ANOTHER CULTURE WAR CASUALTY.

Remember that "Intellectual Case for Trump" made by Mytheos Holt at The Federalist a few weeks back? If you saw it, surely if nothing else Holt's tale of how he turned out a racist chick when she let him "probe her ideology" stays seared in your brain. Did you know that was only Part One? Yeah, I blocked that out too, but Part Two has arrived and it's even stupider. A lot of it is about how liberals got bored with free speech and now they're Hitler -- but God help us, Holt also has a Culture War angle:

For decades, the institutional Right has ceded American culture to the Left, in spite of many voices who pointed out ample areas where the Right could carve out a countercultural movement against leftist domination, or even co-opt some of modern culture for itself.

Not sure what "voices" have advocated a "countercultural movement" as Holt provides no link -- but the voices urging conservatives to "co-opt some of modern culture for itself" we have heard; they're the guys who write articles like "How Star Trek Explains The Decline Of Liberalism" in rightwing rags, and who come up with concepts like "South Park Republicans" to make their sponsors feel au courant.

Holt is true to the template -- he even devotes a paragraph to a South Park episode recap! -- and tells us that the problem with conservatism is that it has become infested with "young fogeys" who are no fun at all, which is why all the cool conservatives are flocking to Trump: "Trump is many things, but a fogie he is not." Trump makes liberals mad, see, just like us cool dudes make our parents mad; he's "taking his cues from his time as a pro-wrestling heel personality," and when all those WWE fans get old enough to vote they'll vote for him, or maybe for Triple H -- he's pretty awesome too.

Eventually Holt gets to the inevitable "choc-o-muts ice creams is conservative" list:

The Right doesn’t have to conjure up its own art from scratch. It can and occasionally has co-opted modern entertainment as well. After all, don’t films like Christopher Nolan’s “Batman” series make the most powerful statement about the tension between chaos and civilization since John Ford? Don’t Nietzschean fairy tales like “Breaking Bad,” “House of Cards,” or even “True Detective,” not to mention most video games, utterly brush aside the Left’s fantasies about Rousseauistic, universal human goodness?

Boring a girl at a party with a rant about how your favorite TV show means Social Security sux is the revolution, comrade -- I mean bro!

These people are always going on about Saul Alinsky -- and The Frankfurt School and the Long March Through The Institutions and all those other wingnut equivalents of the Illuminati -- so naturally they think culture is not something to make, or even to appreciate and enjoy, but something to "co-opt."

UPDATE. Sorry, I can't leave out this bit from Holt's essay about Bill Clinton yelling at the Black Lives Matter guys and how it shows liberals went fascist:

In this, they break from the past in many respects. Bill Clinton himself revealed how significant this shift was when he challenged Black Lives Matter. Clinton was advancing a policy argument in defense of his approach to crime in the 1990s, in the face of protesters who would hear none of it. His arguments were based on the facts, where the BLM protesters’ signs were based on the equivalent of brand loyalty to a cultural movement. No matter how correct Clinton’s case was, it inevitably fell on deaf ears.

No, you read that right: he's really saying BLM's protest signs lost an argument with Bill Clinton. I'd say the signs were at a serious disadvantage; maybe they should have used dry-erase to reduce response time.

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?)

A RINGER. I'm pretty sure this item at Big Government by one "Mytheos Holt" is a parody that got past the irony-deficient staff there. Holt posits that "the current youth ethos embodied by internet subculture is fundamentally conservative in character, even if its denizens have not yet caught on to that fact," and believes this will become apparently as die Kinder start attacking liberals with.... parody websites and 4chan.

...even if you accept the framing of such sites as hotbeds of craziness and rabid disorder, there is a method to their madness. As for what that madness is, once you get past the persistent ironic glorifications of perversity and take a look at how the people who frequent these sites actually behave, and more importantly, who they target, it becomes abundantly clear that not only are the values of such sites fundamentally conservative, but that their communications strategies, even if toned down for a mainstream audience, are nothing less than the perfect weapons for disassembling the Obama Presidency...

While one can disapprove of the tactics used against these institutions/individuals (some of which make the much vilified “enhanced interrogation techniques” look positively benign by comparison), it is worth noting that ultimately, the power of internet goons lies in their ability to enforce social norms against the most flagrantly vile members of society through private sanction – something which conservatives from Russell Kirk and Irving Kristol to Tom Coburn and Dick Cheney have endorsed.

