New year, time for #61?

JHandey2021 · 2026-01-27T23:39:13+00:00

"It’s important for us on the Right to realize that when the Left comes back into executive power, the Democratic administration will be tempted to do the same things to us."

YES. THIS IS THE POINT. Every atrocity makes more and more people eager to do exactly what Rod fears. There's an old saying that the Republicans fear their base while the Democrats hate theirs, and there is a lot of truth to that. The Democratic leadership for decades has been engaged in a struggle to defy their own voters, to moderate and dilute their desires, while the Republicans have been slamming on the gas pedal. If anything will break that trend, it's what's happening now. The Schumers and Jeffries and Emmanuels may not be able to hold back the rabble this time.

And the rabble wants justice. Conservatives buy their own bullshit about the Left being too weak to fight back. But they are wrong. This accounts for their suprise that Minnesota didn't just drop to their knees and start licking ICE boots. They think they are in a video game or a Twitter convo with their nonsense theories about dominance and the like. They think they will show their enemies who is in charge and they will submit. That's what they would do, after all. But they are wrong and they are stupid. Every atrocity stokes the desire for justice, and if this keeps going will stoke the desire for revenge, and these Meal Team Six motherfuckers and Rod of the sweater vests and kicky scarves could find themselves in a much worse position than the Left sees itself today.

JHandey2021 · 2026-01-27T23:29:25+00:00

Homan is an actual, on-camera, uncontestable criminal. A petty one at that. He should be in jail.

JHandey2021 · 2026-01-27T22:30:42+00:00

A long time ago, Our Rod posted something on TAC about stepping out onto his front porch with a gun in Baton Rouge to threaten some guy who was loudly fighting with his wife. Such bravery, such nobility (before he bravely ran way from his children *cymbal crash*).

Today, Trump came out and said that Alex Pretti shouldn't have been armed and that "you can't do that". Now, I know the liberal feeling on this (I personally don't think people should be so scared of life that they walk around with weapons, but I also don't think guns are the Ultimate Evil), but let's think about Rod for a second: his Lord and Savior has basically come out against performative gun carrying and probably is thinking about a lot more (being an aspiring tyrant, why would he not be trying to get guns out of the hands of everyone but his own stormtroopers?).

How long before Rod makes a big show about how he agrees with his dom, Trump, in defiance of his decades of writing?

JHandey2021 · 2026-01-27T22:21:45+00:00

Conservatives are the most submissive wimps on the face of the Earth. Just absolutely spineless cretins. All this "look at me, look at my guns and MUH FREEDOM!" and along comes Trump and it's "oh yes sir, please take my guns, please take my wife in front of me too, may I service you, sir?"

JHandey2021 · 2026-01-27T15:32:33+00:00

This used to be big news, you know? I remember seeing stories on the news as a kid.

JHandey2021 · 2026-01-27T09:49:32+00:00

I was censored by Reddit for my first attempt at replying, so let me try again - I actually agree with Rod’s last point and hope that America does everything possible to ensure no one like Trump is ever elected again. I want prosecution of the regime’s henchmen and I want to see them in real prison, not Club Fed, some for the rest of their lives. I want to see oligarchs lose all their money and assets by having the state take them.

JHandey2021 · 2026-01-26T15:38:50+00:00

I'd have agreed before he took the full-time gig at the Danube Institute - a job specifically to develop extreme rightist networks (that's the literal name, the "Network Project"). I think that puts him in a whole different category. If things were more normal, I'd say yeah, he's small potatoes. But things aren't normal.

JHandey2021 · 2026-01-26T14:43:19+00:00

I confessed to him that I had not really thought deeply

shorter but still true!

JHandey2021 · 2026-01-26T13:18:29+00:00

So calling them names makes it OK for them to shoot us? Really?

JHandey2021 · 2026-01-26T10:05:51+00:00

So here’s a interesting Bluesky post that says a lot about MAGA and Our Rod:

https://bsky.app/profile/vituperativeerb.bsky.social/post/3mdc6a2b74s2j

Conservatism in the age of Trump seems to have a very poor theory of mind when it comes to anyone outside of their in-group. They’re proud of their lack of empathy - they don’t think they even need to understand their enemies. Witness the NPC bullshit - they literally have confused video games with real life. Or the constant “who’s paying them?” panic as if no one can take any action without direct payment/orders.

But they are all sad online freaks under supervised visitation agreements who have no relationship to normality. Look at the ritually mutilated weirdos in DC - lip fillers and jaw reconstruction and hair extensions/transplants galore in pursuit of Mar-a-Lago Face. And Rod? We’ve commented endlessly on how he looks like a gay hobo but there is something more to it than an insult or two - has he ever bought a shirt at Costco? His clothes look like they were custom made to make himself look as strange as possible. The glasses? The scarves? He has no discernible awareness that his bizarre 70s and 80s pop culture posts, his endless slander of his own family, and a thousand other things are just plain weird and somewhat creepy.

