THE PROUD CONSERVATIVE INTELLECTUAL TRADITION.

Dinesh D'Souza, perhaps stung by the cruel things Ross Douthat said about him last weekend, has rushed his latest historical breakthrough to publication via the prestigious academic journal WorldNetDaily:

THE SEX PERVERT AS ANTI-FASCIST
Exclusive: Dinesh D'Souza explains how Nazis were anything but 'conservative'

Yes, it's all about how the Nazis have to be liberal because they couldn't be conservative because like liberals the Nazis were artistic and sexed up. Sample:

While the rutting bohemians of the 1960s had no idea, [Herbert] Marcuse surely knew that the Nazis and the Italian fascists were themselves – almost to a man – bohemians. Hitler himself was a painter and artiste before he went into politics. He was obsessed with music and regularly attended the Bayreuth Festival; Wagner’s music, Hitler said, reflected the triumph of art over life.

He painted and listened to Wagner, see, while conservatives think representations of the human form are of the Devil, and only listen to Toby Keith. Oh, and:

He was also a vegetarian.

Well, that settles it!

Hitler had a secret mistress, Eva Braun, whom he only married the day before the two of them committed suicide. In their case, “till death do us part” was literally a matter of hours.

Whereas conservatives wait till they're caught cheating on their wives to marry their mistresses.

Further down, D'Souza explains that the Night of the Long Knives proves Nazis were liberal because the Brownshirts were homosexuals, and gives us a comparison for the ages:

When Hitler’s men opened Rohm’s door the Brownshirt leader feigned a very casual attitude. Hitler simply told him, “You’re under arrest.” One by one, doors opened and Brownshirt couples came streaming out, in various stages of undress. This was the Nazi atmosphere in those days, and it far more closely resembles that of the Village Voice or the Democratic National Convention than it does the National Review or the Trump White House.

It's been a while since I've been to the Voice offices so who knows, but I watched the Democratic National Convention on TV and didn't see anything like what D'Souza describes; maybe that was at the afterparty. But I should think the part of the Night of the Liberal Knives where Hitlery Clinton had all the gay brownshirts murdered would have been in the papers.

All told, if this doesn't convince you Kamala Harris is more like the Nazis than the xenophbic lunatic Nazi-defender who runs the country, I don't know what will.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about Hurricane Harvey and the political uses to which the brethren seek to put it. One expects this, of course -- liberals have their own angles on it (and very good ones they are too!). But conservatives don't have much to work with here, particularly from an anti-Big-Gummint perspective, and so fall back on the traditional hatred of sissy liberals. I was surprised not to find a Harvey-related defense of Confederate statutes, but maybe that's on the way.

UPDATE. One of the things I couldn't squeeze into the five-pound bag was the wingnut reaction to the widespread puzzlement at the stiletto heels Mrs. Trump wore to what was portrayed as a disaster mission. I am assuming her footwear choice was designed for pissing off liberals, since that is one of the four animating principles of this administration (the other three being looting the treasury, persecuting the underprivileged, and exalting the dark lord Satan), but the payoff in the rightwing press has been frankly subpar. The Blaze made a typical apples-and-oranges error with "While mainstream media scorn Melania’s shoes they’re drooling over Michelle Obama’s skirt"; a legitimate equivalent would be if Mrs. Obama had been photographed holding that "Bring Back Our Girls" sign while wearing a Chance The Rapper hat sideways. And deposed Gruppenführer Sebastian Gorka's tweet was just embarrassing. But the worst was a poetic effort at American Greatness by one Joe Long that puts the "dog" back in doggerel. It begins thus:

So you recall the previous FLOTUS?
Whene’er her biceps she showed us,
How the media gushed and cooed –
Worshipful, their attitude.

Brrr. Brings back nightmare memories of W.H. von Dreele.

ISN'T IT PRETTY TO FINK SO?

[NB: If you're looking for the weekly Voice column, I think it will be out Tuesday -- though, given the flux state, I can't guarantee anything.]

The full-throated lunacy of many of my subjects can be entertaining, but these days the people who bother me most are the apparatchiks who portray themselves as reasonable difference-splitters. In punditry as in real life, there's always something up with these guys. Take Ross Douthat (well, this week anyway -- he's shown himself as capable of lunacy as any of the rest of them).

In his recent column Douthat tells us about two conservative authors of whom he disapproves. One of these is Jeff Flake, whose NeverTrumpism would of course embarrass a conservative establishment figure like Douthat who cannot bring himself to go so far as to anathematize the man who may yet turn the Supreme Court into a religious tribal council (though Douthat does occasionally hit Trump with some zingers, just to show that he's an intellectual). Flake's approach Douthat dismisses as a loser "because purist libertarianism plus supply-side economics is not a winner in the current crisis."

But Douthat also treats Dinesh D'Souza, and at first you might be surprised by how he slams the former wingnut boy wonder -- calling his new The Big Lie book about how liberals are HitlerStalin “demagogy” and D’Souza’s "latest plea for attention.” But this is all a bluff, and the first hint comes when Douthat says "D’Souza has become a hack." When was he not a hack? When he was doing stupid look-how-unPC stunts at Dartmouth? When was blaming 9/11 on liberals for provoking Al Qaeda? D'Souza has always been a piece of shit.

This turns out to be a squirt of lube to grease the way for Douthat's real D'Souza howler, which comes in the form of a rhetorical concession:

Because D’Souza has a debater’s gifts, his wild argument is piled atop a legitimate foundation. The historical relationship between progressive politics and various evils — racism, anti-Semitism, imperialism, eugenics, authoritarianism — that liberals prefer to pin exclusively on the right is complicated and sometimes damning, and that ideological history shapes progressivism still.

