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.

DON'T DREAM IT, BE IT.

OK my commie friends, you know the drill: First we Twitter-mob the polls and cancel-culture Tubby with our so-called "votes"; then, once Biden's inaugurated, Kamala Harris slits his throat -- preferably during adulterous sex! -- and throws us the keys to power, thus beginning the REIGN OF ANTIFA! First order of business: extradite all Republicans to Den Haag -- starting with those Lincoln Project fuckers. That'll teach 'em to suck up! 

Alternately, Tubby steals it and we hella riot! So it's win-win, I'd say.

Signs are propitious. My wingnut mailbag is full of hysterical headlines like "Rudy’s Got Them BOXED In! Biden IS FINISHED!" And "Sleepy Joe’s Assault Victim Is Ready To Talk….He’s Done!" (Links provided for historical purposes, I don't advise clicking, they're super spammy). These guys don't sound like winners.

A good barometer for rightwing panic levels is Rod Dreher and... well...

You know what? Nobody fears pro-Trump riots. They fear antifa, they fear Black Lives Matter, they fear the Left — the same people who have been rioting all year, and for which our media have been carrying water. If the Trump voters are disappointed tomorrow, they’re not going to burn down their communities, smash windows and grab loot, and generally behave like a hoodlum.

Sounds like Doc in West Side Story yelling at the Jets -- get outta here, ya lousy antifa, I'm tryin' ta run a candy store! 

Forgive me, I'm a little punchy -- after all, I've been rioting all year.

Dreher cites as evidence that "the Left" is going helter-skelter a clip of some lady on a video chat with 262 people (I didn't realize "the Left" was so small -- we're sure punching above our weight!), talking about defending against a coup by getting armed and ready to defend freedom, which sounds like standard wingnut patter of the past fifty years to me. Plus some businesses are boarding up their windows in case post-election protests get heavy. Dreher goes on:

Cities boarded up for fear of rioting. The President of the United States having to barricade himself in the White House. This is what the Left has done to our country in 2020. And you watch: if this happens, The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, NPR, and the lot will all be blaming Trump.

Mark my words, in a month Holy Rod's bedroom walls will be festooned with Boogaloo Boys pin-ups.

UPDATE. Even blowdried media-friendly conservatives like National Review's Rich Lowry have Dreheresque paranoia about the window boards:

There are certainly malefactors on the right who should be called out and shunned, and it’s disgraceful that Trump has spent so much time preparing the ground to argue that he’s been cheated if he loses. Yet the Left has the numbers, the proven penchant for violence (up to $2 billion of property damage this year so far), and the intellectual enablers to put parts of America on crisis footing in anticipation of its possible shock and upset after November 3.

"The Left has the numbers"? I thought these guys thought they were the vox populi. Oh, I forgot -- since Tubby's numbers have tanked, the Right is all "we're not really a democracy, y'know" -- basically admitting conservatives only hold power against the will of the people. 

Trump’s most fervid critics have been expecting a coup with such certainty that they will treat a Trump electoral victory as if it is one.

Jut because everyone knows if he wins again it will also be with a minority of votes and the help of hellacious voter suppression, people will call it a "coup"! They're so touchy. Alright, he goes to Den Haag too. Next!

UPDATE 2. Neither are the front pages at the dumbest rightwing websites encouraging to the brethren's cause:

"All is lost, save my honorarium!" Meanwhile at Gateway Pundit the top story is "Don Jr. Rallies in Yuma City – Ivanka Rallies in Michigan – Eric Trump Rallies in Florida… So, Where’s Hunter?" Now there's a story with legs! Senile Grandpa will probably punch the touchscreen extra hard after he sees that.

UPDATE 3. From comments:

I just drove into NYC (Midtown) and can attest the city is not, in fact, boarded up. A couple of chain hotels are boarded up and one groundfloor salad bar that's been vacant the past couple of months. But definitely not "the city."

Here in DC there's been some boards added to storefronts near Black Lives Matter Plaza, but they started doing that at the end of May, when there was some actual damage. Back then they even had some boards up on H Street NE, which were later quietly taken down because lol come on. 

Also, the only rioting I've encountered this past year was a Trump caravan on the I-287...

Ah yes, the Battle of Mario Cuomo Bridge. The douchebags are trying it at polling places, too. But by all means obsess on Antifa -- it might sell a few more barrels of prepper rations, and ain't it all about the grift?

UPDATE 4. Another commenter:

I guess Rod doesn't pay attention to the news as several Boogaloo Boys have been indicted for actions during riots and the US Marshals straight up murdered an antifa dude.

Doesn't pay attention? Does this look like he doesn't pay attention?

Rod Dreher is a straight-up fascist. And many other popular conservatives are just better at covering it up.

UPDATE 5. Well, they said it would take days to count the votes and that appears to be the case. So get some sleep and drink plenty of water, maybe with some bourbon in it.

DREHER GETS WITH THE NATIONAL FRONT.

Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, the granddaughter of French literal fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen, spoke at CPAC last week, and Rod Dreher went gaga for her. Yet he has trouble admitting that she's pretty much what you'd expect National Front royalty to be -- he keeps saying he just doesn't know enough, though he really likes her! I think there’s more than one reason for that.

Calling Le Pen's CPAC speech "dynamic," Dreher swooned, "she went on to condemn euthanasia, gender theory, and transhumanism." She even quoted Mahler! "Continental conservatives in the Le Pen mold are more traditionalist, focusing on natural law, religion, and culture," Dreher explained approvingly.

