NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the imprisoned, immiserated immigrant kids and the Cult of Civility outcry that has ridiculously ensued. If you tried to explain to a normal person how a racist administration's notorious abuse of children and shameless defense thereof led our Guardians of Groupthink to admonish, not the guilty parties, but the liberals who mildly expressed their frustration to the guilty parties, he might not understand you, so I have tried to explain it for the masses.

I didn't have time to stick in other examples of woe-is-me snowflakery, like complaints over Seth Rogen rebuffing Paul Ryan ("The stoner comedy stalwart has built a career on playing the over-his-head everyman," foams Conservative Tribune, "...yet is shockingly clueless about everyday America in real life. During a recent appearance on Stephen Colbert’s increasingly leftist late-night program..."). Like Ryan didn't just assume Rogen was merely protecting his brand! They're both big boys.

As usual, Rod Dreher is ridiculous on the subject. He's mad that Maxine Waters encouraged people to give "anybody from that cabinet" a hard time. Trump's cabinet is basically a supervillain cabal whose members' only superpower is immunity from prosecution, so I can't fault Maxine; if we can't prosecute the bastards, let us at least tell them to go fuck themselves. But Dreher thinks this liberal Helter Skelter. He soothes himself by having a talk with some nice lady he came across in Boston:

“I’m only sorry that I wasn’t here long enough to have any Massachusetts oysters,” I said. “They’re the best in America.”

“You’re right about that!” she said. “My husband is in the restaurant business, and we both love oysters.”

I bid her farewell, and told her I look forward to coming back to Boston when I have time to eat. She smiled at me, wished me a safe flight, and went off down the street with her dog.

Boston being Boston, she’s probably quite liberal. She might have accurately figured me for a conservative, given that I’m from Louisiana. It didn’t matter. We had a lovely conversation about our shared love of dogs and oysters.

That is America.

Awwww. I wonder how the conversation would have gone if Dreher were the DHS Secretary, his agents had snatched the lady's kids and put them on a plane to God knows where, and Dreher was on record saying that's just what happens to people like her. Maybe it still would have been sunshine and lollipops!

UPDATE. I should note that Dreher quotes in support of his point a CNN received-opinion group grope as described by Mediaite:

RealClearPolitics editor A.B. Stoddard kicked off the CNN panel by pointing out that Waters is set to take over a highly important position in the House as chair of the Financial Services Committee — and "she’s doing everything she can to prevent her own promotion."

Gasp! It's almost as if Waters doesn't share the priorities of a bunch of careerist shits!

“This is beyond overreach,” Stoddard said. “It is so outrageous that she is trying to motivate voters on her side to be as divisive as President Trump...."

Only Trump can be divisive -- your job is to be a spineless wimp and go "gee, fellas, I don't know about these concentration camps," as Republicans stampede you en route to sacking and looting the country. It's in the script!

UPDATE 2. Now the shtick for conservatives is that they're ascared Maxine Waters and her liberal friends will kill them, so their factota circulate bullshit stories supporting this delusion. Hack of hacks Paul Bedard at the Washington Examiner:

Trump aides urged to get a gun 

Facing a new wave of potentially dangerous threats, called for by a top Democratic lawmaker, legal and gun experts are calling on top Trump aides to get their concealed carry permit and back it up with a pistol, 

"There are simply not enough police in D.C. or Virginia or Maryland to protect all Trump officials at their homes and when they go out to restaurants. Getting a concealed handgun permit would be helpful to protect themselves and their family,” said John R. Lott Jr., president of the influential Crime Prevention Research Center.

John R. Lott -- possibly the most notorious lyin'-ass bitch among the gun nuts' pet scholars! Still, I endorse Trump officials following his advice and getting guns because, seeing what fuckups they are, they'll probably just shoot themselves with them. It's win-win!

HILLBILLY SNOWFLAKES.

Rod Dreher, who thinks a professor saying "Fuck you, asshole" to an anti-gay colleague is "Leninist and Stalinist," also thinks some effete writer-fella portraying Mike Pence as a rube in The New Yorker is a good reason to vote for Trump:

Holy J.D. Vance, Batman. They really don’t get it, do they? Their contempt. They really do believe they’re punching up, when in fact they’re punching down.

If Trump wins this election, the only comfort I will take from the victory is knowing that Douglas McGrath and the [New Yorker] editors who find that snotty condescension towards middle Americans funny will be wailing and gnashing their teeth.

Have I got news for Dreher! "Li'l Abner," "Snuffy Smith," Them Hillbillies Are Mountain Williams Now, The Beverly Hillbillies -- it's been going on for decades! And some hillbilly jokes have even grosser punchlines, too ("Get off'n me, diddy, yer bustin' mah cigarettes!"). It's a holocaust, culture-war wise.

One thing I always thought about country folk, though, was that they were tough, and that they gave us city slickers as good as they got in the humor department. But that was before such as Dreher became their spokes-snowflakes. (On second thought, let's not blame the honest Tobies of the hinterlands for Dreher's conniption fits -- I'm sure most of them have never heard of Dreher, which is just as it should be; much of the time I wish I'd never heard of him either.)

UPDATE. Speaking of snowflakes, wingnut blowhard and Congressional sore loser Allen West was slated to speak at St. Louis University and, as part of his pre-show publicity, told his followers "Folks, I’ve just been CENSORED" because his operatives "were not allowed to use the words 'radical Islam' on any advertisements for the event." And isn't that what John Peter Zenger fought for -- the right to control collateral materials for his upcoming speaking engagements at a private college? West further raved:

I along with the [Young America's Foundation] activists will not back down from this challenge. And if this is just a case of ill-conceived political correctness, we’ll rectify that. But, if this is a case of the influence of stealth jihad radical Islamic campus organizations such as the Muslim Student Association, an affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood, then you will be exposed. And I recommend to the President of St. Louis University, you do not want it known that a radical Islamic organization is dictating speakers on your campus — that is not the type of PR you really want.

To recap: Because his hosts won't have "radical Islam" on the flyers for his speech, West accused its Muslim student association of "jihad" and threatened to denounce SLU as enablers thereof. In West's world of perpetual grievance that's what fills seats -- and also empties them, it would seem, because when it came time for West to speak a huge segment of the audience walked out.