So tendentious readings of Margaret Sanger are something liberals should engage instead of trying to keep the Jesus Zombies from stealing women's rights. Also, "that ideological history shapes progressivism still"? What the fuck does that mean? That if Bernie Sanders becomes president, he'll institute new Palmer Raids because people like him just can't help themselves? Douthat's basically saying D'Souza's "demagogy" is right -- at least when you say it New York Times style.

Also, while Douthat thinks Flake's sober theme is a loser, he says if conservatives "follow D’Souza’s lead (and Trump’s, now that his populist agenda seems all-but-dead) and wrap unpopular economic policies in wild attacks on liberalism," they hit the jackpot:

With this combination, the Republican Party can win elections, at least for now — not because most Americans can be persuaded that liberals are literally Nazis, but because liberalism’s intolerant and utopian tendencies make people fear the prospect of granting progressives political power to match their cultural hegemony.

I'm sure even Douthat's better-manicured readers will have stopped listening closely after "can win elections" -- because that is all conservatism is about anymore: cheerfully watching Trump use conservative policy (the only kind he has actually tried to effect, remember) to wreck the social structure of America, and going "oh dear dear dear" afterwards to show how much nicer than him they are. Oh, and Douthat adds this:

Winning this way is a purely negative achievement for the right, a recipe for failed governance extending years ahead.

If he'd ever shown signs of a sense of humor, I say this was a joke. Trump's goon squads don't care about the years ahead. After him, the Even More Savage God! As for Douthat, I'm sure he expects to have been raptured into the arms of the Lord by the time this all goes down.

So, to recap, both the NeverTrump idealist and the sensationalist grifter are wrong, but Douthat has money on the half that eats.

SORRY, HILLBILLY HEROIN ADDICTS, CONSERVATIVES ARE MOVING ON.

Remember how hillbilly OxyContin addicts and the lack of attention we callous urban sophisticates devoted to them was one of the big This Is Why Trump Won talking points? It brought all the White Working Class Whisperers to the yard. Recall the post-election Business Insider story called "The revenge of the 'Oxy electorate' helped fuel Trump's election upset" that quoted major WWCW Chris Arnade: "'Wherever I saw strong addiction and strong drug use,' Arnade told Business Insider, he saw support for Trump." "People are literally dying," a "rural sociologist" told Business Insider. "There was such a sense of hopelessness that it makes sense they would vote for massive change."

Arnade's fellow WWCW Salena Zito also chided sissy latte drinking urbanites underconcerned with their rural junkie brethren: "If rural America continues to diminish, all of America will diminish," she wept, "because the countryside is as much a part of American’s identity as New York City’s skyscrapers and Silicon Valley’s sprawling technology campuses." Her solution? Not "subsidies from Washington... they just neutralize that rugged, self-reliant, innovative rural spirit." These proud hayseeds don't want no socialist charity! Zito instead suggested somebody (she never said who -- couldn't be Big Gummint, that's for sure!) "provide incentives that attract entrepreneurs back to invest in their former hometowns..." You know, much in the manner Hillbilly Elegy WWCW J.D. Vance, another longtime weeper over the Trump voters' opioid habits ("Folks aren't going to church, their kids are addicted to drugs"), was lured back to the dinky little hometown about which he complained so profitably in his book -- well, not there exactly, but to hipster burg Columbus, from which maybe he'll take his dogs "Pippin and Casper" out to the boonies for a walk every once in a while.

So up till this week I was still of the impression that liberals were supposed to feel ashamed that our lack of sympathy for the poor, drug-addicted common clay in Oatmeal, Nebraska had driven them into the arms of Trump. But the situation seems to be shifting: Now the opioid problem is not really such a big deal, and to the extent that it is, it's the fault of Obamacare.

Lo, here is Jeffrey Singer at TownHall to command us "Stop the Hysterical Rhetoric About the Opioid Crisis." Singer, who you can see sometimes at libertarian flagship Reason arguing against mandatory vaccination ("Forcibly injecting substances -- attenuated microbes or otherwise -- into someone else's body cannot be justified as an act of self-defense"), tells us here that while "deaths from opioid overdose have been steadily increasing," the majority of those victims "are not patients receiving opioids for pain." Hence they're criminal outliers, hence why should we care -- like all those black people who get shot by cops, it's their own fault.

Or is it? In another recent Singer column, this one at the Cato Institute, he asks, "Is Obamacare Fueling the Opioid Overdose Death Rate?" It's kind of Rube Goldberg reasoning so bear with me: the government does risk adjustment for policies on ACA beneficiaries who aren't cost effective (much as it also does on Medicare Advantage beneficiaries), so "the program systematically underpays," causing insurers to provide as little coverage as they can get away with (a problem for which there is no solution, especially not one called Single Payer) and, finally, worse treatment for addicts, hence death.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) also believes the opioid curse is the fault of Obamacare. “Medicaid expansion may be fueling the opioid epidemic in communities across the country," he claims. So, hillbilly heroin addicts, Trump will help you by overturning Obamacare -- which he hasn't managed to do yet, but that's because the sun was in his eyes -- and returning American to the old Pay or Die model, where some lucky people get Hazelden treatment for their addictions and the rest get Joe Clark bootstraps or an early grave.

Why's this happening now? I suspect it's this: though he's been lavishing monosyllabic praise on his herkimer-jerkimer supporters, with his policies Trump's actually been shitting on them -- his alleged big job "wins" at places like Carrier have turned out to be bullshit, and he's going to pay for their beloved Wall with their own tax dollars. And though he's been slinging boob bait as best he can,  cheering for Confederates and Nazis and yelling at the press, his poll numbers suggest even some of the gomers have ceased to buy it and are abandoning him.

