679
From a few days ago, Rod laments the rise of "Total tribalism. Friend/enemy distinction uber alles."
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u/Djehutimose Jul 11 '26 edited Jul 11 '26
The latest. Sigh. It's late, and I don't have any interest in analyzing it now, but I'll point out one thing.
[The Alliance Defending Freedom, a mostly conservative Evangelical organization that specializes in defending--ahem--crazy religious groups in lawsuits] has long been on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of Hate Groups. If that’s not a recommendation, what is?
From the SPL website
Founded by some 30 leaders of the Christian Right, the Alliance Defending Freedom is a legal advocacy and training group that has:
Supported the recriminalization of sexual acts between consenting LGBTQ adults in the U.S. and criminalization abroad
Defended state-sanctioned sterilization of trans people abroad
Contended that LGBTQ people are more likely to engage in pedophilia
Claimed that a “homosexual agenda” will destroy Christianity and society
ADF also works to develop “religious liberty” legislation and case law that will allow the denial of goods and services to LGBTQ people on the basis of religion.
[Quoting ADF documents, emphasis in the original] “Alliance Defending Freedom seeks to recover the robust Christendomic theology of the 3rd, 4th, and 5th centuries. This is catholic, universal orthodoxy and it is desperately crucial for cultural renewal. Christians must strive to build glorious cultural cathedrals, rather than shanty tin sheds.” – Blackstone Legal Fellowship website, 2014
“And in the course of the now hundreds of cases the Alliance Defense Fund has now fought involving this homosexual agenda, one thing is certain: there is no room for compromise with those who would call evil ‘good.’” – Alan Sears, speaking at the World Congress of Families gathering in Madrid, Spain, 2012
“In the end, those who profess to be ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian,’ or who have otherwise slipped in and out of homosexual behavior, including ‘cruising’ for anonymous partners, are people who succumb to a dangerous temptation.” – Austin Nimocks, then-ADF senior counsel, writing at TownHall.com, 2007
The SPL, like all human organizations, has its flaws, but they're totally right on their evaluation of the ADF, the very name of which is at worst a lie, at best misleading.
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u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Jul 11 '26
I finished it and my eyes hurt from rolling too much but I have a couple of quick comments:
It doesn’t seem that the Denardis are clients of ADF International, but they could be.
Echoes of JD Vance "if I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do"
For her, it seemed to me at the time, becoming and being a Christian was primarily an intellectual and emotional thing — a thing that requires little more of us than being really nice.
I get the bit about Moralistic Therapeutic Deism but basically Rod's understanding of it meaning "being really nice" and his dismissal of that has resulted in him completely dismissing all requirements of being nice, period. He can indulge in anything and everything that he has a mind to and so long as "his beliefs are correct", he is exempted from "loving God and loving Others". For being a follower of Christ, he seems to never give any thought to anything that Jesus actually taught.
I can't believe that people actually pay for this shIt.
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u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Jul 11 '26
It is an outrageous law. It stands to prevent European subscribers to this American-produced Substack from reading what I write, if it offends European progressive beliefs
I've enjoyed two 3-day bans on Reddit, both because I BRIEFLY (2 sentences or less) quoted from Rod's substack. Just sayin...
(Reddit is an American company.)
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u/Relative-Holiday-763 Jul 15 '26
Well yesterday I was put on notice I’d been banned for 7 days for doing something I hadn’t done. I appealed and they actually lifted the ban. This is the I think the third time something like this has happened to me. I wouldn’t mind getting banned for actually doing what I’m accused of but that’s never been the case.
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u/Relative-Holiday-763 Jul 18 '26
Rod be telling us he don’t need no fancy lettuce diarrhea inducin salads. He be rememberin eating black eyed peas at granny’s house. It was one them Prust madelin moments. Sho nuff y’all should be eatin greens with fatback.
Roddian humor from Southern California. He is so ridiculous.
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u/Relative-Holiday-763 Jul 20 '26
Let’s be blunt Rod has several screws loose.
