GRADING ON THE CURVE.

Fuckin' Dreher, man. He's just too rich a subject. There's his post about Brown University providing free tampons in its unisex bathrooms -- which he finds an outrage ("virtue-signaling at its finest, from tomorrow’s generation of American elites") and closes with a link to a video of Putin laughing, no doubt because this is how great civilizations fall: by failing to require females pay for sanitary products, the way St. Paul intended. (The really creepy thing about that post is, Dreher doesn't even bother to explain why anyone should find such a modest change a threat to society -- it's like free tampons are ungodly or something.)

Anyway, today Dreher pimps a Peter Hitchens First Things essay about how sure, Putin is bad, but the Soviet Union was worse so shut up about Crimea. One of the sections Dreher quotes is particularly worthy of note:

A few miles away, near the turbulent Taganka Theatre [in Moscow], is a small park, with trees and a pond. A friend of mine, Conor O’Clery of the Irish Times, remarked in the early 1990s on how the grass grew badly there and the trees were stunted. Only as the pace of reform quickened did he discover why. Men and women still living nearby came forward to recall what they had seen there as children in 1937, in the early summer mornings, as they hid in the foliage of the trees. Silent men had dug great pits in the park. Unmarked vans had arrived, and more silent men, wearing long rubber aprons, had flung corpses into the pits, dozens of them, bloody from the execution chamber. The pits had been filled and covered over. And the children, when they climbed down from the trees and hurried home, were ordered by their frightened parents never to speak of what they had seen—at school, with friends, in shops, anywhere. Nor did they, for more than fifty years.

Very poetic, but if the grass and trees were being fertilized by human bodies, wouldn't they be flourishing, not stunted and bad? I guess maybe their growth was actually suppressed by totalitarianism, in a sort of reverse miracle.


Anyway Dreher swallows this whole, and then tells us about some kid who played Pokemon Go in a Russian church and, under the enlightened reign of the current not-Soviet leaders, faces five years in prison for it. Dreher:

They say he faces up to five years in prison. I find that excessive, but I don’t feel sorry for this jackass. His fellow atheists committed mass murder of and terror against Orthodox Christians when they were in power during the Bolshevik tyranny.

If only the Bolsheviks had possessed Pokemon Go, and expressed their barbarism by catching imaginary creatures instead of Christians!  Later, after (apparently) even Dreher's fans protested, he updates:

Since so many of you asked, I would not give this guy five years. I would not give him five weeks. I would give him five days, max. What I’m praising Russia for is defending its sacred spaces.

Sacred spaces yes, safe spaces no!

It would be fine with me if the local priest or bishop asked the state to waive the charges, and they did so. It’s the principle. Note well that he did what he did knowing full well that he was breaking the law.

Next time you read some of Dreher's "You will be made to care," "Law of unmerited possibilities" bullshit about how transgender Hitler is trying to curbstomp Christianity with the power of the State, keep this in mind.


Oh, and if you can take any more, get a load of Dreher's post on the author of Eat, Pray, Love leaving her husband for a woman, and this update:

In an earlier version of this post, I had some very caustic commentary about Gilbert’s words here. A friend and reader of this blog e-mailed me to point out that I was guilty of the sin of ingratitude. Gilbert had generously blurbed a book of mine, and in this reader’s view, I was wrong to be so nasty about this affair in her life...

I like to think the "friend and reader" was his agent.



DREHER IN THE BUNKER.

I'll certainly have more tomorrow morning in my newsletter (Subscribe! Cheap!™), but I got around the DC protests yesterday (though I bailed on the night watch -- I'm an old man, y'know) and first I'm here to set you straight that the crowd was racially mixed and not just white anarchist punks, and it was very young -- in other words, disenfranchised from jump and not here for your "but my lawnorder" concerns. But one sees what one wants to see, and sure enough here's Rod Dreher quoting James Lileks -- talk about double penetration! -- in one of his many pants-wetting posts about "Weimar Minneapolis" etc. --

I encourage everyone to take a look at Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist James Lileks’s melancholic yet powerful blog take on what some of his fellow citizens have done to the city they share. He took a drive through the riot areas, and took pictures. He posts images of gang graffiti. The Bloods have been here (this is their territory in the city). Also a Mexican gang that is heavily involved in human trafficking — they tagged a wall.

What kind of freak looks at nationwide clashes between young Americans and police and his first words are about the Bloods and Mexicans?

Well, now a new generation is introduced to Ol' 9-11 Jim. As for Dreher, he's doing his usual thing, just at even greater length and in a more screechy, panicked voice -- that noise, far outside my compound! Could it be Antifa? Like, for example, "reader" "mail" from "a liberal(ish) white reader" who "writes to say he has been truly shocked by how all his white liberal friends are acting now, at least on social media." Liberal(ish) White Reader tells Rod, "I know on this issue you’ve had the same response as me, which is sympathy for Black people who are the victims of police brutality," so you know he's legit, right? And he's had "substantial conversations" with "Black people (both college educated, one who still very much lives as part of the Black community, the other who is in a mixed-race marriage and from what I can tell travels in a mostly White social circle)," which... is a weird way to qualify his interlocutors; maybe Dreher's readers would be interested in how much exposure to white people the "Black people" had, in order to know how to judge their responses.

Anyway, Liberal(ish) White Reader says the "Black people" were "hot, and all 5 were more sympathetic to the riots than I was," but never mind them because the white liberals (as opposed to liberal[ish]s) accused him of blindness to the situation because of privilege, which is ridiculous because the white liberals were all limp-wristed caricatures:

The perspectives [the black people] had on it came from growing up scared of the cops, knowing people who’d been manhandled or profiled, and just navigating America and all the systemic racism in it (which I 100% believe is real) as Black people. So it was nuanced and grounded in reality. The White liberals, on the other hand, for them it was purely ideology and performance.

In other words, you have to expect the "Black people" to be this way, but it's obnoxious for whites to sympathize. I've seen this shit for decades: guys like Rod (excuse me, Liberal[ish] White Reader) can at least compartmentalize their feelings about "Black people," but what they really hate is "Black people"-lovers.

Also Dreher's customary "I'm no Trump fan" JustTheTip-Trumper construction is taking on many, many more waste-words:

You see that kind of [graffiti] scrawled on the wall of a building in the city that’s in the process of being burned down by Antifa, and you might think differently about Trump’s obnoxious boast about shooting rioters. I wish he had been more statesmanlike, and laid down a hard line without being so provocative, but it’s hard to look at, and listen to, Antifa without believing that Trump is more right than wrong.

And:

The American media (including me) did not see the Donald Trump election coming, and they’re going to miss the political blowback from these riots. I say that as someone who did not vote for Donald Trump, and who wishes we had almost anybody else in the White House right now in this time of grave national crisis, given that his big mouth is likely to make a bad situation much worse. Nevertheless, the fallout from these riots are going to push so very many middle-class and working-class people to the Right. Count on it. As Douthat writes...

Ugh, I'll spare you. (I would also ask: What "middle-class" and "working-class," anymore?) Lately I've been leaning toward the explanation that Dreher's a con man playing his obviously confused readers with his fancied-up Get Ready Man shtick, but this latest wave suggests to me that he's legitimately unhinged, and suffering mightily as he is inevitably driven by fear and hatred into the arms of Spiro T. Trump.

DREHER'S HAPPY FUN STORY TIME.

