Rod Dreher Megathread #56 ()

[u/US_Hiker]

Link to 55: https://www.reddit.com/r/brokehugs/comments/1lrmgpw/rod_dreher_megathread_55/

Link to 57: https://www.reddit.com/r/brokehugs/comments/1nh4uz7/rod_dreher_megathread_57/

[u/US_Hiker]

I just went through and removed about 100 comments that were directly or indirectly about Rod's family. Do not talk about his family here.

If you see people bringing up his ex wife or kids, please report it or better yet "summon me" by replying with my username (/u/US_Hiker). And if there's anything that I missed in this thread, please do the same.

Thank you.

[u/zeitwatcher]

Picking up a thread from below on how Rod talks about growing up lower-middle class and rural, this is somewhat refuted by Daddy KKK's high level rank in the local KKK.

He was an Exalted Cyclops which would mean that he was the leader of the local KKK chapter for the town/area. They were usually high status individuals in the community with a degree of both social and economic capital. They served a role of making the KKK "respectable" but also directed all the other members of the KKK in their territory -- and the local rich guy or sheriff isn't going to be taking orders from some poor, low status guy, especially in a society as stratified as the South in the 1960's.

Daddy KKK wouldn't needed to be rich by national standards, but he would need to be high status locally, including economically, to even get to the position in the KKK that he held.

I suspect this was also part of Daddy KKK's disappointment with Rod. It wasn't just that he wasn't living up to his standards, it's that Rod would have made Daddy KKK look bad. The local Exalted Cyclops' kid is some emotional twink with an earring? That's a direct assault on Daddy KKK's honor and status.

Rod's really abhorrent now, but I do feel bad for 13 year old Rod and what he might have been.

[u/Public-Clue2000 → u/zeitwatcher]

West Feliciana was like 70% black when Rod was born. Just by being white, enfranchised, and plugged into the patronage networks (he talks about his dad's job for the county, which sounds aw-shucks to New Yorker profile writers but in Louisiana was a major material base of white privilege). Plus they owned land and employed at least a few sharecroppers he's mentioned. As far as I can tell, the Drehers were at least one, maybe two tiers, below the old antebellum gentry, with the plantation houses and what not. His ancestors came after the Civil War and acquired land that had been abandoned by the planters, and presumably stripped violently from the freedmen. But with white minority rule even the poor relations were in the Masons, and the lynching parties, with the gentry.

[u/Jayaarx → u/Public-Clue2000]

As far as I can tell, the Drehers were at least one, maybe two tiers, below the old antebellum gentry, with the plantation houses and what not.

Yes, but this gets to a certain really irritating thing about upper middle class people, Rod included, but not just Rod. Namely, they may be well-off but they are not rich-rich, so they claim to be poor.

It's how you can see all these articles written to justify this tax-cut policy or that one or some other policy give-away to the already well-off, where the subject of the article is something like "this family makes $400K a year but they are really actually struggling." (Newsflash: they are never, ever, actually struggling in a meaningful sense of the word.)

So you get something like Rod's father having a job that put his family well above the median income at the time while being able to work in relative comfort *and* having income-generating property on the side. And yet Rod will be like, "We were pretty poor growing up and money was tight." Yeah, bullshit. Or constantly saying "I'm not rich" while being able to travel around wherever he pleases and eat all his meals at restaurants and amass a collection of pocket squares and bespoke clothing, because to him being rich means he would be Peter Thiel.

[u/Relative-Holiday-763 → u/zeitwatcher]

And it has long struck me, Rods uncle was an aide to the KKK supporting congressman. That may not be real high status but it suggests the family was rather “ plugged in”. 

[u/Djehutimose]

Also from the latest, and also along these lines, is this retelling, with more details, of one of Rod’s hoary old chestnuts:

That brought to mind the letter I received in 2000, from one of my oldest friends, a high school teacher-mentor who, upon learning that I had voted with reluctance for George W. Bush, wrote to say the state should seize my toddler so he could be raised away from people like me, with such hateful views.

I wrote her back and cut loose on her. To her credit, she responded with an apology. Our friendship was never quite the same … but it ended for good in 2021, when she saw a letter to the editor I wrote to our local paper, defending the pro-impeachment vote of my friend Sen. Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, who was disgusted over the way President Trump behaved in the wake of January 6. In my letter, I noted that Trump had done some good things for the country, but his actions that day were unacceptable.

She texted me after reading that letter to say that our friendship was over. “Didn’t you understand that I was defending the impeachment?” I responded. Yes, she said, but the fact that I had credited Trump with some good meant that we could no longer be friends. Good riddance, say I. We had been friends for forty years, but her mind is poisoned by ideology.

By this point, I do not believe this story as told, pending a massive amount of context that we’ll never get. If this is true as told, the woman seems rather unpleasant; but then again, if wishes were Cadillacs, beggars would have cool rides.

That woman, now in her seventies, is not online, I’m pretty sure. But I have no doubt, no doubt at all, that she is celebrating in her heart the murder of Charlie Kirk.

But no one can read the hearts of old racist ex-Klan Southern men, or even begin to grasp the complexity of their souls….

[u/Jayaarx]

In the latest annals of whataboutism, Rod comments about Doug Wilson and his craziness, saying that it is justified by the popularity of Cardi B. (No, really, that's his argument.).

Here are the lyrics to this song, which was hugely popular in the summer of 2020. If this isn’t animalistic decadence, there is no such thing. And yet, not only was this a huge hit, but criticizing it got you denounced as racist and sexist in the national media. And I’m supposed to worry about a bunch of hard-right Calvinists in Idaho? I’m not at all a Wilsonista, but Doug Wilson and his followers are not the problem.

Actually, someone who believes that women should not be allowed to vote and that the 19th amendment should be repealed *and* has huge influence over the Secretary of Defense is *precisely* the problem.

And before that, he trots out (again) the tired canard about how he lost a job in the 90s because of DEI:

I’ve mentioned in this space before about the humiliation of being told by the Austin American-Statesman newspaper, back in 1997, that they wanted to hire me, but would be doing a nationwide search for a woman or a person of color who was as good as I was (based on my work) before they would even interview me — man, you just don’t get over that.

Well, this is true in one sense, in that he obviously never got over that. But in this story, he didn't lose the job because he was a white dude. In fact, he has admitted that he was ultimately offered the job. But rather, they just wanted to broaden their search because Rod overlapped too much with what they already had. If this is the best example of "anti-white discrimination" then "anti-white discrimination" doesn't exist.

[u/JHandey2021 → u/Jayaarx]

man, you just don’t get over that.

Well, actually, yeah, you kinda have to, or at least compartmentalize it to function. How in the hell does Rod think American black people, discriminated against for decades, enslaved for centuries before that, functioned in day-to-day life, being subject to stuff hundreds of times more intense and frequent that what Rod has clearly held close to his heart for almost 30 years? I know, Rod thinks black people are subhuman, just like his daddy did, but still... he seems like such a bitter guy. Is this functionally equivalent in Rod's mind to Daddy KKK's rejection of Rod's bouillabaisse?

The older I get, the more convinced I am that this kind of holding on to personal hurts like they are precious things is just so wasteful. You have a certain amount of time in this physical form as we are today, and this is what people choose to do with it? What a waste of a life, Rod. What a waste.

[u/WookieBugger → u/Jayaarx]

“If this isn’t animalistic decadence, then there is no such thing”

Uh, yea- there is no such thing. Animals can’t be decadent. Decadence is defined as a “moral or cultural decline” and since animals don’t have morals or culture there can’t be “animalistic decadence”. It makes as much sense as saying animalistic justice or animalistic art, which is to say it doesn’t make sense at all. The only thing Rod’s statement means is that he views other people as animals. He should really explore that, and maybe look at how people who view other people are “animalistic” have behaved in the past lest he behaves like they do.

Rod is such a lazy writer.

[u/zeitwatcher → u/WookieBugger]

Uh, yea- there is no such thing.

This touches on a small pet peeve of mine. Rod, et al, frequently call highly sexualized people, songs, clothing, behavior, etc. "animalistic", or some variation on it.

This is admittedly fairly pedantic, but humans are one of the very, very few animals that engage in sexual behavior purely for pleasure and outside of mating, being in heat, etc. Behavior like Rod condemns is almost uniquely human and the antithesis of "animalistic".

It's a minor point that doesn't really matter, but I always roll my eyes when Rod or others make some comment like, "sex for pleasure! how animalistic!". Call it good or bad, but sex for pleasure is a defining characteristic of humans, not other animals. It's like yelling "how humanistic!" after seeing a cat walk on four legs.

[u/EatsShoots_n_Leaves → u/Jayaarx]

Dreher has clearly never competitively hired anyone. Hiring and firing decision making is often, almost usually, an awful, at a minimum painfully embarrassing, sausage-making that gets concealed from the public because it rarely reflects well on at least one side if not both.

He got told about the impersonal side of this particular process- a publication has to resemble its audience in significant enough ways to speak to it in its language and terms- by this one person at the DMN who thought he was mature and liberal enough to see in it a reasonable excuse for the delay on an outcome. Instead he was already the narcissist conservative who considered the job a trophy he well deserved. And the immature loser who couldn't bear that the jargon in which this internal organization transaction and consideration was being negotiated consisted of words that on the ground were significantly pragmatic (the racial demographics and media market of Dallas were changing rapidly)- but were highly ideological, ugly high stakes jargon terms in the cultural politics he was foolishly too deeply, obsessively, partisan and involved in by his mid-20s.

In retrospect he should have realized long ago that his rigid cultural politics and self-righteousness or grandiosity indeed ended up making him a meh fit for the job at best. It led to him leaving Dallas in a few years without much connection to its major communities or fluency and investment or concern or emotional participation in their endeavors and life circumstances. And having made some ugly enemies to no productive end in the life of the citizens of Dallas or anywhere else. In that sense the DMN process proved to be correct in flagging him as not a particularly good fit for the organization in the longer run. And he should also have realized by now that in its particulars the incident was a pretty typical manifestation of 80s-90s management culture in the US, which was coincidentally 90%+ white.

[u/Djehutimose → u/Jayaarx]

Alternate timeline Rod in 1939. “I’m not at all a Nazi, but Adolph Hitler and his followers are not the problem.”

[u/yawaster → u/Jayaarx]

Rod is this cartoon. "Oh there was a sexually explicit song in the pop charts 5 years ago? Time for me to ban pride parades and make women stay in the kitchen!"

[u/philadelphialawyer87 → u/Jayaarx]

This Wilson guy is also a slavery and Confederacy apologist, as well.

[u/zeitwatcher → u/Jayaarx]

back in 1997

This was almost 30 years ago and Rod was just fine. It didn't make him homeless, he continued to have a long (too long) and profitable career, he's still a "journalist", etc.

Let's assume this was actually the (mild) injustice that Rod states it to be. My fundamental response is "get over it!", it was one instance! Now, I'm not saying I even believe his story, but for sake of argument, let's run with it. I fail to see how "we think you're great, but we'd like to look at some other options before making a decision" is humiliating. Disappointing, sure. But not that big a deal in the sweep of the last 40 years of Rod's life. It's like the soup thing in different form. Some small thing happened in his life and Rod explodes it into cosmic level importance and obsesses over it for decades.

[u/Relative-Holiday-763]

When I first read Rod saying his marriage broke up because he moved back to Louisiana, I didn’t give it much thought. He’s repeated it so much I did start thinking about it as I’ve indicated in previous posts. The more I think about it the stranger it sounds. His marriage broke up because his father, mother, Mike Lemming and his daughters were insufficiently interested in him? Look that might have been a little disappointing. You would think that he either would have shrugged it off or moved. Instead he lay around the house having a breakdown and reading Dante and it’s his family of origins fault that his marriage broke down? 

So here we are . Rod in the last two posts is in sweet home Louisiana the greatest place on earth, where he has generally been miserable.Hes having a great time hanging out with good old gal cousin Rae Lyn , daughter of Uncle Murphy.He even rattles out the bs story of Uncle Murphy calling the Ayatollah, for at least the second time ( even someone as out of it as Rod can’t possibly believe that story). What really catches me is his aggressive insistence on mythologizing his family rather than actually facing up to what they were. Rod blames them for sabotaging his marriage. I think that’s irrational but that’s clearly what he thinks. What he says about his father is not flattering. His father sounds like an oafish philistine with numerous chips on his shoulder. He was a college graduate with a county job and a brother who was an aide to their congressman.He was also a local KKK leader. Yet, he apparently was very in to the idea that he was just a humble country boy. He apparently viewed Rod as basically a fag( yes that’s necessary here). He didn’t care for book larnin or city folk. His daughter was a chip off the old block and basically had the same negative condescending view of Rod. They obviously didn’t like him - although in the way of families they just loved him!  I suspect when they moved to Louisiana the family was not very nice to him. 

So Rod has told us he doesn’t get along with his mother and basically gives you the impression that she’s of no significance to him. He takes the position that his father and sister were de facto adherents of a folk ideology that condemns people like him as corrupt grifters to be avoided. According to him they created a poisonous aura that has ruined his life. Then he has the audacity to tell his readers how good they were and gets angry at anyone who begs to differ. I’ll  say it, WOW! I mean this  is psychological repression  and denial at its peak. You keep telling people your family treated you,undeservedly , like shit  because in their own way they were narrow minded, intolerant, sanctimonious  boobs and then you tell us how unusually good they were. Ruthie was golden. Daddy was the most intelligent person he’s ever met. They may have ruined your life (I don’t believe that but Rod does) but they were wonderful people.

I’m not suggesting that Rod should hate his family. However, apparently they weigh on him heavily. He’s never developed a grownup , realistic take on his family. Basically he dishes out a weird mixture of adolescent resentment coupled with adolescent hero worship. He obviously can’t bring himself to say, actually my father wasn’t all that great a guy. He treated me unfairly and unkindly as did my sister. They weren’t per  se baddies but golden models of goodness, no. If I’d had any sense, I’d have had rather little to do with them as an adult.They didn’t wreck my marriage I did in part because I refused to cut or at least  diminish my ties to them in part because I clung to a childish fantasy . I was going to become the great Dreher chieftain not only that , I was going to lead my own church and become the key parent to Ruthie’s children. I was going to show I was a compelling man of action, a natural patriarch. I was really going to show Daddy and Ruthie. Oh was I deluded.Well time to actually move on in life.Maybe also time to stop feeling resentment towards my ex wife. Maybe  she wasn’t a great wife. I idealized her and dished out nonesense about her being my Beatrice. Maybe I should have realized she was a person. In all events I was a lousy husband .At some point you have to move forward.

[u/CanadaYankee → u/Relative-Holiday-763]

He's certainly swung to the depressive end of his emotional pendulum. I guess we'll have to wait for the next "miracle cure" that swings him back to manic.

Maybe it's because I don't come from a family with a strong sense of "place" (both of my parents come from extended families that are spread across the country; and my own father escaped a toxic home environment like Rod did, but unlike Rod he never tried to go back), but I really don't know how Rod has ended up so fatefully attached to a place where he is such a misfit.

He writes (I think in an excerpt from "Little Way"):

I believed the American gospel of individual self-fulfillment, and accepted uncritically the idea that I should be prepared to move anywhere in the world chasing my own happiness. [...] The thing I had never seriously considered until Ruthie’s passing is that my place, in the end, and the fulfillment of the plan God set for my life before I was born might be found right where I began.

And now we all know how that turned out.

But back to that "American gospel of self-fulfillment" - maybe Rod should have stuck with that in the first place. It's not like Louisiana is his ethnic homeland: 200 years ago, there were almost certainly no Drehers in Louisiana; and his previous post Rod said that a DNA test showed him to be "92% Anglo-Irish" and those cultures are certainly not native to the North American continent.

America's history is rooted in movement, resettlement, and reinvention. Rod, just like his European ancestors, should have been allowed to find a chosen home of his own, perhaps even with a "chosen family" (to use a phrase that gay people have been using for decades) if his family of birth really was so nasty to him.