Try to imagine how someone with an ounce of wit or class would have responded to that; a humble "well-played" is the least you might expect. But this sputtering I'm not the snowflake, you're the snowflake! response at Right Wing News is typical:

The students were members of the SLU Rainbow Alliance and the Muslim Student’s Association. Now let’s remember these are the Lefty folks who preach tolerance of other perspectives to all of us. And now look at them acting like immature children plugging their delicate ears with their sticky little fingers so they don’t have to hear the horrifying fact that not everyone, gasp, agrees with them! Good thing they left the venue. They probably had to be checked into the children’s program and go do some crafts and drink apple juice.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: The true definition of "political correctness" is "someone refused to endorse my racist bullshit."

(Since SLU is a Jesuit school, I expect this will eventually be portrayed as part of Tim Kaine's Jebbie treason.)

A LITTLE BAD TOUCH OF DREHER IN THE NIGHT. It's a quasi-holiday, not much doing -- let's go see what Rod Dreher's up to.

How the cultural Left paved way for pedophilia

Ah, the crazy never sleeps at Dreher's.

He quotes a German article about a 60s pedophilia ring run by hippies and professors. Sounds awful, but really, "the cultural Left"? You'd be on much surer ground saying the Catholic Church is directly responsible for all those little boys its priests raped. After all, "the cultural Left" didn't prevent their pedophiles' punishment by sending them to other parishes. (Maybe if we had a stronger central administration...)

Wondering if this crossed Dreher's mind? You must be new here.

I would also like to know to what extent this Leftist anti-bourgeois pedophilia culture penetrated radical circles elsewhere in Europe. Anybody here know? One wonders if the leadership of the national Catholic churches -- I'm thinking right now of the Belgian church, and retired Cardinal Danneels, one of the Roman Church's most progressive top churchmen for decades -- assimilated any of this so-called progressivism in the way they thought about sexuality...

Yes, Dreher's actually trying to build a case that the global Catholic child abuse scandal was actually caused by hippies. To demonstrate his seriousness, he's doing it with a bleg!

Naturally he later denies it: "If you think I'm trying to 'blame' pedophilia on the cultural left (in Germany, or anywhere), you're deliberately misreading what I'm saying here..." ...in a post called "How the cultural Left paved way for pedophilia." Well, if Jonah Goldberg can claim Liberal Fascism isn't about how liberals are fascists, why not?

And I thought I trawled for hits!

UPDATE. Oh my, DocAmazing in comments: "And notice that [Ratzinger's] second-most-famous organizational affiliation was with a group of boys in shorts. Pimpfin' ain't easy." Pimpfin'! V. advanced.

PEOPLE YAKETY-YAK A STREAK AND WASTE YOUR TIME OF DAY...

Well, I see New York magazine interviewed a guy who fucks horses. I like to think the whole thing was designed as a practical joke on Rod Dreher, known for his eruptions over such evanescent prurientia as 2 Girls 1 Cup (remember that?); if so, mission accomplished!

I’m not linking to it, because it is sick, sick stuff. It’s incredibly graphic, and I had decided not to write about it. But...

Yeah, we can guess, preacher man. Or can we? Let's see where Brother Rod takes it:

What’s significant is not that this deranged behavior happens. It has no doubt always been with us. What’s significant is that this interview appears in a mainstream magazine... 

New York has won a slew of National Magazine Awards, including being named 2013′s Magazine of the Year. This isn’t an Al Goldstein rag. This isn’t even the Village Voice.

Yeah, the Voice published Roy Edroso and homos, but New York is a recent award winner! Its pages are glossy! Also, Robert George agrees with Dreher, and don't you pointy-heads discount George because he's writing on Facebook -- discount him because he's a weirdo who favors the anatomical-doll school of Adam and Stevery ("In coitus, but not in other forms of sexual contact, a man and a woman’s bodies coordinate by way of their sexual organs... they are biologically united, and do not merely rub together..."). George shares Dreher's disgust, and demands action:

I mention it, reluctantly, only to show that anyone who thought we had already reached the bottom of the slippery slope is mistaken. The descent into Gomorrah continues. I believe it can be reversed, but not simply stopped. “This far and no farther,” is not an option.

Hear hear, says Dreher, because we wouldn't have horse-fucking in glossy magazines if you non-reproductive bit-rubbers hadn't gotten the slope all slippery:

Ideas have consequences. If your idea is that all consensual sex is good, or at least beyond judgment, and that sexual desire is its own justification, then you have met your consequence in New York‘s anonymous zoophile.

 "Dogs and cats, living together" was not a JOKE, people! Soon everybody, human and animal, will be friggin' and frugin' and sticking their bits wherever they can, unless we reverse the flow! THANKS OBAMA!

UPDATE: Isn't it obvious now that the famous pervert Woody Allen was trying to normalize this kind of behavior?

UPDATE 2. A winning comment right out of the gate by Glock H. Palin, Esq.: "Sure, rural people do it, and have been doing it since before this was a country, but those godless heather urban types write about it. Is there no end to their depravity?!" Oh Glock, you don't know the half of it -- one of Dreher's commenters actually cites Ike Snopes and the cow from The Hamlet ("the whole passage pretty much turned me off Faulkner forever. Yes, I know Faulkner is considered 'literature'...") and betrays no awareness that farmers fucking livestock was not invented by Faulkner, but is part of the great American agrarian tradition.

MARTYR COMPLEX.

Letting gays get married and making insurers pay for contraceptives means we're oppressing Christians. Get a load of R.R. Reno at First Things, who finds these portents that "we’re heading into dhimmitude of sorts":

We’re up against powerful cultural trends that threaten religious liberty. In the recent election Obama won a “values” campaign that felt it could ignore or even attack religious voters (“war on women”).

Offered a choice between Pope Ratzinger and the womenfolk, the whoremongering American electorate chose the latter. But the next part is even better:

In our favor is a parallel trend toward libertarianism and the general view that we ought to let people do pretty much what they want. This is the “don’t tread on me” sentiment that tends to be solicitous toward claims of conscience and against political correctness. This is a dangerous ally, however, since it’s the “different strokes for different folks” sentiment that also supports gay marriage and sexual liberation in general. This libertarian sensibility may support tolerance, but it won’t encourage support for religion. On the contrary, the moralism one finds in all forms of traditional religion will be seen as a threat to our culture of expansive personal freedom.