Oh brother:

Rod Dreher's Reader Mailbag feature is a fun object of contemplation. Sometimes I have no doubt the items are authentic, even when they're most fantastical -- as when he gave the floor to some guy in rural Pennsylvania who told readers his town was a BenOp paradise, with lots of churches and plenty of good manly work that you don't need a sissy degree to do -- "the biggest problem those factories face is not competition from Mexico or China, it’s a shortage of workers" -- and encouraged Christians of a certain persuasion ("we are CATHOLIC. The community demands it") to move there and, one is forced to conclude, join him in nightly mass self-flagellation frenzies to prepare for the day when The Leader calls on them to go to Philly and kill the unbelievers.

But there are some Dreher correspondents who I can't be sure are real -- like the "old friend" who called and said she and her son had been terrorized by potty-mouthed "obviously transgendered" men at a showing of Captain America: Civil War in Texas, of all places:

“Rod, I have gay and lesbian friends. I have a bi friend,” she said. “None of them behave like that. I’ve never seen anything like it. They were egging each other on. And the sense of rage coming off those people — it was evil. And here’s the thing: this was not in Austin, this was not in Deep Ellum [hipster Dallas neighborhood], this was in the far north suburbs. 

“This was not at the fringes. It’s in a town that’s home to three of the biggest churches in Texas!”

Was this person kidding? Was her story actually made up by Dreher, channeled by him while he was dressed like and talking in the voice of Norman Bates' mother? It's a tantalizing mystery.

But this Liberal Who's Had Enough, and whose alleged correspondence fills this current Dreher post, is something else. She says she's a "secular/agnostic Californian" whose "ex-Catholic mom loathes organized religion to this day," and describes herself as surrounded by "secular liberals"--

Almost everyone at my corporate law firm was a secular liberal. My California neighbors and friends are secular liberals, as are my fellow government lawyers. My mother, siblings, and their spouses are all secular liberals.

If this incantation suggests the groundwork for a conversion narrative to you, congratulations! As once we had the liberals who since 9/11 were outraged at Chappaquiddick, so now we have one who is saved by the grace of MAGA, her emotional pussy grabbed by The Leader:

But November 8 and its aftermath revealed to me that I am just so tired of these people. I can’t be like them, and I don’t want my kids turning into them.

Since that fateful day she has become sick of her liberal friends, family, and colleagues, of their "name-calling and virtue-signaling," of their "trendiness," of their "acceptance of vulgarity and sarcastic irreverence," -- indeed, of everything Rod Dreher excoriates from his pulpit every week. And now the metamorphosis:

That leads me to . . . drum roll . . . the Christian Right. It is no small feat, switching tribes. It feels stressful and weird to abandon your tribe for the Detested Other Side.

Since November 8, my husband and I have been taking the kids to church. (He is politically conservative with a religious bent, so no argument there.) I have come this close to buying a giant poster of the American flag for the living room. I may do it still.

We've all had that friend who was really into something -- maybe punk rock, maybe Sufism, maybe Morris dancing -- and then, one day, suddenly hated all those things and went the opposite way; like if they used to be into Bukowski, now they were obsessively reading Chesterton and C.S. Lewis, and had grown a shitty little beard and started smoking a Meerschaum.

That's my offhand psychological explanation. It's also possible that Dreher just made her up. Or it's a Dummy Trap: Someone else made it up and sent it in, knowing Dreher would read it and, his hands shaking, his eyes brimming with grateful tears, fall to his knees and cry to whatever God he's up to now Thank you [Your Name Here] for leading the lamb out of the liberal darkness! I shall repost it on my blog to glorify thy [Your Name Here]!  What do you think?

MORE LETTERS TO REPENTHOUSE.

Fans of Rod Dreher's "reader" "mail" (background here) will appreciate his latest:

A reader sent me the following e-mail, which I have edited a bit to protect her privacy, and the privacy of others mentioned here:

I wanted to bring this to your attention. My husband had a conversation with a young friend of ours who is a recent college grad. He has been working at [a major retailer] for the last year. I’m not sure what his title is, but we have encountered him at the store. He is a great worker and has earned a number of company awards for his performance. He related to my husband that he had had a conversation with a friend at work about the use or non-use of transgender pronouns. He took the position that he would not feel comfortable doing this.

He was later called into his manager’s office and reprimanded. The manager told him that someone had overheard his conversation (manager wouldn’t say who), and that he had made this person feel “unsafe”. Our friend was written up for this, transferred to another store a long distance away, and suffered other severe sanctions! He was a bit naive to have engaged in this conversation at work, but good grief!

What do you guys think really happened?

1. Employee actually said "Trannies gross me out, what do you even call them, 'he' 'she' 'he-she' 'it,' I mean yuk, YEAH I'M TALKING ABOUT YOU 'SERENA'" or words to that effect.
2. Reader ran into Employee who had been absent from the store for a long while and asked Employee what had happened; rather than admit he had been fired for stealing, and knowing from Reader's in-store rants that she was obsessed with trans people, Employee made up story that he knew would excite Reader, then hit her up for ten bucks.
3. This story is bullshit from top to bottom.

The follow-up is also choice ("Yes, under communism, the slightest infraction was met with overwhelming punitive force... The reader goes on: 'I am currently reading “The Gulag Archipelago”, and there are some very obvious common threads..."), and ends on a very promising note:

I’m going to start a new category of blog posts: “The Woke Workplace”. Send me your accounts of political correctness run amok in your office. If you want me to edit any details out for privacy’s sake, say so

Start sharpening your pens, folks: "Dear Repenthouse, I never thought it would happen to me..."

LUDICHRIST. Reading and writing about all these horrible things said by all these horrible people takes a great psychic toll on yours truly. But sometimes Fate (represented in this case by reader Ed Lederer) is kind and sends me something so delightfully absurd that I can only be absurdly delighted by it. Ladies and gentlemen, get a load of this: A theological discussion between Rod Dreher and Andrew Sullivan. Is it my birthday?

It may help to start by reading the endless Sullivan Newsweek essay on (retch) faith and politics that kicked this off. That may be asking too much. It does have its howlers --

Whether or not you believe, as I do, in Jesus’ divinity and resurrection—and in the importance of celebrating both on Easter Sunday—[Thomas] Jefferson’s point is crucially important.

Also:

I’ve pondered the Incarnation my whole life. I’ve read theology and history. I think I grasp what it means to be both God and human—but I don’t think my understanding is any richer than my Irish grandmother’s. Barely literate, she would lose herself in the rosary at mass...

Grant me grandmama's simple faith! cries Sully on the jitney to P-town. But life is far too short. Let's go straight to Dreher's objection and I bet you can guess what it's about (hint: it ain't transubstantiation):

Holy Week reading from Sully’s blog this morning: a reader’s letter about his magical experience hiring his favorite male porn star to have sex with him as a birthday present to himself.

The faggity-fag-fags are having sexity-ex-sex!

To be sure, I don’t know to what extent Sullivan endorses his correspondent’s actions, but I’m a regular reader of his blog, and given the things he does endorse, and write, I think it’s reasonable to assume he approves of his correspondent’s point of view. How is that letter-writer’s actions remotely compatible with Christianity?

If the porn star were the correspondent's cousin, and they did their coupling in the corn-crib, and the correspondent felt so sick about it afterwards that he made a big donation to a megachurch and embarked on a contrite, loveless, and quiverfull heterosexual marriage, all would be hunky-dory. But the gays just have sex for fun, which makes Jesus stabby, as do Sullivan's other infidel friends:

Sullivan praises in his Newsweek essay the selective Christianity of Thomas Jefferson, who famously edited the New Testament to take out the parts he didn’t agree with.

On the other hand, Jefferson did have sex with his slaves, which you have to admit is pretty Biblical.

But for Dreher it's mainly about the gaysex, though he can't supply any direct quotes from the Top Guy to justify his opprobrium. "Jesus’s teachings weren’t as explicit as St. Paul’s," Dreher admits, "but then again, if you cut Paul off, you don’t have Christianity," just as you don't have George Orwell without the glosses of the neocon propagandists who appropriated him.

