I come to bury Rod Dreher, not to praise him

Creepy Crunchy Con Rod Dreher and his lust for primitive root wieners (if he's repressing, he's lusting) are leaving (except for guest columns) The American Conservative. Here's his last regular column.

Dreher is someone of my acquaintance — in person as well as online, having met him once about 20 years ago — for some time. (That was when he was still at the Snooze [my name for the, I am sorry, I mean THE Dallas Morning News] and violating op-ed policy by writing for money for other outlets until I informed them after seeing it. Already then, Rod had a dubious ethical standard.)

And, with that, let's load up some of my Dreher highlights from the past! Not all of them are about teh gay, but some certainly are.

One of the oldest, and kind of sort of funny, was him calling CPAC "white kids on dope." More true today than in 2009, looking at how it's been captured by Trumpkins.

As far as pure odious, non-gay (overall) division, there was his "praying for Hitchens." (And looking back at that link, was late friend-of-sorts Chuck Bloom a fanboi of Rod's, as far as him being the one to inform Rod that Snitchens had terminal cancer and for Rod to call Chuck out by name?)

Then, there was his odiousness, racist division, as an apologist for Paula Deen.

And, even without Rod thinking he was too kind to teh gay, of course he would hate on Pope Francis. UPDATE, May 6, 2026: I am "surrreee" he loves Leo XIV. He did actually write shortly after the election, noting that it's not really a surprise but worried he might be theologically too liberal.

There was his hating on the underclass about wanting to be a gatekeeper on recreational marijuana. (He wasn't alone there; big time pot-legalization guru Mark Kleiman felt the same. And, he had the academic background to know better.)

There was his backdoor semi-anti-Semitic odiousness on his take on the Covington Catholic kerfuffle.

But, in the end, with Rod, it was always about teh gay. And, per the Vanity Fair piece, his one and sole financier of his writings at The American Conservative cut off the money when Rod's musings got too graphic on too regular of a basis. Per his last post, where he writes about seeing his first uncircumcised penis (Black kid, of course, with Rod perpetuating "hung Black" stereotypes, too, natch), which he calls the "primitive root wiener," imagine how shocked he would be at uncircumcised gay cock. And, per the Black angle, there's the background issue of it being revealed a year ago that Rod's dad was a Klansman. Rod, in talking about it at TAC, said he fought back and forth with his dad about it, but ... how much did he pick up implicit bias? I mean, look at the Paula Deen stuff. That's even though he found out that he has a primitive root wiener among his ancestors.

And, per the commenters on Twitter about the last piece, how he talks about losing a marriage among his losses of the last decade, but doesn't mention his wife by name? Having heard the basics of the divorce already ... it's sad.

==

Ohh, add in that Dreher's in voluntary exile in a country with a presumable president for life who spies on journalist cellphones. 

==

Final sidebar: If Dreher's not repressing being gay, the other serious possibility? He's repressing some child sexual abuse, and I"m not joking about that.

==

Another update, May 6, 2026: Rod appears to believe in the reality of aliens, or rather, the fake reality that "aliens" are actually demons trying to take over the planet. No, really. 

And, another, no more shocking: Rod writes for Bari Weiss's circumcised root wiener genocidalists at the Free Press. No, really.

And, in case anybody is wondering what sparked the updates? (Maybe I should have done a separate piece.) Paul Kingsnorth in "Against the Machine" reminds me to some degree of Dreher — an English version of a "crunchy con" who eventually converted to Eastern Orthodoxy. 

Covington Catholic stupidity watch:Rod Dreher vs Andrew Sullivan

I saw Sully's piece pop up on Memeorandum. I then saw a screengrab via a Twitter friend of Dreher's nuttery. Of course, Sully is NOT the "Intelligencer," and Dreher's mag/site is really The American Con.

Shorter Sully? Blame the Yahweh ben Yahweh type black Israelites for starting the whole thing. Triple down on that. Then blame Nathan Phillips et al for not understanding Sandmann et al attempting to calm down the black Garner Ted Armstrongs.

Double down on that.