But he wanted it made clear: "To the extent that she represents his racist, anti-Semitic views, Marion ought to be ashamed," said Dreher later. Still,  he said, "despite having read Bill Wirtz’s TAC piece about her, it is not clear to me what she believes on race and Judaism." Wirtz's piece notes that in 2016 Le Pen's National Front "ran on banning the kippah in public places" -- though he did not cite, possibly because he could not find, Mademoiselle Le Pen explicitly affirming (or, for that matter, denying) her party's position.

"I prefer the flawed attempt of Marion Maréchal-Le Pen to address from the traditionalist right the most pressing problems of our time to the doubling down on the same tired dogmas of the US conservative establishment," said Dreher. Again, he really, really wanted it known that he abjured her grandfather -- "To be clear — pay attention here — Jean-Marie Le Pen is an actual fascist, an anti-Semite, and a disgrace" -- and said elsewhere that he also doesn't like "her secular nationalist aunt Marine, whom I find unappealing" (though he was much more sympathetic to her when she ran for the French Presidency).

And, to make his gutless equivocation even more obnoxious, he added, "Do not take me as endorsing Marion Maréchal-Le Pen! I honestly don’t know enough about her to do such a thing, and I certainly condemn the racism and anti-Semitism of her grandfather — and, if she espouses it, then her own racism and anti-Semitism."

But he kept on about her. In another post contemptuously dismissing Mona Charen and other anti-Trump and anti-Le Pen conservatives as dainty "Principled Conservatives," Dreher wrote, "Marion Maréchal-Le Pen’s [CPAC] speech can only sound like blood-and-soil nationalism to Principled Conservative ears... whatever the sins of Marion Maréchal-Le Pen and her family, Anglo-American conservatism has something important to learn from the European conservative tradition, and needs to think about it, does not make one an anti-Semite or a blood-and-soil nationalist."

Among other things, Le Pen said at CPAC, "We do not want this atomized world of individuals without gender, without mother, without father, without nation" -- a quote that was promoted on Twitter by the straight-up Nazi Defend Evropa. In fact, Defend Evropa was altogether more forthright about what Le Pen was about and why they liked her than Dreher in their own coverage of the speech:

Marion talked about pride, guilt, atomization of society, identity, enrootment to the land, peoples, legacy, survival of nations, family and many more. A beautiful speech, well received from the American public. The tide is turning, Le Pen reminded us, the Nationalists, why we should fight. And we will fight!

DU also cheered when Le Pen condemned the European Union as "an ideology without land, without people, without roots, without soul, and without civilization." She didn't mention blood, though, so Dreher's still in the clear.

And that's what his hard sell with soft details is all about. Dreher's always tergiversating about Trump -- saying he dislikes his "vulgar" style, but implying that maybe there's something valid about his movement; doesn't he attack the same people Dreher reflexively hates, after all? -- and he does something similarly sneaky with Le Pen, in fact, overtly associating Trump with Le Pen and not in a negative way:

The fact that we have Trump has a lot to do with the failures of establishment conservatives — and they still don’t seem to have any real idea why they failed. Is it really the case that the only reason people like Trump and Le Pen find traction on the right is racism and bigotry? The only reason?

You see what he's doing -- he's saying sure, maybe there's a leeedle bit of racism there, and maybe you find it disturbing -- but look, she represents a new kind of conservatism: She doesn't like trans people, either! And if that doesn't turn you on, she's also a nationalist ("Let me be clear here: I’m not offended when I hear President Trump say America first… I want France first for the French people!"). And if that doesn't do it for you... well, like he said, he's not sure what she really believes, we shouldn't judge her by her grandfather, and wasn't that speech stirring...

For her own part Mademoiselle Le Pen makes a valiant effort in her public appearances to keep the potentially less attractive features of National Front ideology quiet, but sometimes the mask slips -- as when The Guardian asked her about mixed marriages and she said, "I'm not against it... For me, marriage is a very personal choice. The only thing I'd say is that I know, from people who've told me firsthand, that sadly mixed marriages can be a bit conflicted on everyday issues. For instance, the naming of children – Muslims need children to take Muslim names, often they want women to convert to Islam..."

I'm sure Dreher knows, as it is not (yet) Le Pen's business to, how something like that might go over in the States -- like gangbusters with the Trump base, perhaps, but not so well with the more soap-and-toothpaste-involved middle Americans. But he also knows that you might could sneak it over the plate if you keep it vague and, if someone smells a rat, make sure to protest that you don't approve of the old version of this exciting new conservatism, from which the new thing is, in some ineffable way, just different. There'll be plenty of time to sort out the details later -- when it's too late.

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.)

FOR HONKY FOLK WHO HAVE CONSIDERED SUICIDE/WHEN DONALD TRUMP IS ENUF.

Just read Rod Dreher's rhapsody on Hillbilly Elegy, an autobio by one J.D. Vance about how he, a son of Appalachia, escaped the depredations of the holler thanks to Mamaw and the U.S. Marines. Dreher's main take-away seems to be that hillbillies (the ones who didn't get out) are lazy, sexed-up, stupid, and self-deceiving and they need Jesus and Brother Rod's Benedict Option, in stores soon. Here's just one depressing piece:

Vance plainly loves his people, and because he loves them, he tells hard truths about them. 

(That's the bless-their-hearts part.)

He talks about how cultural fatalism destroys initiative. When hillbillies run up against adversity, they tend to assume that they can’t do anything about it. To the hillbilly mind, people who “make it” are either born to wealth, or were born with uncanny talent, winning the genetic lottery. The connection between self-discipline and hard work, and success, is invisible to them.

