It's Dork and Hell Is Hot

RIP DMX and WTF JD

I am, technically, the best Magic: The Gathering player in my household. But that’s less a function of my skill at the famous fantasy-based collectible trading card game and more a function of my wife and daughter not ever playing Magic: The Gathering. So, while I’m technically the best in my household, I’m not actually very good at playing, and I play regularly against a friend in my neighborhood, and he regularly kicks my ass. Once I leave the house, my “being the best at Magic: The Gathering” doesn’t count for anything.

This is a good way to think about JD Flynn being “the guy at EWTN with the most integrity”. I guess it was technically true; Flynn worked for the EWTN-held Catholic News Agency until the beginning of this year, and CNA was kind of closer to a straight-news-reporting outfit than, say, whatever the hell Raymond Arroyo does. Maybe Flynn had the most integrity at that particular workplace, but that’s more because nobody else at EWTN was trying, it's not because of any skill or values that Flynn himself possessed, and once he leaves EWTN, that integrity doesn't count for anything. That became especially clear this week.

In January of this year, Flynn left CNA to co-found and become editor-in-chief The Pillar, a Substack newsletter on issues in the Catholic church, as his new independent media venture. He also attached a pretty obvious personal narrative to the launch: Flynn was a man of integrity, a man who was going to run his own media outlet and not let anyone with a political agenda let him compromise his integrity as he did the real unbiased, spin-free reporting work that the church needed. Here's what he wrote in The Pillar's first entry:

"We’ll work in a way that respects our readers, respects the Church, and respects the issues we investigate. We won’t create narratives of polemics, sensationalism, or self-aggrandizement. We won’t treat it like a four-alarm fire every time the pope says something confusing. And we won’t waste your time with more than the facts and the context that gives meaning to those facts. We won’t do those things because we don’t need to. We believe in good, faithful, measured reporting. We know you care about the facts, not our opinions. You care about proof, not personalities."

This is the flagpole that Flynn planted for his new venture, and later in this piece we will grab Flynn by his briefs, attach him to that flagpole, run him up to the top so that his ass is hanging out, point at him, and laugh. But before we get there, we have more to unpack in the passage above. Flynn promised to only give us facts and necessary context. Opinion and sensationalism would never be part of it. But opinion is always part of it. The opinion “this is worth writing about and people should read it” informs the decision to start writing in the first place. The opinion “this is the most important issue and people should read about it” informs the decision to cover one story and not another. The opinion “this context is the most helpful for understanding the facts” informs the decision of what to include in a piece and what to cut. And The Pillar is a site that has a clear point of view and is making clear choices in what they want to cover and how they want to cover it, but it’s marketing itself as the last truly unbiased Catholic news source you can trust.

There's nothing wrong with having a point of view to guide your writing and editorial decisions - that's how writing works - but no writer should pretend to be above it. There’s even a very telling sentence in the passage above: “We won’t treat it like a four-alarm fire every time the pope says something confusing.” Flynn was starting an investigative reporting project that would be free from opinion and polemics, and in his first entry suggested that the pope said confusing things with some regularity. This is a point of view. It’s an opinion that could very easily inform decisions on what stories to investigate and cover, and what context to provide in the pieces that cover those stories. For instance, over the past six months at The Pillar, there have been an awful lot of pieces critical of one of Francis' key allies in the states, and writing all of them is a choice, just like it's a choice to conduct and publish interviews with shithead pro-death-penalty ex-Archbishop Chaput or shithead pro-ICE ex-Congressman Lipinski. Flynn is allowed to have a point of view, but he should have thought a little more before writing a piece in which he asserts that he’s above all of the opinions and personalities of Catholic media, or before Pillar co-founder and fellow EWTN expat Ed Condon wrote this for the site’s launch:

"The Catholic landscape is increasingly crowded with self-appointed experts and personality ‘brands’ offering hot takes and half takes on Church events, often without the context or background to make sense of what is happening. At the same time, reflexive tribalism often colors how events are interpreted or explained. There is a need for Catholic journalism that is planted firmly in the faith, and unshaken by partisan concerns. News and analysis that has as its first and last concern the truth, spoken with filial charity, to and about the life of the Church is a service to be offered, and a mission to undertake. This is what The Pillar aims to be."

