Joel Mathis

 Dreher offers up a semi-defense of Lee, reflecting on a 1970s-era essay by Wendell Berry:  As Berry makes clear, the tragedy of Robert E. Lee was that no matter which choice he made, there would have been pain. For Lee to have remained loyal to the Union would not have entailed mere disagreement with his family and his people; it would have required him to make war on them. This is something I don’t think we fully consider today — that is, what it means to make war (a real shooting war) on your own family. Could you do it today, to remain loyal to the government in Washington? Even though we are far more connected and aware today, thanks to technology, than the Americans of the 1860s were, it is still a hell of a thing to ask people to take up arms against their own friends and family to be loyal to a distant abstraction. Would you turn your abilities against your own people? Even if those people believed wrong things? Even if they believed wicked things? I could conceive of a circum

Photo by  Nikolett Emmert  from  Pexels I've previously expressed my feelings about Rod Dreher in this space, but dammit I can't quit him. So of course I read the latest New Yorker profile of Dreher and his dalliance with Hungary's right-illiberal Orbanistas.  He mounted his usual defense of Viktor Orban: Quite quickly, in the course of his dinners and meetings and observational trips on Budapest’s convenient public-transit system, Dreher began to form a dissenting opinion of the political situation in Hungary. “I was there about ten days before I realized that eighty, ninety per cent of the American narrative about the country just isn’t true,” he told me recently. He had heard Hungary described as an authoritarian state, but in Budapest he saw everyone seemed free to speak their mind. Dreher noted that he had appeared at a conference with an opponent of Orbán, who was critical of the Prime Minister. What’s more, Orbán, Dreher came to think, had a keener grasp of the “cr

...is notably silent about all the lying this president is doing in order to keep his job.  I guess some lies are more equal than others.

 There's never a right way to protest racism, is there?  Dreher is warning that Southern football fans won't take well to LSU football players demonstrating for Black Lives Matter.  It just seems to me that if you are a football player trying to build interest in and sympathy for Black Lives Matter, this is not the way to do it. In fact, it’s the way to energize opponents of BLM. And I have a sense that this is going to have some effect, perhaps not measurable, on the fall election — and beyond. The end result of this logic is that Black people would never, ever protest racism because it would rile up whites. It's the logic of abuse. But I'm sure the "Camp of the Saints" guy is legitimately concerned with helping Black people effectively fight racism. * Oh, hell. Maybe this IS a Rod Dreher shitposting blog.  Please forgive me my minor obsessions.