Rod Dreher promoted to Hardcore!

Took the world’s biggest midlife crisis to pull it off, but he made it

Maybe it’s just election season, maybe it’s Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, but in the field of Hardcore — our term of art for ragebait emails that lure your senile relatives to rightwing garbage sites — the material is getting reeeeally wacky.

Even their usual hysterical-headline technique is being ratcheted up, with such ripe come-ons as “MSNBC uttered one slanderous lie that is sending the GOP into a rage” (DC Daily Journal, about Trump’s Russian collusion) and “Democrat teams up with Trump leaving Leftists with their hair on fire” (The Federalist Wire about, lol, Tulsi Gabbard).

But beyond rhetorical flourishes, some of the stories themselves have zipped past National Enquirer territory and into the land of Weekly World News But Without The Saving Irony. For instance:

Is France’s First Lady Actually a Man? Candace Owens Weighs In… (WLT Report)

WLT Report ran an earlier version of this gibberish, using the classic technique of claiming the slander’s subject is triggered by the slander (“French President Macron FURIOUS Over Rumors His Wife Is a Transgender”), which in rightwing circles counts as a big win, notwithstanding this is from all the way over in Frenchieland. The story on which their concatenation of Twitter troll posts was based apparently originated, according to Snopes, in “a ‘confidential’ newsletter… known for its antisemitism and its conspiracy theories,” which just goes to show that WLT Report, as the old journalistic brag goes, has sources nobody else has.

But the Freixenet must have really started flowing when WLT Report found famous “Blexit” grifter Owens pushing the story. No stickler for journalistic conventions, Owens does not cite sources at all; she merely sticks the allegation in a video headlined “INSANE. This Is The BIGGEST Political Scandal In Human History” and WLT covers it.

In the video Owens does mention a Daily Mail story — but it says Mme. Macron wasn’t born a man; for Owens, however, this is a where-there’s-smoke-there’s-fire hook. She looks at an old childhood picture of the future bride of Macron and her family, and declares the little girl in the picture is not Brigitte, and instead deduces that the boy identified as her brother in the same photo is actually Brigitte, because Owens finds him a “dead ringer” for the PM’s wife.

Owens also suggests another photo of young Brigitte “looks way too new to be a photo of a 70-year-old when they were a child,” then claims unnamed people are calling her accusations “sexist” and “racist” (?) which means her audience, who believe there is no such thing as sexism or racism (except against white men), is bound by wingnut oath to believe the opposite of what they say.  “After looking into this,” Owens further states, “I would stake my entire professional reputation [lol — ed.] on the fact that Brigitte Macron is in fact a man.”

No, WLT doesn’t get any overt credit for shoveling the story, but its Hardcore copy-slave staff know the truth and that is enough.

Now for our celebrity guest!

You may have heard that rightwingers are spreading the word that the recent chaos in Haiti either has revealed or is caused by cannibalism. Many of our usual suspects are being cagey about it — for example, I got an email with this lurid headline and photo:

When you click through, however, the Daily Beat’s headline switches to “The Truth Behind the Biden Administration’s Plans to Flood Florida with Haitian Migrants.” The only references to man-eating are unsupported Twitter slurs from sources like Libs of TikTok  (“Haitian cannibal gangs coming soon to a city near you! Joe Biden’s America”).

There are, however, many passages in the post like “The Biden Administration’s lack of proper planning and disregard for our nation’s security” and “the hardworking citizens of Florida will ultimately pay the price” — that is, they hazily invoke cannibalism without proving its existence, then talk about unnamed-but-hinted-at dangers to which Biden has subjected America, and leave your amygdala to figure out the connection.  

But one brave truth-teller is not only willing to talk Long Pig, but to attribute it to a real cause — our betrayal of God, and the crime it led to: The emancipation of slaves! From The European Conservative, one of his outlets since leaving America and his wife for Hungary and Viktor Orban,  take it away, Bre’r Rod Dreher:

Why Haiti is So Uniquely Miserable (The European Conservative)

Back in 2018, President Donald Trump referred to Haiti as a “s**thole,” and was roundly denounced for being a racist. While watching a clip of a “cannibal gang” member eating a piece of roasted human leg on the streets of Port-au-Prince the other night (it’s revolting; you have been warned), it struck me that Trump’s judgment has held up pretty well.

As if you need reminding, Dreher has long been the king of the Just-the-Tip Trumpers, crying about how awful it is that he has to support that awful man to spare his once-native land the radical socialism of Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer. But now he’s not even bothering to care about Tubby’s disgusting rhetoric — which I guess would count as some species of refreshing honesty, if I thought he were at all aware of the shift.

And of course one video of a guy allegedly eating “a piece of roasted human leg” is enough for Dreher to run with. It’s all yum yum eat ‘em up with those people!

Dreher looks at the relatively un-fucked Dominican Republic, with which Haiti shares an island, and cites reasons for the difference — mainly history and leadership — but blows them off for the real issue:

What about religion? It cannot be denied that religious belief, which infuses culture (after all, you can’t have culture without cult) has tremendous effects on political, social, and economic life. Max Weber famously…

Ugh, but wait, it gets worse:

Both Haitians and Dominicans practice voodoo. But it is far stronger and more prevalent in Haiti. This, perhaps, makes the difference. It is at least worth investigating, right?

He’s just investigating, I mean asking questions, right? Like, would God have made their backs so strong if they weren’t meant to be our beasts of burden? Just spitballin’ here!

For Haitian Protestants, whose opinions we rarely if ever encounter in the media…

Hoo boy. Next week: Why are there so few Boers in newsrooms?

…this is the central fact explaining their country’s chronic misery. They say the country’s founders brought a curse on Haiti by consecrating it to demons in the slave revolt that sparked the Haitian Revolution.

The rebellion that eventually overturned despotic French colonial rule began on the night of August 14, 1791. A group of voodoo adherents gathered at Bwa Kayiman, a forested area, and carried out a ceremony invoking the lwa to aid them as they rose against their European enslavers. A voodoo priest named Dutty Boukman sacrificed an animal and chanted this prayer…

I’ll spare you: You may think it was Papa Doc but Dreher knows it’s all about the voodoo and the slave uprising it made possible, yet we are not allowed to discuss it (well, not allowed to discuss it and have everyone kiss our asses for it, anyway) because the libtards who think racism and sexism actually exist “regard voodoo as sacrosanct because it is a native African religion.”

He’s got a point. Just last night me and my translesbian book club were trying to summon the lwa with a Ouija board.

Now watch Dreher stick the landing on a The Real Racist TM spin:

There’s a word for this: paternalism. There’s an even uglier word for it: racism. It’s the kind of racist paternalism that condemns Haitians to more suffering…

Well, now I believe in zombies, or at least in whatever animus is driving the journalistic corpse of Dreher to stumble and tumble to new depths of self-humiliation. With this column I’d say our favorite God-botherer has found his niche. Arise, Sir Rod of the Holy Hardcore!