YOUR MOMENT OF DREHER.

Rod Dreher:

It’s a pet peeve of mine when NPR’s Hispanic on-air reporters conclude their pieces by pronouncing their names in a strong Spanish accent. It’s a gesture that calls attention to itself. I’m not sure why, but sometimes you hear American reporters — and not just Hispanic ones — pronounce the name of Latin American cities with a distinct Spanish accent... 

The identity politics of liberals spoil everything.

Throughout his post, you will find hundreds of words about how Dreher is really just talking about proper communication, and hey, he softens his accent when he goes on the radio so what's the big deal, and "who gets to define what is an authentically black sound, anyway? And why are the broadcast-neutral voices of most NPR personalities considered 'white'?" etc. He seems to be afraid the big bad multiculturalists want to make his beloved NPR sound like a ghetto barbershop.

But it's the quoted bit that really lives for me. Imagine Dreher bristling as some insolent Dominican pronounces his own name too Spanishy! I suppose he gets it from this:

The rest of his posts are about political correctness, natch.

WHAT PLANET ARE YOU FROM?

Now that the danger has passed, it will be something to recall and reflect how mere days ago conservatives were pee-dancing around Roy Moore, trying to look classy and moral while simultaneously endorsing a pedo. Rod Dreher had one of the worst takes: In "An Anti-Communist For Roy Moore," he told yet another of his patented "reader who doesn’t want to be identified" stories, this one about an Iron Curtain refugee who compared Moore to the persecuted souls back in the USSR, and explained why, given the chance, he would vote for him:

I would have no other choice. The reason being that if we accepted that a mere accusation — however credible — is the new basis of our political and legal systems, than we have already lost both. This principle was at the very core of the mechanism of communist terror. Did you neighbor have a better car? Well, you accused him of being a secret adherent of capitalism. That was enough. He would be done for, and with some luck, his car would be yours. We are not that far from it here …

I don't recall Dreher, or any of his alleged refugee readers, blubbering over Al Franken or giving him the benefit of the doubt -- in fact, quite the opposite ("Bring it on. This is necessary, and important"). But he was all sympathy for Moore, comparing him to Soviet show-trial victims, despite his more credible accusers.

One can guess why.

Of course when Moore lost Dreher gave a long gassy speech full of Moral Dignity, but barely a day went by before he returned to his lying-bitches theme, joining Claire Berlinsky in denouncing what they both characterize as a "Warlock Hunt." The least ridiculous thing about Berlinski's article is her acknowledgement that some of the powerful men brought down in recent scandals were accused of relatively minor offenses -- but she seems to think that, with the possible exception of Harvey Weinstein, none of them did much of anything wrong; in fact she is especially sympathetic toward the men who admitted they'd fucked up -- she assumes they only repented because feminism, like Soviet Communism, is so oppressive that it brainwashes true victims like Matt Lauer into thinking they're guilty ("The most profound mystery of the Moscow Trials was the eagerness of the victims to confess"). I bet feminists who hear this are wondering, like the Jews accused of running the world, when they will reap the benefits of this allegedly immense power.

Dreher of course makes everything hilariously worse:

It brings to mind the time I was accused of racism in the workplace on completely spurious grounds. This accusation would have been laughed out of any remotely fair-minded tribunal. But my accuser was a racial minority...

In this land where women and minorities are forever oppressing white men, Trump is king. But, to paraphrase Adlai Stevenson, he needs a majority.

I AM A REACTIONARY. One reason I enjoy covering Rod Dreher is that he rekindles my love for America. We are surrounded by conservatives who insist that they love America, and describe it as a horrible place where the unfortunate deserve only the back of the hand of power, which must be maintained by endless wars. After a bellyful of their patriotism I sometimes begin to doubt my own. Maybe they're right, I begin to think: maybe the ugly America they celebrate is the real America, and I have only deluded myself that it was something better.

But when brother Rod denounces the West, as he is increasingly prone to do, my defensive reaction troubles me less. Because while I would agree with him, and his sources, that there are many things wrong with this country, his judgment of general rottenness on our way of life so offends me that I turn into a regular Yankee Doodle Dandy. When he says "[Patrick] Deneen raises the possibility that events -- economic, especially -- will do more to enhance traditionalist conservatism's prospects with the public than anything else," and I realize he is praying for catastrophe to befall us so that we will all come running to Jesus and the Old Ways for protection, I feel the sort of things that liberals of old must have felt when student radicals threatened to burn the motherfucker down: this is still my country, and if we are ridiculous about a number of things, I will certainly side with it against the likes of you.

Dreher does the trick for me better than a gibbering Islamic radical any day. The Islamist in most cases is only amplifying an ancient grudge exacerbated by bad treatment and a lack of video games and pornography that might divert and winnow his rage: Dreher enjoys the privileges and grass-fed beef of a great nation, and still judges it damned, the fucking hippie.

I get a similar, America-loving rush from some of The Anchoress' spasms. She begins a recent post with traditional laments about the liberal media, but soon escalates, with extensive self-quotation, to talk of a "painless coup" that has already made a hellhole of the Land of the Free: not only has it corrupted the noble rustics "Aunt Sally" and "Uncle Jim" into accepting abortion and tits 'n' swears on the TV -- it has actually made "our beautiful churches into bare concrete monstrosities (ready-made for quick-conversion into temples to secular reason)..."

She goes on thereafter about Liberty and Truth and the American President, but my mind yet dazzles that she doesn't just think we've picked the wrong leaders -- she believes some demonic force has possessed us, one that not only dirties popular entertainment and allows wrongful social policy but has actually twisted the minds of her co-religionists to build ugly, idolatrous temples. She doesn't just think the political tug-of-war has lately failed to go her way -- she thinks America is depraved. And when she comes to her prescription...

