Patronage and the Benedict Option

Who's the money man behind our prophet of the so-called Benedict Option, Rod Dreher?

Why, the same guy behind this effervescent sibling online option, for those times when your pop-cultural strategic retreat from popular culture has become too strategic and you just need a little sex expo talk to put you back in the mood.

The Benedict Option - just one more exciting contemporary consumer choice brought to you by the man behind the D Empire and The American Conservative.

Like they say, if you can't tell what the product is - in this case, what in the world the Benedict Option might be - you're the product.

UPDATE (as they say): With respect to the book they'll be making out of this movie, Rod's now telling us

[NFR: Well, for the record, my Benedict Option book is going to blow apart any shallow conservative idea that all was well until the 1960s... 

Which tells us in no uncertain terms a whole bunch of our churches must have still been all messed up and in need of a good Rod-fixin' long before those first missiles of October, 1962.

Write that book, Rod. The cure can't get here too soon

UPDATE 2: Here's what that patronage buys. Wick Allison buys the Dreher family's health care and the food Rod's meager book sales can't possibly cover. Wick Allison is a long time Obamacon. Rod Dreher feeds from the Wick Allison teat, therefore...

Instead of Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Harry Reid, or any Democrats who actually take money from PP, Rod Dreher calls out Republican John Boehner to speak out about Planned Parenthood - because a staff member of Boehner's happens to have a relative who works for PP.

That's how the Benedict Option works: those with the Benedict Option gold make the real Benedict Option rules.

TAC's Wick Allison blames American Freedom Defense Initiative for Garland shooting

Nothing goes public from Wick Allison's D Empire without his express approval, so when one of his bloggers asks "Who Can We Blame for This Garland Shooting?", we know what Wick Allison wants the world to think, that the shooting was the fault of the "hate group" American Freedom Defense Initiative rather than the Muslims who pulled the trigger.

Wick Allison doesn't live in Garland, Texas, by the way, or even in Dallas, Texas. He lives in Highland Park, Texas, a little town exclusively for the very wealthy near Southern Methodist University, a place usually referred to with well-deserved contempt as "The Bubble". The Bubble is ferociously protected by its own well-manned police force, even to the extent that if you appear to be Hispanic and your truck doesn't contain at least one lawn mower and leaf blower, you can expect to be stopped and questioned. Within the cocoon of their Bubble, Wick and Christine Allison have little to worry from either ISIS-inspired jihadists or even any other humans at all not of their hue and station.

Wick Allison, the Obamacon money man and CEO behind both TAC's pro-Putin Daniel Larison and anti-Catholic Rod Dreher and the jihadi apologist FrontBurner blog. William F. Buckley must be sneering.

Is Rod Dreher really only Wick Allison's Erin Manning?

That is, in the final analysis only a useful tool kept, like all useful tools, strictly at arm's length only for its utility?

Here's why I ask.

As Jonathan Carpenter had originally mentioned, Dreher was in his old Texas stomping grounds yesterday on various business, attending a secretive TAC meeting, doing a book signing for TLWORL, working his own DIY publicity tour for his Dante book, all of which writing efforts Dreher credits as originally having been birthed at TAC.

Here's the promotion Wick Allison provided Dreher for all those things on his primary D Magazine FrontBurner blog. No, your eyes do not deceive you, there's nothing there. And by all means, if I've foolishly missed something obvious somewhere, call me out on it so I can make amends.

In fact, this is the last I recall of Allison's FrontBurner acknowledging Dreher was even still alive. At least his old newspaper pals celebrate his keen journalistic skills when using his position to expose unsatisfying vendors.

But we also learn that TAC is a sponsor of Dreher's Walker Percy Weekend.

So why is Wick Allison so reticent to directly acknowledge the Allison-Dreher connection on Allison's own home turf? Dreher certainly has a history in Dallas, and the two are far closer than just remote publisher and hired writer. Allison's promoting Dreher's appearance locally in Dallas would certainly raise much broader awareness of Dreher's visit, and thus attendance at Dreher's events, and thus potentially more eyes on Dreher back at TAC in turn. Similarly with Dreher's WPW.

What seems one obvious precipitate from all this to me is that Dreher is far more a liability for Allison if seen to be connected to Allison's primary D Empire (which even boasts its own Academy) than he is an asset for Allison as the little engine that could still keep TAC alive and useful as a tax shelter if nothing else. Manning's unshakeable belief in her Catholic faith may play an analogous role with Dreher.

The other obvious takeaway is that giving Dreher the tax-deductible blog space in TAC to advertise his doings while contributing to Dreher's also tax-deductible WPW is cheaper than raising his salary.

