FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

I like their sound. h/t @sethdmichaels

•  There can be none more Rod Dreher: Apparently Clay Higgins, a rightwing Baton Rouge character currently running for Congress  ("Looking to be a 'loud, angry voice' in Washington, D.C.," per The Advertiser), wanted to go into Red Cross centers where flood refugees were staying and conduct prayer meetings; Red Cross politely declined, and explained themselves thus:

Is it true that the Red Cross doesn’t allow people to pray in shelters? 

We have been so moved by the outpouring of care and kindness we’ve witnessed among Louisiana residents. At the Red Cross, our priority is also providing comfort to all that reside at our shelters. We recognize and are sensitive to the fact that hundreds of people from different backgrounds are often sharing a large space with limited privacy. It is of the utmost importance that we respect people’s individual needs, backgrounds and beliefs in accordance with our Fundamental Principles, which state that we bring assistance without discrimination as to nationality, race, religious beliefs, class or political opinion. With this in mind, and for the privacy of our shelter residents, we do have policies in place on who can enter shelters to ensure that people have a private, secure place to stay as much as possible. Please know people in the shelters are also welcome to pray and gather among themselves.

Dreher quotes these very words, and responds:

So much for the “Cross” in Red Cross. No wonder south Louisiana people are pissed off at them.

Elsewhere at his blog -- check the caption:

Maybe his whole Benedict Option off-the-grid malarkey will in the long run be a blessing to us all.

•  I see people are debating the efficacy of Hillary Clinton's alt-right speech. I of course am fully on board -- she's adopted my method! I've been telling the world about the very large racist component of conservatism for years, starting from back before they had a fancy "alt" name for themselves. I've also told people how they take small stories like the "knockout game" and inflate them into harbingers of race war, and how more mainstream wingnuts promote such loony ideas as a hi-sign to the neo-Confederates in the back room. I have been vilified for it by VDare and other such like, which is just gravy -- I really do it for the Moscow Gold, and also because I think it's  important that we cut the crap and acknowledge where all their crocodile-tear hurts-me-more-than-it-does-you social welfare and policing policy ideas really come from. Hillary's not all the way there, of course -- her husband was a big part of the bullshit, after all -- but I'm for anything that pushes the ball along.

•  Speaking of the alt-right, D.C. McAllister of The Federalist tells us "It’s important, therefore, to step back and analyze exactly what the truth is about race in today’s politics," and the truth is that conservatives aren't the racists liberals say they are -- in fact, liberals summon racism (or something that looks very much like it) by invoking its name:

Those accusations increased so dramatically during the Obama presidency that I would also add it has created an emotional backlash that has caused many Americans to develop negative feelings toward minority groups. We are seeing much of this negativity expressed in politics today. It is important to understand this development in the right context. It doesn’t stem from white supremacism, but frustration born of racial identity politics...

Polls that show Trump supporters having negative feelings toward minorities reflect this backlash. Unfortunately, too many conservatives have misinterpreted such polling, using those errant interpretations to promote the false narrative that Trump supporters on the whole are racist, when they’re actually reacting to the charge of covert racism and to racial identity politics.

When you accuse someone of racism, how else is he supposed to react but with racial slurs? But that isn't the half of it -- apparently, in addition to making these poor people look racist, liberals are also behind the recent murders of cops, and are coming for Rush Limbaugh and D.C. McAllister next:

Today, the violence is directed against police. Tomorrow, other stigmatized groups will be targeted. The question is, what is all this leading to? What’s the endgame? What happens when you stigmatize a group, negate it, make it powerless, and then blame it for all your struggles? They must be annihilated. 

Boy, I remember when they used to call us sissies -- now we're storm troopers! Well, you live long enough, you get to see all kinds of weird shit. Anyway, on to McAllister's solution:

For conservatives to successfully de-stigmatize their identity, they must do something that is not happening right now. They must unite with all stigmatized out-groups. Everyone who opposes the Left has been labeled by the same brand. To fight back, they must unite, overcoming differences to face a common enemy.