So the more freedom people have, they less likely they are to choose R.R. and his crew. A weaker vessel would have shrugged, "They no longer cower at the cross and mitre, but sneer and do anal; the jig's up, time to get a job." But not Reno, and not Rod Dreher, here to (as usual) make everything worse; Reno's essay has him predicting that "Christians will have to accept second-class status in the way Christians living in many Muslim countries do, under Islamic law and culture," at which fate Dreher shakes his tiny lambskin fist:

...it’s better to go down fighting than to meekly nod and conform, though it should also be said that only a fool would take every opportunity to be a martyr. These are going to be interesting times, ones that call for more wisdom than passion. It will be a time of testing, and of winnowing. This is not the first time this has happened in the history of the Church, nor will it be the last.

Oh, keep your top on, Mary, you want to say, your Catherine Wheel's a pyrotechnic at Burning Man. But we should encourage Dreher, as his paranoia may turn out to be productive:

You know what book we need? One titled: American Dhimmitude: A Handbook For Resistance. It would be a sober, plainspoken analysis of the cultural conditions of our time, with respect to orthodox Christianity and its decline in postmodernity. It would also offer intelligent, historically well informed commentary about how great Christians of ages past responded to challenges in their own time, when they were the minority culture, and discern lessons for ourselves from their experience.

Think of it -- an new illustrated book of martyrs, only instead of being stoned or broken on the wheel as in olden days, the new saints will have to change sinecures every so often. Can't wait to read the Kathryn J. Lopez chapter -- she served our Lord, and for that she was scourged with the wit of Alex Pareene!

UPDATE. In Dreher's comments, Erin Manning, whom Dreher sometimes employs to add extra crazy to his site, counsels American Christians to make common cause with another oppressed minority:

Right now in the public sphere people who own or use guns or are facing a culture that is increasingly hostile not only to gun ownership and use but to the very idea of weapons, such that some pretty extreme things have happened... 

I bring this up to show how this kind of thing will play out in public schools when it is Christian thought, not gun ownership and/or approval of weapons, that has become doubleplus ungood expression.

Armed Jesus freaks with a persecution complex -- sounds like a recipe for another Waco wienie roast.

THE ROD DREHER MYSTERY SOLVED? Some of you have actually written to me, asking if I'd noticed that Rod Dreher -- who had been recruited away from Beliefnet to the Templeton Foundation to write longer versions of his crap posts for something called Big Questions Online -- on August 20 suspended comments at the Templeton site "pending the outworking of some technical and editorial issues," and on August 23 announced:

With respect to this blog, we are reconsidering a style and format that will be more in tune with Sir John's forward-looking, positive, constructive ways to engage the Big Questions. We hope to fine-tune things to make BQO better for you, our readers. So, please be patient, and thanks for reading.

Dreher hasn't posted since then. Weirder still, some of his posts were scrubbed from the site. In September Bluegrass Up noticed a quoted email and a comment by Dreher about his "blog hiatus."

What happened? Someone noticed he'd copped out on a September Religion Newswriters Association forum at which he was supposed to appear. So I went to listen to the audio, and heard the moderator announce this:

Rod Dreher, who has gone to the Templeton Foundation to work on their Big Questions Online magazine, is not going to be able to join us -- the magazine just launched about a month to six weeks ago and he was buried alive there...

My God -- buried alive! Was he ritually murdered? I knew Catholics were weird, but during my time in the Church we never got into the Opus Dei shit.

IF IT WEREN'T FOR MOTIVATED REASONING, HE'D HAVE NO REASONING AT ALL.

I think Rod Dreher has no more to teach us about how bad Rod Dreher is -- that is, he does not show unplumbed depths of mendacity, bad faith, and derp, he just does them like usual but sometimes dumber. We've talked a lot about his "reader" "mailbag" shtick, where he blockquotes passages allegedly sent to him by people who he sometimes vouches for ("a reader of this blog writes as a decades-long resident of the New York Congressional district just won [effectively] by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez") and which are often from liberals who are disgusted with liberalism, which always gives Rod some prodigal-son pep, and which are obvious bullshit -- either made up by Dreher himself or sent to him by conservative operatives or possibly trolls playing a deep game.

Anyway here's his recent account of a Thing He Saw On The Internet:

This is both sad and infuriating. It’s from an anonymous academic who posted it on Twitter as @publicola17:

1/ Woke anti-racism is child abuse.
My family is living the antithesis of @thomaschattwill's Self Portrait in Black and White. And I fear it may damage my children irrevocably.
Let me explain
2/ I'm white, my wife's black. When we met, we "saw each other's race," but we didn't think that was the most interesting thing about us. We foolishly thought our children would be part of a post-racial future, in which all Americans could just be human beings to one another.
3/ Then came Trump. I decided I should try to learn more about my fellow citizens, who I now realized were completely opaque to me. In contrast, my wife decided she was at war with an immutably white supremacist America.
4/ My wife began to read authors like Nikole Hannah Jones and Michael Harriot. She had a "racial awakening," concluding that she'd been "inauthentically black" all her life...

I actually had to C&P this from elsewhere because Dreher only provides a screenshot of this thing, which goes on to detail the alleged destruction of this poor guy's family as his wife does things like "regularly explain to our kids that the police want to kill black people" because "NHJ [Nikole Hannah-Jones] and [Ta-Nehisi] Coates are always telling her how traumatized she should be just because she's black in America," while the husband -- I shit you not -- looks forward to the day when his tykes can read Thomas Chatterton Williams and get clear.

Are your bullshit detectors ringing? Not Rod's! (Even though the @publicola17 account has disappeared.) He goes on for hundreds of words about what's "bizarre and twisted" about the woman and how "this is what the identity-politics left is going to bring to all of society: ruin, hatred, endless suspicion" and the Bible story about "when Jesus frees a demoniac by casting the evil spirits out of him, and sending them into a herd of swine," etc.

Finally:

UPDATE: Some of you believe that the Publicola narrative is fake. You might be right. It resonated with me because, as I’ve said, I’ve known people in marriages like that...

More such gush; then --

Even if the anonymous man Publicola’s narrative is nothing but an exercise in creative writing, it still tells a truth.

 Punchline: Dreher's upcoming book, which he pimps endlessly, is called Live Not By Lies.

ROD DREHER & GLENN REYNOLDS: A LETHAL COMBINATION.

It's Pride Month, so of course Rod Dreher is flipping out extra-spicy over the Homosexual Menace. (Regular readers of me and others whose eyes are watching Rod will know Dreher believes gay people are murdering Christianity, and so howl ye for the day of judgment is at hand, etc.) Here's one example: The New York City Department of Health encourages local gays to be frank with their doctors about their sexual practices for obvious reasons. Dreher says:

A reader who sent this item in says [emphasis his]:

Many of these legal rights are positive or unobjectionable, but one is highly problematic: “Have your gender identity and gender expression recognized, affirmed, documented and accommodated.”