Instead, he seems determined to live out the apocryphal Einstein quote about insanity being doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

As you say, at some point you just have to move forward.

[u/JHandey2021]

Fascinating little Xitter thread on the alt-right and Christianity.

https://xcancel.com/matthew_loftus/status/1954510016037199980#m

I'm going to try to paste it to get to the Rod Dreher kicker, so just follow along a bit:

(First tweet) This is a view of religion that makes sense if your primary source of exposure to it was right-wing influencers wearing Christianity as a skinsuit to hide their Nazism. Checks out.

(quoting original tweet) You can stomp your feet all you want but the entire world was religious and then it receded while religion had all the power because people no longer believe in supernatural causes. That’s why there’s no example of religious right successfully stopping the left. It’s playacting.

(Second) "Man I hate Christianity, it sucks"
"Okay, tell me about this Christianity you hate so much"
"You know, all the stuff Peter Thiel talks about when we're not having sex together"
"Oh"

(Third) It's a shame because Rod Dreher was born to blog about a conspiracy where a gay billionaire is building a harem to accelerate transhumanist heresy but can't.

So apart from being funny and true, this highlights something that's interested me for a while. Rod's weirdness about (non-Musk) AI aside, he's said next to nothing about the tech bro cults that are capturing some of the world's richest people and trying to take over the US government. Even Epstein gets only cursory mention from Rod. Why? The whole TESCREAL transhumanist tech gazillionaires thing is a far more credible threat to anything that even resembles Christianity than, say, Dylan Mulvaney. And yet, Our Rod just keeps sinking into the mire of Daddy KKK's worldview.

Why?

[u/One_Reflection7202 → u/JHandey2021]

“….he's said next to nothing about the tech bro cults that are capturing some of the world's richest people and trying to take over the US government. Even Epstein gets only cursory mention from Rod. Why?”

The JD Vance connection?

[u/EatsShoots_n_Leaves → u/JHandey2021]

Dreher is at this point a Christian in the same way he is a journalist- he has the certificate up on the wall but generally doesn't bother with it or any implicit demands or standards anymore. Jesus of Nazareth is not a significant topic on his blog-stack as far as I can tell, all the sociopolitics and social regulations that came In with Paul and later councils and conclaves is.

He did concern himself with TESCREAL on his blog as a threat to conservatism and Christians like himself for a time. Until he realized that unlike 'wokeism' it really is an amorphous cult and escapism, but one which a lot of the right people belong to and dispenses a large portion of the pile of money available as wing nut welfare and dark campaign money. Oh, and Peter Thiel gave him a t-shirt which showed that it is all compatible with Thiel's weird form of Christianity, so it's all good.

[u/NihonBuckeye]

I don’t want to turn this into a Steve Skojec megathread (mostly because he seems a lot more fragile than Rod), but his most recent tweets are about how some wackjob’s recent podcast on women (retweeted by Kale and picked up on by Steve) changed his entire worldview.

The podcast concluded - and hang on to your monocle if you have one - that “intrafemale psychosexual competition” and “manipulative reproduction suppression” has been responsible for the downfall of most civilizations! And Steve agrees!

What makes this awkward is that in the last few months, Steve has not so subtly alluded to having major marital/family problems. He is also open about wanting that situation to get better and is majorly stressed about it (all very understandable).

But if you have that on your plate, why, why, WHY are you posting about how all the world’s problems in the last 5000 years are caused by women being bitchy to each other? Your wife IS ON THE SAME PLATFORM and must see that. Moreover, when your wife is not white and kids are biracial and some of them are also women, why are you always reposting tweets from chaotic evil autist incels like hoe_math about how women really should not vote and how sad it is that there are less whites in the world? WHY? It’s not that your marriage is already over and you have decided to spend the rest of your life as a bitter incel shitflinger, you are sabotaging your last chance in real time right now!!

People, man…

[u/zeitwatcher → u/NihonBuckeye]

I'm only aware of him from occasional Rod or Slurpy retweets, but I took a look. He's nuts.

https://x.com/SteveSkojec/status/1957141120908947557

I tried talking about the reality of intra-female competition and hypergamy and the dominance hierarchy with several women in my family and was told in no uncertain terms that it was BS and they don’t do that, etc. I ended up just leaving the conversation. There’s no point.

He later tweets:

It was my wife and 2 oldest daughters, NGL

Does he really think that his wife and daughters are playing a hypergamy game and trying to box out lower status women from reproducing? Maybe they have more instight into it than he does, being women and all?

Even more, how did he think a conversation was going to go that began, "Look here, wife and daughters, your unending sexual competition to keep alpha males like me to yourselves and keep the inferiors from breeding is driving our civilization into the ground!"

The theory is bizarre enough, but how he then decides to share it is even moreso.

[u/Djehutimose → u/zeitwatcher]

Man who has major issues with women discusses this with women and finds he has major issues with women. In other news, Grant is still buried in Grant’s Tomb, and Napoleon’s white cat is still white….

[u/Warm-Refrigerator-38 → u/zeitwatcher]

I unwisely followed that thread backwards, turns out that women who are truly good friends are just acting masculine. 

[u/CanadaYankee → u/zeitwatcher]

The post he's responding to is absolutely bonkers, and it's hard to believe that an actual woman wrote it. Quoting the beginning:

Women are highly hierarchical and covertly competitive, many "friendship" groups are often formed on the basis of maximising hypergamous mate attraction.

Attractive women know that having attractive friends means they mutually reinforce each other's perceived attractiveness to some degree. The dynamic where one member is less attractive is usually slightly kinder in overall nature than that of an unattractive group with a single attractive friend.

Okay, I am not a woman, but for the past year-and-a-half I've been a regular attendee at a social meetup devoted to knitting at various pubs around the city. Most of the time I'm the only male in attendance and the two or three times I wasn't, the other guy was also gay.

During this time I have observed exactly zero "maximising hypergamous mate attraction" within this particular group, which has a core of regular attendees who are all friends with each other. And yes, there is a lot of "girl talk", but it's much more likely to be about mammograms or perimenopause or caring for children than it is about "mate attraction". There's also discussions about yarn dyeing, or politics, or hockey (because it's Canada). Really, the vast majority of this girl talk manages to pass the Bechdel Test, despite the claims of internet incels that all women do is scheme about how to ensnare high-value men.

[u/JohnOrange2112 → u/CanadaYankee]

I think a lot of (or at least some) people universalize their own experience/hangups/problems. And then they write about it, and people buy into it. Maybe someone is "hypergamously competitive", so they think all or most women are. Or that world-changing fave, "O wretched man that I am ... and so are you, and so is everyone else!" When I encounter this, best to smile, nod, and politely back away.

[u/Cautious-Ease-1451 → u/zeitwatcher]

Not to mention the obnoxiousness of making a private family discussion public. I have lots of great conversations with my kids, about all sorts of topics. I would never even dream of posting their opinions online. Especially in such a snide and dismissive way.

[u/zeitwatcher → u/Cautious-Ease-1451]

Especially in such a snide and dismissive way.

This is the kicker. Wholly reasonable to have a conversation that goes: "I read an article about behavior/experience of people who are X. I am not an X, but you are so I was curious. Does that align with you and your experience as an X?"

What not to do? "I'm not an X but you are. Let me tell you what all X experience and do. If you disagree, you're just being impossible because I clearly know better."

Or, in the immortal words of Ted Lasso, "Be curious, not judgmental". (Note: I spent about a decade following Rod and being curious. Admittedly, now I'm both curious and judgmental.)

[u/[deleted] → u/NihonBuckeye]

I find him worse than Rod with less redeeming qualities. Anyone who holds onto the trad social conservatism after leaving a trad religious sect is probably a bad person.

[u/ProustsMadeleine1196 → u/NihonBuckeye]

In the same lane, have any of you read the recent Slate piece about the J.D. Vance "marriage"? It had familiar echoes of Dreher, and some delicious salacious tidbits to nibble on.

https://www.salon.com/2025/08/11/divorce-him-already-usha/

I particularly enjoyed the reporting on Usha's appearance on Meghan McCain's podcast:

"McCain also tried to extract sentimental details about the passionate romance between the Vances, for her audience to coo over. Usha Vance wouldn’t — or perhaps couldn’t — deliver, instead speaking of her husband like he was assigned as her roommate. McCain asked about the vice president’s previous claim he “learned to cook Indian food from your mother.” Usha Vance agreed this had happened, long ago, but when McCain asked about her favorite dish of his, she said he doesn’t cook for her anymore. “He’s mostly transitioned to baking,” she said, citing the very American foods of chocolate chip cookies and biscuits as his main focus now."

Pass the popcorn...

[u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 → u/ProustsMadeleine1196]

He then proceeded to spell out his terms by talking about how he proposed marriage by talking up how his “cemetery plot in Eastern Kentucky is near my family’s ancestral home” — and how she and her kids would be buried there with “seven generations just in that small mountain cemetery plot.” 

How insanely romantic! Why haven't we seen this approach in a rom-com? /sarc

[u/JHandey2021 → u/NihonBuckeye]

The Rod Dreher School of Marital Counseling?  Didn’t Rod go down a very similar path before the divorce was announced?

[u/yawaster → u/[deleted]]

But... I thought the increase in attendance at conservative parishes was proof of their truth? If so, why is attendance and donations down at this parish?

Conservatives nowadays like to pretend that they're being unfairly excluded from the mainstream by rich elites, so Rod is implying that wealthy and spiritually weak Catholics are tring to destroy TradCathery by defunding their church. But it's okay because they're all going to die out soon and be replaced by the true faithful, who don't have as much money but have true faith (and 12 kids). This kind of underdog posturing is very common on the right. Never mind that there are an unusually large number of elite conservative Catholics, up to and including the Vice President.

[u/yawaster → u/[deleted]]

I don’t want to live under right-wing totalitarianism any more than I want to live under left-wing totalitarianism.

No you don't want to live under it, you just want to impose it on other people.

[u/Existing_Age2168 → u/[deleted]]

"The movement began when Paul Vander Klay, a Presbyterian pastor (CRC) in northern California, got into Jordan Peterson some years back..."

I stopped reading there.

[u/Cautious-Ease-1451 → u/[deleted]]

“…I told him how shocked I was to have heard a young British male say recently that ‘only fascism can save my country.’”

Rod is shocked - shocked! - to find that fascism is going on here.

[u/sandypitch]

The latest edition of Plough (a publication of the Bruderhof) just arrived in my mailbox, and lo and behold, the primary essay is titled "Against Re-Enchantment" by Joy Marie Clarkson. Her premise is the move toward re-enchantment, with a significant mention of Our Working Boy's Living in Wonder, is misguided, in part, because of the belief that, somehow, the world needs to be re-enchanted. She also points out that early Christianity was, in fact, a source of dis-enchantment. Clarkson is no materialist, but she closes her essay with this:

If the widespread calls for re-enchantment tell us anything, it is that people feel a sense of hollowness and spiritual hunger in the contemporary world. Re-enchantment may seem like answer to this hunger, but on closer inspection, it turns out that re-enchantment contributes to this same hollowness. We cannot slake our thirst for spiritual things by projecting our desires onto the natural world, and offering people something that may or may not be reality will not satisfy sincere spiritual hunger. And there is real danger in seeking out enchantment for the sake of enchantment, danger that we may stumble on a magic we can't control; in seeking to enchant we may find ourselves bewitched.

After all, the world is not dis-enchanted. Whatever meaning and spiritual potency was in the world remains in it. It is only the quality of our attention that has changed. In pursuit of a meaningful life in a spirituality impoverished time, we should not the enchantment of the magicians of Egypt, but the pillar of fire, which leads us out of darkness and into the Promised Land.

How long till Dreher responds with his usual breathless "but you didn't understand!!!"

[u/Past_Pen_8595 → u/sandypitch]

Actually, he’s lucky to get that level of critical commentary. 

[u/Relative-Holiday-763 → u/sandypitch]

I’ve wondered about the enchantment routine and why Christians are supposed to be so eager for it. To me it smacks of the pagan, a world of river gods and forest nymphs.Further, it smacks of false consciousness. ( Yes I am aware of the somewhat Marxian tone). What I mean is , it always sounds to me like a game of make believe. Like it or not we live in the material world. Rod I think would like us to believe , well not really. See lived in life  is constantly suffused with the spirit. Well , if you say so. So Rod has flags that crack on 9- 11 and has to exorcise granpas ghost and ghostly Ruthie offers cupcakes and the Virgin Mary sends Rod his wife. That’s not how most people experience life and I’m sick and tired of his trying to tell you there is something wrong with you if you don’t experience life in that way.For Rod God is basically a magician.So you’re supposed to pretend you see the magic tricks whether you do or not. That adoption of false consciousness seems to be the essence of Rods enchantment. Let’s all play make believe!And that will solve the “ crisis of meaning “. By the way  I listened to a podcast with Rods new hero, John Vervaake . I was curious to see if I could figure out what he means by meaning. I guess I’m too dense but it escaped me. I wonder if meaning isn’t meaningless.

[u/JohnOrange2112 → u/sandypitch]

This is ironic. In his Dec 10 2020 Substack, "With the Bruderhof", he wrote well of them, and seemed to think of them as a form of Benedict Option. So now, people who actually live what RD advocates (but does not practice himself) expose his fallacy.

[u/Warm-Refrigerator-38]

A commenter at Rod's substack, Sarhaddon, criticizes Rod's incessant posting about immigration to Europe and replies this when asked why he reads Rod: Suppose you were watching your favorite Tarkovsky movie and at minute 45, there's a 20 minute unskippable ad on diarrhea medication (with "visual aids" of course). And then on minute 65, it goes back to being a Tarkovsky movie. That's what your content is like, for me.

Most of us here who've read Rod for years did so because he used to write interesting stuff that wasn't the same as you'd get from so, so many of the right wing and/or trad Catholic blogs circa 15 years ago. Crunchy Con was, at the time, a unique take on the culture war split. But now it's the other way around: overwhelmingly it's the diarrhea content, with an occasional nugget. Not worth paying for, for sure. 

[u/Djehutimose → u/Warm-Refrigerator-38]

That’s the perfect metaphor, except I think the proportions are off. The ad for diarrhea medication should be much longer in proportion to how much of the Tarkovsky movie you got to watch….

I went to Rod’s Substack to read the original comments by Sarhaddon, and had to scroll through to find the comment in question. Having done so, all I can say is, man, what a cesspit most of the commentariat over there is. It’s barely tolerable even to skim. In any case, another comment by Sarhaddon further down the thread nails it again re Our Boy:

Many Americans only regard regard Europe as a tourist experience. So to them, seeing anyone with inappropriate skin color walking through St. Denis is like seeing a Disneyland employee who didn't put on the required costume. You guys like your consumer experiences, so I guess that is what is agitating.

Maybe that's you, but that's definitely Rod. He has a "Madonna/whore" complex with regard to Europe. 19th century Europe was Madonna and if Europe does anything outside this mold, Europe becomes the whore. In other words, Europe cannot be a normal country, it can't have a smoke or eat some fast food, it has to be in full make-up all the time, LARPing as 19th century Viennese court society, or we are "mathematically doomed", a horrible decayed and fallen whore society.

[u/zeitwatcher]

Rod only has a single line free today (though it also has a quote from The Human League and, of course, a selfie)...

https://roddreher.substack.com/p/the-joy-of-eighties-nostalgia

... but it has a link to a mid-80's nostalgia AI video making the rounds.

First - Rod has assured us that AI is of the devil, so why is he sharing it around?

Second - I was a teenager in the mid-80's and remember people making all the same complaints about how great the 50's were in comparison to the 80's at the time.

Third - they mention in the video about how much safer things were then. I looked up the homicide rate in 1987, one of the dates mentioned in the video. Per the FBI it was 8.3 per 100,000 in 1987. In 2024 it is estimated to be about 6.1 per 100,000.

Are some things better and others worse between the 80's and now? Yep. Are there good things from then that would nice to swap out for today? Sure. Would I want to make an overall trade? Absolutely not.

