“Jeff the GK” is an obnoxious vegan with faux-hawk coiffed hair from Southern California who occasionally shows up on the periphery of polemics news, does some kind of weird dance to get a minimal amount of attention, and then jumps back into the shadows of obscurity. He’s what we call in alternative Christian news a “drafter,” meaning the best he can hope for is to get a response from this B-tier Christian celebrity or that one by some kind of constant harassment that – at best – comes across as a faint buzzing sound in the ear of those he’s talking about.
Dornik is mostly known for being a slightly more affable version of Servetus Diablos (aka Servus Christi aka Joshua Chavez aka whatever his real name is). Dornik first showed up on the discernment scene as Brannon Howse’s attack dog after the “Interfaith Dialogue Debacle of 2017” left Howse without any notable podcasters on his Worldview Weekend podcast network, and Howse had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find a hatchetman to harass people in social media who were ready to anathematize Phil Johnson and John MacArthur to hell and back.
Dornik himself didn’t last long on Worldview Weekend, and from what I understand it has something to do with his uncle running an Occult Museum (or something like that) in Hollywood. I don’t know the whole story, but suffice it to say that Dornik is a D-list influencer who only survived the F-list of total obscurity by the fact his awfulness is prolific.
Like Servetus Diablos or Paul Whats-His-Name from Scotland (or is it Ireland?), he seems to have the mission of making discernment ministry live up to its caricature other people paint of it.
Anyway, Dornik wrote a post about me earlier today, claiming that I have “bought into Prosperity Christianity” because I taught my proprietary “Wrecking Ball Course” over the weekend. His complaint was that the course cost nearly $400 to attend which means, I suppose, I might as well be TD Jakes passing around an empty KFC bucket to the congregation in exchange for promises of financial blessings.
A few things about Dornik in regards to this.
1. Dornik promises his readers that he can show them to do everything I can show them how to do, but for free.
LOL. But, no. My work has been cited in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Maxim, Newsweek, the Daily Mail, the London Telegraph, People Magazine, Salon Magazine, Relevant Magazine, the Christian Post, Baptist News Global, Huffington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the St. Louis Post Dispatch, the Los Angeles Times…I could go on.
Dornik’s work, thus far, has been cited by Dornik.
And to my knowledge, I’m the only polemicist in the world who has been so blessed as to not only afford to do it while simultaneously paying the bills, to does well enough to pay a team to do it. Dornik can’t teach you to do that.
While Dornik brags that his readership is “five times what it used to be,” that means literally nothing when you’re ranking 135k on Alexa (which is what his website is ranking). This website, PNP, was moth-balled months ago to make room for Protestia (this is the first original post written here in months, and only because I’d be ashamed to write about Jeff Dornik on our new flagship site because it has standards) and this site still has 5 times the readership of Dornik’s website even though it’s dormant. All of my other sites – all of them – have far more readership than Dornik’s.
My secular news site, Montana Gazette, was just sold on shares for more than six figures (I have had to navigate through the SEC and securities law to do that, which accounts for some of my absence from polemics) and will soon go to actual print with an additional hundred-thousand in capital to finance that expansion. I could retire for several years from that six-month investment in a news blog, start-to-finish. Dornik cannot teach you how to do that.
So no, Dornik cannot teach you to do what I do.
2. Dornik claimed my online conference had no capital overhead. That’s wrong. I paid thousands of dollars to host that course. I paid for it to be advertised. I paid to have the workbook created. I paid to have the visual aids and graphs and charts made. I paid the Gideon Knox Group to put it together. But more importantly, I paid with 100 hours of my own sweat equity and my time is worth money (it’s worth a lot of money).
Meanwhile, the content of my course is the product of ten years of being a 1% blogger. One-percent of bloggers get quoted in the Mainstream Media and one-percent of bloggers exceed six figures. My money goes back into expanding the presence of Christian polemics and paying a quality team to do this right. But money is money, and a laborer is worthy of his wages (1 Timothy 5:18).
3. The claim that I am “fleecing the flock” is outrageous. To “fleece” means to steal or swindle. I gave people exactly what they paid for, and more. I showed people how to do something in alternative Christian and alternative conservative news reporting that no one else on the planet has done as well. No one was “fleeced.”
Secondly, this was not the “flock” I was dealing with. I don’t have an Internet church. My church meets at 2181 W. Holly St in Sidney, Montana and – as always – they get whatever I do online for free. I’m paid an honest salary for that labor and give generously of it in return.
However, yes, some people bought the course and we got very, very positive feedback and they tell us it was 100% worth it. And that’s because it is 100% worth it.
While I am a pastor, I am also a proud capitalist. Paul made tents, and I make websites. Paul’s tents provided for his mission work. My websites pay for the mission work of many missionaries. I’ll not apologize for the giftedness God has granted me.
Furthermore, as you will see on my Patreon feed or donation pages on my various websites, I tell people not to contribute to me a penny unless they first give sacrificially, regularly, and proportionally to their local church.
With God as my witness (and an additional million or so PNP readers as well), I have eviscerated Prosperity Gospel hustlers with every fiber of my being. While Jeff points out that he too sells things, but they only cost $5 here or $5 there, there’s a reason for that…what he has to offer is worth about $5.
4. Most importantly, not a single aspiring Christian blogger paid for this course. Not one. We offered a 100% scholarship for anyone interested in Christian or polemical writing and they did not pay for their course. Likewise, I offered a 100% scholarship to any Montana conservative who wanted to learn to write polemically about statewide politics. And, we did not let liberals attend, if you think I would dare train the enemy.
However, what I have learned in blogging is also valuable for venture capitalists who run travel blogs, lifestyle blogs, or any kind of random Internet writing. They paid full price…and they got their money’s worth. And next time, frankly, I will charge far more.
The only thing dumber than Jeff Dornik in my book is that I just wasted five minutes responding to him. It will be the last time.
[Editor’s Note: This was contributed by JD Hall]