A blazing tell: He refers with approval to the fanciful South Park Conservative craze. From the comments, he seems to have put it over. Unmask, young Holt, and take credit! You needn't keep the game up merely to encourage them to embarrass themselves; nothing can stop them from keeping it up.

UPDATE. Commenters include people who've been following Holt's career awhile and will attest that he does indeed believe crap like this. Damn! I thought I'd found a great parodist, and ended up with merely another in an endless series of raving lunatics.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

My favorite version. (Explanation.)

•   Maybe you saw that story about a drone with a gun on it, and maybe you didn't think that was awesome because you're not 12 or a conservative. But Hot Air's Taylor Millard negs to differ:

Government, others freak after CT teen makes cool flying gun 

The government and others are going nuts over a Connecticut teen’s pretty cool invention: a drone with a gun. Austin Haughwout posted YouTube video on July 10th, showing the drone firing a semiautomatic handgun. 

Cue government outrage. Clinton police are up in arms (pun intended) over Haughwout’s invention, with one officer saying it’s obvious technology is surpassing legislation. They’re now actively trying to figure out if they can charge the teen, even though the gun was fired on private property...

The ACLU of Connecticut, the organization that claims to want the government to stop using drones in surveillance, is now calling on the government to push through comprehensive regulations for drones.

They don't want freelance assassins or the government to shoot people by remote control -- What a bunch of hypocrites!

People need to remember drones are amoral tools. They can all be used for good or evil, depending on how the person operating said tool acts. South Park had a pretty good episode on drones last year....

Yeah, we could stop paying attention right there, but it's Friday, let's give him a minute:

Those wanting to seriously regulate drones, armed or not, are forgetting how they can be used for good. Ranchers can use them to patrol their fields. Hunters could use them on tough to find predators. People who prefer not to go outside at night could use an armed drone to detect prowlers.

Hi, our car broke down, is anybody BLAM!

Plus, there’s always the simplest solution: take a shotgun to the offending drone. Problem solved.

This is what their ideal world looks like: Everyone tiptoeing around locked and loaded, like Elmer Fudd in search of Bugs Bunny. Only with lots of blood.

•   Oh yeah, Mytheos Holt:

At the time, my thesis was mocked by liberals, some of whom even thought the article might have been a stealth parody. After Pao’s resignation [from Reddit], I expect these people don’t think this idea is quite so funny.

On the contrary! I mentioned last week the idea that a website owner controlling the content on his own site equals censorship is ridiculous, and it remains so. Holt also says the "Left hates Internet freedom," in defense of which proposition he expands the definition of the Left to include the U.S. Department of Justice and major movie studios, and portrays Gamergate, that rat's nest of harassment and crap writing, as proof that conservatives love internet freedom. (Remember when The Well was the poster child for the power of internet freedom? Sigh, me too. And I don't recall the members driving anyone out of her home, either.) I hope Holt can promote this POV sufficiently that some Republican debate moderator has to make Jeb Bush prove his right-wing bona fides by agreeing Anita Sakeesian had it coming. In closing, here's my favorite paragraph:

Even social conservatives have changed from being smugly self-assured about their own “Silent Majority”-style dominance to an embattled approach personified by Rod Dreher’s “Benedict Option,” while blatantly anti-political correctness neoreactionaries like Pax Dickinson and Curtis Yarvin are being cast less as cranks and more like brave, countercultural heroes. One can quarrel with the wisdom of this iconoclastic turn, but no one would ever accuse today’s Right of being defined by its reverence for established pieties.

That'll light a prairie fire, alright. The people will march, just as soon as you explain to them what the hell you're talking about.

YOUR MOMENT OF GOLDSTEIN.

How's the left oppressing patriots today? With video games!  Here's an NPR story:

Back in 2007, in the first installment of BioShock, Levine created a world based on Ayn Rand's individualist philosophy and let it play out. This time, Levine has turned a game into an Aristotelian tragedy and used the model of great tragic heroes.

I couldn't give a shit about video games, but apparently at some point the Bad Guys in this one are revealed to be racists, which prompts this arrgh-blaargh from The Virginian:

NPR broadcast an article today about a developer of a violent video game in which the bad guys were Christians who revered the Constitution and were blatant racists. Of course with a theme like that it's obviously comparable to one of the great tragedies of literature... 

To NPR this is just like Hamlet or Oedipus. This is an NPR employee's dream of all that's wrong with America; America's founders, the religious heritage, and,of course the racism of everyone who's not part of the NPR family.

