THIS WAY TO THE EGRESS.

Erick Erickson was once a Trump skeptic, but when Trump won he began almost immediately to turn:

Take Erick Erickson, the former CNN pundit who for months denounced Trump in nearly apocalyptic terms — e.g. “With the rise of an authoritarian menace to our republic, it is important to go on record now, while he can be stopped, that we will play no part in his rise.” 

After the election, Erickson was conciliatory — not toward voters who had tried to stop Trump, but toward Trump himself. “Perhaps,” he mooned, “as only Nixon could go to China, maybe only Trump can reunite the country.”

Last month Erickson declared himself all-in for the big win:

This week in 2016, I declared I would be “Never Trump.” A friend suggested I use a hashtag that had started circulating on Twitter, i.e #NeverTrump. The piece exploded and pushed me into a whirlwind of coverage. Despite lots of pressure, protestors literally on my front porch, and harassment directed towards my family, I did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. I voted third party.

Some of my concerns about President Trump remain. I still struggle on the character issue and I understand Christian friends who would rather sit it out than get involved. But I also recognize that we cannot have the Trump Administration policies without President Trump and there is much to like...

In the rest of that column Erickson mainly complained about the Democrats' abortionism and environmentalism -- complaints he had already made many times, pre- and post-Trump -- but closed, "I will vote for Donald Trump and Mike Pence. And, to be clear, it will not be just because of what the other side offers, but also because of what the Trump-Pence team has done. They’ve earned my vote."

Yet Erick Erickson, proud Trump voter, just can't quit the contrarian shtick. Here's Erickson recently talking about "Jeremiah 29 Conservatives" who "have given up on national politics. It has become too ugly, too compromising, too unaligned with their values" and who believe "Republicans and conservative institutions in Washington have made too many compromises to be effective"; such Jeremiahs have "retreated from national politics because they could not stomach the character flaws of the President or the direction of the Republican party..." In response to their withdrawal, Erickson says, "Conservatives in Washington and the conservative donor class need to reconsider how to engage on the local level with those more worried about their children’s education than a border wall."

In other words, the big-time conservatives like Erick Erickson have fucked up, and the lost lambs of the movement should take the advice of small-town conservatives like Erick Erickson.

In the long con that is modern conservatism, the advantage of beating the base in the head with bullshit for so many years on end is that it renders them too dazed to recognize that the guy they paid going into the funhouse is the same guy taking their money as they come out.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

When I was a kid, I thought this was a Buck Owens song
because of the falsetto ba-ba-bapa-bapa-bapa-pa parts.
• RedState fired a bunch of writers. Many sore wingnuts -- including former RedStater Erick Erickson --portray this as a "purge" of Trump critics, but there appears to be another factor, one that in America always matters most:

RedState writers work on contract and are paid based on the amount of traffic to their posts. 

"Those who had been under a contract with a higher per-click rate were mostly all tossed, only keeping those who were pro-Trump even if their traffic was comparable," another one of the sources said on condition of anonymity. 

"Of those who make less under their contracts, they mostly tossed those who had been openly critical of the president," the source said. "It seems to have been a cost saving measure, but the deciding factor between any two people seems to have been who liked the president and who didn't." [emphasis added]

If only these poor fellows had unionized! Erickson has invited them over to his site The Resurgent, where they will no doubt be paid in Confederate scrip. I hate to see anyone suffer so from the rapacious capitalism of our age, but I have to laugh at Erickson's huff-n-puffery about when it was all about the music, man:

When RedState started in 2004, it was about collaborating between all sides of the GOP and, after I took over, had a real grassroots focus. Since the Salem purchase of Eagle Publishing, the grassroots focus went away as did the community building aspect in favor of clickbait with analysis... 

They've really stopped driving a conversation among conservatives in the past few years as they turned to clickbait and now will really just be a clickbait site it seems.

Clickbait! LOL, The Resurgent is still mostly Angry Email Grandpa crap ("Are we governed by 535 legislators and an executive? Or by 875 unelected judges?"), and currently features no fewer than four stories about Kanye West, including one by Erickson himself ("Kanye West Thinks For Himself. Liberals Demand He Stop Doing That or Shut Up"). As I have said at length here, the rightwing web was always shit and has been devolving for a while into something even lower -- a sort of quantum shit that increasingly ditches the Great Debate MacGuffin and focuses instead on guttural prompts to stir the deepest fears and hatreds of Trumpkins. There are a few intellectual types (and their pseud equivalents) who are still putting Burkean lipstick on the pig, but Erick Erickson has always been and remains a hog-caller, and that is what animates conservatism today.

UPDATE. I just remembered that, back in his RedState days, Erickson did some purging -- or at least attempted purging -- of his own, running an anti-RINO thing called "Operation Leper" and hollering that "The GOP Establishment Must Be Purged." No doubt he'll return to his purgative roots, too, as soon as he sniffs a market opportunity in it for himself.

THE FEAST OF UNREASON. In 2008, enraged by untoward election results, RedState's Erick Erickson announced "Operation Leper," for the purpose of "tracking down all the people from the McCain campaign now whispering smears against Governor Palin to Carl Cameron and others" so that, when they were caught, Erickson and his colleagues might "make these few people political lepers."

In 2009, when Doug Hoffman screwed the pooch in NY-23, Erickson roared:

The GOP Establishment Must Be Purged as the GOP Loses in NY-23...

I am, however, serious that the GOP must purge its staff and leaders who have decided to always go with the liberal. In particular, the NRCC, NRSC, and RNC need some wholesale job terminations of senior staff.

(All typographic peculiarities in the original.) Now that -- at Erickson's urging -- insufficiently rightwing Utah GOP Senator Bob Bennett has been defenestrated by his own party, Erickson has declared new realities in effect. None of this "purge" stuff! Erickson has found a longer and more sonorous keyword, so listen up, "you media types who look for great meaning in all things considered":

Your shibboleths are crumbling around you and you grasp it not. As you struggle to interpret what the tea parties do and do not mean, you media types and others are getting Utah all wrong.

It’s not about a purge. It’s about an insurrection.

Actually "insurrection" doesn't even cover the great scope of it:

Now, the great disentangling of conservatism has begun.

If the next big Tea Party win comes soon and big enough, "great disentangling" will remain the password; if not, after some screaming for heads to roll, we will get a "grand expostulation" or a "disembraining" (Hurrah, arse-horns, long live King Erick!).

People who go in for purges, manifestos, battle flags, and fanciful names for their own movements are either genuine revolutionaries, emotional cripples, or both. The odds that Erickson is another George Washington are very, very, very slim.

UPDATE. I'm always impressed with the mockery innovations of my commenters ("get with the pogrom," "Gollum as interpreted by Gilbert Gottfried," etc). They also notice that Erickson's "your shibboleths are crumbling around you and you grasp it not" is, in the words of one reader, "irredeemably douchey."

Yeah, when they get into the Forsooth and Zounds lingo it's always a little creepy. Most rightbloggers are aware of poetic conventions -- from Gor novels, if nowhere else -- but, being propagandists rather than poets, they see only one purpose for them: To throw a little reverb on their spiel so's they sound scary and sepulchral-like. It's meant, I believe, as a signal for the punters to further suspend their disbelief. Though, the way they're acting these days, I'd say all of them have already gone the full limit.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 2/17/23.

While I produce five days a week of high-quality content at Roy Edroso Breaks It Down (go over and have a look, subscribe if you like, it’s mighty good eating for the pennies it costs), productivity at the old alicublog plant has been down a while. I regret it, but between REBID and my other editorial work there’s not much room left for bodily functions, let alone the kind of funsies for which this site became known back in 1953, when “blogs” rolled off Henry Ford’s assembly line and, due to their tendency to roll rather than locomote, wound up in the dustbin of history, a short distance down the road to oblivion and turn left. 