So I believe Trump is cutting bait. His grand promises having come to naught, he's denying that they were ever needed in the first place -- if your sons and daughters are on drugs, that's Obama's fault, in any case don't come crying to me about it! He figures he can afford it -- he can always win them back by fanning some more racial flames -- or, if that fails, starting a war.

As for the White Working Class Whisperers, I predict they'll play along, especially since the alternative is finding a new shtick.

TRIGGERED.

Look up "free speech" at Chicks on the Right, and you'll find literally hundreds of stories, mostly about how campus leftists and SJWs are trying to suppress speech and speakers they find offensive ("Student government’s response? Free speech? That might hurt people’s FEEEEEEEEELINGS"). They are especially warm for the speech rights of controversial wingnuts such as Milo Yiannopoulos, as when he was deprived of his constitutionally protected access to Twitter by their "glorified speech police," and they are of course right on top of every conservative campus speech cause célèbre, such as Evergreen State ("But if you thought the Cult of Social Justice was going to stand for Weinstein’s blatant disregard for their precious snowflake FEEEEEEEELINGS, you thought wrong...").

Speaking of free speech and colleges, U of Tampa visiting professor Ken Storey was recently fired because he tweeted that Hurricane Harvey was "karma" for Texas voting Republican. Here's Chicks on the Right's account, which you won't find in the "free speech" section:

University Fires Professor Who Suggested That Harvey Was ‘Instant Karma’ For Texas Republicans 

All I can say about this is, “good”… 

It’s not often liberal professors get fired for their distasteful comments. Glad someone at the University of Tampa has some sense.

If you forget everything else about these people, never forget that they're totally full of shit. For them, free speech isn't a principle, it's just another tactic in their arsenal of victim poses.

THE MYTH OF PRESIDENT TRUMP.

One thing mainstream and conservative journalists seem to share is the curious idea that Trump is making a big mistake by "alienating" Congress.

The MSM pitch it as inside baseball for their cognoscenti readers, who will be titillated by the prospect of a Trump Administration collapse: "Conflict between Trump and Congress escalates as difficult agenda looms," harrumphs the Washington Post; "Trump Widens Rift With Congress as Critical Showdowns Loom," says The New York Times.

Conservatives are more likely to see it as threat to their agenda, since that is, ostensibly, what they and the outsider President share: "Trump will need Republican friends in Washington if Russia probe heats up," warns W. James Antle III at the Washington Examiner; "It’s All Fun and Games until Trump Gets Impeached," says Rich Lowry at National Review; "...the survival of his presidency will depend on the support of people within his own party who have come to hate his guts."

A few of the dumber conservatives, like Conrad "I'm rich, give me a column" Black and The Stupidest Man on the Internet, think Trump will roll over Congress because he is all-powerful. They're closer to the truth, but only accidentally and in a meaningless way. Trump is not going to lose to Congress because Trump is not in conflict with Congress. In fact, he's not on the same planet as Congress, or as nearly anyone else.

I don't mean that he's nuts. It's funny-sad that so many people talk about the mental problems they imagine the President has -- dementia, narcissistic personality disorder, what have you -- as if his behavior could only be explained by an illness. I've never approved of distance diagnosis of Presidents, and I haven't changed my mind.

By his own lights, Trump is behaving rationally. He knows people hate the Democrats -- and they hate the Republicans. Their specific reasons for hating each only interest him insofar as they direct his exploitation of each.

He shows his opposition to the Democrats by appealing to white voters' racism and uneducated voters' resentment of the professional class -- and by stirring the Democrats to show their opposition to him. He distances himself from the Republicans by publicly insulting them -- and by stirring their opposition as well, wimpy though it may be. (Whatever you think of Sheetcake Tina Fey, she's right about Paul Ryan and everyone knows it.)

That way, no matter whom the voter despises, there's a good chance he or she will remember that Trump despises them too and, if they're dumb enough, count it as a point in his favor.

What about blowback? The Democrats Trump doesn't have to worry about. The Republicans do have the power to harm him, but they're not idiots. His harsh words mean nothing to them. They just want their agenda passed.

So this Trump does lavishly: He supports every feature of the conservative agenda -- from tax breaks from the wealthy to persecution of the underprivileged -- and enables the looting of the federal government by Republican donors to an unprecedented degree.

As with his gross properties, he lays it on absurdly thick. Trump is not a traditional politician who horse-trades on a per-horse basis; he doesn't withhold some little bauble as a way of tempting his adversary to put up an equally modest bauble of his own. The ideal situation for most dealmakers is to come out ahead on a trade, but Trump's ideal to get something without paying for it. And he gets things without paying for them by giving the impression of endless largesse available to you if you play ball. He runs his White House grift like a luxury hotel. He keeps the goodies coming -- room service, dry cleaning, concierge perks, etc., all comped -- and leaves it to you to decide whether you want to risk having it all taken away.

Previous Presidents, no matter how scummy, were not capable of these innovations because, whatever their failings, they believed in governance and public service and merely sought to shake the machine enough to bring down some loose change without breaking it. Trump, on the other hand, doesn't give a shit whether he breaks it -- or about anything else. It's no skin off his ass; like his absurd Secret Service overcharges, it's someone else's money.

The reason is that, so far as he's concerned, he's not President. Oh, he has the title, and he famously tells everyone, ad infinitum, how stupendous his 2016 victory was. But he doesn't tell them that because he's proud of being President -- he doesn't care about that, no matter what armchair psychologists tell you about his ego (I mean, a psychologist, armchair or otherwise, is woefully insufficient to address his ego -- you would need a tragic poet). In his mind, Trump has always been something greater than President: He has been Donald Trump.