Alas, McAllister doesn't say who those other out-groups are. Maybe it includes people who hate gay people -- excuse me, people who are made to look as if they hate gay people. OK, but what other liberal stigmatees are there? Billionaires who want even more tax breaks? Pretty sure they're already with the conservatives. Oil and gas executives? Ditto. I suppose the real play here is to convince white working class people in general that liberals are denigrating them -- Obama said that bitter-clinger thing once! -- but that'll be stretch, since conservatives are these days busy telling those folks their problems are nobody's fault but their own. You know, it's too bad no one in that movement knows anything about community organizing.

GIRL TALK.

The Federalist is going in heavy for I-don't-need-feminims stories today. For starters there's this amazing headline:

Nicole Russell tells us:

Over the past few decades, more women than men are going to college and getting higher degrees. Then they’re purchasing homes and putting off marriage and babies. Guess what: They’re miserable. (As Donald Trump would say, “Sad!”)

How does she know they're miserable?

In an interview with Maclean’s Camilla Paglia confirmed this...

Good enough for me! Now that we have statistical confirmation, why are these independent women miserable?

Problem is, the kind of men feminist padawans tend to attract are -- how do I say this politely? -- not really men. Studies even show contraception users are attracted to more passive, feminine men.

Whereas real burly men will gitcha pregnint -- and then probably not marry you, but that's for the "Marriage Makes You Rich" scold-story, not this one.

Then Russell tells us about these two ladies she knows: One married "a softer, but more romantic man who would do whatever she wanted at the drop of a hat." The other married "a more direct, straightforward man, however demanding and borderline-misogynist he was... guess which one is happier?" Surprise, it's the misogynist's wife! At least she says she's happy, but what's with all those notes she keeps trying to pass me when her husband's not looking?

That's basically it, theme-wise, but there are many mangoes along the way, e.g.:

Many men who encounter a true feminist basically cower, act indifferent, shrug, butter up, charm, demean, ignore, or attempt to flirt.

I feel this should be in a poster like the Heimlich Maneuver. "That man is saying 'you come here often?' and shrugging -- must be a feminist in here somewhere!"

Deep down in the confines of her soul where she hasn’t even bothered to look, much less understand, a woman wants a man who exudes masculinity, who remains a steady rock in her current-filled stream of emotions and hormones. Instead of a man who says he’ll eat at the restaurant of her choice for the fifteenth time that month, she wants a man who cooks a meal she’s never tried before.

"Here, bitch, I used milk with the cheese powder instead of water. Now suck my cock." Swoon!

Elsewhere at The Federalist, Joy Pullman tells us how the secret of "mind-blowing sex" is marriage -- and a thousand Rodney Dangerfield jokes pummeled her back into the sea where she belongs. Kidding. Pullman warms us up by informing us that "a higher number of sex partners correlates with psychological and health problems" and if that doesn't make you want to drop the walk of shame for the walk down the aisle, she also has studies that show "two in five will orgasm during a hookup, but four in five will with a committed lover" -- but if you're thinking of just living together with your committed lover to redeem those orgasms, Pullman will have you know that "cohabitation reduces sex frequency and increases relationship conflict" -- whereas if your lover is "committed" by marriage, he can't run away!

If you're happy for Pullman but want to stay single anyway, be warned that she wants to share this gift with everyone, preferably before they get too educated to know better: society, she says, must "rethink the life script that requires young people to wait a decade or two between puberty and marriage." Old enough to bleed, old enough to butcher -- I mean, to have mind-blowing sex!

Rule of three demands we consider D.C. McAllister's "Why Girls Still Play Dumb To Get Guys," and it turns out that, duh, the mens like it:

While they want equal partners, there is a natural disposition in men to want to be dominant, to be the strong leader, and to be the protector. I’ll go ahead and use the antiquated term: most men, deep down, appreciate a woman who is submissive. They don’t want to be constantly challenged. They value deference.

At last! I thought. Someone at The Federalist was coming out for consensual roleplay! But for McAllister, it's not a kink, nor even a lifestyle, but just the way things ought to be -- for everyone. Today's men "don’t stand up for a woman when she leaves the table, open a car door, or show her the respect she deserves" because "our feminized culture has told him he shouldn’t." In fact, those feminims are just a buncha bull-dykes trying to spoil your submission:

These are the feminists who think a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle. She doesn’t need him. If anything, she should dominate him....