Again, you have to understand the context in which Flynn and Condon wrote these words: they were leaving their previous employer, EWTN, who over the past few years had become an explicitly right-wing pro-Trump anti-Francis wasteland. By launching The Pillar, Flynn was very deliberately branding himself as a guy with real integrity, someone who was willing to leave a job in the Catholic media establishment, take a risk, and create his own platform because he cared too much to stick around. That would be more impressive if it hadn’t already been obvious to everyone for a while that EWTN was toxic, and if a multi-part investigative report about how the organization got hijacked by deep-pocketed reactionary donors hadn't landed, uh, several years ago.

But Flynn still wants people to say "wow, you guys have so much integrity, you're doing the real reporting and you were brave enough to leave those hacks at EWTN." This is because he's a dork. His online presence is stuffy and humorless - it's unlikely he'd get the very good DMX pun in the title of this piece - and he enjoys showing off how he's above all of the arguments currently enveloping the church, how, oh my goodness, he's so fair-minded and even-handed that he barely understands what these arguments are even about. That is presumably why he blocked me on Twitter for this devastating own:

Through the Pillar launch, through his initial writing on the site, through his whole career, Flynn's brand has been "integrity". It has been "you can trust this man's reporting, he's above it all even if his coworkers are very partisan". It has been "this guy definitely wouldn't run a piece with questionable sources that makes wild and extremely unethical leaps in logic to suggest that someone is a child molester who is probably having gay sex with a ton of gay hookers". Which brings us to July 20th.

That's when The Pillar ran their piece "Pillar Investigates: USCCB gen sec Burrill resigns after sexual misconduct allegations", a piece with no byline alleging that the elected general secretary of the USCCB, Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill, enjoyed using hookup apps in his spare time. Burill did not comment in the piece but has resigned his post at the USCCB. This is, obviously, a big allegation about a powerful priest. How did The Pillar get there? How did this outlet, founded on principles of integrity and real journalism and staying away from sensationalism , do this reporting?

"The Grindr app and similar hookup apps use mobile device location data to allow users to see a listing of other nearby users of the app, to chat and exchange images with nearby users within the app, or to arrange a meeting for the sake of an anonymous sexual encounter...The data obtained and analyzed by The Pillar...was obtained from a data vendor and authenticated by an independent data consulting firm contracted by The Pillar. The Pillar correlated a unique mobile device to Burrill when it was used consistently from 2018 until at least 2020 from the USCCB staff residence and headquarters, from meetings at which Burrill was in attendance, and was also used on numerous occasions at Burrill’s family lake house, near the residences of Burrill’s family members, and at a Wisconsin apartment in Burrill’s hometown, at which Burrill himself has been listed as a resident."

These bastions of integrity, these brave journalists that proclaim that "News and analysis that has as its first and last concern the truth, spoken with filial charity, to and about the life of the Church is a service to be offered, and a mission to undertake", are purchasing Grindr data and mapping it to dudes' houses. Getting the data was a choice. Mapping it was a choice. But I don't even want to get into the creepy implications of surveilling mobile devices because you've chosen to declare yourself the Sex Police. I want to focus on the other choice here, the choice to pad out the piece's word count with details like this:

"On June 22, the mobile device correlated to Burrill emitted signals from Entourage, which bills itself as Las Vegas’ “gay bathhouse"...The Grindr app and similar hookup apps use mobile device location data to allow users to see a listing of other nearby users of the app, to chat and exchange images with nearby users within the app, or to arrange a meeting for the sake of an anonymous sexual encounter."

The piece is not just about Burrill's actions, it's about HOW GAY EVERYTHING IS. Details on what Grindr is for, specifying which clubs Burrill's phone traveled to, and this overall thesis:

"Burrill is widely reported to have played a central role in coordinating conference and diocesan responses to the [2018 sexual abuse] scandals, and coordinating between the conference and the Vatican. Data app signals suggest he was at the same time engaged in serial and illicit sexual activity."

