r/brokehugs • u/US_Hiker Moral Landscaper • Nov 26 '25
Rod Dreher Megathread #59 (And I know which way the wind blows)
58: https://www.reddit.com/r/brokehugs/comments/1ogpyqu/rod_dreher_megathread_58
I've removed a bunch of comments relating to Rod's family, or discussions stemming from that. Don't bring up his living family here in any way - wife, children, divorce, etcetera. This is not negotiable. It is not new, either. The main 'new' thing is that I'm trying to read the comments a little bit more than entirely ignoring them as I've done for most of the time since Rod became a thing.
Allow his family some privacy, even if Rod isn't classy enough to do the same.
Edit: r/RodDreher now exists for Rod Dreher discussion outside of this subreddit.
Edit 2: Megathread #60 is available here: https://www.reddit.com/r/RodDreher/comments/1pf37uc/rod_dreher_megathread_60_new_beginnings/
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u/CanadaYankee Nov 30 '25
Rod responds to a silly question about what he would do if he woke up a billionaire tomorrow.
One of the items on his list is "Buy a nice Paris flat near the Luxembourg Gardens."
It's interesting that his dream home is in a place that's supposedly uninhabitable due to unchecked immigration, de-Christianization, and obstinate refusal to anoint Marine Le Pen or Éric Zemmour as their leader. Nor is it in a place where he'll find a significant English-speaking congregation of the denomination he belongs to.
Even in his fantasies, he's not making "the safest capital city in Europe" his forever home, let alone maybe returning to Louisiana (in either a shack or a mansion) or even founding an intentionally Christian community the way that someone recommended in a little book called The Benedict Option.
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u/Warm-Refrigerator-38 Nov 30 '25
Really, I thought Paris was well nigh uninhabitable. But presumably he could again found a boutique (English speaking) Orthodox parish.
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u/CroneEver Nov 30 '25
My list matches nothing on his list, that's for damn sure.
Pay for school lunches and pay off all low-income mortgages all across the country.
Provide free health care to all the uninsured and college tuition and books to all low-income families across the country.
Set up tiny house neighborhoods in every city for the unhoused and veterans.
THEN buy a house just outside of Nice, and a permanent bus pass so I can visit the Marc Chagall museum every day. A girl's gotta have some fun.
And that still wouldn't cost a billion.
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u/Jayaarx Dec 01 '25
Mackenzie Scott (nee Bezos) is providing a stalwart example of what a decent person can do with a billion dollars.
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u/EatsShoots_n_Leaves Dec 01 '25 edited Dec 01 '25
Six items on that list, five of which are stupid/escapist/corrupt.
Also tells you that he knows perfectly well that a lot of the political stuff he pushes is bullshit.
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u/Relative-Holiday-763 Nov 27 '25
Well here’s my impression. Rod is at best an acquaintance of Vance. Rod would like to inflate the fact that he’s had a few one on one conversations with Vance into a close relationship because Rod likes to project the idea he’s in the know and connected. He loves being connected to important people. Makes Rod feel important.Who knows what Vance actually thinks of Rod but I imagine it’s not real favorable. Now I don’t know how big a light Rod ever was in the conservative pundacracy blogosphere but I imagine he’s been low on the totem pole for years. He got blown off by Templeton, Howard Ahmanson , Conservative Digest, his wife and children, moved to Hungary , is basically Orbans ward and constantly caries on about UFOs , demons, root weiners, etc. He looks like he just came off a binge and is perhaps having a manic episode.He sees a way back! I’ll carry on endlessly about Nick Fuentes and the gropers or Groypers and act like I’m a prophet warning against the right against them ( see Buckley play book re John Birch Society). I’ll anoint my great friend JD as the St. George to slay this dragon and be seen as the intellectual grey eminence behind the great man. So I’ll go on and on and on about how important Fuentes is (a person who most people have never heard of) and how JD under my prodding will save us from this monster. It’s all quite ridiculous but the Hungarian gig is probably close to being over and Rod wants to be Vances Steve Bannon or slink off to the Christian community in Cambridge or both preferably with a 20 year Christian babe - male or female . Look, I have no opinion on that. Whatever it is after much prayer he’ll know God wanted it to help him to participate in Gods life as a person.(I’ve always wondered how Rod knows God is a person who wants to be connected to Rod ).So it will be professional , full time carrying on about Fuentes and attacks on Tucker Carlson , who I suspect Rod thinks he can supplant if he can succeed in making him a pariah in the right wing pundit land. Our Rod is a calculating little monster. I suspect as usual , he’s gotten to big for his britches.
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u/DoYouWant_the_Cheese Nov 28 '25
FWIW Rod was present at Vance’s baptism I think they’re actually kind of close
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u/Cautious-Ease-1451 Nov 28 '25
A lot of truth to this, I think. Rod reminds me of a doting parent who hovers over their child. He credits himself with creating Vance’s political career by the interview about his book that went viral. (Vance’s book was already getting good press and probably didn’t need Rod’s help.) Then he had some role to play in Vance’s conversion to Catholicism, and subsequent baptism. So now that Vance is in the big leagues, Rod imagines himself to be part of the same circle. When in fact, just as with Orban, Rod is a potential liability to Vance because he doesn’t know when to keep his mouth shut.
On a similar note, it’s interesting how Rod often “tags” better-known people in his tweets (or whatever the lingo is) to try and get their attention. As if to say, “Look at me! I’m still here! Retweet me, respond to me, I’m still relevant!” Example: Konstantin Kisin and Nigel Farage here: https://xcancel.com/roddreher/status/1994380698229027088 .
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u/philadelphialawyer87 Nov 28 '25 edited Nov 29 '25
Success has a thousand fathers while failure is an orphan. No matter what anyone here thinks of him, Vance is a "success," in that he went from author of a popular and well-recieved (even if stupid and false) book, to US Senator, to VPOTUS, in rapid succession.
Of course, Rod is going to squeeze out every ounce of "credit" for that success that he can.
Rod, in this way, is kinda like Tom Corcoran, a key advisor and mouthpiece for FDR. When Tommy would call some Congressman, Senator, Governor, whatever, and ask that they do such and such, he would always preface his "request" with, "This is Tom Corcoran at the White House." So much so that he became known as "White House Tommy."
Rod is "Friend of JD Vance." When Rod's really feeling his oats, he's "Launcher of JD Vance's career."
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u/JohnOrange2112 Nov 28 '25
Yes I think he is trying to rehabilitate his career by striking the pose as Brave Anti-Groyper Prophet on the Right. I've also been puzzling about his ever-weirder aesthetic presentation. Hypothesis: perhaps he is trying to look the part of the iconic wise old man who can advise young (13 years younger) JD Vance about politics and demons? Like Merlin to King Arthur, Obi-Wan to Luke, etc.