I don’t have a good feeling. I think we really have to get our free - and by free I mean unencumbered and disenthralled - press back. And soon.

...I get the queasy feeling that she isn't talking about electing McCain, or a slate of Republicans, or even pushing the kind of draconian legislation that usually emanates from the snake-handler wing of that party. She wants to drive out the demons. And who knows how far she would be willing to go to accomplish this sacred task?

Heaven knows I get mad about what's going on in this country, and often treat its leaders, opinion or otherwise, and even its citizens with raw contempt. So I'm thankful that Dreher and The Anchoress are around to set me straight. The American people are often ridiculous and sometimes do horrible things, and I have turned my wrath on a broad array of our native fixers, crackers, dupes, dopes, and scumbags. But they are still my people. I too want more than I could possibly deserve, chafe at well-meant and even reasonable restrictions, and prefer a good time to a Great Awakening. And in the last ditch I'll take my stand with our credit-, pleasure-, and freedom-addicted folk against our would-be saviors.

JUVENAL HAS NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT.

So Rod Dreher was reading Dante and it made him repentant over some harsh things he said back when he was "deeply impressed by SPY magazine, and its way of savaging the rich and the famous with extremely clever, lacerating prose" -- which style he claimed to have emulated (though I've been reading him since he was a New York Post movie reviewer and I don't remember him producing a single intentionally funny line):

I wrote some pretty funny stuff for the first half of my career, and I’m not going to say I was inaccurate in all my judgments. But I was thoughtlessly cruel... 

Over the years, I’ve heard from people I hurt with my words... and I’ve regretted what I wrote. Again, it’s not necessarily that I made an incorrect judgment in assessing a politician, a movie, etc., but that I did so inhumanely. I find now that the kind of criticism that I used to admire now strikes me as having the overriding quality of malice. 

To speak in Dantean terms, if I am granted to pass to Paradise through Purgatory, my misuse of the gift of language and writing will be the thing about me that most merits the purifying fire.

Snif. Seems like only yesterday -- in fact, it was yesterday. Here's Dreher today:

Ariel Castro & Other Cretins Who Deserved It

...There are lots of people I feel sorry for in this world. These are four I cannot pity. There is some atavistic part of me that doesn’t object to the rough justice they have received, though in Castro’s case, it is truly regrettable that he did not repent and die a natural death. My pity in that case is a function of my religious belief. I said a prayer for mercy on his soul, but my heart wasn’t really in it, I’m afraid.

So, I guess what Dreher really meant was, he was going to continue to be "thoughtlessly cruel" -- he's just going to stop trying to be funny about it.

It's an interesting type of Christianity: One that allows contempt for one's fellow men as long as it's solemn. Pleasure (except for the sneaky pleasure of moral superiority) is the thing that makes it wrong.

That's okay. Dreher was never made to write satire; he was born to be its subject.

FUN ON THE FETAL FEE-FEES FRONT.

I sense the conservative elite (which is probably the wrong word, considering their lack of elite characteristics like education and professional training) is a little nervous about the wack-ass abortion laws coming out of the Bible Belt. They're not less insane on the issue, mind -- just worried that actually bulling this shit through might be a little rough on their election prospects. Even Rod Dreher, a fetus-hugger if ever there was one, counsels the brethren follow Ramesh Ponnuru's go-slow advice: "I think he makes a strong point about the possibility, perhaps even the likelihood, that the pro-life movement has miscalculated by rejecting incrementalism at this stage," says Dreher -- the bolding is presumably meant to tip off his God Squad that this is a tactical matter and when the time is right they can unleash Gilead.

To leaven their impatience, Dreher does give his fans a taste of that old-time psychosis, claiming the destruction of in-vitro fertilization blobs is also murder -- "IVF is widely used by Christians, and a consistent, logical pro-life position would outlaw it" -- and that his co-religionists only fail to wave signs with grisly pictures of discarded petri dishes because rich people do IVF. Of course, Dreher also says "I don’t think the inconsistency of the Alabama law can be honestly chalked up to a desire to 'control women’s bodies,'" so we can discount his testimony.

At The Federalist, however, moderation is treason, they can't stop/won't stop -- Georgi Boorman and James Silberman:

3 Negative Consequences From Not Prosecuting Parents For Obtaining Abortions

Guess no one told them ix-nay on the ilead-Gay. In another Federalist story, author Lew Jan Olowski laughs -- laughs, I tell you! -- at the baby-murdering Washington Post, "Washington Post Publishes Abortion Article So Stupid You Won’t Believe It." Already I am crying with amusement! Key graf:

The headline says it all: “If a fetus is a person, it should get child support, due process and citizenship.” Why, yes, it should; this is a commonly held view among pro-life Americans. But the author apparently doesn’t know that. Nor, apparently, do any of her editors.

He sure showed us! My question is, does Citizen Fetus have the vote? And how does it make its preference known? One kick for yes, two for no? Or does its pastor vote on its behalf?

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Been on an early Waylon kick lately; here's one I got off my mama's old radio.
• I'm unlocking yet another issue of the newsletter (Subscribe! Cheap!™) that's just for funsies, albeit the grim modern political kind, in which the White House gets a couple of special dinner guests. Enjoy!

