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Ruh-Roh, Rod: Dreher’s Pseudonymous Postings Could Cause Him Big Trouble

Posted on | May 8, 2011 | 24 Comments

Using an online pseudonym is always a dangerous game, and now it is being alleged that former National Review/Dallas Morning Journal writer Rod Dreher has jeopardized his career with pseudonymous posts at a religious blog.

A round-up of the story at Est Quod Est blog may leave some readers confused, but it identifies Dreher as “Muzshik” (Russian for “peasant”) on the Orthodox Christian blog OCATruth.com. (OCA = Orthodox Church in America.) The blog launched on March 3 in defense of OCA primate, Metropolitan Jonah Paffhausen, who is opposed by some Orthodox clergy and laity, including Mark Stokoe, who blogs at OCANews.org.

On April 30, Stokoe published a series of e-mails purporting to show that Dreher had been instrumental in establishing OCATruth.com, which included this message attributed to Dreher:

“Please, please, please don’t tell ANYBODY that I have anything to do with this site. . . . But really, I am taking a big risk here.”

To say the least! Dreher is publications director for the John Templeton Foundation. He left the Dallas Morning News in January 2010 to take that job, and the kind of pseudonymous activity at OCATruth.com is definitely not within Dreher’s job description. He hasn’t blogged at BeliefNet since July 2010, and the blogger at Est Quod Est suggests Dreher’s bosses at Templeton may have forbidden him from further outside blogging.

As soon as OCANews.org published the e-mails, “Muzhik” stopped blogging at OCATruth.com. (His last post on April 30 was about a synod of Orthodox bishops in Chicago shunning Paffhausen.) So it at least appears that Dreher may have some ‘splainin’ to do.

In case you don’t remember who Rod Dreher is, he made a big splash in March 2009 by bashing Rush Limbaugh’s CPAC speech. In May 2009, Mark Levin took on Dreher in a guest-post at Riehl World View.

UPDATE: Linked at Riehl World View — thanks!

UPDATE II: A reader helpfully points out that Dreher’s BeliefNet attack on Limbaugh’s CPAC speech has been taken off-line, but was substantially quoted in Tim Graham’s rebuttal at NewsBusters.

UPDATE III: Thanks to another reader for pointing out where Dreher distilled his anti-Limbaugh sentiments into a newspaper column:

[T]he GOP and the conservative movement are stuck on stupid. . . . [I]f Limbaugh’s vision represents the future of American conservatism, count this conservative out.

OK, Rod: You’re out. And no one in the conservative movement will defend you in your present predicament, nor lift a finger to help you if you get fired by Templeton, because you are so damned important — and so much smarter than the rest of us — that you clearly have no need of anyone’s help.

You are an autonomous Movement of One. And good luck with that.

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Category: Blogging, Religion

Comments

  • Anonymous

    Ruh-Roh!! That’s what you get for dogging Rush!

  • http://thegunsreport.com Ran

    Crunchy “Conservatism” meets the wall, and voila: CRUNCH!

  • higgins1990

    “Muzshik” is actually Russian for man in the context of “The Man” or “A Real Man”.

  • Anonymous

    Remind me again why pseudonymous postings are bad?

  • Paul Zummo

    I’m sure Dreher will find a way to blame this on the Church’s abuse scandal.

  • Paul Zummo

    It’s not that they’re bad in and of themselves, but people assume a false sense of security when using pseudonymns. You should always presume that whatever you say can eventually be attributed back to you by someone digging hard enough.

  • Anonymous

    I don’t make my living posting on the internet, but just need some plausible denial from my left of center employer.

  • Anonymous

    Dandapani +1

  • R S Mccain

    Exactly. The thing that is most dangerous is attack from behind a pseudonym, which creates a motive for the attacked party (or their friends) to try to sleuth out your identity.

    Evidently, the world of Orthodox bloggers is small enough that Dreher was pretty quickly identified as a suspect in the OCATruth.com site. It took less than two months for Stokoe to get the incriminating e-mails, which suggests that one of Dreher’s friends was less than careful about whom he was sharing information with.

  • Joe

    His punishment should be going to Orthodox Services back to back (there is a lot of standing and kneeling in Christian Orthodox services, you have to be committed. No kneelers either. Kneelers are for wimps).

  • Anamika

    The thing that is most dangerous is
    attack
    from behind a pseudonym, which creates a motive for the attacked party (or their friends) to try to sleuth out your identity.

    Speaking from a bad personal experience, I bet! How harmful to your reputation did it turn out anyway? Or was that just a (dangerous) pain in the ass?

  • Anamika

    The thing that is most dangerous is
    attack
    from behind a pseudonym, which creates a motive for the attacked party (or their friends) to try to sleuth out your identity.

