THE ACTRESS VS. THE WITCHFINDERS.

I guess the brethren will be going on for the rest of the week about how Meryl Streep assaulted their snowflake sensibilities by saying it was bad when The Leader made fun of that crippled guy -- and, worse yet, did so using her evil devil-sent acting talents, rather than (as God intended) with high moral stiffness, like a pundit on a Commentary podcast:

On the first of this week’s podcasts, we dilate [!-ed.] upon Meryl Streep attacking Donald Trump and Donald Trump attacking Meryl Streep and how Trump represents a different kind of combative conservative—one who has his own form of pop-culture reach that is beyond the capacity of the Streeps to silence or control.

I'm not going to spend half an hour of my precious drinking time experiencing a dilated John Podhoretz -- that time I braved a Nick Gillespie podcast on how Trump could be good for libertarianism was bad enough. But what a pitch! Trump will not be silenced by the Streeps! He is beyond the Streeps capacity! He's taking it to the Streeps!

There are plenty of these idiots enraged over the mild criticism of their buffoon-king, but so far the worst (to be fair it was always a safe bet, though Dreher is a close second) is David French at National Review:

I have no particular affection for Trump, but I positively loathe the condescension, alarmism, ignorance, and self-regard of the wealthy Hollywood Left, and each of those elements was on full display in Streep’s speech.

As a believing Christian, I can't quite come out and say I love the pussy-grabbing Putin pal, but if there's one thing I positively loathe (you hear me, plain people? Looooathhe) it's elitism, at least as long as the bullshit-populism thing we got going now still plays. (Why he didn't just say "ah don' lahk me no fancy big-city actress nohow" and spit, I can't guess.)

French's arguments against the actual speech are ridiculous. Get a load:

Streep raised the specter that Trump would expel “outsiders and foreigners,” leaving Hollywood bereft of talent. Yet is anyone proposing deportation of legal-immigrant Hollywood actors?

That's even stupider than usual for him, because he's just making shit up -- there is nothing actually genuinely offensive in the speech except what he projects onto it, which is his own stark terror that anyone can claim the attention of an audience who isn't a beady-eyed Witchfinder General like himself or a blow-dried con man like the politicians he serves. And so he does the Whore of Babylon bit to get the rubes quaking:

Hollywood sells the best cultural drugs. Truth is optional, self-indulgence is a virtue, and bullying is bravery. And last night it was all wrapped in Streep’s alluring package, an emotion-laden call to arms that stirred the hearts of millions.

The humans -- she makes them feel things -- it must be the drugs! French rails about the baleful power of "culture" not because he knows what it is, nor why the human mind and soul invented it, but because he senses its power and sees it as a threat to his own.

What a sad way to live.