Plus they's always a-fuckin' and a-feudin' -- "Marriages rarely last, and informal partnerings are more common," he tsks. Why, they're as bad as the blacks!

Is there a black J.D. Vance? I wonder. I mean, I know there are African-Americans who have done what he has done. But are there any who will write about it? Clarence Thomas did, in his autobiography. Who else? Anybody know?

Maybe the job of Black Wingnut doesn't pay as well as it used to -- I mean, I'm sure this guy (author of "If You Don’t Want Police To Shoot You, Don’t Resist Arrest") gets lots of high-fives from Young Republicans, but I doubt he's making Clarence-level bank. But whatever Dreher's problems with black folk, this is just a brief detour for him; clearly white worthlessness is his hard-on here; he loves that the enlightened hillbilly Vance got out because it shows how shiftless the rest of them are. In fact, he references Kevin D. Williamson's infamous hymn of hate for poor whites --

I criticized Williamson at the time for his harshness. I still wouldn’t have put it the way he did, but reading Vance gives me reason to reconsider my earlier judgment.

Thank you, Rod "Imitation of Christ" Dreher. (Isn't it perfectly Dreheresque that, though he feels himself closer to Williamson's hatefulness, he wouldn't "put it the way he did"?)

As I mentioned when I wrote about Williamson's column, Dreher's review is part of a growing wingnut literature on how badly the poor honkies have let them down. There are a couple reasons why it's growing. For one thing, obviously, the rise of Trump has got these white-collar conservatives scared -- for years they applauded Joe and Jane Sixpack (remember them?) because they thought the Sixpacks were sufficiently racist, sexist, and otherwise class-resentful that they would reliably return Republican electoral majorities; then, however, it appeared they'd lost control of their Monster.

But this tendency slightly pre-dates Trump -- Charles Murray's book about the plight of white "Fishtown" punters (and David Brooks' effusions over it) go back to 2012. So there are clearly other reasons, and I can see them, too. First, the demographics that created the second Obama victory shattered mainstream conservatives' belief that whiteness might yet save them another time. Second, white-collar conservatives noticed that when they raved about lazy, sexed-up, stupid, and self-deceiving black people, everyone under 60 years of age gave them the stinkeye -- but if they just ported their viciousness over to another out-group, no one except obsessives like me paid any attention.

In fact, poor whites' very status as an out-group may have been the clincher. When it came out that white working-class people had begun committing suicide at an alarming rate, the first reaction of David French at National Review was to blame liberal hippies for making crackers feel bad.  But four months later French had changed his tune: "No one is making them do it," he had decided; "...The economy isn’t putting a bottle in their hand. Immigrants aren’t making them cheat on their wives or snort OxyContin..." They were, rather, only the victims of their own "self-destructive moral failures."

In many ways, my friends, it's no fun to get old, but there is some grim amusement to be had seeing people who thought for years that hate had made them safe learning God's truth the hard way. (You may think I'm talking about the poor whites, for whom I have much sympathy -- after all, I come from them -- but I'm really talking about the guys who've just thrown them overboard and are about to find out that the mainsail won't hoist itself.)

DREHER AND NOSTALGIA FOR GERMAN RACISM.

Wondering about AfD (Alternative for Deutschland), Germany’s entry in the international fun-fair of Fuhrer-phumphers? Here’s a nice rundown from Deutsche Welle, with some points of interest:

“When it was formed in 2013, the AfD's main thrust was its opposition to bail-outs of indebted European Union member states, like Greece. Its leader, Bernd Lucke, described it as a 'new type of party that was neither right- nor left-wing.'" (Hey — just like what our dummy journalists think about Trump now!)

“German border police should shoot at refugees entering the country illegally, the former co-chair of the AfD told a regional newspaper in 2016”;

“The AfD also sees itself as a defender of the traditional nuclear family model. It is anti-abortion and hostile to alternative lifestyles.”

Sounds pretty wingnutty, even by American standards. A piquant feature is that their current leader, Alice Weidel, is gay — not unheard-of among anti-untermenschen bigots; think of Pim Fortuyn and Ernst Röhm.

Ah, but longtime readers will know where I’m going with this — right to Rodland! Rod Dreher does the finger-on-chin, quizzically-cocked-hip musing thing on AfD. First, get a load of the Lolworthy header:

Ja, das ist eine Schwarze Frau!

As often, Dreher has loooong quotes from another source, this one claiming a German “Christian civil war” between Merkel’s CDU and the AfD neo-whatsits, in part because the CDU “saw eastern Germany as more open to “Asiatics.” “It’s a powerful charge,” says Dreher, “and I have no way of knowing whether or not it is true. But I’ll assume that it is.” LOL. Also, per the source:

…the CDU’s postwar leader, Konrad Adenauer, was a Catholic who attended mass faithfully. Subsequent leaders have been less and less pious. Angela Merkel is the least pious of them all…

Yeah, we’re in legitimate political science territory here, but Dreher is rapt. He is aware of the Head Lesbian in Charge, but seems to have found some wiggle room via something called Christians In The AfD, which equivocally gibbers at length that it's okay if it's for whiteness; Dreher, who Wants To Believe, observes, “maybe they believe it makes more sense to tolerate same-sex marriage (which is now a fact in Germany) within a larger context of the state working to support marriage in general. I don’t know… It’s in German, but I read it in translation via Chrome.” Again, LOL.

But then Dreher gets to the good stuff — White Supremacy, Deutsch edition (because it’s a good idea to support other nationalists’ Supremacies, in case you need their support in, for example, a World War):

In general, I believe that all nations have the right to determine their own character. If a historically Islamic, Hindu, or Buddhist nation wanted to maintain its religious and civilizational character, they would have the right…

We don’t begrudge you darkskins if you want your own table at the campus union — why should you begrudge us our white nations?

