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I don't see a denunciation there. Moore basically said sucking sewage through a straw is "incredibly seductive," and she drew a moral equivalency between "Trumpism" and a non-existent "Bidenism."

Butler is right on, but it's worse than she says. These guy are liars. They know. They're not shocked. Dreher, French, Gerson, and many others have palled around with the people they denounce today, have drawn support from the same sources, and they fundamentally understand this is just a big show where the only losers are the sorry scapegoats driven from the field and forced to subsist in the margins, if at all. That's what happened to Dreher when he started at TAC; likewise, Metaxas has been desperately clinging to the people who will have him now. If he hangs on, maybe like Dreher he will cultivate reactionary discourse to the right of Dreher so that TAC ends up being considered centrist. I think this actually has almost happened already, certainly in the minds of the TAC folks. And they're not wrong — it's just that they created this situation, in which their extremism generates more extremism and helps shift the center.

So the show of "shock" over Metaxas is just absurd. He's been patronized by the same extremist "philanthropists" that bought Dreher after his racism got him kicked out of TNR and Dallas Morning News over a decade ago. French goes out of his way to describe Metaxas's extremist-filled podcast as something innocuous — "prominent Christian radio" — and fails to recall Metaxas' book on Bonhoeffer is trash that was roundly attacked by real historians as pseudo-scholarly propaganda. It compares the Nazis to the Democrats, and that's also the message Metaxas had at the National Prayer Breakfast when he aimed it directly at Obama. This abuse of a sitting president (who was sitting right there to take it) was praised in TNR at the time, and the Christian right lapped it up. It was shockingly offensive and ignorant. The idea that the "National Prayer Breakfast" itself is a legit thing is nuts! By invoking this as Metaxas's past résumé of credible and professional work, French is showing his own complicity and deep cynicism in covering up how bad it was to ever tolerate, praise, and support people like Metaxas. They did not just suddenly unmask themselves as extremists yesterday.

I'm glad Dreher is now on record saying that his understanding of religion is that it's an irrational, libidinous, crazy-making thing that naturally produces zealous and hysterical maniacs. (How like a very repressed man's understanding of his erotic attachments. NB: on the topic of Dreher's multiple churchly conversions, Dreher has publicly recounted a sexual motive — fear, guilt, shame, loathing — driving each of them.) If that's why religion/the sacred can't be mixed with politics, this says more about Dreher's internal miswirings than anything else.

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