Dreher continues to yell at Sullivan for his lack of chastity, inevitably inserting the Bullshit Christian Moment of Self-Abnegation:

Look, I don’t exempt myself from this. Every day I resist the radical call of Jesus to detach ourselves from our desires for His sake.

Sadly, he doesn't go into details; I imagine him jerking off with his Wii console.

In his response, Sullivan seems at first to panic and admit everything; while insisting that "sex is an extremely minor theme" in Christ's work, he accepts that "the notion that Jesus was a free love kinda guy is also preposterous, and I never wrote otherwise." So he is guilty, guilty, guilty of lust -- and since that includes lust in one's heart, then so is everyone else -- "Any man who has ever had a chubby for someone not his wife is an adulterer," he writes. "Every celibate priest is an adulterer. The Pope is an adulterer..." One begins to suspect Sullivan experiences guilt not as a psychic or mystical transmission, but as a kink. In desperation he brings up The Woman Taken in Adultery and Let He Who Is Without Sin Etc. Translation: Don't hurt me/Or you're a Pharisee.

Then it's Sullivan's turn to have the Bullshit Christian Moment of Self-Abnegation, which he performs splendidly:

I have had good moments in this struggle and terrible, lasting failures. This Lent has forced me to consider my constant failures more than my intermittent moments of grace. That I confess. As a practical matter, I have not had the strength to live as Saint Francis, without possessions, without a home, without sex, without anything but a subsistence diet, reliant entirely on physical labor and begging on the streets as a last resort.

Oh well, maybe next year, Sully.

Dreher comes back to patiently explain to Sullivan the real meaning of the WTIA story: Apparently the cast-the-first-stone thing is a minor part of it, perhaps added by script doctors on the road, and the real message is that woman was a whore and she better not do it again. And that reminds him: Homosexuals! By which he means, why do you liberals keep bringing it up?

It’s interesting how so many liberal Christians accuse conservatives of being obsessed with sex, yet so much of their own writing and activism focuses on sex and sexuality, especially homosexuality. In my old, lily-white Philly neighborhood, there was a mainline Protestant church that posted a banner out front with the rainbow flag, announcing that it was a “welcoming and affirming” congregation. Which is fine, if that’s their thing. I passed that church every day, though, and it finally occurred to me that they never put a banner up announcing that they welcomed black people, or Hispanics.

Somebody make this man a BUTTSEKS=RACISM bumper sticker, stat. Also Dreher returns to Thomas Jefferson, "a brilliant and noble man who, in his intellectual pride, only accepted as much of Jesus as made sense to him. This won’t work, and it won’t work because it can’t work." Thomas Jefferson burns in hell! But Dreher won't, because in his early 20s he let Christ all the way in, if you know what he means, and has been fighting for his chastity ever since. He even has his own version of an "It Gets Better" message for the kids:

It is not true, by the way, that marriage is any kind of “cure” for unchaste thoughts. You have to keep at it, repenting, repenting, repenting, and allowing the grace of God to work on you. I am not the man I was at 25, when I had my conversion. I am not tempted as I once was, but that’s only because I was able to receive God’s healing grace.

Translation: Yes, there is enough good French wine in the world to get you through the long nights of bootless bundling Jesus requires. Get thee a nice wingnut welfare sinecure to pay for it, and sin no more!

THE PUSSIES THAT GOT GRABBED.

Man, this particular Rod Dreher "reader mailbag" -- the latest in a series of highly suspect alleged third-party transmissions Dreher publishes that, remarkably, always sound like Rod Dreher -- is a corker; it goes on so long that Dreher even has to start it in his own voice before cutting to the correspondent's, just for the sake of variety.

I have to admit, when I saw the title art --

-- I was expecting big drama, like maybe a gang of trans thugs beating up a wispy Dreherite. But instead I got acres of this:

He studied education in college, and said that many of the materials they studied were preoccupied with “white privilege” and woke ideology. He didn’t think it was a problem, because it conformed to the view of the world that he’d been raised with. He ended up in the social work field, which was ideologically the same. 

In college, he converted to Christianity, which radically changed some of his values. He now identifies as a conservative, though he has never voted Republican in a presidential race. He says he’s “kind of confused politically” because of all this.

Less talk more rock, buddy! Get to the bigot-bashing!

He says that he’s growing increasingly angry by the relentless wokeness in popular culture. He gave a couple of recent examples of having a strong reaction at the overt liberal messaging in TV shows he and his wife watched.

???!!!???

He says they talked about it, and she convinced him that the liberal messaging was based somewhat in reality (e.g., racism and sexism really do exist). What surprised him was how “black and white” his thinking has become on these topics, as a result of being on the defensive all the time against the overwhelming progressive messaging he sees.

So... the guy sees "liberal messaging in TV shows" (unnamed, probably because Dreher doesn't want to be laughed at even more than he already is), and he and his wife talked about it? Doesn't seem so Stalinist to me -- hold on, Dreher's switching to the Voice Of The Correspondent, maybe there'll be some hot stuff here:

I certainly feel like the progressive ideology is being forced down my throat at every turn. I have unfollowed basically everyone on social media and stopped using it except for work purposes because the stuff people posted made me like them less (both on the left and right).

Wait, so you've had something forced down your throat -- boy, if I had a dollar for every time a theocon told me that! And it's so bad that you had to block nearly everyone you know on social media. Wow, must be something terrible -- lay it on us, bro, and don't spare the lurid details!

I can’t count how many times I have heard people make flippant comments about the taint white men and the patriarchy have left on our society. I don’t feel like I can express my thoughts about any polarizing topic because I will be dismissed due to my sex and skin color.

Blink. Blink.

Flippant comments?

Of course, I recognize I don’t have to let that happen to me, and I don’t want to just sit here and say I’m helplessly being polarized by the rhetoric coming from the left.

Great, maybe he'll snap out of this now!

I won’t ever go down the alt-right road. I don’t want to watch shows and movies and feel so sensitive to what seems like a political agenda or start disliking friends who are left leaning and that I may even agree with about a lot of things! Even if they aren’t militant, I still feel threatened. I have a friend who is letting her 8 year old present as the opposite gender...

AAAARRGH I've stood all I can stand and I can't stand no more! To cut to the chase, nothing happened to this guy but the presence of conflicting views and lifestyles, and he talks about it as if it's Kristallnacht. There follows a lot of traditional Dreher you'll-be-sorry I'll-show-you-all snowflake gush ("Woke cultural politics are crow-barred into any and all areas of news and entertainment. And it’s radicalizing to the Right people who don’t want to be"). But all I can think to say in response is the words of Billy Sol Hurok:

May the Good Lord take a liking to you and blow you up real good.

DOGS AND CATS, LIVING TOGETHER!

There's been a lot of nonsense written about the Oscars, but Rod Dreher has surpassed everyone and even himself, through the agency of a "reader" "mail":

“The Academy used to play it safe with controversy, but now it’s moving the Overton window faster than in real life,” he wrote. “Who’d have thought one decade ago that the most prestigious award in the film industry would go to a film about bestiality, and casting it in a positive light?”

Yes, he's talking about The Shape of Water, which I told you about here -- but even if I hadn't, if you've had a halfway decent liberal arts education you'd recognize it from even a summary as a fable, like Ovid's Metamorphoses or Penny Marshall's Big.