Ignore Sandmann's smirk. Downplay how much the arm motions of the other Covington brats were tomahawk chops. Ignore than Sandmann's rich parents hired a PR firm for a fake apology.

And, then claim it's all anti-Catholic bias driving this, with a dollop of whataboutism at the end.

It would be hard to top that.

Until you start with the header on Dreher's piece: "Of Pogroms and Political Theology."

Of course, there's no pogroms involved. This is an insult to Jews that Dreher, as a non-antisemitic "Crunchy Con," still claims to like. He then commits the rest of the Sully type moves, only trying to frame it in a Richard John Neuhaus stance shifted two Overton Windows Right.

Drecker then puts a bow on it by linking to Sully's piece.

I'm surprised that Drecker didn't claim Phillips was gay.

==

Meanwhile, out in the streets, a guy named Ryan Moore admits that he wears a MAGA hat to troll people, all while claiming white males are the most persecuted or discriminated against section of America.

==

Update, Feb. 3: Lawyers for Sandmann are sending clearly intimidatory letters to major media, and supposedly to celebrities and others. The idea that, if libel cases went to trial, they'd all "of course" be tried in Kentucky is part of the mask-slipping. Interestingly, the Cincinnati Enquirer, reporting the story above, is not named as a recipient of one of the letters, though it uses the word "smirk" itself to describe Sandmann (tho not by name, it's clear the reference) in this news analysis piece.

I also find it interesting that mega-torts lawyer Lin Wood complains about mobs rushing to judgment, albeit without mentioning social media by name — and does so by making his own apparent mob appeal on Twitter.

Finally, Lin Wood does NOT come cheap. Even if Sandmann's parents had the money for a PR firm for his so-called apology, is there outside money coming in? This initial PR piece by their local mouthpiece, Todd McMurtry, only raises eyebrows. They specifically say "no media statements." Instead, they're turning to Twitter. And making media statements with the retention letters comments. In addition, Lin's law firm set up an email account with a specific "supportnick" prefix. It asks for information, but I suspect probably wouldn't have a problem with legal fees, either.

Doubly finally, a sitting member of Congress, Ilhan Omar is on that list. Especially given Supreme Court ruling in the case of William Jefferson, I'm sure she is protected by the speech or debate clause.

==

Update, Feb. 19: Sandmann's flacks are suing the Bezos Post for $250 million. Which they will not win, I'm sure.

And, here's American Indian reporting truth about what went down.

Rod Dreher, tripling down on the bigotry

First, Sarah Jones nails the racism behind his backing Trump's "shithole country" comments.

Specific to one issue he raises? Dreher knows and ignores — or else is incredibly ignorant — that Section 8-type housing in metropolitan areas was built on a history of redlining and segregation. It was often that way in its USDA rural equivalent in small Southern towns, for that matter.

Second, Dreher hangs himself in accusing the NYT of pseudoscience on transgender issues. The reality is that this is the same Religious Right "established science" bullshit on gender identity that Dan Patrick peddles.

None of this is new, of course.

I've made a semi-staple of writing blog posts about Dreher's various bigotries.

Here's the last before my current one, which itself contains links to him defending Paula Deen's cringeworthy comments and other things.

Beyond that, per Sarah Jones, it also notes how much of an elitist he is. That's even more laughable, given that he's written before about how troubling in some ways his visits back to childhood Louisiana are. He has noted some degree of family distance, without apparently wondering that his family might see him as an elitist. (From what I've read, I don't think they've got so much problem with his other stances.)

Dreher strikes me as a version of Andrew Sullivan, moved about three Overton Windows right.

Rod Dreher: Pot for me but not for thee; it's gotta be the gay

Rod Dreher channels his inner David Brooks on legalization of marijuana, and gets even worse.