• I get after Rod Dreher a lot, but he's such a perfect amalgam of nearly every terrible conservative trait that he's sort of irresistible. Take this one in which he riffs on a Michigan Live story, "Teen who traded tennis for video games says more pressure playing virtual sports." The kid, Ben Stoeber, is interested in robotics and says he was drawn to tennis "because of the social aspect of it" and expresses no other feeling for it, so I guess it makes sense he'd switch and who cares, but Brother Rod howls "Decline and fall... So this kid left his body, and now lives inside his head. What a tragedy this is!" and goes on about how "doing work with your body (or playing games with your body)" is imporant because "When we remove ourselves from the physical world and retreat into our heads — as these young people are doing — we habituate ourselves to a false narrative about who we are, and what we are. We also become weaker, more subject to authoritarian rule."

That seems weird coming from a guy who doesn't look like he's done much heavy lifting himself, and is so exquisitely sensitive that he can't clean up after his dog without puking. Maybe he figured other readers would make this connection, too, and so rambles about how when he was growing up his old man was always trying to push him to do sports, but young Rod wasn't into it:

I honestly can’t say to what extent my resisting his attempts to get me into the world beyond my head was about a character flaw within me, or it was about him pushing too hard for me to do something that went against my nature. Had my dad not been so pushy about it, or if he had tried more gently to introduce me into nature, or if he had ever shown interest in the books and ideas that captivated me as a child, maybe I would have been different.

This reminds me so much of one of Albert Brooks' narration bits in Real Life: "I’m an entertainer but, quite frankly, if I’d studied harder -- or been graded more fairly -- I would have been a doctor or a scientist."

Anyway, just because Rod Dreher can't snap an emery board doesn't mean anyone else can get away with ignoring the physical world. (Plus, he reveals, his own son has taken up bicycling -- see, Dad, maybe if you weren't such a hothead we'd be a sports dynasty now!) "Please, Ben Stoeber, pick your tennis racket back up!" Dreher cries. "You don’t have to quit playing video games, but make them secondary to your life. Watch Wall-E and think about the choice you’re making..."

At no point does Dreher seem aware that Stoeber's leisure-activity choice may be reasonable and in any case need not be made with any consideration for the False Narrative of Modern Man; nor that his own lack of athleticism is something he might, after years of adulthood, take responsibility for himself instead of laying it on his now-dead father.

NOT WORTHY OF OUR TIME.

Looking in on Rod Dreher just to see if he's still awful. Here's one about (groan) evolution where he says fancy-pants liberals

who love to put the Darwin fish on their cars and rail against fundagelicals who want to teach Creationism in public schools should be honest with themselves and admit that they don’t really want to teach Science and nothing but either.

Because if they were being honest, they'd accept his idea of science, which is that black people are inferior. He demonstrates this via a Steve Sailer link that pulls the cheap parlor trick of never mentioning American blacks (except indirectly, e.g. "Darwin wouldn't be surprised to learn which race had invented rap music") while maintaining Darwin proves races are unequal; for the missing pieces, you just have to look at the rest of Sailer's career. Plus there's the old nudge-wink from Dreher:

One of the things that keeps drawing me to Steve Sailer’s writing is that his beliefs on human biodiversity sometimes lead him to point out inconvenient truths about ideologies informing our common life.

[pushes in nose, pushes out lower lip]

I don’t read him often enough to say for sure...

Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Anyway, Dreher says it's cool, libs, we all ignore reality sometimes:

Unless you believe that plans for building atomic bombs and how to poison a city’s water supply with ricin should be distributed freely on the Internet, then you too believe in the concept of forbidden knowledge.

This is comparable to Jonah Goldberg's schtick of saying you liberals are in favor of censorship just like me because no one wants spread beaver on children's TV. The thing is, while you might entertain these logic games from someone who offers them in good faith, Goldberg and his crew have over the years so convincingly proven themselves first-class enemies of human liberty that there's no need to say anything back except, "Sure, make it Adventure Time for real, what the hell I don't have kids." It's even worse with Dreher, who ably represents centuries of theocratic suppression; the idea that inquisitors like him now stand outside our discourse, hiding pots of flaming pitch behind their backs, and say may I point out your hypocrisy is just too rich to bear.

Fuck 'em. Call me a liberal fascist, but I say Torquemada doesn't deserve a second chance.

JESUS WANTS ME FOR A DUMB SCHEME. I hope you've all been enjoying the latest conservative counterintuition: That Fox News is in the tank for gay marriage. Rod Dreher is right in there, telling us one of his famous stories about how ten years ago a "Fox staffer" told him he "had been told not to touch anything to do with homosexuality" -- in the specific context, that is, of Rod's big scoop on "the role homosexual networks within the seminaries and the Catholic clergy have played in the [child abuse] cover-ups." (This was before Dreher decided that it was not the gay nets per se but the "cultural Left" that caused the altar-boy daisy-chains. Or is that the same thing?) "This was policy handed down from the very top of the network," the apparatchik allegedly told him. Straight from the Gay Fox Kremlin!

Ah, how this takes me back -- specifically, to 2007, when Brother Rod was ecstatic that Foxy "Uncle Rupert" Murdoch had bought Beliefnet:

This is good for Beliefnet, trust me. Murdoch is an Internet visionary, and his deep pockets will only allow this website to diversity and improve its content. I have absolutely no fear at all that Team Rupert will in any way dictate content. Murdoch's core ideology is capitalism -- for better and for worse.

Happy capitalist Uncle Rupert is Jesus' best friend until it's time for the story to change. Outrage, for these people, is a little tin clicker they keep in a box until opportunity demands they take it out, stand on a soapbox, hold it righteously aloft and feverishly fiddle. That the scam sometimes involves a pretense of interest in the truth probably amuses someone Dreher's working for, though I don't think Dreher himself understands what's funny about it.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about "presumptive nominee" Trump and the slow shift in rightblogger sentiment toward him. Some #NeverTrump types will hold firm, I think, but Principled Conservatism will leak a great many soldiers because many of them have no real reason to resist Trumpism -- the National Review guys are obliged by the terms of their sinecures to talk about policy, but do you think someone like Ace of Spades or the guys at Hot Air really give a shit about the Constitution as anything but a rhetorical weapon to use against the dirty hippies they hate? That being the case, what's stopping them from lining up with the ultimate dirty-hippie hater?