But not Dreher. "I don’t pay attention to the Oscars, or Hollywood," he sniffs, "because I’m interested in other things' -- oooh he's an intellectual, look at his eccentric glasses! -- but though actually exposing himself to Hollyweird mindrot is beneath his dignity as a pedant, Dreher asks his readers to tell him about the movie -- and then he can’t even wait for that expedient before giving forth with the crack-brain hooey:

Could it be in this film, what happens at the Occam facility is Elisa, who works there as a janitor and first encounters the creature, learns to separate morality from matter, so that she can open herself to a sexual relationship with an aquatic creature? In other words, if there is no intrinsic meaning to matter, including humanity, then we can do with it whatever we want. Including submitting sexually to animals, or any creatures that give us pleasure and affection?

Here's another clue for you all -- the Walrus was Paul.

I don't know whether Dreher's gurus actually let him watch movies except to get something to yell about-- I remember him denouncing The Hours in 2003 as an "apologia for evil" -- but I like to imagine him leaping from his seat at A Midsummer Night's Dream when Titania makes love to the donkey-headed Bottom, screaming SACRILEGE, LIQUID MODERNITY! (I could go on like this all day -- e.g., Dreher sees Carl Dreyer's Day of Wrath and when it's over cries "I knew it! Witches are real!")

Imagine getting this far in life, and in a writing career no less, and having no fucking idea what art is nor what it's for. As I've said many times before: For these maroons, culture war is war on culture.

UPDATE. Dreher got mad because people made fun of him:

You guys, knock it off with “you didn’t see the movie so you don’t have the right to say anything about it.” I conceded early on that I hadn’t seen the film, and that my comments are based only on the Wikipedia description of its plot, and things both the director and others favorable to the film have said about it. Of course I could be wrong! If I’ve made a mistake in my description of the plotting, then I welcome correction. Nobody has yet said that I got that wrong...

It says right here in the review that she fucks a fish, so it's propaganda for fish-fucking -- because what else could it possibly be?

UPDATE 2. I saw a headline at Media Matters -- "Fox News keeps running columns from the same guy explaining, 'I'm a Democrat but [insert agreement with GOP]' -- and it put me in mind of two things: First, Harlan Hill; second, Rod Dreher, whose "reader" "mail" from Liberals Who've Had Enough is legendary. And he has a beautiful one today! Excerpts:

I read what you said about having spoken with four people recently who didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 but are considering it now because of the left’s recent behavior. I’m not quite in that camp, but am close to it; I suspect my progress on the issue largely resembles those of your friends and (I suspect) a substantial minority of other Americans as well.

Oh that's another thing -- all Rod's apostate liberal "readers" have their finger of the pulse of America.

...I’m certainly not a typical Trump supporter — I believe in climate change and America’s responsibility to take policy steps to reduce our contribution to it, I’m anti-NRA, pro-Obamacare to an extent, and detest the Republican Party generally. The day after Trump got elected, I posted a scathing denunciation of everyone who had voted for him, which got the millennial social capital gold: hundreds of likes and almost 40 shares, including by several people I didn’t even know.

This is where all the folks on the Mourner's Bench go "oooooh!" 'cuz they know a conversion narrative's a-comin'.

...But leaving the nuclear issue aside, the Left’s behavior in the last year has pushed me steadily more and more in the direction of being willing to vote for a sort of lower-key Trump (someone like Ben Shapiro)...

I wonder if Dreher owed Shapiro a favor; if I weren't quite sure he's humorless, I would suspect him of making a joke.

UPDATE 3. Just had to share Dreher's sputter-back in his Shape of Water comments section:

I wonder if Rod really means to posit the Ancient Greeks as his socio-sexual model.

LATEST DREHER CATACLYSM.

Gotta thank Christopher Hooks for pointing this one out: Holy Rod Dreher hears from a data scientist that "roughly 30 percent of American women under 25 identify as LGBT" and flips:

Has anything like this ever happened to any society, ever? Three out of ten women under the age of 25 consider themselves to be gay or transgender. Five percent, sure. Maybe even eight percent. But thirty? Will they always think that? Maybe not, but these are their prime childbearing years. The US fertility rate is at a 35-year low, and there’s no reason to think it will rise. Some critics blame structural difficulties in the US economy that make it harder for women to choose to have children, but European nations make it vastly easier for mothers, and still cannot get their fertility rates above replacement.

What’s behind this is primarily cultural. We have become an anti-natalist society. And further, we have become a society that no longer values the natural family. We see everywhere disintegration...

As you may have guessed, Dreher didn't realize "B" means bisexual, and when it is pointed out to him he emits a can't-miss 2020 Jonah Goldberg Central To My Point winner:

This is probably true, but it doesn’t really change much. I’m not sure how many men would want to partner with a woman whose sexual desires are so unstable. I would never have wanted to date a woman who identified as bisexual. How many women would want to date men who identified as bisexual? 

Blink. Blink.

So, I will withdraw my “not interested in sex with men” claim, because “bisexual” could cover “open to sex with both sexes”....

Might could, huh. 

...but I maintain my point about this being a decadent and deeply destabilizing finding.

If it makes Rod feel bad it's bad for America/Christianitythe babbys. 

But let's go back to his blather about how non-het women are "anti-natalist." Set aside that not only bi but also gay women can have babies (and trans people too -- which Dreher should know because he frequently screams about it); why would it be anti-natalist if a lot of women (including straight women) didn't want to have babies? That doesn't mean they're against childbirth -- that just means they don't want to do it themselves, just like my lack of interest in downhill racing makes me anti-skiing. The difference, I guess, is that Dreher thinks it's these women's duty -- every woman's duty, it would seem -- to make themselves available for childbearing whether they want to or not. 

PS. In case you were wondering where Dreher, the prototypical JustTheTip Trumper, had come down after months of "I'm not Trump fan BUT" pee-dancing: In a separate full-body-fit over an Associated Press story that accurately portrays Amy Coney Barrett's support for anti-LGBTQ policies, he's taken a quintessentially Dreheresque route -- he probably won't sully himself with a vote for that Bad Man with the Good Judges, but he definitely wants other people to do it for him:

I have pretty much decided to vote third party for president (American Solidarity Party). Trump has my state locked up anyway, so I’m thinking that I would like to cast a vote in favor of a party whose platform I really believe in, as opposed to voting for the lesser of two evils, and choosing between the evil of two lessers. 

BUT:

Reading this AP story this morning, though, has reminded me again of the contempt the left has for people like me, and our institutions... I hope you Christian readers — especially those in swing states — will too. Though my vote really doesn’t matter in my state, this issue might move it to Trump anyway, given the quality of his judicial appointments. If I were in a swing state, this AP story, and what it symbolizes, would seal the deal for me.

There's an old gag about how if men could get pregnant abortion would be a sacrament, but if men could get pregnant Dreher would just find some other bullshit reason to get other humans to do the job for him. 

UPDATE. Just want to note for the historical record (I'm old-fashioned that way) that Dreher has updated again from his famous "reader" "mailbag." The alleged correspondent is a "Gen Z female reader" who says girls are saying they're gay or gayishe because of "increasing self-aggrandizement" among today's Fallen Youth "that surrounds this idea of identifying as any type of LGBTQ. It’s a social marker that puts you in the ‘in’ crowd. It makes you cool, it makes you one of the crowd." It's Queer Pressure! 

WHERE THE BOYS ARE.

Here's an unlocked Roy Edroso Breaks It Down number, laying out some possible future projects for Johnny Depp. I did not pay attention to the Depp-Heard trial, and it may be that someone has laid out a coherent explanation for the verdict, though mainly what I have seen from those who approve of it has nothing to do with legal rationale and everything to do with creepy pseudo-butch displays. 

