Rodsmack
Other titles I considered were "Goodbye Yellow Brick Rod" and "Rod's Plan" and "Old Town Rod" and "Rod's Favorite Customer" and "Rodspeed You! Black Emperor" but I had already used that joke
As of this writing, the most read piece in all of G.O.T.H.S. is the August 2020 John-Henry Westen/LifeSiteNews piece, with 2,899 hits total. I'm a little surprised it's that one - I personally think the other pieces from that month, on Abby Johnson and Alan Keyes, are stronger - but there you have it. In addition to being the most read piece on G.O.T.H.S., 2,899 views makes that piece the most read thing I’ve ever done in any format. More than any book, any podcast episode, anything.
This is, obviously, not a huge number, and that's fine. G.O.T.H.S. is too niche to ever have a really sizeable audience, and to have this audience, that likes the project and enjoys reading it, is really a blessing for me, as it would be for any writer. I have to remind myself of that sometimes: that writing, for me, is ultimately a hobby, something I do to help myself think through things, and it's never going to be my job, and that I'm lucky to be able to write about the things I want to write, the way I want to write them, and have a small group of people who enjoy reading that writing. If I may be candid, there are days when this is more challenging to make my peace with, but I do the best I can, and am grateful that I can learn so much not only about the very stupid people I research, but also learn about how I write and what I really get out of it.
My point is this: I'm doing way fucking better than Rod Dreher right now.
Oh, Rod. Rod Rod Rod Rod Rod. You walked up to the Pope and were like “yes mister pope perhaps you've heard of my book"? Rod, come on. Look at me, Rod. Come on. The man probably didn't read your book because he was busy, I don't know, running the Vatican and traveling to Iraq, although that’s not quite as demanding as your schedule tweeting about Diet Peach Snapple or lamenting John Roberts' secret liberalism or accidentally sharing neo-Nazi propaganda:
Of course Pope Francis would have no idea who Rod Dreher is; the same week Dreher met the Pope, he had written a column for The American Conservative panicking over a potential non-binary character in Australian children's show The Wiggles, writing “What is the point of this? Why can’t kids just be kids? Why do the sick, twisted elites of Anglophone culture have to force their obsessions onto little ones? Not even the Wiggles are allowed to escape the totalitarian sexual revolution. As I write in Live Not By Lies, totalitarianism is” and at this point I don't think you need to read any further, since 1) the character in question was confirmed to be non-binary in a Twitter reply by one of the Wiggles and that character’s gender identity is not actually mentioned in the show, and 2) that character is a literal unicorn. But I swear to God, this is how the piece actually ran:
This is what Dreher put his name on five days before meeting the Pope and publicly asking “why the hell hasn't this guy read my stuff?” Dreher also had multiple columns that week decrying “creeping wokeism in the workplace,” so he has plenty of credentials for being a replacement-level rage-blogger, and none of that seemed to catch His Holiness’ eye either. Dreher’s most famous work, bestselling book The Benedict Option, justifies its exhortation to Christians to separate from broader civil society by basically saying “seriously, do you want to live in a world where gay people have rights?” There are not additional justifications beyond that one, but to be fair to Dreher, I'll use his words: “L.G.B.T. activism is the tip of the spear at our throats in the culture war. The struggle over gay rights is what is threatening religious liberty…Blacklisting will be real. There are people alive today who may live to see the effective death of Christianity within our civilization.” The Pope appears to have never seen these words, and you are seeing them right now and likely thinking “wow this guy sounds like an idiot.”
Look: Dreher is not a serious intellectual, and you shouldn't have to give him any more credence than you should give any other dumb homophobe. The substance of what he writes is indistinguishable from more openly hateful conservative pundits, and although Dreher likes to present himself as somebody who has thought harder and prayed more than the average conservative, he still ends up in the same small dumb bigoted place as everybody else.
With that in mind, take a look at the yawning chasm between the critical reception of this man and his actual output, which includes falling ass backwards into white supremacist content and having to repeatedly backpedal on social media. The New Yorker did a lengthy profile of Dreher in 2017 that described his writing as, among other things, “deeply confessional, achingly sincere, intellectually searching;” presumbly the writer was unaware of Dreher’s strong views on where unicorns land on the gender spectrum. David Brooks of The New York Times called The Benedict Option “the most important religious book of the decade,” referring to a book with the stated thesis “wouldn't it be great to live in a world where I didn't have to look at a gay person”. Dreher’s Substack costs $300 per year to subscribe to, about 5x what a subscription would cost from a better writer, for writing that is “that is not so polemical, but rather more poetical and reflective” but also talks about online pickup artist grifter Roosh V.
Dreher, presumably extrapolating from successes like these, possibly assumed his meeting with the global leader of the Catholic church would lead to a Homeric battle in the arena of faith and orthodoxy, with Dreher ultimately emerging victorious. Instead, the Pope had no idea who Dreher was, because he's the Pope and has no reason to read the writer whose job it is to explain which Wiggles’ genders were fixed at birth, and Dreher was so hurt by the snub that he had to post about it. Dreher's success and acclaim have long outpaced his value as a public intellectual, and knowing that he is less satisfied with his own massive level of success than I am with my very modest level of success is…delightful.
So with that, I will dedicate the rest of this piece to very funny jokes about this incident that I saw on the Internet.
Oh, and maybe one subtweet:
Grift of the Holy Spirit is a series by Tony Ginocchio detailing stories of the weirdest, dumbest, and saddest members of the Catholic church. You can subscribe via Substack to get notified of new installments.