But sometimes a red flag can get this old bull to charge. Erick Erickson, a longtime figure of fun in the alicublog rep company, has an even more ridiculous than usual item up today. The headline is:

We Cannot Reject Sabotage On Rail Lines Just Yet

Let us tiptoe past Erickson’s long preliminary yammerings about how Joe Biden is trying to blame everything on Donald Trump (though given Trump’s rollback of rail freight safety features he’s certainly blameworthy) and Biden LIED about the CHINESE BALLOONS (“The Administration that lied repeatedly about the Chinese spy balloon wants us to trust them on it not being sabotage, just Trump”), and cut to the 19th graf:

The reality is these incidents are probably not sabotage. Buttigieg, for all his whining, has a point. There are many train derailments every year. We’re more sensitive to them now because of media exposure.

This is the next best thing to “it was all a dream.” 

So why was Erickson going on about sabotage? 

But the point is that this Administration regularly tries to blame Donald Trump for everything, has lied repeatedly in the past few weeks about the Chinese spy balloon, has done such a bad job dealing with these issues too many Americans now know the Transportation Secretary’s name, and we simply cannot believe them.

And if “we” (Erickson and his tapeworm, who I gotta say has his work cut out for him) can’t trust Joe Biden, maybe we’ll trust Erick Erickson’s self-refuting innuendos. Oh, and if you took the side-bet on “Hunter Biden’s laptop” being in the story? Collect your winnings. 

But the real prize this week is Peggy Noonan, who has been on fire (regrettably not literally) with her rambling silver-alert takes. This week’s starts with snipage at Nikki Haley, who recently launched her Vice-Presidential (whoops, I mean air-quotes Presidential) campaign:

On Wednesday Nikki Haley announced her presidential campaign in Charleston, S.C. I found myself thinking not about her candidacy but about the launch itself, which was creepily stuck in the past. A horrible, blaring song from a Sylvester Stallone sequel pumped her in as she strode out in the white suit and there were adoring fans on the rafters behind her, with whom she briefly interacted before turning toward the audience and doing the point—standing there and pointing to individual members of the cheering audience as if she knew them and was being natural. An introducer said she will “lead us into the future”; she added, “America is falling behind.” It was all so tired, clichéd, and phony. It was national politics as it has been done circa 1990-2023.

1990? How about the 80s, Peggy, when as Ronald Reagan’s handler you filled his mouth with uplifting bullshit and helped engineer spectacles like Nancy waving at Ronnie on the telescreen at the 1984 Republican Convention? That's when propaganda was propaganda, you young punks! 

Speaking of bullshit, this seems to be about the only thing Noonan likes about Haley: 

In her speech she said some nice things: “Take it from me, the first female minority governor in history: America is not a racist country.” Everyone who scrambles over our border knows that; it is good when elites say it.

…until said scramblers-over-the-border get driven back over by Greg Abbott’s vigilantes or dragged up north to use as pawns in a cruel culture-war stunt. Honestly, I can’t imagine even her Republican readers don’t immediately think this. 

Then there’s a long grumble about those horrible ads on the teevee during the Super Bowl – they made America look like “a nation of morons” (don’t bother waiting for the penny to drop, guys), whereas back in the day they had Mean Joe Greene being all nice and cuddly for Coke and that was the real America, real Ronnie-and-Nancy koochie-koo kitsch, not this nutty, noisy stuff:

I’m here to say I’ve met America and that’s not what they want. What they want is “Help me live, help my kids live, help me feel something true.” 

Sorry, lady, but would you like a new car, soft drink, or diabetes management app? These are the damn ads. I’m convinced Noonan was just turned off by all the rock and rap (“the music shifted, screamed, and the mood became discordance”). It's a miracle the Journal kept her from fulminating on Rihanna. Look, Grandma, they aren’t pitching this shit to me, either, but I know better than to Blame Society.

Oh, but her closing… man; she gets on Will Smith and starts pitching to write his Oscar 2023 speech:

Here is how to turn that moment into something helpful. It doesn’t involve “image rehab.” It involves constructive honesty. Will Smith should walk in and say this:

“It is painful in life when you embarrass yourself. It is horrifying when you do it in front of tens of millions of people. Last year I did something bad to a guy who was just doing his job, and I am here to acknowledge it from the same stage—to admit that in attempting to humiliate him, I humiliated myself. I showed a number of things, including sheer bad judgment…

Two more grafs of this! I give it five barf bags! I doubt Noonan is even expecting the call (though I love imagining her on the phone, pinching her nose, and droning “This is Miss Noonan’s answering service”); I expect the play is to wait for Smith to deliver what promises to be a perfectly anodyne and expected (though less white!) apology-like spew, and then sigh contentedly: “Ahhh, he took my advice!”

ONE-STOOP SHOPPING

Announcing a brand-new supermarket of rightwing barf -- The Resurgent, brainchild of onetime CNN commentator and RedState kingpin Erick Erickson. Why'd he start it?

Our desire at The Resurgent is to build a website unafraid of any arc of history imposed by men knowing that history ultimately bends towards our Creator and His is the side of history on which we should stand.

So, for nuts, then, and perhaps also to funnel wingnut welfare to conservative writers -- Erickson belly-aches that "boycott and harassment of advertisers by the left" has made it hard to generate income with these grifts, but he expects to support the thing with weekly sponsorships drawn by the lovely site design ("Try printing this page. Seriously. Just look at the thought we put into the print template. It is gorgeous") and the brilliance of his copy. "I want to control every pixel so if I get blamed for something, I will actually deserve the blame," he says, and he's not kidding: Some of the articles are by Steve Berman, mostly Ted Cruz rah-rah disguised as horse-race journalism ("Sen. Ted Cruz has the left running scared... he was mobbed by adoring fans like he was Mick Jagger crowdsurfing at a Stones concert," etc). But most of the current output is by the boss himself, and indeed the site bears his distinctive, belligerent-in-a-Barcalounger stamp. Let us review his first offerings:

"Republicans and the Lessons of 2014." Mostly pimping ("Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. This is your must read of the day") a National Journal story about how the radicals are taking the GOP over from fuddy-duddies like Paul Ryan, possibly leading to a Trump nomination. Erickson claims not to like Trump, especially since Trump was mean to prospective future Erickson employer Fox News, but he hates the Republican Establishment more, enough that he'd chain the party to a buffoon-led disaster and then scavenge the saving remnants. Bonus quote: "...I can give you names of tons of activists who, for example, would not even consider Rick Perry this go round because he hired Henry Barbour after the Cochran mess."

"The One Thing We Know About The GOP’s Response to Obama on Guns." The Republican Establishment will do nothing to stop Obama's fascist gun takeover. And what does this tell us?

The very reason Barack Obama can get away with what he is doing is the very same reason China is building islands in the South China Sea, Putin is helping Syria, and ISIS is spreading like a virus. The only force willing to block them is impotent, just as the only force willing to stop Obama is impotent.

Apparently the boss wants so much control he won't hire an editor for himself. Charitably, this glurge might mean that Obama is a sissy before Xi Jinping, Putin, and ISIS, but the Republican Establishment is even sissier because they're sissies before sissy Obama. "The only force willing to stop Obama is impotent" is a puzzle, though: Maybe Erickson has some nut, driven by despair over his erectile dysfunction to consider killing Obama, holed up at his klavern.

Speaking of which...