No, he tells them that because it's a way to extract fealty, or bribes, or to get the press to act as if he's President -- you know, like when Glenn Thrush says this hurricane represents for Trump a "Chance to Reclaim Power to Unify." Their willingness to play along -- that excites him, because it plays into his grift.

But the Presidency itself? He doesn't care. And I think his behavior become much easier to understand, and even less frustrating, when you stop assuming that he does. Think of him instead as a tyrant who somehow took over the apparatus of government, and who has none of the traditional ties to the citizens who normally elect Presidents. It's close enough to the truth.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the right's recent defense of Confederate statuary. I note that, while they seemed a little confused by the drive to remove symbols of Treason In Defense of Slavery after the Charleston massacre, and slow off the mark, they've been a lot quicker, more unified, and more devoted to their pro-secessionist-sculpture talking points after Charlottesville. Their arguments are still shit, though.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

If you’re feeling down this’ll pick you up.
This is my favorite Sammy Davis Jr. number, a great tune from Finian’s Rainbow that he just swings the hell out of.
Love the byplay with Jerry (RIP) and with the audience, too.
• My Bartlett's entry about Jonah Goldberg has been around long enough that we sometimes take it for granted, but today he proves the truism true: he really has come up with the stupidest thing ever written. It's an entry in the Confederate monument debate, which has already inspired a lot of brain-bleeds on the right, but no one else need bother now that Goldberg has weighed in (in part because he broke the scale). Here's a typical farting point:

Indeed, the fight over Confederate statues is just a discrete and more understandable eruption of the larger trend. This stuff has been happening for decades. One of the first outbreaks involved the word “crusader.” The term hurt the feelings of people who didn’t know what they didn’t know. Left-wing historians (and the Islamists who love them) convinced themselves that the Crusades were a trial run of Western imperialism and colonialism. They were, in fact, largely defensive wars intended to beat back the aggression of Muslim colonizers. Even the organization Campus Crusade for Christ changed its name to “Cru” lest people get the wrong impression.

Goldberg doesn't see why lefties and their head-chopping Mooslim friends consider the Crusades a racist symbol. I wonder if he sees why actual racists (including Anders Breivik) consider them a racist symbol, too. Maybe the liberals and Mooslims bamboozled them? Oh, and:

What fascinates me about this civilizational auto-immune disorder is how superficial it is. Mark-Viverito is from Puerto Rico. More than 95 percent of the people there speak Spanish. The dominant religion of Puerto Rico is Catholicism (85 percent). As far as I can tell, Mark-Viverito, who is of mixed European ancestry (her mother, Elizabeth Viverito, was of Italian descent and a prominent Puerto Rican feminist; her father, Anthony Mark, was a prominent doctor), does not speak Taino, the native language of the Arawak tribes who inhabited Puerto Rico when Columbus arrived. Rather, she speaks the languages of her alleged oppressors — Spanish and, of course, English. She even attended Columbia University. I could find no mention on the Internet that she has burned her diploma in protest.

You have to hand it to Goldberg -- the whole "you use an iPhone, your anti-capitalist argument is invalid" shtick seemed totally dead, yet he's given it new life by declaring it hypocritical to denounce colonialism if you speak Spanish (or English!). Goldberg braps the field again -- what a great way to shart the morning!

• "John C. Danforth was a Republican U.S. senator from Missouri from 1976 to 1995," intones the Washington Post, instead of saying "here's another old Republican who has nothing left to lose by disowning Trump":

Many have said that President Trump isn’t a Republican. They are correct, but for a reason more fundamental than those usually given. Some focus on Trump’s differences from mainstream GOP policies, but the party is broad enough to embrace different views, and Trump agrees with most Republicans on many issues. Others point to the insults he regularly directs at party members and leaders, but Trump is not the first to promote self above party. The fundamental reason Trump isn’t a Republican is far bigger than words or policies. He stands in opposition to the founding principle of our party — that of a united country.

We are the party of Abraham Lincoln...

LOL Abraham Lincoln! Buddy, most Republicans today would postpone the freaking 2020 election if Trump said it was necessary. They also think his nice-Nazis response to Charlottesville was a-ok. Most of them think colleges have a "negative effect on the way things are going in this country." Oh, and Republicans nominated and elected Trump. Notwithstanding his horrible policies are virtually the same ones the other preening dickheads they've been sending to statehouses and Congress for years have been pushing for, I understand why the Senator would prefer the lumbering, murderous Frankenstein he and his comrades brought into being to have a more thoughtful, "Presidential" countenance. But the actual voters have decided: It's not good enough being self-centered bigots on the downlow anymore -- they want to revel in it. I wonder if anyone not sitting on an editorial board is fooled?

CHOAD RAGE.

I see someone else decided to run down protesters:

A man hit three protesters while he was trying to drive through a march in St. Louis on Wednesday night.

The black Mercedes collided with protesters marching in honor of Kiwi Herring, a transgender woman shot dead by police on Tuesday, FOX2 reported.

A man and two women sustained minor injuries, and the driver was taken into custody about one block away from the scene for felony fleeing, according to St. Louis police spokesperson Schron Jackson.

Very interestingly, a street-level witness and the cops have different accounts of what happened. From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

The witness, Keith Rose, said the driver had his middle fingers raised before he accelerated through the group of people who were blocking Manchester Avenue and Sarah Street in the Grove neighborhood.

But St. Louis police said the driver stopped, honked and attempted to drive around the protesters before some of them surrounded his car and began hitting it with their hands and a flag pole.

