IMITATION OF CHRIST. P.Z. Myers' communion-wafer stunt has received ample commentary from CrunchyCon Rod Dreher. Before the event, Dreher used his traditional approach to sacrilegious artists: "Just try doing the same thing to what Muslims regard as sacred. Let's see what you're made of."

Later Dreher hoped for blowback, telling readers that an obnoxious atheist had helped make him a Christian and that he hoped "Myers' infamy will be redeemed at least partially by it shocking the conscience of agnostics, and encouraging them to read more about the Christian faith..."

After Myers had desecrated the host, Dreher played the forgiveness card, trying, with veins bulging in his neck, to follow the passive-aggressive example of Christ:

I was thinking last night what the proper Christian response is. If you think about it, P.Z. Myers has done far more to damage himself than anything any of us might do. With his Satanic pride and diabolical act, he has put himself in serious danger of hell -- and that's far worse than any worldly sanction we might (justly) [?? -- ed.] see applied to him...

But what would he do if the response to his hideous blasphemy is ... love? What would he do if Catholics and other Christians, and even sympathetic members of other faiths, turned up en masse on his campus simply to pray quietly for him? What kind of witness would that be to the wider culture? How might that make straight the path to salvation for P.Z. Myers, and many who now admire him? Wouldn't that be blessing those who persecute you, as Christ commands us to do?...

Let's provide a counterwitness for what faithful Christianity is capable of. God may work a miracle in that man's life yet (consider the example of Saul). Let's not get in the way of the work of redemption in this lost man's life. As much as we can, let's answer hate with love...

Yesterday Dreher showed what he means by Christian love: discussing ways to get P.Z. Myers fired.

I'm not a fan of Myers' approach -- not because it is counter-productive, but because it is unproductive. It appears designed to expose the hypocrisy of his opponents, but that is on full display at all times, and has been for centuries. Pointing it out -- even as spectacularly as he has drawn Dreher to do for him -- doesn't seem to make much of a difference.

GAYPOCALYPSE NOW!

Good ol' Rod Dreher is predicting (based in part on the perorations of some guy who has Charles Bronson in Death Wish as his Twitter avatar) that the left will go crazy with violence soon:

[Fake Paul Kersey] says another big takeaway from his tweetstorm to that point are that political violence can come from anywhere, and that the left has the infrastructure to make it happen more than the right does, in part because there are mainstream leftist leaders who would accept it. These don’t exist on the right.

Ahem ahem ahem ahem ahem --  but I expect my throat-clearing is wasted on Dreher, who believes that since liberals are "allowing courses that teach students of all races how terrible white people and their culture is," the only possible result is SJW Violence and Ooga Booga unleashed across the fruited plain.

[Fake Paul Kersey] gets very dark in this series, and says that the actions of the left on Inauguration Day may prove decisive. He links to this article about how various left-wing and anarchist groups are organizing to disrupt the Trump inauguration. If that goes down in a significant way, you can bet that Trump is going to break heads over it — and that a lot of ordinary Americans are going to be on his side.

I wonder why he's so confident liberals will riot at the inauguration -- wishful thinking, perhaps, or maybe he's got some inside information from James O'Keefe.  But more provocative than the blacks and the college students is Dreher's Pubic Enemy Number One:

There’s a report that queer protestors are going to start the ball rolling with a gay dance party outside of Vice President Mike Pence’s home. If that happens, and there is anything lewd about it, then you can bet that the Christian Right, even people who aren’t fond of Trump, will begin to migrate solidly to Trump’s side...

Lewd gay dancing -- the thin, erect end of the wedge! When Mr. and Mrs. America get a load of gay people working it to "Bounce" in the presence of Vice President Pence, there'll be hetero hell to pay. Then maybe Dreher will get the Great Re-a-Straightening he's been dreaming of -- hell, maybe they can turn Milo!

I know we're supposed to be scared of Trump, but I can't imagine being as scared of anything as Dreher is scared of everything.

UPDATE. Dreher always brings out the best in my commenters. "Fidel from the Castro: 'History of Disco, Volume 3 will absolve me,'" and "RuPaul Revere: 'One if by glam, two if by glee,'" contributes J---. "Maybe Rod should drop Logo from his cable package," suggests AGoodQuestion. And Fats Durston gives us a sneak preview of the forthcoming classic, Rainbow Dawn:

Sergeant: The Bisexuals reinforced with some weird division. Subarus across the plains. Thrusting ever forward, right down our throats. Cut the pipeline we needed. Dykes overran the dikes we had set up round N'Orleans. Just when it stabilized, then six million screaming ladyboys.

Kid: I thought there were ten million screaming ladyboys?

Sergeant: There were.

Go look just to see what he uses for "Wolverines."

TOGETHER AGAIN FOR THE FIRST TIME!

Rod Dreher's back from another of his extended Parisian foodie boondoggles -- I swear, for someone who's always going on about Little Ways and common people he spends an awful lot of time in Yurrup, and not doing missionary work neither -- and has resumed his usual Ben Op/Get-Ready Man routine, supplemented with great lashings of Harvey Weinstein because it fits with his Fallen World scenario. But give him credit -- I looked in because I always expect him to exceed himself, and by God he has delivered.

This post is mostly about how 1.) Mark Lilla would be perfect if only he accepted Christ as his personal savior, and 2.) Ta-Nehisi Coates is a racist. At first I thought this was the plum of the post:

Ta-Nehisi Coates and [neo-Nazi] Richard Spencer are both atheists who have found a strong source of belief in their respective races.