"Our Impotent President." Obummer cried over those kids at Sandy Hook but "never shed a tear over the innocent lives butchered in the Planned Parenthood videos..." All he ever does is hold press conferences -- "the Washington equivalent of viagra" which "only scratches the itch of 'JUST DO SOMETHING,'" and "ignore he really can’t get up to anything more than a pregnant pause these days," ha ha. This is a real Erickson hallmark: While his contemporaries like to tell us Obama is a tyrant, Erickson prefers to demean him with sexual imagery -- see "Barack Obama is Vladimir Putin’s Submissive Gimp," "Barack Obama is a Moral Coward and Fluffer of Totalitarians," etc. If Erickson gets anywhere the 2016 candidate's image-making apparatus, we can expect lots of rape-porn images of Hillary Clinton.

Perhaps related:

"Rubio Slams Christie Pretty Hard." "It slams him pretty hard and I suspect it is going to leave a mark."

There are also video and audio modules, but life's too fucking short. Final analysis: If there's room for one more angry white man in the hearts of wingnuts, Erickson has the inside track

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Christgau steered me right again with this soundtrack.

There are already so many Substack newsletters devoted to cancelculture crybabies blubbering that someone changed the name of a high school or some shit, yet here comes ham-faced Jesus freak Erick Erickson – who refers to himself as “Erick-Woods Erickson” for some reason; maybe it’s a Puritan thing, like Praise-God Barebone – who today shook his fist on the subject in not one but two newsletter issues. In the first he declares “The Union is fraying and cancel culture is radicalizing otherwise reasonable people… One bad word choice, one misunderstanding, and often one false accusation can lead the mob to your employer or even to your door.” Wow, I just checked my door – all clear so far! So how’s this cancelculture thing work? 

We see this with Black Lives Matter, the organization, declaring itself against the traditional nuclear family. We see it with its activists attacking anyone who points out that Black Lives Matter maintains this position.

Erickson offers no examples, but when I think of Black Lives Matter and cancellation, I think of Colin Kaepernick, and I doubt that was what Erickson intended. Maybe he meant all the cops who were briefly subject to disapprobation when videos showed them beating up BLM protestors, before they were cleared of all charges. What else?

The Christian baker must bake the cake, but the cultural, secular left gets to opt-out when it disagrees. One side gets to impose its will on the other. 

Bake the cake? But the Supreme Court backed the gay-hating baker. He and his ilk can say "we don't make cakes for fags here" and get away with it, which is freedom! Erickson’s actually citing examples that disprove his case, sparing me the effort. But let me add another:

Jeep trots out a rabid partisan with a history of disparaging remarks towards the right and they place him in a church declaring we need the middle. If anyone objects, they’re the bad person.

Oh brother. As with most of these yahoos, the most realistic concern is that people will criticize their opinions, which colicky conservatives cannot abide. And no such rant is complete without the obligatory Look What You Made Me Do bit:

The disparity in cancellations is going to boil over to violence. We are, frankly, getting our first early tastes of this…

The seething over the disparity caused a lot of people to support Donald Trump and a great many of them were and are willing to turn a blind eye to what people did on January 6th because they know what much of the left and the press won’t admit — that side really does want to silence Trump supporters…

If the right cannot voice its views and people of the right can be punished for things the left is spared from, there will come greater antagonism that will ultimately lead to violence.

“Will ultimately lead to violence,” then, means “kiss our ass or we’ll kill you.” In newsletter two Erickson rattles the begging bowl:

As cancel culture is a thing and the Woke-o Haram terrorists continue to silence the right, your subscription to my daily emails makes it harder for them to cancel my voice, both in print and on radio.

I assume there are enough people who think “Woke-o Haram” is hilarious to keep his fat ass in clover. You good people, I'm sure, would prefer Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, the only Substack newsletter devoid of boo-hooing over big bad cancelculture, offering instead five (5) days a week of quality content – here, free to non-subscribers, are two recent examples: my transcript of a Trump impeachment lawyer’s opening statement, and my reaction to the prosecution’s new video of the insurrectionists’ depredations. Go on, have a subscription – they make great Valentine’s Day gifts! 

DEATH CULT.

Some of you may remember my column last Spring about what I characterized as the new conservative position on climate change: roughly, "Hey, everybody dies (literally)". In other words, even if you stupid libtards are right, environmentalism is futile and we should just all prepare for an earlier-than-expected deliverance unto the loving arms of Jesus.

Mind you, my analysis was largely based on extrapolation of the texts. But it turns out RedState kingpin Erick Erickson is willing to say so out loud:

I Simply Do Not Care About Global Warming

We’re all going to die or something according to the latest hysteria from the United Nations now that government bureaucrats have sufficiently added hype and hyperbole to the IPCC report on global warming a/k/a climate change.

Folks, I do not care. Let me assure you that the world is not going to end and we are not going to cause ourselves to go extinct. This report is written by a bunch of people who believe in the evolution of humanity, but somehow think mankind is unable to adapt to changing circumstances. 

The simple fact is that, if they are right and the world is warming, there is nothing we can do short of economic Armageddon to stop it. We’ve already told most of the third world they have to hide under nets or die of malaria because we do not want them using DDT. We should not now tell them they have to turn off their electricity and never improve their existence because of global warming.

The DDT thing is total bullshit, by the way --  scientific management of a dangerous chemical is not politically-correct reckless endangerment, it's the opposite of it. But does Erick Erickson care about your so-called "science"? Erickson then gets to his secondary argument, which is eat it you stupid libtards:

This is all orchestrated left-wing crap that a bunch of private jet setters and twitter liberals can worry themselves over. I have never once met a person who treats global warming as the most significant issue of our time and is a well adjusted, happy person. From Al Gore to the nuts on Twitter who’ll fill up my timeline in outrage over this, they are maladjusted, angry people in need of prayer to a realer God than Gaia. 

Epistemic closure? We didn't know the half of it. Expect a series of these "who gives a shit" items, and not only from Erickson, on banking regulations, race relations, foreign policy, etc. As my archive shows, all these guys have left now is resentment, racism, and rifle worship; it's about time they abandoned argument altogether. At least it'll be an improvement over that "conservative reform" bullshit, in that they'll no longer be pretending.

PRE-THANKSGIVING AROUND-THE-HORN.

•    Remember a few days back, when Rod Dreher was flipping out that New York magazine interviewed a guy who fucks horses, and blaming this bestiality breakthrough on our tolerance of gay marriage? He's still on about it! He has dragged in the equally awful Damon Linker, who tries to reassure Dreher that "most people will continue to live boring, mundane sex lives, monogamously committed to one human being of the opposite sex at a time." You'd think this vanilla vision of the future would cheer Dreher, but it does not; he rehashes his previous mopes and also complains that "'emerging adult' Catholics are abandoning the faith in droves." Dreher himself abandoned Catholicism years ago, but that was different because 1.) he's Rod Dreher, the center of the universe, and 2.) he quit to join another hardass skygod sect, not to go friggin' and frugin' with the hippies, as he seems to assume the non-Dreher apostates will do. I thought at first Dreher, despite his roots in rural Louisiana, was somehow unaware of the ancient association of Southern hicks with barnyard sex, but now I'm thinking he does know, and has in fact been hired by the local chamber of commerce to get it associated with urban sophisticates instead.

•    Erick Erickson has a full-on soregasm because Ezra Klein doubts Officer Wilson's story about how Demon Mike Brown made him kill him. Why that sissy Klein knows nothing about "the blue collar of existence of a beat cop and what that cop sees," unlike red-blooded, ham-faced lawyer/politician Erick Erickson:

I think liberals like Klein who find Darren Wilson’s statement as simply too incredible to be true need to call their local police force and see if they can tag along in a squad car a few times. I have done it. It is quite an education.

Yeah, like that time the cops Erickson was with those cops who shot a black guy dead, and then were allowed to bag their own guns as evidence, and the prosecutor told the grand jury not to take it all too seriously -- you libtards don't realize this is the real world!