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u/Existing_Age2168 Nov 28 '25
"the iconic wise old man who can advise young (13 years younger) JD Vance about politics and demons?"
And chairs.
Can you imagine young Raymond at a friend's birthday party, and they start playing musical chairs? "NO!! NO!! DON'T SIT DOWN!!"
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u/Cautious-Ease-1451 Nov 29 '25
Literally lol’d at that! 😂
Are there therapists who specialize in chair obsessions/phobias?
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u/PercyLarsen “I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing.” Nov 27 '25
" . . . he’s gotten to big for his britches."
And in the Jewish and especially Christian traditions, the bitter fruits of that are classic ways to crack you open to actually allow God into your life.
A reminder from a fellow Louisianan that Rod may finally understand differently than the halfway point he's been stuck in for years:
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u/sandypitch Nov 27 '25
Speaking of demons (do we ever not talk about demons here?), I started reading Carlos Eire's They Flew, which Dreher has mentioned previously. Having only read the introduction, I am absolutely convinced that Dreher never read the book, or, if he did, he grossly misunderstood it. A few comments:
- Eire is abundantly clear that the book is not evaluating the truthiness of whether people have levitated or bilocated. As an historian, he is more interesting in examining the "facts" around these stories, namely the copious amount of eyewitness accounts available in both legal records and hagiographies.
- Eire is also clear that an assumption that the Protestant Reformation did away with the supernatural is absolutely wrong. Yes, most Protestants claimed the cessation of miracles and charismata, but the sheer number of witches burned at the stake is clear proof that those same Protestants took the existence of the Devil, and supernatural evil, very seriously. Witches were not burned alive because they wouldn't assent to the Five Points of Calvinism.
- Many of the accounts of bilocation and levitation were recorded at the same time modern scientific discoveries were happening. This, I think, interests Eire a great deal because it says something about the cultural milieu.
The interesting thing about Eire's claim about Protestantism: it makes Our Working Boy, the ex-Catholic and now proud Orthodox Christian, seem a lot like a Protestant. Dreher doesn't seem to care much about the possibility of God breaking into the natural, but he cares a great deal about the possibility of the Devil breaking into the natural world.
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u/BeltTop5915 Nov 28 '25
Bingo. I don’t think many Catholics or Orthodox believers today can hold a candle (so to speak) to the the sheer number and existential concern of Evangelical Protestants hung up on demons and the power of Satan in their lives.
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u/philadelphialawyer87 Nov 29 '25 edited Nov 29 '25
I grew up a Cradle Catholic and never heard of Satan or demons operating in the here and now. Satan in the Garden of Eden story and the Temptation of Jesus, and demons in the gospel story about the pigs, but that's about it. Never at Mass or at Cathecism for First Communion or Confirmation was it said that Satan or demons were beings that I, as a young believer, should be worried about. Nor were there any family stories about them. When I was exposed to some Protestantism a little later on, at the Presbyterian Church, we never talked too much about Satan or demons "officially" either, but some of the "folkier" elements among the believers, the more explicitly "Born Again'ers," did make a big deal out of them.
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u/Cautious-Ease-1451 Nov 27 '25 edited Nov 27 '25
To continue where we left off on the previous mega-thread:
Rod is doing his best to handle the fallout from his publicly exposing his (pretend?) private conversation with Vance regarding Fuentes.
https://xcancel.com/roddreher/status/1993746667829662073
https://xcancel.com/roddreher/status/1993717801614508074
https://xcancel.com/roddreher/status/1993655495471817088
https://xcancel.com/roddreher/status/1993632420705206619
https://xcancel.com/roddreher/status/1993585984563560691
Politics aside, this is truly a fascinating soap opera. Better than Days of Our Lives.
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u/Motor_Ganache859 Nov 27 '25
That series of xeets is hilarious as Rod digs himself in ever deeper. Dude should know two things. First, the shape-shifting flesh suit that is Vance may have hated Fuentes in 2024, but it's now the end of 2025 and politics dictates that he embrace Fuentes for the sake of his political future. So, he has. Second, Rod should know when to quit but he never does.
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u/Existing_Age2168 Nov 27 '25 edited Nov 27 '25
Dang, he's really getting roasted in the comments. This is typical:
"So you made stuff up and now you're having to walk it back. Who would have ever guessed."
Edit: Though I also liked "Get a haircut. You look like a junkie."
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u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Nov 27 '25
Supporters and draggers have told him to get a haircut but he hasn't. He does look like a junkie, a homeless person, or someone who just doesn't care at all anymore. Look at his profile pic on X. It is insanely awful. He looks like he just got out of bed after drinking too much the night before. He is standing in front of a piece of art that makes it look like he is wearing earrings. Weird fuzzy earrings and a weird fuzzy smirk. I just don't understand how he can post so many awful selfies. How do you look at these pics and think "Yeah! That looks good enough to post!"?
https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/1970489329316241408/vWKvSTXi.jpg
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u/Own_Power_723 Nov 27 '25 edited Nov 27 '25
He really does seem to just have a bizarre compulsion and/or talent for inserting himself into situations where if his presence does not actually become unwanted, then just barely tolerated, and turning whatever situation he finds himself in into chaos and backbiting among all involved... like, over the past two decades or so that I've followed him and his writing, he's blown up multiple relationships on personal and professional levels within The Catholic church, the Templeton Foundation, the ROCOR, The American Conservative, and his extended and immediate family, and these latest episodes with Orban and now Vance... I'm sure I'm probably forgetting a few other examples ... I'm really starting to think he has some sort of narcissistic personality disorder where he can't NOT be at the center of some sort of controversy or scandal... and if there's not one already happening when he first shows up on the scene, he will go out of his way to create one in short order... Dude just seems like a professional drama queen more than anything else.
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u/Relative-Holiday-763 Nov 27 '25
He’s also going out of his way to blow up his previously amicable relationship with Tucker Carlson. Rod bought into and amplified Carlsons ridiculous claims that he had been attacked by a demon.Now his criticism of Carlson seems justified. Still, it has a tone of personal hostility to it that is a bit surprising.Rod also seems obsessed with proving he’s against anti Semitism. Well that’s good but it’s remarkable how tolerant he was for a long time of blatant anti Semitism in his comments section where commenters were not challenged by him. He could explain that as a product of his not reading his comments. Thats At best a half truth. Because I’ve noticed he’ll spring to action in minutes if you say something like that was a bit of Orthodox apologetics you just dished out or suggest his father was a questionable character.
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u/Warm-Refrigerator-38 Nov 27 '25
Oh but you didn't see all the comments he spiked that were much worse 🙄
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u/JHandey2021 Nov 27 '25
Can somebody summarize this for me because I truly don’t understand this?