But as loony as it is, it's of a piece with other Dork Right attacks on Coates, like this woo-woo at The Federalist by Dimestore Douthatwith Threenames about how Coates, in his perfectly reasonable prediction that America's inequality might lead to violent confrontation, is "feinting toward violence as a means... of achieving social justice," as if Coates had done the interview bare-chested and bandoliered and simultaneously strangled a white man.  (I can imagine Threenames in 1963 hearing Malcolm X talk about chickens coming home to roost and muttering, "see, what'd I tell you about those people.") No, the plum comes at the end:

Only a strong Christianity can counter this nihilistic tribal religion. But this we do not have today. I am on record as strongly disapproving of some of the antics of Milo Yiannopoulos, but he and I are on the same page here, in this excerpt from an interview with America magazine, which he says they refused to print...

By "on record as strongly disapproving," Dreher means posts about Milo like "CPAC Welcomes Pederasty Advocate." But convinced as Dreher is that gay marriage will destroy America (see his Obergefell essay, "Democracy Is Dying; Persecution Is Coming") unless he and his God Squad can destroy it first, he's nonetheless pimping for this recently-gaymarried aging twink because in the alleged unpublished America excerpt (Milo is a master of persecution-as-self-promotion), he praises in his lubricious way things Dreher loves: the military ("Now the men in uniform are much better men than I"), muscular Christanity ("too many in the Church keep masculinity hidden or the subject of shame"), and Rod Dreher:

I’m with Rod Dreher: Anybody who only preaches a namby-pamby God, and not the highly masculine God of Scripture, is leaving young men vulnerable to the monstrous false gods of race and ideology.

Looks like Milo is eager to be gathered in from the wilderness, and has wisely pegged Rod as among the easier gatekeepers to grease. Hope he at least got a reacharound!

AND WE HEIL, HEIL, RIGHT IN DER FUEHRER'S FACE.

Rod Dreher's been on another of his foodie-Nazi vacations (doesn't spend much time down on the farm, does he?), this time in Hungary, and by utter, absolutely unforseeable coincidence someone decided that one of America's leading white nationalism apologists should meet Victor Orban!

You may have heard that the Hungarian prime minister is a cryptofascist who gutted the nation's top court when it gave him a hard time, took over the national media likewise, and chased a leading university out of the country because of (((Soros))), among other atrocities. But Dreher basked in the man's presence and wants you to know he's dreamy -- in fact, so mesmerized was he that though he had 90 minutes with Orban he didn't ask him any questions.

I tell you this so you readers don’t ask me why I didn’t challenge Orban on this or that policy of his government. I am perfectly aware that he is a controversial figure who has done things and pursued policy goals that are highly controversial for a number of reasons. However, this was a completely unexpected opportunity to be in the presence of one of the most extraordinary world leaders of our time, and to get a sense of his mind.

I mean, would you ask Jesus questions?

If the only thing you know about Viktor Orban is from Western media accounts, you would think that he was nothing but some kind of mafia thug. The Viktor Orban you encounter in person is very, very different from the Viktor Orban shown to Americans by our media. In Orban — who speaks good English — was energetic, fiercely intelligent, funny, self-deprecating, realistic, and at times almost pugilistic in talking about defending Hungary and her interests. 

Well, I'm convinced. In case The Leader's act wasn't enough to convince the group Dreher was part of, Orban also had on hand "Nicodemus, the Syriac Orthodox archbishop of Mosul, whose Christian community, which predates Islam by several centuries, was savagely persecuted by ISIS." What that's got to do with Hungary? Silence, mortal! Nicodemus does Flava Flav to Orban's Chuck D, ringing out every so often with "Those people, if you give them your small finger, they will want your body" and such like.

Dreher faithfully transmits Orban's messages ("Western peoples have decided to create a post-Christian, post-national, multicultural society. Peoples in Central Europe do not") and closes with what he clearly considers the convincer:

Hungary has a million problems, but Parisian-style banlieues filled with angry and unassimilable Muslim migrants, vicious institutional combat around so-called “white privilege,” and endless fights in locker rooms and libraries over gender ideology are not among them.

Yes, Paris is nothing but a wasteland of ooga-booga and trans commisssars, just like California is nothing but bum shit and New York covers up its high crime with low crime!

If you aren't convinced by Vic 'n' Nic, Dreher comes back at you with a whole extra post of Orban fan art:

[Christopher] Caldwell points out that the [Orban] anti-Soros campaign arguably did traffick in anti-Semitic rhetoric... still, that completely justifiable circumspection should in no way justify averting one’s eyes from the fact that Soros really is using his considerable fortune to liberalize Europe, and to dilute European peoples.

Well, at least he said "dilute" instead of "mongrelize." Maybe in February Dreher can jet off to Brazil and, along with the food and drink, take in Jair Bolsonaro, who will explain to the no doubt speechless American why God wants him to destroy the rainforest.

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.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the pussy thing, and the debate. The topic was an embarrassment of riches, not to say a plain embarrassment, and here are some of the outtakes:

Regular readers will recall that Rod Dreher has been extremely Trump-curious lately (“The more things like this happen, the more sense Trump’s idea to halt Muslim immigration for the time being makes”). Friday morning Dreher was swooning for him, with “Trump To Catholics: ‘I’ve Got Your Back’” (“Donald Trump sent a letter to Catholic leaders gathering in Denver… I find this encouraging”) and an even more embarrassing post called "The Little Way of... Donald Trump?" Hours later Dreher was demanding Trump resign. “There is no way a pig like this will be elected president. None,” he wrote, the scales falling from his eyes, or his thumb falling from the scales. Later Dreher declaimed, “When the smoke clears after November, the Benedict Option [subject of Dreher’s new book] will be all we will have left.” By then there’ll have been enough born every minute to make it a best seller!

