"}How Rod Dreher\u2019s Blog Got a Little \u201cToo Weird\u201d for The American Conservative
\u201cIt never got weird enough for me,\u201d once spoken by Hunter S. Thompson, is an apt mantra for the dedicated fans of eccentric conservative blogger Rod Dreher. Over the last 12 years, Dreher, whose blog at The American Conservative will post for the last time Friday, has built a cult following with some of the most bizarre diatribes in opinion journalism. He has warned that so-called sissy hypnosis porn is \u201cprofoundly evil;\u201d detailed the \u201cformal\u201d Catholic exorcism of a friend\u2019s suicidal wife; and recalled\u2014in unsettling detail\u2014the time he witnessed a Black classmate’s uncircumcised penis.
But one particular reader, upon reading the last of said posts, determined the blog had simply gotten too weird, according to two sources familiar with the publication. That disgruntled reader was Howard Ahmanson Jr., the heir to a California banking fortune and the sole benefactor of Dreher\u2019s six-figure salary at TAC, which is published by American Ideas Institute, a nonprofit. This unique funding arrangement\u2014a single donor choosing to cover one writer\u2019s entire salary\u2014was paired with an even more unusual editorial arrangement: Dreher was allowed to publish directly on TAC\u2019s site without any revisions or legal oversight, according to the two sources.
Dreher, Ahmanson, and Emile Doak, TAC\u2019s executive director, did not respond to requests for comment.
Ahmanson had apparently long admired the work of Dreher, who has authored numerous conservative books and previously wrote for the Beliefnet blog and The Dallas Morning News. But according to the two sources, Ahmanson began to sour on his beneficiary in 2021, when Dreher, in a blog post debating circumcision, wrote the following: \u201cAll us boys wanted to stare at his primitive root wiener when we were at the urinal during recess, because it was monstrous. Nobody told us that wieners could look like that.\u201d Incredibly, that was the \u201cfirst red flag\u201d for Ahmanson, one source told me, adding that the rift had been building for about a year.
Some of Dreher\u2019s commentary on the gay and transgender communities also proved off-putting to Ahmanson, such as his lurid musings on anal sex, rectal bleeding, and the \u201cpartially rotted off\u201d nose of a gay man who contracted monkeypox. \u201cAt some point, he basically decided, ‘This is too weird,\u2019\u201d the source, paraphrasing Ahmanson, explained to me. \u201c\u2018I don\u2019t want to read this or pay for this anymore.\u2019\u201d
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As for Dreher\u2019s future, he has said he plans to move his blog to a Substack while continuing at TAC as an editor at large and will \u201cprobably\u201d contribute a column\u2013\u2013this time, per the two sources, under an editor\u2019s supervision. \u201cI want to thank Howard and Roberta Ahmanson for their generous financial support of me at TAC for my run here,\u201d he wrote in a Friday farewell he published after being notified of this story. Remarking that he wrote \u201cimportant things\u201d and \u201cstupid things\u201d during his time at TAC, Dreher closed with a nod to a post he said fit the latter category: \u201cAll you Mongoloids were the Primitive Root Wiener in my Lucky Dog, and I love you very much.\u201d
*dying*