Likewise, ladies, you don’t need to be a dominant bullish Amazon woman to prove your worth, either. If a man likes that, then so be it. I wish him well in finding his man parts at some point in his life.

Man, these red-pill chicks have very specific ideas of gender roles. And that's cool! America's a big, beautiful rainbow flag of sexual choice. But I have a nagging feeling that they wouldn't agree it's a choice.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...on the weeping and lamentation of the rightbloggers in the wake of South Carolina. It's a day late because of some VV administrative issues, but the extra hours haven't shaken my thesis -- especially the bit about how hard it will be to get either Cruz and Rubio to stand down for the Good of the Party. Since I filed, we've seen the hilarious contretemps over whether Marco Rubio believes in the Holy Bible -- which I love, first because Rubio's originally-alleged crack about the Revealed Word of the Lord ("Got a good book there, not many answers in it") sounds like something Dougal on Father Ted would say, but also because at first I thought Rubio might indeed have slagged the Bible just to wind up that religious maniac Rafael Cruz, and was tempted to switch my support to him on that basis.

Also, I noticed rightbloggers pushing and pulling for their favorite anti-Trumps, and now there are even more of them; for instance, D.C. McAllister at The Federalist declares -- in defiance of an avalanche of new Rubio endorsements  -- that "Rubio Needs To Move Aside For Cruz, Not Vice Versa." To a suggestion that Rubio promise Cruz a seat on the Supreme Court in exchange for his withdrawal, McAllister says, "even if Rubio did nominate Cruz, it is highly unlikely he would be confirmed. The establishment wing hates Cruz. Sen. Lindsey Graham said he’s worse than Obama. The chance of Cruz being confirmed as a Supreme Court justice is slim." So the right place for this lovable character is at the top of the GOP ticket.

My favorite fallout so far is from Ben Domenech, explaining that evangelical Republicans are flocking to Trump because, basically, that Jesus stuff was all bullshit and they're really just mean sons of bitches who want to get back at the hippies:

Congratulations to the American left: you asked to win the culture wars -- and evangelicals are giving you Donald J. Trump.

On to victory in November! And please do read the column.

SEDUCED INTO GAYNESS! ONE WOMAN'S STORY.

Not that D.C. McAllister of The Federalist had ever written anything that made sense to me before (Sample: "If we’re going to warn people of the perils of Big Gulps and French fries, shouldn’t we warn them of the dangers of sex?"), but when she started talking about how some people, particularly children and butch dudes, have problems with sexuality and friendship I thought she was in the ballpark at least of rational discourse:

Just this morning I was watching Fox NFL Sunday, and Terry Bradshaw was talking about how he was excited by Howie Long the first time he saw him play. The eruption of uncomfortable laughter was expected. But he kept on, saying how Long “took his breath away”—which incited even more snickers. 

While I grinned, having seen this same scenario played out over and over again, I was also saddened, because I saw it as just one more knock on a kind of love we desperately need in our lives—passionate, nonsexual love. But we’re so uncomfortable with the expression of intimate, familiar feelings among men that we’ve given it its own name—bromance. 

I should have known when she started quoting C.S. Lewis that things would go badly wrong (quoting Chesterton is also a useful warning sign). Ditto when she started ranking on Romanticism and The Sexual Revolution. Then:

Let me illustrate this point with two men—let’s call them Steve and Paul—who are both very expressive in their feelings. This is an important distinction because it’s no accident that the top personality types by a large margin for people who identity as homosexual are “feeling types” —INFP and INFJ for women, and ESFJ and ENFJ for men.

Steve and Paul—two highly extroverted-feeling men—meet one another and they have an immediate connection and common interests. The effect of a Puritanical attitude still pervasive in our culture says “Don’t show affection, be controlled with your feelings.” But that’s not who they are. They’re passionate... 

Maybe, if they lived in times past, when men had places where they could really connect as men, they could express themselves in some way. But that’s not the case in modern culture with fluid interaction between the sexes and lack of “man-only space.” So what do they do with their feelings now? Suppress them or show them? 

Not sure what's wrong with "fluid interaction between the sexes" (I could go for some right now!), nor why guys who need a "man-only space" can't just join the Man Scouts and go hang out under a bridge, but okay.