Old "crunchy con" (I guess a nutbar with extra rocks in it can be "crunchy") Dreher says, nope, no pot for you, you huddled masses, you 47 percenter slackers. Only the financial titans vulture carcass feeders of America are entitled to smoke dope:

Most of these driven, type-A personalities would benefit heavily from being able to relax and avoid burn-out. If they experiment with drugs that function as source of stress relief (and pot does that better than anything else!), they see their experiences as overwhelmingly positive. They project those positive experiences externally on the general population, to the extent that they are in urban population centers which have little contact with “ordinary” Americans (those who feel their lives offer little prospect for advancement or self-improvement).

So, like children out of wedlock, this becomes another example of how something that works well for elites can simultaneously become a disaster for the underclass. Middle/lower-class employees in America need the energy and drive to show up at miserable jobs and work long hours for meager wages. That’s something you get from caffeine or nicotine, not from THC. If they mellow themselves out, they become the proverbial pot-smoking ex-roommate on the couch who never holds the same job for more than a couple months, due to apathy and disinterest. So successful members of the working-class are disproportionately not pot-users, and perceive unsuccessful pot-smoking members of their circle of friends and family leeching off them. This is a totally different set of immediate social references than those urban elites ever get to experience.

Old Rodney tries to spin himself as a moderate libertarian, even to the point of deceiving Oprah. But really? He's a hardcore far rightist on social issues who has never met a conservative religious based issue where he didn't want maximum state regulation against your personal rights.

He's antigay and personally homophobic. He's a racism apologist. (Related to that, he's probably some sort of Lost Cause Confederate mythologist.)

But, more than apologizing for the likes of Paula Deen, per the first of my two links in the paragraph above, it's teh gay that really bunches Rod's knickers in a knot. So much that the former Catholic, who's sampled from all the different waters of conservative Christianity, also got his dander up over the idea that Pope Francis might want to turn down the Vatican's boiling pot of antigay down to a low simmer.

So, it's gotta be teh gay, eh Rod?

Pot for me but not for thee? Maybe we should only let straights have pot because, well, teh gay will go all jungly-jiggly on us if they toke, you know? Some big gay black buck might want to molest Rod, fulfilling both his worst nightmare and possibly his top secret dream.

You know, Rod? Most gay and lesbian people just want to be treated as, and called, people. The Castro-district types are a small minority and probably, were it not for gay rights issues, they'd find some other reason to get their freak on.

And, you know, Rod? If you didn't rabidly foam at the mouth over stuff like this, on teh gay, then go on to write classist and racist crap like this on marijuana, people would not take such sharp shots at you.

Rod Dreher channels his inner racism apologia for #PaulaDeen

I'm pretty tired of Paula Deen myself, but, when a "crunchy con" like Rod Dreher (think a bit more southern-fried Ross Douthat if you're not familiar with Dreher) pulls the "Southern heritage" card to try to defend Deen, well, we have to fire back.

First:

Every younger white Southerner who holds enlightened opinions on race knows that you have to allow for the cultural deformation of older white Southerners.

Really? Hey, Rod, Selma was nearly 50 years ago. The lunch-counter sit-ins started before she hit adulthood.

Beyond that, there's the assumption, unspoken here, but voiced more later, that this is something that's just at the edges of her personality. Just an occasional slip. Not something ingrained from someone young enough to be in high school herself when Little Rock was integrated.

Speaking of past as prologue, or better yet, history repeating itself, now as farce, trotting out a 56-year-old letter from Walker Percy qualifies:

In a 1957 letter, the Southern Catholic novelist Walker Percy, who openly opposed segregation when that wasn't easy for a white Southerner to do, conceded the wickedness of the peculiar institution, but warned that anti-racists could not win if they attacked "not only segregation, but (the Southerner), his people, and his past." 

"Perhaps the best imaginable society is not a countrywide Levittown in which everyone is a good liberal ashamed of his past, but a pluralistic society, rich in regional memories and usages," Percy wrote. "I sincerely believe that the worst fate that could overtake the struggle against segregation would be its capture by a political orthodoxy of the left." 

Uhh, Rod, Percy was expecting more enlightenment by 1980, I'm sure, and definitely by 2013.

Dreher then finishes with the "damn Yankees" defense.