I'll be interested to see how Rod Dreher's case resolves itself. For months, Dreher has been pee-dancing around Trump, saying things like “I want Trump to beat the SJWs at their game. They are making America ungovernable… But it is not sufficient to cheer Trump for opposing these idiots. Whatever my heart says in the moment, my head tells me that I don’t want Trump to win…” blah blah blah.

Dreher has remained unproductive on the pot, but lately his hints at Trumpism have gotten stronger. Last week he read a rude blog post by Harvard professor Mark Tushnet, moaned for the millionth time that “we cultural conservatives have lost, and have to prepare for active resistance under occupation,” and declared, “the only good reason I can think of to vote Trump this fall is that we can be certain that President Hillary Clinton, who will probably get to name three, maybe four, Supreme Court justices, will do her best to appoint justices that believe as Mark Tushnet does…”

I imagine Dreher will keep this up till one day Hillary Clinton supports some trans woman using the ladies room, whereupon he'll declare THIS IS IT! and go whole hog. No more lesser-of-two-evils shit, like when he voted against David Duke but “felt sick inside over it.” And he won’t be the only one. After all, if guys like Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich have gone over, how bad can it be?

UPDATE. The rats are boarding the sinking ship! At National Review, Fred Schwarz:

For both candidates, their main interest is, of course, themselves; but Hillary’s basic inclination is far to the left and so is the base of her party, whereas Trump’s inclination is centrist consensus and the base of his party is to the right. Even if you assume they both will practice Clintonian triangulation (govern from middle and placate your base with gestures), Trump’s middle will be to the right of Hillary’s. She will fight to shift the nation leftward, while he may let such a shift occur but will not aggressively pursue it (for instance, on immigration, he won’t do much to stop it, but neither will he aggressively work for legalization and amnesty, and he will let Border Patrol and ICE do their jobs).

So if Trump gets elected and drones some guy because he beat him on a land deal, or clubs Paul Ryan to death with a baseball bat on national TV, Schwarz can confidently say, "Yes, but his capricious evil inclines to the Right!"

ROD DREHER ON THE GAY MENACE, WHICH MUST BE MET WITH ARMS. Oh, go ahead. You'll never guess why Rod Dreher keeps a gun in his house. Gay people! Someone wrote in the Washington Post about anti-gay-marriage people who were not chaw-drooling Cletuses; some readers strongly objected. Maggie Gallagher, as usual, says gays are the real bigots. Dreher says:

She's right about that. Trust me on that one. It's one reason I have a gun in the house. I've let a couple of you trusted readers -- same-sex marriage supporters who believe I'm very wrong on this issue, but who are civil about it -- know what I'm talking about.

I was hoping he'd tell us about the roving bands of sodomites who rattle a stick on his picket fence at night, but apparently he restricts this info to the Righteous Homos in his congregation. But he's an equal opportunity armorer:

It's why I support fully the intention of Celtic Dragon Critter, a transgender reader who believes people like me are badly mistaken on same-sex marriage, to maintain the means and the will to shoot anyone who crosses her threshold to harm her or her family. There are people on both sides of this issue so crazy with rage that they will stop at nothing to punish those they hate.

The spirit of madness and hatred now rising in this culture is prominently on the right of late, but not exclusively on the right.

Dreher's idea of gay violence is presumably this:

Mark Shea points to this video of a small group of peaceable Christians who had to be protected by a phalanx of San Francisco police as they walked through the gay Castro District in San Francisco. Otherwise, it's clear they would have been assaulted even worse than they were before the riot police arrived.

This is terrifying. This ought to be on the national news. If this were a Christian mob surrounding gay-rights campaigners, it certainly would be -- and should be, as no peaceful protester in this country should be subject to this threat. (And no, this wasn't a made- up thing: here's how a local SFO TV station covered it).

Watch this, and tell me these people [Update: by which I mean the enraged activist core, not all gays -- RD.] aren't going to come against churches full force once they have the civil rights laws on their side:

I don't advocate meeting mere offense with violence. But one of the ways we ordinary people get along is this: I don't take a group of people to a church picnic and make a show of telling the folks there, one way or another, that their lifestyle disgusts me. The Christians in question have a certain right to behave provocatively, as a drunk in a bar has a right to tell you your mama is ugly, but they dissemble when they say it's not a provocation.

To compare this to the constant threat some people face just by being perceived as gay is somewhere south of offensive.

THE MOSQUITO COAST. Erin Manning continues to fill in for Rod Dreher at the Crunchy Con blog. Today she considers the Benedict Option -- Dreher's notion of Christians going off the grid and starting their own autonomous communities, far from evil Western culture -- and finds a sticking point: lack of easy ways for neo-Benedictines to "[sustain] themselves and their families apart from the reality of 24/7 corporate employment, which in most cases is only located in or near major urban areas."

One possibility involves the presence of a university which would be a source of jobs and income for many in the community. Some small Catholic colleges in relatively rural areas have seen this kind of thing flourish spontaneously. But I think the key is that the community should arise on its own; the planned community of Ave Maria in Florida seems like something that could easily be a disappointment to those who choose to settle there, for reasons that are beyond the scope of a single blog entry.