•    If you need some what-a-bunch-of-morons for entertainment, look at the responses to any Progressive Insurance @ItsFlo tweet, such as this one; most of the respondents are wingnuts enraged that the insurer gives all its money to George Soros:

Lewis, who did contribute to liberal causes, stepped down as Progressive chairman in 2000 and died in 2013. But tell that to the salt of the earth, the common clay -- or to John Hawkins of Right Wing News, who was telling his poor readers in 2013 that Lewis was still in charge and "may be the biggest liberal sugar daddy on the block." Actually, considering the difficulty they have understanding health insurance, maybe conservatives should boycott all insurance as socialism. Hell, those pointy-headed actuaries even believe in global warming!

•    A John Podhoretz (ding!) column in the New York Post (ding!) called "Turning on the cops: Forgetting what crime was like" (dingdingdingding!) was bound to be a nightmare, and it is -- all about how you liberals don't remember the crime it was so bad you must worship the Man on the Beat etc. But the bit where Podhoretz tells black folks to cool it over Ferguson is awful even for him:

It might surprise Al Sharpton to hear this, but even among white people, it’s rare to find any American who’s only ever had pleasant interchanges with police officers. 

Every year, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 41 million speeding tickets are written in the United States. The notion that only minorities have infuriating encounters with cops is belied by that astounding factoid. 

After all, is there a soul alive who hasn’t reacted negatively (in his heart, at least) to the cop who comes to the driver-side window and asks that obnoxious and oddly schoolmarmish question: “Do you know why I stopped you?”

I dunno what black people are bitching about -- white people get speeding tickets all the time!

THE FIRST SPUTTERS OF INDICTMENT SEASON.

At Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, I have unlocked a taxonomy of Trump defenses inspired by his latest indictments. There is no need to explicate the brute brayings of guys like Tim Pool, so I confined myself to complainers who try a little spin – not that the spin makes them any more intelligent or convincing; in fact in some ways they’re more pathetic than the dummies yelling “Civil War!” or “Fix!” or “Kill Biden!” because they’re like precocious kids who have just made their first acquaintance with irony and, seeing how favorably some people react to it, try to emulate it without understanding how it works. 

Some of the operatives are already spinning out of control. Erick Erickson has a real lulu. I mention in the REBID item the chronic bothsider reactions of prestige media clucks; well, Erickson, who after all has been employed by CNN, tries his own version of it:

I don’t think Democrats realize how radicalizing it was for Republicans that Barack Obama sued nuns to force them to pay for abortions. Nor do I think Democrats realize how radicalizing it is now for culturally conservative people across races and political parties that they’re pushing transgenderism as hard as they are. They simply do not realize how much of an existential threat they seem to many voters.

They literally sued a bunch of nuns to force them to pay to murder children, which is what abortion is to a great many people.

I don’t think Republicans realize how radicalizing it was for Democrats to see the “character counts” GOP come out for a twice-divorced serial adulterer…

There is blame enough to share, quoth Erickson, between the Trump fans and the baby-murdering nun abusers! Anyway, because he can’t help himself, Erickson repeats the threat popular among his ilk (“Hell is coming for Democrats, most particularly for Joe Biden and members of his family and cabinet. Republicans will pay them back in kind”) and then tries on the Solomon robes and proposes a solution:

The old man on the right must stop trying to get back into the office. And the old man on the left must pardon the old man on the right and bring all pressure to bear on the two state prosecutors, both of whom are Democrats, to stop their prosecutions too.

It’s like a glitchy AI version of The West Wing. Eventually even Erickson stops pretending to believe it could happen and starts raving about Civil War. Once again I must ask: Do these guys even know any normal people?

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 3/31/23.

I don't listen to this guy often enough.

Happy Tubby Got Fingered Day! As I mention in today’s Roy Edroso Breaks It Down – released to general population as a commemorative gift – this indictment is no guarantee of justice; we haven’t even seen the full indictment yet, nor do we know what’s coming down the judicial pipe, and one never knows what a jury will do.  But it has shown, in a small way at least, that this alleged untouchable, the princeling of the putzes, is not utterly beyond the law. 

Which of course has the Trumpkins fully flipping out. Along with what you’ll find in the REBID piece, you’ve got U.S. Senator Rand Paul calling for D.A. Alvin Bragg’s arrest, and many other rightwingers, ranging from the Speaker of the House to the lowliest, tiniest-faced propagandists, calling for retaliatory prosecutions with no legal justification. Which just shows how strong their position is! You can find others on the internet crying that this indictment means America is a dictatorship, and soon the True Sons of Liberty will rise up and take down the Dusky Soros Hordes. In other words, Insurrection Attempt II – This Time It’s Hilarious! 

Even worse are the sober-sided Just-the-Tip Trumper types, like the Wall Street Journal editorial board, who call the indictment “a sad day for America,” sob sob, and insist that in such a case “the evidence should… be solid enough that a reasonable voter would find it persuasive,” which (though IANAL) seems to be a brand new standard for felony prosecutions. Eventually they get to a slightly more manicured version of the bald threats made by the goon squad:

Once a former President and current candidate is indicted, some local Republican prosecutor will look to make a name for himself by doing the same to a Democrat. U.S. democracy will be further abused and battered. Mr. Bragg, the provincial progressive, is unleashing forces that all of us may come to regret.

The cheaper the kooks, the gaudier the patter. 

UPDATE. I neglected to mention Erick Erickson's lulu. He advances the same tropes as the rest of them – the indictment “will help Trump immensely,” and “the case is so, so thin that Trump is very likely to get acquitted” (again, the indictment is as yet sealed) – and adds some nonsense of his own: For example, that “independents who don’t care for [Trump] but do not hate him could swing decisively and sympathetically in his direction just as a recession is breaking out. Alvin Bragg could very well have gotten Trump re-elected.” Apparently Erickson had a choice between polling data and his own ass and chose his ass. 

Most remarkably, Erickson also goes out of his way to insult D.A. Alvin Bragg -- and the grand jury: 

Alvin Bragg represents a wing of the Democrat Party that is on the short bus of the party. He’s not very bright. I suspect the grand jurors are just rabid progressives, too, and they are all in the wing of “let’s put the SOB behind bars.” They hate him. They call him vulgarities instead of the President. They just want him in prison, and they’ll do anything to get him there. 

They are not smart enough to consider the ramifications and too blinded by rage against Trump to care.

In a later post Erickson calls Bragg “a dim-witted county district attorney.” I’m sure Erickson’s constituents enjoy hearing the black lawyer and the New York City jurors (whom they probably imagine as the Central Park Five padded out with skels from Death Wish) called stupid, and that's why he's laying it on so thick. I wonder what he’ll do, though, as the wheels of justice slowly grind and he is obliged to up the ante. Maybe he’ll call in the AI that says racial slurs! 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

I'm so past & out of it I didn't even know this was briefly popular, sort of.
Well, I still like it!

•   I only unleashed one Roy Edroso Breaks It Down joint (the one mentioned last post) out of five this week on the GP.  Come on and sign up for the full subscription -- it's cheap! And I'll still be filling in the blanks over here. For instance, I just did an issue digging through what was at the time the latest offense to reason by ham-faced pundit Erick Erickson, and no sooner did it publish than he posted something at least as dumb. It is facially inspired by Hunter Biden saying "nigga" (aka the soft n-word) to his lawyer.

Erickson claims that a country musician and a high school student (Wallen and Groves, I guess their names are) got in trouble for using that word (which version of the word, alas, is not made clear), but “the major media outlets across the country that condemned Mr. Wallen and Ms. Groves are silent” about Biden fils. 

First of all, I never heard of the musician or the student before Erickson mentioned them. (I should add that Erickson claims “the New York Times wrote approvingly of Mr. Galligan ruin[in]g Groves’ scholarship,” which is a reductive-to-the-point-of-bullshit characterization of the Times’ actual coverage.)  