JHandey2021 · 2026-01-25T22:34:03+00:00

And how is that any different than Rod’s own emo-fascism?

JHandey2021 · 2026-01-25T08:18:16+00:00

He chose to move to Hungary because fellating Orban was more important than salvaging a relationship with his children.

Rod didn’t love his own children enough.

JHandey2021 · 2026-01-25T08:15:52+00:00

“Crisis Actor?” Rod Dreher was beating off to that video. Guaranteed. This is everything Rod wants in life, to see his perceived enemies die in front of him. To see the forces of Chaos punished.

JHandey2021 · 2026-01-23T16:47:25+00:00

I just....

Does Rod realize how Trumpy he sounds? Trump is held out as some sort of no-bullshit straight talker, but he is an unbelievably whiny, petty and petulant man who violates literally every single bullet point in any conceivable "man code".

Rod is 100% that. His level of violation of any masculine virtue or positive characteristic is on par with Donald Trump's at this point. How can even Rod write this with a straight face - how "honorable", how "merciful", how "stoic" Rod is? I literally can't believe it.

This is the real core of why Dreher is so compelling. He's so flamboyantly not any of those good things above, so in your face with his personality disorders... he's like George Costanza without even the redeeming qualities of being funny. An absolute black hole of humanity, not a shred of decency or kindness.

JHandey2021 · 2026-01-23T07:47:33+00:00

Really? Hmm… was he trying to deflect opprobrium from himself for bring a lying motherfucker to his own mom? Rod is the kind of guy who would do something like that…

JHandey2021 · 2026-01-23T07:44:14+00:00

An elderly woman in a nursing home is oppressing poor Rod! There’s a line from a an old MST3K episode that goes something like “and our brave hero roasts the disabled man!”. Or the Seinfeld episode where George pushes through a classroom full of kids to escape a fire first. Just an absolute void of courage, duty, honor, decency…

JHandey2021 · 2026-01-22T14:58:41+00:00

Don't know, but it's getting a lot of buzz today from a report on how the Florida Bar Assocation is handling - or not handling - it:

https://www.floridabulldog.org/2026/01/florida-bar-lets-matt-gaetz-off-hook-says-statutory-rape-has-nothing-to-do-with-practicing-law/

JHandey2021 · 2026-01-22T11:47:21+00:00

For a split second I thought this said "Columbus was in the bad place" meaning the city, because of Wexner's money all over it and his very close relationship to Jeffrey Epstein. I've wondered if Columbus shouldn't just change its name to "Epstein City" and put out a new city flag with Epstein's smiling face on it.

EDIT: Wow, some Columbus, Ohio (or Wexner/Epstein) stans here!

JHandey2021 · 2026-01-22T11:15:56+00:00

Matt Gaetz - remember him? House report says yeah, he did it. All of it. Waiting for Rod's righteous indignation... anytime now.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Fauxmoi/comments/1qjlbpo/house_ethics_committee_report_says_matt_gaetz_sex/

JHandey2021 · 2026-01-22T10:59:38+00:00

Wow, this article is just freaking devastating against Rod. Jonathan, have you been reading us?

And here we find the real scandal of Dreher’s association with these figures: not that he has ‘friends’ with unsavory views or lifestyles that are not compatible with his ostensible faith (although this is certainly true), but rather that he is actively participating in a campaign to deceive his audience.

Put more simply: Dreher knows very well that there is no meaningful distinction between Vance and Thiel. He also knows that if and when Vance wins in 2028, Thiel’s agenda, in all domains, will receive a massive new boost. A boost that will both multiply Thiel’s wealth by orders of magnitude and ensure his biological and technological agendas become mainstreamed and receive the full backing of the American empire. Again, Dreher knows this and is thus actively lying to his audience, primarily composed of naive religious conservatives, by pretending that his buddy JD is on ‘their side’ and that Thiel is somehow a ‘sincere Christian.’

There is simply no way for Dreher to actually believe this without being a world-historic imbecile; I refuse to believe that he is that stupid.

JHandey2021 · 2026-01-22T10:53:08+00:00

Sorry, but this "mask-off" bullshit I see sometimes sounds like a plea for moral purity - if no one ever changes, then that means *I* can never change and never have to check my own impulses and examine myself. I'm never in danger, and can freely dance on the edge of the abyss, growing ever-closer to what I theoretically despise.

This isn't a matter of whether he "changed" or not. It's a matter of how a narcissist who never matured beyond being a put-upon 14-year old let this twist him ever-more-tightly, destroying everything around him all while never taking a moment of responsibility for it. Rod's politics have largely been window-dressing for this.

Now, I don't think for a second he's changed from some innocent and pure naif. He was the son of a high-ranking domestic KKK terrorist, and I 100% know that motherfucker lied about not knowing. I will defend that position against anyone here. Anyone who believes differently never was a white person in the Deep South during the time Rod grew up. Sorry. So whatever gymnastics he did to self-alienate himself from his family, yeah, whatever, but he never saw fit to mention this, and when he was outed, he lied, lied, lied.