After the debate Dreher declared Trump the winner and wrote,"You know, I really think Donald Trump still has a chance — not much of one, but a chance — to win this thing. I did not expect to be saying that after this debate." That would be a good reason not to constantly make hysterical statements that you have to disown a few hours later, dummy.

The most interesting thing about Jonah Goldberg’s column on the subject was that it wasn’t totally stupid: He even said people who “still think Hillary Clinton would be worse” than Trump should “just be prepared for an endless stream of more embarrassments in your name.” I think that, while other big-name conservatives are secretly rooting for Trump, this campaign has really put the zap on Goldberg's head. Imagine that your biggest claim to fame is a book about how liberals are all fascists, and then one day your whole movement is taken oven by a guy whose campaign blueprint is the rise of Adolf Hitler. Even worse, the guy thinks you're a loser. If Goldberg’s entire career hadn’t been a geyser of poison shit I’d feel sorry for him.

UPDATE. You gotta be shitting me, Scott Gant and Bruce Peabody at the Wall Street Journal:

What’s next for the Republican Party and Donald J. Trump? After hearing Mr. Trump make a series of derogatory and sexually predatory statements in a 2005 recording that was leaked last week, Republican officials are openly fretting about the future of their party and its candidates. Some are calling on Mr. Trump to step aside so that a new presidential nominee can be chosen.

With Mr. Trump emphatically rejecting that idea, the best chance for Republicans to secure the White House (and improve their prospects down ballot) may be a different course: Mr. Trump could publicly declare that although he will remain the Republican nominee he will resign immediately after taking his oath of office on Inauguration Day, leaving his more-popular running mate, Mike Pence, to succeed him as president.

In this way, Republicans can effectively replace Mr. Trump at the top of the ticket, without having to endure the logistical and legal turmoil of formally nominating a new standard-bearer less than a month before Election Day.

"Logistical and legal turmoil" meaning "impossibility," in this instance.

...Under the 20th Amendment, the newly elected president’s term begins at noon on Jan. 20. A President-elect Trump could recite his oath of office and then immediately resign.

I think they should let Trump do the inaugural address first. Maybe even sit in the Oval Office awhile and give away some pens.

Fantasies like this aren't meant to convince. They're just symptoms of dissociation. Conservatives want the benefits of a Trump campaign (all those nice new Nazi frog voters and energized hillbillies!), but they want you to believe -- they want to believe -- that it has nothing to do with them, because they're in a tower above the fray, swaddled in nice, reasonable discourse.

WEIRD TALES.

Today Rod Dreher took a break from his customary racist and homophobic material to rage about sex, this time quoting extensively from a Mary Eberstadt Weekly Standard essay that seems -- though it's hard to be sure, for all the froth -- to descry "the destigmatization and mass adoption of artificial contraception" as the cause not only of widespread abortion but also child poverty, sexual assault, lonely old age ("Each year, some of [Japan’s elderly] died without anyone knowing, only to be discovered after their neighbors caught the smell”), and other horrors. Even the good news she can't ignore is contaminated by contraception: "Although teen pregnancy rates have declined in recent years, rates of sexually transmitted disease continue to rise." It would seem the only end to this nightmare, if you follow Eberstadt's logic, would be the banning of birth control. (Hey, maybe the new Trumpified court can do it!) But maybe an end to it isn't what she seeks: Maybe all she wants is for us to feel dread and shock and bad about ourselves for daring to get laid without fully committing to childbirth.

Dreher gets right in the spririt: "The truth about the Bolshevik Revolution was to be found in the gulags," he cries. "The truth about the Sexual Revolution is to be found among the poor in our inner cities and trailer parks."

But shortly before that, Dreher got on an even weirder subject: Was Anthony Bourdain suicided by witchcraft?

Somebody in my Twitter feed last night observed that “the Internet” was making a pretty good case for Anthony Bourdain’s suicide being tied to the occult. Say wha’? Lo, it turns out that his girlfriend Asia Argento is a witch, and not just a casual one either. There’s lots of extreme darkness there, right in the open. She flaunts it. Bourdain, the poor fool, was doomed the day he met her...

This is exactly where we are as a post-Christian culture: we have usurped the powers of binding and loosing from God. The Satanists admit what the rest of us cloak as advanced liberty and self-determination. Here is the line that Justice Anthony Kennedy will be most remembered for. It’s from the 1992 Casey ruling reaffirming the constitutional right to abortion...

This is so loony Dreher eventually took it down (the prior link is actually to its Google cache). But I think it was an instructive post: For all his theological palaver, a lot of Dreher's ravings are rooted in the sort of doomy, scary stories that used to bulk up pulp magazines, lurid 60s tabloids, and comics like House of Mystery; their place has been filled by websites like the crackpot collection where Dreher got this one. Come to think of it, posts like Eberstadt's owe a debt to this genre as well: The world as a nightmarish place to gawk at, with perhaps a little moral uplift at the end to make you feel like you got your money's worth. Well, at least in that sense these guys are observing the verities.

A TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE. My long-term readers may wonder what has become of some of my former favorite figures of fun in whose grills I am less up than once I was. Sometimes I wonder the same thing.