Second, at this moment if you look up “hunter biden n-word” on Google News you get, no lie, 91,300 hits. The majority of them seem to be from rightwing news sites yelling WHY WON’T LIB MEDIA HUNTER N-WORD BLARGH, true, but that just goes to show that rightwing media is "major media," and indeed the only source of “news” tens of millions of Americans choose to read or watch, notwithstanding that it’s mostly outrageously shoddy propaganda wearing a filmy g-string of journalism. I'm sure vastly more people have heard about Hunter Biden’s n-word than know, for example, that Trump’s AG seized Democratic Congressmen Adam Schiff’s  and Eric Swalwell’s records from Apple for reasons anyone who spent more than a few seconds downwind of the Trump Administration can guess. 

Also, this bears repeating: Who the fuck cares about Hunter Biden? These guys always talk as if he’s a Democratic Senator or something liberals have to defend. (Conversely, Trump’s nitwit, charity-defrauding sons constantly vaunt themselves into the political spotlight by helping their dad lie about the 2020 election.)

But then Erickson gets philosophical about the N-word itself:

The N-word has become the one word, the use of which, can destroy a person’s career. But it is routinely used in popular music that is listened to and enjoyed across racial lines. The word has become weaponized beyond the power any word should have if it can be used to selectively target and destroy.

“How come they can say n***** and we can’t” is a junior-high trope that we must expect, alas, even at the highest levels of conservatism. But it gets worse:

If the double standard cancelations continue, people will begin to use the word more, supposing the double standard is faux outrage at a word so common in parts of popular culture. Put another way, if the press will ignore Hunter Biden for the same sins of Wallen and Groves, many will presume the use of the word is not really a cultural sin and they will be bolder in use of it.

OK, gotta admit: “Liberals are making us say n*****” is a new one. 

•   Late add here but: There's a lot of good in this year's Pulitzers (besides, of course, my not getting one) but the decision to give no editorial cartooning award despite having three genuinely world-class nominees -- Ruben Bolling (Ken Fisher), Sammy Two Bulls, and Lalo Alcaraz -- stinks to high heaven. The Pulitzer committee has been dickish on drama in years past, usually because some old fart couldn't stand the newfangled young turks like Robert Wilson or Edward Albee, and Tom Tomorrow suggests on his Twitter account this year's fiasco could be even worse than that. Anyway, boo to whoever fucked this up. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Ah, that's the stuff. I miss noise.
(Can you believe they did this in 2003? The ex-kids are alright!) 

•   Biden's speech appears to have gone down a treat among normal people -- naturally, as it was delivered by an avuncular old man who already did a good job of delivering COVID vaccinations and is now promising to similarly fix other fucked-up shit. The brethren are furiously spinning it. Ham-faced pundit Erick Erickson first tried "Republicans Should Be Encouraged By The Biden Speech," on the grounds that it was "a desperate grab for control" that's "going to cause more inflation and that's going to hurt Biden" (Gasp! Not inflation! Someone get out the old WIN pins!) and anyway "the Democrats are headed into disarray... Joe Biden's days are numbered and he knows it."

Erickson must have looked at the polls, because the next day he was claiming "two days after Joe Biden’s first address to Congress, more people are talking about Tim Scott’s response than Joe Biden’s speech." If this were true, since Erickson thinks Biden's speech was a dog I don't see how that's supposed to be bad for Democrats; also, to the extent people are talking about Scott, it's certainly attributable to fascination that there's still a black Republican in Congress, and that he claims liberals called him the n-word. (Didn't say who, though! Maybe he's saving it for his autobiography.) This routine is catnip to Erickson, who praises Scott for "exposing how must [sic] the progressive wokes really hate this country" and "reminding Americans how out of touch the elite tastemakers and opinion setters are." Candace Owens, Sheriff David Clark, and Ali Alexander must be pissed, all their dreams of joining Ron DeSantis on a You're The Real Racist GOP Unity Ticket having crumbled. (I wonder whether Scott's speech moved the 47% of Republicans who think Derek Chauvin is innocent.)

Peggy Noonan does her bit, and it's a chef's casserole of rightwing received opinion. Being smarter than Erickson she knows she'd better acknowledge that Biden seems nice, but then it's Coffee Break Over Everyone Back On Their Heads: After the snottiness that has become the new GOP SOP on Biden's social distancing and masking ("playacting Pandemic Theatre" -- guess she thinks gin kills the germs before they can get to her lungs), and some How Will You Pay for It posturing, it's time to Reacharound Across The Aisle:

The president said again he is eager to negotiate with Republicans. There isn’t much evidence of this, but here are the reasons he should be treating them with respect and as equal partners. It would be good for the country to see the Senate actually working—negotiating, making deals, representing constituencies. It would be good for the Democrats to show they’re not just playing steamroller and flattening the Republicans; they’re reasoning because they’re reasonable. Also they need Republicans to co-own legislative outcomes because whatever they are they’ll be very liberal. Negotiation and compromise...

I'm seriously asking: Does anyone believe this shit anymore? After Tubby paid off Republican donors with his trillion-dollar-plus Tax and Jobs Act, and all the pandemic spending, people have started losing their fear of deficit spending; also, they know economically things are fucked up and bullshit and even Republican voters want a higher minimum wage -- but the Republican Party is still blubbering about deficits and bootstraps, preaching Reaganism to generations who weren't around to be bamboozled by it and who probably look upon the artifacts of the Age of Alex P. Keaton with horror and disgust. How are Democrats supposed to negotiate with that?

Noonan alludes to this shift in the vaguest way possible  -- she sees "a deep reconsideration" and Americans "questioning that oldest American tradition: ambition" and seeking "something new, less driven, more communal." That could mean what the left is proposing with anti-racism and mutual aid -- or it could be evangelical home-school Bible rule. I think she sees a replay of the 1970s, when social and political upheavals led to the Reagan reactionary wave on which she built her career. But it's interesting that she won't say out loud where it will go; a true careerist always leaves the door open for a heel-turn. 

•   This week's Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies include this one about the stupid Biden Bans Red Meat thing that conservatives were spreading a week ago but you know what? Better you should just go in the front door and look at all the stories that don't have locks next to their descriptors. And then subscribe! I know some of you can afford it. 

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about rightbloggers and the Iowa caucuses. This was interesting to write because, as I sort of mention in the column, while political reporters are by and large just hoping to get reads and keep their jobs, rightbloggers are more hubristic: they really seem to believe they can make a difference in national events by the perfection of their logic, the shrillness of their vituperation, or the capitalization of random words. Look at Erick Erickson, who demands purges at the drop of a hat, and all the political illiterates who talk electoral strategy from their Barcaloungers and make Mark Penn look like Clausewitz. In a way it's touching, and in the last ditch I guess I prefer them to working propagandists like George Will and Peggy Noonan, who may know a little more than the bloggers but use that knowledge to perpetuate ignorance because it pays. But then, some of our worst columnists used to be bloggers (latest installment: If I define "decadence" low enough, maybe someone else will help me obsess over it)...

Ah, screw 'em all. Anyway, here's my version of horse-race journalism, and I didn't have to stay at a Motel 6 in Keokuk to write it. My editor took out my joke about Ted Cruz' bad breath -- in fairness, I've probably cost them a fortune in lawsuits already -- but there are still few good ones left.

UPDATE. Just days after their big anti-Trump issue, National Review's Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponurru are already trying to adjust to life in the joint:

Through the Goldwater revolution, the party became newly oriented around limited-government conservatism, and eventually a better politician than Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, came along to represent the new dispensation and get elected president.  

Maybe Trump could serve roughly the same function. 

Sorry, laughed so hard I sprained something.