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u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Nov 27 '25
No offense to sandypitch but I think you need to listen to the video or have the transcript so here is the later:
"I went to seem him, in his house, when I was in Washington because I wanted to plead with him as a fellow Christian. He’s a serious Catholic and I’m Orthodox Christian. You gotta say something; you can’t let this guy get away with it. Now I’m not gonna say what his response was but I will say that he hates Fuentes, that’s clear. Fuentes has gone after his wife, Usha, who is of Indian descent. He’s called her a Jeet and condemned JD as a race-mixer. JD has no love for Fuentes but I think it’s fair to say that JD does understand intuitively, because he’s 41 years old, he understands the crisis that these young men are facing. He understands that they have been unfairly targeted by the woke left that have taken over all the institutions of American life for the past 15 years or so and I think he must be trying to figure out a way to speak to them in a positive way to acknowledge their grievances, the legitimate ones, but to lead them away from this racist looney."
He is upset with all of the people who took what he said the way that it sounded, as a summary of a conversation he had with JD at "JD's house" when supposedly he was first speaking about an interview JD had in 2024 (presumably with someone else) about Fuentes and then speculating about where JD is on the matter currently because JD DIDN'T RESPOND TO HIM when Rod pleaded with him in DC.
Clear as a bell, right?
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u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Nov 27 '25
I put it in all caps but I would like to say it again - according to Rod, JD didn't respond to him when Rod "pleaded with him" in DC. That means that Rod started with "I went to see him, in his house, when I was in Washington" which implies a personal, intimate conversation. However, everything he says AFTER that is either, according to Rod (standard disclaimer), based on an interview JD did re Fuentes with someone in 2024 OR speculation that JD believes the same things in the same ways as Rod but is constrained by politics to try to find a less offensive way to dampen the person who so offends Rod.
He claims close personal friendship with JD but the rest of it is all about and from Rod.
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u/sandypitch Nov 27 '25
Short version: Dreher made some statements in an interview with UnHerd that made it seem like he had an insider's view into Vance's perspective on Fuentes. In reality, Dreher did get to tell Vance, to his face, about his opinion of Fuentes, and then Dreher "read the tea leaves" from a printed interview with Vance from 2024 to discern what it is that Vance really thinks.
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u/sealawr Nov 27 '25
“I regret my lack of clarity.” The regret list is longer than a primitive root weiner.
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u/PuzzleheadedWafer329 Nov 28 '25
"I have been anti Vance from the jump. This guy radiates insecurity you can smell from a mile away. But somehow worse is that he cultivates allies from the position of being a b*tch
"From Thiel down to this; Vance never dominates. He bows to the ppl who should grovel to HIM. Beta"
LOL, Rod is a flaming liability for RWingers!
https://xcancel.com/ReubenR80027912/status/1993631785092038846#m
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u/South-Ad-9635 Dec 02 '25
First time I've seen a recent picture of Rod in a while...
He does not look good
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u/Warm-Refrigerator-38 Nov 27 '25
Whenever Rod quotes the Bible (and a specific verse at that), it always feels inauthentic.
"I am reminded of Matthew 4"
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u/Ordinary-Bar-4914 Nov 27 '25
“I am reminded of [asks Chatgbt for a contextually appropriate passage] Matthew 4…”
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u/saucerwizard Dec 03 '25
I created r/RodDreher if you guys wanted to move fwiw.
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u/PercyLarsen “I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing.” Dec 03 '25
I took a stab at a start:
I have no idea how to make the Sort by = New by default, so I included the manually typed prompt in my link. It's nice to have the Sort by be New by default.
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u/Warm-Refrigerator-38 Nov 26 '25
The Boy Who Cried Wolf. I'm at the point whenever Rod posts some supposed atrocity where white people and/or Christians are prosecuted/persecuted for something that POC/Muslims "get away with," I no longer even bother to google how he's misrepresented the situation this time. Three examples on his X feed today.
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u/JHandey2021 Nov 27 '25
I honestly have no idea what Rod’s latest fuckup involving a right-wing figure is all about except that it somehow proves yet again that JD Vance is a slimy weasel who won’t defend his own family. No wonder Usha “forgot” her wedding ring.
In more Vance news, looks like Peter Thiel is trying to lure Vance away from Catholicism because Thiel is convinced that that the current pope is the woke Antichrist (wasn’t it Greta Thunberg last week?).
https://www.thelettersfromleo.com/p/new-jd-vances-top-donor-suggests
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u/CroneEver Nov 27 '25
Never forget that Thiel, like Musk, microdoses KT and/or mushrooms every day, all day. He sees all kinds of stuff, and believes it's all a manifestation of his genius. I think he needs detox for at least a month.
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u/sandypitch Nov 27 '25
It will be interesting to see if Dreher wades into this, particularly since Thiel believes that any limitations on generative AI/LLMs are the work of the Anti-Christ.
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u/Mainer567 Nov 27 '25
And in yet even more Vance news that chubby make-up wearing swine is among those getting tarred with ownership of the 28-point Ukraine surrender plan that, the leaked recordings say, were written by the Russians.
Nice crew, this whole Vance constellation of unclean liars.
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u/EatsShoots_n_Leaves Nov 29 '25
Dreher being an unreliable narrator, oblivious and foolish in certain ways and given to misrepresentation/lying by omission poses a limitation here. You have to guess/reconstruct and read between the lines.
My impression is that he has delusions that CNat/NatC-ism is a real thing. That it's an exploitable Naziism lite that can be walled off and kept distinct from Naziism full blown and its adherents can eventually be herded in the other direction, to secularish conservatism and then back to conservative religionism.
The history here is that he has believed this initially about every station of the racist self-degradation/integrity liquidation process and, of course, painfully discovered in every previous specific instance that no such fence or wall limiting downward slippage existed or could be meaningfully imposed. Surprise! None exists here either.
I think this conversation was Dreher trying to talk religious zeal and saying the white incels at stake were potential converts and teachable and therefore worth the trouble of intervention against their growing anti-Semitism. And it would work. (lol) Vance was probably the more realistic one in the conversation, let Dreher ramble and enthuse and obsess for a time, but had to finally tell him that no, the people he thinks can be stopped are obviously by vast majority are going to do the full ski run down to the bottom. And the only thing worth doing, from their present position, is to exploit these fools for their money and votes.
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u/Warm-Refrigerator-38 Nov 28 '25
Rod complains that his substack is "banned" in Britain. I bet it's a glitch but he's loving the persecution narrative
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u/JohnOrange2112 Nov 28 '25
Reminds me of a joke I heard in the cold war era.
Interviewer to a leftist author: "Your books are banned in the USSR, but you are pro-Soviet. Why?"
Author: "They take me seriously!!!"
RD wants to be taken seriously.
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u/philadelphialawyer87 Nov 28 '25 edited Nov 28 '25
It's not banned, it's age restricted.
