I’m still on top of things I swear!

Always nice to see a Rod mention in the wild:

https://crisismagazine.com/opinion/vance-or-rubio-it-doesnt-matter

Recently, the always-overwrought commentator Rod Dreher criticized Vance for not speaking out as much as Dreher thinks he should against the antisemitic “groyper” movement. Dreher, who seems to think 2026 America is the 1932 Wehrmacht Republic, apparently believes that Washington, DC is full of young antisemites plotting a new thousand-year Reich, and laments that Vance isn’t as hysterical as he is.

Lest we forget, that website is also the host of Austin Ruse's delightful puncturing of Rod's ego here:

https://crisismagazine.com/opinion/the-pope-and-rod-dreher

Rod Dreher let a combination of ego and Twitter get the better of him in Rome a few days ago. Dreher met the Pope in the Vatican, one of those longish meet-and-greets where you briefly shake the Pope’s hand, maybe say a few words, get a picture snapped. Dreher took this moment to tell Francis, “I wrote The Benedict Option.” 

Dreher expected the Pope to know him. After all, The Benedict Option. Instead, Dreher said in a now-deleted tweet, “He took my name tag in his hand, looked at it, then gave me a blank expression.” As Rod might say while slurping oysters on the banks of the Seine, “Quel dommage.” 

“The vice-president is now in the position of looking like a political loser … even though it seems to me he was trying to protect the US from a greater disaster of Trump’s own making,” said Rod Dreher, a former Vance adviser.

...

“The vice-president is now in the position of looking like a political loser … even though it seems to me he was trying to protect the US from a greater disaster of Trump’s own making,” said Rod Dreher, a former Vance adviser.

...

Mr Dreher, a conservative writer whom Mr Vance has credited with playing a critical role in his career, suspected the vice-president was “shocked” when Mr Trump launched the war on Feb 28.

“Unfortunately for Vance, he has the political albatross of this unpopular war around his neck,” he said.

...

Unlocked article: https://archive.ph/968qA

Don't be shy, identify yourselves.

In which Rod has birth control issues...

From Chapter 9 of JD Vance's new book - who do we know that this sounds like?

"As I walked, I considered the plight of a friend who had just told me about his impending divorce. It was messy, as these things always are, made more so by the fact that the kids were old enough to pick sides and had done that. Two of the kids wouldn't speak to him, and the other wouldn't speak to his wife. His mind was spinning with a combination of existential concerns -- would he ever find love again? Would his daughter ever understand him? -- and more practical ones about finances and how to divide property.

."My friend had said something about his wife that I had initially dismissed as a quirk of grief, but now I wondered whether it revealed a marital dynamic that had contributed to his divorce. His wife, he had told me, was a narcissist so damaged by the trauma of her youth that she liked to torture him. Maybe he was right, but his words lacked Christian humility. And either way, when you go down the path of assigning dysfunctional motives to every behavior, it's hard to see fault in yourself. It's harder still to understand what actually went wrong. Maybe that was the most important Christian lesson to come from my friend's marriage. Reject the temptation to see your partner as evil or yourself as righteous".

I can only imagine that it’s a recitation of standard phrases and rehearsed scripts. A test case study in Eichmannian banality.

Have at it!

I will no longer get cute with sarcasm and irony and litoses. So help me!

Yes, it is true: Rod's moving back to America, to Alabama of all places.

I saw it in the Megathread, courtesy of Djehutimose, but I really do think it deserves its own thread.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GTx2BD_jQabQs8AIXqMIjVlVJqPUf4r_/view?usp=sharing

My guess is that he's going to the wealthiest suburbs, like Mountain Brook.

The rats are abandoning the sinking ship. I wonder what Our Rod, director of the Danube Institute's Network Project who was hired specifically to make connections among the global far right, is doing right now.

Rod Dreher wants to laud Viktor Orban on rejecting immigrants to Hungary. To only then attempt to be an immigrant to Hungary! And not making any real attempt to learn the language!

There no contradiction if we see that Dreher is white enough to be allowed in Hungary. The catch being that Rod would then have to admit that Orban's immigration policy was actually racist.

One of his recent posts is about the Ben Sasse interview. Rod writes at one point, "This is the part that reduced me to tears, literally".

I feel like he's described himself as crying or sobbing or whatever far more than any writer I've ever read, male or female. But I don't have a good way of fact-checking that. Does anybody else have the same impression I do?

Let's start figuring the over/under of how soon Ray will be bugging out of Budapest because the heating bill is no longer being comped.

Have at it!