Who will Rod Dreher's Benedict Option corrupt next?
It has already corrupted his employer, The American Conservative. Who or what will it corrupt next?
Just so you know, like Spain's Francisco Franco TAC blogger Noah Millman's "Three More Benedict Option Questions", thoughtfully critical of TAC star Rod Dreher's so-called "Benedict Option", is still dead. As I already wrote here, one can still read the Google cached version here, and Pauli has also archived it on EQE here.
What I want to recap for those innocents not fully up on the story, however, is how we got to this point, and what that journey implies for those choosing to involve themselves on anything Rod Dreher might consider the wrong side of his Benedict Option.
On July 7, while Rod Dreher was vacationing in Italy with his male comrades, his TAC colleague Noah Millman wrote and published "Three More Benedict Option Questions", in so doing linking several times to New York Times Catholic columnist Ross Douthat, a name Rod Dreher drops at every opportunity he gets. One might therefore think Douthat himself would be as interested in the twists and turns of this tale as anyone.
Shortly thereafter, Millman's piece vanished as if it had never been. The next day, July 8, Rod Dreher published in its place "Critics of the Benedict Option", a post in which, by interviewing himself, he and he alone picked the questions, the criticisms, and the answers. As recently as today, Dreher still describes himself as a professional journalist.
So what happened to Millman's piece?
Rod Dreher, professional journalist, first claimed no knowledge of how a post by a colleague critiquing the subject he hopes to write his next book about got spiked between the day it was written and the day Dreher himself wrote a post replacing it, then claimed he never realized that Millman's post had just been written, then pointed his readers to the same dead link.
As Pauli first posted here, commenter Virgil T. Morant alerted us to this statement from TAC implicitly referring to the missing Millman piece critical of Dreher's Benedict Option:
United Airlines, the New York Stock Exchange, and the Wall Street Journal aren’t the only organizations that have encountered technical turbulence lately: on Tuesday an item was incorrectly published on Noah Millman’s blog due to an error in our system. The problem has now been fixed, and we apologize to Noah and to our readers for the mix-up
You can find Noah’s latest posts here at: The Necessity of Greece’s Separation and Obergefell and the Pursuit of Happiness.
In the process of explaining why the Millman piece disappeared forever, TAC also deleted it from its own explanation. The Millman piece critical of Dreher's Benedict Option - did I mention you can read it here and here? - had officially been scrubbed from ever officially having existed at TAC at all.
Why?
TAC is run by long time publisher Wick Allison, someone who knows quite well what draws in readers' interest. A discussion of his star blogger Rod Dreher's current signature theme, the Benedict Option, between that star and another masthead blogger within the same organization would deliver all of the readers possibly interested in either person's opinions and arguments directly to the TAC bottom line.
There was no rational publishing reason, therefore, to spike the Millman piece in the first place and, even if the Millman piece had mysteriously become unpublished because of "technical turbulence", not to republish it as soon as possible, preferably with a response from Rod Dreher.
This is what The American Conservative does with the money it solicits on a tax-deductible basis from its contributors: it publishes interactive thought pieces between its masthead bloggers that engage thought.
Until now. Now it serves as Rod Dreher's personal publicist.
Why?
From the time Ron Unz was driven out of TAC, it has been common knowledge that Rod Dreher has been TAC's only real lifeline to the daily online views necessary to sustain it as a going concern. Now the power Dreher apparently wields at TAC has become great enough to get the views of anyone who disagrees with him peremptorily deleted.
This is neither American, nor Conservative. This is Hollywood-diva-throwing-a-fit journalism, Hillary Clinton journalism. True Politburo journalism or Mafia journalism would of course require a subject of more weight and substance than Rod Dreher's Benedict Option, but the thuggish reflex is identical to all, including Dreher himself.
Nevertheless, like a baker finding out the consequences of not baking a gay marriage cake, if you are a small enough religious blogger or outfit and you do not sufficiently suck up to Rod Dreher in your discussion of his Benedict Option, you have every right to be apprehensive that he or those he is able to influence, like TAC, will attempt to roll over you the way they rolled over Noah Millman in order to unilaterally control the Benedict Option narrative, the way Dreher himself just tightened the allowable narrative within his own blog at the end here.
If you are truly having trouble with our contemporary culture and the modern age and for some unfathomable reason cannot already find all the resources you need within your own faith and church, why would you ever think of yoking your trust and faith to the Christian blogosphere's version of Hillary Clinton?
Why?
