let us catalogue the insanity of rod dreher

this guy might be even more divorced than elon

Just under the wire, Rod Dreher comes through in the clutch with what is without a doubt the single most insane thing I’ve read in 2022https://t.co/jFdf2BWPvd

— Screamer Jim (@HeheWaitWhut) December 28, 2022

There's something eerie here too. Just last week, in conversation with an Orthodox priest back in America, a cleric who is also an exorcist, the priest told me how he had discovered in his exorcism work how wicked Freemasonry is. He has seen people become possessed through it. I told him about my Catholic friend in New York whose grandfather was a high-level Freemason in Italy, and who had become possessed through the curse he brought onto the family (which destroyed her father and his generation within the family, and had wreaked havoc on hers). In this conversation, I mentioned to the exorcist my belief that my late father, a 32nd-degree Mason, had been involved with the Klan in the Sixties, and how I suspected that had a lot to do with his prior involvement with Freemasonry. The exorcist told me that I must pray for my father's soul every day for the rest of my life. I agreed to do this.

And now we find proof that my suspicions were accurate. Lord, have mercy. I don't know what else to say.

what the actual fuck

Again, my parents didn't teach my sister and me white supremacy, and I would be very surprised to learn that any white kid's parents did. (The local Klan wound down in the late 1960s, I learned at some point, under FBI pressure.) But they didn't have to, because the ambient culture, while post-segregationist, meant that one absorbed these values unconsciously. Plus, black people and white people really were very different in terms of culture. What a shock it was to me to go to a rare evening assembly at school, when I was 13 and was then moved to the same building as high schoolers, and to see girls only a year or two older than me, whom I would see daily in the hallways at school, carrying their babies while their mothers doted on them. This was how local black culture was. It was also very, very strange to me, as a kid, to learn from black classmates in elementary schools that they had no fathers in the home. I eventually began to wonder to what extent the white taboo against "race mixing" was merely out of pure race hatred, and to what extent it was a form of protection against the sexual code that was destroying the black family.

This might sound shocking to you, but it's true: for us Southern white kids, the only source for any narrative that ran counter to white supremacy was network television. It was really true.

and sure, rod’s dad was a klan archduke who had zero respect for his son — the stress of which caused rod to suffer mononucleosis for four years and led directly to the failure of his marriage — but if you liberals think rod’s dad was anything less than a good man, you’re wrong

3 weeks ago, this great man of the Catholic Church, who bore slander & persecution w/courage and grace, welcomed me to his table in Rome. Now he is gone. He blessed me as I left, right after this photo. Thank you, Lord, for this meeting. Servant of God George Pell, pray for us! pic.twitter.com/WsiZNuiK4b

— Rod Dreher (@roddreher) January 10, 2023

shame about the persecution

Wait is he Catholic again

No, he’s just praising their attitude to child rape

Oh joy

For those who need annotation: Pell spent 41 years actively covering up for repeated child rapists with victims as young as four years old - including relocating them to multiple new hunting grounds other parishes, bribing and threatening the victims and their parents to stay silent, and eventually (once ascending to archbishop, a position he held in the country's two largest cities across a sixteen-year span) establishing and rigging internal and external enquiries into five decades of child rape to avoid prosecutions.

For no particular reason, $8 million in payouts were made to accusers during his tenure as archbishop in the second of these two cities. In one single case, the church spent 15 times more in lawyers' fees than the victim sought. A royal commission determined that this expenditure was intended primarly to deter other targets from bringing claims. Pell also publicly stated at this time, upon questioning, that abortion is "a worse moral scandal than priests sexually abusing young people."

He was then rewarded for his service by being appointed to the Vatican, with a newly-created role in order to transfer him from local jurisdiction.

Eight years after the first legal inquiries into Pell's own multiple, three-decade-spanning, child rapes and molestations, and four years before transferring him to Vatican City, the Vatican began a regular process of claiming that he was too unwell to return to face questioning. (NB: he repeatedly flew to other countries on church business for at least five years during this time.) Nine years after that, after finally agreeing that investigators could fly to him, he was convicted and spent one year in solitary, before the conviction was revoked on technicality, with the judge observing the the accusers' testimony had been factual.

During the trial, Pell's defense lawyer had argued for a lower sentence on the grounds that one specific rape in the case was “plain vanilla sexual penetration case where the child is not actively participating.” (Multiple of his accusers had committed suicide during the trial and its lead-up, and were not testifying.)

tbf Rod is surely correct, prima facie, that he was a "great man of the Catholic Church."

max:

I used to think that “shamelessness” was a prerequisite to online success, but I increasingly think that successful online writers’ relationship to shame actually falls in a bimodal distribution: There are many big-time bloggers who post on relentlessly, impervious to embarrassment or shame (you can supply your own examples); but there are also a number of successful, influential bloggers who are the opposite, who feel shame so deeply and thoroughly it actually compels them to post more, pushing them to respond to any kind of emotional stimulus at all with endless (if still always inadequate) self-examination. I’m thinking here, e.g., of American Conservative blogger Rod Dreher, whose magnificent oeuvre reached new heights in December when he produced an astonishing post about how his dad was in the Klan that veered from brutally honest reckoning with familial sin to accusing the Freemasons of possessing his father with a demon.

How Rod Dreher Caused an International Scandal in Eastern Europe

Whoops