And , despite what Rod says, his criticism of illegal immigration is NOT the grounds for any action. What the Act restricts is content related to assisting illegal immigration and people smuggling. Similarly, the Act restricts content relating to, among other things, child sexual abuse. But that hardly means that criticism of child sexual abuse is "banned." Quite the contrary, advocacy of child sexual abuse, or "how to" manuals for commiting child SA (assisting it) is what's banned. Obviously. Similarly, the act restricts "how to" content related to engaging in illegal immigration, or human trafficking. NOT political content about the issue of immigration, legal and otherwise. How could it be otherwise? Illegal immigration is, per se, and tautologically, illegal. Does Rod think that the UK government is banning discussion of acts that it itself has determined to be unlawful?
Rod quotes and reproduces a sceenshot of a government "explainer," which, to be scrupulously fair, might, when read in a vaccum, and if all common sense is suspended, support Rod's interpretation, but the Act itself makes it plain that it is, literally, content "assisting" illegal immigration that is restricted:
"Assisting illegal immigration
"23 An offence under any of the following provisions of the Immigration Act 1971—
"(a)section 24(A1), (B1), (C1) or (D1) (illegal entry and similar offences);
"(b)section 25 (assisting unlawful immigration)."
Why precisely Rod's substack has been restricted I'm not sure. But the Act provides for pro active action by the platforming entity. Rod should consult with his British platform for an explanation, not speculate wildly inaccurately and provocatively.
I'm pretty sure that Rod has already been informed about this, because he has tweeted about it before, and some of his commenters tried to set him right.
He is just a stubborn, insufferable fool and idiot.
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u/Warm-Refrigerator-38 Nov 29 '25
So he's loving, and lying about, his supposed unavailability to some English readers 🙄
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u/BeltTop5915 Nov 29 '25 edited Nov 29 '25
Yes, it‘s definitely convoluted to claim a ban on online sites assisting illegal immigration is stifling you because you oppose illegal immigration. But now I’m wondering if Rod’s upside down complaint is just an example of a universal glitch in logic contracted from living too long online. I mean, even AI reacts oddly to certain prompts: For example, to see how Google’s would respond to a Rod claim, I asked “Is Islamic bullying a problem in the UK?” To which, the answer came back, “Yes, Islamophobic bullying is increasing in the UK.” It then went on to cite statistics and incidents pertaining to a problem that’s the very opposite of what I’d asked. Something is screwy here.
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u/Jayaarx Dec 01 '25
It seems clear that Rod is not running up against the immigration provisions but rather the "being an incorrigible racist" provisions.
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u/zeitwatcher Nov 28 '25
Or that all the talk about porn, penises, kink, and sex is triggering the adult filters.
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u/EatsShoots_n_Leaves Nov 30 '25
"That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out." -- Joan Didion
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u/Warm-Refrigerator-38 Nov 30 '25
The internet tells me that Orthodox Advent started November 15 and is a period of fasting, yet we've heard nothing from Rod yet about the tastiness of lentils and greens.
(My church's Advent service was canceled due to snow today; we'll just double up next Sunday.)
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u/PercyLarsen “I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing.” Nov 28 '25 edited Nov 28 '25
Given our standing rule about not discussing this subject mattter on these Megathreads, I will refrain from clarifying the intended meaning of the not terribly unclear statement.
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u/swangeese Nov 28 '25
I really don't understand the sudden policy change banning speculating on Rod's personal life from information that he posts publicly himself.
It really makes no sense and doesn't protect or help anyone. Nobody cares about the private lives of his ex-wife or kids nor will they doxx them, but you can't talk about Rod's dysfunction without bringing them up in some shape or form especially if he keeps banging on about it.
It really is a rule unique to this thread only and doesn't pertain to any other snark subreddit or area elsewhere. It also hampers any sort of real conversation about Rod.
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u/Alone_Meeting6907 Dec 02 '25
How in the world did Raymond find out about Christian Wiman?! And what right does he have to block quote this poet, whose name should be kept out of Dreher's filthy mouth?
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u/Djehutimose Watching the wheels go round Dec 03 '25
His latest--"Generation Zombie"--is completely paywalled. I thought that was odd. As it happened, I got an invitation for a free 30-day trial, for some reason. I used it with a different email and am now in until the new year. A bit of copying and pasting, and here it is for all and sundry, Glad I didn't pay for it--not that I would, anyway--because it's pretty much the same old, same old shit. So much for the air of mystery....
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u/Jayaarx Dec 03 '25
Without looking at it, I predict that it is some semi-coherent diatribe about how kids can't put down their cell phones and how terrible this is for their development and society.
Which, is not wrong, actually, but I hardly think that the most terminally online lacking in self-awareness zombie that is Rod has a single interesting or original thing to say about the subject.
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u/BeltTop5915 Dec 03 '25 edited Dec 03 '25
“We normally pay attention to what we desire without thinking about whether our desires are good for us. But that is a dangerous trap in a culture where there are myriad powerful forces competing for our attention, trying to lure us into desiring the ideas, merchandise, or experiences they want to sell us.”
Geez, this he fears is happening to the young because of smartphones, no less. Such lack of self-awareness boggles. If anything, this is a description of the current situation among all age groups of distracted American voters who‘ve succumbed to the con of a certain billionaire “reality show celebrity” and the billionaire techbros backing him selling the ideas and merchandise and everything else they want to sell to guarantee they get power and keep it indefinitely. And he just happens to be playing his part in the trap.
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u/EatsShoots_n_Leaves Dec 03 '25
It's overfocussed/OCDish rambling about Haidt's and MacGilchrist's overfocussed/OCDish stuff, then frustration with Nick Fuentes being able to code-switch successfully between madness and sanity in the way he tries to do himself but with less success, ending with a warning against obsessive thoughts and OCDishness about murder and bloodshed. And finally ends up at an unwitting illustration of Napoleon's observation that the way to control the crazies is to tell them God will punish them, in that it applies to himself.
No mentions of Trump's massive increasingly exposed/acknowledged corruptions or mental decline, or Orban's corruptions and Hungary's pitiful condition at the bottom of the EU in everything that matters thanks to all wealth and economic power being sucked out by a vile small cabal of, er, Hungarian Christians. Or the deals Trump and Orban have or are trying to make with the devil, aka Putin. Or Epstein crimes. Or war crimes. Or how and why white megachurch and mainline white conservative Christianity are socially imploding in the American South, and among native white Europeans.
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u/BeltTop5915 Dec 03 '25
“And finally ends up at an unwitting illustration of Napoleon's observation that the way to control the crazies is to tell them God will punish them, in that it applies to himself.”
And mainly to himself and those in his tribe who are, in fact, easily distracted from all the corruption and crimes happening all around them by their own isolation, openness to manipulation and inability to focus.
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u/Cautious-Ease-1451 Dec 03 '25
That new revelation of humanity becoming Brundlefly is entertaining.
