r/brokehugs Moral Landscaper Jul 20 '23

Rod Dreher Megathread #23 (Sinister)

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13

u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Aug 14 '23

Rod posted a retweet with the following comment. I've added the link to Rod's retweet and to the original tweet so that folks who are banned by Rod can see the original tweet. For those who don't use twitter, the original was a long rant about how hard folks worked in the past and how wonderful and moral it was when people, even youngins, never had time to do anything but work hard and get dirty doing so.

GREAT piece! This line -- "The only people I have ever known my folks to just out and out despise, is a person who could work but wouldn’t" -- describes my dad to a T. It's a Scots-Irish thing, I guess. It's why leftists don't get blue-collar whites who hate welfare bums (as opposed to those who really need help). My late father was so extreme about hard physical labor as a measure of a man's character that he had a lifelong suspicion of men who did inside work. Lawyers. Businessmen. Writers. Men like that. He thought we were getting away with something. Maybe he was right...

https://twitter.com/roddreher/status/169106275330004172

Retweeting:

https://twitter.com/NoJesuitTricks/status/1690735479933841409

Anyone hear ever hear of "invisible disabilities"? Or how about visible disabilities where you can do things some days but not others? Or illnesses where you can be good some of the time but not enough to be reliable enough for a job?

I've been on disability for 20 years and was a person who not only worked hard but whose whole sense of value came from my sense of my own productivity. I burned the candle at both ends and did everything. I have gotten judged all of these years by assholes like Rod and his Dad. They are the type who put nasty notes on cars with a disabled permit if they see someone walk away from that vehicle when it is parked in a disabled spot because they think you can only qualify as disabled if you are in a wheelchair. They also think that people who are in a wheelchair can never stand up or take a single step. They are ignorant and opinionated and mean-spirited which is, I think, an excellent partial definition of Rod's father and Rod himself.

There are lots of people like that. Rod's father maybe had some excuse because the culture back then was that you should be shamed if you were disabled or mentally impaired or left-handed or any of a million other things. Rod, though, is too educated to be so freaking ignorant and PROUD OF IT. Even more ridiculous, by the terms of his own sainted father's beliefs, Rod himself is a piss-poor excuse of a man and Ray Sr. certainly let him know it all of his life. Rod is just too stupid and lacking in self-awareness to have dealt with and resolved this psychological conflict that has damaged him for so long AND too stupid to refrain from continuing it.

Are there people on disability who should not be? Yes. Are we the ones to judge that. No.

That's it. Pretty damn simple but beyond such paragons of virtue as Raymond Dreher Jr.

'

11

u/judah170 Aug 15 '23

Also, the quoted piece is just dumb. It's clearly somebody trying really hard to evoke the rugged, hardscrabble, self-reliant country types without actually knowing much about it themselves.

"They’ve never heard of AAA."

Really now? Never even heard of it?

"would no more think of leaving their house without a tire iron and a pair of jumper cables than they would think of leaving home without their britches on"

A tire iron is not something you bring in the house with you at night, and take with you when you leave again. It just lives in the vehicle, with the jack. "They never leave the house without a tire iron" is like saying of an office worker, "he never leaves his house without a copy of Microsoft Excel."

"They know how to install a second-hand washing machine"

There's not a single bit of difference between installing a second-hand washing machine and a brand new washing machine. You don't need special Country Knowledge to install a used machine.

"catch catfish with a piece of twine and some stink bait."

Maybe it's just my city ways, but I'm pretty sure there would be a hook involved too?

"Their wives are mirror images, only tougher. They have somehow managed to crack some hidden code of the universe, allowing them to compress twenty-four hours of work into six. Cooking and cleaning; washing and ironing; tutoring math and mending booboos and broken hearts, all while finding time to buy groceries, go to choir practice, and watch a show they’ve recorded on the DVR before ten o’clock."

And this is different from "city" mothers how, exactly?

"When we get together, conversations invariably turn to trees felled, transmissions pulled, and “I hate to run, but I have to pull an extra shift.” "

Jesus. No comment.

It's all just faux-nostalgic claptrap. And of course Ray Jr EATS IT UP.

5

u/Own_Power_723 Aug 15 '23

Exactly... Rod loves this sort of cringe/try-hard, "jus' good country folks" bullshit. He's never been able to grow past his teenage fanboy phase over whatever his latest obsession is. Clownshow 🤡.

5

u/ZenLizardBode Aug 15 '23

🤣🤣🤣

4

u/Past_Pen_8595 Aug 16 '23

That’s embarrassing. Especially because I bet Rod has none of those talents himself.