…To the deracinated, globalizing liberal, it doesn’t really matter if the medieval church in the town center becomes a mosque or a disco, as long as procedural liberalism has been respected. This kind of thing gives lie to the claim that liberalism is neutral.

Christ is King is the neutral state — oh, if only the Inquisition were still around to show you libtards! Thereafter, more what-if-white-people-invaded-a-dark country bullshit, and this remarkable graf:

If you asked Western Christians if they would rather live in Christian Lagos or atheistic Berlin, I suppose most would choose Berlin. I would, or at least that’s what I think off the top of my head. It’s not simply because the standard of living is higher there. It’s also that despite the absence of Christianity, the culture is much more familiar. But consider this: Christian children raised in Lagos almost certainly have a much greater chance of retaining their Christianity into adulthood than children raised in Berlin. What profiteth it a man to raise his kids in all the order and comfort of the West, but watch them lose their souls? According to the logic of my own principles, I ought to choose Lagos over Berlin. And perhaps I would do so, after thinking about it.

Sure you would! Dreher, who’s always fucking off on European foodie vacations, pretending he’d go live in Lagos? Shit, he couldn’t even stick it in St. Francisville, Louisiana. The fucker has lived in Philly, Brooklyn, Dallas, and Baton Rouge, and has had three religions — he’s the very definition of a rootless cosmopolitan!

Then Dreher thinks about whether Christian refugees are bad for thinking of going to Germany where it’s less Christian than their native hellhole, and comes to this:

Hard, hard questions. If Germany loses her Christian faith, she may be persuaded in the future to return to it. But if Germany loses her distinctly German culture through mass immigration, there will be no going back. Obviously, the Hitler legacy makes these questions excruciatingly difficult for Germany — as well as hard for the rest of us, or at least it ought to make them hard — but that horrible legacy does not settle the questions.

I should fucking think the "Hitler legacy" -- that is, the Third Reich, the Holocaust, and the Second World War -- settled those questions for good and all. But maybe hardcore Jesus people like Dreher have a more, let us say, transactional relationship with Nazism.

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)?

THE LAST REFUGE OF A WINGNUT. Rod Dreher points to a French academic's book which contradicts long-accepted ideas about the Islamic role in spreading Greek thought in the West. Edward Said et alia said it was big; the new guy says it barely existed. As usual when someone says something bad about Islam and not everyone in the universe applauds, Dreher yells thought police:

...many in the academic establishment have set out to ruin its author, Sylvain Gouguenheim, by tarring his as a racist and a tool of the right wing. Some medievalists have come to his aid, saying that it's a perfectly legitimate question and area of inquiry. But the politically correct academic police de la pensee are out for his head.

First, I checked Dreher's link, which is to Le Figaro and unhelpfully in French. Babelfish gave me a suspect but hilarious translation ("D' other researchers choose Libération to express their 'stupor' in a signed letter... The guards of the doxa leave their hinges"), which nonetheless shows the article to be highly prejudiced against the unhinged doxa guards -- that is, the petitioners against Gouguenheim.

But not everyone in Dreherland sides with the chief. One commenter points out another story about the controversy from the International Herald Tribune, which is in English and makes clear (as Dreher does not) that Gouguenheim has plenty of mainstream support. And several commenters point out that it's not thought-policing to point out that the guy's theory is full of shit.

Dreher updates:

Just to clarify, it's beside the point whether or not the historian Gouguenheim is correct in his theory. The point is, he should be able to raise the question, and to be able to be wrong in his theory, without being professionally ruined by the academic thought police.

Ruined? I notice his book is still selling. And, with the support of Le Figaro, Le Monde, and every Muslim-hater in the Western World, we expect Gouguenheim will become an international "contrarian" superstar, like Oriana Falacci or Camille Paglia. For people like that, the outcry from colleagues is the best possible advertising.

Dreher is a professional schismatic who owes his entire Crunchy Con following to the massive persecution complexes of like-minded vegetarian Jesus freaks who consider themselves the one true church of conservatism, as proven by the contempt in which all other conservatives hold them. That such a person would fail to recognize the selling power of apostasy is nearly unbelievable.

So unless he's faking -- never a longshot with this bunch -- the best explanation for Dreher's thickness is this: conservatives, even the fringier conservatives like him, have reached a point in their degeneracy where they must believe other people are trying to silence them. It doesn't matter that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, they are not being silenced at all, but merely called out on their bullshit -- to their fragile psyches, it's the same thing: an intolerable assault on their egos that, if not repelled, will result into the obliteration of their carefully-constructed personalities. So of course any opposition loud enough to reach their ears is Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini all rolled into one.

A pity that Dreher and Jonah Goldberg fell out; they have so much in common.

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."

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

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

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

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

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

Dreher's idea of gay violence is presumably this:

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

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

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

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

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

REDUCTIO AD DREHER. Rod Dreher wrote two days ago that he just wants to be nice to his fellow-creatures. Perhaps he was then temporarily mellowed out by some organic, artisanal weed. Since then he has been shaking his fist at everything that moves. I should have known he'd eventually turn his wrath on that pregnant guy:

In the consumerist utopia that we've built and are building, the individual's desires are God. Nothing is more important in this world than what Thomas Beatie wants. Thomas Beatie creates his own reality, heedless of the things that are. And we bless this tyrannization of nature as liberation.