If you follow the link you can see a few obvious drawbacks at Ave Maria: they've already contracted with the Publix supermarket chain and BP. Since these businesses market goods from the godless outside world, there's always a possibility that residents may find the near occasion of sin in a sexy magazine or tomato can label. And isn't consumerism part of the problem? Won't the bounty of big-time supermarket shelves corrupt the souls of the anointed?

For centuries "autonomous" communities sustained themselves -- and some monks, zealots, and survivalists still do. Why can't the Crunchies till the land, bake bread, fetch water, and read the Bible by candlelight, if this is what the Lord has called them to do?

The obvious answer is they don't really want to. From comments on this post, and the blog generally, there seem to be an awful lot of Crunchies who expect to keep a desk job in the New Jerusalem.

I look forward to the day when some fundamentalist billionaire gifts Dreher and his crew with some arable land. Within weeks there'll be big fights around the Talking Stick, as public relations executives and journalists explain why someone else should hammer nails. Eventually Dreher will have to announce that an angel has told him the location of some magic tablets or something. And the great thing is, there'll be plenty of knowledge workers on hand to document the collapse.

UPDATE. Commenter FMguru reminds us that "the traditional conservative Christian way to deal with this problem is to import menial labor from far away, transported in the packed, sweltering cargo holds of specially-built sailing ships."

YOU FIRST! "Like J.H. Kunstler likes to say, we are wicked people who deserve to be destroyed." -- Rod Dreher.

In the post before that, Dreher nods approvingly to folks who think Al Qaeda and the Aborigines have it all over us godless humanists.

I used to think Dreher turned against the War on Whatchamacallit because of some late spasm of Christianity. Now I'm convinced it was because he despaired of a Christian revival, and hopes for fundamentalists of whatever stripe to come make us godly. This was sometime a paradox but now the time gives it proof, to quote that Shakespeare play that one of Dreher's anti-humanist heroes likes to bring up.

ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER CONSERVATIVE BITCHING ABOUT ANOTHER AWARD SOMEONE ELSE WON. You thought the Nobel was the end of it? Crunchy Rod Dreher howls about the injustice of... Bill Maher winning the Richard Dawkins Award.

That's right: Jesus freak Dreher and his fellow Jesus freak Mark Shea are saying that the atheists picked the wrong atheist to honor. That's like a vegan telling me I didn't tenderize my pork chops well enough to suit his palate. (One of Dreher's commenters even says -- I shit you not -- "he's not even an atheist, he's an agnostic.")

This helps put the Nobel thing into perspective. Conservatives have as little standing to talk about peace as Dreher has to talk about atheism -- all they know is that they don't like it. Engaging them on these subjects is pretty much the definition of wrestling a pig.

COFFEE BREAK OVER, EVERYBODY BACK ON YOUR HEADS. A few weeks back we looked in on The Anchoress and Rod Dreher, two rightwing God-botherers who nonetheless seemed to have been slightly intoxicated by a whiff of American Autumn -- The Anchoress declaring "those who support capitalism and free markets have a responsibility to demand that manufacturers and suppliers do the right thing," like Jesse Jackson or something, and Dreher siding with Occupy Wall Street against Rand Paul.

Could it last? Are they distributing hand warmers at the encampments, or at least boycotting grapes for old times' sake? Let's see what they're up to now:

The Anchoress:

A lot of people on Twitter are swooning over [Herman Cain singing at the National Press Club]. Some are declaring that “Cain just won the election!”

Which is silly nonsense. He hasn’t even won the nomination, yet.

Having said that, though, Cain has just struck a note that will resonate for many in the country, particularly African Americans in the churches. Don’t minimize the effect his lovely basso profundo will have on people who are looking for something a little human, a little authentic and a little consoling. Do not underestimate the impact this stirring little ditty will have on some.

Fifty years from now, there'll be a giant statue in Washington of Cain emerging from a rock with "Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan" chiseled on the side.

Later The Anchoress takes on liberal media bias. You'll find it in the most surprising places!

Former First Lady Laura Bush, and former first daughters Jenna and Barbara have been included in Glamour magazine’s Women of the Year issue.

That’s nice. Surprising. I can’t help wondering, though, why the magazine known for its photos has chosen such a cramped, graceless and uncomfortable-looking one to illustrate their story.

I mean, these are all-three beautiful, poised women. Glamour has them looking like they need to find a loo. Ah, well, what else would we expect, I guess? The other “Women of the Year” fare much better — their pictures are uniformly excellent, spacious, graceful and complimentary — but I guess Glamour couldn’t bring themselves to praise these three women without punishing them, as well, so they served up this unflattering pic.

Wait for it...

Small potatoes? Sure. But still, how petty.

In The Anchoress' world, self-awareness is a mortal sin. Now on to Dreher, who unsurprisingly has fallen hard for that David Brooks "Blue Inequality-Red Inequality" column with which Charles Pierce mopped the deck earlier. Brother Rod feels the spirit, especially the bit about the poor Red chillen suffering from their special Inequality because they have been prevented from getting married and Christening their babies by something or other:

It’s easy to scapegoat the one percent, in part because they really do deserve a lot more critical attention, but also because nobody loves them. It’s far, far more difficult to talk about the other things, because that involves making hard judgments about moral and cultural values, which, generally speaking, liberals don’t like to do (unless it’s against the white working class), and about facing how economic conditions can work against a building a culture of strong families and moral stability — something that most conservatives would prefer not to face. You could confiscate all the money of the top one percent and distribute among the bottom 99 percent, and that would do little to nothing to address this deeper culture of inequality Brooks identifies.

Well, if you also told them, "Get a marriage certificate and this 100 grand is yours," I think that might move the needle. Also, Dreher tells us that bastard Corzine is a Democrat. Fight the real enemy!