The police statement, from spokeswoman Schron Jackson, said that three protesters were injured after they jumped onto the car and fell off when the driver pulled away.

Whom do you trust? Well, for one thing, the guy fled the scene; also the "protesters assaulted my car with their bodies" shtick sounds a lot like this 2008 fantasy from an Ace O'Spades rando who claimed "gay pride protesters" on Sunset Boulevard "ran in front of my car when they saw that I was almost past them" and "ducked down behind my car out of my view... hoping that I would put my car in reverse so they would get bumped and become 'justified' in focusing their rage against me and my vehicle" because, I don't now, gay people hate cars or something. Totally makes sense, right? (Rando also claimed to disperse the protesters with his sidearm, which is like the icing on the cake or the fly on the bullshit.)

It's fitting that running down protesters has become a rightwing thing, from Pepe Nazi twitter to Ole Perfesser Instapundit to mainsteam conservative media to Charlottesville and now this. Isn't conservative politics in the age of Trump pretty much the same as road rage -- fury at any social restriction that allows less-well-protected people to get in your way?

TRAVELING LIGHT.

The Village Voice stopped putting out paper editions this week. There's a lovely roundup at Esquire in which several old Voice hands pour one out.

No one asked me (nor mentioned my name THANKS PALS) but I'll speak to it anyway. I think Michael Musto made a good point --

I'm old enough to remember when computers came around and people felt there was something lost in communing with your typewriter. I don't think anybody now wishes they had their old typewriter back. A lot of times we cling on to old habits because they're familiar and it's hard to adapt, but ultimately we don't look back with a lot of longing about old archaic ways of doing things.

It's also true, as Christgau says, "Ten years ago everyone believed that the Kindle was going to kill the book. It didn't. Walk into the Strand Book Store. Books are not dead." But that's because books have proved out, as it were -- people keep reading them because they've seen the alternative and still prefer them. Paper-paper editions, on the other hand, aren't getting the same kind of play. Kindle-swiping and -tapping is a paltry thing next to the oceanic thrill of 80,000 words nestled in your hands, but once you learn to focus on a tiny screen the average New Republic or New York Times article doesn't lose much from digital transfer. So periodical paper, glossy or newsprint, is going away.

Regular readers will know I'm sentimental about the old things, particularly the old New York things. Growing up in Bridgeport, I cherished the weekly Voice as a dispatch from the world I wanted to get to; when I got there, I became one of those Village habitués waiting on Tuesday nights by the newsstand at Cooper Square to get the Voice for the job and apartment listings, or to see if my band got a Voice Choice. I did read the thing, too, and took it seriously enough to send in letters -- which they took seriously, too; I remember spending a half-hour on the phone with an editor who wanted to make sure his cuts to my stupid letter were acceptable to me. (They didn't do that at the Times.) When I got the chance to write for them, I took a big pay cut to take it and didn't flinch, because a call from the Voice was a call of duty -- maybe fancy-pants editorial professionals turned their noses up at it, but shit-ass urban poetasters like me answered the summons and joined the few, the proud, the mercilessly exploited. To do otherwise would be unpatriotic.

And still I serve -- at least so far as I know: maybe when I file next Sunday I'll get a note back saying, oh yeah, forgot to mention, like I did in 2014. If I don't, I'll get to work on the next one. One reason the fall of the paper-paper doesn't faze me is because I've been ploughing my furrow digital-only for years now -- as have a few others who, unless things really go south, will be on the unprinted page with me. They're part of the great tradition, too, even if the new Villagers are thumbing phones and pads for our words rather than waiting on the Square to buy them in a parcel.

Maybe you think the death of print means "the death of the Village Voice." Go on ahead, honey. We hear this every time some big bad thing happens -- like when Murdoch took over, and when Stern took over, and when so-and-so left and when so-and-so came back; eppur si muove. Even if the thing's a Flying Dutchman, I'm still at my post and ready for the next adventure.

LIBERTARIANS FIND THEIR LIMITS.

For years conservatives and libertarians agreed that employers could do pretty much anything they wanted to their employees, that worker protections were just an impediment to profit-making (though they were more than happy to protect workers from unions), and that the right to fire them for any old thing should not be abridged. But their hackles were raised in recent years when men like Brendan Eich and Donald Sterling started getting defenestrated on the grounds that their bigoted speech or actions had damaged the business entities with which they were associated.

Still, in nearly every thundering defense of these guys and denunciation of the PC liberal speech police, your average conservatarian would throw in a sentence, obviously painful to utter, about how of course the company had the right to fire the guy, however blah blah blah.

Apparently they're sick of having to defend this as a universal principle. The brethren have really gone nuts for James Damore, the Google Bro who was famously fired for circulating a memo saying his female co-workers were biologically unsuited to excel in a tech company. He's gotten more Ugh PC Bad defenses than all the other poster boys put together. And some of them have started asking: Must we protect every company's right to fire whom they please? Surely we can find a way to protect the racists and sexists!

Some of them have been content to vaguely threaten ("I’m just beginning to wonder if Google is not getting too big for our own good" -- Andrew Stuttaford, National Review). But in "How to Break Silicon Valley’s Anti-Free-Speech Monopoly," Stuttaford's colleague Jeremy Carl endorses regulating Google -- and other tech companies around which wingnuts have concocted conspiracy theories -- so that they're forced to publish, and if need be offer inflated prominence to, conservatives:

Government regulation of [electric] utilities has traditionally been justified to avoid having multiple companies building redundant and costly infrastructure and distribution assets. 