In comments he clarifies:

I'm not saying that we don't have the right to change anything in the natural world. Were that the case, we'd all still be living in the jungle. But as the pope indicated, it has to be developed according to its intrinsic nature. It is not wrong (in my view) to eat animals for sustenance. It is wrong, though, to pervert their nature by raising them in conditions that do not allow them to live in some basic sense by their nature.

If you don't believe there is an intrinsic nature in the created order, then there's nothing wrong with what Beatie is doing. But nor is there anything wrong with what factory farmers are doing, or the scientists busily creating new forms of life by mixing animal and human DNA.

Godless humanists will see the problem with his thinking: factory farming affects other living creatures in a real way, physically and against their wills. Thomas Beattie only affects Dreher's idea of how everyone else should think and behave. Even if you are tempted to cut him some slack when he complains that swears on the TV are making our children into savages, you may have trouble understanding why a guy having a baby drives him nuts.

We might speculate: maybe Dreher is worried that someday society will make him squeeze out a young'un himself. Or that he might one day encounter a male mom at a PTA meeting and be socially obliged to treat him civilly, and isn't sure he has the stones to rebuff him as the Little Colonel did Silas Lynch.

But really, no one need be harmed, not even Dreher, for him to react this way. To that extent, this particular rant is revelatory. Usually, when he talks about "culture," he has at least the thin excuse that other people might be harmed -- by poor education, by poverty, by STDs -- because of whatever malfeasance he describes. Here it's all about the God Dreher worships and whose prescriptions he insists upon: "As goes the culture, so, in time, goes the civilization," says Dreher, "betrayed by pride and rebellion."

For Dreher it's really all about obedience. He'll try and reason with you sometimes that it's for your own good, but when he's on a jeremianic roll he will let you know it's because God said it, he believes it, and that settles it.

Of course, this leaves a lot of column inches to fill. Relieved of the necessity (or perhaps the advantage) of spending paragraphs explaining how this may affect you here on this temporal plane, he'll instead populate the space with jabber about "the things that are." If you don't get it, don't worry, he isn't talking to you. He's talking to the folks who will not be cast into everlasting darkness at the Final Trump, when he and they and their pal Jesus no longer have to make up reasons for you to believe them.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the March For Our Lives and rightwing reaction thereunto. I wrote it last night and there's been a lot of froth since; Rod Dreher's post, mentioned briefly in the column, has metastasized with many updates since I first saw it into a full-body freakout, including supporting quotations from Jonah Goldberg (!), a reference to "Piss Christ," and more of that patented Dreher "I Don't Endorse Trump But Because of X I Endorse Trump" routine. But the real howler is this bit:

One more thing about all this. As longtime readers know, I lived in New York on 9/11. Stood on the Brooklyn Bridge and watched the first tower fall. Smelled the sweetness in the smoke for days, and learned from a friend who had lived through the war in Beirut that it was burning human flesh....

I cringe to think about some of the things that surely must have come out of my mouth in the year that followed. David Hogg-like stuff, no doubt. The hate felt good. It really did. It also felt good to hate those who cautioned me and others about our rhetoric. Fools and cowards, they were, as far as I was concerned.

I allowed that righteous anger to justify my cheerleading for the catastrophic Iraq War. I was the fool, and I was the coward, because I was afraid to interrogate my own rage. I regret bitterly being so eager to hate, and thinking of myself as someone who got a free pass on that, because hey, I lived a mile or two from Ground Zero, so who are you to tell me that my feelings are wrong, huh?!

That’s what’s happening here too.

So, to recap: in 2001 Dreher favored blowing up Ay-rabs because the 9/11 bombers were Ay-rab, and because he was in Brooklyn and smelled the WTC. (I myself lived in Brooklyn then and also smelled the WTC, yet never called to blow up Ay-rabs. My immunity is called "common sense.") Now Dreher repents, and compares his intemperate, racist foamings to David Hogg's rather tame and definitely not racist calls for gun control. This is, in form anyway, the sort of stop-and-think by means of which Christians are traditionally encouraged to "judge not, lest ye be judged" -- but even Jesus can't stop Dreher from judging, so he doesn't withdraw his judgment that Hogg is a "disgusting little creep," or anything else: Instead he just calls his younger self names, too, and bids his readers attend his current wisdom, which is sure to be infallible.

The punch line is that Dreher spends a lot of his time ragging on other religious conservatives for endorsing Trump. Those guys are certainly hypocrites, but at least they're not nuts.

UPDATE. Dreher just can't let go -- from a new damn-kids post:

Second, this movement is not going to stay focused on gun control. The passions of the left, and the media, won’t allow it. Emma Gonzalez gave a memorable speech at the rally. But the media can’t let the speech stand for itself. They’re already celebrating the intersectionality of Gonzalez, a self-defined bisexual who has shaved her head...

Dreher was, too, going to come out for gun control, really he was, but then the liberals had to turn him off with a bald lesbo.

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

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

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

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.

JESUS, FREAK! Crunchy Con Rod Dreher has started talking about what a mess that Iraq is. We were "rolled" by the Shiites, he says: "They played us for useful idiots...I hate that a single drop of American blood was shed for these people," adds Dreher, whose Christianity apparently stops at the water's edge, "But what happened, happened."

And part of how what happened, happened was crap like this, written by Dreher in the run-up to war:

We’re already moving toward Baghdad in our war against Iraq, one I believe with all my heart is just and necessary. We don’t know how long it will last, or what the fallout will be. When the smoke clears, I am afraid that one home-front casualty will be some friendships.