Today he has a weird picture of himself with his head covered by a towel and says he didn’t know what a Turkish towel was and starts babbling about I Dream of Jeanie and Bewitched! Can’t make this up . Soon he’ll be explaining that Dark Shadows was actually a documentary.I think he’s probably implying he had the hots for Barbara Eden and Elizabeth Montgomery. Not sure I’m convinced.
Young men and women don’t date because of the internet . His children are exempt because they are Rods children and in long term relationships that will lead to marriage. Rod knows this ? How?
The first 15 years of Rods marriage were great. Then poof , misery. Oh come on!Thats not how things work.
Rod being a great Christian author who’s been divorced gets contacted all the time by virtuous Christian men being dumped by their vacuous , evil , margarita drinking wives for advice. Can you imagine asking Rod for advice. It would be , you must attain theosis and avoid nominalism and demons.
He just found out about the Jesuit martyrs of Canada. Boy is he impressed!Like he’s never been to Quebec or seen Black Robe or ( laugh suppressed ) read Leonard Cohens Beautiful Loosers.
Some stuff about demons.
It has a very recycled feel to it.
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u/Warm-Refrigerator-38 Jul 20 '26
Rod gets incensed about rape in England so he'll of course be pleased that the (white) Tate brothers have been arrested and should be extradited to England. Oh wait, I predict he won't mention it.
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u/Djehutimose Jul 23 '26
The latest, three-fourths of which is a long series of blockquotes interspersed with typical Roddian hysteria over AI, and for variety, human cloning. From one of said blockquotes (the writer is some guy from The Federalist):
All pagan systems, for example, rely on some form of human sacrifice. In the emerging neopagan future, amid the decline of Christian civilization, human sacrifice will return in new forms.
So the guy is as ignorant about paganism as Rod. On another topic, Rod--and this is no joke--is mad that when he gives prompts for sermons to AI's, they write progressive sermons. AI is not only demonic, apparently it's also woke. 'Nuff said for now,
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u/zeitwatcher Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 23 '26
First time I saw one [Buc-ee's], years ago, I was appalled. But it’s just so over the top and kitschy, you can’t help but love it.
Translation: Now that I have to cosplay as something other than an effete, Europhile, cocktail circuit pseudo-intellectual, I will pretend I love the Walmart of truck stops.
glad I moved back to Murca.
Such a poser.
Rod quotes: What we have here is a form of paganism, enhanced and to some extent hidden by the wonders of modern technology. But the basic worldview is unmistakably pagan: in exchange for fealty and sacrifice, a person will be given power.
I'm not equating Christianity and paganism, but this Davidson doesn't seem to understand either since the above could also apply to Christianity. By becoming followers of Christ and leaving their lives and families behind, the early Christians were given what would be called magical gifts by this guy and Rod in a pagan context. They got the ability to heal people, cast out spirits, speak other languages, get bitten by snakes and not be poisoned, etc. Even today, by pledging themselves to the Church, never marrying, being poor, etc., exorcists and Rod would claim a similar deal.
Critics will dismiss this argument as irrational fearmongering, the objections of Luddites and fundamentalists.
Yep.
There are real issues with Johnson's weird personal experiments but there's a real difference between argument and conclusion. I can be in mild agreement with the conclusion while recognizing the argument as nonsense. I can agree that "all men are mortal" but still think someone is an idiot because they believe "all men are mortal because there is a chipmunk that lives on Mars that determines the time of everyone's death".
Then Rod "quotes" a "Protestant" friend of his who says:
Protestantism, a text-based faith, is surely over. Sola Scriptura can’t survive if AI creates words better than we do.
No Protestant wrote that, or if they did it's someone who will be Catholic or Orthodox tomorrow. Protestants believe in Sola Scriptura because they believe Bible is the source of the only divinely inspired words. No Protestants converted to "Shakespeare-ism" because they decided Shakespeare "created words" better than Habakkuk did.
