Rod Dreher Orlando Confidential
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| What Rod Dreher thinks may have killed 49 in Orlando |
Rod Dreher writes:
1. He was likely a closet case.
2. He was probably mentally ill.
3. He was filled with rage at everybody.
Before I go any further I need to stress for readers who may be confused that this is not a confession. Rod is not talking about himself, but rather about Omar Mateen, the self-professed ISIS martyr who killed 49 in an Orlando gay club and wounded at least as many more.
Rod takes pains to elaborate under 1.
What kind of devout Muslim goes drinking booze at a gay bar? You’re going to blame Islam for this guy? Really?
Um...well, yeah, Rod...really.
The guy whom the FBI investigated twice previously for Islamic terrorism. Yeah, really.
The guy who shouted "Allah hu Akbar" as he methodically shot gays - who are routinely murdered in Islamic nations when not formally sentenced to death by their various governments - yeah, really.
The guy who calmly pledged allegiance to ISIS on 911. Yeah, really.
Commenter Fran Macadam points out:
He’s not the first Islamist terrorist to enjoy a libertine Florida lifestyle; so did the 9/11 perpetrators.
Yeah, really, really, really.
But Rod has a big problem that desperately needs a solution. His blog boasts more than a few Muslim and gay readers, and so he needs a narrative solution to Orlando that won't dare alienate even one of them, because they might also purchase his upcoming Benedict Option book, if only out of fondness for his blog or curiosity.
So Rod needs an Orlando narrative that pops into our universe, does its dirty work, and then vanishes back into the mysterious alternate universe from whence it came - sort of like the Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters.
What can pull off this neat trick of producing a mysterious one-off, other-dimensional, self-extinguishing injection of mass murder into our universe?
Why, a unique, mentally ill, self-loathing homosexual.
Rod's Muslim commenter Jones? Not implicated. Rod's mentally "healthy", butt-humping gay commentariat at large? Not implicated.
Just Sta-Pufty Omar Mateen, random, idiosyncratic, incomprehensible hate-bot.
"Dangerous faggot" Milo Yiannopoulos, an actual conservative not needing to desperately suck up to every possible Muslim, liberal, or even gay reader, sees things a bit differently
Milo will be expanding on this epiphany today at 6:00 PM EST at the University of Central Florida, Orlando.Liberals: the problem with putting Muslims at the top of your victimhood hierarchy is that THEY WANT TO KILL EVERYONE ELSE ON THE LIST— Milo Yiannopoulos ✘ (@Nero) June 12, 2016
Rod's newly discovered existential innocence obviously has implications for his Benedict Option - or does it?
Come to think of it, Rod's Benedict Option has always explicitly declared it was never about resistance to, well, anything other than those particular elements of contemporary culture each BOpper decides for themselves they find aesthetically unattractive.
Instead, it has always instead used the vague term "thickening", which cynical readers can't be blamed for believing probably refers to over-consuming the delicious goodies featured in Rod's regular food porn posts.
So...eat, drink, and thicken, pretending you're invisible to everyone else, and hope that Sta-Pufty doesn't suddenly burst into your universe inexplicably shouting "Allah hu Akbar" while pumping slugs into your little girls head.
UPDATE (as they say): Beyond Rod's immediate publishing interests, what other factors might be contributing to the fantasy balloon commenter Fran Macadam so neatly popped?
Hmmm...what does Wick Allison, the guy who ultimately pays for Rod's health care and other family benefits think about this?
Well, he thinks, through his FrontBurner blog puppets, this:
Dan Patrick Biblical Tweet, conceivably but not at all necessarily pointing to Orlando - bad.
Lovely gay marriage celebration as Dan Patrick-cleansing mouthwash - good.
So good, in fact, that new D Magazine Executive Editor Kathy Wise comments
Beautiful. Thanks Peter! Reminds me of my wife's wedding proposal. Minus the blindfold. And the dancers. And the ribbon wavers. And the choir robes. #loveisloveisloveisloveislove
So, if Rod wants to keep his kids in braces, he'd better understand how the cow eats the cabbage: the people who buy the fabulous, high end stuff Wick Allison depends on to keep his magazine afloat have the tastes and disposable income concentrated in gay communities, so Orlando must implicitly become an act of "homophobic terrorism", not something divisive and distracting like Islamic terrorism.
And besides, Sta-Pufty can't be killed by a Sig Sauer MCX, not even by "a Glock with a lot of clips in it".