But as much as Dreher does to promote Allison's take home revenue through TAC, one would think that Allison would at least publicly give him the time of day in Dallas rather than treating him ultimately as a potential embarrassment. I'm sure Erin Manning could commiserate.

TAC publisher's Anonymous pet given 63 months, $890,000 in restitution

Barrett Brown, the Anonymous spokesman who threatened the family of FBI agent Robert Smith, has just been sentenced to 63 months in prison and ordered to pay $890,000 in restitution.

Championing Brown over the last two years (see further "Free Barrett Brown" links there if interested) has proved a click bonanza from young supporters of Brown for Wick Allison, publisher of The American Conservative.

The full details of Brown's relationship with Anonymous and its assaults on Stratfor and other organizations is widely available on the internet. Below is the link to an NSFW F-bomb-filled Part Three of Brown's threats against Agent Smith.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOW7GOrXNZI

Even though a punk is involved, there's no music, so I decided not to embed it.

UPDATE (as they say): More what-can-you-do-for-me-today? journalism

Crunchy TAC

The conservatism every thirteen-year-old girl can love.


Can't say we haven't seen the marriage of these two blog grooms barreling down the SERP aisle for some time now. Sully must feel so left out. I can't wait for the Instagram page.

Brought to you by the publisher of "The" "American" "Conservative"

We have some fun here, from time to time, chatting about the dyed-in-the-wool conservative chops of Wick Allison, publisher of The American Conservative.  Which, in the same manner that a roundtable is neither round nor a table, is neither "American" nor "Conservative".  (For a refresher, here's Allison's Cub Reporter discussing the boss's renewed support for Obama in 2012, and chiming in his view that Obama was better choice than Romney on foreign policy and economic issues -- quite the oracle, given recent events.)

Anyhoo, Wick Allison's other vehicle is D Magazine, which is one of those print and online rags about what is trendy and cool in a particular city.  D is of course about Dallas.  In the recent issue, D published an online ranking (don't know if it's in the print version) of the various suburbs in the Dallas area.  The city of Rockwall, TX was ranked #16 out of 63 (yes, we have a lot of suburbs here).  But it is the six-paragraph story accompanying the ranking that raised a bit of a foo-fraw on local AM talk radio today.  The story noted that Rockwall is the hometown of US Congressman Ralph Hall, who is 91 years young and who was recently beaten in the GOP primary by a Tea Partier, and then quoted a local barber thusly:

 “I’ve been cutting Ralph Hall’s hair for 20 years, his kinfolk’s even longer,” he says, pointing to a framed picture of the congressman. “He’s a gentleman. That guy who beat him? He’s an asshole. All these assholes have moved in here. I had a better clientele 20 years ago, no assholes.” 

So there you go.  According to D Magazine, a city loaded with Tea Party "assholes" makes it into the top quartile of suburbs.

And yes, they're hiding behind the "we're not saying that, it's just what we heard" defense.  But it seems an odd paragraph for the publisher of The American Conservative to have in a six-paragraph blurb.

This Way to the Egress

P. T. Barnum, author of the subject line, was obviously the first person who came to my mind upon seeing the latest addition to The American Ideas Institute/The American Conservative CEO Wick Allison's Texas stable, none other than hactivist group Anonymous' spokesman Barrett Brown, currently jailed among other things for threatening an FBI agent and his children.

Given that recaps of a reality show named Courtney Loves Dallas are the consistently highest drawing posts on Allison's FrontBurner blog, I'm now putting my money on Bert and Ernie becoming Rod Dreher's blog mates over on TAC any day now, offering their unique perspectives on fleece, flock, flannel, friction, and other conservative LGBT puppet issues crucial to TAC readers.

Speaking of Rod Dreher, is the polar vortex still keeping you and the kids trapped indoors? If so, here's a quick and inexpensive game to help break that cabin fever: Rod Dreher Twister.

What you'll need: a used shower curtain, a large permanent marker, and a large round Styrofoam dinner plate.

Now, first, take the dinner plate and the marker and draw 4 rows of 6 circles (or, if you're a rebel like Barrett Brown, 6 rows of 4 circles).

Then, in each one write one of Rod Dreher's long ago exhausted memes, like "kale" or "The Little Way Of Ruthie Leming" or "Dante".

Finally, inspired by Rod Dreher's penchant for mindlessly connecting his obsessive memes merely to produce page fill for gullible college sophomores, challenge those bored kiddos by successively calling out random combinations of your 24 choices, like maybe "Pope Francis" and "The Little Way Of Ruthie Leming", or "Dante" and "kale", or, if you're really wicked, "Dante" and "Phil Robertson" and "kale" and "The Little Way of Ruthie Leming" and "Walker Percy", just to see if the kiddos are up to using their heads.

Good clean fun for the entire family!

A bonus bleg: in comments, help list the 24 circle memes needed.