These militant culture warriors are placing abstract ideals over flesh and blood reality. That too reflects an impoverished moral imagination. But then, Southerners have long considered that to be the graceless Yankee way. If this Deen episode reinforces odious Northern stereotypes of Southerners, then I assure you the feeling is mutual.  

The likes of Dreher provide fertile seeds for a new stereotype to start: "The conservative side of New South as Old South — don't get fooled again."

It's always been this way among Southerners of Dreher's ilk, whether 1923, 1963, or 2013 — that is, the claim of "just give us more time."

Rather, with using zoning, private schools and more, many a conservative Southerner's idea of "more time" is turning the clock further back.

But, given that Mr. Dreher's let the mask slip before on gay issues, this is no surprise to come from him.

(Update, July 9: A Facebook commenter said that, before the person finished reading through the first graf of Rod's anti-gay rant, they were convinced he was gay. And, per the link immediately above, it kind of makes sense. Only a self-repressing gay, I think, would worry so much about this issue without worrying so much about the kids being scarred and damaged.)

Another mask-slipping is for the formerly Catholic Dreher to claim that the Catholic church's pedophile priest plague is all driven by said priests being gay. His rant about a "lavender mafia" and more really sound like someone self-repressing.  

Anyway and basically, the shorter Dreher is saying: Gays need to show personal growth, racists don't.

Having lived in Dallas most the previous decade, and being a suburban newspaper editor, I actually happened to meet Dreher in person once, when he was promoting his first book at a civic event in my suburb. He was certainly affable enough. But, then again, I'm a white male, and don't look like a stereotypical gay person. And, he had no idea then of how liberal I am. (He does now, of course, since I Tweeted this to him; I have no idea if he remembers me, or exactly what is the incident he references.)

And, of course, in his own way, because of this, he IS a next-generation Paula Deen, of sorts. Now, even in narrower circles, unless he was absolutely sure of said circle, if he has any personal racism or racialism bones in his body, rather than just being a defender of others, he wouldn't say "nigger" (let's not euphemize it) with anyone else to hear, unlike "Crazy Aunt Paula."

But, would he say "faggot" in the right circle? Or "queer"? Given what's on the record, sure.

And, 20-30 years from now, he might hope that the intellectual scion of him and Crazy Aunt Paula wandered down the road, and said:

Every younger straight Southerner who holds enlightened opinions on gay issues knows that you have to allow for the cultural deformation of older straight Southerners.

Dreher won't change. That we know. No more than his praying for Chris Hitchens' conversion (what else would healing of an atheist's "soul" be?) was going to change Hitch.

We can, perhaps, hope that Paula Deen Drehers will indeed be few and far between when that 20 or 30 years comes, though.

And, as a sidebar, let's note the hypocrisy of Dreher accusing Rush Limbaugh of racism, even though the linked post at Beliefnet is no longer there. (The Hitch one, obviously, is, so I linked it instead of my blog post. I call shenanigans on Dreher, Beliefnet, or both.)

We also know the hypocrisy of "crunchy cons." If they're religiously driven ones, at all, the granola stays on the straight side of the table. And, black folks only get their hands on it by serving it to white folks.

Rod Dreher: Anti-gay bigot

As someone who lived in Dallas a number of years, I semi-regularly read Dreher when he was a Dallas Morning News columnist. Like Ross Douthat at the New York Times, he reminded me of two things — the Peter Principle and the existence of a promotional network for young conservative writers. He also reminded me of Douthat directly; both in some ways being "crunchy cons," conservatives who gave off a patina of having a "moderate" take on a couple of issues, issues that weren't core ones for them.

Well, after he left the Snooze, I didn't really read him any more.

I had met him personally, once, about a year or so before he left. He certainly seemed personable enough. Of course, I didn't let on that I read him regularly, and that I, among others, contacted his boss, the editorial page editor, about him violating company policy and creating a conflict of interest by also writing for World Net Daily.

But, maybe he seemed personable for another reason.

I guess that's because as a straight man, I didn't put off some sort of "gay funk."

Because, per Alternet, the real Dreher is a flaming homophobe, one who can talk about "gay McCarthyism."