As an add-on, let us briefly treat (not successfully, I'm not a clinical psychologist) Megan McArdle, whose Occupy Wall Street post is more or less David Brooks', but stuffed with extra self-regarding prattle, and with a decent respect for your betters (I'm not being colloquial, she means your betters) standing in for God. Excerpt:

Similarly, in the 1990s, when I worked with a lot of mostly blue-collar and first-generation college grads (with a fair sprinkling of Ivy Leaguers, to be sure)...

Can't you just see them at the Blarney Stone, knocking back boilermakers and talking derivatives?

...I didn't hear nearly so much about the rich and how greedy they were--even though in the late 1990s, income inequality was almost certainly worse than it is right now.

Things were rough in the days of the Clinton boom, I tell ya. We didn't have iPods! But wait for it...

As IT consultants...

One is tempted to flip all the cards and call it a night, but let's upshoot this with a parting Shorter: All the OWS kids are just jealous, not like me, and my friend George Orwell agrees.

THE VIRTUES OF HYPOCRISY. Beliefnet's Rod Dreher starts out saying "there's something ...not quite there when conservatives who don't have families give advice and commentary on family-related issues." He tells us how a "conservative acquaintance... explained that the experience of raising kids, especially the one who suffers so much, has made him far less willing to pass judgment on other parents."

You know the drill. After several paragraphs Dreher executes a McArdle Maneuver and ends up talking about murderous teens who won't do their homework and "self-centered, couldn't-give-a-s**t parents." (He also says that having children "made me less quick to judge others harshly.")

Dreher's apparently in a mood to advise his fellow conservative commentators on lifestyle choices. Some days earlier, he told them to leave "Leave the NYC-DC Bubble":

I wonder if The American Spectator would be better off moving back to Bloomington, Indiana. I wonder how different National Review would be if it kept its DC bureau, but relocated its offices to Dallas or Atlanta. Similarly with the Weekly Standard. And so forth. For one thing, there would be much greater attention paid to culture, and less to policy and pure politics.

More attention to culture? Didn't he see Jonah Goldberg's review of Cloverfield? (Spoiler alert: it's about 9/11, "a message worth pondering.")

We've been over this before. Pleasing as is the prospect of Goldberg spending his lunch breaks at the Cracker Barrel in Fritters, Alabama, there's no reason for rightwing columnists to walk the walk. They're big idea men; they have read Hayek and Bloom and Coulter. It is for the lumpen to follow their social prescriptions, while the Smart Ones ponder welfare policy over phyllo-wrapped salmon at Persephone.

It would be easy to twit them for hypocrisy, but let us say this for them: they want others to think as they think, but draw the line at demanding that they live as they live. Dreher wants them not only to think as he thinks -- insofar as they can follow that snaking stream of half-baked ideas -- but also to live as he lives: religiously, away from major cities, with kids, organic food and compost heaps. He's the sort who will worry over "what American conservatism has become," and in the very next post worry over those who are "policing conservatism from within." And he thinks he's being non-judgmental. Some kinds of hypocrisy really are worse than others.

BELLS, SMELLS, AND INCELS.

I'm an old fart and in many ways think like one; I am pleased, for example, when Pedro Martinez bitches about pitchers who save their pwecious widdle arms with short starts. Sure, the world and the game have both changed, but I'm an old fart, dammit, and there's not much left for me except the prospect of withering death, Gold Bond Medicated Powder, and the right to complain!

But I tell you, boys and girls: While I at first found the prospect of music and movie stars doing the Vatican drag at the Met Gala a tiny bit embarrassing -- not so much for the Church, though I am ex-Cath, as for the Met (since it's charging the little people more money to get in, I feel it shouldn't be glamming so hard) -- I was talked out of it pretty quick by all the wingnuts screaming sacrilege. Of course no one was more protective of the Mother Church than religion-hopper Rod Dreher, who starts by suggesting that one reason he became Catholic was the stink-eye he got from an old priest when he tried to touch him up for some old vestments for Halloween; the priest's "visibly shocked" refusal was "teaching me something about sacredness," says Dreher -- no doubt that it's a powerful weapon to use against the psychologically crippled.

And now we have rappers wearing mitres! Look, says Dreher, here are some dirty lyrics from a dirty, dirty Rihanna song: "Sticks and stones may break my bones/But chains and whips excite me." Gasp! Normally one only finds such disgusting sentiments on greeting cards, aprons and coffee mugs.

But Ross Douthat manages to top him: The Gala, he muses, is the fault of Vatican II.

It was the church’s own leadership that decided, in the years following the Second Vatican Council, that the attachment to the church as culture had become an impediment to the mission of preaching the gospel in the modern world. It was the leadership that embraced a different approach, in which Catholic Christianity would seek to enter more fully into modern culture, adopting its styles and habits — modernist and even brutalist church architecture, casual dress, guitar music...

And these concrete cathedrals and folk masses took the majesty out of the Magisterium:

The secular culture welcomed the church’s Protestantization and demystification and even secularization, praised the bishops and theologians who pursued it, and then simply pocketed the concessions and ignored the religious ideas those concessions were supposed to advance. Meanwhile, that same secular world maintained a consistent fascination, from “The Exorcist” down to, well, the Met Gala, with all the weirder parts of Catholicism that were supposedly a stumbling block to modernity’s conversion…

See, the plebes still go for that disused liturgy and pomp -- 'member when everybody bought that "Chant" record? And this, Douthat says, shows an opportunity for Churchy wingnuts:

Thus the only plausible approach for Catholicism is to offer itself, not as a chaplaincy within modern liberalism, but as a full alternative culture in its own right — one that reclaims the inheritance on display at the Met, glories in its own weirdness and supernaturalism, and spurns both accommodations and entangling alliances (including the ones that conservative Catholics have forged with libertarian-inflected right-wing political movements).

