FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

I thought the only lonely place was on the moon.
•  You know it's trouble from the hed and dek:

Why This Twitter Purge Is Okay with Me
In the case of Richard Spencer, the media jackboots are getting it right.

And make no mistake: National Review's Ian Tuttle still thinks that, while libtards kinda-sorta-maybe have a right to invite or disinvite whomever from their own social media networks and college commencements, they're still liberal fascists because liberals are fascists Q.E.Duh. Here's Tuttle's extremely unfortunate object lesson:

Those of us on the right spend our time trying to loosen the very real clamps that exist on speech, for instance, on university campuses. And that’s important work. DePaul University has the right to forbid Ben Shapiro from speaking, as it did this week. But conservatives oppose DePaul’s doing so because they object to the idea that Ben Shapiro is somehow morally beyond the pale. He’s not. He’s a mainstream conservative, working within a delineable tradition of conservative thought.

Actually Ben Shapiro is a fucking asshole, and DePaul needs no better reason than that to disinvite him. You don't have a Constitutional right to be the skunk at someone else's picnic. I've been saying this since wingnuts wept because Rutgers students didn't want war criminal advice from Condi Rice,  but they never seem to have a better answer than Yer Hitler. Anyway, Tuttle approves of the (still fascist!) Twitter throwing a bunch of neo- and crypto-Nazis off their rolls because he doesn't like them, which he justifies with a lot of gloopy talk e.g.,

Communities form a consensus about what is right and wrong based in part on public debate, but also on custom and taboo and religious practice and a whole lot of other factors that were built on syllogisms and that are not entirely subject to rational debate.

"A whole lot of other factors." That's really threading the needle, buddy. Well, I guess one benefit of our increasingly post-logical environment is that intellectuals don't even have to pretend to try, and we will know them only by their tweed and shitty attitudes.

• From "Annals of the Age of Trump," a continuing series: Larry O'Connor of Hot Air announces Jeff Sessions' AG appointment, then cackles, "And right on cue, the mainstream media and Democrats (redundant) are shouting 'racist!'" Ha ha, stupid libtards, always with the racism! Then O'Connor quotes CNN to show how they're all worked up over nothing:

The former US attorney for the Southern District of Alabama and Alabama attorney general isn’t without controversy. His appointment to a federal district court by then-President Ronald Reagan sank when a former Justice Department employee testified that Sessions had made racially tinged remarks.

He had denounced the 1965 Voting Rights Act and had labeled the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP “un-American” and said the organizations “forced civil rights down the throats of people.”

A black Justice Department staffer said Sessions had called him “boy” and claimed he had thought the Ku Klux Klan “were OK until I found out they smoked pot.”

Maybe O'Connor didn't read it. Maybe he assumed none of his readers would read it, since it was printed in a grey box. There are other possible explanations, none of them flattering. (I think we can rule out economic anxiety, though.)