This, the reader says, will make it much harder to be a traditionally religious doctor in New York City.

"Traditionally religious doctor in New York City" sounds like a fish-out-of-water comedy: Thet there Department o' Health got plumb mad 'cuz when this l'il girl asked for birth control I tole her she's a slut an' wrote her a pre-scription fo' church!

Another one:

A small but telling example: the announcement that the US men’s and women’s national soccer teams will be wearing pro-gay jerseys: 

[Picture of rainbow letters on soccer jerseys] 

And notice how the Fox Sports journalist described this move: 

U.S. Soccer has dropped some spiffy new rainbow kits to raise money for a good cause, coinciding with LGBTQ Pride month in June.

What if you are a US Soccer player who is Catholic, Evangelical, Muslim, or otherwise religious, and objects morally to celebrating gay pride (even if you have no problem at all with gays and lesbians playing professional soccer)? Too bad for you. If you objected publicly by refusing to wear the jersey, you would put your career at risk.

Or how about if you're a religious hockey player drafted by the Los Angeles Kings and you refuse to wear their jersey because God, Not Man Is King? Your career will suffer too, curse this fallen world! [Scourges self]

So: violate your conscience or suffer professional consequences. This is one example of how coercive political correctness moves throughout the system.

From there Dreher goes into a grand mal tizzy:

The rising Left is bound and determined to crush or at least permanently sideline people it deems heretics — in particular, whites, males, orthodox Christians, and skeptics of the LGBT project...

Yeah whatever ya big Dairy Queen, but here's the punchline -- he's actually outdone by Glenn Reynolds. Yes, Ole Perfesser Instapundit has in his dotage gone full culture-warrior, and he takes off from Bre'r Rod's post thus:

The thing is, you don’t get Hitler because of Hitler — there are always potential Hitlers out there. You get Hitler because of Weimar, and you get Weimar because the liberals are too corrupt and incompetent to maintain a liberal polity.

Put another way: See what you queers did? You made me Hitler! Remember, now, what me and my klavern are doing to you is all your fault.

I'm not sure whether it's more accurate to say Trump has emboldened them or unhinged them. Hmm, why not both?

MORE CONSERVATIVES GETTING STRAIGHT-BASHED.

As it gets less and less acceptable to yell "pray I don't kill you, faggot," conservatives become more and more panic-stricken. "Gay-Marriage Decisions Read Like GLAAD Press Releases Now," sputters Jason Richwine at National Review. He's upset that Judge John E. Jones III's Pennsylvania marriage equality decision was freighted with such obnoxious phrases as "all couples deserve equal dignity in the realm of civil marriage." "No one could read this decision and think the judge is merely following the dictates of the law wherever that might lead," Richwine cries. "...in what other discipline is inserting one’s personal politics into a technical analysis celebrated rather than discouraged?" Next they'll be working gay slang into bookkeeping! It's a Michael Sam sack dance, linguistically speaking. (Wow, even "sack dance" sounds gay now. What hath GLAAD wrought?)

As you were expecting, Rod Dreher is even better. He's particularly enraged that Jones used the term "ash heap of history" in reference to the exclusion of gay people:

That phrase “ash heap of history” used in this context is outrageous. Know where it first came from? Trotsky, denouncing moderate revolutionaries, and consigning them to “the dustbin of history.”

The very next sentence:

Ronald Reagan memorably used it to describe the fate of Marxism-Leninism.

Reagan can cleverly appropriate commie metaphors, but when you homosexualists do it, it's like you're giving it back to Trotsky. Further down: "This kind of radicalism is familiar, but it must be said that Robespierre was a much better writer."

Poor Rod is having a bad gay week. In a later post, after hearing about the possibility that the U.S. is spying on domestic dissidents, he shivers, "I look forward to what [Glenn] Greenwald has yet to report. All Americans, especially we whose beliefs are being consigned to what a federal judge called this week 'the ash heap of history,' are going to live through some difficult times." That's why Obama wants them drones -- not because no Democratic President could get away with even one-hundredth of a 9/11, but because he yearns to snatch up Maggie Gallagher and put her in Gay Gitmo. (Equally hilariously, Dreher cites J. Edgar Hoover in his headline.)

Dreher's highlight, though, at least so far this week, is an earlier post in which he quotes Thierry Cruvellier, interviewed on "a trial in Cambodia of one of Pol Pot’s henchmen," and winds up guess where:

If you read the boldfaced material in Cruvellier’s response, and think of the culture war in this country over same-sex marriage and gay rights, you will understand much better the Error Has No Rights phenomenon, and the Law of Merited Impossibility — and you will better be able to anticipate what comes next in the name of justice.

Pol Pot and gay rights -- there's a new one. Where can he go next?  Please, nobody tell him about Ernst Rohm.

UPDATE. Comments are lively, but I must single out what aimai found in a 2013 Rod Dreher update to yet another why-do-all-these-homosexuals-keep-sucking-my-cock post:

It’s funny. Some liberal commenters complain that I spend too much time blogging about gay marriage, but those threads are almost always the most popular ones, in terms of comments. Only race consistently draws the number of comments. If marriage weren’t at issue, I would almost never blog about homosexuality, because it just doesn’t interest me all that much.

Whatever you say, Mary. Can we get a drag queen in here to do video responses to Dreher? It would beat the holy shit out of Bloggingheads.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN

 

Happy Labor Day weekend. Take it easy -- but take it! 

  •   I haven't unlocked one for a while so here's my Monday edition of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, on the evolution of conservatives' that traditional hate-on for New York City; whereas after 9/11 they briefly pretended to care what happened to the City, now that it's challenged by COVID-19 they exult in fantasies of its death. 