Against my better judgment I have been guided to Rod Dreher, whose work I haven’t looked at much since he revealed that he was getting divorced and sternly warned everybody not to read anything into it. (Everything conservatives always say about divorce culture destroying America, for example, apparently doesn’t apply to Dreher. It’s Wilhoit’s Marital Law!) He seems to have gotten even weirder since. And sure enough, in a recent post, he “responds” to this “reader” “email”:

…The news of your divorce coming around the same time as the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trial has me thinking thoughts that had never occurred to me.

First of all, I can’t believe I’m riveted by a dang celebrity trial. It’s typically not something I spend any kind of time on. But riveted I am. Despite the fact that we are practicing conservative Christians, our own marriage is headed for a hard crash, because I’m confident that my wife is mentally ill. Watching the Depp/Heard trial, I learned about the existence of a condition called Borderline Personality Disorder…

When I read that, everything became SO CLEAR to me about why my marriage is in so much trouble, and why therapy has not worked for us.

(Dreher, resuming his authorial voice, follows up: “This is really something, because I have been getting a surprising number of e-mails from readers saying pretty much the same thing…” Future ex-Mrs.-Dreher, I hope for your sake you have a lot of money in a separate account.) 

The Dreher “reader” experience does seems to comport with a general observation that, whatever this particular celebrity trial was really about, all the creeps have lined up with Depp. But this is no different than what we experience in other areas of real life, whenever we see someone driving with needless aggression on the highway or yelling “Let’s Go Brandon” at a non-political event or trying to cut in line and acting the victim when they're called out: Assholes flock to assholes. Trump merely gave them an Alpha Asshole around which to cluster. 

QUACK.

Rod Dreher, better known for his obsession with gays, transsexuals, and cuddly neofascist dictators, has branched into medicine with disastrous results:

You might remember the post here about “Moralistic Therapeutic Med School,” in which medical schools are starting to remove or relocate images of white men affiliated with the school who accomplished great things.

Ah, yes, I remember -- it was bullshit.

This is about something related, but much more serious. 

A reader who is a physician sent me this WSJ op-ed column the other day. He said that this is bad news for the medical profession. The author is Stanley Goldfarb, a former administrator at Penn’s medical school. Excerpts:

Goldfarb's brief op-ed, "Take Two Aspirin and Call Me by My Pronouns," is just a series of grump-farts -- he complains, for example, of being "chastised by a faculty member for not including a program on climate change in the course of study" at his med school. Ooooh, how SJW! But Goldfarb's real bugbear is the "educational specialists" he encounters who "emphasize 'social justice' that relates to health care only tangentially" and "focus on eliminating health disparities..."

In case you don't know (and Dr. Golfarb seems to hope you don't), this is something known as population health, to which Goldfarb refers as if it were some ghastly new fad like rainbow parties but which has been around for decades and is studied by the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and thousands of scholars and think tanks. It is not something working MDs do instead of treating their patients. Even holy Mike Pence employed a few such experts for his Healthy Indiana Medicaid initiative, from which Seema Verma was promoted to CMS Administrator, in which capacity she often talks about addressing "health disparities." Tell me they're SJWs!

Goldfarb also says that "teaching these issues is coming at the expense of rigorous training in medical science," an outrageous claim for which he offers absolutely zero evidence. Does he really think new doctors don't know how to treat the sick because they spent too much time on "social justice" in school? Doubtful, but I expect he knows some Journal readers will be dumb enough to buy it.

Dreher takes this all at face value, natch:

At some point, reality will take its revenge, and the woke will be banished. But how much suffering will innocent people have to endure before it does? And how many people of faith will be deterred from seeking a medical career because the militant left has placed absurd barriers to keep out the politically incorrect.

Come on, guy, can't you at least find some Young Republican who can claim he was discouraged from attending Johns Hopkins by hippies?

But wait, there's more: Dreher finds a way to connect this paranoid miasma to his transphobia. Instead of hectoring trans folks as usual, though, he tells them (from a hygienic distance) that he understands their plight because he's been there, in a sense:

I have never felt comfortable in my body, though I thought for most of my life this was simply neurosis. No, I have never had the faintest thought of gender dysphoria, but it manifested itself in something feeling … not right. Something hard to define.

Snnkkk.

To be frank, one reason I drank so much in college — aside from the fact that LSU in the 1980s had a massive binge-drinking culture — was to overcome that sense of not-rightness, so I could talk to girls. The point is, when I read about officially-diagnosed autistic young people seeking sex changes because they say they don’t feel right in their bodies, I get that. I can’t pretend to know about that from a sexualized point of view, but that sense that things aren’t right is quite familiar to me. And it never goes away. You just have to learn how to cope with it. For me, it got better as I grew older.

See, y'all don't need top surgery -- you need time and Jesus! But no, they won't listen -- these transsexuals turn away from their Savior and allow themselves to be "driven by the popular culture and the culture of medicine [!] into asking for life-changing procedures that will not actually cure them..." When Rod takes over as Patriarch of the Popes, them so-called doctors will have to dispense the Blood of the Lamb!

Dreher's materia medica is also invoked in an earlier post:

I’ve done research in the past on the phenomenon of demon possession, and it does seem to be tied closely to intense childhood trauma, especially in the family — sexual trauma in particular. There is something about trauma that cracks the psyche; sometimes, that crack is big enough for evil spirits to come in. It is certainly not the case that everyone who experiences childhood trauma become possessed! (Actual possession is rare.)

Well, there's a relief. I wonder why Doc Dreher just doesn't go the whole hog and start selling nootropics.

UPDATE. Comments are choice on this one, and one guest reminds me of this wonderful bit from Dreher's autobiographical segment:

I’ve come to see, for example, the fact that I have unusual superpowers when it comes to taste and smell to be an advantage. This is why I love food and wine so much: I can experience aromas and flavors more intensely than most people.

It's not gluttony, it's my superpower! I've laughed for two straight minutes imaging Dreher's audition for the Justice League. (For more enjoyment of Dreher's food fetish, see here.)

GUN NUTS, PART INFINITY.

The latest NRA charmless offensive shows how bad the situation is. When the NRA found its normal post-massacre duck-and-cover routine -- that is, waiting until our attention was drawn away from the latest multiple-casualty Second-Amendment demonstration -- had left it vulnerable to the protests of telegenic survivors, they immediately went on offense, with Wayne LaPierre babbling about socialists and Dana Loesch lying at top speed at the Parkland town hall. If you want to know why LaPierre and Loesch chose not to take a more reasonable and conciliatory approach with the kids in the wake of the mass gun murder they'd just suffered through, dismiss from your mind the absurd idea that it's the natural product of principled advocacy; ideas that are right don't need to be defended with bullying and bullshit. The NRA's PR makes clear that they are not peddling an Amendment or a specific interpretation thereof so much as the fear of violation and the thrill of violence.

That's why they came hard -- not because they're tough, and certainly not because they're right, but because they're full of shit. And they count on their belligerence to convince Americans they're fighting for them, rather than fighting to keep up the nice livelihood gun manufacturers have bestowed upon them, and against "socialists" and other ooga-booga rather than against the young citizens who have seen the effect of their depravity up close and want it stopped.

Too many liberals seem to think shame or conscience is going to stop these guys. No. They have to be repudiated decisively at the ballot box and throughout public life. If they aren't, things will only get worse.

Depressing, isn't it? Thank God we've got Rod Dreher for lulz! Right out of the gate God's Gastronome gives us a striking comparison:

I get as annoyed with right-wing Second Amendment absolutists who insist that any attempt to control guns will lead to a civil liberties apocalypse as I do with left-wing First Amendment absolutists who hold that any attempt to control access to pornography is welcoming Big Brother.