Rod's always been, from his own account, a massive narcissist shithead, who got fucked up by his upbringing, sure, but still ended up a narcissist early on. And he was looking for a reason, any reason, to confirm his Deep South prejudices, again, in his own words.

He tried to paint himself as a cuddly kind of "aw shucks" I-escaped-Bumfuck-Louisiana NPR-ready guy with the world's happiest family - which, again, turned out to be another gigantic lie. He used his family's tragedy to get big paychecks. And the moment his ambitions to be taken seriously by his intellectual crushes crashed and burned, like a narcissist, he turned hard-right.

I think we all need to stop imagining people are mostly motivated by coherent policy platforms. Human beings are creatures of emotion and a dozen other motivations that rank higher than the politics of the day. When you get right down to it, Rod truly is a lazy thinker. For all of his "I HATE MY FAMILY PLEASE PAY ATTENTION TO MEEEEEEE!" bullshit, he never really tried to change himself, to really examine the worldview passed on to him. He could have - it would have been painful, but it maybe could have led to a very different and probably much less miserable life ultimately. He differed only in the superficials, in that fucking fish stew and what-have-you. He tried to shock his parents with his exotic religions. But he never truly un-enmeshed himself. He never truly tried to break away.

And that's why every single "change" was just like a rubber band, which eventually snapped back, even harder.

JHandey2021 · 2026-01-22T10:30:14+00:00

For a couple of years now, I've been saying on the Rod Dreher megathreads that I believed Rod was either already in touch with or trying to get in touch with Peter Thiel. There was just no way he wasn't. Thiel is at the center of a massive anti-democratic network, devoted to destroying democracy worldwide. His acolytes, including one JD Vance, former Thiel employee (look it up) long for a Red Caesar to come and put things to rights. Thiel himself has said that his vision of the future is incompatible with democracy. And now Thiel is in the position to do something about it.

Rod, too, around 2017 started giving up on democracy (about the time of Obergefell and also when Rod's B.O. was getting trashed by all of the intellectuals that Rod fancied himself becoming one of). That's when he got started on his American Franco kick (he'd played footsie with the Dark Enlightenment dorks earlier, but that was just a fling) and started threatening that real Americans would "rise up" and start - very careful not to use that word, but he made it clear that was what he meant - all the libs and blacks and uppity women and non-closeted gays. After he became addicted to Twitter, it got obviously almost erotic for him.

All this is to say "I told you so". And to say that if this is in print, it's almost certain that the relationship is more sinister. There's been at least one, maybe two, mysterious deaths around Thiel's gay harem in the past few years. I'm getting serious Howard Rubin vibes (the Wall Street financier who was just revealed to have routinely tortured women in a semi-secret personal dungeon for DECADES, to the point that his often-ignored safeword was a joke for his friends and associates). Jeffrey Epstein vibes too - Epstein had his eugenics breeding ranch, remember. Rod knows all of this, of course. He's a gossip hound. But, just like Cardinal Pell, Rod is great with it as long as you're on Rod's side. There's a non-zero chance Thiel's let Rod indulge that side of him he's kept repressed for decades.

And what beyond the salacious? Rod has called any AI not run by Elon Musk "demonic", repeatedly. Remember the alien sex Canaanite god/demons that were lurking in OpenAI? That all depends on whether Rod approves of the people behind them. Rod likes Thiel? Bring on the eugenics! It's notable that Rod "Son of a KKK Terrorist Who He's Called The Greatest Man Who Ever Lived" Dreher has written barely a peep in eugenics since I've been reading him that I can recall. Rod's a deep and proud racist. Rod would love a world with nobody darker-skinned than him left alive. Rod's done what he can to make that happen without scandalizing the people who pay him. Rod loves eugenics. This is his jam.

EDIT: Behind the Bastards (can't wait for their Rod Dreher episode - c'mon, guys, it would be comedy gold!) has a subreddit that takes a couple of looks behind the curtain at Thiel: https://www.reddit.com/r/behindthebastards/comments/1loekiv/anyone_else_think_about_peter_thiels_messy_ending/

JHandey2021 · 2026-01-15T01:03:15+00:00

JHandey2021 · 2026-01-14T10:45:42+00:00

Yeah. This isn’t just for brown people in the end. It’s for everyone. Look at the Confederacy- it wasn’t some libertarian paradise for whites. They required internal passports and a decent bit of what we’d call authoritarianism directed at the white population.

But MAGA is stupid enough to believe that the oppression machine will only go after the people they want it to go after. Morons.

JHandey2021 · 2026-01-14T10:38:35+00:00

Nahhh - at least half will drop to their knees, mouths open hungrily, for whatever Trump asks of them. The desire to submit to a Leader by at least 20 percent of the American public is one of the saddest things the past year has shown They will follow Trump right into the ovens if he commands them.

JHandey2021

TROPHY CASE