One would hope they can simply show them, but because of the impact of sexualization, they interpret that expression in a sexual way. As a result, the two men either don’t want to be thought of as gay (because they’re not, not because they necessarily think homosexuality is wrong), and they withdraw.

That does sound sad. But there are alternatives to submitting to this kind of social pressure. Changing you support system, for example --

Or, they begin to doubt and wonder, Am I gay?

Oh fuck me.

“I get excited when I’m with Paul,” Steve says to himself. “He puts a spring in my step just talking to him. I’m stimulated by his intellect and insight. He makes me feel more alive after talking to him than I did before. Those feelings are so strong they must be sexual. I must be gay.” Paul feels the same. But they’re not gay at all. They don’t want to have sex with each other. They’re simply men who feel and express deep passions and feelings, and they want to connect with someone with common interests.

Ya gotta wonder how McAllister knows they're not gay. Maybe she decided while staring into Steve's dreamy eyes during one of his long talks about how Paul puts a spring in his step.

Anyway, it turns out the big problem is not that jocks will be awkward among their fellow bros, but that "the more friendship is misunderstood and ignored, the more people will identify as homosexual and bisexual." Out of pure confusion of eros and phileo, men wind up sucking cock and women wind up eating pussy. Not to mention the polyamory! "What you need are friends," McAllister tells one poor soul who has been seduced into multisex, "real, loving friends -- not more sexual relationships." She explains that eros is "a throaty passion that can end badly and lead to tragedy," but that probably just got them more turned on.

Me, I'm all for nonsexual love, including the demonstrative kind, but if my friends are getting laid I'm usually happy for them, not convinced they've made a throaty mistake (unless they've picked up a thrush). Why is sex such a puzzle for these people?

BEST IN SHOW.

There are different kinds of conservative reactions to the hilarious phenomenon of Republican frontrunner Donald Trump. There are lofty denunciations from rilly smart conservative True Scotsmen like this one from Charles C.W. Cooke: "Trump’s devotees consider themselves to be the rebels at the gates," he sniffs, but "by their dull, unreflective, often ovine behavior, they resemble binary and nuancless drones, as might be found in a novel by Aldous Huxley or Yevgeny Zamyatin" yeah yeah whatever Limey Brainiac hey didja see Trump smack down that fat bitch Rosie O'Donnell?

Others just compare Trump to other things they don't like, or blame him, as conservatives do everything else, on Obama; for example, here's some guy at the Washington Examiner who understandably did not demand attribution, bidding us "imagine America with an older, less knowledgeable, rude and charmless version of Obama as its president, and you get some idea of what Trump is all about," though he doesn't explain how Trump differs from an "older, less knowledgeable, rude and charmless version" of, say, Thomas Jefferson or anyone else.

And there are outright Trump defenders, generally small fry or once-major wingnuts who no longer have anything left to lose, like Ben Shapiro.

But in a category all by herself is D.C. McAllister from The Federalist. Like Shapiro, she's upset that conservatives are dissing The Donald, but for her it's intensely personal, and by way of explanation she chronicles her own feelings from 2009 to the present. First:

Like so many of my fellow Americans, I felt helpless as I sat in front of the television in the fall of 2008, watching Barack Obama become the 45th president of the United States.

If only we had elections back then! Happily for McAllister, then came the Tea Party, which she characterizes as a response to the "huge government bailout of the housing market," a popular but woefully incomplete rightwing theory that doesn't explain what the Tea Partiers themselves actually yelled at their rallies. Bliss it was to be alive then, but alas, the tricorn rubes were teabagged by Anderson Cooper and stabbed in the back by the Republican Establishment. This taught McAllister that Mitch McConnell was no different from Barack Obama -- they both believed in "Money. Power. Cocktail parties. Media incest." So McAllister did what any patriot would do -- she became a blogger. "I made friends," she tells us, "and I made enemies because I didn’t care about playing politics.... I didn’t have a fancy degree. I didn’t have a fancy fellowship," unlike all us other web writers who went to Breadloaf with Saul Alinsky and swim in Moscow gold.

One of the things she discovered during this journey of personal discovery was that the Republican base was "motivated by fear," an assessment she stands by today:

Some might not want to admit this fact. It sounds weak, maybe even naive. But fear in the proper context is anything but naive. It’s wisdom based on experience and knowledge...