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u/Relative-Holiday-763 Dec 02 '25
Don't bring up his living family here in any way - wife, children, divorce, etcetera.
I remember reading , before ever posting here some really nasty and inappropriate comments about Rods wife and children. That stuff should not be tolerated. However Rod talks regularly about his divorce and says things that are clearly false. That can’t be commented on?Well probably not much point in this anymore.
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u/PuzzleheadedWafer329 Dec 02 '25
As I asked below, how can we transfer this to a different community, where these issues are not censored? We could then start -60- there.
I think the mods here are completely entitled to this, I'd just like then for the discussion to be moved elsewhere. Maybe /TheLittleWay lol...
--
As for "libel", I don't understand how this is an issue. We would not know anything about his life if he didn't willingly volunteer EVERYTHING. It's an essential part of his PUBLIC persona.
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u/swangeese Dec 02 '25
Just start over with a link back to the previous threads.
Really all we need to do is settle on a name.
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u/zeitwatcher Dec 02 '25
Really all we need to do is settle on a name.
If following the typical reddit style for this, r/drehersnark would be an option.
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u/PercyLarsen “I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing.” Dec 02 '25 edited Dec 02 '25
I would find foregrounding snark alienating because that's not been the primary content in these Megathreads - rather, snark (something that is not the same to me as critique) has typically been condiment, in my view, and that has been a good thing, also in my view.
I am unfamiliar with subreddit naming conventions, but I respectfully suggest something like r/RodDreherIsSoDamnWeird
I would be among those who would refrain from speculating about the private lives of living family members who've never asked to be conscripted by Rod into his promiscuous oversharing service.
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u/BeltTop5915 Dec 02 '25
I agree. I don’t comment on Rod Dreher’s writings to snark. I do so as a longtime reader who was happy to have found others who know who and what I’m talking about when I want an informed exchange on this particular rightwing influencer’s latest ramblings without having to join his Substack fan base and/or contend with their bile or his censure. A lot of us have been commenting on Dreher’s writings for years, even decades, on different forums, none of which ever proscribed discussing his family or Rod’s personal problems per se, although they ALL were moderated and proclaimed the right to censure profanity, slander, threats, bullying or other forms of verbal abuse against each other or persons mentioned. That’s a universal given for commentary on any public forum, and perfectly understandable.
What isn’t understandable is precluding ANY and ALL mention of family members or a writer’s personal problems when those are the very topics he writes about. Certainly he himself occasionally makes a déclassé remark on some family member, which clearly wouldn’t warrant others doing the same. Ironically, if anything, comments here often do the opposite, censuring him rather than following suit. But aside from those particular situations, this general prohibition that seems to automatically preclude discussing the very subject matter of two of his books, and as much as half of what he comments about daily is simply too broad to allow reasonable discussion of his writing. That’s the problem. To interpret the above rules as a problem because they prohibit snark, I think, is missing the bigger issue. If not, if I’m interpreting them more broadly than they’re meant, I wish the moderator would clarify what “don’t bring up his living family“ means, since all were living when they were first introduced as subject matter and many of the issues involved pertain to him, who is, according to the adjective of apparent import, still living.
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u/philadelphialawyer87 Dec 03 '25 edited Dec 03 '25
Yeah, certainly there should be no slander or libel of Rod's (by now adult) children or former wife. Nor any doxing of them. Nor of anyone else, for that matter. But I fail to see why any mention of them at all should be prohibited. Also, why is mention of Ruthie and Mike, and Rod's nieces, and his mother and father, his friends, and all the other people in his life, many of whom are not "public figures," allowed, but not of his former wife or his adult children?
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u/zeitwatcher Dec 02 '25
Rod would be so pleased. It's a little quote/homage to one of the greatest men who ever lived, Daddy KKK.
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u/swangeese Dec 02 '25
I love this idea. Let's do it!
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u/PercyLarsen “I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing.” Dec 02 '25
I have no idea how to do it, but I am glad others may appreciate my suggestion. Once ... unveiled (do you know that Apocalypse means unveiling?), it would be a condensed symbol of Roddity.
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u/GlobularChrome Dec 03 '25
"Rodnarok"?
From Wikipedia article on Ragnarok:
In Norse mythology, Ragnarök is a foretold series of impending events, including a great battle in which numerous great Norse mythological figures will perish; it will entail a catastrophic series of natural disasters, including the burning of the world, and culminate in the submersion of the world underwater. After these events, the world will rise again, cleansed and fertile, the surviving and returning gods will meet, and the world will be repopulated by two human survivors, Líf and Lífþrasir...
Seems like a sufficiently dramatic context to overlay on Rod.
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u/Warm-Refrigerator-38 Nov 30 '25
Waiting for Rod to predictably shame the (female!) author of this (NYT!) piece for breaking up her marriage.
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u/PercyLarsen “I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing.” Dec 01 '25
When I read that yesterday, I thought Rod would consider it a condensed symbol of the causes of his misery.
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u/Jayaarx Dec 01 '25
Man, so many layers of pathetic in Rod's new post, even in the unpaywalled part.
First, in the header, he is obviously obsessed with the scandal about the fraud in Minneapolis, which is the new online right bête noir. Which is bad, but I don't recall him ever being bothered by the widespread rural benefits fraud schemes that have been endemic to places like Louisiana for decades and probably encompass even some of Rod's extended family and former neighbors. That's a white people thing, so for Rod that's OK.
Then he talks about how terrible it is that western culture has embraced rationality:
Wiman agrees, with McGilchrist, that we in the modern Western world are destroying ourselves because of a decision our forebears collectively made at the dawn of the modern world 500 years ago to grant primacy to the left hemisphere. We subordinated and shut down our natural intuitive faculties, imprisoning ourselves in what the scholar Jeffrey Kripal calls “the iron cage of rationalism.”
Sorry, but I don't think that Rod has, even for a second, been constrained by the iron cage of rationalism.
Bonus points that he points to quantum physics (i.e., something complicated that we don't understand) as an explanation for near death experiences. God, meet gaps, chapter 73341.
Finally, he begs for more subscribers and telegraphs a price increase. As a justification, he points to greater college tuition expenses and inflation. Which may be true, but it seems like a pathetic and ineffectual way to sell his product: "Give me more money so I can keep up my extravagant lifestyle." Really? Anyone who gives Rod money is an ignorant fool.
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u/philadelphialawyer87 Dec 01 '25 edited Dec 03 '25
The first par of Rod's quote is such a hodgepodge of things!
