Why Rod Dreher is pushing a Hillary Clinton victory

Various email discussions over the past weeks have pondered who Rod Dreher will be voting for in the upcoming presidential race and have given several plausible reasons why, although Dreher himself has been coy about the matter on his blog in order to technically protect TAC's tax-exempt status.

Regardless of which candidate Dreher actually ends up pulling the lever for, here is who he is pushing to win, and why.

Who: Hillary Clinton

Why: The candidate most damaging to Christians will do the most to promote sales of his forthcoming Benedict Option book, delivered to the publisher just today, a book about, as Dreher himself touts it, the last, best and only hope for Christians at the end of the cultural line.

The better things are for Christians, the worse a book about a pointless and needless Benedict Option will sell. The worse things are for Christians, the better a book that purports to offer any hope at all will sell.

Demand, meet Supply. Or, rather, Supply, meet a Demand massaged as best the Supplier can manage to massage it.

Well, Keith, why do you say such a thing, readers may ask. Rod has already told us he cannot tell us who he favors for President. Why shouldn't we believe him?

He doesn't have to. His actions speak louder than any words ever could. And besides, it doesn't even matter who he votes for. What matters is how many votes he can steer to the candidate he needs to win to maximize his personal book sales profits. He doesn't need to vote at all so long as he steers enough votes to produce a Hillary win.

If one reads his posts over the last year, they are Trump-this and Trump-that out the wazoo, most of them either actively or passive-aggressively negative, with virtually no posts at all about candidate Hillary or any of her sins dating back decades.

Debbie Wasserman Schulz herself could have scheduled these non-existing Hillary posts in the same manner and for the same reasons she made poor Bernie Sanders try to make his case on television on a Saturday freaking night, for goodness sake, in order to effectively render the subject - in Dreher's case Hillary, in Schulz' case Bernie - virtually invisible.

But isn't Donald Trump just naturally more..."newsy"?

Sure enough. Trump is always saying things to make people's tongues wag.

But, although his style will always be Gawkerish at heart, believe it or not Rod Dreher's current beat really isn't the juiciest, most gossipy newsy tidbits of a TMZ or a Gawker. According to Rod, his passion and focus is being ostentatiously hip-deep in his own personal Christian holiness and, above everything else worldly, religious liberty and a fierce dedication to the protection of that religious liberty.

A religious liberty a Hillary Clinton presidency would end up stomping like Godzilla, before Godzilla then ate whatever mush remained.

But he hardly ever mentions Hillary Clinton. Why not? Why does he never mention the one candidate that everyone knows and every liberal dreams will do the most to damage the religious liberty of Christians in every way possible?

Because he needs a religious liberty stomped to mush by a Hillary Godzilla Clinton in order to drive sales of his prescriptive solution for mush-stomped religious liberty - his Benedict Option. If the financial motive were not so glaringly obvious, one might suspect Munchhausen by proxy.

To follow Dreher's comparative interest in Hillary Clinton is to be led to the belief that Hillary is spending her time only doing yoga and playing with her grandchildren, not trashing national security, not selling access to government for personal gain, definitely not working every angle available to change "...deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases..."

Prove me wrong. Watch Dreher's past, present and future posts about the presidential candidates and score things for yourself. Trump will be held up as an appalling pariah; Hillary will be invisible; and a dependable percentage of Dreher's readers will end up voting for the major party candidate who has not been held up as an appalling pariah.

And, then, after Hillary ends up doing enough of this and that, particularly with the help of her newly energized Supreme Court, even you might fall into enough despair to buy Rod's Benedict Option book, if only as the worthless placebo you nevertheless desperately need in lieu of no other hope at all.

This is the true cultural wasteland for Christians, what Hannah Arendt called the "banality of evil": in this case, casual, premeditated betrayal by those you trust most. Your mother sells you to the biker gang passing through for a bag of meth. Your ostensibly most (self-declared) Christian hero sells you out with a smile to line his own pockets.

By the way, I hear Rod's Benedict Option book goes on sale shortly after Hillary's inauguration. Just in time.

Stronger Together

Tim Kaine: Another Pro-abortion Catholic VP Candidate

Wow, what a coincidence. Hillary picks another souper candidate—a pro-choice Catholic in the mold of Joe Biden. This is obviously meant to secure the Catholic vote which is already eluding Trump as this piece points out; excerpt:

Consistently reliable Republicans who attend Mass weekly supported Mitt Romney four years ago by 15 percentage points. Clinton is winning this critical slice of the Catholic electorate by a whopping 19 points. The Republican ticket also usually performs well with white Catholic voters, who supported Romney by 9 points, 53 percent to 44 percent. Clinton has halved that gap, trailing Trump by only a few percentage points, 50 percent to 46 percent.

John Zmirak sums it up for me. My thoughts exactly, man.

As a Catholic who considers human life the first and most critical issue, with freedom a very close second, I can cut some slack to secular atheists and agnostics who don’t see what’s wrong with abortion. Their worldview tells them that life is cheap, man is a mutant, and we should grab what pleasure we can before our skulls fall to rot with Darwin’s. That’s an ugly view of life, but at least it makes sense. I feel profoundly sad for people who see their own lives this way; they’re like a primitive tribe that forgot why cannibalism is wrong, which proudly shows a visiting missionary their jewelry made out of human fingers.