•   As we get closer to the election, conservatives and Republicans are getting increasingly obvious about what they really stand for, and it ain't Small Government and Sound Fiscal Management. Here's a Facebook ad from Majorie Taylor Greene, a racist QAnon lunatic who stands a good chance of winning election to Congress from Georgia: 

In case you can't make it out, she's holding an assault rifle. Democratic Congresswomen Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib, and Omar earned their office by proposing new policies and advocacy to their constituents; Greene apparently seeks office by threatening to kill them. And it's equally clear that while the wave of the Democratic future is young, diverse, and Democratic-Socialist, the wave of the Republican future is white supremacist violence. Remember Ole Perfesser Instapundit Glenn Reynolds, the O.G. rightblogger? He's still at it, and here's what he had to say September 1st: 

Stalin said it doesn’t matter who votes, but who counts the votes. But people know that now, and the months of (Democrat-incited) civil unrest have moved the Overton Window on political violence. If this leads to Democrats being hanged from lampposts, it’s their own fault.

You can see why double-murderer Kyle Rittenhouse has become a hero to these guys. Rod Dreher, need you ask, slobbers all over the guy; here's a post in which Dreher suggests that, because one of the guys Rittenhouse killed, Joseph Rosenbaum, turned out upon investigation to be a pedophile, Rittenhouse's vigilantism was justified. "The world would be better off with more Kyles and fewer dirtbags than the child molester he shot," ran the story's teaser, and Dreher wrote, "After reading those court documents, though, I can say without fear of contradiction that the world was not diminished by the passing of Joseph Rosenbaum." (Dreher and The American Conservative removed the line and the teaser later, I guess to show how Christian Dreher can be when his social anxieties are engaged. Him and Jesus are still cool with Rosenbaum and the other guy getting iced, however.)

There's no need to sugarcoat it: These guys are fascists, and their fight for Trump's reelection is a fight to make America a fascist state. Plan accordingly.

REALLY BURYING THE LEDE. Rod Dreher talks about the drop in newspaper circulation. Here are the examples he chooses to cite:

But look: the newspaper with the worst circulation falloff in the country, the San Francisco Chronicle (which lost 25 percent of its readers since the last reporting period), is a liberal newspaper in a liberal city. The ailing Boston Globe, ditto. This doesn't mean newspapers aren't biased to the left, but it does mean that there's something else going on here.

Yuh don't say. Among the other losers in the latest ABC tally, which Dreher declines to mention: his own paper, the Dallas Morning News, has seen its circulation drop 22 percent in a year -- slightly less than the Chronicle, but more than the Globe (18.5 percent) and much more than the New York Times (7 percent).

Advertisers are bailing, but the Morning News' circ revenue is growing -- because they're charging more for the paper. "We've listened to what our readers and advertisers tell us they value most," says publisher Jim Maroney, "and we are responding to it by maintaining a robust newsroom focused on original, local reporting."

What this "original, local reporting" approach means for the hot gas Dreher blows there -- yelling about Hollywood and his inability to hear U2 properly at the local stadium, for example -- is anyone's guess. "I've tried to do something with the Dallas Morning News online op-ed page, to run it like a blog/aggregator site," says Dreher, "but that hasn't really caught on like I'd hoped it would." Seems to me if Dreher paid less attention to the influx of sooties over t'England, and more on the gol'-durned Mescans in Dallas, he'd have hisself a winner for shore! Yee-haw!

CRUMBS, MARY, WHY DON'T YOU JUST KISS HER ALREADY?

King of the JustTheTip Trumpers Rod Dreher, shortly after doing one of his highly outraged Look What Trump Has Done This Time posts, says good conservatives should defend Trump because he's like Edwin Edwards, because he's crooked but acceptable as opposed to "the Left" -- that is to say, Democrats including (I shit you not) Joe Biden, whom Dreher excoriates for his defense of "radical transgender rights" -- which is like David Duke, the Klansman Edwards defeated in the 1991 Louisiana governor's race:

It’s hard to express strongly enough how much both conservatives and good-government liberals despised Edwin Edwards. He was, and remains, a clever man, but also a symbol of good ol’ boy Louisiana political corruption. To find oneself in a position to have to vote for EWE because that was the only way to keep a Klucker out of the governor’s mansion was revolting. I can remember to this day standing in the voting booth and pulling the lever for Edwards — something I never, ever imagined doing.

I bet that's not to only time Dreher had to overcome his disgust before "pulling the lever."

As regular readers know, I did not vote in the 2016 presidential race (it didn’t matter; my state was heavily pro-Trump), but if I end up voting for Trump in 2020, it’ll be a VFTC:II thing.

"If I end up voting for Trump"? He must think his readers are awfully stupid. With good reason tho!

It’s easy to see how Trump is analogous to EWE (though unlike Trump, EWE was quite competent).

Oh for fuck's sake.

But how can the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates possibly be analogized in any way to David Duke?

A non-lunatic would have stopped there, balled up his laptop and thrown it in the trash. But not Dreher: He argues that even though "Duke’s political positions were mostly boilerplate Reagan conservatism... everybody knew that Duke was no ordinary Republican." (Boy, there's a statement that could use some examination!) So many Republicans rebuffed him to avoid "mainstreaming a truly hateful figure."

Of course, from my vantage point in 2019, it looks like mainstreaming a truly hateful figure is Republican strategy and David Duke -- now an ardent Trump fan -- was a prophet of the party's future. But Dreher says no, the Democrats are the Klansmen, because abortion and whatnot:

What about immigration? Am I happy with the way Trump has handled the immigration issue? No. But unlike Elizabeth Warren, his likely 2020 rival, he is not for open borders. Biden has been evasive on his immigration stance, but I have every confidence that he will move to the far left.

As a Christian, it's important to maintain the baby cages to prevent a Mexican from working at my local gas and go.

Oh, and before we leave the topic I have to include some classic Dreherisms. To wit:

Remember Nina Burleigh? She’s the journalist who, back during the Clinton impeachment proceedings, said that she would fellate Clinton herself to thank him for preserving abortion rights. At the time, conservatives (including me) cited that as an example of how corrupt liberals were. Just look at that so-called feminist, carrying water for that dirtbag Bill Clinton! we said. Where are her morals now? 

In retrospect, Burleigh was right... 

Yeah, it was gross. But from a pro-choice feminist point of view, it was defensible. Trump has turned a lot of us into Nina Burleigh Conservatives.

Just close your eyes and think of the Rapture! On the other hand:

UPDATE.2: I’m struggling with this. I’m going to think out loud here for a minute.

It's 4 a.m. and he's still got his pants on. But when your date is Donald Trump, I imagine the idea is to hold out until he gets rough.

ROD DREHER FASCISM WATCH CONT.