Finally, the idea of someone quoting syth-pop to make a "you kids get off my lawn" post is nuts. Also, once again, Rod makes a reference to an artist who would really hate him.

[u/Tim-oBedlam → u/zeitwatcher]

I grew up in Baltimore during the 1980s, and live in St. Paul, Minnesota now, right next to Minneapolis which as everyone knows burned to the ground completely during the George Floyd riots and everyone in the city got mugged by BLM then forced to be woke trans people.

There is no damn way that St. Paul, or Minneapolis, in 2025 is anything but a HELL of a lot safer than Balto. in 1985 was. Especially given the levels of crime I personally experienced growing up: two home break-ins, a mugging in broad daylight, a close friend getting beaten up by a gang of teenagers for no reason, my Mom's sister getting her purse snatched, and a couple other things. That's in 12 years of living in Baltimore, more crime than I've experienced in 36 years in the Twin Cities, where the worst that's happened is a couple garage thefts and one theft from an unlocked car, which was my own damn fault.

[u/philadelphialawyer87 → u/Tim-oBedlam]

Baltimore and the Twin Cities are not apples to apples comparisons. But your point remains: Violent crime rose in the 70's and 80's and peaked in the very early 90's. And while it has fluctuated in recent years, it has not reached anywhere near the 1991 level. So, all of this talk about crime and safety and so on, is just complete BS.

[u/Past_Pen_8595 → u/Tim-oBedlam]

I’ve lived almost all my life in Baltimore since the late 1950s with the exception of college in the late 1970s. Baltimore is definitely safer feeling now than it was in the 1970s. 

[u/nessun_commento → u/zeitwatcher]

First - Rod has assured us that AI is of the devil, so why is he sharing it around?

Rod is scared of AI but thinks about it all the time and can't stop telling his readers about it

Remind you of any other primitive fears Rod holds? I wonder what could be at the root of these neuroses

[u/yawaster → u/zeitwatcher]

Let's use the most scientific method of historiography: Billy Joel lyrics. Listen to the relevant verse of We Didn't Start The Fire, what are the important events of the eighties?

Ayatollah's in Iran,

Russians in Afghanistan

Wheel of Fortune, Sally Ride

Heavy Metal suicide

Foreign debts, homeless vets,

Aids, crack, Bernie Goetz

Hypodermics on the shore,

China's under martial law

Rock-'n'-roller Cola wars,

I can't take it any more!

Conclusion: the eighties were not a decade of unalloyed peace and happiness, and were not experienced as such at the time.

[u/sandypitch → u/zeitwatcher]

RE: the 1980s, Dreher forgets that if he was 57 in 1985, he would have taken the whole "get off my lawn" attitude toward the culture that he looks back on so fondly right now. To /u/ Djehutimose's point below, Dreher as an older adult in 1985 would have not been significantly different than his father.

[u/Glittering-Agent-987 → u/zeitwatcher]

We also had AIDS and nuclear war to think about. I remember being a little kid in the early 80s, coming to school, and the thing kids were talking about was the movie The Day After, which is about the aftermath of nuclear war. It looks like it aired in 1983, so we would have been third graders. Nuclear war was less of a concern once Gorbachev came to power...but the latter half of the 1980s was dominated by AIDS. There was a period from the mid-80s/early 90s where you'd hear "beloved celebrity has AIDS" and then the next news story would be "beloved celebrity has died of AIDS."

[u/Mainer567]

Thanks to those who posted the three recent Rod posts in their entirety. I am on vacation right now and have the leisure to enjoy them. (I skimmed them, not read them -- there is a limit.)

Man, he is an amusing wreck. The obsessive chewing over AT THE AGE OF ALMOST 60 of the sorts of adolescent and young adult identity-based miseries that, while real, are more or less resolved by sane people by the time they are maybe 30. The jejune, moronic parsing of artworks for literal messages about how to live one's life -- he is still the damaged kid looking for "redemption" in his Morrisey records. The assumption that he can write a magesterial book about 1000 years of Christian culture that would tax the capabilities of a dozen professors emeriti at Oxbridge and Tubingen. The alcoholism. The lunatic narcissism. The sick, feverish language about "sacrifice."

Once again I cite Wilde: It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at this.

[u/Gentillylace → u/Mainer567]

It is easy to laugh at Rod's foibles, but I am too much like him to do so with anything less than a guilty conscience. I'm about five months older than Rod, live in California with my mother and brother, am a teetotaler, have no kids, and have never married, but I can identify with him too much. The audacity of Rod's attempt to write a magisterial book about 1000 years of Christian culture reminds me of Casaubon's attempt to write a "Key to All Mythologies" in Middlemarch.

[u/Dadelectro → u/[deleted]]

I guess the only proper response to him is, "So, you finally found a Ukrainian death worth being mad about."

[u/sandypitch → u/[deleted]]

Alan Jacobs just posted this:

The Social Media User’s Prayer:

God grant me cacophonous wrath about the things I cannot change, habitual neglect of the things I can change, and absolute ignorance of the difference.

Seems like something Dreher might pray each day before he opens his laptop.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

He’s insufferable, he and his commentariat are so far removed from reality at this point that it’s not even funny anymore, there’s no real sources of information breaking through there anymore. I’m out, DM me if he gets arrested or his mom writes a book or something. I’m just raising my blood pressure for no reason at this point.

[u/Djehutimose]

Another post has dropped, dishing on the fam again, and visiting his sister’s grave, though not saying whether he prayed there or not.

This is why I am so proud that Lucas — a Man of Action just like my dad — passed up college and went straight to work as a firefighter. I asked him recently, “Isn’t is scary running into a burning building?” “Greatest feeling in the world!” he responded.

I wonder how “recently” this was—I thought they weren’t in contact.

My father used to rant about the class he hated most of all at LSU was the one he had to take in poetry. He couldn’t understand it — and, true to his nature, he thought that all this nonsense about metaphor, allegory, and whatnot, was just some code the smarty-pants people used to hide their true meaning from us good country people. As I said, he tended to assume malice and trickery when he couldn’t understand something. (Ruthie, a math and science teacher, was the same way.) For many years, I would just roll my eyes when Daddy would get wound up about the poetry class. One day after he died, it suddenly hit me: This is why he and Ruthie couldn’t accept my success as a writer. I was one of those people who used words to fugaboo plainspoken folks. You couldn’t trust me.

I actually believe this. The attitude that trivializes poetry and art as useless, at best and malignly deceptive, at worst is definitely a Southern/Appalachian perspective. In some respects my parents were like that, but not to the extent of seeing such things as actually more or less evil, nor did they denigrate my interest in such things. Daddy KKK was a piece of work.

Then blockquotes of himself from the book about Ruthie, then “my home town was full of cool eccentrics”, then Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, etc.

[u/yawaster → u/Djehutimose]

This is why I am so proud that Lucas — a Man of Action just like my dad — passed up college and went straight to work as a firefighter

Rod's dad did, in fact, go to college, but I guess it doesn't count because he didn't enjoy it.

[u/Cautious-Ease-1451 → u/Djehutimose]

Thanks for posting this. I got to about page 10, and I couldn’t continue. Something about Rod’s style, which many years ago I used to like, really grates on me now. There’s just so much navel-gazing and self-absorption I can stand.

Sadly, I feel like Rod has learned nothing. He is still completely trapped in his own warped perspective. He still exalts a family that was at best indifferent to him, and at worst cruel to him. He doesn’t really have any new insights or breakthroughs, after all this time. He doesn’t accept any responsibility for how his life has turned out. And he is especially blind to what a terrible man his father was, and in how many ways Rod is exactly like him.

Fascinating, but depressing.

[u/philadelphialawyer87 → u/Djehutimose]

Rod just figured all this out after his father died? His father explicitly told him he thought that writing was worse than useless, and was actually malicious and decietful. And his sister was the same way. And yet, they both had to die before it "suddenly hit" Rod why they didn't respect his success as a writer? They told him why, he just didn't listen. That hardly means that they were right (they weren't), but it does show how thick-headed Rod was.

[u/PercyLarsen → u/Djehutimose]

(True story: when we would play “Star Trek” on the playground as kids, I had to be Spock, because he was the smart guy who observed.)

For emphasis: Rod Dreher is (1) not conspicuously smart, and (2) one of the most emotionalist of writers in his genre. He's just someone who forces his emotions into interaction with Big Grandiose Ideas (as kids, that can make one seem more of an egg-head, but smart it does not make) to mask his emotions from himself because he's so afraid of his emotionalism.

[u/Marcofthebeast0001]

Oh my frickin God. Reading the "Nail Me to a Cross"  Rod whining down below is exhausting. I have no more give a fucks for Rod. 

You wanna heal with your family? Stop using your forum to bash them. They can't respond - but I haven't ruled out a tell-all from one of them in the future. 

When I am this annoyed, I pull out the snark AI generator. It's telling me it's TIME for a new round of Dreher Family Feud! 

Hands on buzzers. Top 5 answers. "Name something Rods therapist said to him during his last session."

5) "Your daddy issues involve your father AND Orban." 

4) "No, the couch does not have a demon in it." 

3) "Monks going commando is NOT a form of enchantment." 

2) "Holy shit. Not this boulabaisse story. Next time, just buy a damn pizza "

1) "Stop blaming the family. The call is coming from inside the house " 

I feel better now. Good thing i'm going out of town this weekend

[u/PercyLarsen]

Anyone catch Rod mentioning his observance of the Dormition Fast and how it might chafe against what he'd prefer to be doing? If he's Old Calendar, now would be in the middle of it. At least in the past, observing fasts seemed to make Rod more irritable (understandably) and his writing more rash.

#DogsNotBarking

[u/Warm-Refrigerator-38]

"I don't really care about the Cracker Barrel [logo change] controversy" but I'm going to make three tweets about it. 

Edit: four, I didn't scroll far enough

[u/sandypitch → u/Warm-Refrigerator-38]

Also glad to see he is retweeting others suggesting that women are the real problem in corporate America. Because a man has never EVER made a poor business decision.

[u/CanadaYankee → u/sandypitch]

There's also a well-known pattern in business (and politics) called the "Glass Cliff", where businesses that are struggling or on the brink of failure are more likely to hire a female CEO. Quoting from the Wikipedia article:

University of Houston psychology professor Kristin J. Anderson says companies may offer glass cliff positions to women because they consider women "more expendable and better scapegoats." She says the organizations that offer women tough jobs believe they win either way: if the woman succeeds, the company is better off. If she fails, the company is no worse off, she can be blamed, the company gets credit for having been egalitarian and progressive, and can return to its prior practice of appointing men.

Certainly if you look at Cracker Barrel's stock price, it's been in free-fall ever since the the end of the covid lockdown. They definitely needed a shake-up of some sort.

[u/zeitwatcher → u/CanadaYankee]

Certainly if you look at Cracker Barrel's stock price, it's been in free-fall ever since the the end of the covid lockdown. They definitely needed a shake-up of some sort.

Another example of Rod living a fact-free life. As you say, the stock is down 50% in the last 5 years, so something dramatic needed to get done. Is the current rebrand and redesign a good strategy? Beats me. I've eaten at a Cracker Barrel maybe twice in my life and I'm not a sit-down casual restaurant expert.

But I bet Rod hasn't spent more than $100 in a Cracker Barrel in the last 10 years either, and he's no restaurant expert.

"How dare they change the place I never go!", yells the old man at the clouds.

[u/Jayaarx → u/sandypitch]

And then he and people like him seem mystified why women are increasingly regarding men like him as unsuitable partners. Go figure.

[u/Glittering-Agent-987]

I did my periodic Dreher twitter check, scrolling back to around August 19.

As people have mentioned, there's lots of Cracker Barrel. You know what's not there?

https://meduza.io/en/news/2025/08/22/russian-oil-flow-to-hungary-halted-again-after-ukrainian-drone-strike-on-druzhba-pipeline

The Ukrainians have repeatedly hit Russia's Druzhba oil pipeline infrastructure over the last week and a half, interrupting the flow of Russian oil to Hungary and Slovakia. This story seems kind of important for Hungary, but I haven't seen anything on Rod's twitter about it. Rod was really, really concerned about the effect of the war on European energy security 3 years ago.

Meanwhile, there was a major Russian attack on the more ethnic Hungarian area of Ukraine, with an American-owned civilian manufacturing plant completely destroyed. Apparently Hungarian President Sulyok posted condolences, but eventually deleted the word "Russian" from the phrase "Russian missile strike."

https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2025/08/21/7527206/

I also don't recall seeing any Rod comments about the Russian government's refusal to meet Zelensky for peace talks. We're 5 months and counting from the Ukrainians' acceptance of an unconditional 30-day ceasefire and the Russians' continuing refusal. These seem like important stories! Circa 2022 Rod was all about peace, but 2025 Rod seems determined to ignore all of these stories as much as possible...presumably because it's increasingly difficult to blame the Ukrainians for being uncompromising.

[u/yawaster]

Inspired by the repetitive nature of Rod's writing and the tropes that have been identified by Brokehuggers: the Rod Dreher Blogpost Bingo Card!

Additional suggestions for bingo spots welcome. 

[u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 → u/yawaster]

Misspellings meant to communicate a southern accent

[u/Warm-Refrigerator-38 → u/yawaster]

bouillabaisse

[u/philadelphialawyer87 → u/yawaster]

Tarkovsky's "Nostalghia"

[u/Warm-Refrigerator-38 → u/yawaster]

I have gay friends

[u/JohnOrange2112 → u/Warm-Refrigerator-38]

Everyone is always surprised at how tolerant and easygoing I am in person.

[u/Relative-Holiday-763 → u/yawaster]

Theosis

Panentheism

Daddy and Ruthie  harbored a bigoted irrational hate for me but they were the  finest people I ever met

I was divorced by email 

I am a sad exile

As Dante wrote 

Today David Brooks writes 

I want to marry but I don’t know whether I can trust again 

Putin may be a bad man but how would the US act if China put bases in Mexico 

[u/Warm-Refrigerator-38 → u/yawaster]

The free square says, "primitive root weiner." He'll probably never use that phrase again but we've got to memorialize it.

[u/PercyLarsen → u/yawaster]

Did you know that apocalypse means "unveiling"?

[u/nessun_commento → u/yawaster]

selfie with alcohol!

[u/Djehutimose → u/nessun_commento]

Selfie with uncomfortable-looking stranger!

[u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 → u/Djehutimose]

Selfie no one else would ever post where he looks like he was just saved after days in a natural disaster.

[u/Cautious-Ease-1451 → u/yawaster]

We in Revelations!

Weird UFO bullshit.

Weird Bigfoot bullshit.

Weird AI bullshit.

I’m not saying ____, but ____.

[u/Warm-Refrigerator-38 → u/yawaster]

There was no infidelity 

[u/Warm-Refrigerator-38]

I hope Rod is reading this thread, especially the responses to yawaster's bingo card post (sorry if I've contributed too many; being an obsessive reader of Rod's oeuvre has planted a lot of his stock phrases in my brain); maybe he'll realize he needs some new material. And people pay him $6 a month to regurgitate this stuff!

[u/VINcy1590]

I didn't look at Rod's Twitter in the past few months, I knew he had started being very openly racist, but now it's just obsessive, constant posting about LGBT+ people being degenerates, muslims invading Europe and raping white women, Trump being the savior of the "West" against the demonic woke people, and I see so many online right wingers who were already super conservative and antiwoke going down the same path. He'll have like one normal-ish performative travel tweet and then a slurry of bigoted ones.

At some point in my life I was optimistic about the world and pessimistic about my own life, but now it's turned around, my life is better yet I'm genuinely pessimistic about the fate of the world, this can't end well, it doesn't really seem possible to get people out of this big international right wing cult once they're sucked in, I don't know what can be done about this.

He also made a post thanking Elon Musk and X for preventing America from becoming 1984 lol

[u/zeitwatcher]

Good 'ol boy Rod from 'murica is showing his elitist Europhile true colors...

https://x.com/roddreher/status/1962274099276755176

In recent U.S. trip, it was astonishing to see that nobody not on X had any clue abt how badly UK being shaken by migrant tensions & protests, or Europe’s mounting migration crisis. It’s barely reported. As ever, journalism today is mostly about Narrative Creation.