Thanks, Keith. One of the many tragedies of Dreher's career is that he used to be on the right side of this issue (Robert Spencer pointed this out a year ago) but his "evolution" on it has led to his current derangement. Here'shis conclusion to his review from 14 years ago (from Spencer's link):
ReplyDelete"Spencer may be wrong — I doubt it, but I'd like to hear a convincing refutation of his arguments — but he is asking questions that few others have the courage to. And until we hear from this supposed vast silent majority of peace-loving Muslims, the answers Spencer gives go a long way to explain the hatred, violence, backwardness, and fanaticism endemic to the Islamic world."
Oh, dude, that Journalist's Guide to Firearm Identification is priceless.
ReplyDeleteIndeed, Keith.
ReplyDeleteThe incoherence of the "unique, mentally ill, self-loathing homosexual" theory with the reality on the ground illustrates that the response to Orlando isn't about the victims nor about stopping future attacks. Instead, the larger goal of the progressive left is the destruction of society's moral institutions. So the left gives a pass to radical Islam -- the jihadists are useful allies in that destruction. The poor victims of Orlando are just unfortunate collateral damage along the way.
Unfortunately, those like Dreher and the "people who buy the fabulous, high end stuff Wick Allison depends on to keep his magazine afloat" become unwitting tools toward that destruction as they seek acceptance by the bien pensant. I'd wager that Wick's customers who "have the tastes and disposable income concentrated in gay communities" generally live moral lives, but won't preach what they practice; rather, to the extent they preach, they preach the opposite.
Because Dreher's only interest is in how he can spin Orlando to sell more copies of his Benedict Option book, it becomes incumbent upon him to light the Reichstag fire himself.
DeleteThe Benedict Option is not a response to foreign and domestic Islamic terrorism perpetrated by ISIS and others. That might even require Dreher sons enlisting and shooting at real Islamists. So, whatever you do, do not look to real world Islamic jihadism as any sort of cause of Orlando or as any sort of existential threat.
Instead, the Benedict Option is a magical stance with respect to threats real and imagined within its own native culture, so whatever can enhance the meme that social conservative Christianity rather than Islamic terrorism was at fault for Orlando raises the market value of his Benedict Option in the eyes of the gullible marks who buy into it as the only place to flee from such persecution.
The cynical self-dealing at play here is breathtaking and stunning (if also grotesquely transparent and ham-handed): real Islamic terror becomes worse than useless for the Benedict Option - it might necessitate actual, real world combat. Promoting the fiction of anti-homosexual terror in its place, anti-homosexual terror caused by the very social conservative thinking Dreher now wants to "save" (for a small fee), however, sets up his Benedict Option as supposedly the only fireproof safe room in town.
If anyone hasn't yet thought that social conservative Christians are at fault for Orlando, Dreher will do everything in his power to ensure that they do.
If you'll notice, Dreher has already started laying the match in the final pararagraph way back here, long before the meme-o-sphere picks it up with any real interest.
DeleteThink of your pediatrician giving your child a Teddy bear infused with the measles virus. Who you gonna call?
[R]eal Islamic terror becomes worse than useless for the Benedict Option - it might necessitate actual, real world combat.
DeleteBingo. What is amazing is that anyone as smart as Dreher thinks that the closeted-gay angle or mentally ill angle changes the story any more than recent confirmation of Hitler's cryptorchidism.
Most of us know conflicted religious homosexuals of the Christian variety and none are violent killers. We also know mentally ill people who have flipped out, even sometimes violently, but have not committed a very premeditated, deliberate act of mass murder. The key ingredient here is radical Islam. That's the root cause and everyone knows it. It is as plain as any nose.
Did you read the last line of his latest post? "Cooper’s moral preening in this interview is one of the most unprofessional things I’ve ever seen a journalist do." Talk about Chutzpah? Considering his preening about anyone who dared not tow his line about how corrupt the Catholic church is. Any thoughts?
ReplyDeleteFrankly, the original version was more coompelling than Rod's: IKYABWAI.
DeleteFruity and shriekingly liberal as Anderson Cooper may be, he's actually a working journalist. When was the last time Dreher was ever hired to report anything? Dreher as "journalist" is like the guy who squeaked through med school in the Virgin Islands at the bottom of his class and now makes his living dealing Adderall and Oxycontin to his friends while complaining about how badly a John Hopkins hospitalist on TV explained a procedure to the press. Before returning to his day job, a one-man off-Broadway performance art show about his feelings.
Again, these are the true signs of the Dim If Not Dark Ages: when the Drehers of the world start becoming Thoughtful Christian Thought Leaders.
As I've already pointed out, there's no one and no faith Dreher will not sell out in order to self-promote his vainglorious Benedict Option. His latest post merely turns an industrial fan on the fire he himself first worked to kindle here.