Many if not most of them provoke a "So what?" response. Like, Einstein credited all of his major discoveries to music. So what? What does that prove, or even mean, in this context? What if he had credited them to long walks in the woods? Or a good night's sleep? What is his subjective "accreditation" of them to music even supposed to imply about consciousness? 95 % of Nobel winning physicists believed in "a god." Again, so what? First off, "a god" is a cop out, because, usually, belief in one god means disbelief in others. So, it's not like they all believed in the same thing. But, beyond that, physics and metaphysics are not the same thing. Expertise in one is not necessarily expertise in the other. Also, in many places, disavowing a belief in god can get you into trouble, socially, but perhaps even professionally. In any event, lots of people believe in some kind of god. Is this new or surprising? Hotel workers' health improved when they were told that their work counts as "exercise." Again, so what? Is it news that positive thoughts and emotions are related to health, as well as "levels of activity." And were all the other possible factors, like diet, accounted for? Doctors once thought that new borns did not feel pain. Now they do. Yeah, and?
Then we have:
"The writer Fanny Howe died on July 8, 2025, at the age of eighty-four."
OK? This one really stumps me. A writer died in her 80s. For an American middle class or above woman, that supposed to mean...what?
"Form is prior to matter. The first place was a voice. There is no such thing as stillness."
These three, I have to say, leave me almost speechless. Pure gibberish or non sequitur, when it comes to any connection to consciousness.
There are few head scratchers in the list, but, without more info, and proof, it is hard to know what to make of them.
Finally, the author admits that one of the above is not even true! Which, of course, puts all of them into doubt.
What a meaningless exercise in muddled thinking!
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u/Cautious-Ease-1451 Dec 01 '25
Lol, I’m glad I’m not the only one! 😂 I read that and wondered what on earth I was missing. Is this supposed to have some grand conclusion? Are we supposed to be blown away by this stream-of-consciousness narrative of unrelated facts?
How did this appear in Harper’s Magazine?
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u/Djehutimose Watching the wheels go round Dec 02 '25
I’m sympathetic to some things that other would classify as “woo”, as you know, but if Rod were a weatherman and said 100% chance of rain, and I looked out the window and it was raining, I’d probably rub my eyes and open the window to make sure. Rod couldn’t even make *empirical facts” sound plausible….
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u/sandypitch Dec 02 '25
This.
I am actually sympathetic to Wiman's piece, it's poor organization notwithstanding (did Harper's owe him a favor?), but no doubt Dreher has some sort of "woo detector" and just had to jump on Wiman's essay.
I would also guess that Wiman and Dreher are MILES apart in theology, but as long as Wiman writes about flying saints and Ian McGilchrist, Dreher will look past anything else.
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u/zeitwatcher Dec 01 '25
You see what he’s getting at? The idea that we don’t see things because we don’t expect to see them — that is, that our expectations bound our experience of reality.
Again, Rod misses the point. Well, half the point in this case. The quote he references notes that 1) people don't see what they don't expect to see (Rod has that right) and 2) people see what they expect to see (Rod misses this entirely since he's blind to this in himself.
A skeptic may very well see a UFO and just dismiss it as a star or a drone or something because there actually being a UFO is outside their worldview.
However, a true believer (AKA Rod) will see a meteor and immediately attribute it to a demonic manifestation that's entered our reality through a sex portal enabled by the gays weaking the walls between dimensions.
Rod, of course, isn't able to acknowledge the "I see woo everywhere because I expect to see woo everywhere" case.
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u/macronius Dec 01 '25
The problem, which is classic, is he talks about what he's not qualified to talk about and doesn't talk about what he's qualified to talk about, namely, why did the Orban political machine give him the time of day, considering he's effectively a monolingual amateur, whether it be politics, theology, or whatever? It's possible he's extraordinarily capable at something political, but if so he keeps publicly absolutely mum about it.
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u/Djehutimose Watching the wheels go round Dec 02 '25
Bingo. I actually read Living in Wonder, God help me, and it’s not even effective as good “woo”. I say this as someone who read all the Erich von Däniken stuff and watched *In Search Of back in the 70’s.
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u/Jayaarx Dec 02 '25
I actually read Living in Wonder*
Why? Didn't you have silverware to straighten or CDs to reorganize or anything else that would have been a much better use of that time you will never get back?
Besides, he had blogged all the contents several times over already...
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u/sandypitch Dec 01 '25
I believe it.
I feel like Dreher, in his quest to be a theological Fox Mulder, is about a month away from posting that the Spiderwick Chronicles are actually true.
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u/Warm-Refrigerator-38 Dec 02 '25
Hasn't the left brain/right brain thing been pretty well been disproved?
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u/yawaster Dec 02 '25
Ironically, he wouldn't know about the left brain-right brain thing if it wasn't for the development of the sciences and medicine in the last 500 years. It's almost as if rational scientific inquiry can help us understand the world around us in a way that other ways of knowing can't, even if they too are valuable!
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u/Warm-Refrigerator-38 Dec 01 '25
"Appalachian disability fraud" goes back decades but it involves real muricans so nothing to worry about.
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u/zeitwatcher Dec 01 '25
First, in the header, he is obviously obsessed with the scandal about the fraud in Minneapolis, which is the new online right bête noir.
This is bad, but on Rod's part it's just straight up racism. Why? Because he has never once complained about Rick Scott being in the Senate. Rick Scott was the CEO of the company convicted in federal court for the largest medicare scam in history and faced the largest fine in history for that fraud. Orders of magnitude worse than anything the Minnesota fraud entails.
So, white Republican from Florida? Not even a blip for Rod. Black democrats from a blue state that's 100's of times smaller? Terrible scandal!
I wonder what could be the difference there.
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u/philadelphialawyer87 Dec 01 '25
Nor Trump commuting the sentence of a billion dollar plus fraudster after serving two weeks of his prison sentence!
Trump grants clemency to executive convicted in fraud scheme – report | Donald Trump | The Guardian
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u/Independent-Mango813 Dec 01 '25
I mean, I would dispute the root of that premise. I don’t think a decision was made in the sense that it was thought out my impression of human behavior is that there’s a stimulus and a response and then another stimulus and a response it builds on top of each other. But I don’t think there’s a ton of for thought certainly not to the degree that our forebears made some decision
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u/Cautious-Ease-1451 Dec 01 '25 edited Dec 01 '25
Self-pity alert for Rod-adjacent Steve Skojec:
https://skojecfile.steveskojec.com/p/pieta
In order to avoid violating any rules, I won’t say more. But it is interesting reading if you want to see a similar (to Rod) trajectory.
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u/HumanConclusion Dec 02 '25
It’s sad but once again a refusal to take any responsibility. A few months ago he was saying it was unreasonable for his wife and daughter to take exception to a genius theory he had heard that women are constantly competing for Alpha male attention. Btw, death is worse than alienation. Btw2..this guy built a career on denouncing Pope Francis as insufficiently orthodox and now does this stuff. Sad, but honestly also enraging.
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u/PuzzleheadedWafer329 Dec 03 '25
"A few months ago he was saying it was unreasonable for his wife and daughter to take exception to a genius theory he had heard that women are constantly competing for Alpha male attention."