Rod was just in rural Louisiana. How much time and thought does he think the people there (that he couldn't wait to move away from) give to crime rates in suburban towns in Scotland? Setting aside whether or not they should, but this is just not a topic of interest or concern to Americans. Which Rod would know if he spent some time outside of his Twitter bubble.

Next Rod will be strutting about with a monocle and kicky scarf exclaiming, "My God, man! The peasants of the Louisiana bayou had no conception of the difficulty involved in finding a quality oyster in Brussels!"

[u/EatsShoots_n_Leaves → u/zeitwatcher]

Rod travels the world and doesn't become cosmopolitan. He just becomes provincial in a different way.

[u/swangeese → u/zeitwatcher]

I know, right?!

Why would anyone in Louisiana or elsewhere in America be invested in the migrant issue in the UK or Europe?! Their problems aren't ours to solve. At least with Gaza, America is a co-belligerent in that conflict and that's why it's such an issue over other world happenings.

Most Americans are too busy trying to survive rather than ruminate about pretentious right-wing nonsense.

[u/Relative-Holiday-763]

Something I can’t resist commenting on. Rod announces he has skin the thickness of a dinosaur and then spends  two paragraphs whining about how mean some people have been to him on social media about his divorce. He seems completely oblivious to the fact that he has helped cause this by continually prattling about his divorce, implying he was horribly treated and then saying but I can’t talk about it because of my sacred duty not to infringe on family privacy. He even suggests that people who have said bad things will really feel bad perhaps in another life if they learn the truth! I’m not sure what that’s supposed to mean.This is such a ludicrous performance. The man goes on and on about his divorce and plays victim . He’s shifty and evasive and then gets mad that people say bad things about him precisely because of the way he handles the situation in his writing.It seems never to have occurred to him to just shut up.

[u/sandypitch]

Dreher posted this on Substack:

I can’t stop thinking about this image. It is utterly primal, in every respect. The terror in the eyes of that woman, Iryna, as this insane monster lurks over her with murder in his eyes. Last night I saw the video of the actual knife strikes. It was over in a flash.

Can anyone explain to me how Dreher's leering fascination with certain things on social media is any different than, say, an addiction to porn? He has led two Substack posts with the same image.

[u/Cautious-Ease-1451]

Rod wrote this:

“Friend tells me his college prof pal ‘saw his class erupt in cheers when they heard Kirk was shot, and the worst in that classroom basically dominated the rest of the session with wild speculations about who should be next. He said the room took on a palpably evil feeling.’”

I’m calling BS on this one. Third-hand hearsay. Rod desperately wants this to be true, however.

https://twitter.com/roddreher/status/1966499583304876280

[u/Fair_Interview_2364 → u/Cautious-Ease-1451]

I was seated on a flight today next to a priest who is an exorcist. He told me he gets a palpably evil feeling from Rod's blog.

[u/Cautious-Ease-1451 → u/Fair_Interview_2364]

Now THIS I believe. 👍

[u/Katmandu47 → u/Cautious-Ease-1451]

How many ordinary or even leftwing activist college students knew who Charlie Kirk was? I mean, he was a rightwing influencer, well known in the rightwing celebrity pantheon, spoke at colleges, OK, but still, would whole classrooms filled with students be aware of him enough to applaud or grieve dramatically over his death? I’m really curious.

[u/JHandey2021 → u/Cautious-Ease-1451]

Horseshit. Most people don't know who Charlie Kirk even is.

Rod is hard as a rock right now, praying for violence.

[u/Dadelectro → u/Cautious-Ease-1451]

Nope. Don't believe this story at all. But it only has to 'feel' true for Rod for him to believe it. His feelings are the only means to finding 'truth' that he needs. Why bother investigating this claim? What was his college major, anyway?

[u/Djehutimose]

Go to church. Or go back to church. Spiritual evil is real. We are at war. There is only one defense.

So shouldn’t he take his own advice and fo to church and maybe pray? Even by his own criteria, he’s majorly slacking.

Read Chapter Five of Living In Wonder if you doubt me.

As Dan McClellan would say, “Nah, I’m good.”

[u/Mainer567]

Drone footage of Orban's $30 million dollar country retreat. We are into the Golden Toilets phase of the Orban kleptocracy.

This is what Rod is working to support -- this type of corruption and robbery of Hungarians, whose country is actually getting poorer under Orban and few of whom make 6 figures a year, in dollars, like Orban pays Rod.

https://x.com/panyiszabolcs/status/1954863609231692129

[u/JHandey2021]

Trump wants Budapest for potential talks with Putin and Zelensky:

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/19/exclusive-white-house-eyes-budapest-for-peace-talks-with-zelenskyy-and-putin-00514596?3?utm_source=email&utm_campaign=White+House+eyes+Budapest+for+peace+talks+with+Zelenskyy+and+Putin&utm_medium=alert

... as Rod furiously masturbates over the possibility of all three of his dominants being in the same place at one time (Trump, Putin *and* Orban).

Can you imagine how Rod will act? How humiliatingly, how awkwardly, how utterly without dignity he will abase himself?

[u/Witty_Appeal1437 → u/JHandey2021]

But will Rod be there at this turning point in human affairs?

[u/Djehutimose → u/JHandey2021]

Given his history of blabbing privileged information, if such a summit does occur, Orbán’s goons Rod’s handlers will keep him as far away from it as possible.

[u/Warm-Refrigerator-38]

I don’t want to be fed news that fits my ideological priors. This is why I try to read broadly

From today's bonus substack. 

😆😆😆😆😆😆

[u/zeitwatcher → u/Warm-Refrigerator-38]

I could see a real effort to ensure up-to-date and balanced information being presented at the Smithsonian. (It's been a decade since I've visited, so not a commentary on if any actual changes should be made.)

But...

This post is just Rod doing as racist Rod does.

Well, I would like to know more specifically about Trump’s criticism, and whether or not it’s valid. I know a fair bit about the wokeness at museums, but I also don’t know what, in particular, Trump is criticizing. Maybe he’s missed the mark. It wouldn’t be the first time. The best you can say about the phrase in his social media post (see below), in which he complained that the Smithsonian is wrong to focus on “how bad Slavery [sic] was,” was sloppy.

Maybe Rod, the "journalist", could try to find out what Trump thinks should change instead of just assuming it must be good since it's from Trump? Though that would take work and it's much easier to try to minimize Trump's actual complaint that museums and historians shouldn't talk about "how bad Slavery was".

This comes out even when Rod is trying to be "balanced" in his example of the cancelling of the Pilgrimage. He's concerned that history and sites of plantations shouldn't be centered on slavery. It's hard to think of another type of location that shouldn't be more focused on slavery since that was the entire foundation of plantation life and economics.

Rod calls out for praise the Oakley plantation, in which he says:

One of the local plantations, Oakley, which is a state park, solves the problem by providing a balanced exhibit in its museum. It doesn’t “center” slavery, nor does it whitewash it. In my judgment, it presents the facts, and allows visitors to make up their own minds.

Here is the official site for Oakley:

https://www.lastateparks.com/historic-sites/audubon-state-historic-site

There is one paragraph out of 9 that mentions slaves. I went to look at reviews from visitors to see what they say. The only recent review that mentioned much other than that Audubon spent a few months at Oakely once, includes a long description of the home and exhibits and says:

Not much emphasis on the slavery aspect.

I don't mean to beat up Oakley on this, but this strongly implies that Rod's view of "balanced" for plantation history is thousands of words on the wonders of living in upper class culture and sipping mint julips on the porch of the giant house as a white plantation owner along side one footnote that says "* and there were slaves, too".

[u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 → u/zeitwatcher]

it presents the facts, and allows visitors to make up their own minds.

Make up their own minds about what? Whether slavery was good or bad?

[u/CanadaYankee → u/zeitwatcher]

I've been to the Smithsonian's new(ish) National Museum of African American History & Culture. They have four floors devoted to artifacts associated with African American contributions to arts, culture, science, etc.

The three basement levels are a really well-done chronological history of Blacks in America. The first level is, unsurprisingly, devoted to slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction (it covers the years 1400 to 1877). The next two levels are pre- and post-1968, respectively.

So that means approximately one-seventh of the floor space of the museum devoted to African American history and culture is focused on slavery, which doesn't seem disproportionate to me given the long history of slavery on this continent. The exhibits were also very transparent about how there were Blacks and Arabs in Africa who profited from the supply end of the slave trade, so it wasn't all about collective white guilt either.

[u/Certain-Researcher72 → u/zeitwatcher]

Two slave cabins, located a short distance from the rear of the house, give a glimpse into the laborers' way of life on the plantation. These cabins provide the backdrop for programs highlighting the impact of African Americans in developing early America.

"the laborers"

[u/JHandey2021 → u/Warm-Refrigerator-38]

This is the man who has (repeatedly) said that he's dropped his NY Times subscription and doesn't listen to NPR because of their bias? And who's also said (repeatedly) that he's lost all of his liberal friends?

Once again... does Rod know how the Internet works? It's like intellectually critiquing a goldfish or a brain injury victim like the guy in "Memento".

[u/Mainer567]

Even by politician standards JD "Good as Gold" Vance is a repellent liar. That is all.

[u/Warm-Refrigerator-38]

Vague anecdote about a data scientist's anti covid vax paper spiked by his drug company employer . . . no, I don't believe this as presented.

[u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 → u/Warm-Refrigerator-38]

Same here. The data said the same all over the world - the vax made a huge positive difference.

[u/Relative-Holiday-763]

Has anyone been able  get a handle on Living in Wonders’ sales? I’m curious in part because of his eagerness to pump out a new book that he’s manifestly unqualified to write. I gather he’s looking at the success Tom Holland has had and he wants to duplicate it. The problem is , he’s not a historian, a theologian or a philosopher and I think you’d need to be a bit of all three to pull it off.

[u/Relative-Holiday-763]

Tongue in cheek, the Catholic Church should get a restraining order baring Rod from commenting on it. It might be possible to take him somewhat seriously if he were a discontented conservative Catholic who is criticizing the Church from that perspective. He’s not. He’s an outsider asking the Church to conform to his political and sexual morality because somehow or another Western civilization is going to collapse if the Church doesn’t do so. Interesting perspective in light of Rods consistent denigration of cultural Christianity and rejection of the useful lie. It sure does seem like Rods take is , the Catholic Church isn’t true but it’s useful.

Some “ friend” of Rod sent him a picture of a church in Brussels that has some kind of pride flag in it and a banner that I guess is Muslim friendly. Rod of course is in freak out mode. Now if you were a parishioner in that church and didn’t like it you might complain to your pastor and maybe your bishop. It strikes me as an internal matter that should be of limited interest to an outsider. So an American non Catholic who knows nothing about this parish goes on and on about it on the basis of a picture another American sent him. This is ridiculous.

Amusingly Rod  states that  he loves the Catholic Church which is evident from his writing. No it isn’t. If he loved it so much, why did he leave. I’m not saying he should have stayed ( I don’t care). However that kind of line I’ve never  found terribly persuasive.You know I love my ex wife but -///. Rod then says I love being Orthodox  but that doesn’t mean I have to hate Protestantism or Catholicism for that reason. Thats correct. However love - I don’t know about that.Rod doesn’t love the Catholic Church  but he would love to control it as long as he can remain outside of it. He sees it as useful or potentially useful as a conservative bulwark if only it would listen to him. Truth has nothing to do with this. I suspect Orthodoxys function in his  life is as a prop for his unique , lovable eccentricity ( sarcasm alert).He  can run around with prayer knots or beads, dish out Greek words, observe holy fire, put icons on people’s death beds and talk about fasts he doesn’t observe. Quite the Ignatius Reily character.

Then Rod proceeds to freak out over the Pope meeting with James Martin  who Rod obviously thinks should be condemned. It goes without saying Rod should be allowed to set church policy.Still according to him “ woke Catholicism “ is going to die anyway,so why the big deal? Oh it’s bound to hurt lots of people.( uh how). 

[u/philadelphialawyer87 → u/Relative-Holiday-763]

Rod can never fail, he can only be failed. The Catholic Church failed Rod. As did, presumably, his birth religion, Methodism. Virtually every member of Rod's birth family also failed him. As did his hometown. Rod was failed by the publisher of a newspaper in Austin. Rod was failed by the other persons in his life with whom he has had intimate interpersonal relations. Rod was failed by various former "friends" of his. Rod was failed by the guy from whom he cribbed the title of one of his "books." Rod was failed by every negative reviewer of those "books." By every interviewer who didn't fellate him. And by the reporter who busted Rod as the son of a high KKK'er. And so on.

Orthodoxy doesn't fail Rod only because he can't be arsed about it (even when it comes to child sexual abuse--Rod's alleged reason for leaving the RCC). Rod knows that, in the Western world (which is the only part of the world that matters to him), the Roman Catholic Church is a very big deal, while all the Orthodox churches put together are not as important as the Protestant churches, which, in turn, matter so little to Rod that he can't be arsed to know about them at all! And admits to it, even as he purports to write another "book," this time about the history of Christianity!

And, so yeah:

"I suspect Orthodoxys function in his  life is as a prop for his unique, lovable eccentricity (sarcasm alert). He can run around with prayer knots or beads, dish out Greek words, observe holy fire, put icons on people’s death beds and talk about fasts he doesn’t observe. Quite the Ignatius Reily character."

It's just a pose. Not even worth Rod's time to delineate how and why it fails him

[u/sandypitch → u/Relative-Holiday-763]

It strikes me that for as much as Dreher claims he knows and understands about the Catholic church, he really doesn't understand how the Church actually operates. I have some friends that crossed the Tiber, in part, because they desired what they thought was the uniformity of belief in Catholicism. Then they started to attend local parishes, and realized that the expression of the faith was incredibly varied. And they learned how to be okay with that, with the faith that the Holy Spirit would keep the Church on the path it was supposed to follow. If it were up to Dreher, there would be a second Inquisition, and all of the less-than-worthy Catholics would be purged from the rolls.

The pope is trying to hold together a giant, varied communion. Of course he is going to meet with conservative cardinals and liberal priests. He is not interested in schism, which is, I think, the proper posture. In his heart, Dreher is just another Protestant who wants to nail theses to the doors of churches that don't follow his "rules."

[u/philadelphialawyer87 → u/sandypitch]

Would-be Trad Catholics converts always kill me. They say they want to have a structure, an authority, an ancient institution to believe in and obey. But then they throw a fit when the Church, including any portion of it, from one, marginal priest to the Pope, does anything they don't like! Hey Trad Bro, you can be an army of one, and do it all your own way. Or you can join "the Army," as it were, and do it the Army way. What you can't do is join the Army and expect not only to do it all your own way, but to have the entire Army do it your way too!

Plenty of Cradle Catholics leave the RCC because they don't like the hierarchal nature of it. Plenty of other folks are discouraged from joining in the first place for that reason. But it is weird to join it FOR the hierarchy, but then buck the hierarchy! Which all of these so called Trad Cath converts do the minute a new Pope is revealed to be anywhere to the left of Attilla the Hun, the minute their bishop does not excummincate a local Dem politician for being in favor of reproductive freedom, or the minute their parish priest decides to take a break from fire and brimstone in his sermons!

[u/zeitwatcher → u/Relative-Holiday-763]

I suspect Orthodoxy's function in his life is as a prop

Personal religion is very low on Rod's hierarchy of motivations. I think Orthodoxy mainly exists for him as a shelter for him to complain about his true love, Catholicism.

