THEY'RE EVERYWHERE -- IN EVERY NOOK AND CRANNY! AND ME OUT OF TINFOIL!

Sometimes, long as I've studied them, I'm still amazed how deeply devoted your average conservative is to his own victimhood. Whether out of office or, as now, enjoying nearly unprecedented control of the levers of power, your conservative will performatively cower before mouse-shadows he'll claim are the Alinskyite hordes, and plead for your sympathy and probably a fundraiser donation.

Have a look at David French's latest at National Review, about how all the colleges are aflame with anti-Milo riots and, in that small part of the country not occupied by burning campuses, Ta-Nahisi Coates conducts his vast honky pogrom; in other words, a typical David French column. Except in this one, French actually acknowledges that liberals have tumbled (about time, too) to their outrage machine -- that, in the polite words of David Remnick, conservatives "take some examples of exaggerated identity politics… and blow them up on Fox or Breitbart" till they're all thrashing in their Barcaloungers, self-soiled with rage and ressentiment.

To this French gives his defense, or rather his belligerent nuh-uh:

When I read words like that, I think they just don’t know.

Picture French in a James Dean red jacket, kicking a hole in a portrait of Hillary Clinton.

Or maybe they know — but don’t care — the extent to which a hostile, illiberal brand of identity politics has seeped into every nook and cranny of American culture. It’s not the case that conservative Americans sit ensconced in their immense privilege, raging at an irrelevant fringe hyped up by Fox News. Rather they experience identity politics at their jobs, hear their children and grandchildren describe experiencing it at school, and find it so omnipresent on television and online that they can’t seem to find any space (aside from conservative media) where someone isn’t mocking their values or accusing them of being complicit in historical atrocities.

Sounds like a nightmare! Yet, amazingly, absolutely no one I know shares French's experience. If "every nook and cranny of American culture" really were taken over by the ultraleft, people who were not directly employed by the wingnut outrage industry would also notice. Yet the young people I know who are in school don't report being forced to abjure or condemn (as the case may be) whiteness. Neither I nor any of the other working schlubs I know are interrupted at our jobs to troop down to the Cesar Chavez Auditorium for our mandatory two-minutes hate against Trump and the Bible. And given the enormous number of channels on "television" and the infinity of offerings "online," I can't even guess what French means by "can’t seem to find any space... where someone isn’t mocking their values or accusing them of being complicit in historical atrocities," unless he has some haywire version of Parental Controls that has him locked into Rachel Maddow and Lawyers Guns & Money.

The way I see it, were French to acknowledge that his odd theory -- that a country ruled by Donald Trump and a mob of ultraconservative Republicans is actually groaning under the yoke of a leftist hegemony -- is not shared by many more people than subscribe to his magazine, he would have but two possible rejoinders: That libtards like myself and David Remnick, old and white and male as we are, "just don't know" French's pain because we're so numb to the constant social justice warring and Antifa and Black Lives Matter and George Soros that it sounds normal to us -- or we're in on it with them and are lying to protect our international socialist masters and to make it look like French is the crazy one! 

Actually there's a third option: French is just full of shit. Now, why didn't I just go to that first? Hey, I guess in a way his whining worked!

IS YOUR WIFE A GOER? SAY NO MORE, NUDGE NUDGE?

Your moment of Dreher, Part 3,209:

Note the caption. Hey, you should have seen the cover they wanted to use!

Dreher's inspirator this time is Mark Regnerus, who reports that women with liberal views desire more sex than women with conservative views (or at least report something like that on whatever survey he's using; when it comes to this sort of thing, the grains of salt come extra large). This Regnerus attributes not to circumstances or experiences, but to philosophy: "it is a moral good to express one’s sexuality in actions of one’s own free choosing. Pleasure is reached for and should be." This attitude, which may sound healthy to you heathens, Regnerus anathematizes; normal people only have sex when God or grandma demands children, whereas liberal women DENY THE LIVING GOD, and all His works (and probably grandma and her works too, yea even the Pie Baked From Scratch), and thus "have a difficult time attributing transcendent value to aspects of life such as work, relationships, children, and daily tasks.” Look at women with ten children — you never see them wanting sex! And your lady CEO is famously sexless, until the Right Man comes along and she takes off her glasses and shakes out her hair [guitar riff]. In the end, they want more sex only because “they feel poignantly the lack of sufficient transcendence in life” they could have had from Joel Osteen and vacuuming if only they weren't so liberal.