He could lose badly this year and yet give rise to a future GOP that takes enforcement of the immigration laws seriously, reduces low-skilled immigration, and does more to represent the less-schooled wage earner, while also rejecting fantasies of mass deportation.

I see a conference room session, like the old Erhard Seminars Training except everyone wears Trump clothing and thinks he's in charge and must assert his authority at all times or be crushed. The participants are all hoarse from screaming at each other. The sign outside the locked room reads REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION 2022.

Those gains would, however, come at a fearful cost that conservatives should strive to avoid.

Pssssh. Like they wouldn't take it if it meant more elbow room at the Big Trough.

UPDATE. Looks like Cruz came in first, and National Review is partying like it's November 8; on Twitter Lowry is thanking Mark Levin, Erick Erickson, and (get this) Glenn Beck, and declaring, "My tally of top four finishers in Iowa: Conservatism 60%, Trumpism 24%." If it had been Conservatism 57%, Trumpism 27%, of course, they'd all be hiding under desks while Il Douche goose-stepped up and down Main Street. I think Trump has a few kicks left in him, but as I said last month, he was never going to be the nominee; he is what he has always been, a symptom. When he goes dormant, the sickness will pop out somewhere else.

I'm not going to stay up to see if Bernie Sanders will pull it off; the arc of history bends toward justice, but it's long.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

God save your mad parade.

 (Note: Contrary to custom, the freebie links are at the end.)

Funny, I’m actually susceptible to royal drama. I remember the scenes around Victoria’s death in PBS’ dramatization of The Forsyte Saga – the maid crying out, “it’s the Queen, mum, the poor old Queen – she’s dead!”; the archival footage of the cortege, and the infirm Old Soames tottering to his feet: “Don’t care to be seated when the Queen is passing.” I even felt a little blush of sentiment in Frears’ The Queen when the little girl proffers Liz the flowers and says “they’re for you,” notwithstanding the real meaning of the scene is that foxy Tony’s scheme worked a charm.

But I’m not so depraved that I can’t also enjoy some good Dead Queen jokes, and apart from Irish Twitter the funniest have been unintentional – that is, the puffed-up boo-hoos of reactionaries who halted, as if by reflex, their usual smackdowns and slurs on the poor and underprivileged to blow their noses over Betty Saxe-Coburg and talk about the Passing of the Old Order. For example, Andrew Sullivan:

For my impertinent reply I got a week off Twitter. Worth it! 

Sadly I can’t slap ‘em all. Erick Erickson, for example, glurges that the people cracking wise at the Queen’s death are all snooty liberals. He seems particularly incensed at the black ones, whom he angrily accuses of anger; “undoubtedly,” he fumes, “they also understand their careers are what they are because of white progressive elite head-patters, and it makes them angrier.” Hey, give Erick credit – he learned a variation on “liberal plantation”! But the rest of the shtick is musty as hell – “the left is increasingly cloistered inside a bubble of their own making,” blah blah blah – though nothing in the thing is more sick-making than his attempts at funerary prose: 

Truly, I have no words to add to the hundreds of thousands already written about the death of Elizabeth II. I can only offer my prayers. Her shoes are too big for anyone to fill, so I will also pray all of us can give King Charles the grace to walk in his own shoes in his own way, unshackled from the expectations left by our memories of his predecessor, his mother, the Queen. In the shadow of his mother’s crown for so long, he now comes into the light beneath its weight on his head and its burdens on his shoulders as he and his people mourn Elizabeth II, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of her other realms and territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith. What a time.

As their eyes pass over this, I doubt even the people who take Erickson seriously are paying close attention, and it registers merely as a gush of So Sad So Sad God Save & Are Eye Pee. But for those of us who can’t help ourselves, it conjures vision of King Charles III trying out one of his thousands of pairs of shoes with a renewed sense of purpose (and a great fat book on his head, to improve his posture), and Erickson, squeezed into an equerry costume, bawling out the late Queen’s honorifics at a suburban barbecue. 

I’m grateful that old Bess stood up to the Nazis with whom her wicked Uncle liked to party, and can even understand how the durability of her reign gave very old people some sense of continuity and stability, and that it must be rough to lose it. But most of us do not have such a sense, because the world has been getting worse for a long time and dragging our hope and fortunes down with it; and in that light the bejeweled lady hanging in there year after year to greet one horrible knob after another, then bidding them cheerio as they went out to fuck up England and the world some more, doesn’t seem so much a comfort as a cruel joke.

That’s why the jokes are funny. And speaking of jokes, I have a Roy Edroso Breaks It Down issue on the subject – accept it please in the spirit of the occasion (and tell your friends, since, ahem, I can’t tweet the link). And while you’re at it, read and enjoy the previous one about people who think liberal arts degrees are bad because they don’t make you rich.

FREE SPEECH DEFECT.

Here’s a rare midweek release of a Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebie to the non-members among you, about one conservative’s (and every one’s, really) response to the firing of an NFL coach for years of offensive messages. It is, as they say in the promos, inspired by true events. 

As I always say whenever the cancelculture crybabies rush to defend some big name like Coach Gruden who will almost certainly die rich of old age in his bed despite his “cancellation,” I would happily accept laws that kept such people from being fired, suspended, or otherwise punished for speech so long as the law also applied to the non-rich, such as the trans Netflix employee who, so far as I know, is the only person who has actually suffered for what they've said about the Dave Chapelle special (notwithstanding the fantasies of rightwingers who go “I bet my buddies will get fired for writing a good review of The Closer I bet I bet” -- bitch, show me one!). But conservatives never accept that deal, for some reason. 

Though Erick Erickson is not my model for the REBID item (when he is, I take greater care to ape his awfulness specifically), his own essay on the subject was inspirational. It’s full of nuggets like these:

Gruden said in private what other people might say, including referring to Joe Biden in 2012 as a “nervous clueless pussy.” Whether you like it or not, these conversations happen among friends who sometimes use coarse language.

This was clearly an orchestrated effort to punish Gruden for past comments and drive him out of the NFL. We can speculate on who did it. But we should really focus on the problem here that keeps happening.

There’s so much ugly-stupid in there, but for me the suggestion that Gruden was targeted by the NFL because he said something bad about Joe Biden once, plausibly-deniable chickenshit though it is, doesn’t approach the cowardliness of the “Gruden said in private what other people might say” argument. Erickson can’t even go all the way with the logic of his essay: that it’s so common and understandable to use racist, misogynist, and homophobic slurs on a regular basis that anyone, including himself, might do it. 

I’m not saying Erickson spews like Gruden did; obviously he’s too weaselly to expose himself like that. But if he were more forthright about his assertion, he might be forced to explain why, in his experience, “conversations” that “happen among friends who sometimes use coarse language” (not his friends, surely!) so frequently include these slurs. Or would that be a “critical race theory” question to ask, since it implies American bigotry didn’t die at Appomattox?

Can’t resist adding this bit from Erickson’s essay after this one, about how mandatory vaccination against pandemic viruses is liberal tyranny:

When my father-in-law went for an antibody infusion the other day, the nurse told him the infusions were in short supply. According to the nurse, the Biden Administration was punishing Georgia, Florida, and other states that had no mask or vaccine mandates by withholding antibody infusion doses. Whether that is true or not is beside the point. The point is the nurse believed it and is relaying that to patients. That will have an effect and, in fact, the Biden Administration is withholding antibody doses for reasons that remain nebulous. [Italics added]

I mean, the anonymous authority with an outlandish accusation that the author disseminates is standard procedure with, for example, Rod Dreher, but I don’t think even Dreher would just admit up front that it may be bullshit. 

TODAY IN CONSERVATIVE INTELLECTUALISM.