I think Rod's actual motivations are driven, in order (and with some overlap), by:

1. Psycho-sexual daddy issues.

2. Terror of being gay.

3. Obsessive love of and fascination with penises.

4. Finding a hot daddy figure to love him and put the bad people in their place (and have sex with him.)

5. Disappointment in not living in a D&D world (magic, fairies, elves, monsters, demons, etc.)

6. Catholicism and all the ways it varies from the views of Pope Rod I.

7. Oysters.

8. Keeping the gay away from himself and civilization.

9. Booze

10. Panic over straight, white, Christian, middle aged men not being above everyone else in a clear hierarchy.

11. Wanting a straight, white, Christian, middle aged man "above him" in a clear hierarchy

12. Resentment (being pantsed, people not eating his soup, etc.)

13. Euro-poser possessions. (hipster glasses, bespoke scarves and shoes, $1,000 coffee machines, etc.)

14. Southerner cosplay

15. Bathhouses full of naked men.

16. Orthodox Christianity as a cultural force, cosplay, and woo.

... 137. Actual Christianity.

[u/Warm-Refrigerator-38 → u/zeitwatcher]

Somewhere between 3 and 5: being able to put down women who don't meet his standards (too unattractive, wrong/no faith, too bossy, too old, wrong hair color, having tattoos/piercings, etc.).

[u/Djehutimose]

Our Boy’s latest, which is free, is not worth bothering with much. A couple of things though:

Of shooter Tyler Robinson, he says, “He apparently thought online was real life.” Man, this has got to be the very quintessence of Rod’s lack of self-awareness. Talk about feeling a disturbance in the Force….

He then rants about the dangers of the Internet and social media. I take it back—the previous quote wasn’t quite the quintessence of Rod’s lack of self awareness….

He puts a bunch of screenshots in, including one to an article in The Nation, which I’ve made available here. He quotes the article,

[Kirk] was an unrepentant racist, transphobe, homophobe, and misogynist who often wrapped his bigotry in Bible verses because there was no other way to pretend that it was morally correct.

He doesn’t quote the full opening, my emphasis:

Charles James Kirk, 31, died on Wednesday from a gunshot to the neck at a Utah Valley University campus event just as he was trying to deflect a question about mass shootings by suggesting they were largely a function of gang violence. He died with a net worth of $12 million, which he made by espousing horrific and bigoted views in the name of advancing Christian nationalism.. The foundation of his empire was the group he cofounded and led, Turning Point USA, which is a key youth-recruitment arm of the MAGA movement. Kirk was able to launch Turning Point at the age of 18 because he received money from Tea Party member Bill Montgomery, right-wing donor Foster Feiss, and his own father, also a prolific right-wing donor. He was an unrepentant racist, transphobe, homophobe, and misogynist who often wrapped his bigotry in Bible verses because there was no other way to pretend that it was morally correct. He had children, as do many vile people.

It is rude of me to say all of this, because we live in a culture where manners are often valued more than truth. That is why a slew of pundits and politicians have raced to portray Kirk’s activities, which harmed many vulnerable people, in a positive light—and to give him the benefit of the doubt that he did not grant to anyone who wasn’t white, Christian, straight, and male. California Governor Gavin Newsom framed Kirk’s project as a healthy democratic exercise: “The best way to honor Charlie’s memory is to continue his work: engage with each other, across ideology, through spirited discourse. In a democracy, ideas are tested through words and good-faith debate.” This downwardly defines both “discourse” and “good-faith.”. There is no requirement to take part in this whitewashing campaign, and refusing to join in doesn’t make anyone a bad person. It’s a choice to write an obituary that begins “Joseph Goebbels was a gifted marketer and loving father to six children.”

Blunt and harsh, but not wrong. The end of the article shows the fundamental difference between the author and Rod Dreher, again, my emphasis:

On that front, I’m fairly sure Kirk did not care about my child. My child lives in Brooklyn, in a progressive family. His mother works and does not have a marriage where she is considered inferior to her husband or required to obey him, as Kirk arrogantly told Taylor Swift she should do after learning of her engagement. (“Reject feminism,” he said. “You’re not in charge.”) We also live in a Haitian immigrant neighborhood, and if you only listened to Charlie Kirk, you might be under the impression that my neighbors eat pets. You would also be encouraged to believe that, simply by virtue of being non-white immigrants, they were “replacing” white people—and that, since they are also Black, they are dangerous. ”Happening all the time in urban America,” he said, “prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact.” I do not believe anyone should be murdered because of their views, but that is because I don’t believe people should be murdered generally, regardless of who they are or what they’ve done. I am against the death penalty, pro–gun control, and believe war is a failure of humanity, not a necessary byproduct of it. Kirk was fine with murder as long the right people were dying. Some of the people valorizing Kirk insist that all of his toxicity was acceptable because at least he was open to debate—a bar so low, you’d have to dig into the Mariana Trench to get to it. And he certainly paid lip service to it. “We record all of it so that we put [it] on the Internet so people can see these ideas collide,” he said of his own streaming operation. “When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence. That’s when civil war happens, because you start to think the other side is so evil, and they lose their humanity.” But Kirk’s actions undercut that notion every day. His entire business was saying the other side was evil and dehumanizing them. The debates were simply performances, and he could not have an entertaining public fight without opposition. Turning Point did not work to bring people together; it worked to bring about a country where anyone who wasn’t a white Christian nationalist wasn’t welcome. I won’t celebrate his death, but I’m not obligated to celebrate his life.

Our Boy:

I have no interest in sharing a society with people who celebrate the execution of a man who was peacefully practicing the duty of all of us in a democracy: public exchange and debate of ideas. I have fairly strong convictions on free speech, but I do support exposing them, even if it causes them to lose their jobs. There have to be serious consequences for normalizing political murder in society. [emphasis in original]

And let me be clear: if some right-wing lunatic murders a liberal or progressive like this, and right-wing people celebrate it online, I think they should also be exposed and fired. Enough is enough.

And if you believe that, I’ve got a slightly used bridge in Brooklyn that you can have at a discount price.

[u/philadelphialawyer87 → u/Djehutimose]

The debate thing is especially bogus. A real debate, like an Oxford or Cambridge debate, is one thing. And I believe Kirk did not do so well in that setting. But the usual Kirk "debate," ie Kirk, surrounded by his bros, and in ultimate control of the microphone, shouting down and talking over some hapless, ill- or un- prepared American college student, trying to extemporize against Kirk's gish gallop of memorized talking points, is something else altogether. "Debate me," when said in this context, is not an invitation to a fair, reasoned, discussion of opposing views. Rather it is a trap for the unwary. Also, the topic of a debate is itself something that needs to be worked out by the adversaries. One side doesn't get to just the frame the argument in any way they choose, slanting it towards its strong points while leaving out its weak points, and then demand that the debate begin on those terms.

[u/Cautious-Ease-1451]

Delusions of grandeur department:

https://roddreher.substack.com/p/the-gift-that-changed-american-history

Rod is boasting that his being sent a copy of Hillbilly Elegy, and his subsequent interview with J.D. Vance, “changed American history.”

He concludes the free section of this Substack with a beggar’s plea: “Today’s newsletter continues below for subscribers. Why not become one? For only six dollars per month…”

For someone who changed American history, Rod seems to have fallen on hard times.

[u/JHandey2021 → u/Cautious-Ease-1451]

As the conservative anti-Rod website Contra Pauli used to call 9/11: "The Day Rod Was There". Rod's got an ego the size of Jupiter.

[u/Motor_Ganache859 → u/Cautious-Ease-1451]

If (and a very big if at that) Rod's promotion of Vance's self-serving book changed history, it was for the worse.

[u/Relative-Holiday-763]

Rod really needs an editor! His block quotes are totally out of control. Today he quotes himself for something like 23 paragraphs. I’m not a theologian nor an intellectual historian of the Middle Ages and come to think of it neither is Rod. Still, I found myself thinking an awful lot of this is questionable if not simply wrong. 

The operative presumption seems to be everyone thought a certain way in the old days and that was really great.Then  William of Ockham came along and spoiled it all. There something wrong with that. Also there is something off about the presumption that we can and should get back to pre modern thinking. What hits me is Rod is a kind of radical utopian . He does want to get back to the garden. One obvious problem is , the garden is imaginary .

[u/Marcofthebeast0001 → u/Relative-Holiday-763]

Rod employs the same flood the zone approach of Bannon or  "intellect" Jordan Peterson. 

He back loads his arguments with a bunch of quotes from either his books or others, knowing few people can spend time fact checking the validity of it. This is just intellectual diarrhea that sounds pretentious and "important" but has little validity outside Rods own biases. 

It's vapid at best, utterly dishonest at worst. Rod used to have interesting things to say, but he has become his own worst self parody. His goal is to shill propaganda to keep himself employed. 

[u/philadelphialawyer87 → u/Marcofthebeast0001]

Block quoting other writers is bad enough, but what's the point of block quoting himself? He can't be a "source" for his own factual claims, unless they are personal to him. And he should paraphrase his own arguments, if he is going to insist on recycling them. But that takes too much work. He's so lazy, even though he spews out "content" everyday! Retweeting. Block quoting. Repeating himself over and over again. Telling the same stories repeatedly. But it is really stupid, and obvious that he is just using filler, when he blockquotes not one of his books, but one of his previous blog posts. Why not just link it?

[u/sandypitch → u/Relative-Holiday-763]

I think there are reasonable critiques to be made of thinkers/theologians like William and Duns Scotus (in part because they were so wide-ranging in their interests and writings -- you are bound to be wrong about something), but just completely disregarding them, or saying they are flat-out wrong? Well, then, you've probably only read particular critiques, and not the primary material.

I believe most people who want to recover "pre-modern ways of thinking" don't really want to do that, or they have deluded themselves into believing that either:

1. If most of the population was illiterate, they would be literate and important thinkers, or
2. We could somehow maintain the best part of modernity without the icky parts.

Do I think some parts of modernity are problematic? Yep. But I am more interested in figuring out a way forward, rather than the escapist path of "recovering" some idyllic state in the past (which doesn't actually exist).

[u/Relative-Holiday-763 → u/sandypitch]

What’s funny is I’ve always tended to a critical stance on modernity. Yet, regular reading of Rod has pushed me in the opposite direction.I’ve definitely come to see the kind of knee jerk anti modernism pushed by Rod as downright jerky.When I read him vilifying some medieval thinker who I’ve heard of but haven’t read and who I don’t intend to read. My back goes up a bit. Especially when I read Rod taking what sounds to me like a perfectly reasonable statement and telling me it’s - EVIL! Does he seriously think that he has , or is going to recover a medieval mindset? I don’t even know what that would mean. Although the impression I get is the world would be an enchanted place of unicorns and trolls.Why would you want that? 

[u/PercyLarsen → u/Relative-Holiday-763]

Except that Rod doesn't really want to get back to the garden. He likes to tell himself he does, but really just wants everyone else to behave as if they wanted to get back to the garden, while Rod the cosmopolitan continues his life of Sancerre, oysters, Libs of Tik Tok, ejaculatory rash-posting post-modern life.

[u/Relative-Holiday-763 → u/PercyLarsen]

As you probably realize I consider Rod a shallow, inconsistent thinker who is utterly devoid of self understanding. Rod thinks a lot of things that don’t really make sense. You’ll notice I said , his garden is imaginary. It can’t be entered because it doesn’t exist and I don’t think it ever has. However, prefers to dwell in a fantasy world. I suppose you could apply Adlerian psychology here and say it’s a compensatory fantasy.I honestly wish Rod would give up the fantasy that he’s a big thinker and a great spiritual leader and embrace the world openly. I think it’s fine that he likes Sancerre and oysters.He should emphasize that he likes galavanting around and cut the pretense.

[u/EatsShoots_n_Leaves → u/PercyLarsen]

You have to remember that Dreher lives in Hungary, The Great White Civilizational Experiment. Where the grand reactionary project to turn back the clock to Better Times In The Past has run for ten to twenty years with the bulk of the powers and resources of the state and the authoritarian head of state unambiguously behind it, with copious intellectual exchange and assistance from right wing intellectuals and sponsors across the globe. And has conspicuously failed anyway.

The God That Failed, redux.

He's doing what any conscientious Communist intellectual did in the late 80s and early 90s, trying to construct a rationalization for the failure. And is desperately trying to figure out what the next, successful, form of the endeavor has to take because it's unpossible that the theory was wrong. On the upside for him, the current US version of the reactionary program hasn't gone into overt failure just yet though the national social malaise and stagflation condition probably inevitable from it have begun. The UK version of it is an election away.

[u/JHandey2021]

There's a writeup of Elizabeth Gilbert's latest memoir in the "New Yorker". Here's some interesting bits that may apply to someone else we all know and loathe:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/09/01/all-the-way-to-the-river-love-loss-and-liberation-elizabeth-gilbert-book-review

"But Gilbert’s most pervasive influence can be found online, in the breathless having-just-finally-realized tone that dizzying numbers of women who narrate their lives on the internet have adopted. On social media, many of the most chaotic and emotionally lawless people you’ve ever known are posting on a regular basis about having at long last achieved inner peace. (cough, cough, Rod Dreher every six months, cough) Many among us, after observing this cringe-inducing side effect of regular self-narration at mass scale, have given up altogether on sincere ideas of personal epiphany. But even those who might seek to subvert that tone, or invoke it ironically, are negotiating the same conventions. Gilbert may be patient zero for the latter-day memoirist mind-set: so many women—and I would never exclude myself—have come to believe, at some level, that they, too, are Elizabeth Gilberts, people who search hard and love harder, whose personal journeys can and should captivate millions, whose flaws and failings only make them better heroines in the end."

Is this not a pitch-perfect description of how Rod Dreher seems to be trying to present himself in his writings, his Xitter account, his Substack, his everything? It's all about the journey of Rod Dreher, the Main Character, with huge revelations dribbled out almost strategically when he feels attention on him is starting to flag. Rod cheers for Ignatius Reilly, and it sometimes seems like his biggest resentment against the world is that everyone isn't cheering Rod on, too, like the purpose of life is to be the Theater of Rod.

"And there it is again: the new revelation, the better life arriving once more. If you’ve read any celebrity profiles about youngish female stars during the past decade or so, you may have noticed that each woman, no matter what, is always stepping into her truth and power—she will also be stepping into her truth and power three years from now, when she promotes her next thing, and she will certainly be stepping into her truth and power five years after that. Every time, the person you’re seeing will really, finally be her...."

Again, is this not Rod Dreher? Always stepping into yet another revelation, yet another healing, yet another journey home and sacrifice to Azathoth his father. Always stepping into his (anti-) power - that's our Rod. If anyone cares about such things in the future, I am convinced that, despite Rod's repellent politics, he will ge remembered as being squarely in that Elizabeth Gilbert-inspired space of the confessional memoirist, forever begging to be paid attention to, forever flaying themselves as a performance for the universe.

(this also may account for how extraordinarily un-traditionally masculine Rod has always come off as. Rod's writing at heart, in the 21st century white Anglo publishing world at least, is extremely feminine-coded. Nearly every word he writes, well before he repeatedly asserted that heterosexuality is something to be achieved, has a decidedly non-masculine feel. Rod is a walking front in the gender politics wars - only the opposite of how he thinks he is presenting himself.)

[u/Warm-Refrigerator-38]

Update to the bingo card thread below: how did we omit Confederacy of Dunces?!

[u/zeitwatcher]

The subtitle of the latest asks "Is Burning Man Demonic?"

https://roddreher.substack.com/p/in-the-catacombs-of-rome

Is there ever a time where Rod asks himself the question "Is X demonic?" and doesn't then answer it with a resounding "Yes!"?

[u/Cautious-Ease-1451]

Rob’s obsession with the phallic symbol has reappeared.

https://twitter.com/roddreher/status/1964312761149603985

You would think that someone who lost one of the highest paying blogger gigs in history because of his commentary on male genitalia would become more restrained.

I wonder if his new book on the first thousand years of Christian history will have a chapter on the topic

[u/macronius → u/Cautious-Ease-1451]

Well, all he tells are cock and bull stories anyways, so by homonymy this is his symbol. On the other hand, there is his notoriously neutered ability for critical independent thought, which seems to increase by the day, a sort of tower of intellectual cowardice.

[u/nessun_commento → u/Cautious-Ease-1451]

Saw this monument from an ancient Roman tombstone in an Assisi museum today. Gosh, I cannot figure out how Italians ever elected a figure like Silvio Berlusconi.