DeleteWith an embarrassing disconsonance, though, the real political battle coming out of Orlando turns out to be everything but Dreher's hoped-for religious war and instead the perennial, cynical liberal effort to convert any shooting event into increased Second Amendment restriction and gun control.
Of course, Dreher himself wouldn't be defending his pie-in-the-sky bucolic, romantically agrarian, gourmet-fed Benedict Option bastions of religious liberty against any sort of encroachment anyway. That's for others to dirty their hands with (that self-defense isn't even within the BO horizon makes such delegation effortlessly axiomatic). Instead, he'll be writing the BO catechisms and stocking the wine cellar.
From my perspective, with respect to his former Catholicism Dreher is only disparaging something he himself only adopted as a superficial fashion statement anyway (how can one possibly repudiate something one genuinely holds true as a faith merely on the basis of transient events?), now for him unfashionably out of date and replaced with his newest self-authenticating religious find to accessorize his eyeglasses.
Of greater concern should be those being seduced into Dreher's phony Benedict Option event horizon. Those I would consider the truly "lost people" among those Matthew Loftus is concerning himself with, above.
Dreher's just jealous that Anderson Cooper has a bigger stage on which to morally preen.
DeleteDreher is certainly no wallflower when it comes to castigating someone in precisely the same way (i.e., "Why didn't you say something I wanted you to say, instead of what you did say?").
Just posted this to his blog. We'll see if it sees the light of day over there. I tried to be firm without being mean or snarky:
ReplyDelete"I’m really cynical regarding your reading here, Rod. I think your downplaying of the Islamic angle and going for the “complicated” narrative combined with the way in which you see all of this as being played out in the religio-cultural sphere of the Left all plays out too nicely with your BenOp. I don’t think you’re consciously trying to manipulate the narrative, but as you’ve admitted many times, you often get obsessed with narratives and then things get filtered through it. I think you’re thinking BenOp all the time.
It just seems to convenient that the slaughter of 50 people ultimately leads to a cultural moment in which traditional Christians are going to have to hunker down while they’re treated as cultural lepers. And what will they do out there on the margins? Well, BenOP, obviously.
Again, whether or not this is intentional, anyone can see where this narrative is going. If it’s about Islamic terrorism, then the BenOP has nothing to offer. It turns out, however, that even if it is about Islamic terrorism, the Left, according to you (and the stories you select to post here), won’t let that be the dominant narrative, and so it’s a religio-cultural narrative. And so the BenOp has something to say.
Just take one example: the Left seems to focus more on gun control than anything else. But that’s not really a BenOppy topic, so not much to say about it here. But the Left will use a gun narrative as much as they will a religio-cultural one and will in fact out the law behind that narrative. I understand completely and appreciate why you don’t run those stories–because they don’t fit your narrative–but we should all be aware that you have a clear agenda here in posting all of the stories you do and offering the analysis you offer: the ongoing and forthcoming BenOp project."
Anon 11:07, on which of Rod's posts did you you post your comment?
ReplyDeleteYou're right about Rod's serial obsessions and his own occasionally admitted recognition of this tendency in his thought. When I can set aside my irritation with him, I (also just occasionally) feel sorry for him. It's got to be painful living inside that constant need to go on and on and ON publicly about everything that he sees though his few obsessions.
Anon 5:17:
ReplyDeleteI posted at this one: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/religious-war-martyrs-of-orlando
Sorry, I should have been clearer.
And here it is. No "NFR", unfortunately.
Deletepik,
ReplyDeleteI'm surprised he let it through. But then again no one is responding to it. Not even a turd in the punch bowl.
If you sell out your core beliefs; you could be like Drerod and get invited by the New York Times to post to forums. This is an example.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/debating-orlandos-meaning/#post-comments
All that Bobo virtue signaling he does (Listening to NPR the other day, while drinking an affordable, yet quaffable, Provencal rose I thought about my vacation in France and how it relates to what a vulgar barbarian Trump is...) eventually pays off.
DeleteDrerod...the "conservative" house n***r for the liberal media establishment.
-Anonymous Maximus
Drerod says he is not an Ulsterman but that does not stop him from posting this.http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/millions-of-catholic-bastards/
ReplyDeleteWhile it was good to see that the first UPDATE swallowed the post, Dreher is of course not intellectually honest enough to change the clickbait-with-alternate-meaning title of the thing.
DeletePure maliciousness, especially considering that his reduction to absurdity masked the thrust the Pope's statement against the "culture of the provisional" (which is of course true).