Like I said, I don't care about gaming and the NPR story doesn't mention it, but are the Founding Fathers really in BioShock Infinite? Because that would great to use in history classes. It speaks to the kids!

But The Virginian's a piker -- the aargh ain't blaarghy till Jeff Goldstein gets at it:

It’s out in the open now. There’s no longer any real pretense of objectivity. Each time the progressive media “report” favorably on something they characterize like this (fairly or not) — and no switch comes down to sting their hands — they grow ever more emboldened... 

They are the ones they’ve been waiting for, they were told. And it invigorates them. It gives them a sense of purpose and momentum. Because through the heart of every leftist runs the blood of totalitarianism, of confirmation bias, of rank bigotry and a mob’s lust for violence, for punishment, for blood, for inflicting suffering on those who dare oppose their designs...

Gasp! Not confirmation bias!

I don’t care who rolls their fucking eyes at my saying this. Circumstances have taught me that in several years, when the political winds allow them to do so, those very same people on “my” side will be saying the very same things I’m writing on now, pretending there wasn’t a time they rolled their fucking eyes at the True Believers, the embarrassing Hobbits who were preventing them from wooing the moderates.

To paraphrase LBJ's analogy, he's outside the tent, pissing himself.

I eagerly await Bill Whittle's take.

UPDATE. This story seems to have been covered previously by Big Breitbart and by Mytheos Holt, whose culture war training has got him thinking correctly about how to cover a game stoners play when they're bored:

Naturally, the creators denied any intent to specifically attack Rand, arguing instead that their general intent was to criticize extremism of all stripes. And considering that the first game treats Andrew Ryan (who isn’t even the main villain of the original Bioshock) with far more sympathy than it treats the all-but-explicitly communist villain of Bioshock 2, Sofia Lamb, who willingly traumatizes her own daughter and leaves a trail of corpses behind her in her pursuit of a utopian society, one could argue that the series had been comparatively right-leaning up until Infinite.

After much study of the struggle of competing Tendencies in this video game series ("In other words, the Leftist mass movement could come off mildly more sympathetic, though not much"), Holt finally feels he can answer the question, "Was the game created by Marxists/atheists?"  The answer may surprise you!

Coming soon: Which pornographic Tumblrs are consonant with free enterprise? (Trick question! Only pay sites embody the robot Founders' vision.)

UPDATE 2. Commenter Gromet informs us that "Breakout was the last truly God-fearing and patriotic game" because "your job was to destroy a band of rainbow colors." Wait, what about the Hunger Games?

MINOR OFFENSE. Wingnuts love their child prodigies. (Easy to program, and they have no trouble internalizing the philosophy, having learned all about it in their anal stage of development.)

Richard Brookhiser was 15 when he started at the National Review; Kyle Williams was 13 when he was enlisted by World Net Daily. And anyone recall the name of that little kid who wrote a book about virtue or something six or seven years ago, and was briefly their teen heartthrob?

Their most recent child star, 13-year-old Jonathan Krohn, was a hit at the last CPAC, but he hasn't been getting much ink lately -- at least, not the right kind -- so apparently someone at American Thinker thought it was time to roll out a new conservakid.

Behold:

My name is Sam Besserman, I'm eleven years old, I live in Beverly Hills, California, and ever since I can remember I have been subjected to political bias in school.

It's a dream come true -- only 11, and already he's learned his Conservative Victimization Tables!

The first time I noticed the bias was actually in preschool [italics his - ed.] where the teacher was reading a book about the importance of mothers and the inferiority of fathers. I tried to tell the teacher that dads might be just as important. The teacher responded in a sing-song, "No, listen to me, I'm the teacher."

Goddamn liberal bitches, always infantilizing our pre-schoolers!

The whole thing's like that, all commie thought police and suspiciously big words:

At Beverly Vista, my first teacher was a full-time misandrist and global warming wacko.

Some of you may suspect a hoax -- either because the kid's too young (especially for the Feminazi stuff, which usually doesn't hit conservatives until their first prostatitis episode), or because it sounds like a parody. Don't underestimate these people. I thought Mytheos Holt, who proposed at Big Hollywood that the brethren bring down Obama with parody websites and 4chan, was some kind of joke, but commenters proved him a true specimen.

If Besserman's a fake, the American Thinker commenters certainly haven't caught on. Remember: Just because they're increasingly ridiculous doesn't mean they're not serious.