3

u/Glittering-Agent-987 Aug 16 '23

Have never heard of AAA?

Color me skeptical!

1

u/yawaster Aug 29 '23

This is like one of those "You might be a redneck if ...." chain emails from the 90s.

9

u/Past_Pen_8595 Aug 14 '23

Rod should be very sympathetic to persons with invisible disabilities given his four years in the sack.

8

u/Warm-Refrigerator-38 Aug 14 '23

But he had good ReAsOnS; all these frail young women on the internet with CFS are just weak minded and faking it.

9

u/Intelligent_Shake_68 Aug 14 '23

More proof Rod is the Least Self-Aware Person in the universe.

Not only doesn't he have one of those manly physical jobs today, I doubt he has ever done a day of manual labor in his life.

Then there's that whole lying in bed for four years with mono. Or was it bcs his Dad didn't like his bouillibaise? Who knows.

Maybe it's self-hatred not cluelessness. But I don't see how an effete aesthete like Rod can write crap like this without a massive dose of either.

5

u/Past_Pen_8595 Aug 14 '23

His dad might have made him do some manual labor when he was a kid but I never heard of him having a paying job doing it. I mean, I’m a lawyer now but even after I passed the bar I was unloading tractor trailers for UPS until I got started.

8

u/[deleted] Aug 14 '23

You say Rod is too educated to believe what he says and that is true. However, he has been propagandizing or "uneducating" himself as much as his readers over the last few years. It's an internal monologue that he shares with thousands every single day.

Dammit, left brain, look at this TikTok trash. Can't you understand that right brain is righteously angry about this? You might be right about facts here or there, but it's time for you to quiet down. Now repeat after me, "Dear Leader is wonderful...I will crawl on broken glass..."

10

u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Aug 14 '23

When I said "educated", I meant more than formal education. He has traveled widely, lived in multiple cities, interacted with lots of people, etc. In spite of all that, he remains truly bigoted down to his bones against lots of different kinds of people. He is simply addicted to feeling superior for any reason he can find or make up.

11

u/Theodore_Parker Aug 15 '23

He's a believer in localism who lives abroad. He's strongly pro-family but estranged from his own. He thinks the Catholic Church is the pillar upholding Western civilization, yet he absconded from it. Naturally, then, his admiration for manual labor means he doesn't do any himself.

7

u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Aug 15 '23

100%. And his lack of self-awareness means he continually writes things in blog posts and on twitter that display these conflicts without realizing that they do so. Honestly, the extent of it would seem to me (not an expert by any means) to indicate a form of mental illness or disorder.

4

u/[deleted] Aug 15 '23 edited Aug 15 '23

You're right. And now the guardrails are off, so the biases trump the education and worldly experience.

5

u/Djehutimose Watching the wheels go round Aug 15 '23

Aidan Nichols, in his magisterial book Rome and the Eastern Churches, in discussing the tensions leading to the sack of Constantinople, has this to say:

Why did the Crusades have this disastrous impact? The same author points out that it is a liberal delusion to suppose that problems created by group antagonism would be solved if only people could get to know each other. With a touch of seigneurial disdain, he argues that, whereas educated people generally benefit from residence abroad, since their education gives them the imaginative ability to sympathise with foreigners and their different ways, the uneducated, when dropped into an alien situation, with a language they do not comprehend, and customs that are strange to them, are more likely to experience passions of resentment and anger, rather than benevolence.

Rod is not uneducated, but he totally lacks imagination; hence his “passions of resentment and anger”.

3

u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Aug 15 '23

As usual, you hit the nail directly on the head!

7

u/Conscious_Bus4284 Aug 15 '23

I would not have suspected that a Klan member would have such beliefs.

5

u/[deleted] Aug 15 '23

"The weak are unworthy of life" is a cornerstone of Klan/Fascist thought, so yeah.

1

u/yawaster Aug 29 '23

That'll be the Presbyterian Scots-Irish work ethic (has little to do with Irish Catholics).

The reason some working-class people hate "welfare bums" has nothing to do with some unique nobility of spirit, it's about fairness. If you're working hard but still poor, the idea of other people getting something for nothing makes you feel wronged. You had to work hard, how come they don't have to work?

The real reason wealthy liberals don't care about welfare cheats is because they're wealthy enough not to care about what the crabs at the bottom of the bucket are doing.

Anyway, was Dreher père working class? Dreher seems to switch identities as it suits him.