When I heard the Catholic Church has decided that the 60s made their priests fuck little boys, I was put in mind of that early adopter of the POV, Rod Dreher. He's brought me great joy over the years. For several months, though, Dreher hasn't been blogging much, apparently on the orders of his employers at the Templeton Foundation. He is still authorized to spread the Good News in major media, as with this Washington Post op-ed, in which he tells again how he removed his family from Catholicism and the "loosey-goosey moral teaching in Roman parishes" to the Orthodox Church, with its "seriousness about sin... the long liturgies, the frequent prayers, the intense fasts... Men love a challenge, and that’s exactly what Orthodoxy gives them."

This sounds like something from an artisanal tour of the World's Finest Religions, which suggests to me that Dreher is still the Crunchy connoisseur, judging morals by mouth-feel -- as does his slam on the "dreary parish life" found "often among the ethnically-oriented older parishes that see themselves as little more than the tribe at prayer." The locals don't know what they've got, it seems, and that's why they need professional converts like Dreher to curate the icons and bring in celebrity guest cantors.

So I wandered out to see what's been doing with Old Crunchy. I see he is on Twitter, addressing the sacred ("Progressives tear down taboos around sex, and are shocked when men turn into beasts") and the mundane ("I've been off sugar & starch for a month now -- never felt better").

He appears also to have become embroiled in a controversy over pseudonymous postings at an Orthodox site, which activity, it is suggested, runs afoul of his Templeton strictures. If there's anything to this -- and I'm not about to take the word of religious maniacs on anything -- I am in sympathy with Dreher here, not only because he's already been savaged on this account by the likes of Robert Stacy McCain and Dan Riehl, who hate him for his deviation from traditional wingnut doctrine. Dreher's inability to stop talking is to me his most charming feature, though (perhaps because) it leads him into buffoonery. And if his problem is that he couldn't refrain from blogging even after his masters cautioned him, that just endears him to me all the more.

While I was on this memory trip I looked in on James Lileks, another onetime alicublog mainstay. Along with his column and his Bleats, Lileks now contributes to Ricochet, a clearinghouse for high-toned wingnuttery. Lileks' dispatches there are what you would expect: Snarls at liberals, including those reportedly within the Muslim Brotherhood -- "does he believe," Lileks says of James Clapper, "these liberals won’t make common cause with the 'conservative' wing the moment they got their hands on all the levers?" And he's got a point -- isn't that what liberals do in the U.S. Congress?

So he remains politically engaged, but in short bursts. Back at the Bleat, from what I can see, he mostly leaves off national news and contents himself by explaining how "the rot" pervades his day-to-day life, often evinced by the insufficient helpfulness of clerks and laborers. Here's a recent example: A deliveryman wouldn't drag some fabric rolls into a store for some nice ladies.

“What a jerk,” one of them said. “I understand he can’t help for legal reasons, probably, but he was just so unpleasant.”

Stop and think about that: can’t help for legal reasons. The modern assumption: if you do anything outside the tightly defined parameters of your job, and something happens – say, you swing around an enormous roll of fabric and knock over a dressmaker’s dummy, and it’s scuffed – there will be LAW INVOLVED, or at least something in your file that recounts the regrettable consequences of your decision to cast heed to the breeze and help two women drag the stuff from the curb to the store. He couldn’t even take the items off the pallet.

I was waiting for the more specific Big Gummint corollary -- something about labor unions or OSHA, or how customer service has declined since FDR tried to pack the Supreme Court -- but then Lileks mutters:

Or he just didn’t want to. He didn’t have to and he didn’t want to.

Maybe that just makes it worse. This Bleat also contains Part III of Lileks' war with insolent bicycle shop employees: "Nothing like a bike shop to remind you how the economy would look if capitalism was abolished and pot legalized."

Now for the button, thanks to commenter Halloween Jack: A return visit to Annie Jacobsen, not a member of our regular cast past or present but a guest star, who in 2004 freaked out over Arabs on a plane, who turned out to be not terrorists as Jacobsen feared, but musicians. For this misapprehension and the notoriety it brought her, Jacobsen was rewarded with gigs at Pajamas Media and the Los Angeles Times.

Jacobsen is now promulgating a new terror-in-the-skies story, this one having to do with the Roswell UFO incident. Per Time:

What really crashed near Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, was not an alien ship, nor was it a weather balloon as previously speculated by many, according to Jacobsen. In fact, she says, it was a Soviet spy plane. And it was controlled by disfigured adolescents, two of whom survived the crash.

So those photogenic corpses weren't aliens after all -- they were Commies! Even better: They were mutants created by Nazi doctor Josef Mengele on Stalin's orders to look like aliens and thus throw America into turmoil. Son of a gun -- Jonah Goldberg was right!

FELCHIN' WITH CRUNCHY ROD DREHER. It was a treat to scroll through the latest Crunchy Rod Dreher stuff and find a post that begins, "In the most recent Eminem thread..." Boy, there's a phrase I haven't seen in a while!

This bit of internet retro came up because Dreher had earlier read somewhere that a mass murderer had chanted Eminem lyrics during his slay-fest, and despite admitting up front that "it's wrong, of course, to blame Eminem or his music for these murders," he proceeds to do just that ("That's on you, Marshall Mathers. Live with that, Mister"), and to also titillate the faithful with some of the allegedly psycho-enabling lyrics (a popular gambit with this lot).

Later it is pointed out to Dreher that the psycho in question did not spit Eminem lyrics at his terrified victims. This leads Dreher to announce that he is "backing off -- somewhat -- the force of yesterday's post," which of course means a longer, more fevered rant to follow. First he tries to bring aboard liberals, as he perceives them, by denouncing the horror that is "24" ("its valorization of torture was having enough of an effect on troops in real life..."). Then, black kids laugh at a severed head in a movie theater! Clearly a sign of End Times, like the Haunted House at a fairgrounds. And then, along with more Bill Bennett vintage horror stories, comes one of the great Dreher couplets of all time:

I wonder what higher faculties of the soul are nurtured by contemplating Eminem's couplet in which he discusses ejaculating into someone's anus, then eating the semen. (Sorry to shock you, but if we're going to talk about this, let's be clear what we're talking about).