For conservatives, the time has begun to think of some major Web services — in particular Facebook, Google, YouTube, and Twitter — in the same way. Yes, they are private companies, just as many utilities are. And yes, these Internet monopolies do not have the same physical-infrastructure advantages that electric-utility monopolies have. But because of their network effects, their dominance and monopoly power are in many ways even starker.

If I don’t like my utility I can put solar panels on my roof and an inverter and battery in my garage, and I can still get power. But if I can’t get access to the 2 billion people on Facebook because Facebook doesn’t like my politics, my rights of free expression are greatly curtailed. [emphasis added]

If I'm not guaranteed equal market share with Trevor Noah, I'm being prejumadiced against!

Making everything worse, as usual, is Megan McArdle. Suddenly the power of the internet "mob" to crush Damore's career is a massive problem for her -- in a way that its power to crush, say, Kathy Griffin's never was.

"Whenever a new form of power arises," McArdle cries, "we need to think about how to safeguard individual liberty against it." After all, "there’s only one internet, and we’re all stuck here for the rest of our lives." It's kind of like living in a company town -- except of course the company is always right... Well, it's kind of like being an entertainer who turned up in Red Channels during the blacklist -- except they were commies, or at least comsymps, so they got what was coming to them... Well, whatever, when it comes to this particular kind of speech martyr, "mass private coercion, which even if not quite as bad, still needs to have safeguards put in place to protect individual liberty."

McArdle doesn't say what those safeguards would be but, since she compares the current situation to the old Soviet Union and (I assume this was an inside joke) The Handmaid's Tale, clearly emergency powers may be invoked. The free market is okay when its hegemons are right-wing -- what's good for General Motors and all that -- but when it starts siding with liberals, something's got to be done.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about Charlottesville and Boston, and the hard time rightbloggers are having with their Scary Alt-Left bullshit.

Among the fun sidelights: Susan Wright of Red State explaining what's really so terrible about the Nazi-Confederate comeuppance --

What we’ve seen, as a result of the filth they brought to Charlottesville and the subsequent loss of life, is that any meaningful discussion about the importance of maintaining our nation’s heritage – every part of it – has been lost. 

They gave Antifa and every other leftist group wiggle room to claim the high ground. Anybody who might be thinking about defending some of those time-worn monuments to the southern side of the war between the states will have to wade neck-deep through a cesspool of liberal rage and accusations of racism.

Wait, here's the best part:

Not that anyone not a liberal would ever be given the benefit of the doubt, anyway.

The party of personal responsibility just can't seem to catch a break!

Also, I refer briefly to Peter Ingemi's Boston post in the column, and his obvious frustration at having no juicy alt-left ultra-violence stories to tell. Ingemi was extremely upset by the crowd yelling at two Trump guys, mostly because one of them was holding an Israeli flag, which I guess is supposed to protect you like a St. Christopher medal protects travelers, or an American flag pin protects a Republican politician. Though no harm came to the two men, Ingemi says,

To me this was a turning point, it is a moment that in my opinion will get replayed over and over in states that Trump carried and I can’t think of anything else that would infuriate and energize Trump supporters more.

I'm sure they're very sensitive to criticism of Israel in Fritters, Alabama. Ingemi also tweeted, "Can't imagine any Massachusetts supporter of @realDonaldTrump walking through #BostonCommon today without thinking 'I need to arm myself.'" LOL. What was someone saying about snowflakes?

ANOTHER ONE JUST LIKE THE OTHER ONE.

I see a lot of jibber-jabber on Twitter to the effect that Steve Bannon's exit will activate some sort of big change. Don't you believe it. Optimists (who are nearly always wrong) think it's great that Trump jettisoned a fascist, but his staff is full of them; the only thing that makes Bannon look more dangerous to us than, say, the deeply evil Scott Pruitt is his history at Breitbart, which has given us a lot of over-the-top rightwing gibberish headlines. (That, and him looking like a tub of rancid butter come to life.) But Trump doesn't even recite Breitbart headlines when he wants to go full Klansman -- he mainly cribs from Fox News. And just because Bannon's creepiness is more obvious than that of the other creeps doesn't mean his is particularly meaningful. There are tons of budding factota in the rightblogger farm system who could whisper the same poisons into Trump's ear, and he can get them cheap.

Even more hilarious is the idea that Bannon's ouster will lead to a Breitbart vendetta against the President. Those guys were on a 24-hour vendetta against Obama for years and it didn't amount to a fart in a windstorm. People make much of Breitbart factotum Joel B. Pollak tweeting "#WAR" after the announcement, but he and his squad were continually tweeting that hashthreat at the Kellogg's cereal company when they got into that stupid beef with them back in December, and people are still eating corn flakes. Our problems with endemic racism and dumbassery predate Breitbart and Bannon.

Expectedly, Breitbart alumnus Ben Shapiro takes the cake:

I'm sorry, shit like this just makes me think of that Achewood thread:

Can't you explain it to me in terms of The Two Ronnies or The Life of Riley?

UPDATE. Ha ha, sorry I can't stop Shapiro is killing me:

Bannon is also media savvy enough to know that he’ll never miss work being a Trump critic. The media will continue to book him. They’ll be eager to put him on television to criticize Trump; they think this will drive down Trump’s approval ratings. 

Millions of Americans who've never heard of Breitbart or Bannon will turn on the TV and think they've accidentally stumbled onto an old George Romero movie. "Mommy, is he a zombie?"

And Bannon will look for some other horse to back, or try to become the horse himself.

Oh Ben. Still haven't lost that fine literary style.

...I said one year ago that Bannon understands that in the game of thrones, you win or die; he doesn’t intend to die. Now that he’s been beheaded by Trump, look for him to try to become the Night King, leaving destruction in his wake.