On Substack, you can write anything you want, and an editor isn't going to tell you "hey, calling the activity illicit, plus heavily implying that he compromised the response to the abuse scandal, without anything to back it up, is not something we can let you do." Because all The Pillar had available to report on was location and app data. There are no firsthand accounts - or secondhand or thirdhand accounts - of any of Burrill's alleged sexual misconduct in the piece. There are no interviews with anyone who worked with Burrill during the period of the alleged misconduct. There are no police reports, because Burrill doesn't appear to have broken any criminal laws; there's nothing to suggest that he engaged in any non-consensual sex, no evidence that he ever solicited a sex worker, and certainly nothing to suggest he ever had inappropriate contact with minors. There's nothing here that could even suggest that the sex Burrill was allegedly having was unsafe. Those are all elements of this story upon which I would not want to just wildly speculate, given their sensitive nature. If Burrill's using Grindr, he's not good at his priest job at all, but that's about as far a leap as I'm willing to make. Let's see how far The Pillar leapt.

According to The Pillar, Burrill was likely engaged in a "pattern of high-risk sexual behavior", which is a big jump, which The Pillar then followed with an even bigger jump. After writing the sentence "There is no evidence to suggest that Burrill was in contact with minors through his use of Grindr," the author of the piece then writes twenty-three paragraphs detailing other instances of priests and civilians using hookup apps to sexually abuse children, none of which have any relevance to Burrill's case whatsoever. The writer simply wanted to include those presumably to say "sure we can't say Burrill abused children, but JUST SAYIN' that if he wanted to, it would be easy, plus we already know he's gay, and the gays like to fuck kids, right?"  I have written about troubling leaps in logic before, but it is stunning to me that anyone at The Pillar, least of all Mr. Integrity JD Flynn, would have signed off on this. It feels comparable to me just writing "Flynn wrote a lot about child sexual abuse, wouldn't it be nuts if he was abusing a child right now? Sometimes people do that? Here's twenty-three grafs thinking about how crazy it would be if JD Flynn was a serial child sexual abuser." That's not something I would write in earnest! Because I'd be concerned about getting sued!

To be clear, if the allegations in the piece are true, Burrill shouldn't be in office at the USCCB, and he needs to do some work before he returns to ministry. And look, if you've ever read my previous work, you know I don't care if the USCCB collapses completely. I think a story about somebody in USCCB leadership acting against his vows is reportable, but there's a way to report this story that can hold leadership to account that doesn’t allege “high-risk sexual behavior" without any evidence, that doesn’t luridly imply that this dude was also assaulting minors, that doesn’t build out details on which gay nightclubs he visited and how gay they are, that doesn’t equate gay orientation with pedophilia with "high-risk sex". But reporting that story properly would require traveling to talk to people, legal review, and, you know, resources that actual publications have and guys on Substack don't.

Here's Flynn again in his first Pillar piece back in January:

"We aim to do serious, responsible sober journalism about the Church, from the Church, and for the Church...Good reporting assumes that people deserve the facts, unvarnished and without spin, in order to make judgments about real things that matter in their lives."

I would ask Flynn if, when he wrote these words, he imagined himself mining Grindr data and copy-pasting child sex abuse stories from his email forwards.  You have to have a point of view when you write something, even if you claim you're doing unvarnished reporting without spin, because the point of view informs the decision to start writing in the first place, and what you choose to write about, and how you structure the piece. Flynn had a point of view when he signed off on the Burrill piece - a piece that was ninety percent varnish and spin, with the remaining ten percent being creepy location data - and this point of view was cruel and vile, and there is no clear reason why it had to be so cruel and vile. The man who built his personal brand on integrity, on being too good for EWTN, has instead shot right past the Church Militant stories on “Motown Homopredators" or the LifeSiteNews stories explaining how all gay men are exhibitionists deep down, and at least with those pieces I can enjoy the unintentional comedy of Michael Voris trying to string a sentence together. It only took six months for JD Flynn, starting from “annoying conservative dork", to curdle into “truly pitiable and hateful man". But to be clear, he's also still a dork, and not even the good kind of dork that plays Magic: The Gathering.

Grift of the Holy Spirit is a series by Tony Ginocchio detailing stories of the weirdest, dumbest, and saddest members of the Catholic church, and we're not fucking around. You can subscribe via Substack to get notified of future installments.