More on Dreher's background as a young conservative in general, and a highly bigoted one, here.

Why bring this up now?

Dreher has a new book out, "The Little Way of Ruthie Leming," for which he got an advance possibly as much as $1 million. It's been speculated that he may wind up on Oprah.

Well, Ms. Naive had better learn more about Dreher's background.

I'm not surprised, even if I hadn't followed details of him to know about his gay-bashing for some time.

Dreher also used to be a regular on Beliefnet. Given that it's by no means limited to fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals, that website also needs to be made aware of Dreher's full background.

Rod Dreher, still stupid and arrogant

Leaving the Dallas Morning News op-ed staff obviously didn't remove those traits from Roberto, judging by his "praying for Hitchens" blog.

If only there were an "anti-praying" for someone, eh?

Red Dreher calls Limbaugh out as racist

I couldn’t have said it better myself, but it’s nice to see a religious conservative pundit with a certain amount of credibility spell it out in black and white. Dreher worries that Limbaugh is going to keep digging lower, too.

VD Hanson licks Rush’s pilodinal cyst; Crunchy con Dreher says wake up

And finds it quite tasty.

Classicist prof, neocon, and Islamic red tide worrier V(ictor) D(avis) Hanson decries what he sees as a tide of “highbrow conservative attacks” against the Rushster, and then licks the cyst hard by saying the non-churchgoing Rush never would have stayed in Rev. Wright’s church, or the white-supremacist equivalent, and other stupidities.

So,. Mr. Crunchy Con, Rod Dreher, tells VD to buy a clue, even calling him a “Mongoloid.”

Ahh, some of the few conservatives who do have brains, arguing over the bloated, bloviating carcass called Rush Limbaugh. Gotta love it.

Rod Dreher – CPAC is ‘white kids on dope’

When somebody as conservative as Mr. Crunchy Con, current Dallas Morning News and former New York Post editorial columnist Rod Dreher, makes a comment like that about this past week’s Conservative Political Action Committee confab, you know it’s bad.

Dreher goes beyond that.

He says that the Big Fat Idiot, Rush Limbaugh, is not a conservative, does not understand the philosophical foundations of modern American conservativism and more.

Well, half right there, Rod.

One doesn’t have to be a social conservative to be a conservative, totally refuting your religious-driven belief that conservatives believe in “fallen human nature.” Which gives irony, at least, if not hypocrisy at most, to this Dreher rhetorical question:

Do they really believe politics is dogmatic religion?

You gonna dig up Barry Goldwater and tell him he wasn’t a conservative?

Dreher - Prop. 8 victory 'Pyrrhic' for conservatives

For the second Sunday in a row, Dallas Morning News "crunchy conservative" op-ed columnist Rod Dreher devotes his space to Proposition 8 fallout.

He notes that conservatives have not won any "war," that openness to gay marriage increases the younger look in the voting spectrum, and that, with the inevitable tide marching forward (even without Gavin Newsom's attitude), not coming to terms with this could produce a religious backlash against religious conservatives:

No, pastors won't be jailed for anti-gay sermons. Nor are clergy likely to be forced to marry same-sex couples. But because marriage carries with it a vast array of legal rights and obligations, a live-and-let-live settlement is hard to imagine.

If courts place homosexuality on par with race in civil rights jurisprudence, a host of penalties against traditionalist religious organizations – including the loss of tax-exempt status – will kick in.

I disagree on his last sentence. I don't think churches are likely to lose tax-emempt status, nor likely to be sued for hiring decisions that happen within purely internal programs such as church services.

That said, could church-run day cares and schools that accept children from outside their congregations of ownership be sued over hiring practices? Possibly. Could a parochial school refuse to accept an openly gay student, or would that provoke a suit?

I don't know, and beyond that, why would a parent try to force such an issue if another private school were more tolerant.

Dreher: Time to accept gay marriage

WOW.

Mr. "Crunchy Con" himself is ready to throw in the towel on a culture war cornerstone and accept gay marriage.

Well, Rod, expect to have your Republican Party membership platinum card revoked at any moment.