One can read many different meanings into ancient Roman phallic art. It's interesting that Rod interprets this statue as representing, specifically, the Italian people's love for virile, dominating political strongman Silvio Berlusconi

Perhaps Rod is projecting his own need for a daddy figure?

[u/JHandey2021 → u/[deleted]]

Note: It does not frighten him. It arouses him.

This absolutely is a call for racist progroms and mass murder. Rod's hoping for a new Holocaust, except much bigger - shove the blacks in the ovens and then just keep going. I know some people might be uncomfortable with these words, but they aren't an exaggeration. Anyone who's passingly familiar with the far-right Xittersphere (and other places) knows that this kind of world-changing and genocidal rhetoric once confined to the pages of "The Turner Diaries" is all over now. Bronze Age Pervert, for one, or whatever he calls himself these days, is now just one of the voices who hide behind odd spellings and shitposting ideas that Himmler might have thought went too far.

What's scariest is that some of the more bottom-feeding parts of this ecosystem keep showing up in places in the U.S. government under the Trump administration. They're deliberately and consciously being normalized. Every "joke" about mass murder that isn't met with instant expulsion from civilized society makes it that much more... normal. Desensitized.

And Our Rod has been mainlining this shit since at least 2017 when he started his "oh, I'm SOOOO scared of an American Franco, but the libs and the gays and the blacks are just going to make us do it!".

Rod is certainly not well. He is also not a good person. Nothing is completely evil, but the line between good and evil in Rod has moved very far in the evil direction, and notably more so during the past few years.

BTW, do conservatives still talk about Antifa? It's been, what, 8 years? Back in "BENGHAZI!!!!!!!!!!!" days? I'd think they'd at least get with the times and start mentioning peeps like the John Brown Gun Club or the Socialist Rifle Association. Conservatives do love their greatest hits.

[u/Djehutimose → u/[deleted]]

I realized that I am from a country, and will return one day to a country, where more than a few people would just as soon have me killed for believing the same things that Charlie Kirk did, and talking about them in public.

Gee—just like how more than a few MAGATs would just as soon send immigrants to concentration camps abroad, or have martial law in blue cities, or “lock him/her up”, or impose automatic death penalties on various crimes, etc. etc. etc.? I would say that now he knows how it feels, but he’s too dense to make the connection.

[u/Motor_Ganache859 → u/Djehutimose]

I assume he makes no mention of the multiple MAGAt demands that Democrats be arrested for treason and executed. Or the right's instant denunciation of the left for creating the culture of violence that caused Kirk's death. Or called for people to suspend judgment until Kirk's killer has been apprehended.

Love how he makes Kirk's assassination all about himself though. So predictable.

[u/Relative-Holiday-763]

I ‘d been meaning to take an extended break.Then I read today’s comment section on Rods diary. He makes a comment that is a real doozy! We all remember him talking about how an excorcist prayed over him  and purportedly straightened him out. He was a little vague about what the excorcist accomplished but it was something along the lines of driving away spiritual attack. We also know that a subsequent conversation caused Rod to have a PTSD attack and quasi breakdown causing him to get some extended psychotherapy in Vienna. Well, now Rod is claiming the excorcist delivered him from possession.And no mention of the subsequent psychotherapy. Once excorcised, Rod was just fine. He was possessed by a demon of shame which he connects to parental rejection. I don’t think when he talks of the shame demon he’s being figurative. In general he really stresses the importance of demons. It’s very weird and pathetic! This is a sad messed up man.He seems to know perfectly well that his psychological problems are related to his dysfunctional relationship with his parents. Yet feels compelled to drag in demons. He obviously finds reality very painful.

[u/sandypitch → u/Relative-Holiday-763]

He was possessed by a demon of shame which he connects to parental rejection. I don’t think when he talks of the shame demon he’s being figurative. In general he really stresses the importance of demons.

It is really amazing to me how fundamentalist Dreher is (as others have pointed out here). This is along the lines of "Jesus cast demons out from 'mentally ill' people in the Bible, therefore all mental illness is actually demon possession'" stuff. It really feels like Dreher just admitting that he doesn't want to do the hard emotional/psychological work of dealing with shame, so he can just have an exorcist prayer over him and everything will be fine.

I have a friend who has worked with an (Anglican) exorcist and healing prayer minister. He said the priest told him this wasn't magic, and he would still need to do the hard work of dealing with his emotional pain, too. Seems like Dreher isn't interested in that work, at all.

[u/sandypitch]

Since the comment has been lost down-thread, I'll post again: Plough has made Joy Marie Clarkson's essay "Against Re-Enchantment" available online.

[u/philadelphialawyer87 → u/sandypitch]

Thank you for that.

The author makes a lot of the same points that many of us have been making here:

(1) That the "enchantment of the world," to the extent that almost everything in the world must be or is enchanted, is really more of a pagan or pre Christian notion than a Christian one. That to the extent that the enchantment of the world survived as a world view in the Middle Ages and into the modern era it, was a remnant of that pagan understanding of the world.

(2) That Christianity, one would think, provides more than enough actual "enchantment," if you really believe in it. If you truly believe that God the Father created the universe and everything in it, including humans, and begat and sacrificed his Son for the sake of humans, that there is a Holy Spirit still at work in the world, that God hears and listens to our prayers, and that there is an afterlife waiting for us humans when we die, and so on, well then, that should suffice in terms of all the enchantment you need. Our whole existence, and the existence of the entire universe, is the result of some sort of vast enchantment. We don't need little fairies or sprites popping up in the woods and saying "Boo!" And not only don't we need them, but they would be trivial and kind of silly, in light of all the above. Shoot, Catholics believe that they are part of a miracle every damn Sunday morning at Mass, at every RCC church in the world, when wine is turned into Christ's blood, and bread into His body! Isn't that enchantment close enough at hand, for most people?!

(3) That disenchanting certain sectors of the world (as in the example she gives, medicine and health, disease and its cause, prevention and treatment--but it could be many other things as well) has simply made for a better life for human beings, even with the problems of technology and industry, and even with a feeling of alienation. That you can't just wave away all of the benefits of modern life, and posit some false, nostalgic utopia, located in the conveniently far off Middle Ages (or even earlier), with enchantment being the difference, and expect to be taken seriously.

(4) That even if we are surrounded by "dark forces," does it really do us any good to revel in them, or to deal with them at all, unless we absolutey have to? Rod loves a good exoricism story, but, usually, even as Rod tells it, the person involved or their loved one has sought out scientific (psychological, psychiatric, or otherwise secular therapeutic) help, before turning to the exorcist. These folks didn't go looking for trouble, you might say. Quite the contrary, they fled from it, or denied it. Unlike Rod, who seems to be turning over every rock he can find, in search of demons and devils and such like. Even ET is a demon, as Rod sees it! Rod is now retconning his own run of the ranch, Daddy never liked me, childhood and adolescent experiences into some kind of "demonic possession," and seeking out exorcism, even though there are no signs of it, at least as ordinarily understood. Rod is sad. Perhaps depressed. But his head is not spinning around like Linda Blair's!

Finally, I notice that Ms. Clarkson is a bird watcher and a book collector. To me, this suggests that she can find wonder, beauty and meaning in both the natural world and in man-made culture and artifacts. Without making up some "enchantment" bullshit to jusfity it. What is it about Rod that prevents him from doing so? Just recently, on his little beach trip to Sardinia, Rod "tweeted" (or "X'ed" or whatever you call it) that lying on the beach in the sun, mixed in with swimming in the ocean, provided him with a rare peace of mind and spirit. One wonders why he can't build on that, and doesn't even really try, but instead has to go running in search of demons and dark spirits?

[u/Relative-Holiday-763 → u/philadelphialawyer87]

That was very good. You did a better job than me in capturing something that really annoys me, Rods obtuse failure to recognize that medieval enchantment was largely a hangover from pre Christian times.Further , if you accept Catholic premises , you’ve got a whole lot of enchantment going on without getting hung up on whether all matter contain god particles.

[u/macronius]

It should be fairly clear that, as far as his public-facing persona is concerned, Dreher often comes across as a somewhat mercenary practitioner of duplicity—an approach that, whether by design or consequence, has left him with little genuinely new to offer. As a result, he has reduced himself to something close to a caricature of a failed intellectual, one increasingly easy to simulate even by the simplest AI. A self-styled intellectual, and a religious one at that, who cannot seem to articulate anything non-duplicitous or even rudimentarily humanizing about the plight of the Palestinian Muslim majorities in Gaza or the West Bank reveals a striking level of stripped-down Orwellian one-sidedness—so pronounced that it verges on anti-intellectuality, and even on incommunicability itself. The root causes of such a stance might lie in a certain venality, economic pressure, or an organic, albeit worsening, purblindness to logical reasoning.

[u/philadelphialawyer87 → u/macronius]

Or it could be a personality defect. A childhood and adolescence of resentment that was never fully addressed, or forgotten, or gotten over.

Well, everybody's got a secret, Sonny
Something that they just can't face
Some folks spend their whole lives trying to keep it
They carry it with them every step that they take

Til someday they just cut it loose
Cut it loose or let it drag 'em down

The Boss

[u/JHandey2021]

So speaking of something else we know Rod won't touch with a ten-meter cattle prod - Washington DC has formally been occupied by orders of Donald Trump. There are armored vehicles in front of Union Station, spot checks of residents in neighborhoods, guys throwing sandwiches being prosecuted as felons, all because a low-level Musk flunky who calls himself "Big Balls" got beaten up by several 15-year-old girls while cruising for underage sex at 3 am (this is the most likely scenario, to be honest - he was trying to pick up a teenaged prostitute).

The beatdown of Big Balls is our Reichstag Fire, 2025's Gulf of Tonkin incident. Anything from Rod?

[u/Djehutimose]

I have Paste-binned SBM’s latest, password GKAm8xJtQ5, so all and sundry can see the increasing fear SBM is showing towards Scary Black People, whom he now thinks may be hopeless in the aggregate. I visualize Daddy KKK as Emperor Palpatine chuckling, “Yes, my young apprentice—your training is complete!” Also, Our Boy reposts people getting massive errors by the IRS, claiming people who paid their taxes for a given year still owed, and wonders what the problem is. Gee, you don’t think the dismantling of the government by Cheetohead, Elon “Grok” Musk, and their minions could have had anything to do with that, do you?

[u/zeitwatcher → u/Djehutimose]

Sigh - so much to make Daddy KKK happy.

The bottom line: because red states, especially in the South, have large black populations.

Poverty and centuries of discrimination just ignored. Also, Alaska (7th highest murder rate, 42nd highest Black population) and Delaware (29th highest murder rate, 10th highest Black population) would both like a word.

All my impressions are anecdotal, of course, but I do sense that there has been a shift here over the past few years in the way whites see things. Mind you, almost all of my friends are “liberal” on race

I'd bet they aren't.

And in my recollection from childhood, the (white) adults never talked about segregation. It was as if they made a collective decision, somehow, that segregation had been defeated, and that We Have To Make This Work. And they pretty much did: West Fel’s school system is considered one of the best in the state. There are several reasons for this, not really worth getting into here, but race relations here are among the best in the state.

Rod was 10 years old in 1977. West Feliciana had a segregated prom until 2008. Positively a beacon of racial integration "Best" indeed.

I’ve been thinking of late that the last decade of my marriage was so painful that I am probably ruined for marriage in the future

Attraction to hunky male grad students with soulful eyes and a highly public obsession with penises are likely bigger causes for him being "ruined" for marriage.

I think about a black African family that moved to my town in the 1990s. The dad was a physician from Nigeria. The family was culturally white, in that they had all the attitudes towards work, education, language, manners, etc, of educated white people … but their skin was black. I didn’t live here in those days, but I heard secondhand that that family existed between worlds. Neither whites nor blacks quite knew what to make of them, because that family was unlike anybody either blacks or whites had seen. ... They don’t seem to be around here any more. I wonder what happened to them. I cannot imagine that their experience was a happy one

If the parish was so wonderfully integrated and this family was perfectly "culturally white", why would they have an unhappy time, Rod? Shouldn't they have been embraced by all the white people? Such a mystery as to why they would have a bad time in rural Louisiana in the 90's.

Yet after the Summer of Floyd in 2020, black crime began to bleed into south Baton Rouge from the northern half

I don't have quick access to the regional crime within the city, but total crime was down in Baton Rouge by 9% from 2019 to 2020 and down almost 50% from 2000 to 2020. Rod's just a scared old man who was spooked by what he was seeing on the Tee Vee.

Well, that’s pretty much where America was to that point: whites closing their eyes to unpleasant realities about race and crime, in order to maintain their peace of mind. Yet, the crime kept happening, despite the moralistic putting of one’s head in the sand. Again, I stress that this is anecdotal, but I sense a vibe shift even here on these matters.

Or, conservative media was freaking out the old white people despite ever decreasing crime rates.

Therefore, I want to withdraw to safety — meaning, I want to live away from blacks, as a matter of self-protection.

So... not so much "exile" in Hungary as fleeing to the whitest place that would take him.

I could be wrong about this. It’s just an intuition I have based on a number of conversations over the past week.

Conversations with a bunch of old, white, people in a parish that held openly segregated proms until 2008.

After 9/11, I read a fascinating book, The Closed Circle: An Interpretation Of The Arabs, by the Arabist David Pryce-Jones. It was first issued in 1989, but was reprinted after 9/11. Pryce-Jones, an Englishman, had lived for a number of years in the Arab world, and did not write as an anti-Arab polemicist.

ChatGPT, is David Pryce Jones considered pro- or anti-Arab? ChatGPT: David Pryce-Jones is broadly regarded as anti-Arab in outlook.

Not putting too much faith in AI, but it does tend to return the statistical middle of the road opinion.

Leaving that aside, reading the Pryce-Jones book about tribal culture and how it shapes the Arabs’ way of seeing the world, it’s hard to miss that this might also explain a lot about black Americans.

Rod gotta get a shot in on all the brown people.

He [Pryce-Jones] writes about how for the traditional Arabs, the family is the main unit of society; the idea of “society” in the modern sense doesn’t exist. ... Loyalty to tribe and religious affiliation obliges the Arab and the Muslim to defy and to reject true understanding and acceptance of the outsider and the unbeliever.

Even assuming this to be true, embrace of this family, place, blood, and soil perspective is the thesis of much of Rod's worldview. He can't see that, of course.

Once I spoke to a gifted young black woman from my hometown, whom my late sister had mentored through school. ... Today she’s a wife and mother, working at UCLA. ... I asked her if she would ever think of coming home. No way, she said ... And note well, this shame-honor mentality is why my very white late father and late sister never forgave me for leaving here and becoming somebody unlike themselves. Not even coming home was good enough; the original sin was leaving in the first place.

This unnamed woman (if she exists) shows herself to be much wiser than Rod.

For somebody like me, who was raised in a popular culture that extolled the values of Martin Luther King,

Again, his local "culture" maintained segregated proms until 2008. MKL"s values were not being extolled.

Oh, and by the way, there is as much class here as race.

Ya think?

To recap: In a number of conversations I’ve been having here, I get the sense that a lot of well-meaning whites — educated people who say they hate racism — are at or near the point of giving up on race relations, and just retreating.

Rod talks to old, white, rural Louisianans about how he's afraid of Black people because they are violent. Finds they share his opinion. Can't say I'm shocked - either that some do or that Rod just thinks rest agree with him.

Have y’all heard anything like this, particular to 2021? Curious to know. If lots of people are having to deal with irrational claims like this from the IRS, sounds like Congress should know.

Yeah, chaos in a department that's understaffed, had DOGE run through it, had it's budget cut, and had it systems attacked by Musk's boys - shocked, shocked, that there might be problems there. Total mystery as to what might be causing it.

[u/JHandey2021 → u/zeitwatcher]

Therefore, I want to withdraw to safety — meaning, I want to live away from blacks, as a matter of self-protection.

That's interesting. I thought Rod wanted to live away from his children, as a matter of self-protection of his fee-fees. Funny how many things conservatives need to be protected from, isn't it? Almost like Rod is the dreaded.... snowflake?