The great volume of work required by my God Damn Job and Roy Edroso Breaks It Down (a classic, only Substack newsletter not devoted to cancelculture blubbering, subscribe!) is part of what keeps me from following Rod Dreher as closely as I used to. But most of it is just fatigue and disgust. As with another of my longtime figures of fun, Jonah Goldberg, their idiocies that once tickled me have palled; neither Dreher nor Goldberg ever improves or even becomes memorably worse, and all they seem to learn are new scholarly references to stick to their same old, shitty ideas. 

Dreher is mainly noteworthy for the increasing obviousness of his fascist beliefs.  Last week I mentioned his latest expression of fondness for Generalissimo Franco (one in a series). This week, as you may expect, he has been disgusted that the awful man whose manners he excoriates (but who he nonetheless had hoped would be reelected) spurred the mob to violence, but did you know the attempted coup was actually "The Left’s Reichstag Fire"? No, he's not saying the Left actually did the attempted coup (at least not yet) but that they stand to benefit from it -- that is, sure, Trump's goons tried to murder Congress, but now liberals will treat this "as an opportunity to begin to implement the rudiments of a social credit system, and to otherwise marginalize and suppress right-of-center discourse and people." Which is so much worse! 

Then, in another post, Dreher goes further: 

Anyway, I anticipate that rightist radicals will now begin to undertake campaigns of low-level violent actions — bombings and other forms of domestic terrorism. It won’t amount to anything, but it will give the Establishment (= not just the state, but corporations too) even more excuses to crack down. 

So "rightist radicals" are going to do "bombings" and "other forms of domestic terrorism" but "it won’t amount to anything" -- besides, I guess, the murder of a bunch of people, but Rod's not really concerned about them because really, what's some dead terror victims that probably don't go to his church compared with cancel culture victims? You may have lost your life but I got a 12-hour Twitter time-out! And my beloved horrible president [sniff] lost his Twitter entirely! ALL GAVE SOME, SOME GAVE ALL!    

Guy's a fascist.

ASS MAN.

Professional scold Rod Dreher is on a tear. Here's one called "The Myth of Islamophobia":

The truth is that [journalists] loathe ordinary unenlightened people more than they fear jihadists. There is always this great unwashed mob of right-wing lunatics just looking for an excuse to carry out pogroms against Muslims in the wake of Islamic terrorism. The fact that these Muslim-bashing episodes are always just that — episodic, I mean — never seems to change their minds.

Come on, Muhammad, it doesn't happen that often! Jeez, you guys are as bad as the blacks.

Remember the fear in the media prior to the release of Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ movie — that the film would set off anti-Jewish pogroms around the country? Didn’t happen, did they? The concern within media circles was real; I remember it well. And yet, it was absurd. I knew that at the time, as did just about every Christian.

See, anti-Semitism is bullshit, too. Except in France, and whenever it's convenient to say so.

But this one's the jewel. Dreher starts out about how France suffers religious maniacs like the Hebdo assassins because it doesn't respect the authority of organized religion of the right kind anymore. Then:

I thought about that this weekend when I saw a photo of a blasphemously anti-Christian cover that Charlie Hebdo once published (it depicts the Holy Trinity having three-way anal sex). It would not occur to me that anyone should lay a hand on the Charlie Hebdo artists or editors who produced that filth...

But...

Yeah, you knew there'd be a but (and its homophone! Keep reading!):

...But the decadence represented by Charlie Hebdo is probably a greater threat to Western civilization than anything the Islamists can dream up, and it’s important to keep that straight even as we defend the right to free expression and a free press.

Why a greater threat? Because it belittles religions other than the One True? Ha ha, kidding! On and on about the horrible atheists and various Dissolutions of the Monasteries -- "This is what the party of Charlie Hebdo has done to France since 1789: murdered its Christian soul, and called it progress" -- until Dreher's agon reaches, or rather suddenly collides with, its logical conclusion:

Scrolling my Facebook feed last night, I found this New York magazine feature about the season premiere of HBO’s Girls, which featured a scene in which a man performs oral sex on his girlfriend’s anus. It turns out that this is a thing in pop culture now.

"In pop culture"? Please, nobody tell him. Also, Dreher has "an Orthodox Christian friend" who feels the exact same way about things: "He talks about how his parish is pretty faithful," says Dreher, "but so many of the kids raised in it still get sucked in and away from their faith by the culture of Lena Dunham, of Charlie Hebdo, and the rest." Sucked away! Christianity is licked! These two should do a podcast while Wachet Auf plays in the background, or vice-versa.

In the end, all the stupid atheists join ISIS and Rod is ascended into heaven in divine recognition of his faithful mopes. Four stars! (h/t Will Menaker)

PWNED. I like to think I get around, at least on the internet, but Beliefnet's Rod Dreher did me the favor of calling attention to the "2 Girls 1 Cup" video. Rawwr! Two hot chicks eating shit and puke. I mean, does it get any sexier? (I'm not linking to it now -- I'll save it for a fundraiser or something.)

Almost as good is the way Dreher sells it:

...don't worry, I'm not about to link to it from here... suffice it to say that it's really too disgusting even to describe here. There is no way I'm going to watch it, because I don't want those images lodged in my brain. If you watch the reaction videos Slate has compiled, as part of a discussion of how in the Internet age we process taboos, you'll get an idea of how unutterably grotesque this video must be.

...something so horrible it beggars the imagination... I know that the way I'm writing about it will make lots of readers want to see the clip. I'm sorry about that, but there's really no other way to write about it. If you are bound and determined to let your curiosity win here... images you are going to have burned into your brain forever...

What kind of society do we have when that kind of information is easily available to people, especially to children? What kind of society...

If the newspaper gig doesn't work out, Dreher can always get work as a copywriter or a carnival barker.

This reminds me of something an old friend told me once. He was doing a computer gig at a corporation and one of his colleagues, assuming from my friend's free-and-easy attitude toward sexuality that he was in a position to hook him up, asked for URLs that would bring him to "exotic" porn. My friend demurred but the guy kept bugging him. Finally my friend pointed him to some hot pukkake action. "He never bothered me again," he told me.

Some people aren't so easy to dissuade, apparently. Maybe the End Times commentary (and the calls for censorship and Jesus in the comments) makes the experience more exciting for some people. Well, different strokes and all that.

Oh, Dreher adds that "defanging [the video's] horror with ironic distance... I find that the scariest reaction of all." I have mixed feelings about adding to Dreher's excitement with this post -- I barely know the guy. The internet is indeed a scary place.