What can one say to that except:

A MODEST PROPOSAL.

LOL The Federalist:

Quoth author Matthew Boomer:

This is precisely why it is important for everyday people, most of whom try to be decent as well, to remember Lee—not as a hero, but as a man who devoted himself to the wrong ideals and, whatever sort of individual he may have been, found himself on the wrong side of one of the most decisive and morally laden moments in history.

OK -- so to make sure that happens, how about we give Lee googly eyes, paint I'M A STOOPID JERK on his horse, and have it fart "Dixie" on the hour?

(Speaking of which, the all-time greatest version of "Dixie" starts at 1:16 of this episode of Hard Drinkin' Lincoln:)

DON'T FORGET WHERE YOU CAME FROM.

I told you that the Google Bro story and the Charlottesville story would dovetail. Neo-Nazis had planned Google Bro-related marches this coming weekend, but -- well, let CNN Tech tell it:

Rallies were slated to happen Saturday in at least nine major U.S. cities to protest Google (GOOG)'s firing of James Damore, an engineer who wrote a controversial memo on the company's diversity policies. 

Now, the organizers behind the "March on Google" have decided to cancel. 

The effort was announced last Wednesday by Jack Posobiec, a vocal Trump supporter and right-wing activist who is known for pushing the false "Pizzagate" conspiracy theory...

I remind you that Google Bro went hanging with the alt-right homies right as soon as his first wave of publicity hit. But he has since been elevated by the Wall Street Journal and (of course!) Reason (where he was interviewed by Cathy Young, who asked such hard-hitting questions as "among the women who work at Google, there are many who don't agree with the standard progressive view of women in tech—i.e. that all disparities are due to sexism?").

Now that he's been picked up by the majors, and Charlottesville has made things hot for his old running buddies, Damore went out of his way to say that he found those fringey guys de trop in another big-media int. So Puffed, the Alt-Right Dragon sadly slipped into his cave:

On Wednesday, a post on March on Google's website said it is postponing the march...

...because everyone involved realized it was unseemly? Ha ha ha, no:

...due to "credible Alt Left terrorist threats."

Yeah, hanging with fascists might call down the anti-fascists, and blaming Nazi violence on anti-Nazis is the new MAGA.

Of course there's a bit of media lag, so some of Damore's alt-right pipeline is still disgorging -- his interview with The Rebel, a Great White and I Do Mean White North alt-right outfit, has just dropped. But I'm confident he can ride this wave of unfortunate counter-publicity out and, when no one remembers who his early sponsors were, make his big move to Time or the Atlantic or MSNBC, where he'll be accepted as a voice of mainstream conservatism -- as opposed to those guys who (no one will remember) he used to hang out with. That's how the pros do it, folks!

THE SOUTH SHALL WRITHE AGAIN.

The negative fallout from decent people and a few Republicans over Charlottesville has got wingnuts foaming at the mouth. Here's Mark Krikorian, a vicious immigration opponent who is seeing his devil's bargain to get President La Migra dying on the vine, flipping out:

Let’s accept for the sake of argument the president’s contention that there were “fine people” on both sides in Charlottesville (though where you’d find such a person in a torchlight parade chanting about Jews isn’t clear). These hypothetical fine people on the “Unite the Right” side still would not be conservatives, or even American patriots, because they’ve given up on America. They, like the left...

Let's just pause to savor this direct comparison of liberals to neo-Confederates and Nazis, right after the Republican President spoke up for neo-Confederates and Nazis.

...reject the existence of an American people and equality of all before the law, and instead embrace identity politics and the ideology of government-enforced multiculturalism.

Multiculturalism -- the root cause of slavery and genocide throughout history!

There’s no mystery why the mainstream left hasn’t denounced the antifas and communists the way the mainstream right has the Nazis and Klansmen. The mainstream left and the antifas share an antipathy for American nationalism and agree on the goal of deconstructing the American people – it’s just that the antifas are willing to do the wet work that New York Times editorial writers are unsuited for.

I don't see why the Good Grey Lady needs such cat's-paws to achieve their goal of violent revolution when they've got top agents like Bret Stephens and Ross Douthat working on it for them.

Seriously, don't they have an employee assistance program at National Review? Guy needs a tranquilizer. (Disclaimer: Not recommending Soviet-style involuntary commitment and medication for political reasons. You might have thought so 'cause that's just our style!)

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Google Bro and how his sad case demonstrates what conservatives really mean by "free speech." I know Charlottesville is the big deal these days and it pisses me off too, but there's plenty of good stuff on that (e.g.); I wanted to make sure the Damore thing got noted, because it's typical of the bad faith among the rightwing: They never mention Constitutional rights except as a punchline until an opportunity emerges for their invocation to serve the powerful, and then all of a sudden they're William fucking Kunstler.

Besides, I think over time a linkage between Charlottesville and Damore will emerge. You can already see it in the subtext of William Jacobson's pathetically-titled Legal Insurrection post, "The Ritual Shaming of James Damore still matters." "If anything," says Jacobson, "Ritual Shaming as a means of controlling speech will get even worse after Charlottesville." He doesn't explain that remark, but I bet his fans can guess what he means, and so can I: People may start noticing that the people most inclined to bitch about free speech rights these days are the same people who for decades have been trying to take them away from everyone else.

UPDATE. I see at National Review today Jeremy Carl suggests the government regulate Google and other popular internet businessess like utilities so conservatives may be guaranteed access to their users, as the Founding Fathers intended. "If I can’t get access to the 2 billion people on Facebook because Facebook doesn’t like my politics," says Carl, "my rights of free expression are greatly curtailed." As long as we've stopped worshipping the magic of the marketplace, comrade, how about we nationalize some industries?