You'll get my porn when you pry it from my warm, sticky hands, Dreher! Porn, or what passes for porn at the BenOp compound, turns out to be much on Dreher's mind: After suggesting school shootings are caused by kids going to large schools -- as opposed to the one-room schoolhouse where Rod's ancestors l'arned to read and cipher -- he suggests a connection to stories in magazines like The Lily and Teen Vogue "pushing polyamory," ass-fucking, ice cream douches and vibrators -- "the most tender, intimate expressions of love between a man and a woman, reduced to bestial gestures," preaches Rod; "...It’s almost as if the dominant culture and its institutions are radically dehumanizing teenagers, and are mystified as to why some of those teenagers don’t see others as human beings worthy of respect and care."

I wonder what's the mechanism of action for this -- do the antisocial young men who comprise the majority of mass murderers get corrupted by reading Teen Vogue and Vulture? Or do they somehow meet the sort of big-city gals who read these publications, perhaps at potential-mass-murderer mixers, and become intoxicated and corrupted by their intimate Ben & Jerry's scent?

As usual, the Dreher "reader" "letter" is the highlight:

UPDATE: Reader Matt in VA writes:

I am surprised that you don’t draw out the parallel between school shootings and another common theme on this blog — early-onset transgenderism.

The easy availability of machine guns can't be the problem; otherwise why would they be so much more scared by the monsters under their beds?

UPDATE. Who could have suspected that Rod would have a woody for third-generation French fascist Marion Maréchal Le Pen? She speaks French and hates homosexuals -- il se pâme! ["Lady Marmalade" plays] Voulez-vous détester les Noirs (ce soir)?

WRITING LESSON. Two interesting views of what was so awesome about 9/11, from two very different writers. First Christopher Hitchens:

In order to get my own emotions out of the way, I should say briefly that on that day I shared the general register of feeling, from disgust to rage, but was also aware of something that would not quite disclose itself. It only became fully evident quite late that evening. And to my surprise (and pleasure), it was exhilaration. I am not particularly a war lover, and on the occasions when I have seen warfare as a traveling writer, I have tended to shudder. But here was a direct, unmistakable confrontation between everything I loved and everything I hated. On one side, the ethics of the multicultural, the secular, the skeptical, and the cosmopolitan. (Those are the ones I love, by the way.) On the other, the arid monochrome of dull and vicious theocratic fascism. I am prepared for this war to go on for a very long time. I will never become tired of waging it, because it is a fight over essentials. And because it is so interesting.

Second, the man who quotes him, Rod Dreher:

I didn't, and don't, ultimately value the same things as Hitchens, but in reading this passage, I recognize his sentiment. To walk around New York City on that day and on the days that followed -- and probably to walk around where you live too -- was to see things with crystal clarity. As I've written elsewhere, that clarity, or perception of clarity, was more of an illusion than we could have recognized, and it led many of us to make bad decisions. Nevertheless, whatever one's view of the Iraq War, the feeling all, or nearly all, of us had on 9/11 and in its immediate aftermath was one of ultimate meaning returned to the world. Irony was suspended, and it was possible to feel not only real love for your neighbor, but love for your country, and a recognition of what you really did love, but took for granted -- until it was threatened. It couldn't last, but it was -- I have to confess -- a great feeling. All the usual bitching and moaning we do as part of our everyday lives ceased. We saw pure, uncut evil, and we knew it wanted to kill us, and we didn't know what we were going to do in response, but we knew we'd do something. And we were clear that Everything Mattered. Whatever else life was, it was no longer boring. We lived in interesting times.

One of the things I still admire about Hitchens' writing is that I believe him: not his belligerent analyses, but his portrayal of his own thoughts and feelings. He identifies clearly the personal obsessions that informed his strange reaction to the horrible event -- the multicultural versus the monochrome. He puts responsibility for his feelings on himself, and dares the reader to find him insane, because he doesn't care what the reader thinks. Hitchens seeks not to beg his reader's attention and understanding, but to command it.

Dreher has none of this. To speak in the first place of "the feeling all, or nearly all, of us had on 9/11" is a glaring sign that even in confessional mode, Dreher thinks in groupthink, and his announcement that our group feeling was "one of ultimate meaning returned to the world" shows that he can't even get groupthink right. "It couldn't last, but it was -- I have to confess -- a great feeling... And we were clear that Everything Mattered." Even if you weren't there, you'd have to doubt this, it's so phony. The problem is that Dreher can't take ownership of his own strange thoughts -- he has to project them on all of us. I think in the back of his mind he knew he was saying something awful, and so sought to offload responsibility for them.

If you can't take responsibility for what you're saying, you might as well shut up.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN

I just love it, okay?

•   Hey, it's almost time for the big game -- by which I mean the Oscars, a week from Sunday. Over at the newsletter (it's called Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, if you want to know what to ask for at the newsletter store) I've started my Best Picture nominee reviews. Last year I correctly predicted Green Book to win, so I'm feeling pretty damned cocky (though I only got 61% right overall). For those of you non-subscribers who want to get in on the tinsel and glamour, I've unlocked my reviews of Marriage Story, The Irishman, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, Parasite, Joker, and Jojo Rabbit; -- the other three are coming soon. Oh, and as long as I'm here: Chiefs by 3!

•    I assume most of you are acquainted with the Rod Dreher "Letters to Repenthouse" shtick, whereby conservative operatives (compensated or not) pass him their "I never dreamed this would happen to me" missives and he posts them as Vox Populi. Here's his latest, in a post called "Actually, There Is A Christian Case For Trump"; Dreher explains that he's still only thinking about voting for Trump (LOL) but if he does it'll be for better reasons than those trashy not-artisanal Evangelicals have, and to back it up he dips into the ol' reader mailbag and finds a fellow who rails against "local, woke Democrats in positions like D.A., city council, etc. in cities." The rubes have a hate-on for cities these days, so you can see why Dreher picked it, notwithstanding its lack of relevance to Trump:

The ideology they are pursuing, of completely ignoring any quality of life related criminal behavior and deconstructing muncipal competence brick by brick, is horrifying. Decriminalization of theft, of open drug crime, vehicle break ins, public urination, etc. is turning our cities, and increasingly exurban towns, into absolute hell holes.

So far it's standard "Them there big cities what gawts fee-cees an' needles in 'em" boob bait, but how did our alleged correspondent come to know the horrors of city life?

These doofuses are bringing the medieval plague back to Los Angeles, where I recently visited my fiancee’s family. The stuff I saw there was shocking, and really sobering. It made me remember why I identify as a centre-right person to begin with, and why despite being a bit more on the Tucker Carlson side of view on markets, I will have no time for woke municipal governance.

I'm guessing the guy is a "centre-right" citizen of the Commonwealth. But couldn't Dreher have at least proofread his copy for Britishisms? They rather spoil the effect. The best part of the post is not from mailbag guy, but from Dreher himself on his big dilemma about voting for Trump:

If Bernie Sanders were a pro-life social conservative, I would strongly consider voting for him, even though I don’t like his economics.

If you don't like his economics, then why the hell would you be interested in voting for him? Maybe Dreher believes that bullshit about Sanders loving George Wallace.

•   One other thing: The Republicans laying down for Trump on impeachment is no shock. (Democrats will make it hurt for them in November, if they're smart, which, yeah, I know.) This is all Republicans are good at anymore. Here's a great example from the Washington Examiner, reporting that a "surge in meth could bring drug overdose death rates back up." This couldn't be good news for the god-emperor, especially coming after the Examiner recently said a 2018 drop in U.S. drug overdoses "offers President Trump a boost during his reelection campaign as Democrats criticize his administration for not going further in fighting the crisis." So here's how they spin it:

A top Trump administration health official is worried that meth-related deaths will counterbalance the progress the United States has made in reducing drug-overdose deaths

See, it's not that Trump isn't doing great against drug overdoses -- it's that his success has been counterbalanced by... failure. (Well, who could have guessed meth was a problem?) I'm going to try this at work: I didn't fuck up, my good work was counterbalanced! If only I had an entire political party willing to cover for me.