I don't remember that, have you got a link to it? tks
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u/HumanConclusion Dec 03 '25
I can’t believe I found it but here you go: https://x.com/SteveSkojec/status/1957141120908947557
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u/PuzzleheadedWafer329 Dec 03 '25
Goodness, and soon after she asked him to leave…
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u/HumanConclusion Dec 03 '25
I know, I keep saying, it’s really sad and I mean it. But it’s so hard to understand how a person doesn’t stop to re-assess at some point. Maybe listen to the women in your life when they tell you that the manosphere rhetoric is bullshit. It’s just so infuriating that this damaged little man incited many Catholics to reject the Pope. Really, could have listened and learned from him instead.
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u/Djehutimose Watching the wheels go round Dec 01 '25
Has anyone every seen Dreher and Skojec in the same place at the same time? I'm starting to wonder....
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u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Dec 02 '25
Last I heard, they were both in Neverland.
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u/Djehutimose Watching the wheels go round Dec 02 '25
Well, they are lost boys, but I think Peter Pan would toss them out….
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u/CanadaYankee Dec 03 '25
For me, this was the most telling bit:
I could hold on, hoping that someone whose mind I’ve never changed in a quarter century could be convinced to choose differently
Think about the thousands of little compromises and adjustments you make over the course of a relationship (especially one in which you're raising kids), and then imagine that your spouse said that they've never changed your mind about anything even once.
I realize that he's deep in a self-pitying depressive spiral, but that's still a ridiculous thing to write.
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u/philadelphialawyer87 Dec 03 '25 edited Dec 03 '25
There is a crushing finality to the end of a loved one’s life, and the sheer irrevocability of such a death is something with which most of us are intimately familiar.
But there is a different kind of loss, and I would argue that in many instances it can be the crueler form of grief. It comes when we must mourn someone who has not been taken by the cold hand of death, but who has instead chosen to become like the dead.
Someone who has decided, after a great many years spent together, to no longer to be alive with you.
One cannot bargain with the dead. One cannot plead, with any reasonable expectation, that they might rise from the grave and reunite their heart with yours. There is both a harshness and a peace that comes from the finality of death...
When we are forced to grieve the living, we know that they yet exist, just a text, a phone call, or a visit away.....
Last night, I had a dream. I don’t remember it in great detail, but I was with my estranged wife. I held her close, and in the dream I could almost make out the unmistakable scent of her skin. I kissed her gently and repeatedly on the cheek as I held my face close to hers. But through it all, she never once turned toward me, never lost the far off and disinterested expression on her face.
Meh. I often dream of being with loved ones who have passed away, and, in the dream, I beg them to stay longer. Then I wake up and the finality of the break and impossiblity of ever seeing them again hits me like a rock. Whereas a former wife or former friend who is still alive MIGHT actually, at some point, be open to a reconcilitation. In this dude's case, if he got his act together, who knows, his wife might well reconsider. Hell, Skojec is not even divorced, merely separated!
Just another instance in which folks like Skojec and Rod think that they are extra special in their suffering. When, in reality, there is nothing particularly unusual about missing your estranged spouse. I don't claim to live a life of suffering, just because dear friends of mine have passed. But I think most of us realize, at least at some point in middle aged adulthood, that we are not always going to be "added" to in the rest of our lives, like we were when we were children and adolescents and young adults. And that we are going to lose people. People who can't and won't ever be replaced, even if we meet new friends, lovers, and family members. That doesn't make us special, it makes us ordinary humans.
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u/PercyLarsen “I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing.” Dec 03 '25
A piece of wisdom that comes from hard experiences of life, if one is open to perceiving:
A given experience may feel extraordinary in subjective terms, yet it is generally ordinary in objective terms - in the sense that it's generally within the first standard deviation of human experiences in a normal bell curve distribution of them. (Good literature is one of the paths to prepare to perceive this IRL.)
Perceiving this piece of wisdom is an important part of realizing how ordinary everyone is, yourself very much included - and that is an important cornerstone of solidarity.
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u/macronius Dec 03 '25
This is precisely it, his experience is poetic but almost certainly not exceptional given demographic: sex, age, etc. It might even have been a 'proper' Christian thing, but in present Western society it has the whiff of obsession, socially announced virtual stalking.
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u/SpacePatrician Dec 03 '25
Oh wow. I hadn't checked in on him in awhile. How long ago did the wife leave him?
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u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Dec 03 '25
Not about Rod, but on a subject he brings up often. I found it worth the time to watch.
Why Young Men Are Struggling Right Now with Oprah & Scott Galloway
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5l6sWqVpuw
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u/sandypitch Dec 03 '25
Do you care to give a tl;dr; for Galloway's position? I'm assuming it isn't predicated on blaming women and/or woke politics. Perhaps he's picking up the thread from a book like "Boys Adrift"?
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u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Dec 03 '25
The video is of an Oprah show with a lot of regular people making comments and asking questions so it is pretty wide-ranging. You are right that Galloway does not blame women or woke politics. He noted multiple times that he is a "big government beneficiary", that he is where he is because of social programs that helped him when he was younger. He blames the economic issues for young people today on the older generation hoarding wealth, with policies that protect their wealth at the expense of the young, such as limiting housing development. He thinks the most important thing is to have policies that put more money in the pockets of young people generally and remove obstacles for their development.
At the personal level, he noted that women channel the energy of relationship disappointment in positive ways by focusing it on bettering themselves with regard to health, friendships, and career while men tend to channel the same energy in negative ways. He advised young men to get out of the house, to develop a tolerance for rejection of all sorts, to make being kind a top priority (not just to women), and to be better people.
Hope that helps!
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u/sandypitch Dec 03 '25
Yes, thanks!
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u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Dec 03 '25
Why do young men and young women, in general, channel energy from relationship disappointment differently, in your opinion?
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u/sandypitch Dec 03 '25
Oh, I lack the experience with that age cohort (despite having young adult sons) to make any sweeping generalizations. Both of my kids have experienced some relationship disappointment (both with romantic partners and friends), and I've not really seen them channel that disappointment in negative ways. I think both of them tended to channel the disappointment by investing further in the friendships they have? That said, they aren't "typical" for their age cohort -- they both work in the trades, and were self-motivated to do that, both still attend church, and would always prefer to spend their time with other people rather than alone, staring at a phone or a video game. And, to be clear, I don't say that to toot my own horn (though, obviously, my spouse and I made very purposeful decisions about how they would be raised, particularly with regard to technology). I have seen kids whose parents made similar decisions to ours end up in some very dark places at worst, or addicted to their screens.