Maybe there's a corollary -- you won't feel like having sex if you have a column to wank several times a day.

NATIONAL EMBARRASSMENT GOES INTERNATIONAL.

Trump's "I will kill you all" speech at the U.N. pleased the expected parties -- his anti-immigration twaddle thrilled the overt racists, the Believers in the Three Magic Words got what they came for ("Trump called out radical Islamic terrorism BY NAME"), and his general belligerence excited chest-beaters such as Florida Republican Congressman Ron DeSantis, who declared, "This is the international UN version of 'draining the swamp'" -- though, to be fair, seeing how draining the swamp has turned out domestically, maybe DeSantis was trying to tell us this speech was bullshit, too. And maybe Trump's brutish base, to whom I suspect it was pitched, liked that he was tellin' off them furriners, if they even remember what the United Nations is (the wingnut operatives in the White House seem to be working from an antique Bircher playbook).

The funniest ones were those who tried to make Trump's rant seem thoughtful and philosophical, like Sohrab Ahmari at Commentary:

If your default vision of liberal order looks like Barack Obama- and Angela Merkel-style transnationalism, you were probably disappointed with Trump’s speech. The features of the Obama/Merkel model are endless diplomatic processes for their own sake; the expansion of transnational “norms” and institutions, usually at the expense of democratic self-government; and a general disdain for anything redolent of nationhood and nationalism and particularity.

Translation: If you have to power to kill and don't announce your intention to use it, preferably in the crudest terms and while wearing a flag pin, you're a weakling. Trump's "alternative vision of liberal order," Ahmari claimed, "would have looked familiar to a Ronald Reagan or a Daniel Patrick Moynihan." I'm sure it would be familiar to them -- from their buddies the Contras. But as little as I think of those two, I don't think they would have wanted America itself to become a banana republic, and its President a caudillo.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the uproar over Jemele Hill calling Trump a white supremacist, and how we all learned to laugh and love again thanks to Clay Travis saying "boobs." It's kind of fitting that the brethren cheered for one of the stupider terms for breasts; if he'd said "I support the Second Amendment and tits" I wonder how it'd go over. (If he'd said "I support the Second Amendment and eating pussy" I know how it'd go over.)

I mentioned the blackcon group Project 21 in the column -- I'd seen them before, and regret not having space to discuss their history. In addition to pushing wonky wingnut causes like genetically modified foods,  they've been sending black conservatives to stick up for white conservatives for years. Here’s Project 21 spokesperson Deneen Borelli, for example, a frequent talking head on Fox, claiming in 2012 that Obama threw the black community “under the bus” by supporting same-sex marriage; here she is that same year responding to the Trayvon Martin shooting with “race-based concerns with Barack Obama, Eric Holder and their involvement with the Black Panther movement…” Most recently Project 21 defended Trump against the CEOs who quit his business councils (“it certainly reeks of corporate America bowing to the will of the anti-Trump resistance movement”) and by bothsidesing the Charlottesville incident. Diamond and Silk can only hope the wingnut sinecures remain so generous into their old age, but I have a sneaking suspicion that if it ever comes time to cut staff, white people won't be in the first wave.

STRAIGHTS AND FREAKS.

I put up some pictures from the two rallies I attended in Washington Saturday: The pro-Trump Mother of All Rallies, and the March of the Juggalos. The two groups had something in common: in each case the crowd was conscious of its outsider status. But the Trump people seemed defensive, like they know they're surrounded by people who don't like them and from whom they may have to defend themselves. Maybe it's because they know how precarious their victory was, so though they claim the privileges of the majority (a preacher on their stage kept talking about "restoration") they hang onto the grievance and persecution of the minority. It seemed at least a fifth of them were dressed in some kind of security gear -- shirts and jackets with "Burnside Bums," "Picket Patriots," "American Guard," and other para-paramilitary names printed on them -- and stalking around like they were looking for malefactors to take down. (I got some of this on my Twitter feed, but Will Sommer's from Saturday is better.)