The future of conservatism: Bells, smells, and incels! I wonder whether Dreher or Douthat or any of the other crabby cons have considered even for a minute that what they're promoting is basically a fetish, and that what they appear to love about the Church has nothing to do with Jesus (the world's first SJW, after all) and everything to do with grandeur and power of a sort promoted by Donald Trump -- he's into all-gold stuff, too.

WON'T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE ASSHOLES?

That lady who called the cops on that black-people picnic in Oakland, got embarrassed, and cried, was pretty funny/sad, as have been the associated photoshops. But a man of God has asked that we spare a thought for the lady who called the cops -- the internet can be cruel, he says, and she must be suffering from all the negative attention, so let us HA J/K IT'S ROD DREHER so of course his brief pretense of Christian charity is really just a gimmick to get you to listen to how scared of black people he is:

Here’s a story: We lived in an apartment complex not too long ago. There were three young unmarried guys living in the flat above ours. They would get loud on the weekend. We decided that being good neighbors meant that we should put up with the banging and hooting until 10pm, but not after that, because that was bedtime. The first few occasions we went up to ask them to knock it off, they were nice about it. But then they got obnoxious, usually after they had been drinking. Finally one night, after multiple attempts to ask them to stop, we had to call the apartment security people. We didn’t want to be those neighbors, but they left us no choice.

The difference is that those bad neighbors were causing actual harm, yelling and banging on the floor and playing loud music until late in the night. The people grilling in the park were not harming Barbecue Griper one bit. Still, had the jerks upstairs been three young black guys, not white guys, I wonder if I would have said anything to them at all, for fear of them turning it into a racial confrontation. If I had called apartment security on them, like I eventually did with the white guys, after they ignored our repeated requests to stop banging on the floor, etc., would they have confronted me in the parking lot with a smartphone camera, calling me a racist, and distributing it to social media, and turning me into a racist pariah?

Too bad about that lady, but the real victim is Brother Rod who is persecuted in his fantasies by race-card-wielding black revelers who are much worse than the actual white people who gave him a hard time.

Later in the column Dreher yells at Ta-Nahisi Coates, as one does, then gives us one of his patented "Reader" "Letters" in which some guy says that first, "This lady is NOT white. It is clear to me from her facial features and body type that her racial and ethnic background is mixed " -- trust him, he's spent a lot of time on these things! -- and barbecues in Oakland are a fire hazard ("Oakland Hills fire of 1991 anyone? Google images. I survived it") and "people regularly, openly and brazenly break the law in Oakland and asking them 'nicely' to desist DOES NOT WORK" -- you Rod Dreher readers all know what he means and if you don't, he inevitably makes it clear:

Oakland, especially the area around Lake Merritt, is in a state of complete lawlessness. And no one cares. In fact, the lawlessness is celebrated as a kind of teenage, immature, passive aggressive rebelliousness. You can’t tell me what to do! Especially if you’re white – because that’s, you know, intrinsically racist. Their sad battle cry…..

It's the old story: I'm a white guy who has lived among the savages, and Breitbart says liberals all live in white places, so take it from me, they're sub-human. It's only a matter of time before Dreher moves his blog to Stormfront.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, following some of the more miserable rightblogger Pride Week posts. The Rod Dreher one is a pip -- a long passive-aggressive whine about how unfair it is that the New York Times is nice to gay people, and Rod Dreher has to put up with it week after week because the New York Post is a piece of shit. I couldn't get too deep into it, or I would have included this:

The point is, even though its fortunes have been diminished over the past decade, as have the fortunes of all newspapers, the Times has unparalleled power because it has the attention of elite opinionmakers. Media bias exists not in telling people what to believe, but in framing the context for which an event or phenomenon can be understood. A paper as powerful as the Times may never tell its readers that America should go to war with Freedonia, but if it devotes hugely disproportionate coverage to the wickedness of Freedonia, and the noble efforts of anti-Freedonia Americans, then we should not be surprised when public opinion moves steadily in favor of war with Freedonia. All decent people support war with Freedonia, right? What kind of unpatriotic Americans oppose war with the wicked, liberty-hating Freedonians? You see how this goes.

That's one hell of an example. I know the Times has supported imperialism in its own way many times, but given that at the start of the last big war, when you could at least hear some dissenting voices at the Times, Dreher was all in for the big win, that takes balls, or whatever Dreher has instead of balls.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

It's good, and sort of new!

•  Got a hot-off-the-press Roy Edroso Breaks It Down issue inspired by the McMinn County Board of Ed pulling Art Spiegelman’s Maus from its schools on the grounds that the rudeness of its depictions of the Holocaust and its fallout are unsuitable to its students. 

Yair Rosenberg, who is the author of one of the dumbest essays on film and TV criticism ever written, takes a look-on-the-bright-side angle on the Maus controversy: surveys suggest Americans know more about the Holocaust than they do about their own democratic processes! For obvious reasons, that’s certainly not unmixed good news; also, just because students know the Holocaust happened and who the major players were doesn’t mean they’ve grasped its full significance, and the rise and spread of eliminationist rhetoric in the United States as directed toward other minorities -- for example, the Latino immigrants whom Fox News sturmers call “poison” -- suggests that not enough of them do. It may be that, as the kids have been encouraged to think of racism as something that's over and done with (because to suggest otherwise is critical race double-plus-ungood), so they consider genocide something that was knocked out when the camps were liberated. 