UPDATE. Oh, alright, here's the video:

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Weird to see them show-bizzin' it up here-- I always imagined them
all serious, even pained, in a church. Shows what I know!

•  I've been asked more than once this week what I think about Rod Dreher getting greater-than-usual dissemination in the mainstream press for his recent bizarre reminiscence about being in third grade and ogling his black classmate's "primitive root wiener when we were at the urinal during recess, because it was monstrous." But I have followed Dreher for many years and frankly this doesn't even make my Top Ten wacko Dreher moments, such as his friend's wife's exorcism ("his wife’s face contorts into expressions that he has never seen in her, despite their nearly two decades of marriage"). Besides, as far as racism goes, the Mandingo root weiner may be funny, but I've seen so much of the guy's less-funny racism, such as his suggestion that if airlines hire more black pilots, airplanes will "start falling out of the sky" (because, come on, black people flying planes!), that it has lost it charm for me. Meanwhile Dreher's still dropping gibberish like this on the regular:

A reader who grew up in communist Czechoslovakia said the letter from the National School Board Association to President Biden, asking for the feds to move in to protect school boards from angry parents, reminds him of this August 1968 letter that the Communist leadership of his native country sent to Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, fraternally requesting an invasion to protect them from the Czech people...

But while this comparison of a DOJ investigation into violent threats by rightwing freaks against school board members for purposes of intimidation to the crushing of the Prague Spring is clinically insane, it's well within the range of mainstream conservative opinion, so we can count on the prestige press to continue to fluff Dreher the way they have Hugh Hewitt and other such ogres as fascinating contrarians. 

•  I have cleared only one Roy Edroso Breaks It Down entry for readers who are not paying subscribers -- the latest in a series of conservative columns about how you liberals are just silly to worry about another attempted Trump coup (bringing to mind the old Tom Lehrer lyric: "Once all the Germans were warlike and mean/ But that couldn't happen again/ We taught them a lesson in 1918/ And they've hardly bothered us since then"). It's been such an action-packed week that you should really consider subscribing. I mean, take today's entry on the new political party/grift created by Andrew Yang. (Here's a free column of mine from 2019 about how I knew Yang was no good. Sometimes the gift of prophecy is a curse!) That alone is worth the $7 monthly subscription rate -- and it's just one of the twenty (20) issues you get for that price! It's almost wasteful not to subscribe! 

FOR HONKY FOLK WHO HAVE CONSIDERED SUICIDE/WHEN DONALD TRUMP IS ENUF.

Just read Rod Dreher's rhapsody on Hillbilly Elegy, an autobio by one J.D. Vance about how he, a son of Appalachia, escaped the depredations of the holler thanks to Mamaw and the U.S. Marines. Dreher's main take-away seems to be that hillbillies (the ones who didn't get out) are lazy, sexed-up, stupid, and self-deceiving and they need Jesus and Brother Rod's Benedict Option, in stores soon. Here's just one depressing piece:

Vance plainly loves his people, and because he loves them, he tells hard truths about them. 

(That's the bless-their-hearts part.)

He talks about how cultural fatalism destroys initiative. When hillbillies run up against adversity, they tend to assume that they can’t do anything about it. To the hillbilly mind, people who “make it” are either born to wealth, or were born with uncanny talent, winning the genetic lottery. The connection between self-discipline and hard work, and success, is invisible to them.

Plus they's always a-fuckin' and a-feudin' -- "Marriages rarely last, and informal partnerings are more common," he tsks. Why, they're as bad as the blacks!

Is there a black J.D. Vance? I wonder. I mean, I know there are African-Americans who have done what he has done. But are there any who will write about it? Clarence Thomas did, in his autobiography. Who else? Anybody know?

Maybe the job of Black Wingnut doesn't pay as well as it used to -- I mean, I'm sure this guy (author of "If You Don’t Want Police To Shoot You, Don’t Resist Arrest") gets lots of high-fives from Young Republicans, but I doubt he's making Clarence-level bank. But whatever Dreher's problems with black folk, this is just a brief detour for him; clearly white worthlessness is his hard-on here; he loves that the enlightened hillbilly Vance got out because it shows how shiftless the rest of them are. In fact, he references Kevin D. Williamson's infamous hymn of hate for poor whites --

I criticized Williamson at the time for his harshness. I still wouldn’t have put it the way he did, but reading Vance gives me reason to reconsider my earlier judgment.

Thank you, Rod "Imitation of Christ" Dreher. (Isn't it perfectly Dreheresque that, though he feels himself closer to Williamson's hatefulness, he wouldn't "put it the way he did"?)

As I mentioned when I wrote about Williamson's column, Dreher's review is part of a growing wingnut literature on how badly the poor honkies have let them down. There are a couple reasons why it's growing. For one thing, obviously, the rise of Trump has got these white-collar conservatives scared -- for years they applauded Joe and Jane Sixpack (remember them?) because they thought the Sixpacks were sufficiently racist, sexist, and otherwise class-resentful that they would reliably return Republican electoral majorities; then, however, it appeared they'd lost control of their Monster.

But this tendency slightly pre-dates Trump -- Charles Murray's book about the plight of white "Fishtown" punters (and David Brooks' effusions over it) go back to 2012. So there are clearly other reasons, and I can see them, too. First, the demographics that created the second Obama victory shattered mainstream conservatives' belief that whiteness might yet save them another time. Second, white-collar conservatives noticed that when they raved about lazy, sexed-up, stupid, and self-deceiving black people, everyone under 60 years of age gave them the stinkeye -- but if they just ported their viciousness over to another out-group, no one except obsessives like me paid any attention.

In fact, poor whites' very status as an out-group may have been the clincher. When it came out that white working-class people had begun committing suicide at an alarming rate, the first reaction of David French at National Review was to blame liberal hippies for making crackers feel bad.  But four months later French had changed his tune: "No one is making them do it," he had decided; "...The economy isn’t putting a bottle in their hand. Immigrants aren’t making them cheat on their wives or snort OxyContin..." They were, rather, only the victims of their own "self-destructive moral failures."

In many ways, my friends, it's no fun to get old, but there is some grim amusement to be had seeing people who thought for years that hate had made them safe learning God's truth the hard way. (You may think I'm talking about the poor whites, for whom I have much sympathy -- after all, I come from them -- but I'm really talking about the guys who've just thrown them overboard and are about to find out that the mainsail won't hoist itself.)