With America preparing to blow the shit out of a bunch of people on the other side of the world, for Dreher the clear and present danger was arguments with his anti-war buddies.

At least Dreher had an exit strategy: "There’s simply no point in talking to most antiwar people, left and right, because they’re lost in a fever swamp of emotionalism." Comity problem solved! Unfortunately for the Iraqis, they couldn't wish us so easily into the cornfield.

Now that the place is a hellhole, does Dreher regret his support for the Maximun Leader in 2004? Well...

...my heretical thought is not, "Maybe I should have voted for Kerry," though that might be true. My heretical thought is that no matter what my reservations were about Bush either time I voted for him, they were overcome by my single-minded focus on the Supreme Court.

And get this -- he's not sure he wouldn't do it again! Even knowing what was to come of it, and despite all the American (if no other) blood spilled.

Ladies and gentlemen, your Moral Majority Redux: willing to permit the needless deaths of as many non-American non-embryos as it takes to keep women from getting abortions and gay people from getting married.

And they say Allah attracts a rough crowd!

UPDATE. Like Clouseau's crime scene investigation in The Return of the Pink Panther? ("What wax? AAAAAH!"), Dreher keeps finding new and more amusing ways to display idiocy. In a new post, he lambastes the Republicans for playing a "confidence game" in which "all they have to do is keep banging away on the public's fear that the Democrats would be worse." As if to demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach, Dreher finishes:

[The Republicans] deserve to lose. They really do. But I don't think the country deserves the Democrats, at least not the Democrats we have now.

One reaches this level of self-unawareness only after years of patient non-study, or immediately following a strong blow to the head.

PLAYING FOR THE COACH.

It's always interesting when Rod Dreher goes on a multi-installment tear, as when he melted down over Chick-fil-A's gay reversal and started babbling about Thomas More. LSU's college football championship has had him man-crushing hard on coach Ed Orgeron over several posts. Dreher has talked in the past about how unathletic he was as a kid and how his dad thought he was a sissy ("raised me to be a miniature version of himself... The damage this did to me, and to our relationship, was significant") so you don't have to be Sigmund Freud to figure this one out.

In his latest Orgeron orgasm Dreher scoffs at Binyamin Appelbaum, "an Ivy League graduate who writes editorials for The New York Times" -- haw haw, what a sissy! -- who "did not like the fact that LSU cancelled classes on game day and the day after... You’d think that the media elites would by now have learned the cost to their own credibility of not understanding this country... if you plan to vote for Donald Trump in November, do me a favor, and think of Binyamin Appelbaum and the LSU Tigers when you do." Reg'lar folk don' care 'bout no book-l'arnin' nohow!

Then come more belligerent insults to Appelbaum ("Maybe economics nerd Binyamin Appelbaum gets little endorphin bumps of pleasure when the Fed lowers interest rates, but that doesn’t do much for the folks in south Lafourche"), and this poignant reflection:

I used to be something like Binyamin Appelbaum. I’m not much of a sports fan, but I am an LSU Tigers football fan, because that is our tribal religion here on the bayou. I’m not kidding: I’m sitting here writing this with tears in my eyes at the very though of Ed Orgeron. I love him so much. Here is a rough guy from down the bayou...

Eeeeyikes. The howler is, when he's not butching it up, Dreher is the sort of wispy pseud who claims to appreciate fancy cold cuts better than you grubby commoners because they're "sacramental" to him, and is too exquisitely sensitive to clean up after his dog. He's like a rightwing version of Malcolm of The Modern Parents in Viz.  He even wants to start "a Benedict Option for the traditional humanities... the equivalent of monasteries and monastic communities," he says in a recent post, because, don'tcha know, kids today only study wokeness and are unacquainted with "the philosophical genius of the Greeks," which I assume Benedict Option Distance Learning Academy will teach without the homosex.

But Dreher's other recent obsession is even sillier: The Harry and Meghan royal thing. First he offered "A Yankee Yoko In Queen Elizabeth’s Court," and called the couple "Henpecked Harry" and "the Princess of Goop" for being mean to the richest woman in the world.  Dreher then makes his dumb insults even worse in a second post trying to make them look intellectual, as a response to "a clash of worldviews" between Markle's corrupt Hollywood values and "the great good the monarchy does for Britain simply by existing" (which Dreher never explains, probably assuming his readers are sufficiently monarchist to share the assumption) rather than just gossip.

The post contains this wonderful "no, it's the children who are wrong" bit:

There’s been a lot of attention paid to this Buzzfeed piece comparing and contrasting UK tabloid coverage of Kate Middleton with Meghan Markle. This is prima facie evidence that there is a double standard. But why that double standard? Some say racism, though there’s no proof of that...

I mean come on -- racism? Among British royalty?

I defer to British readers on this point, but it strikes me as plausible that the tabloid editors, with their intuitive grasp of what their readers think, gave Kate the benefit of the doubt not necessarily because she was white, or British, but because as a Briton, she intuitively grasped the monarchy’s role, her own place in it, and what was expected of her. Into this very particular and rarefied world walked an American television actress, who has been accustomed to living out her privilege in a different way, and she rebelled against it. Perhaps the British tabloids sensed that Meghan wanted to set her own rules for how she was going to be a Royal, and they decided to take her down a few pegs to teach her what it meant to be a British Royal.

So, see, it's not because she's a sooty --- it's because she doesn't know her place!  Fortunately those great guardians of morality, the British tabloids, have fulfilled their Constitutional duty by piling slop on her. Ugh -- it's enough to make one wish Dreher would go back to football fantasies.