Watch that slippery slope, Rod -- soon you'll be running a midway tent and promising suckers a glimpse of the Depredations of the Liberals for only one-tenth-of-a-dollah. Oh wait -- change the last bit to "click-through" and he already is.

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! 

THE SIN OF MAUDLIN CLODHOPPER. In case you're wondering how shitty a film critic Crunchy Rod Dreher was at the New York Post, get a load of his aesthetics:

I remember riding back to midtown in a cab from the Manhattan screening of some movie, can't remember which, and listening to the two well-known film critics sharing the cab with me talk about what we had seen. It was a very violent film of some sort, as I recall, and the thought occurred to me as we rounded Columbus Circle -- I do remember that part vividly -- these people don't have children. They could analyze the film more coolly than I -- who was not a father yet, but who would be in a few months -- in part because they didn't imagine, or didn't seem to imagine, what it would be like to raise kids in a society where lots of people had their moral imaginations informed by eviscerations and the like.

I think Dreher is only pretending not to remember the name of that film. And that's because he suffers from a guilty conscience. If he told it, we'd know when the incident took place, and we'd know how much longer Dreher took Uncle Rupert's money for a job he was clearly incompetent to perform.

Maybe, on or about this date, he went to his editor and admitted that he couldn't review movies as art, but only as moral medicine for the masses, or as things that did or did not hurt babies. But either the editor entered into a corrupt pact with Dreher to mask this revelation from the public, or he told Dreher to stop being such a fucking dink and do the job he was paid to do.

(Of course, it was the Post, so maybe the editor was too drunk to comprehend him.)

Either way, assuming the cab ride did not take place on his last day on the job, by commission or omission Dreher practiced prevarication. Being a stickler for moral perfection and shame for others, he should make a great public show of contrition for this, perhaps a barefoot march to the tomb of Manny Farber.

But he doesn't even seem to think he did something wrong. That's the problem with Christians. They can commit any kind of sin without blanching, so long as they can think up a moral-sounding excuse for it.

RACIST WITH AN EXPLANATION.

"Is Racial Profiling Ever Okay?" Of course it is, says Rod Dreher. When he lived in DC, Rod used to cross the street if he saw "young black men dressed like street thugs" coming at him, but not if they were clothed in "office wear." He bets you would too! Did you know a couple black guys beat up Matt Yglesias? Yet he still defends those people!

If you think it's not about playing the odds in a late-night street encounter, but about day-to-day life where black people get treated like shit on a regular basis even in daylight, Dreher knows all about that -- he too has suffered from racial prejudice:

The time that stands out to me was years ago, when I was applying for a newspaper job that I really wanted, and was told that I was perfect for it. Then the paper stopped returning my calls. Finally, an executive there told me that either the editor-in-chief or the publisher, can’t remember which, decreed that a minority or a woman must be hired for that job. It was humiliating and infuriating to me. All I was to that newsroom executive was a white male.

Also, can you believe it, in the little Louisiana town where he moved to, some of the black people have negative feelings about white people. But they're not all like that: Dreher knows this black lady whose mother "prefers to hire white repairmen because based on experience, she trusts them to do better work. Who am I to argue with this woman’s experience? Who are you? If it was your money at stake, would you profile in this way?"

Dreher is the upscale Internet world equivalent of the sort of Reasonable Racists you're bound to run into if your scope of acquaintances is wide enough. Mention the difficulties of black life in America, and you'll get the exact same routines: I was mugged by black guy so I know. Oh, you were mugged by one too? If you still don't see how dangerous they are, you're blinded by political correctness. Listen, black people racial-profile me all the time, I went to this bar one time and they wouldn't serve me...

They always have an argument, and they always say they want a "dialogue." (So does Dreher, here: "Why is it right in college admissions and hiring to reduce individuals to their race or gender? I’m not asking rhetorically. I really would like to hear what you have to say...") But you, my readers, are pretty well-travelled, and you know what they really want: They want you to tell them they're not bad people for feeling the way they do.

If you won't give it to them they way they prefer, right away, as something they're owed as a fellow white person, then they'll get argumentative. If you say, as Yglesias said about his assault, "that was a single incident on one day out of thousands. The overwhelming preponderance of black men I walk past on the street on a day-to-day basis... aren’t committing any violent crimes," the racist will say something like what Dreher says: "But it is reasonable to assume that if you are going to be a violent crime victim in DC — as most people in Washington are not, and never will be — then your assailant will almost certainly be a young black male." See? You have statistics, he has statistics. Now why don't you be reasonable and admit he's not a bad person?

The one thing that never occurs to these guys is that racism is not like monetarism or socialism or academicism or henotheism or anarcho-syndicalism; it's not a thought system we can sit up arguing about all night and be, other than the hangover, none the worse for wear after; it's cancer. Centuries of experience documented by historians and artists show it, if you need guidance, but a few years living in America ought to wise you up to it pretty quick all by itself.

I like to contend about everything, but you know what? On this subject, there really isn't anything to discuss.

OH MERCY. In case you were wondering, Rod Dreher is still pecking away at his Crunchy Con blog, and still a big dork. Most days he's just dreary, but sometimes he puts a little extra Praise Jesus into it, and achieves insufferability.