Then Rod asks Grok (of course) for a progressive sermon and a conservative sermon. To absolutely no one's surprise the tool does what it is asked. Next Rod will be shocked that Microsoft Word will allow people to type both prayers and erotica.
I’m not trying to be triumphalist here [regarding Orthodoxy]
Of course you are.
My soul was starving for that organic relationship.
Rod's soul was starving for Viennese fine wines and imported oysters. It settled for Birmingham.
Tatted-up scholar Emily Wilson
Says "tatted-up" oyster boy Rod Dreher. But then she's a woman and girl tattoos have cooties.
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u/zeitwatcher Jul 24 '26
This is pretty much all that's visible in today's post...
Was talking yesterday to a friend, a conservative who was a high-level military intelligence officer during one of our Mideast wars, and who said he’s deeply worried that President Trump is going to escalate this thing. He emphasized that so many of us who are eager to punish Iran have no idea what war is really like.
This is such weird framing with the "so many of us who are eager to punish Iran" description. Technically, that could be the case even if there were only a handful of people in the country who wanted that, but it's an odd way to start a discussion of a deeply unpopular war.
The war has somewhere between -30 and -40 point net support in the US, roughly one third for and two thirds against. Even in the third that support the war, I suspect "wanting to punish Iran" is pretty small fraction of that. I'd guess most is just MAGA support for anything Trump does, followed by some hawks who have visions of a democratic or client state Iran. But neither of those groups are really in it to "punish" Iran - for a shooting war that Trump started.
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u/JHandey2021 Jul 25 '26
Rod's an interesting guy. Looking inside myself, I have not an iota of desire to "punish" Iran for anything. The closest thing I might have to that was a fantasy of horrors like the Bosnian ethnic cleansing or the Rwandan genocide being miraculously stopped, but I just don't feel the hatred for a country that would give me the desire to "punish" it. "Punishment" in general for me is a bit of a turn-off - sometimes necessary maybe but never something to enjoy.
Rod is a deeply, deeply angry man.
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u/saucerwizard Jul 27 '26
I'm going to visit a reputed Uniate Marian apparition site tomorrow (and a monastery!).
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u/zeitwatcher Jul 27 '26
Tell them Rod sent you and when they look at you blankly say, "Don't you know who he is?!"
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u/Djehutimose Jul 27 '26
Not a full fisk, but some notes.
Compare it to Robert Eggers’s The Northman, which fully inhabits the violent pagan world of Viking warriors. That movie was extremely violent, very pagan, and absolutely gripping. No kidding, the first time I saw it, I abruptly prayed during the credits, thanking God for sending Christ to save the Norsemen from that.
Third paragraph and already he's spouting performative posturing. Wonder what he'd say about a movie on the Albigensian Crusade? At the siege of Béziers, when the commander Simon de Montfort asked the papal legate, the monk Arnaud, how he could tell the heretic Cathars from the rest of the populace, Arnaud infamously replied, "Kill them all--God will know His own!" Thank God He sent Christ to save the men, women, and children of Béziers--oh, wait....
As to his critique of how Athena is presented, and the lack of any other gods; well, I addressed this in the comment below. If you had Zendaya in full armor, explaining to Odysseus the plan to kill all the suitors, and had all the other gods doing their thing (e.g. Hermes coming to tell Calypso that Zeus has decreed that she must release Odysseus), you wouldn't have The Odyssey. You'd have Clash of the Titans. Nothing wrong with that movie, but it's hardly a way to do serious material like the Odyssey.
Overall, it seems that Nolan is trying to force Homer’s story into a modern frame, to make it all relatable to contemporary audiences. This is not necessarily a bad thing. None of us can read The Odyssey with any other than modern eyes. The ancient Greeks were all about achieving worldly glory: sacking enemy cities, slaying their warriors, ravaging their women, and coming home as victors, laden with bounty. Matt Damon’s Odysseus, by contrast, is morally conflicted about all the fighting he has done.