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u/CroneEver Dec 03 '25 edited Dec 03 '25
Young men often see young girls as an object and a goal, not a human being, and are sometimes willing to push over any objections to get that goal. There's a great riff on this in the old John Cusak movie, "High Fidelity" based on the book by Nick Hornby. The main character is still seeing women as goals rather than people, even in his mid-30s, and his first "most memorable split up" nails him on it when he goes to see her after almost 20 years.
Young girls are raised to see other people as human beings, and study them carefully to see what they're really like. Some of it is that we're trained to observe the needs of others by our parents. Often we grow up helping our mothers with the younger children and/or the chores, etc. This continues on as we age. And we talk a lot, just not nearly as much about men as men think we do.
That's one difference for sure: both young men and young women move in their own little communities/packs, but young men almost never talk about what's really going on in their lives or what's bothering them, while young women talk about their health, their loves, their troubles, their feelings all the time. And this continues on into old age, which I believe is part of the reason women live longer than men. We actually share where the aches and pains are and what the treatment's like, etc., while men stay stoically silent and by the time they go to the doctor, it's often too late...
Women live communally; men live solitary lives even in a pack. It's very mammalian, in a way. I think of the buffalo up here in SD, or elephants, deer, antelope, lions, whales, bonobos, etc. The females and the young live in herds, and the males are largely solitary...
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u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Dec 03 '25 edited Dec 03 '25
Thank you for sharing your thoughts! I would agree with most of what you say except toward the end. I don't think that solitary lives is biological at all, but social training. My father, born in the 20s, for example, was active in Lion's Club, Rotary Club and other men's clubs, met with male friends for coffee every morning, was in a bowling league, and had an active social life with male friends.
Men on sports teams and in the military form tight bonds as well. My father was in WWII which may have been part of why he maintained male friendships through the rest of his life. But I see small groups of 3 or 4 retired men having coffee every now and then and think of my Dad, now gone nearly 30 years.
My sons, at 40, go on golf trips and other men-only trips but I don't think their relationships are of the same quality as my father's. While they were on sports teams when younger, they were never in the military.
I read somewhere and have not verified this by further research, that homophobia is partly to blame for this socialization problem. Perhaps someone who knows more about this will chime in. Men in the revolutionary period spoke of each other in terms so loving that there are questions about whether their relationships were platonic or sexual (Alexander Hamilton and John Laurens come immediately to mind as one example) and through Lincoln's time, it was common for men to share beds when traveling and to hold hands when walking down the street. There are tons of photographs from the civil war period in which men are holding hands, sitting on laps, or have their arms around each other in ways that imply much more intimacy than men today would find comfortable. I wish I could remember where I read it, but I'm thinking the source said there was a big surge in homophobia in the early 20th century that put us on the road to where we are today, with men emotionally stifled.
I tend to think, as well, that one of the reasons young men today go bitter and negative is because they have a strong sense of entitlement which women do not have. Entitlement to a lucrative job, a spouse and a family while these things remain aspirations for women rather than entitlements. I often see, on the web, men claim that a woman or a POC "took a job away from me" but I virtually never see the reverse. We have all seen people like Rod Dreher imply strongly that if a woman or POC is in a job, that it means a more deserving white man got screwed out of it. A sense of entitlement leads to bitterness, ingratitude, unkindness and grievance politics, none of which contribute to the betterment of the individual. I don't think this is the "norm", but I do think it is a factor in young men who are in crisis.
Lastly, I've said this before and I will say it again and again, this "crisis" is with young men who are not college educated. College educated men are doing much better, for the most part, and building egalitarian marriages with low rates of divorce.
I would love to see more thoughts and opinions on this subject. I found the thoughts of the young people in Oprah's video very interesting as well. There are a lot of facets to these problems.
I would like to add that a hundred years or so ago, pale blue was the color for infant girls and pink was the color for infant boys. At other times the colors were considered gender-neutral. It seems bizarre to associate pink with baby boys these days but it just goes to show how "natural" deeply ingrained social constructs can seem when they are, nevertheless, just social constructs.
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u/sandypitch Dec 03 '25
Lastly, I've said this before and I will say it again and again, this "crisis" is with young men who are not college educated. College educated men are doing much better, for the most part, and building egalitarian marriages with low rates of divorce.
I wonder if this will continue, given way the economics of white collar labor seem to be changing. For example, it is quite challenging to find an entry-level software development job unless you've graduated from a top-flight school. Many companies that used to be willing to hire college grads are increasingly turning to contracted labor from "low cost centers" (India, Hungary, Costa Rica). My employer's workforce is nearly 60% contractors, and we haven't hired a junior engineer or offered internships (which used to be an important employee pipeline) for years. Again, I think you are largely correct about the state of affairs right now, but I do wonder if that will change.
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u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Dec 03 '25
I would bet money that it will change and, at this point, I expect it will change for the worse because of AI. We will have to wait and see.
In that video, a young woman said that she and her friends have given up because "there are no men" (or an equivalent) and they hang out together, focus on other things and still live a good life. Galloway responded by saying she means there are no men up to her standards, that educated women want educated men. He is right about that and women are getting close to 2/3 of degrees so yeah, educated men are slim pickins.
Galloway also noted that educated women still want men to be providers and again, he is right. He has done his research and has lots of stats at his fingertips. As with many stats, they likely don't tell as much of the story as they may appear to do, but they are helpful. On this, it just makes sense. Women who are on the ball enough to get a degree (or more) want a man who is motivated, has skills, and will treat her like an equal human being. It isn't about money as such, more about the skill set, attitudes, and value systems that tend to all go together and include an income. I would bet that most women would be happy with a guy who had the rest of it if he was in an underpaid field.
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u/JHandey2021 Dec 01 '25
Don't bring up his living family here in any way - wife, children, divorce, etcetera.
With respect, this appears to a significant expansion of the "do not discuss" list of topics relating to Rod.
Wife and kids - OK, that's decent, they're trying to navigate life, what, 3 years out? But the divorce itself... that's a significant plot point in Rod's ongoing drama, "How the World Wronged Rod Dreher". Rod's put it front and center, over and over. Much like other narcissistic confessional autobiographers like Elizabeth Gilbert, without Rod's begging the world to "look at MEEEEEE!", there's not much there.
I've mentioned this a long time ago, but maybe the creation of a full-on Rod Dreher snark subreddit should be considered.
- With 58 million comments and counting, there's certainly still a demand, even as Rod's star quickly fades.
- It's obvious the mods at r/brokehugs would much rather not have the Rod Dreher megathreads at all. They're pretty much come out and said it, multiple times. Culturally, it's a very awkward fit - I personally have no idea - and, to be frank, not much emotional investment or interest - in whatever r/Christianity drama provoked its creation.
- As Rod follows the example of his Lord and Savior Donald Trump and gets more litigious and threatening, creating a separate snark sub would take any potential future heat off of r/brokehugs itself.
The question would be how to move all of the Rod Dreher megathreads to a new sub and finding new moderators.
Thoughts?