For some time, I have been trying to figure out exactly how to describe the quality of horrified fascination that the right-wing writer Rod Dreher evokes for so many of the people I know — many of them the same sorts of people that the reactionary writer would happily see gulaged, or perhaps “helicoptered,” to adopt the image more appropriate to his increasingly openly fascist sympathies. The man cannot so much as announce his divorce, or cause a minor diplomatic scandal for the regime he now serves, without it becoming a shared joke in any of several group chats I belong to, or a forty-five-minute riff on multiple left-wing podcasts. We all know we’d do better to just ignore his existence, but we can’t stop watching The Rod Show.

Why him? There are lots of crazy, silly, harmful people in the media. Indeed, the one advantage that the era of social media and personal branding offers, entertainment-wise, is that you can basically spend your whole life doing “Mystery Science Theatre 3000” over any number of would-be discourse warriors, life coaches, #successwin guys, memesmiths, shams, and scolds. But Rod keeps himself at the center of attention week after week. How does he do it?

Is it his inability to leave anything to subtext? Is it the way he immerses himself in contradictions so profound that one feels one has entered a strange new post-hypocrisy era, in which the concept itself has somehow lost coherence? Is it his versatility, the way he can scale new heights of both pitiability and loathsomeness, with barely a pause for breath in between, like a man running back-to-back marathons?