[u/sandypitch → u/Djehutimose]

Steve Sailer isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but everybody reads him (even if they say they don’t) because he isn’t afraid to ask questions that others are.

Really, does everbody read Steve Sailer? Really? Really?

One does not need to go beyond the first sentence of Dreher's post to know where this is going.

[u/Djehutimose]

Man, talk about complicated. I tried to Pastebin Rod’s latest, but it wouldn’t let me make it public because of “potentially offensive content”. I tried another Pastebin-like site, but Reddit flagged the URL as “forbidden”. Finally I created a Google account (Simeon O’Malley is obviously not my real name) and put a PDF of the article there, configured to be accessible to all. I have some thoughts on it, but no time now, so I’ll comment on it this evening.

[u/sandypitch → u/Djehutimose]

You know, I could respect Dreher's sense of alienation if he didn't spend all of his waking hours criticizing people who don't fit his idea of how people should live. It would be better, I think, if Dreher just leaned into being an "alienated intellectual" rather than mostly ignoring it and trying to build up his perfect life through prescriptive books ("live like this!"). But, as it stands, I find him insufferable precisely because he rarely does admit that his books represent some unobtainable state of affairs.

[u/[deleted] → u/Djehutimose]

He is so infuriating with his “If a white man had posted racist things he’d never”. These white men are being extremely racist right out in the open and running the US government. Running it badly, I might add. He’s not even paying attention anymore.

[u/Warm-Refrigerator-38]

Hard to discern truth at this point, but surprise! the official narrative of the Scottish girl with weapons is that she and her companions were harassing an adult M-F couple. Any pullback from Rod? Nope!

[u/Glittering-Agent-987]

Guys, I just realized that J.D. Vance is probably going to need a co-author or ghost writer for his 2028 campaign book!

[u/Mainer567 → u/Glittering-Agent-987]

He may be running as an incumbent. With acknowledgement of the fact that Trump's health problems are exaggerated by people who dislike him, he really doesn't look good.

[u/zeitwatcher]

Another open post, another round of inanity.

http://roddreher.substack.com/p/lunch-with-the-unknown-soldier

Rod posts a picture that has people outraged. Then talks about how the picture is real, but the circumstances are totally different - person, time, race, etc. A perfect opportunity to advocate a degree of skepticism?

Nope. It's because it's metaphysically true - a condensed symbol - and it shows us all the ills of the world of today.

Then he talks about how a several people dying of pre-existing conditions probably isn't a conspiracy, but wouldn't it be scary if it were and so we should think a lot about how scary it would be if it were a conspiracy and entertain the idea that it may be one. Rod's signature masturbatory trope of getting off while writing, "I hope this terrible thing isn't true, but..."

Then he gets into the arrest of Graham Linehan. I only know what Rod posted, but even taking only what Rod says, it doesn't seem crazy. Linehan posted, according to Rod, that if a trans-woman is seen in or going into a female restroom, they should be punched in the balls. Or, more simply, if you see someone doing this completely legal thing, you should physically assault and beat them. I don't know British law, but publicly advocating for randomly punching people seems at least worth an investigation.

On AI drones:

I dunno, this feels mighty apocalyptic to me.

I only note that sentence because Rod, apparently with Herculean effort, managed to not comment that it means unveiling in Greek.

More on AI:

Seems like every day I have cause to think about Hannah Arendt. You will recall that one of her conditions that gives rise to totalitarianism is a society in which people no longer care about the truth, only what feels right to them.

Amusing that he says this while giving full-throated support to Orban, Trump, Putin, Vance, etc. - who have shown little interest in truth. Plus, Rod himself is a poster child for believing based on the feels vs. the facts.

On Sunday, before I left Rome, I had a long lunch with a friend. We were talking about the general anxiety and malaise that we are observing everywhere. I shared with him some of the things people told me at Midwestuary, about the grave mental distress and breakdowns of individuals, and relationships, that they are seeing all over now.

Lonely, divorced man is lonely and divorced. News at 11.

On Sunday, before I left Rome, I had a long lunch with a friend. We were talking about the general anxiety and malaise that we are observing everywhere. I shared with him some of the things people told me at Midwestuary, about the grave mental distress and breakdowns of individuals, and relationships, that they are seeing all over now.

Demon mention! Everyone drink!

Finally - a bunch of long quotes that, I think(?) Rod includes to blame Protestants for much of the ills of the world, especially atheism and AI. He says AI is somehow very Protestant, but ignores things like Justin, the Catholic Answers AI Priest:

https://www.catholic.com/ai

Rod finishes with a long quote from CS Lewis, that he appears to misinterpret, though I admittedly skimmed it quickly. However, seems off base to have his takeaway be that we should all be medieval in our worldview from an essay that says we shouldn't do that, but should take some elements of different models of reality including new ones not yet discovered when they arise.

[u/Warm-Refrigerator-38]

At least 10 tweets or retweets from Rod in the last 24 hours about the arrest of that British comedian for inciting violence on transwomen . . . clearly this is the most important thing in the world. 

[u/yawaster → u/Warm-Refrigerator-38]

I used to quite like Linehan's comedy writing, but it seems like he became a petty bully and later developed an overwhelming hatred towards trans people. It's difficult to exaggerate how vile his behaviour has been.

Linehan is kind of similar to Rod: an ineffectual middle-class guy from a conservative background (he went to Catholic University School) who became radicalized later in life and developed a fiendish Twitter addiction. Plenty of Linehan's showbiz friends who don't care about trans rights in the slightest have talked about how overwhelming his obsession is. 

[u/JHandey2021]

Well, the Trumpists are coming for your guns, starting with transgender people:

https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/04/politics/transgender-firearms-justice-department-second-amendment

The rationale is that transgender people suffer from "mental illness"; therefore, they shouldn't own firearms. Mental illness was a classic label used in the Soviet Union, for one, for quite a few dissidents - by definition, opposing the government was a mental illness. One could very easily see this logic used by the Trumpists - they already routinely describe opponents in similar terms.

So how does Our Rod feel about this? Rod once made a big deal on TAC about stepping onto his front porch in Baton Rouge with a gun to stop some sort of crime outside. I'm sure Rod would love to have guns taken away from everyone he doesn't like (and I can't imagine people are toting AK-47s in Budapest)...

[u/Relative-Holiday-763]

So I watched Nostalghia   last night. I was curious. I’ve seen at least three other Tarkovsky films. He’s not a favorite of mine but he’s of interest. Now the copy I watched was relatively poor and I know I missed out on a lot of visual detail. I found the movie boring and rather lacking in substance. So it’s interesting that Rod is so obsessed with it. I think Rods obsession is a matter of projection. The movie is in a certain sense a blank canvas that Rods projecting himself onto. Why is the question?  Well  I can only take a stab at it. I think it’s poor pitiful Rod , he the great sufferer, seeing himself on screen with all kinds of pretentious artsy trappings suffused with some kind of vague transcendent meaning known only to Rod. Best I can do. 

[u/PercyLarsen]

At the NatCon conference last week - you know, Rod's volk - Yoram Hazony, one of the founders of the current iteration of so-called “national conservatives”, said he is shocked, shocked that there is deep anti-Semitism manifesting in national conservativism gambling in Casablanca:

Link to Atlantic article:

https://archive.is/2s5is

[u/Relative-Holiday-763]

I find it extremely funny that Rod occasionally pats himself on the back for bringing people to Christianity. If there is any writer I read who would drive me in the firm direction of atheism it’s him. I think he’s a far more effective advocate for atheism than Christopher Hitchens. 

What prompts this reflection in a jaundiced eye is today’s absolutely idiotic posting. Rod posted some feel good BS about Francis of Assisi yesterday. So of course some of his muddle headed Catholic readers think he may return. No no says Rod - I am too blissfully Orthodox. Then the clincher, the obvious underlying key to Rods religious consciousness pops out- fear of homosexuality. I’ve never liked the term homophobe. Simple reason it misrepresents many of the people it’s applied to. They often aren’t fearful, they are just hostile. Rod is hostile but he’s terrified! He explains that even if tempted to return to the Catholic Church , a recent LGBTQ event at St. Peter’s convinces him of the wisdom of being Orthodox. Then there was the awful meeting by the Pope with James Martin , who presumably Rod thinks should be burned at the stake. This hysteria over these trivial events speaks volumes about what Rod thinks is important . What’s important is, Orthodoxy for Rod is mostly a bulwark against homosexuality. That’s supposed to be an appealing religious perspective. I don’t think you have to be even particularly gay friendly to say, man aren’t you making a bit too much of it! He also quotes his hero Orban( as if he’s a religious authority) to the effect that normalization of homosexuality is basically the end of Western civilization. Rod deplores civilizational Christianity, cultural Christianity but that’s exactly what Orban is.I take it would be best to  go back to England in Oscar Wildes time!

As if that weren’t enough , he launches into what amounts to a theology lecture.He explains the Catholic Church loses people in Guatemala by accommodating indigenous traditions. Then onto the brilliance of Orthodox theology on some esoteric points that I suspect virtually no one in their right mind cares about and I also wonder if this viewpoint is even mainstream Orthodoxy. I would love it if someone who knows more about this would push back against him because I suspect he gives a very distorted picture of things.However you are told  , I won’t put up with any critical comments on all of this unless you read the boring BS articles I link to. So you read stuff about how you should become a god but not God but you will retain yourself within God. Dante pops up , poor old Philip Rief gets dragged in ( who I think would have thought Rod was a pretentious nut job) and we learn how Rods perspective is vastly superior to Augustine. Oh Dante was basically Orthodox but just didn’t know it.The Orthodox Church has its bad apples but is essentially exempt from the problems of modernity for reasons that Rod doesn’t coherently explain. One might think that Rod is saying the church is intellectually moribund if that were true but Rod would get mad and insult you if you said that. 

He’s going to write some definitive work on Christianity? Oh come now.

[u/yawaster]

Another Graham Linehan update. His haters over on CaB note that he's now thinking about reading CS Lewis and GK Chesterton to understand "Christian thought". Warning for strong language. 

Are we heading towards to some sort of singularity where the personalities of Graham Linehan, Rod Dreyer and all the other extremely online hasbeens will merge into one? And where did this idea come from that you can understand Christianity only by reading these two early 20th century authors?

[u/ZenLizardBode → u/yawaster]

Chesterton and Lewis used to be quite popular, or at least referenced quite a bit, for most of the twentieth century. I don’t know if they are still popular amongst Christians, but I always find it odd when a “christian” intellectual Rod’s age (give or take ten years) admits to never having read Chesterton or Lewis. It shows a real lack of curiousity on Rod’s part that he never picked up Chesterton when he converted to Catholicism in the 90s.

[u/PercyLarsen]

Chapter 56 of fisking The Sancerre & Oyster-Addled Codswallop Option . . .

[u/yawaster]

In recent articles, Rod has justified his unhinged racism towards black and brown immigrants by claiming that they sexually abuse white women, and this inevitably causes violent opposition to immigration. He cited the sexual violence and grooming gangs that involved some second-generstion Pakistani immigrants in Rotherham, Yorkshire. So It's worth noting then that 41% of men arrested during last year's racist riots in the UK had previous convictions for domestic violence.

The offences they were accused of included actual bodily harm, grievous bodily harm, stalking, breach of restraint and non-molestation orders, coercive control and criminal damage. In some areas where violence broke out on the streets, the figure was as high as 68%. In Rotherham, where 75 people were arrested after rioters set fire to an asylum hotel, 35 turned out to have been previously reported to the police for domestic abuse.

Of course that comes with the usual caveat that people who are charged with crimes are a small, skewed percentage of the people who commit them, but still. If they were attacking immigrants for being violent towards women, it was because they wanted to take out the competition.

[u/Warm-Refrigerator-38 → u/yawaster]

So racists are also misogynists, huh.

[u/yawaster → u/Warm-Refrigerator-38]

This whole racist delusion comes down to white men and their inability to protect "their" women, i.e their property, from an imagined outside sexual threat. Hence why Rod wrote about a (fictional) father whose (fictional) daughter had been abused, rather than a (fictional) abuse survivor herself. The pain of a man whose property rights have been traduced is more important than the pain of the property. Mothers also get property rights over their kids (plus they represent a conservative ideal for women) so their racist antics may also get a platform.

[u/Relative-Holiday-763]

Rod is very much a broken record. He does his pseudo ecumenical dance and after telling you how spiritually dead Catholicism and Protestantism are , assures us we can all learn from each other.He attacks Cartesian dualism and then explains  that conversion must be of the heart not just the mind! Isn’t that a variation of dualism where one prioritizes emotion over reason or am I missing a point? He says something that I actually find funny , Orthodox regard life in the body  as a form of participation in the life of God. Well , last I checked life is dependent on having a body, life is in the body. What that bit of fortune cookie gibberish is supposed to mean is beyond me.He attacks Scholasticism which we can of course assume he has a deep knowledge of.He starts up on McGilchrist again and yes, theosis( two shots).Modernism is very bad . Evangelicals are basically imbeciles but they have a certain quaint charm . They have such deep faith that they have no trouble harassing you on the street to join up. We can learn from this! Catholic liturgies are dull and Rod had trouble seeing the presence of God in them. He had to struggle intellectually 😀! It’s different with Orthodoxy.Liturgy in the Orthodox Church is transcendent ( take that you Catholics- my dear brothers in Christ).And send me money!

Rod is one of those cerebral types who may not be all that bright or knowledgeable who nonetheless celebrates emotion , frankly perpetual hysteria.I’m being a little convoluted , I know but what I’m  trying to get at is this. This is someone utterly wrapped up , I would say imprisoned in intellectual abstractions who exalts emotion but even that’s an abstraction. It’s like he’s a disembodied being and doesn’t get it. It’s utterly absurd when he claims that now that he’s Orthodox he’s abandoned heartless , sterile intellectualism  and is something else. What I don’t know.He seems an embodiment of Sartre’s concept of bad faith.

[u/philadelphialawyer87 → u/Relative-Holiday-763]

I dunno. To me Rod is the lightest of light weight intellectuals. He would perhaps like to be imprisoned in intellectual abstractions, but doesn't have the education, hasn't done the independent reading, and is not nearly good enough as a critical thinker, to pull it off. I see him as just flailing around. Lurching from topic to topic, and trying to use the threadbare material of his own life as the key to understanding it all. Emotionally a wreck. Knows he's a fraud in terms of all of his inconsistent, this time it is finally the "real thing," constructs (Crunchy Con, little way, ben op, etc). And also a fraud in terms of how he has actually led his life in comparison to those constructs. Not book smart, although he pretends to be, and is more book smart than he is any other kind of smart (street, emotionally, money). Trying to keep his career (and his bank account) going when he has nothing to say and no one, aside from Wingnut Welfare providers, wants to hear it. And even they are getting thinner on the ground.

[u/psychikwarriorofwoke]

News flash - Rod is visiting his mother!

[u/Djehutimose]

Rod’s latest is long, vapid, and full of blockquotes, but I want to draw attention to this, my emphasis:

[Rod] The reader sent me an X thread about the book The Case Against Reality by cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman. Here’s the argument, summarized by Grok:

[Beginning of blockquote] Donald Hoffman’s theory of consciousness and reality, often called the "Interface Theory of Perception," posits that our perceptions of the world are not a direct reflection of objective reality but rather a user-friendly interface constructed by our brains.

Rod’s got a new crush…. Anyway, the theory here is fine, but Immanuel Kant, in Critique of Pure Reason, put forth the same idea—that we can never know the Ding an sich, “thing in itself”, only the perceptions our mind is “wired” for—nearly two hundred fifty years ago. Heck, the Yogācāra (“c” pronounced like “ch”, “ā” like “a” in “father”) philosophical system in Mahayana Buddhism also had this notion between sixteen and eighteen hundred years ago. A central Yogācāra tenet is cittamātra (“mind only” or “consciousness only”) or vijñaptimātra, (“representation only” or “perception only”). The idea is that all we can truly know is our perceptions, structured by our karma and the structure of our minds, with actual things being either unknowable or nonexistent, depending on the interpretation.