QUINTESSENCE OF DREHER. Rod Dreher tries to get the CrunchyCon kids excited about John Edwards. He agitates to get the big papers (presumably including his own) to cover the Edwards affair story, which has so far been proffered only by the National Enquirer, bloggers, Fox News, and that monstrous hybrid of all three known as Mickey Kaus.

Dreher says he has very serious reasons for wanting to promote this story. "[Edwards is] still a big player in Democratic politics," says Dreher, "and might have been either an Obama running mate, Attorney General or held some other cabinet post." To elevate the tone further, he refers to Edwards twice as "the Silky Pony."

Amazingly, Dreher's readers don't take the bait:

Sounds like you are rationalizing. And gossiping.

I'm no fan of Edwards, but is it any wonder why people don't go into public service?

I am so glad I am not the only one who reads the tabloids when standing in line at the grocery store. Seriously, though do we know if these rumours are even true? It seems in poor taste to malign someones character without proof of their alleged indiscretions.

Some readers also mention the rich veins of McCain scandal that could be opened under this forgiving policy.

Dreher responds as one would expect of a Christian:

It is impossible for some people to engage in a rational critical discussion of the point. Another reader just wrote me privately to say I should shut down all the comboxes for a while, because the tone has gotten so nasty he doesn't want to visit them anymore. I'm not going to go that far, but I am going to shut down this one. Sorry, screaming mimis!

I'm tired of the excuse that Jesus is just misrepresented by his followers, and am going to have to assume that He's an asshole, too.

FRIDAY ‘ROUND-THE-HORN.

Well here's a rabbit-hole for the weekend.• I know I've spent a lot of time on Dreher already this week but the guy's just been so awful. It's like he came back from the week or two he spent in Hungary pimping his book crazier than ever. While he was there he seemed happy enough and mostly posted gush about how great the Saving Remnant in godless Eastern Europe are (and of course how great the food is -- when this Benedict Option thing blows over he can be the new Jeff Smith). But something put a burr up his ass -- maybe he found out fellow theocon Michael Brendan Dougherty said mean things about Viktor Orbán just as Dreher was ready to come out for him, and it spoiled his high. Since then he's been raging on the usual stuff like the Trans Menace, but also displayed a particular hard-on for Pope Francis, who is the head of one of the many religions Dreher has belonged to, albeit not the current one. All wingnuts hate Francis, of course, but Dreher's goes above and beyond; he seems especially mad now that Francis did not strongly refute a reporter who said Francis does not believe in hell ("Francis is winking"). Example:

Think back to 2013, when he made his famous “Who am I to judge?” remark about gays in that press conference. A reader of this blog who teaches religion at a Catholic high school wrote to say that in a single stroke, Francis destroyed all the work that he (the teacher) has done with the kids in his classes. The students all concluded from that remark that they could believe anything they wanted to about sexuality, because even the Pope said, “Who am I to judge?”

This is Francis’s way. Remember his drawn-out answer when a Lutheran woman married to a Catholic man asked why she couldn’t receive communion in a Catholic church?

In other words, Francis refuses to stress hell, gays, and intermarriage -- that is, the parts of Catholicism that nobody, including Catholics, likes. I assume Dreher's mainly mad that his ex-religion has, as Jack puts it in The Ruling Class, forgotten how to punish -- what's the fun in being godly if you can't feel confident that your opponents will burn for all eternity? It perhaps also stirs Dreher's dreams of being himself the first modern-era cross-cult Pope -- I bet he daydreams about a scenario like that West Wing episode where John Goodman was President for a couple of days. Then again, maybe he's just logrolling a fellow God-botherer's book. In any case, I look forward to his next conversion, hopefully to Sufism so he can work off his nervous energy by whirling.

• Remember when brave National Review editor Rich Lowry got all the conservative stalwarts to contribute to an "Against Trump" issue in 2016? And how most of them started going over the side before Trump was inaugurated? Today Lowry makes it official in "The Never Trump Delusion":

A realistic attitude to Trump would acknowledge both his flaws and how he usefully points the way beyond a tired Reagan nostalgia.

Goodbye "Reagan" macro; hello MAGA macro!

...The hold that Trump has on the GOP has a lot to do with his mesmerizing circus act, but it’s more than that. He’s been loyal to his coalition on judges, social-conservative causes and gun rights. His desperation to get a border wall speaks to his genuine desire to deliver on a signature promise. The same is true of his tariffs this year.

The last two items underline Trump’s heterodoxy, although he isn’t as ideologically aberrant as Never Trumpers would have it.

Liberals have known this all along, of course -- Trumpism is just conservatism with the gloves off and a screw loose. It's about conning the rubes by beating up their perceived inferiors and promising windfalls that never come. Some of Trump's con games eschew wingnut orthodoxy -- you won't hear him giving lip service to the magic of the market -- but the end result is the same: tax cuts for the rich and the poor get screwed, with a new war a short-odds favorite before 2020. As I've been saying since this started, the deal is he signs their bills and they let him grift. With few exceptions, the conservatives who have been wringing their hands over Trump's bad manners have been as sincere as Noah Cross' show of sorrow over Evelyn's death in Chinatown, and now they're skulking away with their prize.

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.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Whattaya think? Kinda Young Marble Giants meet Pylon, right?

I know, Rod Dreher's an easy layup, but I'm feeling lazy. Here's a post availing Dreher's traditional "reader" "mail" device. This alleged tenured professor, after the customary his-masters-would-punish-him-severely shtick ("if you post anything I share, please keep both my name and university confidential, as I am supporting a wife and a large family, and cannot risk getting doxed at my job"), bitches at length about his online diversity training, which Dreher agrees is totalitarian. One fascinating section:

 Look at the first and last bullet points here in particular.  The first: “Call transgender individuals by the name and pronoun that reflects their gender identity.”  I have no issue with the “name” part, but look how they are also forcing us to use their preferred pronoun.  They could have kept the peace by saying “name or pronoun,” as calling somebody by their preferred name would not violate my Christian conscience, but of course there can be no compromise here.  I refuse to use a non-biological gender pronoun, for the exact same reason that I would refuse to call an anorexic person overweight, which makes me wonder how long I will be able to stay here before the issue is forced.  

 First of all, I've wracked my brain and can only guess that the professor is willing to use a trans person's name but not their pronouns because it's easier to express contempt with a proper name ("Give this file to... 'Mary'") than with a pronoun. That's the only way this hairsplitting makes any sense. (Come to think of it, maybe he's got some kind of mind-game going where maybe a guy could be called Mary -- look at Evelyn Waugh and Leslie Nielsen! -- but can't be called "she," because pronouns are of The Lord or some shit.) Also, yeah right, next we're gonna force the guy to call skinny people fat, because respecting trans people is just a wedge-end for our real goal, demonic mastery of REALITY ITSELF mwah hah hah. Yeesh, even Dreher's imaginary characters are nuts.

 Then Dreher comes in and yells a while and does this interesting bit:

His point would seem to be that United is doing affirmative action and any black person thus "socially promoted" to pilot would be so unqualified they couldn't fly a plane. But we'll all pretend they can because PRONOUNS WERE JUST THE BEGINNING. (It occurs to me that it was easier to put this affirmative-action bullshit over when it came to college admissions, because grading is always a little arbitrary and one could imagine unqualified people getting inflated grades -- as rich guys' sons had been getting since forever -- but the idea that recruiting more black and female pilot numbers is a suicide mission because women and black people just naturally can't fly planes and white liberals are willing to die in a fiery wreck just to dispute this elementary fact of life, well, outside Dreherland that's a harder sell.)   