Today he actually caught me off-guard. When I saw Dreher had a post about those kidnapped TV newsmen who had to "convert" to Islam to get out of jihadi jail, I expected something less stupidly bellicose than, say, the ravings of Mark Steyn. I should also have expected that Dreher, by simpering and vacillating over the exact nature of his moral superiority, would be even more annoying than the frostback chest-thumper.

Dreher starts by admitting that even he, filled with grace as he is, might not be such a good Soldier of Christ with a knife to his neck, and maybe "I ought to be merciful toward the Fox guys."

Mercy from a Christian! Should have known it was a bluff -- after quoting some other blowhard who says he doesn't hate the newsies for converting but for not displaying shame over it, the scales fall from Brother Dreher's eyes:

If I had capitulated, the shame of it would haunt me for the rest of my life. And it should. What those two men did was understandable on a human level, but they ought to be ashamed of themselves.

Two things. First, if the jihadis got me and all I had to do to get out with my neck was sing The Three Stooges Alphabet Song, I'd go for it in a second. And though I never like being told what to do, I doubt I would experience great anguish over the performance. The Nicene Creed and whatever the Mohammedians recite mean as little to me as that Alphabet Song, and vice versa.

Second, if this is what Dreher and his fellow chesty-boys think of the TV reporters, what must they think of that Austrian girl whose recent escape from a madman's dungeon after eight-and-a-half years has been in the news? What the rest of us heathens think of as an "ordeal," surely the Jesus folk see as 8.5 years of continuous shameful capitulation for which the traumatized victim must feel everlasting shame.

But of course with this lot you're supposed to feel shame about everything, except crappy prose and a soul-dead insensitivity to the suffering of everyone except Jesus and yourself.

CRUNCHY CONS GO DOWNMARKET. I see that Rod Dreher has moved his Crunchy Con blog to Beliefnet. Time has not been kind to his movement, and it seems the come-down in venue has made Dreher more anxious to boost his conservative niche brand into the big time: he's talking less now about the relation of medieval theology to organic food, and more about gay toilet sex:

...a gay Republican male -- very successful guy, well-dressed, in the public limelight, not at all a desperate troll -- told me that this was a pretty normal part of gay male culture. He told me that he used to cruise public toilets looking for sex, in part because the stench of those locales smelled like "nectar"...

...what are the rest of us supposed to think about gay male culture, and the degree to which it self-defines according to behavior that most people rightly find repulsive?... it's pretty clear to me that the media, as a general rule, have a habit of sanitizing coverage that reflects badly on gay male culture...

Yeah, the media never asks Elton John if he likes it up the ass in a crapper. (Maybe Dreher's gay Republican friend can do a special report on Fox!)

Most of Dreher's recent posts are about your basic culture-war bullshit -- like how kids don't say sir or ma'am no more (especially when they's raised by New York bitches!), or how no one takes time to be pals anymore (and neither does Dreher -- oh well, that's life! Bye!) -- or standard-issue conservative belligerence: posts about how Israel must kill more, we must kill more, here is one of God's creatures I really want to die, etc. Not much here about Heraclitus or wheat germ.

Apparently the Crunchy book didn't summon an army of Ned Flanderses, marching with a cross in one hand and a bucket of Seven Stars yogurt in the other, so Dreher's going back to being a ordinary pain in the ass.

MAU-MAUING THE FAT CATCHER. The new fun at NRO's blog on Crunchy Conservatism -- which, as previously explained, is Rod Dreher's revival of Jesus Freaks as home-schoolin', homo-hatin' yuppies -- is the exploding head of Jonah Goldberg.

Goldberg challenges Crunchy Con Man Rod Dreher's assertion that "the 'conservatives' will not oppose promiscuity because sexual discipline would reduce the profits of corporations, which in their advertisements and entertainments encourage sexual self-indulgence as a way of selling merchandise."

Now, you or I might sensibly tell Dreher: "So what?" (Come to think of it, it is instructive to consider how many of the complaints of today's lifestyle conservatives invite, nay demand, just such an answer.Hollywood doesn't make movies I like! So what? TV commercials make men look stupider than women! So what? Young girls are exposing their midriffs! Where? I mean, so what?)

But Goldberg, alas, has neither the standing nor the inclination for such clarity. He is a Big Wheel of Big Tent Conservatism, fond of defining conservatism extremely broadly, the better to keep together the great Republican coalition whose victories keep his Wheel Big. "You don’t really have to be a free-marketer or capitalist to be a conservative," he has argued. "The simple fact is that conservatives don’t have a settled dogma." And so forth.

This laxity suits Goldberg's role at NRO. He can make all kinds of ridiculous, lazy assertions, and when he is contradicted he can say: yes, you have a point, I'm sure the opposite can be true, too, we aren't really arguing and anyway it's late and I have to walk the dog etc. (No link needed: most of his stuff is like this.)

But when Dreher and his stupid hippies start spouting snake-handler gibberish, you can tell that Goldberg is just revulsed. Maybe it's just due to a storm of negative pheromones between those who smell of organic compost and patchouli, and one who smells of Cheetos, Johnson's Baby Shampoo, and farts. Anyway Goldberg lashes out instinctually at Dreher's imbecility -- "Have you ever met a conservative in your travels who won't attack promiscuity because to do so threatens corporate profits?"