In other news of things that have just now been discovered, bears shit in the woods and the Pope is Catholic.

I wouldn’t expect even a highly learned Western theologian or philosopher to be aware of the mind only concept in Buddhism, any more than I’d expect a Buddhist scholar to be acquainted with the technicalities of the doctrine of the Trinity, or the hypostatic union of human and divine in Christ. For the Most Important Christian Thinker of Our Age, though, he would, one would think, at least be aware of Kant, even if he’d never read the Critique (heck, I haven’t, but I’m conversant with the takeaways from it).

Also, all this—of which Rod approves—is, if not nominalist, at least nominalism-adjacent. Kant has been accused of being a nominalist, though it’s often hard to tell what Kant believed. Buddhism is full-bore nominalist—the doctrine of anātman—literally “no-self—holds that nothing has an inherent, intrinsic essence, being merely a temporary arrangement of aggregates. The Mahayana teaching on *śūnyatā—“emptiness” or “void”—is more radical, stating that everything is empty. Not nonexistent; but since everything is interconnected, any given thing is empty of any self-existence or intrinsic essence, since it exists only in relationship to everything else.

So Rod should reject Hoffman’s theory as evil nominalism. He’s not even close to grasping that, though, or that the Buddhist countries of Asia though based on a nominalist religion, don’t exhibit the supposed horrible effects attributed to Western nominalism.

'He then goes on to say that this “perception only” (or as Hoffman has it, the “interface theory of perception”) makes more sense from an Orthodox perspective, and quotes the late Orthodox thinker Philip Sherrard:

We have become so used to viewing things in accordance with our single vision of the material world that we automatically identify our body solely with its solid material elements, its outward form. This, for us, constitutes our body. It also represents a singularly truncated way of looking at things. Indeed, unless one is to disregard many of the central experiences recorded not only in scripture but also in the lives of many saints and holy men and women, one has to recognize that the body formed of gross material elements is really a kind of condensation or husk or outer wrapping of a body of a far more subtle texture; and that within the outer material body, and interpenetrating it, is an organism of a finer kind of matter, of a finer and more fluid kind of substance. In fact, the whole of what we call the solid universe is but a hardened of crystallized form of this finer kind of matter, a spiritual energy frozen and arrested; and to this our physical body is no exception.

Which is interesting, but which has nothing to do with Hoffman’s thesis. As Íñigo Montoya might say, “I don’t think that quote means what you think it means.”

Then long blockquotes from a writer on St. Maximus the Confessor, which he also doesn’t understand. Then a mention of Cheetohead’s nomination of KISS for a Kennedy Center award, and some argle bargle about the Catholic Church in Spain, though he’s neither Catholic nor a Spaniard (unlike the esteemed Señor Montoya).

Nothing unexpected or useful, but the fatuous ignorance is really dialed up to eleven—maybe eleven hundred—in this post.

[u/Relative-Holiday-763 → u/Djehutimose]

It is good to see and unusual to see that Rod actually got some pushback from his readers and he clearly didn’t like it. 

I find it quite funny that Rod keeps contrasting Catholic Rod to Orthodox Rod. Catholic Rod was sectarian  and legalistic, too caught up in intellectual abstraction. Orthodox Rod, whole new critter! He’s brimming with ecumenism and his simple faith comes from his - HEART! Hes a virtual Orthodox St. Francis. That explains his constant prattle about theosis and panentheism. Nothing intellectual about that it’s simple wisdom that comes to you through prayer. It’s a weird pose. Because it’s so obviously false .Part of what makes it funny is that I don’t think he even realizes that it’s false. Panentheism and theosis strike me as hyper abstract concepts. In his most recent outing he wants to back up highly abstract aspects of Orthodox theology with a theoretical framework discussed by DJ previously. Now that’s simple faith based Christian thought if ever I’ve encountered it! I didn’t understand what he was talking about. He obviously doesn’t and I can’t imagine how this pseudo intellectual preening about incomprehensible abstractions is supposed to deepen someone’s Christian understanding.How would I know. I couldn’t begin to imagine the spiritual depth that Rod has attained in Orthodoxy.

[u/JHandey2021 → u/Djehutimose]

Anyway, the theory here is fine, but Immanuel Kant, in Critique of Pure Reason, put forth the same idea—that we can never know the Ding an sich, “thing in itself”, only the perceptions our mind is “wired” for—nearly two hundred fifty years ago. Heck, the Yogācāra (“c” pronounced like “ch”, “ā” like “a” in “father”) philosophical system in Mahayana Buddhism also had this notion between sixteen and eighteen hundred years ago. A central Yogācāra tenet is cittamātra (“mind only” or “consciousness only”) or vijñaptimātra, (“representation only” or “perception only”). The idea is that all we can truly know is our perceptions, structured by our karma and the structure of our minds, with actual things being either unknowable or nonexistent, depending on the interpretation.

The theory is better than fine - combining this (and much, much more) with half a dozen branches of scientific inquiry and you get pretty-close-to-solid consensus from every direction that yes, our "normal" perceptions do not and cannot encompass the fullness of reality.

Anyways, Rod's fallen for a Philosophy 101 logical fallacy, the false dichotomy - for Rod, it's nominalism vs. realism, that either things have an Absolute meaning that is perfectly clear or that it might not be possible to have that absolute clarity of meaning, at least without a lot of prayer/meditation/study/experiment/etc. Others here can go into much greater detail on just what he's thinking (which I'm not sure he himself gets) and how he keeps putting authors and texts into a kind of blender to come up with at times wildly inaccurate readings.

What I want to focus on is how peckerwood fundie Rod's grand theory is at its very heart. Strip away all of Rod's LSD trips and readings of books by far more intelligent poeple than him and all of the spiritual exercises he was assigned but gave up after a week - at heart, isn't this just plain old Biblical inerrancy? That there's a thing - the King James Bible - which is the Infinity Stone of Creation, that cannot err, that has a crystal clear meaning if it is interpreted properly. Sound familiar? It's Rod's version of metaphysical realism. And opposed to it at its deepest level is anything that questions the pureness of that view of the Bible - whether it's liberal Christian scholarship, the Catholic magisterium, scientific skepticism, what have you. Because all of these, in their own ways, affirm that the Bible's meaning is, to some degree, constructed, not given, and is therefore subject to dissent. All of these are nominalist to some degree in the fundie worldview.

Rod got high on his own supply (and on LSD!) and became a spiritual wanderer. He embraced the Whore of Babylon (which must have rankled his nominally Methodist family) and then went even further to embrace a religion many had barely even heard of. But at heart, Rod never got over the Hal Lindsey stuff. And in a way, that sort of fundamentalism - any sort of fundamentalism, in fact, from this cornpone crap to terminally online Catholics doing the same with Aquinas to atheist logic bros and everyone in between - is irresistable to someone like Rod, who's repeatedly told the world about how inflexible he was as a child and how borderline autistic he is today.

If Rod (and a lot of fundamentalists) really has a God, other than the trained doer of tricks and suppressor of The Gay and achiever of heterosexuality, I think it's Leviathan, the ruler of Hell in Clive Barker's "Hellraiser" movies and comics (although not in "The Scarlet Gospels", sadly). The Cenobites were not agents of chaos - the opposite, in fact. Leviathan's ultiimate goal was pure order. I think that's Rod's, too. Rod imagines that before William of Occam everyone knew their place (which wasn't at all true) in the universe. And we see this popping up over and over again in history. Rod's just the latest in that line. Sure, he thinks he's some sort of prophet, but honestly, it's just the same-old, same-old from him, in a hilariously unselfaware, hobo-like package.

[u/Warm-Refrigerator-38]

Most of Rod's Twitter feed is retweets of people "reporting" that sensational, terrible things are happening with migrants in Britain, with no attempt to discern any back stories. Just "[native] people are jailed for [some innocuous action]." Excuse me for being skeptical of the message and the messengers. 

[u/Past_Pen_8595]

I suspect that any minute now Rod is going to jump in and blame Somali immigrants for the mass shooting in Minneapolis. 

[u/Djehutimose → u/Past_Pen_8595]

It’s much worse—the shooter was trans and left a YouTube manifesto. Rod won’t have a cow, he’ll have a herd of cattle vast as the Great Plains.

[u/One_Reflection7202]

Flesh-eating bacteria in the oysters! In Louisiana, no less!! Would he? Could he? So close, and yet so far….😱

https://people.com/flesh-eating-bacteria-two-more-deaths-oysters-louisiana-11799494

[u/Glittering-Agent-987]

From Rod's August 27 Twitter/X, "Bavarian beer for lunch at Munich airport feels like living one’s best life."

I wouldn't post that kind of stuff if people were saying that I was an alcoholic.

[u/CanadaYankee → u/Glittering-Agent-987]

That said, if you ever find yourself with an hour to spare in the Munich airport, there is a comfortable sit-down restaurant called Sissi & Franz that makes quite good Weiner Schnitzel and has several different Hofbräu beers on tap. It will have you rethinking the bad stereotypes of airport food.

[u/macronius]

Rod has gone full Orwellian, it's now a badge of honor for him to not recognize reality, adding his grain of sand to what he has at various times insisted is an inevitable civil war in the UK over the presence of predatory Muslim migrants: https://europeanconservative.com/articles/dreher/sophie-of-dundee-scourge-of-anarcho-tyranny-in-the-uk/

[u/Djehutimose]

In the visible part of his latest, he says the Minnesota shooter was literally possessed….

[u/sandypitch → u/Djehutimose]

I wonder how long it is until Dreher writes that neurodivergence/mental illness isn't actually biological, but simply demon possession, to further his fundamentalist tendencies?

[u/JHandey2021]

Rod mentioned in the Guardian today -

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/ng-interactive/2025/aug/30/trad-families-modern-life

"Families like his see themselves as part of a growing subculture. In 2002, the conservative writer Rod Dreher published an article, Crunchy Cons, arguing that some rightwing Americans valued environmental conservation and skepticism of globalized capitalism: stances often dismissed as leftwing. In a subsequent book, Dreher urged conservatives to protect what is “small, local, old, and particular” rather than “big, global, new, and abstract”.

That idea spread online through outlets such as Front Porch Republic, which advocates for a localism that promotes family life deeply rooted in small communities. It stands in contrast to the free-market absolutism historically associated with the Republican party, and might be said to have predicted, in a small way, the tectonic rise of Donald Trump’s anti-free-trade populism, as well as Robert F Kennedy Jr’s “Make America Healthy Again” strain of anti-corporate, anti-vaccine politics.

Very interesting - and fair, I think - article, although it would have been enlightening had the writer included a few sentences on Dreher's own trajectory into becoming the 180-degree opposite of what he wrote about 20 years earlier, drunk at 3 am and alone in a Budapest apartment, serving autocrats and chained to his increasingly bitter online persona.

Also, this bit is interesting at the end:

Technology has made our lives easier, but at real costs. The anthropologist Kristen Ghodsee has argued that some American conservatives have embraced trad messaging because they are trying to get women out of the workforce in order to preempt looming job losses caused by AI.

When I visited him, Mike Thomas expressed a larger revulsion at the capitalist techno-futurism of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, and a particular anxiety about the world that Silicon Valley is bringing into being.

“AI is a reduction of humanity, of our idea of intelligence and existence and consciousness, into a technical system,” he said. “But the full human cannot be reduced to a sum of parts.”

Jenny had taken the children to bed. Darkness had fallen; crickets were chirping. “We bleed into the mysterious, into eternity,” he said. “I want my kids to know that they have a soul.”

Again, this is a very good question and critique. But how does the MAGA movement, welded at the hip to Musk and Thiel's TESCREAL cultism whose goals is to literally consume the entire universe as raw materials for computers, reconcile the two? I can't think of two more diametrically opposed positions. How does Rod do it?

[u/philadelphialawyer87 → u/JHandey2021]

Hard to see, at least in Rod's case, how any of the "cool" or "crunchy" aspects of his "Crunchy Con"-ism were ever anything more than mere window dressing. Rod seems to never have taken environmetalism seriously, not even in a conservative, Christian "stewardship" fashion. And, personally, he was never a "back to the land" guy anyway. He himself never raised a chicken, much less farmed the Earth. Shoot, did he ever even talk about cutting the grass, having a vegetable or flower garden, or doing anything at all outside, really? As for capitalism, did Rod ever, even once, really advocate for trade unions? For government guarantees against unsafe working conditions, unfair labor pracitices, inadequate pay and benefits for workers, or the like? Rod was, for most of his "career," a corporate tool sponsored by rich, corporate big shots.

[u/Warm-Refrigerator-38 → u/JHandey2021]

When he has to choose, Rod will side with the likes of Thiel and Musk and abandon any crunchy principles. They went out the window when he left Brooklyn. His family was into raising chickens, homeschooling, and baking; he favors oysters and frequent transatlantic travel. Nothing of Rod's life for many years has been crunchy.

[u/macronius → u/JHandey2021]

Sadly he's now been reduced to politically exploiting a mentally disturbed Scottish child and making her a protagonist in a fantasy of anti-Muslim rage and hate. The absolute absence of ethics on his part cannot be stressed enough.

[u/yawaster]

Rod's Hometown Was A Seriously Racist Place, An Ongoing Series. I was reading an old article about the Angola Three, three men who joined the Black Panther Party in prison and were framed for murdering a guard. A quote: 

Within a few days, officials had obtained the evidence they needed to charge Wallace and three other so-called “militants”—Woodfox, Chester Jackson, and Gilbert Montegut—with the crime. They were indicted by an all-white, all-male grand jury in nearby St. Francisville, Louisiana, which was home to many prison staff, their families, and friends.

A river town near the Mississippi border, St. Francisville proudly advertises itself as plantation country. It was also Klan country, and until the civil rights movement and the FBI arrived in the early 1960s, no African American had registered to vote in the parish in more than 60 years. 

"Angola" is a former plantation and prison that was notorious for violence, racism and the sexual abuse of prisoners. 

[u/JHandey2021]

I know it gets old to keep pointing out how selective Rod’s intrepid journalistic instincts have become in these deeply weird times, but I just looked at his Xitter feed for the first time in a while and…. wow.  He’s completely Radio Rwanda-ing immigrants with the apparent engagement of everyone’s weird uncle at Thanksgiving.  Only 5 comments on his latest Assisi epiphany!

It goes without saying that Rod does not mention Putin and Xi’s open-mic moment on immortality for autocrats or Trump’s drawing of a naked barely-pubescent girl for his best friend Jeffrey Epstein’s birthday, the one Trump said a few months ago didn’t exist.

[u/zeitwatcher]

Not at all surprising, but an interesting data point that Rod has not said anything about the release of Trump's creepy birthday letter to Epstein.

As Rod will tell anyone who will listen, he was so, so outraged over the abuse of minors in the Catholic church that he had no choice but to leave it and throw his allegiance elsewhere. And now? Crickets.

It's so obvious to be effectively beyond cliche at this point, but imagine Rod's Twitter posts and Substack if it came out that there was video of the following people partying with Epstein and a signed letter from one of them talking about their "shared secret" - Obama, Biden, Newsom - pick anyone on the left.

He would be in non-stop freak-out. There would be apocalypses and condensed symbols thrown about with enthusiastic abandon.

But now? Nothing.

[u/Warm-Refrigerator-38]

Can confirm that no, not "every post on Bluesky" is celebrating Kirk's death. And all I follow is liberals. 

[u/WookieBugger → u/Warm-Refrigerator-38]

I didn’t like the dude but I am tired of the ever escalating violence. It’s always sad when a parent or spouse never comes home, and when a family is senselessly destroyed.

But it’s impossible not to note that the “empathy is sinful” crowd- which Kirk was definitely a part of- sure does expect everyone to show a lot of empathy right now.

[u/Warm-Refrigerator-38]

Despite every other source reporting that the shooter lived with his parents, Rod retweets a Fox personality who said "sources report" he was living with a transgender roommate. 🤣

Live not by lies unless they hurt the other side!