 (Lagniappe: Dreher announces he's summering in Budapest (or as he puts it, "moving to Budapest for the summer" -- maybe he thinks that less touristy and more artisanal). Guess his earlier taste of Viktor Orbán was not enough! Wonder if he'll come back with armbands for the family, if he does come back.

Oh, this week's Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies -- almost forgot! Here, and here. Have fun! 

LETTERS FROM REPENTHOUSE GOES BIG-TIME!

 Here at alicublog we've been having fun for years with Rod Dreher's Letters to Repenthouse -- those too-good-to-be-true anonymous "reader" "letters" Dreher posts that have the same breathless I-never-thought-it-would-happen-to-me vibe that made lonely teenage boys hot and Bob Guccione a fortune. Through this shoddy journalistic device Dreher thrills and chills readers with honest-to-gosh you-bet real scenes of "obviously transgendered" he-shes grooming a child at a Dallas showing of a Captain America movie, "a 13 year old girl in his church who came to the pastor and asked innocently if it was worth it to give a boy a blow job in exchange for a meal at McDonalds," etc.  

A classic of the genre is the MAGA Gryphon -- a Liberal who has suddenly decided to turn right-wing, like a Letters to Repenthouse "reader" who said he was "anti-NRA, pro-Obamacare to an extent, and detest[s] the Republican Party generally" but was now ready to "vote for a sort of lower-key Trump (someone like Ben Shapiro)." JustTheTip Trumpers like Dreher love this bit, as it convinces them they're not alone in wanting those sweet, sweet Handmaid judges without the indignity of owing it to the thuggery of Trump Republicans. 

This has been a niche entertainment for years, but I guess us hipsters couldn't have it to ourselves forever: Bret Stephens is taking it mainstream --

Meet a Secret Trump Voter
‘Being a lesbian who’s voting for Trump is like coming out of the closet again.’

Gotta say, it's a clever twist on a classic formula; Dreher hates gay people, so he's unlikely to use them in his fantasy stories. And it's found money, because there's nothing rightwinger readers love more than a persecution narrative, and the idea that the MAGA Lesbian is forced to "come out again" for Trump (which must be painful, right? I mean we made coming out gay hell on earth!)  must tickle their innards.

Much of Stephens' script, though, is straight out of Dreherville:

It’s worth understanding where she’s coming from.

Start with the economy. “I haven’t seen double digit [gains] in my 401(k) since the internet boom of the late ’90s,” she says. “It went up 19.6 percent” in the year before the pandemic. 

That's like saying the car felt like it was flying before it plummeted to the ground. 

“Look at the stock market,” she says. (Up about 35 percent from four years ago.) “Look at gas prices.” (About the same as what they were when Trump took office, but well below the $3.31 per gallon at the midpoint of the Obama administration.)

That last part is great -- I wonder if Stephens went back and asked MAGA Lesbian if "the midpoint of the Obama administration" was what she meant. More:

"...I care about having a job. I care about having health care through my company."

Wow, normally you have to be in a Koch Brothers front-group ad to explicitly insist your health care come "through my company."

"I was out of a job a few years ago. Obamacare priced me out [of private insurance]. It was like, $560 a month. Then Obama’s website blew up. He can’t get the website right?”

How about that website, huh? I'm still thinking about that. And Obama with his Grey Poupon! As always when a conservative sets his scene the Big City, the topic turns to bums and poop: 

What worries her more are the effects of the response to the pandemic in a liberal city like New York. “Crime is in my neighborhood now. There’s a homeless encampment near me that’s growing and growing. They have a living room and a shower curtain and that’s where they go to the bathroom. I have a guy who walks in front of the store every day. In a diaper!"

Yeah, gay New Yorkers are shocked to the tits by this sort of thing. 

I ask Chris whether Trump’s behavior has ever come close to being a deal breaker for her. She asks me to name some of the lowlights.

“Grab ’em by the. …”: “Didn’t bother me at all. For every cad out there, there’s equally a gold digger who will let you do it.”

I imagine Stephens' readers in Fritters, Alabama smiling broadly: "I betcha that Anne Heche was a lesbeen gol'-digger. Whut's a 'cad'?" And they ain't seen nothin' yet:

The media as the enemy of the American people: “These days, yeah. Whenever I read a front-page story and I get to a disparaging adjective, I stop reading.”

Definite city slicker stuff. "I didn’t believe Christine Blasey Ford for one second," "“The Clintons’ fingerprints are all over this," etc. -- yeesh, at this point I bet even Dreher's going, "Whoa, tone it down, guy." And here comes the piece de Resistance:

You don’t have to agree with Chris on any of these points. You can note some of the inconsistencies in her views, most of all between her support for Sanders...

Stephens has never shown much talent for writing or argument, but I'll say this for him: He's sure got nerve.

IF IT WEREN'T FOR MOTIVATED REASONING, HE'D HAVE NO REASONING AT ALL.

I think Rod Dreher has no more to teach us about how bad Rod Dreher is -- that is, he does not show unplumbed depths of mendacity, bad faith, and derp, he just does them like usual but sometimes dumber. We've talked a lot about his "reader" "mailbag" shtick, where he blockquotes passages allegedly sent to him by people who he sometimes vouches for ("a reader of this blog writes as a decades-long resident of the New York Congressional district just won [effectively] by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez") and which are often from liberals who are disgusted with liberalism, which always gives Rod some prodigal-son pep, and which are obvious bullshit -- either made up by Dreher himself or sent to him by conservative operatives or possibly trolls playing a deep game.

Anyway here's his recent account of a Thing He Saw On The Internet:

This is both sad and infuriating. It’s from an anonymous academic who posted it on Twitter as @publicola17:

1/ Woke anti-racism is child abuse.
My family is living the antithesis of @thomaschattwill's Self Portrait in Black and White. And I fear it may damage my children irrevocably.
Let me explain
2/ I'm white, my wife's black. When we met, we "saw each other's race," but we didn't think that was the most interesting thing about us. We foolishly thought our children would be part of a post-racial future, in which all Americans could just be human beings to one another.
3/ Then came Trump. I decided I should try to learn more about my fellow citizens, who I now realized were completely opaque to me. In contrast, my wife decided she was at war with an immutably white supremacist America.
4/ My wife began to read authors like Nikole Hannah Jones and Michael Harriot. She had a "racial awakening," concluding that she'd been "inauthentically black" all her life...

I actually had to C&P this from elsewhere because Dreher only provides a screenshot of this thing, which goes on to detail the alleged destruction of this poor guy's family as his wife does things like "regularly explain to our kids that the police want to kill black people" because "NHJ [Nikole Hannah-Jones] and [Ta-Nehisi] Coates are always telling her how traumatized she should be just because she's black in America," while the husband -- I shit you not -- looks forward to the day when his tykes can read Thomas Chatterton Williams and get clear.

Are your bullshit detectors ringing? Not Rod's! (Even though the @publicola17 account has disappeared.) He goes on for hundreds of words about what's "bizarre and twisted" about the woman and how "this is what the identity-politics left is going to bring to all of society: ruin, hatred, endless suspicion" and the Bible story about "when Jesus frees a demoniac by casting the evil spirits out of him, and sending them into a herd of swine," etc.

Finally:

UPDATE: Some of you believe that the Publicola narrative is fake. You might be right. It resonated with me because, as I’ve said, I’ve known people in marriages like that...

More such gush; then --

Even if the anonymous man Publicola’s narrative is nothing but an exercise in creative writing, it still tells a truth.

 Punchline: Dreher's upcoming book, which he pimps endlessly, is called Live Not By Lies.