ANNALS OF COMMUNITARIAN CONSERVATISM, CONT. You may recall that last weekend David Brooks told his readers how Rod Dreher had moved back to his old homestead because small-town folks are so nice, and invited them to check out Dreher's "communitarian conservatism" (i.e., the scam formerly known as Crunchy Conservatism) at his blog at The American Conservative.

I wonder how those who took Brooks' invitation enjoyed this heartwarming recent post in which Dreher commiserates with an understandably anonymous doctor about what leeches the poor are:

["Dr. Smith"] said that many of the patients he sees “are people who are poor because they just don’t want to work. They’ve never had a job and they never will have a job. They’re fine with that.” 

He said that the general public has no idea how much money is wasted on medical fraud and abuse by members of the underclass, and on treating people who have no intention of being anything other than dependents on the state, and who will demand treatment “if they as much as stub their toe” because they don’t have to pay for it...

The observable common behavior [of the poor] is so strange, irresponsible, and wholly dysfunctional that it’s hard to relate it to any norms we recognize as healthy, or even sane. But one is not permitted to say things like this out loud, or one will be accused of heartlessness, and worse.

Yet here's Dreher saying it out loud; what a brave fellow! Be nice to him, now, he just lost his sister.

It's been a while since I read the Bible. Was this Jesus guy Dreher claims to worship as big an asshole as he is?

UPDATE. Some commenters observe that Dreher, like his intellectual forebears, distinguishes between the "deserving poor" and the "undeserving poor." Slocum observes, "The Christian conservative thing to do would be to throw some money down on the ground and get a good ole bumfight going. That's how we see who deserves what."

Commenter g asks, "If you 'as much as stub your toe' and get treatment, the doctor gets the payment, not the patient. What motivation would the patient have to get treatment if he doesn't need it? Aren't most perpetrators of Medicaid fraud the medical professionals, not the patients?"

Medicare and Medicaid frauds do indeed enrich unscrupulous doctors, pharmacists, and health care professionals -- like these charming HMO execs I wrote about elsewhere, who are charged with shunting their sicker, less profitable customers off to hospices, from which they allegedly received kickbacks.

The Obama Administration has been working hard to cut medical fraud. But that's not the solution Christians would prefer; rather than crack down on the industrious capitalists who cheat the system, they'd prefer to throw poor people whom they suspect of malingering out of hospitals. They seem to believe that, like hippies, the poors fuck up the system out of sheer malevolence, not from any rational cause.

UPDATE 2. You know, I really shouldn't blame Dreherism on Christians. Many evangelicals support government services to the poor, and there's no reason to assume that all Jesus people share Dreher's way of looking at things. It's easy to be misled by the very visible public perches occupied by retributive Christians, and thus perpetuate the feedback loop that associates ordinary followers of Christ with religious hucksters.

YOUR MOMENT OF DREHER.

You and I are well acquainted with the awfulness of Rod Dreher, and it's gotten to the point where I don't check his site much anymore, because it's too often the same old lather-rinse-repeat of gay oppression and the Benedict Option and I can't even. But I wandered over there today and came across a paragraph in a post called "Trump, the American Pim Fortuyn" (yes, Dreher managed to top the other ridiculous Trump comparisons) that epitomizes not just what's awful about Dreher, but also what's awful about a certain cast of mind all too common in this great democracy:

When I think of Trump’s appeal, I think about the conversations we used to have at the editorial board of the Dallas Morning News years ago. All of us involved in the discussion had good private health insurance, so none of us had to use the city’s public hospitals, which were jammed by immigrants, many of them in the country illegally, demanding health care. If we were poor or working-class citizens — white, black, or brown — who depended on the public hospitals (or for that matter, the public schools in small towns or non-white suburbs), the immigration problem would probably have looked a lot different. But we weren’t, so immigration more often than not appeared as a matter of socially tolerant liberalism and pro-business conservatism. People of all races who weren’t well-off enough to have good private health care, to put their kids in private schools, or to move to suburbs with good public schools — who spoke for them? Who speaks for them?

Dreher is a Christian of the most strenuously self-promoting kind. Christ's least-of-my-brothers stuff is, of course, also the least-assimilated part of the Gospels for people like him.

But for most of them it's enough just to be a flat-out hypocrite and act as if those poor people who aren't dropping the little extra they've got in their favorite megapastor's collection plate don't exist: No, Dreher acknowledges them, but cunningly finds a way to turn these out-group paupers, these desperate Mexicans who risk death in coming to America, risk uprooting and disaster once they've arrived, and are regularly and viciously exploited while they're here, into the real oppressors.

They can't legally get health insurance, see, so they clog up the emergency rooms that can't turn them away when they're sick -- which Dreher characterizes as  "demanding health care," as if treatment for illnesses were the equivalent of an iPhone or a pair of fancy sneakers. And in seeking medical attention, these immigrants deny native-born Americans the emergency room elbow-room they deserve. No, it has nothing to do with the shitty bottom-layer funding and attention we give to all our public services, including emergency care, in this country -- it's those even poorer poor people who are to blame.

And, naturally, liberals who give a shit about these bums are just pretending to do so because they secretly despise the non-Mexican, legally-working-for-the-most-part, and (most importantly) reliably-Republican class -- especially if those liberals have "good private health insurance." Because if you think everyone should have the privileges you have, then you should feel guilty about having them yourself; but if you don't think everyone should have them, then your possession of them, even in the midst of thousands suffering for lack of them, is just the earned blessing of the righteous.

Evil's not too strong a word.

PANDERING.

Matt Lewis at The Daily Caller:

This summer, I interviewed Dr. Helen Smith about her book Men on Strike...