But then Goldberg is ever so lightly challenged, and his instinct is to run to his suckup strategy. First he defends mainstream conservatives as every bit as spirited a set of fist-shakers and finger-waggers as the Crunchy Cons: "This administration puts real dollars behind its advocacy of abstinence, here and abroad... Conservatives criticize the popular culture." But -- here he reaches out -- "Now, they may not do it enough. That's a legitimate argument to make." Later, Goldberg strives so hard to accomodate Dreher's millenarial Christer philosophy that he even defends Karl Marx ("As for the alienating and deracinating effects of the free market and all that, I think some of the critiques — Marxist and otherwise — have varying degrees of value and merit"). See, Goldberg concludes, "I'm not the strawman conservative who idolizes the free market Rod has constructed."

So we see a leading figure of the Cause who, assailed by a new and radical fringe group convinced of its righteousness, has not the intellectual ballast to withstand the attack. I agree with your ends, he says; it's your means that I question!

Does this remind you of anything?

UPDATE. Meanwhile Ross Douthat, a smart fellow, reminds readers that the secret to success for a conservative niche brand like Crunchy Conservatism is to not take it very seriously:

...if such a cultural movement is going to win converts — or at least supporters — it shouldn't be too hard on those fellow-travelers who aren't up for home-schooling their kids, and don't quite have the time and energy to seek out the local organic co-op, and love "Lost" too much to get rid of their televisions. It's important to hold up an ideal, but it's also important not to let that ideal get in the way of making common cause with people who are, well, doing their best.

Sometimes I perceive that, despite all the fervent hallelujahs, modern conservatism is just a marketing exercise. Douthat's got his finger on the aspirational component of Crunchiness. And if you can get people to buy your hot cereal by telling them "It's the right thing to do," why not?

I realize this is a cynical reading, but it is also very charitable, considering the alternatives.

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.

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.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

What do you think of the new Garbage album? I like it.

•  OK, OK, here’s some free content from the Roy Edroso Breaks It Down daily newsletter (though really you should subscribe, fresh copy five [5] days a week from America’s most underrated writer for approximately 35 cents an issue is ludicrously cheap): First, some future National Guard deployments we can expect since Kristi Noem rented her troops out to some gazillionaire wingnut to play Border Patrol with -- real fall-of-Rome stuff, but I got some laughs out of it. And here’s a speech from a recently released sex offender! I’d say “trigger warning” but really, these days I’d say a TW is implicit in just about any national news coverage, straight or fanciful, wouldn’t you? 

•  Speaking of triggers, Pride Month has ended, which I hope will reduce some of the intense pressure Rod Dreher seems to have been under. You will recall he’s been in Hungary studying up on how to prepare Orbán fascism for export, and though Big Vik has been banning all the gay he can ban, the persistence of happy homos abroad seemed to bother Dreher all the more – as if living the dream of anti-gay persecution in Hungary made him all the more painfully cognizant of those corners of the globe where homosexuality was not suppressed. It’s been fun, but my favorite Moment of Dreher this past week is more racism-driven, as well as a classic example of his “reader mailbag” shtick:

I had a conference call on Sunday night with two guys back in the US. Both are young conservative Christian friends who worked for the same major American media company (one still does, but the other quit a few months back). They are white males. They reached out to me via a mutual friend after my book Live Not By Lies had an impact on them. They agreed to talk to me for the record if I consented to keeping their details private. What follows is my record of our conversation, revised to honor their concerns. I sent the draft version of this post to them both to make sure I had written down our conversation accurately, and that I had protected them both. The one who still works for this company (I’ll call it ACME) has a family to support, and can’t afford to lose his job.

I will call these men Rick and Charlie. Their real names aren’t even close to this. I hate that I have to write like this, but these are the stakes. People are scared to death for their careers – and they have reason to be.

Reminds me of this:

Anyway, these two Swear To God They’re Real guys had the devil’s own time at ACME, what with all the post-George-Floyd wokeness:

Rick says that in these endless strings of meetings, ACME executives would give black people an opportunity to voice their frustrations and anger, and to talk about their “lived experiences” with racism, or what they perceived to be racism.

“Some of these things really were racism,” says Rick. “Others weren’t specific to race, but were everybody’s lived experience. Everybody gets treated badly in the same way at some point. But you couldn’t say that out loud. I sat through countless hours of that kind of meeting.”

The intended effect is, no doubt, to get readers to envision some strapping young buck bitching that his dented fender was racism, and poor Rick Nothisrealname having to listen to it for hours with his head chained up like the kid in the old Radio Free Europe ads. Anyway ACME decides to hire black people and surprise, they’re a pain in the ass:

There was one case in which the team had the budget to make a hire, and considered taking on a freelancer who had done superb work for them in the past, under budget. The problem: he was a white male.

“Someone present in the hiring meeting said, ‘White people had it good for 400 years – it’s about time they felt the sting,’” says Rick. “None of the people leading the meeting said a word about that.”

I know, you folks in corporate life hear that sort of thing all the time! 

There was another case in which a team was carrying out an expensive shoot in an environment in which a black actor hired for the shoot decided on the set that they didn’t want to subject themself to a minor inconvenience that was part of the contract. After the shoot ended, ACME offices were filled with lamentations over how racially insensitive ACME was to expect a black person to do something they didn’t want to do — even though the request was extremely minor, and the actor had signed on for it. As Rick put it, expecting a black actor to honor a professional commitment was considered intolerably racist by ACME staff.

I guess the buck wanted Van Halen treatment. So touchy, these blahs -- excuse me, those blah-lovers! 

The White Whatstheirnames also suffered from the persecution of not being Free To Be MAGA Me:

Rick is also a conservative, and was a supporter of Donald Trump. “On set, I would hear people dogging Trump supporters and Christians. I didn’t say anything. This made friendships so hollow. You just knew that if these people knew this little thing about you [your politics or religion], they probably wouldn’t want to be friends anymore.”