But when a highly educated Christian, himself a former Catholic missionary, slaps on such a necklace because it will help him win elections — that’s something else entirely. Tim Kaine’s is the face of a man who knows better, who by his own admission realizes exactly what Planned Parenthood is doing, and who they are doing it to: innocent children, who hide in the womb as each of us, and as the baby Jesus, once did. It should be the safest place on this fraught and fallen earth — but in America, it has become a killing field. Not because of men like Lenin, like Hitler, or even like Hugh Hefner.

Because of men like Senator Kaine.

Barack Obama has become the Anti-cop President

City Journal's Myron Magnet points out that Obama had a chance to use his good fortune as the first black President to correct the impression that in the United STates blacks will always be an underclass of victims. It is so sad that he chose instead to stoke resentment among hate groups, even inviting representatives of one of them to the White House.

It seemed to me that Obama had a unique opportunity to speak about values and virtues to this minority of African Americans—to tell them that his own life exemplified how in twenty-first century America you could get an education, work hard, get married, be an attentive husband and father, and maybe even become president of the United States. How disappointing that he chose the other tack, stoking grievance and resentment over supposed victimization by all authority, whether from teachers, cops, or potential employers. He and his attorneys general went sniffing out evidences of racism everywhere, and demonizing the police. Even after five officers were assassinated by an enraged black murderer in Dallas, he said, inaccurately, falsely, and callously: “There are legitimate issues that have been raised, and there’s data and evidence to back up the concerns that are being expressed by these [Black Lives Matter] protesters. And if police organizations and departments acknowledge that there’s a problem and there’s an issue, then that, too, is going to contribute to real solutions. And, as I said yesterday, that is what’s going to ultimately help make the job of being a cop a lot safer. It is in the interest of police officers that their communities trust them and that the kind of rancor and suspicion that exists right now is alleviated.”

Obama was offered this chance, and he blew it....

Followup from David Clarke on the nature of Black Lives Matter

As an apt followup to my post about what Black Lives Matter is really all about, this is a short exchange between a journalist who is too limp-wristed to condemn a hateful ideology and a Sheriff, David Clarke, who is not.

Don't Take the Bait

If you are a mouse or a 21st century American I have some advice for you: learn to identify traps, then don't take the bait.

While driving down the road, several of my sons and I were watching some 20-somethings put up Black Lives Matter yard-signs in a neighborhood around West 150th Street in Cleveland. My oldest son stated it best. "Everyone believes that black people count just as much as whites, except for racists. So when someone says to you 'Black lives matter' what they really mean to say to you is 'You're a racist.' It's just an accusation."

He's right obviously. It's the same leftist abuse of language which infects the pathetic chant of the Occupy Movement "We. Are. The Ninety-nine Percent!!" But they're not; they are a tiny sliver of the American populace. They may speak for somewhere between 5% and 15% of the victicrat population, but that's probably generous of me.

Unfortunately some people who aren't anywhere near the fringe left have taken the rhetorical bait. The group Blue Lives Matter is one which I heartily support, but Oh! how I wish they hadn't named themselves that. Once you realize that saying "Black Lives Matter" is really a challenge which could be phrased as the question, "Are you going to support us or the police?", then saying "Blue Lives Matter" can be interpret as answering "No, I don't support you; I support the Police." It is a way to inadvertently perpetuate the perception that the police are out to get anyone who is black. That perception is a win for BLM and left's booming victim industry.

The latest abuse of this comes from the Charles Sheldon-style Protestant Socialist contingent in the form of WWJD-ing the rhetoric. The first place I saw this was a Facebook placard which simply appropriated the voice of Christ saying things like "Jesus didn't say all lives matter, He said leper's lives matter. Jesus didn't say all lives matter, He said the poor's lives matter." And on and on. The truth is that Our Lord didn't speak in hashtags and soundbites at all, and that is the best counterpoint here. One could point out the many times that Jesus used universal language (ever hear of John 3:16?) but I'd be wary of taking the bait.

The other place I saw something similar was a Patheos article which I won't even link to. It actually uses the Beatitudes in an attempt to make a similar point. It has a cartoon of Christ saying "Blessed are the poor in spirit," and a listener objecting "No, Jesus! Blessed are we ALL!" So the message is that anyone who says "All lives matter" is telling Jesus to shut up. One could point out that none of the Beatitudes mention race, but again, I think that getting into a theological discussion on this is getting into pearls/swine territory and we know how that ends. It's best to stay in one piece.

So the best comeback to shouts of "Black Lives Matter!" is not "Blue lives matter" or even "All lives matter". Calling out the Black Lives Matter movement for what it is, an organization profiting from civil unrest and organized by racist agitators, is the best reaction to anything touching which smells of their caustic rhetoric. Christians and especially American Christians have to become aware of real motives and quit being so gullible. Jesus instructed us as much.

The rules about blowing bubbles

Just a quick review...

Educational Video about Islamic Jihad and Sharia

Hat-tip to the Clarion Project for this succinct and accurate video about the threat of civilizational jihad and sharia as the motives behind terrorist acts. This is the sort of thing people in the west need to know. So what did YouTube do. They banned the video. read more about that at the Counter Jihad link.

This video was produced by the Center for Security Policy, an excellent organization started by very knowledgeable people in the world of fighting Islamic terrorism.