Seriously, although Rod hits clinkers about 85 percent of the time, is OK about 10 percent of the time, this might be a 5 percenter, at least in its prescriptions for the GOP.

The whole column is a definite read.

‘Crunchy con’ — Reagan has left the building

Dallas Morning News op-ed columnist and self-styled “crunchy conservative” Rod Dreher plays the St. Paul Requiem for the alleged “Party of Reagan.”

Here’s some outtakes:

The Palin pick, vivifying though it is, does not erase the fundamental philosophical problems besetting the GOP. This week's GOP convention will, in effect, be the last hurrah of the Republican Party as we've known it for a generation.

The Republicans come to St. Paul to praise John McCain, but whether they know it or not, they also come to bury the party of Ronald Reagan. …

Neither Mr. Reagan nor his successors truly sought smaller government, hence the unintended honesty in GOP Rep. Mike Pence’s pathetic 2006 boast: “We may be the party of Big Government, but they are the party of Really Big Government.” If it's an epitaph for the Reagan GOP you seek, that's as good as any.

Dreher, who is NOT about to announce some surprise move to the left, then wonders if the GOP has been asking the wrong political philosophy questions in recent years.

“Conservatives really don't understand that culture trumps politics,” (conservative) screenwriter and novelist Andrew Klavan told me recently. “A Ronald Reagan can change the political culture for 20 years, but that change can completely vanish, and conservatives will not even know how they got there. How does that happen? Through the culture. But we don’t even see that over time.”

Dreher then says conservativism of the true-blue nature will win out in the end.

He says that the coming hard times of Peak Oil, an overextended military and other issues will spell an end to cultural liberalism and individualism.

Funny, last time we had really hard times, it led to the New Deal, which didn’t involve Republicans at all, except in grumpy opposition, Rod.

Dreher then goes metaphysical, including with this nonsense quote: “History is cyclical, not linear.”

That implies that there is such a thing as History with a capital H — history of the metaphysical Hegelian type.

One might argue that Rod Dreher isn’t even sure what building he’s in, in the first place.

Who kidnapped Rod Dreher and replaced his brain???

Mr. “Crunchy Con” actually made sense yesterday. And, for more than one line of text!

The notion that (food shartages aren’t) going to happen here is an example of a logical fallacy that Mr. Taleb calls confirmation bias. It's the same mistake made by the turkey that wakes up the day before Thanksgiving convinced that this day is bound to be just as terrific as the last thousand, based on his own experience.

And then there’s the narrative fallacy, which depends on the human weakness for imposing patterns on data. Because we’re hardwired to interpret facts in terms of a story, Mr. Taleb explains, we erroneously exclude information that doesn't fit our preferred narrative. It was easy for Americans to believe erroneously that the Iraqis would welcome U.S. invaders as liberators because that conclusion fits the story we like to tell ourselves about human nature and progress.

Both fallacies work to keep us from taking seriously the possibility that the country could face something as seemingly absurd as food shortages. We are psychologically invested in the idea that America is insulated from history and that our wealth, creativity and technological expertise will keep the barbarians, figuratively speaking, at bay.

Which is true – until it isn’t. At which point we will, in retrospect, look back at all the signs that pointed to the Black Swan event, as if its advent had been obvious all along.

First, I never thought I would read Dreher throw American exceptionalism explicitly under the bus.

Second, parallel to that, I never thought Dreher would honestly talk about an “era of limitations.”

Third, I sure as hell never thought Dreher would actually approvingly cite a commonplace of evolutionary psychology.

That said, the column is very interesting. Dreher kicks it off by noting Wall Street Journal what investment writer Brett Arends thinks Americans should seriously consider stockpiling food.

Of course, as I blogged Friday, Jim Jubak thinks that’s just scarcity thinking. With rice, other people claim it’s a government-rigged market in Southeast Asia that’s part of the problem. Nonetheless, for a WSJ guy to even suggest that is highly interesting.

Anyway, I’m sure Dreher will be back to his usually con, with a side of crunchy, in a few days.