I know, off to a bad start already. But wait, as the kids say, it gets better:

Her premise is simple: More and more American men are making the conscious decision to avoid the drama and heartache that comes with relationships. It’s just not worth it, they say. 

The Japanese word for this is “Mendokusai.” How do I know? It turns out this same phenomenon is taking place amongst young people of both sexes in Japan. Not only are many forgoing marriage, they are also skipping... sex. It’s just not worth it, they say.

Number one, there's a huge gap between "I don't want a relationship" and "I don't want to have sex." Number two, the Japan study to which he refers is mostly bogus. But when you're dealing with American conservatives, facts are the least of it. Lewis laments:

Could there be a connection between what Dr. Helen is documenting here and what’s happening in Japan? Japanese culture and American culture are, of course, a world apart, but technology has made that world smaller. And, in fact, technology might just be the common denominator... 

Interestingly, in her book, Dr. Helen also argues that online porn is replacing the need for American women.

Oh well then: A reference to technology, and an assertion by Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser. What more do you need? The angst extrudes -- Erstwhile sex scold Rod Dreher:

How can an entire country lose the will to reproduce itself, which is to say, the will to live?

Glenn Beck's The Blaze:

WILL THIS NATION’S ‘CELIBACY SYNDROME’ CAUSE IT TO ‘PERISH INTO EXTINCTION’?

At Legal Insurrection, neo-neocon:

When nearly all is permitted (sexually, that is), the prospect of sex loses its forbidden fruit aspect and becomes more ho-hum.

Speak for yourself, honey. But let's not miss the big picture here: Conservatives are beginning to reverse their usual pattern, and are complaining about other people not having sex instead of other people having it. It's kind of a breakthrough!

Alas, there are holdouts. From the Patriot Action Network:

The latest 'trend' that has been called for this is that young men and woman are not having meaningless sex, premarital sex or leading the value of sex being the key to their lives... 

The news is saying this is a bad thing...but in the big picture, is that the truth? 

What isn't being reported, is the transformation that is happening with the young... Many are becoming Christians.

Eventually someone from the central office is going to have to come around and hip this guy to the new realities. I predict conservatives will shift over time from nagging paupers to get married to nagging them to have sex. It'll give them something positive to offer voters. I mean, it's not like they can offer them clean air or water.

UPDATE. Comments are always the best part of alicublog but in this case our gloss squad have outdone themselves. Some are understandable bemused by professional slut-shamer Rod Dreher turning into a sex cheerleader. "When Crunchy Rod is asking us to fornicate, the End Times are upon us," observes DocAmazing. But philadelphialawyer rightly points out that Dreher and his colleagues at The American Conservative are addicted to gloomy "the death of" stories -- and that their prescriptions are, for people who profess a concern for our humanity, weirdly inhuman:

For example, folks should have children not because they want to, not because they enjoy children, or because they think they would be good parents, or because society is accommodating to child raising, but because society, particularly Western society, oh screw it, let's just tell it like it is, because the Great White Race needs them to... 

In other words, people should make highly personal decisions which directly impact their life for the good of the collective... And yet they will turn around and accuse "the left" of suborning the individual to the mass, of being purely utilitarian, of running roughshod over individual conscience, and so on.

Or as Spaghetti Lee puts it, "Fuck like your country depends on it!" Meanwhile trex delineates Matt Lewis' logic model:

I like to call this fallacy "The Transitive Property of Cryptids" or "The Six Degrees of Loch Ness Monster:" 

1. Dr. Helen says men are avoiding relationships.
2. Kids in Japan are avoiding sex.
3. Technology exists in both cultures
4. Women use technology look at porn
5. People look for other forbidden things with technology
6. Loch Ness Monster

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about Mike Pence's poor reception at Hamilton, and Trump's simultaneous machinations behind the scenes. Don't mistake me for one of those guys who think the Hamilton thing is a mere "distraction." I mean, obviously you couldn't put it past Fat Goebbels to gin up an effete-East-Coast Kulturkampfire for that purpose, but I hardly see the need: Trump's got so much wrong with him in so many ways, yet months of experience show it doesn't mean anything to his marks; they've always known he's corrupt as hell, and don't expect high office to change him. They just want to swim, maybe drown, in his bullshit. That's how it is with the better class of fascist -- they spew scum from every orifice, till everything is a distraction from everything else, and those so inclined may surrender.

Rod Dreher makes an appearance in the column. All weekend long he ejaculated over poor innocent American Pence and the fascist arty-farties who oppressed him. Sample:

I mean, is it the case that liberals believe that artistic performances — theater, music, and so forth — must be limited only to people who share their moral and political views? If I were worried that the Trump administration was going to be hostile to minorities and gays...

(Pause to imagine a Rod Dreher "worried that the Trump administration was going to be hostile to minorities and gays," unsuccessfully)

...I would have gone out of my way to make Mike Pence feel welcome at Hamilton, and hoped and prayed that the power of art moved his heart and changed his mind. But that’s not how the audience saw it.

That, Brother Rod, is because the audience weren't morons. They knew Pence wasn't going to see a fucking play and go, "Wow, suddenly I see minorities and gays in a whole new light, no more gay-straightening for me!" More likely he'd think, heh, them sub-humans sure do sing and dance good, and then cheerfully go back to Washington to fuck up their lives even worse. In other words, some people you can't and don't try to convince; with them all you can do to them is warn. For starters.

Extra negative points to Dreher for adding a column about why we should applaud his toleration in going to see Brokeback Mountain and writing an incredibly shitty column about it.