And this, brothers and sister, is where things get weird:

Let me explain a little something about human nature. When someone feels oppressed and controlled and you continue to belittle them and push them against the wall, they get angry. They’re not going to be particularly rational at that point. They’re in a corner and they lash out—that’s human nature. They fight. They get angry. They grab hold of whatever weapon they can find to defend themselves. That’s what you mostly see with Donald Trump. It’s anger, fueled by fear and stoked by insiders who continue to demean the base, who refuse to listen, and who want to maintain the status quo... 

This reminds me of a toxic relationship between a man and a woman in which the man continues to control the woman, keeping her from speaking her mind, calling her stupid whenever she does. She tries to find ways to win her independence, to be heard, to be free, but he keeps pushing her back against the wall, telling her that she’s the problem. Over time, the anger swells within her. She’s afraid. She isn’t free, and she hates it. She’s powerless. Anytime she tries to stand up for herself, she is mocked and slapped down. Her fear resides. Her anger grows. Her hope recedes. One day, she just loses it. She lights a match and burns the whole house to the ground. Give me liberty or give me death takes on a whole new meaning in the context of oppression and abuse.

RINO-abused with John McCain, then with Mitt Romney -- what choice does a true conservative have but to BURN THE MOTHERFUCKER DOWN! It's a good thing McAllister can afford mental health coverage.

JESUS HATES YOU.

I don't mean to write so much about torture but Jesus, conservatives sure are covering themselves in glory with this, huh? At National Review, Deroy Murdock -- once considered a libertarian, if you can believe it, despite his history of torture advocacy -- did a yay-torture column that had so much 9/11 in it that Rudolph Giuliani filed a trademark infringement suit. (Murdock also uses the mildest descriptions of what happened -- e.g. "blowing cigarette or cigar smoke into a detainee’s face" -- rather than the killing and broken bones stuff, and omits the torture of innocents altogether, so I can't even give him Cheney points for bare-faced evil -- like most of his fellow torture fans, he wants readers to wish it into the cornfield and denounce liberals for thinking bad thoughts about Anthony.)

Speaking of Jesus, from D.C. McAllister at The Federalist here's what may be a new low:

Yes, Christians Can Support Torture
Majorities of Christians support the use of torture in some instances. And they’re not bad Christians for doing so.

I'm not even kidding. McAllister smacks down some wussy "pastor" who claims it isn't Christian to chain people to the ceiling, keep them awake for days on end, and rape them with syringes:

He states in a “PS” that he originally wrote, “You cannot be a Christian and support torture.” He took out “a” probably because he received a lot of backlash, and rightly so. So he qualified it: “You cannot be Christian and support torture. . . . Can you support torture and go to heaven? Maybe. Can you support torture and be Christlike? No.”

Zahnd can try to disingenuously snake his way out of his own wording, but it’s obvious he’s calling people’s Christianity into question, and that’s what he meant when he initially wrote the post. But even with the qualifier, he is judging 79 percent of evangelicals in America and 78 percent of Catholics (along with 68 percent of all Americans, according to a recent poll)—who say torture can be justified.

How dy'ya like that, Mr. Pastor? The overwhelming majority of Americans say "Give us Barabbas!"

I expect next we'll see Jesus paraphernalia that shows the Prince of Peace giving the Abu Ghraib thumbs-up.

THE WORLD IS SO FULL OF A NUMBER OF THINGS...

Since that Robert Tracinski column about Ayn Rand's heroes looking for love I've been checking out his venue, The Federalist, and I must say it's a treasure-trove of old-fashioned virtues-'n'-values nonsense, with titles like "If Millennials Want Liberty, They Need Virtue Too." (Author Rachel Lu promotes something called "virtue-interested libertarians," or as we call them around here "the worst of both worlds.")

I could go on about it all day, and I'll certainly have more later, but for the moment I'll just leave you with this wonderful passage by D.C. McAllister:

If we’re going to warn people of the perils of Big Gulps and French fries, shouldn’t we warn them of the dangers of sex?

The title of this essay is "Stop Pretending Sex Never Hurts." Amazingly, there's no cross-promotion with Astroglide.

I have to say I'm enjoying the conservative movement's Libertarian Moment much more than I expected.