The Juggalos, on the other hand, were the opposite of paramilitary -- their costumes were variegated  and fanciful -- they're literally a motley crew -- often loud and vulgar but never aiming to intimidate. They were louche as hell, having clearly dispensed with as given their last fuck whether the world at large digs their scene, but confident that whatever the world thought, their Juggalo crew had their back (the "Fam-i-ly" chant was big at the Lincoln Memorial). Over the mainstream as they were, they didn't seem to expect enemies; you didn't see anyone looking to crack heads. They wanted respect, but only as a means to get the law's unjust persecution off their backs; other than that, if you didn't like 'em, your loss. They were an easy group to be around, but so would be the Trumpkins, I imagine, when they're not on their imaginary battlements; it's too bad they think they have to always be on them.

TODAY IN WINGNUT GRIFTS.

Some of my longer-serving readers will remember a project by Bill Whittle called Ejectia. It was yet another online wingnut nest, but pitched by him as something more than a website -- indeed, a "City-State of Virtue" that he intended to build with reader donations. He even had "early test renderings" of the intended result ("Some people would like it to be a collection of Greek buildings in a verdant valley. Some want it on a tropical isle...").

Ejectia of course vaporized,  and Whittle went on to new horizons - and he's still out there grifting, bless him, with the same cutting edge material. But what of the dream of an alternative rightwing universe? One would think that with Trump mutilating America into the human centipede of their dreams, conservatives would have no need of fantasy lands. But hope springs eternal, and if they bought it once they'll buy it again, so here's something called "Respvblica" (the "v" is for "it's like in the gladiator movies, see?"). I learned of it from a pitch letter that began thus:

A NEW NATION DAWNS, VIRTUALLY 

Believing that real estate is not necessary to form a country in our Internet-led world today, innovators, pioneers and entrepreneurs Benjamin Poser and Joshua Resnek announced the start of Respvblica.com, the first, credible virtual nation. At first, it will launch as a news and commentary site, offering some of the sharpest writing about issues people truly care about, or should.

Respvblica is proud to be joined by Keith Ablow, MD, the New York Times bestselling author and psychiatrist who has spent ten years as psychiatry Contributor for the Fox News Network. Keith is available to talk about this new online nation...

Ablow, you may know, is a famous crackpot, the inheritor of the tinfoil crown of Dr. Martin Abend from Fox's prescursor, WNEW-TV. The other guys, who knows; Resnek seems to be a Jews-for-the-GOP sort with a taste for culture war ("Jews claiming shock and horror at some of the things Donald Trump says do not claim shock and horror watching five love making sessions during a popular movie..."). Also, his name appears in some novels by Keith Ablow, probably as an inside joke; Resnek himself writes novels -- the promo for one tells us, "through finely wrought portraits of Iowa and Washington DC of that era and of himself as a lover, as an observer and as a close-up, real time participant in the war protests and the great rallies, he stirringly depicts an American social and political era and reveals the American pastiche in all its violence, emotion and irony." What more could you want (though maybe hold the himself-as-a-lover part)? As for Benjamin Poser, he's a mystery man; maybe he put up the starter money.

From the site's "Become a Citizen" pitch:

We live, after all, in an age of Jihad, when virulent ideas have been promulgated by entities which began without any land mass, but called themselves nations, nonetheless. What if our nation—Respvblica—also were free from the notion that a land mass is essential to nationhood?

Hell of a model, guys.

What if we invited people all over the world to remain citizens of the countries in which they live, while also holding dear their allegiance to a virtual nation that, as we grow, can offer them online learning about liberty, best in class legal representation to assert their rights to free speech and the pursuit of happiness, as well as the power of a growing citizenry to obtain preferred pricing on goods and services, all around the world?

It's like your survivalist treehouse, only cuh-lassy! The price of admission is -- how cute is this -- "$17.76 USD for the first 14 days, then $17.76 USD for each 30 days." That's for starters -- I expect there'll be Platinum Citizenships and such like as soon as it gets going. Something's got to pick up the slack from Respvblica's slow-moving Kickstarter, and it'll have to be you the sucker -- er, citizen!

The site itself, you will be unsurprised to learn, is hot garbage, with a heavy pro-Trump, kill-Palestinians focus. But remember, they're not selling the steak, they're selling the pizzle.

DREHER AND NOSTALGIA FOR GERMAN RACISM.

Wondering about AfD (Alternative for Deutschland), Germany’s entry in the international fun-fair of Fuhrer-phumphers? Here’s a nice rundown from Deutsche Welle, with some points of interest:

“When it was formed in 2013, the AfD's main thrust was its opposition to bail-outs of indebted European Union member states, like Greece. Its leader, Bernd Lucke, described it as a 'new type of party that was neither right- nor left-wing.'" (Hey — just like what our dummy journalists think about Trump now!)