UPDATE 2. For readers who've been speculating that Damore is actually trolling for a wingnut welfare gig, his new statements at CNN suggests that you've won the pool:

"I do not support the alt-right," he told CNN Tech. "Just because someone supports me doesn't mean I support them."

From Stefan Molyneux's special guest to huffy post-Charlottesville moderate Republican -- good career move, Google Bro! And:

"I'm a centrist, and they're calling me a Nazi. That is a real problem."

Say, wasn't that how Bret Stephens got the Times gig?

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.

• Hey baby (above) has been in my head for awhile. The other day someone directed me to a funny item in McSweeney's or something like that (can't find it now) in which a woman writes clever reviews of her street harassers. It was okay, but in my book no Hey Baby, partly because it didn't have Pat Place on guitar, and partly because, if we're going to use mordant humor to cope with endemic sexism, I prefer it with a little scrappiness, which is Maggie Estep's big plus here: she's like some cute, adenoidal raven. It's also partly because, of course, that place and those days are written in my heart, which breaks to think how lost they are. Maggie Estep is dead; John S. Hall, the King Missile guy who tangos with her here, keeps his oar in, but is mainly a lawyer. Now they are old, now they are young; they change all in a moment as their thought changes. It is sometimes a terrible thing to be out of the body, God help us.

• It had been remarked elsewhere that CNN's reason for getting rid of Jeffrey Lord was bullshit; Lord was clearly using Sieg Heil as a joke, not as an ode to Hitler. It's also bad tactically, because it gives Lord the opportunity (which he swiftly seized) to play the First Amendment martyr. But this false move has its merits. First, it goes to show how pusillanimous CNN is, and may convince people who should but don't know better that Big Media is not their friend. I know this overlaps with the POV of the Breitbart Bund, but the reason they have gotten over so well with it is its kernel of truth -- the nets are certainly not their friends, either, and the Breitbarters' acknowledgement of their gutlessness was what made it so easy for them to manipulate the mainsteam press; they knew that the media "moguls" would bend with the first hard word borne on hot air. That's how we wound up with an administration full of feebs, cranks, and fascists -- these people first colonized the airwaves as the browbeaten refs went "let's hear them out, it's only fair," and when we got crypto-Nazis in the White House and memos about "cultural Marxists" at the NSA, no one could remember what was insane about it.  That's why Jeffrey Lord, whom I have shown time and time again to be a meretricious piece of shit, was on CNN in the first place.  Which brings up the other silver lining of CNN's unfortunate decision -- bad as it is, it reduces the opportunity for Lord to normalize his shabby arguments and further dumb down the discourse. So I won't wring my hands too much about the reasoning. As the Google Bro incident and their many other flops-on-the-pitch show, they'll scream foul no matter what.

ASSPECTS OF THE NOVEL.

I'm late to this, but my truism that anything Jonah Goldberg writes is the stupidest thing ever written until Goldberg writes something else may have been shattered by the synapse-freezing stupidity of his column last weekend. Written in the form of a Q&A, for a while's it's just normally Goldberg-dumb: He mentions he's writing "sort of a prequel to Liberal Fascism" (like The Phantom Menace, only performed as a monologue by Jar Jar Binks) and meanders through some politics:

Q: What do you think of the White House’s new immigration proposal?
M: I haven’t studied it.
Q: Is that a dodge?
M: Sort of. I will say that the reaction has been ridiculous. The idea that it’s racist to control your borders or copy Canada is bonkers. It’s also funny. Liberals love to insist that Europe or Canada or Scandinavia does things in a more enlightened way. But say, “Okay, let’s have Canada’s immigration policy or France’s national-security policies or Switzerland’s health-insurance system” and the same people freak out.

Durr hurr you liberals love Canada but you don't love stampedes but Calgary has a Stampede every year WHICH IS IT LIBS.

But later, McRib intoxication or something sets in:

Q: Will you ever write a novel?
M: I hope so. I never planned on being a pundit. I wanted to write comic books and sci-fi. I kind of stumbled into this life. I have several ideas, but I need time and/or f-you money.

Faulkner said, "The writer doesn't need economic freedom. All he needs is a pencil and some paper." Goldberg says well, if I save up enough money from writing about how liberals are Hitler maybe I'll write a novel. And I bet he'd be great at it -- listen to his aesthetics:

Q: What do you mean fiction is about human nature?
M: I’m glad you asked. I think there’s a profound conservatism to all great fiction.

[Almost imperceptibly -- with the merest shiver of leaves and panic among the animals -- the fart-rumble commences]

If I had to define the essence of leftism in a single phrase, it’d be “the perfectibility of man.” This is the idea that stretches back past Rousseau and probably the Gnostics to Plato’s Republic. Before public policy or any ideological agenda, conservatism recognizes the bedrock fact that man is flawed. He can be good, but only by being civilized. That’s why science fiction is so conservative.

[Now all can feel it, like the first stirrings of Sensurround; all can hear it, like the ripping of a distant, gigantic sail; and some poor, sensitive creatures can even smell it]

It can be set in some far-flung galaxy or some technological wonderland. But what makes it accessible to us is that humans — or even aliens — are still driven by timeless motivations. Human nature is the rock in the river of time. Acknowledging the fact that human nature has no history is the first principle of realism, and realism is conservative.

[A FARTING COMES ACROSS THE SKY -- like the jagged bellow of a cassowary caught in a paint-mixer, amplified a hundred-fold. Nostril hairs singe; lungs convulse. "The fools," gasp those who have not been immediately knocked unconscious, "they let Trump near the button."]

I've already asked the TLS for dibs.