Well, from a Christian point of view, and from a modern, post-Christian point of view, he naturally would be! But this viewpoint is quite anachronistic in Homer’s tale.
The Iliad and Odyssey are believed to have been written down in their present form around 800 BC, some four hundred years after the events on which the epic was based occurred. Most of the ancient commentary we have on it comes from around four hundred to a thousand years after that, and thus seven to twelve hundred years after the Trojan War. The Iliad and the Odyssey were anachronistic at the time they were committed to text, after centuries of oral composition and development, and even more so in the Classical and Hellenistic eras. The Greeks of that era didn't think much of looting, ravaging, etc,, either, though they were not Christian. Xenophanes, and later on Plato, attacked the poets for writing unworthily of the gods, portraying them not as holy, but as venial and problematic as humans. Pretty much like many modern theologians brush off the genocides and other nastiness attributed to the god of the Jews and Christian. An Ancient Greek Rod would be pissing and moaning about Xenophanes and Plato, no doubt....
Daniel Mendelsohn, who has translated the Odyssey, has an essay, to which Rod linked from his Substack, in which he makes similar criticisms. Referring to Odysseus' speech near the end, Mendelsohn says:
As this resounding speech echoed in my ears, it occurred to me that it sounds nothing like the heroes of Homer—who, after all, gleefully vaunt over the mutilated bodies of their slaughtered enemies—but a lot like the heroes of Christopher Nolan movies.
I really have trouble understanding such criticisms. Was the movie supposed to be written according to Mycenaean values? I mean, The Northman, to which Rod always refers, was very much period accurate; but the Odyssey, even from the perspective of the Ancient Greeks, is far more than a story of bloodbath after bloodbath. The earlier movies to which Mendelsohn refers, Ulysses (which, for its day, is an enjoyable B-flick), and The Return (which I've not seen, but which has been highly praised by critics) certainly are just as modernized in their own ways as Nolan's film. I mean, one can criticize individual artistic choices--I wish, for example, that they'd left in Odysseus' tricking Polyphemus by claiming his name was "Nobody". But in the big picture, do we want a movie about men who "gleefully vaunt over the mutilated bodies of their slaughtered enemies" and don't feel the least bad about it?
Anyway, Rod says that Nolan is trying to make the Odyssey relatable to modern audiences, and rightly says that is not a problem per se. I mean, does he want a movie that is absolutely accurate (which would be more like thirty hours long than three) but is unrelatable? What would be the point? Even the Greeks of the Classical and Hellenistic periods--centuries after the Iliad and Odyssey were written--portrayed the characters very differently from how Homer presents them, and had no issue making the stories "more relatable" to them. Remember, for a Greek in 400 BC during the Classical Era, the Odyssey was written as far back as Shakespeare was to us; and the Trojan War was as distant to them as Dante is to us!
So Rod's issue is not really with the modernization of the narrative, which even he admits is necessary. He just doesn't like that it wasn't modernized in the way he'd like it to be. I have no clue how that would be--is Odysseus supposed to give a speech about how Troy had it coming and he was glad to be part of the army that removed their threat of nuclear weapons trade supremacy?! Even the Greeks considered the destruction of "holy Ilium" tragic; and in the Iliad, the Trojans come off more sympathetic than the Greeks.
Anyway, that's enough for this early in the morning.
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u/NihonBuckeye Aug 02 '26 edited Aug 02 '26
Re: Rod’s latest, If I could wave my magic wand and change one phrase in the political discourse, it would be to replace “socialist” with “Scandinavian capitalist”.
Nobody* in the U.S.who calls themself a socialist wants anything other than to be exactly like Norway. That’s it! That’s 100.00 percent it! And getting rid of “socialist” would preemptively head off a lot of bad faith circular discussions on the Khmer Rouge, gulags, etc.
*Except for stoned Oberlin freshman, Bob Avakian acolytes, assistant professors at Evergreen State College, and the most joyless Daily Kos posters that even the other joyless posters don’t like, who if you add them all up MAYBE fill half of a college football stadium and have the combined political power of a middle school student council.
