CHOC-O-MUT ICE CREAMS IS STILL CONSERVATIVE!

Jumpscare! 

I seldom post outside of Friday-'Round-the-Horn weekly summaries anymore -- subscribe to Roy Edroso Breaks It Down for daily doses! -- but I figured I owe this one to history. 

Ross Douthat interviews some neo-Nazi crap diffuser for the New York Times and it's absolutely surreal -- not least (though not mostly!) when the diffuser, Jonathan Keeperman, posits Douthat's more fash-friendly side as "Italics Ross" and they have what to them must be a thoroughly enjoyable chin-wag (I just read the transcript, no way I'm listening to these guys giggle and snort) but for any neutral eavesdropper would be a hard cue to change seats: 

[Keeperman:] I do want to point out that in 2020, when we first were having this dialogue and debate over the election, you also had something of a pseudonym. I was arguing as much with Ross Douthat as I was with Italics Ross. As Italics Ross, you had written at least one column, maybe two, in which you made the case for why Trump might be a superior choice to lead the country, despite the amount of chaos that we’d have to endure under his leadership.

I was trying — if I remember the whole episode correctly — to get Italics Ross closer to the surface of the real Ross, the underlying Ross. We all are trafficking in certain kinds of multi-identities, I guess.

Douthat: Those were columns that I wrote where I essentially deliberately cultivated a kind of split personality and drew up out of my Jungian subconscious a version of myself that would be pro-Trump.

Keeperman: Right.

Douthat: I was never for Trump. I was part of “Never Trump” — whatever that may have been way back in the past — and I retained a basic view that it was a mistake for conservatives to lash themselves to the Trump phenomenon.

For me, Italics Ross was not the true Ross lurking below the surface. That wasn’t how I thought about it. I thought about it as a set of ideas that certainly existed in my consciousness and that were really useful for understanding where American culture was and why people supported Trump, and which New York Times readers needed to engage with.

Attributing paranoid schizophrenia to the "Jungian subconscious" and "multi-identities" seems like a dodge to me, but this is in the Times so I guess it's consensus reality now.

Anyway they get into Whither Conservative Art and it's every bit the cystoscopy you might imagine, but I must draw your attention this bit:

Douthat: What is the coding? To a listener for whom it seems absurd to call “No Country for Old Men” right wing, what makes that right wing to you?

Keeperman: Because I like it, it’s good, and therefore I want it to share my political preferences.

OMG "choc-o-mut ice creams is conservative because i likes choc-o-mut ice creams" ISREAL! 

No need to bother with the ensuing discussion of what makes choc-o-mut ice creams and other neat junk conservative -- it has to do with "vitality," the boys say, whereupon they are docked a few more points for not calling it "purity of essence" instead. Also they get into to the old rightwing trope about Lena Dunham's "Girls" being conservative because the eponymous characters were whores who would never know God. We marvel these days at the absolute screaming lunatics like RFK Jr. who infest Tubby's cabinet, but it's instructive to be reminded that the madness really started in the meth labs of conservative journalism.