Think for a minute of actually believing that if the people you spend all day with knew what you were really like, they would hate you. Would you say the problem was them or you? If you said “them,” yewwww miiight be whoever's feeding this stuff to Dreher.

It goes on like that – one Whatshisname quits ACME to stay true to his beliefs, which is a big deal because “his star was on the rise,” claims Dreher – “I looked him up online at the ACME website, and he seems to have been a rising start at the company.” Meaning I guess that his company bio was flattering, as opposed to all the company bios that make their subject look like duds. 

I wonder: Do even Dreher’s loyal readers believe this shit? Or is it all an unspoken conspiracy to keep going along with the gag, in the hope that some poor dopes will wander in and mistake it for the truth? 

AND THEY'LL KNOW WE ARE CHRISTIANS BY OUR WHINING.

I think most of my readers will agree that the murder by ISIS of Christians in Egypt is bad, right? Well, that's not enough for conservatives -- you have to agree with them that Christians here in the States are persecuted, too, or you suffer from "anti-Christian bias." Here's Rod Dreher's brain-teaser on the subject, from his evocatively-titled post "Lions & Christians in America":

The mass martyrdom last week of the 21 Egyptian Copts at the hands of ISIS is a sobering reminder of what real persecution looks like. Yet it is also the kind of thing that people in this country who fear and loathe Christians point to as an argument-ender when Christians complain about social injustice against themselves, e.g., “Get back to me when they’re chopping Christian heads off, then we’ll talk.” I would point out that ISIS is throwing gay men out of high windows to their deaths, and the crowds below are finishing off the job with stones. No secular liberal would — nor should — accept the argument that gays in the US have no right to complain against discrimination because they don’t have it as bad as gays in ISIS-held territory. So let’s put that cheap argument to bed.

Based on this, if some nut on the other side of the world is persecuting your affinity group, you're being persecuted here as well, or should at least be treated as if you were. I wonder if Dreher knows that ISIS is a champion killer of Muslims, and would agree that we should for that reason hold our domestic Muslims as a persecuted group as well, and tell their stateside critics like Pam Geller and Daniel Pipes to fuck off.

No chance of that -- you can read farther down Dreher's post about the media's "normalization of homosexuality," just a small number of paragraphs after Dreher was using gays as a point of comparison with Christians. At National Review, Jim Geraghty also thinks the newsies are unfair to American Christians; he heads toward the same affirmative-action argument we often get about conservatives in the press, but is smart enough to realize that most reporters are probably at least nominally Christian -- or else Jewish, and he can't complain about that; think what Bibi Netanyahu would say! -- so he takes an interesting tack:

Last night I argued that in most media newsrooms, the notion of Christians as victims doesn’t fit their usual narratives. Fournier argued that there are a lot of Christians in the Times newsroom, and that the Times has a lot of reporters in the Middle East, covering ISIS, at considerable risk to themselves. Both points are true but neither really refutes my argument. 

For starters, sure there are Christians in the Times newsroom, but not particularly representative ones. Here’s Nicholas Kristof, New York Times columnist, back in 2003: “Nearly all of us in the news business are completely out of touch with a group that includes 46 percent of Americans. That’s the proportion who described themselves in a Gallup poll in December as evangelical or born-again Christians.”

So it's not enough for reporters to go to some modern Church where anything goes -- one has to roll hard and roll holy! Picture the new breed of newsroom quota-Christians: Fear-God Gump and Barebone McGillicuddy, working on a Style section piece about a hip new way to handle snakes.

My own solution would be regular cats-for-Christ slideshows, which should give everybody what they want, or at least deserve.

UPDATE. Mmm, them's some good comments, e.g., Megalon:

[Dreher says,] "The mass martyrdom last week of the 21 Egyptian Copts at the hands of ISIS is a sobering reminder of what real persecution looks like." 

Yes it is. That's why you and your cohorts in this country trying to claim that having to accept a paying job to bake a gay wedding cake means you're being persecuted the same way is so offensive. Especially when it's coming from a man who often talks like he's about ten minutes away from converting and joining IS himself.

Also, Hob runs down Kristof's shady "a group that includes 46 percent of Americans" = fundies claim and finds it possibly lacking. I wouldn't be surprised, but then, the claim is 15 years old -- maybe since then millions of Americans have got born-again, moved to the haunts 'n' hollers, and stopped voting, which explains how Obama won twice.

UPDATE 2. If we ever get Cats for Christ (no not this one) off the ground, I think we have to use ADHDJ's topline: "I'm not purrfect, just furgiven."

THE RETURN OF ROD DREHER. A reader wrote to inform me of the demise of Rod Dreher's Crunchy Con blog. Halfway through the second bottle of champagne, I noticed that Dreher had actually started a new blog at Beliefnet. So I went to see what this back-to-the-land, Benedict-Optioning, cult-friendly enemy of modernity is up to, and found:

OK, I'm going to confess to you now that Santa Claus brought the Dreher chirren a Wii for Christmas -- and it was a fantastic purchase, for the most part. The kids are getting actual exercise...

A fucking Wii? I'm a rootless goddamn cosmopolitan and I don't have a fucking Wii. What would Solzhenitsyn say? And why aren't his kids building their muscles by chopping wood and drawing well-water?

I understand he's moving to Philadelphia. I wonder if anyone told him they have a lot of black people there?

UPDATE. Now that I think of it, Dreher reminds me of this panel about George Hamilton III from Peter Bagge's Hate comics (click to enlarge):