I hate to do such a quick reprise of the "My Frontrunner is Your Fault" theme, but I can't let this Erick Erickson thing at The Resurgent pass without remark:

In other words, the one group to blame for Donald Trump is everybody.
Opportunity Lives and the Koch Brothers deserve blame.
The conservative movement deserves blame.
Republican leaders and the actual Republican establishment deserve blame.
Democrats deserve blame.
The media deserves blame.
I deserve blame.

It sounds like a suicide note, but alas! I'm pretty sure it's just Erickson trying to reassure his base, who (it's a safe bet) are suffering similar spasms of existential dread over Trump,  that the whole world's gone crazy and it's not just them. There are some blind-squirrel-nut moments like this:

Conservatives too, myself included, deserve blame. We have fought awfully hard against the establishment, but often decided we wanted to fight more than we wanted to solve the problem.

This from the architect of Operation Leper! It'd be even funnier if he meant it. Oh, and this:

Another perfect example of the one group to blame for Donald Trump is Barack Obama and his Democratic coalition. In 2007, Obama heaped scorn on white, blue collar workers in Pennsylvania bitterly clinging to their guns and religion. He went to war with them, dividing classes and races and putting a lot of blue collar workers in the energy industry on the unemployment line.

If only Democrats were actually serious about the needs of the white working class, they could have had those votes instead of Trump -- because, Erickson's argument clearly implies, his own party is totally shit at meeting those needs.

You know who else thinks Trump voters have been "left behind by liberalism" and #NeverTrump conservatives are missing a trick? The Federalist's Mytheos Holt, who starts by telling us about this straight-up White Nationalist chick, "Sylvia," who he was able to turn, guys (high five!). He came to her at first "in the company of another friend, who had made it his personal mission to deconvert her from her ideology, a task with which I agreed to help" (sexy already, right?), but then on his own:

I continued to send out feelers... so I could probe her ideology... After a while, she got used to me... she began to open up about her more risqué beliefs. So, this time with more gentle prodding, I started to make her doubt what she’d been taught.

Things got even hotter when Holt revealed to her that he's Jewish: "my ethnic revelation actually made her open up more to me rather than less."

After that revelation, gently poking holes in her worldview was out of the question, as I’d just metaphorically sent a cannonball straight through its foundation.

Boom! So, Holt reasons, if he can shoot his cannon of understanding into this racist chick, why can't other conservatives appeal to her co-racists? After all, they're not bad people, just misguided:

Ultimately, the biggest reason the pain that drove Sylvia’s family and so many like them into the arms of white nationalism is unfair is a pain that I, as a Jew, can empathize with. After all, once many Jews turned to communism as a way of trying to get political rights they didn’t think they could get any other way, and as a way of lashing out at a society that unfairly disdained them and their culture.

Even though this ideological shift made many people hate Jews more, at least the communists were trying to do something. Only that kind of desperation can make a radical ideology like white nationalism attractive.

Be sure to catch Holt's version of Fiddler on the Roof, in which Perchik turns into Norman Podhoretz.

On and on it goes, so let's wrap it up: Holt thinks conservatives don't complain enough about social justice warriors (I know! And at The Federalist! He's got nerve, I'll give him that), causing white proles to turn to Trump, so you squishes better drop the "Kemp-and-W-style 'bleeding heart conservatism'" and start Trumping it up --

Otherwise, the people damaged by multicultural, leftist attacks on Western civilization will be thoroughly justified in sneering at us as proverbial “cuckservatives” forever mentally masturbating with our own empty universalism while barbarism rapes Lady Liberty.

Maybe Holt should drop the politics stuff and devote his considerable talents to specialty porn. (In a way, isn't he doing that already?)

FUCK YOUR FEELINGS AND YOUR THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS.

The middle-of-the-road wingnuts are running to convince us that no, that's not what they meant. For years David French has thundered against "SJWs" as the aggressors against poor defenseless conservatives. He called for "a cultural and political war against the intellectual and legal corruption of the university Left" and, having gotten those ass-covering modifiers out of the way, asked "Which GOP presidential candidate will fire the first shot?" He lamented how "painfully easy" it would be "for leftist activists to position themselves close to a group of strategically-chosen Trump supporters, initiate a disruption, and then resist the instant the crowd tried to push them out" and make his people look bad. Now that what was really going on all along has followed its natural progression and a young SJW is dead at the hands of a Nazi, he tells us at National Review (where another front-page story tells us, "Whatever the campus mob wants, the campus mob gets"), that "America is at a dangerous crossroads."

David French can go fuck himself. The guy who shot Steve Scalise was a lone nut wandering the world with a gun, not remotely typical of liberals and denounced immediately and unequivocally by the man he claimed to follow; Heather Heyer was killed by a member of a real mob that goes around invading college campuses to wreak havoc on college kids because guys like French told them there was a war on.

Fuck Erick Erickson too, who couldn't BothSides hard enough:

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. As the left-wing social justice warriors have created mobs across America intent on destroying lives for daring to engage in wrong-think, an equal and opposite white supremacist movement has risen up. Both would silence the other side for wrong-think. Both work at the extremes of American politics.

He blames Heyer's death on "the planned white supremacists rally that turned into a day of violent clashes" -- on an event -- no, not even an event, the sequelae of an event, not on her actual assailant. Things just got out of hand! Also, Erickson predicts "the reaction of the social justice warriors will be equal to what is on display in Charlottesville, which in turn will force another reaction from these boys." What the neo-Nazis did was terrible, but no worse than what the other side is going to do in my paranoid fantasy!

The actual neo-Nazis are almost comically inept at defending themselves. Here's far-right nutjob Angelo John Gage, described as "Marine Veteran Angelo John Gage" by Truthfeed, in a video admitting the Unite the Right rally brought in “kooks,” but also some people he didn’t think were kooks — like indentitarians (Spoiler: They're white nationalist kooks), whom “I agree with,” said Gage, because they’re “simply people who believe that everyone has an identity that’s worth protecting. If you don’t believe that, then you think certain identities don’t have a right to exist and therefore you’re a supremacist and you’re a bigot…” Gage then blamed the violence on the neo-Nazis being “stripped of their First Amendment rights" and the local government, which “failed to protect United States citizens which led to fatalities..."

This Big Gummint is the Real Killer excuse is spreading among the nut fringe, and any normal person will probably see though it and treat it with the contempt it deserves. But many of them will look at French's and Erickson's moderation act and take it at face value, and in due time they'll go back to talking about how SJWs -- not neo-Nazis, and certainly not the safety-net-slashing GOP nor the bought-off id-monster in the White House and his crackpot enablers -- are America's greatest threat.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

She had a syndicated afternoon talk show back in the day.
I bet her life's a story.

• Look, I told you guys already, I need more paying customers, not the Love of the People -- I'm like the Democratic Party in election season, except I actually deliver! So there's just one (1) free Roy Edroso Breaks It Down issue this week. Admittedly, it's a good one about a signal feature of the Dobbs blight: vicious scumbags pretending to be nice in the (I think) mistaken belief that if they talk about how much they love mommies and babies, you'll miss that they're stealing your rights. 

Of course increasingly these people aren't even bothering to pretend, as Akiva Cohen caught this morning in a Josh Hammer column:

Hammer later stealth-edited the quiet-part-out-loud about rewarding friends and punishing enemies, but it's still clear what his idea of justice is. One of my favorite targets, ham-faced pundit Erick Erickson, is too stupid to conceal or retract his similar views:

Those of you who are screaming about the Supreme Court this week can, in your words, check your privilege.

(Note the traditional portrayal of liberals "screaming," an old conservative NLP trick, and the use of "check your privilege" as Babylon Bee-grade humor. Also Erickson titles this page "Best Pride Month Ever" for added prickishness, a trait to which outspoken Christians are generally inclined.)