Also, Maus is not the only book yahoos are currently banning or looking to ban, thanks to the CRT scare and related pathologies -- see here and here just for starters. Conservatives have been freaks about culture war for decades, but the Trump metastasis has upped the ante; once they were content to snarl every once in a while about Tinky Winky or some shit, but now they’re rampaging through reading lists and erasing anything that might give their kids a different way of looking at the world than what they try to beat into them. And heads up, because they never stop at schoolbooks.  

•  Actually there’s a bumper crop of freebies at REBID, including this one about Joe Biden calling that stupid son of a bitch a stupid son of a bitch, so go look around and, if the spirit moves you, subscribe so you can get it all on an ongoing basis. It’s cheap!

•  Rod Dreher, prestige media’s favorite religious maniac, just gets better and better. Here’s the header on my favorite Dreher post of the week:

Mouthy darkskin pussy-hat GRRRRR splurt! But what’s this about “some of her generation are choosing sterilization, because of wokeness”? Turns out this refers to a single alleged instance in the Dreher “Reader” “Mail” that constitutes most of the post, the author of which Dreher has thoughtfully anonymized lest the Woke Mob come after him, sure that’s it wink wink. 

Author’s assistant “Annie” moonlights as a bus driver, see, and she says she knows a family with three college-age girls, one of whom “graduated third in her class of thirteen hundred and was given a scholarship to attend an Ivy League university.” If you’ve ever read a rightwing column, I bet you can already hear the sinister background music! Sure enough:

The other day, Annie told me that there was a family argument because the daughter was going to schedule an appointment at the gynecologist to get her tubes tied. She is twenty-two years old! Her rationale was that the world is too awful and that no more children should be brought into this hellhole.

[Organ sting!]

I have known her daughter since she was eight years old, and for the past fourteen years her mother has told me about her increasingly radical, Leftist views. Starting in high school, the cause was environmentalism, and then being at that Ivy League university, especially during these last two years, the cause has also grown to include the usual diversity, equity, inclusion, social justice and destroy-Western-Civilization bullshit.

Wow -- if she goes to grad school, I reckon she’ll kill herself for Gaia! But wait, there’s more psychosexual just-so storytelling:

Last year, the same daughter made an appointment at Planned Parenthood to have an IUD implanted. Her mother threw a fit, as they have good health insurance; she lamented to me that if she wanted an IUD she could go to any gynecologist in the suburbs for a more hygienic and safer procedure. 

You know how dirty those Planned Parenthoods are, on account of the abortion germs. 

And what’s even more troubling is that the daughter isn’t even sexually active according to her mother (knowing the mother and the daughter, I believe it). Therefore, it wasn’t even for preventing pregnancy but rather for making a statement of solidarity with her “Black” and “Brown” sisters.

We’ve all been to the marches and seen the “PESSARY SOLIDARITY” banners, haven’t we? (I would love to hear this cowboy explain why "Black" and "Brown" are in quotes, too.)

Two years ago, none of the three daughters wished their mother a Happy Mother’s Day, as they considered it an antiquated custom. 

Wow, if only I’d thought of that one whenever I forgot to mail a card! “Sorry I missed your birthday, but you know how I feel about annualism.”

These kids are becoming evil. At least one consolation is that if the daughter gets her tubes tied, that’s the end of that bloodline.

“They’ll know we are Christians by our love.” ‘member that joke?

Now on a more optimistic note, I have attached a Christmas photo from one of my neighbors. The father is the pastor of a local Mennonite church. They have eleven children (they had twelve, but one died shortly after childbirth). They have all been homeschooled, and they are all very sweet and pleasant…

WHICH WAY, WESTERN MAN? Will it be the false god of IUD, or Daddy’s Little Brood Sow? If these clowns ever Benedict Opt out of the internet, I have to say I’ll miss the laughs.

IGNORANCE IS BLISS. John Podhoretz asks: what good are film critics who actually know something about movies? I'm not kidding, that's his point:

Film criticism requires nothing but an interesting sensibility. The more self-consciously educated one is in the field -- by which I mean the more obscure the storehouse of cinematic knowledge a critic has -- the less likely it is that one will have anything interesting to say to an ordinary person who isn't all that interested in the condition of Finnish cinema.

He gets Rod Dreher to bite, too, and pretend that the breezier style of Anthony Lane (writing about Star Trek!) relative to that of the learned J. Hoberman proves his point.

It's a big wide world and raw talent will always find a way, but there are few practitioners of anything who would argue that training and education are drawbacks in their fields. Would Dreher and Podhoretz say so about their own current occupations? (Each refers to his own woeful career detour into criticism, and as someone who has read their reviews I am not surprised to learn they now disdain the craft, as they showed little interest in it when they were practicing.) Dreher will go on and on about the sad state of informed religion reporting, and Podhoretz can spool out conservative movement history. I doubt they'd tolerate someone wandering into their kitchens and saying, "Let me have a go -- I don't know much about it but I've got an interesting sensibility." (In fact, why should people bother with all the heavy theologians Dreher likes to quote, when Andrew Greeley and Dan Brown make easier reading?)

If they wouldn't indulge it themselves, why do they apply it to criticism? Partly it's an excuse to play populist -- lacking an opportunity to talk NASCAR and brewskis, they assure the imaginary common folk in their audiences that they don't get all that guff about mise en scene and deep focus neither. But I think they disdain criticism mainly because they think it doesn't count. As we have tirelessly (or tiresomely, depending on your POV) discussed here, anything having to do with the arts is for many conservatives some baffling voodoo that liberals like, so it must be insubstantial and easy to do; but they can't get much of a toe-hold in it, which must be due to some fancy-pants professor's trick. Still they feel they should try to take it over, because it represents, in their infertile imaginations, a source of cultural power. Maybe they think if they deride criticism, its existence will cease to trouble them.