checking in on Rod Dreher now that his man, JD Vance, had his national launch
Peter Thiel is getting all the attention relation to the selection of JD Vance, and as a matter of actual policy implications he probably ought to. The cultural debris will land with a thud. But the Silicon Valley Crypto Currency design could work it’s way in through its sheer degrees of separation from mass understanding. Still. I do come right back to Rod Dreher, sitting and it has been a while since I read the stimulating and varied comments section under his not much interesting (or sometimes too damned interesting) blog column at the American Conservative, wandering away when the comments section went away, then of course completely as he headed off to Hungary under his favored leader Viktor Orban. Dreher considers himself a man instrumental to Vance’s rise, promoting his “at one time universally” or largely so “praised book”, praised before he took that step into electioneering and you you had fuller reason to interrogate his politics and concern yourself with more than just passing input on his book. And we see him, alongside Thiel, in “the seven intellectual forces behind JD Vance” politico article. He heard the speech. Thrilled to it, I guess.
I think the phrase is “playing to the base”. You can take it as an amusing anecdote and eccentricity. Or you can ask if we really want to be that turbo-paranoid.
You have to pay for his substack, or get a free week, but i do see he spent the last week on the JD Vance train, posting old photographs of him next to him. A title, “Reagan of the Milennials”. And I am not wholly sure of the Vanity Fair article, seeing that he now is in charge of “The European Conservative”, where we find Dreher chomping at the bit on behalf of Vance, and explaining that he hated Trump too but then that Covington Kid thing happened. And then changed everything. Not mentioned in the article, but from my reading it changed again on January 6. But then there was a book in a school library somewhere that has a drawing of a penis, and that changed that. The penis book is more important than January 6.
It is interesting that The Nation magazine has an article up which pulls the latest found epithet on “childless cat ladies” — a category which includes step-parents such as Kamala Harris and gay men such as Peter Buttigieg — back to Rod Dreher, because I was thinking about this independent from The Nation. I am not even dipping far into fullest explications, but I do recall Dreher tossing the phrase about here and there — a jeering reference to jezebel-ish publication article excerpt that a litmus question in a relationship should be asking your would-be partner what the legal state on sex workers should be. “How to secure ‘Cat Lady’ status”. I would be one to think you make up what litmuses work for you. Beyond this, I am curious to see how he treats the misinformation about JD Vance and his couch — “lust in your heart?” – – but have a pretty good idea that he thinks on the rest, pontificating wildly on divorce and abortion laws and extra parental voting to subdue these cat ladies — just clueless liberals that don’t get the real America, or have closed their minds to new ideas. Or, as I see, a “and you???” , long held outrage on the big “mostly peaceful protests” — interesting diversion, cultural cross current battle. It will be worth poking at Twitter for this all.