“German border police should shoot at refugees entering the country illegally, the former co-chair of the AfD told a regional newspaper in 2016”;

“The AfD also sees itself as a defender of the traditional nuclear family model. It is anti-abortion and hostile to alternative lifestyles.”

Sounds pretty wingnutty, even by American standards. A piquant feature is that their current leader, Alice Weidel, is gay — not unheard-of among anti-untermenschen bigots; think of Pim Fortuyn and Ernst Röhm.

Ah, but longtime readers will know where I’m going with this — right to Rodland! Rod Dreher does the finger-on-chin, quizzically-cocked-hip musing thing on AfD. First, get a load of the Lolworthy header:

Ja, das ist eine Schwarze Frau!

As often, Dreher has loooong quotes from another source, this one claiming a German “Christian civil war” between Merkel’s CDU and the AfD neo-whatsits, in part because the CDU “saw eastern Germany as more open to “Asiatics.” “It’s a powerful charge,” says Dreher, “and I have no way of knowing whether or not it is true. But I’ll assume that it is.” LOL. Also, per the source:

…the CDU’s postwar leader, Konrad Adenauer, was a Catholic who attended mass faithfully. Subsequent leaders have been less and less pious. Angela Merkel is the least pious of them all…

Yeah, we’re in legitimate political science territory here, but Dreher is rapt. He is aware of the Head Lesbian in Charge, but seems to have found some wiggle room via something called Christians In The AfD, which equivocally gibbers at length that it's okay if it's for whiteness; Dreher, who Wants To Believe, observes, “maybe they believe it makes more sense to tolerate same-sex marriage (which is now a fact in Germany) within a larger context of the state working to support marriage in general. I don’t know… It’s in German, but I read it in translation via Chrome.” Again, LOL.

But then Dreher gets to the good stuff — White Supremacy, Deutsch edition (because it’s a good idea to support other nationalists’ Supremacies, in case you need their support in, for example, a World War):

In general, I believe that all nations have the right to determine their own character. If a historically Islamic, Hindu, or Buddhist nation wanted to maintain its religious and civilizational character, they would have the right…

We don’t begrudge you darkskins if you want your own table at the campus union — why should you begrudge us our white nations?

…To the deracinated, globalizing liberal, it doesn’t really matter if the medieval church in the town center becomes a mosque or a disco, as long as procedural liberalism has been respected. This kind of thing gives lie to the claim that liberalism is neutral.

Christ is King is the neutral state — oh, if only the Inquisition were still around to show you libtards! Thereafter, more what-if-white-people-invaded-a-dark country bullshit, and this remarkable graf:

If you asked Western Christians if they would rather live in Christian Lagos or atheistic Berlin, I suppose most would choose Berlin. I would, or at least that’s what I think off the top of my head. It’s not simply because the standard of living is higher there. It’s also that despite the absence of Christianity, the culture is much more familiar. But consider this: Christian children raised in Lagos almost certainly have a much greater chance of retaining their Christianity into adulthood than children raised in Berlin. What profiteth it a man to raise his kids in all the order and comfort of the West, but watch them lose their souls? According to the logic of my own principles, I ought to choose Lagos over Berlin. And perhaps I would do so, after thinking about it.

Sure you would! Dreher, who’s always fucking off on European foodie vacations, pretending he’d go live in Lagos? Shit, he couldn’t even stick it in St. Francisville, Louisiana. The fucker has lived in Philly, Brooklyn, Dallas, and Baton Rouge, and has had three religions — he’s the very definition of a rootless cosmopolitan!

Then Dreher thinks about whether Christian refugees are bad for thinking of going to Germany where it’s less Christian than their native hellhole, and comes to this:

Hard, hard questions. If Germany loses her Christian faith, she may be persuaded in the future to return to it. But if Germany loses her distinctly German culture through mass immigration, there will be no going back. Obviously, the Hitler legacy makes these questions excruciatingly difficult for Germany — as well as hard for the rest of us, or at least it ought to make them hard — but that horrible legacy does not settle the questions.

I should fucking think the "Hitler legacy" -- that is, the Third Reich, the Holocaust, and the Second World War -- settled those questions for good and all. But maybe hardcore Jesus people like Dreher have a more, let us say, transactional relationship with Nazism.