    Speaking from a bad personal experience, I bet! How harmful to your reputation did it turn out anyway? Or was that just a (dangerous) pain in the ass?

  • Snippy

    I remember Dreher. He was a whiny baby.

  • Darth Venomous

    _Was?_

  • JB

    From the Red Cardigan link at the EstQuodEst site we learn in Dreher’s own words when OCA Truth was probably formed, February 12 & 13, 2011:

    “I was just down in your part of the world this weekend. I’ve had a hard last few months — not being allowed to blog as part of my new job has really been tough, especially because I was hired in large part because of my blog — and I really needed to see my old friends, and go to Sunday liturgy in my old parish. Fortunately, American Airlines announced a weekend fare sale in the middle of last week, and I got a last-minute cheap ticket between Philly and Dallas. Rushed down on Saturday afternoon, and flew back home this morning. It was so good to be back in Texas, and in my home parish, with my dear, dear friends. And it was SUNNY! And there was Tex-Mex food! When I flew home today, Julie and the kids showered me with love, and birthday cake.”

    Now, I’m as devout as the next guy, but if I’m going to leave my wife and kids behind and fly cross-country the two weekend days immediately before my birthday to meet up with some male friends in my old Orthodox parish, it’s absolutely going to be for business, and business pretty important to me at that, not for pleasure, not just because the airline has a special. That’s assuming I’m not on the down low. Which I’m not. Swear. Cause if I was I’d have to protest too much to cover my tracks.

  • Juliusz

    True dat … but the best take-down of Dreher remains Roissy, classic, boy he nails Rod – pun intended – in all his fey, vaguely homo glory.
    http://roissy.wordpress.com/2009/06/30/june-2009-beta-of-the-month/

  • Diane

    Yuck, Julius. I’m no Dreher fan, but that site is horrible: coarse, vulgar, nasty, and deeply misogynistic. I think one can make legitimate criticisms of crunchy idiocy without resorting to vicious insult and gutter vulgarity. After visiting that site, I feel like I need brain bleach — and a computer cleanse!

  • Juliusz

    Coarse, vulgar, nasty, and deeply misogynistic … what’s the bad part? LOL

    Roissy is a very well known manosphere commentator, who’s been covered in the MSM, including The Weekly Standard.

    Grow up.

    P.S. It’s not written for women.

  • Diane

    Ah, the tired old “Grow up” response. So much for minimal civility in the blogosphere….

  • Juliusz

    I’m quite civil. If you act like a hysterical girl, I will call you out as such.

    Roissy’s mantra is: “Where pretty lies perish”. Very few American women can admit the existenceof all the pretty lies around them.

    Roissy is a provocateur; he’s also usually right about the less pleasant realities of human nature and gender relations.

  • Diane

    Yeah, “grow up” and epithets like “hysterical girl” are soooo civil. I’m overwhelmed by your graciousness and good breeding.

    In what moral universe is it OK to fling around “c*nt” and similar ultra-coarse terms? You are defending the indefensible, and that’s why you are resorting to personal insult.

    I don’t care how pretty or non-pretty this dude’s mantra is. His site is a sewer. Period. It is beyond the pale. It has no place — zero, nichts, niente, nada — in civilized disourse.

    The fact that I even need to point this out, much less defend myself against personal insult when I do so, is a sad commentary on our culture’s
    descent into barbarism.

  • http://contrapauli.blogspot.com/ Pauli

    Didn’t realize you were hysterical, Diane. You are right–that site is abysmal. There are too many good substantive critiques of Dreherism to waste time reading that.

    “Very few American women can admit the existence of all the pretty lies around them.” Oh, gag.

  • Juliusz

    Nice white knighting there, dude …

    I don’t see any suggestion that Roissy is WRONG about his take on gender and society.

    He’s just “mean” and “abysmal.”

    Speaking of name-calling when you got no actual argument …

    I challenge you to actually read Roissy for a while. You will disagree with a great deal, but it will make you (and I mean men here) think and will provide insights which are deeply subversive but also mostly true.

    If you can handle the truth …

  • Juliusz

    Wow, you are an even bigger Church Lady than Dreher: impressive.

    You are biologically obligated, as a woman, to rail against Roissy: of course.

    That’s half the fun.

    I am confident that, if you actually read Roissy, you would understand that it’s actually a plea for resstablishing a moral code in society – you know, the one wrecked since the 1960s by lefties and feminists with a lot of Vichy-like collaboration from girlie-men, especially devotees of Churchianity like Dreher – but, if we can’t do that, we might as well have a good time.

    I don’t subscribe to Roissy’s moral code, but it is a necessary argument for men to have.

    It’s not about you, lady … that just kills you, doesn’t it?

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