Conservatives have spent over fifty years watching the Supreme Court give you everything you demanded, including a novel right to kill children unheard of in American jurisprudence until 1973. When those of us on the right operated through the nation’s democratic and republican institutions and the elected bodies of our nation, we saw the Supreme Court repeatedly snatch those wins away from us for you...

You people have been able to rub your SCOTUS genie and get court imposed wins that no one could challenge democratically and now you can’t do that anymore. We’ve worked democratically to make sure of it. Now, to win again, you’re going to have to do what we did — change hearts and minds in places as varied as Alabama and Iowa. Why? Because we are a republic and states matter, not just people. We have fifty states and 350 million people. Your coalitions of angry rich white people on MSNBC won’t work anymore.

Set aside the claim that what this Court has produced comes of conservatives "working democratically" -- which is rich because half of the rogue Justices were appointed by a president who lost the popular vote, and the whole conservative bloc's decisions are highly unpopular in general and in the particular with Americans. "Coalitions of angry rich white people on MSNBC" didn't produce the eight million vote majority Biden won in 2020. (It's amazing what some people will write when they think nobody with any brains will read it.)

But Erickson's main idea, if we can so dignify it, is that liberals got what they wanted for a while and now conservatives should get a turn. This is worse in a way than his fraudulent claim of popular support -- though it also relies on that lie -- because like Josh Hammer thesis it's purely instrumental and anti-democratic, and assumes that the bauble of power is what's important rather than the will and welfare of the people.

I would also say that the Warren-Rehnquist Court decisions conservatives hate mostly furthered unacknowledged rights -- those of arrestees, prisoners, women, LGBTQ people -- while the Roberts But Really Thomas Court decisions are about taking these rights away and then some.  Though abortion rights as such are the big cause and I don't doubt the disapproving majority thinks "put it back, thief" (further polling suggests so), I think the extreme high-handedness of the Court is something of which normal people will also take notice and disapprove. At least I hope so, and that they get the chance to show their disapproval before the Court delivers the coup de grace to democracy with Moore v. Harper. 

A SOUNDING BRASS AND A TINKLING CYMBAL.

Remember when National Review did that NeverTrump thing and they included Erick Erickson, which was weird because he admitted straight up "I would vote for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton," but he said some bad things about Trump and was wingnut-famous so okay? At his own site The Resurgent, Erickson now has video of himself talking to some fellow Christians about Trump. In the accompanying text Erickson tells readers,

My position is that if you want to vote for Trump, go for it. But Christians should not be actively, publicly supporting Trump.

In the video, he says:

I do think Christians in America, particularly those of us who have platforms, should not be supporting Donald Trump openly, because I think it’s harmful to our witness... 

If we are in the public square advocating for someone like that, what good are we as Christians to say we believe in the inerrancy of scripture?

Now, me, I look at this and think: So you don't want to be associated with Trump, because it doesn't look good, but you're cool with Trumping on the down-low, and possibly putting your fellow countrymen at the mercy of this yutz? And people wonder why their Jesus Fish bumper stickers aren't getting them so much respect anymore.

I'll leave the rest to djw at LGM, who looks upon that other prominent rightwing Christer Rod Dreher -- who denounced Pope Francis for an attitude toward refugees that, back before the faith got overrun by Ericksons and Drehers, was considered Christian -- and saith the sooth:

As you let that sink in, keep in mind two things. First, this statement is written by a man who has spent much of the last several years trying very hard to convince anyone who’ll listen that it’s contemporary liberals who’ve become an unprecedented threat to religious freedom. Second, as recently as just a few months ago Dreher routinely expressed horror and dismay at the rise of Trump, and what that rise meant for conservatism, and how evangelical acquiescence to Trumpism was evidence of a deep sickness in American Christianity and the Conservative movement. Watching Dreher, predictably, come home, it occurs to me that perhaps Trumpism is best understood not so much a betrayal or failure of politicized evangelicalism, but a return to its 1970’s roots.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

 

Robert Christgau informed me these guys are still at it! 

 Time has been kind.

•   Republicans are so accustomed to minority rule, and so encouraged by their conspiracy-addled looney fringe (and by the customary feebleness of Democratic resistance) to believe it can never be broken, that even after they lost a presidential election by seven million votes and were disgraced by their leader's attempt to overthrow the government they can't acknowledge that they fucked up. For example: Now that the world is seeing more of QAnon Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene's loony beliefs, ham-faced pundit Erick Erickson tells his Twitter followers it's the fault of poor Republican opposition research during the primaries:

Can't be that voters in a district where Erickson and others have been vomiting rightwing poison on the radiio for years found a far-right conspiracy theorist palatable -- nah! They just didn't know what QAnon was, maybe they thought it was like a Sesame Street spelling thing or a brand of athletic shoe. At this rate I expect Vermin Supreme to cross over -- except he's probably too benign for this bunch.

•   Meanwhile the awful Salena Zito has one of her usual Republican sources explain that Trump was really not so bad -- why, Trump and Obama were practically the same:

[Tom] Maraffa says that both Obama and former President Donald Trump were equally divisive — Obama was just more elegant in his delivery. The reporters who covered him missed it because they shared his cultural values.

What cultural values does he mean? Gay marriage, apparently:

"Lighting the White House up with rainbow colors — in a way, that was just sticking a thumb in the eyes of people who disagreed rather than using it as a moment to say the Supreme Court's made its decision, we don't all agree, but this is the law, and we have to move forward together" [Maraffa says].

By celebrating gay marriage Obama was being mean to people who hate gays -- just like Biden is being mean to people who show their patriotism by storming the Capitol. Oh, and Obama gets a pass because he's black: "These reporters and Democrats instantly viewed people who did not like Obama as racists because what else could it be?" 

Then Maraffa and Zito blubber over how what's wanted is "unity" and the Democrats have to meet the gay marriage opponents halfway. Thing is, polls show 70% of Americans approve of gay marriage. And I'll bet if you made a Venn diagram of the 30% who dispprove of gay marriage and the 39% who still approve of Trump, the overlap would be nearly complete. So tell me: Why should we meet these people halfway when they're nowhere near half the people?  

•   Seriously, though, this shit goes on and on and the mainstream aka "liberal" media do nothing but enable it.  The New York Times has extended its Cletus safaris into the post-Trump era -- once they were all "Let these simple souls tell us why they gave Trump an almost-majority of the votes" and now they're all "Let these simple souls tell us why it's mean to hold Trump to account for sending lunatics to murder Congress." Axios invites Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro to predict/threaten mayhem ("'Not a sustainable moment,' Carlson added. 'Something will break'").

And the Washington Post has former GOP Majority Leader Eric Cantor in to decry what his successors are doing to the country -- but adding (I assume this was part of the deal) a bothsider bit: sure, Republicans are spreading conspiracy theories to dangerously derange our politics but whatabout The Squad -- 

And to my Democratic friends who think this is a Republican problem, I say be careful. The same pattern is already unfolding on your side as progressive activists — joined by elected officeholders, including Reps. Pramila Jayapal (Wash.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) and “the Squad,” with aspirations of higher office — tell tales of what Democrats could accomplish if only they were willing to fight and use their power.

By "fight and use their power," they mean "vote for things their constituents want," which is pretty much the same thing as sending one's goons to kill Mike Pence -- it's a form of electoral insurrection against Republican rule, without which there can be no true civility! 

Well, we always knew we couldn't count of these idiots to save us. Put your faith in Roy Edroso Break It Down instead -- one of the only Substack newsletters that's not about how its proprietor has been cancelcultured! We have a couple freebies up from this week: A Twitter beef between two Republican up-and-comers, and the real readout from Kevin McCarthy's visit to Mar-a-Lago. Enjoy, and then subscribe (cheap!).