BIG-TIME NEGOTIATORS, FALSE HEALERS AND WOMAN-HATERS. A bride wants her wedding dress to reveal the tattoo on her back, and does not feel the need to appear virginal on her wedding day. So Rod Dreher calls her a slut.

It takes hours, and a visit from Ayaan Hirsi Ali, to make Dreher retract the slur, though he still accuses the bride of "cheap morals" and "bad manners," and calls her behavior "slutty." Big difference.

Dreher frequently reminds us that Christians don't riot, as some Muslims do, when they perceive their values to be mocked. But he never recalls that for many, many centuries, Christians backed by the power of states harassed, exiled, and burned men and women who didn't conform to their prejudices in comportment or anything else.

When we mock Dreher here, we are not always thinking solely of the little fellow in Dallas who shakes his impotent fist at our times and manners. Often we also have in mind the loathsome traditions he wants to bring back to the civilized world, even praising the "order," "unity," and "purpose" of barbarous Islamic societies as a means of attracting us to a Western version with Jesus on top. Imagine a country where men like Dreher have the power to order a stoning.

It took us nearly two millenia and oceans of blood to reduce these savages to a noisome rump. We can spare a little attention to remember why we did it.

WHERE THE BOYS ARE.

Here's an unlocked Roy Edroso Breaks It Down number, laying out some possible future projects for Johnny Depp. I did not pay attention to the Depp-Heard trial, and it may be that someone has laid out a coherent explanation for the verdict, though mainly what I have seen from those who approve of it has nothing to do with legal rationale and everything to do with creepy pseudo-butch displays. 

Against my better judgment I have been guided to Rod Dreher, whose work I haven’t looked at much since he revealed that he was getting divorced and sternly warned everybody not to read anything into it. (Everything conservatives always say about divorce culture destroying America, for example, apparently doesn’t apply to Dreher. It’s Wilhoit’s Marital Law!) He seems to have gotten even weirder since. And sure enough, in a recent post, he “responds” to this “reader” “email”:

…The news of your divorce coming around the same time as the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trial has me thinking thoughts that had never occurred to me.

First of all, I can’t believe I’m riveted by a dang celebrity trial. It’s typically not something I spend any kind of time on. But riveted I am. Despite the fact that we are practicing conservative Christians, our own marriage is headed for a hard crash, because I’m confident that my wife is mentally ill. Watching the Depp/Heard trial, I learned about the existence of a condition called Borderline Personality Disorder…

When I read that, everything became SO CLEAR to me about why my marriage is in so much trouble, and why therapy has not worked for us.

(Dreher, resuming his authorial voice, follows up: “This is really something, because I have been getting a surprising number of e-mails from readers saying pretty much the same thing…” Future ex-Mrs.-Dreher, I hope for your sake you have a lot of money in a separate account.) 

The Dreher “reader” experience does seems to comport with a general observation that, whatever this particular celebrity trial was really about, all the creeps have lined up with Depp. But this is no different than what we experience in other areas of real life, whenever we see someone driving with needless aggression on the highway or yelling “Let’s Go Brandon” at a non-political event or trying to cut in line and acting the victim when they're called out: Assholes flock to assholes. Trump merely gave them an Alpha Asshole around which to cluster. 

DREHER IN THE TERTIARY STAGE.

Rod Dreher's been on a tear lately. He is of course over the moon about the possibility of overturning Roe v. Wade. He knows he owes Donald Trump for this, so in his usual "I'm no Trump supporter but"/ "I'm no Trump fan but"/ "I didn't vote for Trump but," plausibly-deniable testimonial to the President, this time he lets in considerably more than the tip:

I will say that Gorsuch, plus whoever is coming next, is, are two facts that Trump-voting social conservatives can and ought to use to beat Trump-skeptical conservatives like me over the head, in a we-told-you-so fit of vindication. I find it harder to justify my sitting out the presidential election in light of the facts of this tweet...

If only he could confess his secret love! I think ol' Rod's gonna wake up Trump-pregnant, and will of course bring it to term, while steadfastly, like Hester Prynne, refusing to identify the father.

But the real fun with Dreher is his "reader""mailbag," and the victory of Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York has his alleged correspondent in this instance, who honest to God lives in Ocasio-Cortez' district, in stitches, or perhaps a straitjacket:

The Department of Transportation, a bunch of crazy far-left progressive activists, and the Mayor were trying to force these bike lanes down our throats despite a huge outcry, and we pushed back enough where Joe Crowley said no and our local councilman ended up not supporting the project. Now with Crowley gone, the snowflakes who demand these bike lanes might become emboldened again.

Dreher's audience, which probably hates cyclists even more than it hates pedestrians and drives to go to the bathroom, is no doubt sympathetic, and wonders why all the Archie Bunkers they imagine populate all of Queens couldn't vote in Crowley. After a feint at claiming "big money was definitely backing [Ocasio-Cortez]" -- despite the well-known fact that she refused PAC money while Crowley was up to his eyeballs in major donors-- Alleged Correspondent suddenly goes full bull-goose racist:

However, what was really bizarre for me was the fact that the overwhelmingly majority of activists who were campaigning for her like a bunch of fanatics were WHITES! 

When I see stuff like this, I can’t help but think that whites, especially white liberals, have some sort of in-built suicide complex, where they want to give away their own country to non-whites. It’s absolutely mind-boggling to me. And it’s going to be hilarious watching these whites eventually be pushed out of the Democratic Party and straight into the hands of the alt-right.

In updates, Dreher does his usual "What, you think that's racist? Well, takes all kinds" thing.  But he does a little of the racial heavy lifting himself in a later post,  pointing out the ooga-boogas in Ooga-Booga Land are multiplying rapidly, white people aren't squeezing out enough little Crusaders, and reckoning is inevitable:

Where are those Africans going to go? They’re going toward Europe, which is depopulating. Miguel said that given the geography of the Mediterranean, it’s going to be very, very hard for Europe to keep African migrants from entering. I suggested that given the unwillingness of European elites to confront the hard facts of what’s happening, in part because it conflicts with their liberal ideology, this will make the inevitable reckoning even more violent and traumatic than it would otherwise be. 

The massive migration of barbarians into the Roman Empire, in the 4th through 6th centuries, changed European civilization permanently...

Poor guy -- he's about to have his female-crushing wet dreams fulfilled by the Supreme Court, and yet he still can't stop thinking about being overwhelmed by the fecund, dusky hordes! Well, there's some of God's justice, perhaps; with all that privilege and power protecting him, he still can never feel safe.