(Thanks to Nancy Nall for the tip.)

UPDATE. Holy shit, R. Porrofatto found a video! Young Besserman appears on camera, but he doesn't use any big words. (Who'd like to see the outtakes video?) He does report that the bullies all yelled "Global warming is real" at him. Bullies sure have changed since I was a kid; maybe in Bev Hills they all get subscriptions to The Nation for their tenth birthday.

THE REPUBLICAN IDEA OF FREE SPEECH.

Tucker Carlson has been laying the white supremacy on pretty thick lately, focusing on Rep. Ilhan Omar, offering her as proof that "the way we practice immigration has become dangerous to this country" (i.e., we let in too many darkskins). Even weirder, Carlson got some other creep on his show to pull the old You're the Real Racist bit, claiming that "if she wasn’t a member of Congress, [Omar] would be a member of the KKK."

This is, as we know, based on the aging slur spread by shitheels both low- and high-status, that Omar's opposition to the lobbying group AIPAC is anti-Semitic. Or rather I should say it's not based on it but excused by it, because what obviously animates these guys is not any policy thing (let alone philo-Semitism) but that Omar is -- like their other recent hate-objects such as AOC and Rashida Tlaib, and their more longterm hate objects like Maxine Waters and Frederica Wilson -- an elected female Democrat with some added streak of "otherness" that makes her extra-triggering to conservatives (I almost wrote "of a certain kind" but come on, are there any other kind anymore?).

They'll swear to you that they're not racist, and I do believe they would love to have a reactionary former Muslim like Ayaan Hirsi Ali in Congress on their side. But let's face it, they can't get even Red State voters to go for such people; South Carolina may send a traditional black Republican like Tim Scott to Washington (and Scott has been very careful not to get too exotically rightwing), but the kind of minority conservatives who are up-and-coming now are simply too crazy to overcome those voters' natural racism. Look at my-people-suck characters like Candace Owens -- Johnny Reb might applaud her as Not Like The Others, but would he phone-bank or canvass for her?

I don't think so, but maybe that'll change over time as the conservative movement promotes more overt psychos, and thereby makes the whole movement more psycho. You may have noticed that the Claremont Institute, one of those piss-elegant rightwing think tanks like Peterson or AEI, just gave fellowships to some folks who would, in a simpler time, be instead remanded to mental health treatment facilities, including Mytheos Holt, a longtime rightwing journalistic grifter, and Jack Posobiec, a full-on Pizzagate crackpot.

And of course there was Trump's crazy alt-media summit at the White House this week, at which conspiracy theorists like Mark Dice and vapid fameballs like Joy Vila were invited and offered as a superior alternative to the "fake news" media that practices the dark arts of interviewing, research, and fact-checking. (Remember when conservatives talked about improving the skillset of their journalistic outfits to match those of the MSM? You don't hear much of that anymore.)

At the event the President made some stupid and frankly fascist comments about what and what does not constitute free speech in the banana republic of his dreams. While it apparently does not include any criticism of himself ("To me, free speech is not when you see something good and then you purposely write bad"), it does include what the nuts he invited were peddling -- and by the way, their speech is, despite appearances, endangered because some social media companies block users for violating their terms of service, for which those companies may get hit with legislation to force them to carry it because that's how conservatism works, now. This sounds extra obnoxious coming from the Trump but is pretty close to the beliefs of more manicured Republicans like Senator Josh Hawley.

Maybe in the end, like so much else coming from this White House, who gets rights previously thought to be universal really comes down to whether conservatives can easily identify the person claiming rights as one of their own. Here's an example: In an incident at a Denny's in Michigan from last October that was only recently revealed, a bunch of bikers called a party of female black diners by familiar and unambiguous racial slurs, and it is alleged that, rather than ask the slur-slingers to leave, the manager, Patrick Fort,

allegedly responded, “'No, I cannot ask them to leave. It’s a freedom of speech.' When [one of the black women] returned to her table, the manager followed her and, in earshot of the bikers, continued to lecture her about their free speech rights."

The social media summit must have Trump really feeling the vibe, because today he too jumped on Ilhan Omar: "If one-half of the things they're saying about her are true," he said, "she shouldn't even be in office." As whether he means the voters shouldn't have elected her, or whether he means it doesn't matter what they thought, we cannot, as with so many of his burbles, be entirely sure; but we can make an educated guess.