NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about Bari Weiss' Intemallectual Dork Web, and all the wingnuts rushing to tell us that if we don't see how cross-partisan and free-thinking this passel of cranks and crackpots was, we're  intolerant and This Is Why Trump Won etc.

That Weiss column shook loose an avalanche of bullshit, for which I had not nearly room enough in the column, but I must make special mention of the New York Times' follow-ups -- first, Michelle Goldberg defending Weiss from a really unique perspective: Goldberg reveals she was “red-pilled” by seeing Israelis persecuting Palestinians in Hebron, and considers her “transformation not unlike the one my colleague Bari Weiss described in her recent article on what’s been called the ‘Intellectual Dark Web'...” Surprisingly, the Dark Web guys haven't rushed to thank her for this, and poor Goldberg now has to worry about being snubbed at the  good parties by Eli "Check The Ratio" Lake.

Worse still is Gerard Alexander's "Liberals, You’re Not as Smart as You Think" rewrite of his 2010 Washington Post essay. It's every whining cliche about mean liberals turning poor, mush-brained Republicans into Trump monsters, but what's most annoying is the sloppiness of his accusations: First he claims liberals have "a lot of power to express values, confer credibility and celebrity and start national conversations that others really can’t ignore" -- which doesn't sound like "power" so much as that they're the kind of "chattering class" conservatives normally like to deride as irrelevant  -- then says "but this makes liberals feel more powerful than they are," which maybe he measured with a Liberal Feelsmeter but forgot to share the data with his readers. It's like a little Strawman Punch and Judy show.

Speaking of shit that would be unrecognizable to people who live in the real world, Matthew Continetti hops fully aboard the Cultural-Marxism nutwagon:

A renascent Marxism competes with, and to a large extent has been subsumed by, the ideology of multiculturalism and its attendant identity politics. 

It is this ideology and politics that have captured America's most prestigious intellectual, cultural, and media institutions. The university, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and increasingly formerly "neutral" and "objective" platforms such as the New York Times and the Atlantic have come under the sway of racial and sexual dogmas and attitudes that brook no disagreement.

Republicans literally control the federal and most state governments, but in Continetti's Kampfire story liberals actually run everything through movies and college. If Continetti were circulating this conspiracy theory about real people, he'd have been involuntarily committed by now. (N.B. No, this is not a threat made from my exalted position as a big wheel in America's most prestigious intellectual, cultural, and media institutions.)