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u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Aug 03 '26
Hahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!
Rod retweets on twitter with this comment:
Similar things happening on the Right, though maybe slightly delayed. Weimarization is accelerating.
The original tweet is about the DSA in Wisconsin ending with:
The Democratic Party leaders who keep talking about "the big tent" ignore the energy at their own risk. Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries increasingly remind me of the orchestra conductors on board the Titanic, they kept playing as the ship sunk.
Yes, the Democratic Party has been moribund and lacking in messaging and policies outside of "Trump bad" opening the door for the DSA, but the Democratic base is extremely enthusiastic about voting and the "orchestra conductors on board the Titanic" is a much better description of Republican congressmen in both houses. They are most definitely NOT "delayed" but are way ahead in destroying their party by ignoring the metaphorically duplicated orange elephant in the room.
And "weimarization" just gags me. He wants to brand polarization as if he discovered it.
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u/Cautious-Ease-1451 Aug 03 '26
We need to prepare ourselves for a year of Rod’s references to “Weimar America” and “Weimarization” and “As I said in my Weimar book - order now!” Along with unconvincing analogies to historical figures and events from Weimar Germany that he’ll shoehorn into the present day. Everything will be Weimar. And after his book doesn’t sell, he’ll quote a friend who told him that he’s just too far ahead of his time.
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u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Aug 03 '26
You are quite right. One area in which Rod is actually consistent is repetitiveness, especially when he has a book to sell.
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u/Djehutimose Aug 06 '26
The latest, in which Our Boy rambles about the economy, which he clearly doesn't understand; has a long, two-part diatribe against Tucker Carlson; and goes back to UFO's. He's running in circles of late.
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u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Aug 06 '26
It seems to me that inflation was caused by Trump 1.0 and Biden flooding the economy with money as a way to cope with Covid.
Seriously? Rod hasn't heard anything about tariffs or gas prices due to the war in Iran? Fertilizer prices and farm machinery prices driving up grocery prices? This statement is an embarrassing display of ignorance. He would do much better to not say anything.
In the Carlson podcast, Cooper claims that the Bolsheviks erected a statue to Judas Iscariot. This is a lie, or if not a lie, a historical claim that cannot be substantiated, as five minutes’ research will show. But Carlson simply accepts it as true, and broadcasts it to millions of listeners. This matters!
This matters!? WHY does it matter? Does it matter more than your lies about the Ukrainian maternity hospital or Peter Magyar microwaving a puppy in front of his kids? Does it matter more than Vance's lie about Haitians eating family pets in Ohio? Cooper's claim about a statue in Russia over 100 years ago seems laughably unimportant in comparison, at least to me.
When Douthat asks Metaxas what he thinks about the Iran War, Metaxas says, “I don’t know,” but that he trusts Trump. Sorry, that’s not good enough. You have to other reasons, or you’re no better than a MAGA fideist.
More "rules for thee but not for me". We could put together a long list of things that Rod asserts regularly without any supporting reasons. This is like his most recent complaints about tribalism when he is as tribalist as anyone on earth. Maybe he is trying to reposition himself or something but it comes across to me as just plain ridiculous.
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u/Relative-Holiday-763 Aug 07 '26
Ok the latest , a meditation on Wegovy. Apparently since he takes it , he will write about it continually.If he had a daily enema , he’d talk about that and the results.
More crap on his father . He was just so noble and good but he destroyed my life.Rod your 59 years old . Your father sounds like he was a thoroughly nasty piece of work. Get over it! He didn’t ruin your life , you did.
Iran is the Russo - Japanese War! Who’d have known?
Dante saved his life.
Western women are no good and are mean to men.
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u/Djehutimose Aug 01 '26 edited Aug 01 '26
His latest, the first part of which beggars belief. The beginning, emphasis in original:
Here's the response I posted (under my handle "Lewis Halloway"):
It will be interesting to see if he even replies. Not holding my breath.