FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 9/16/22.

Preach.

•  Here’s today’s free issue of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, on the conservatives’ latest New Low – BTW these New Lows seem to be coming faster, don’t they; like the contractions of the birth of fascism – namely, dumping even more immigrants in blue states, only this time sending some of them to Martha’s Vineyard.

As mentioned in my previous and more thorough examination of this trollery, conservatives have been enjoying Greg Abbott’s months-long shipments of immigrants to blue cities because they think the hardships they cause prove that a.) immigrants are disease carriers that no one wants and b) liberals don’t want them either so they’re hypocrites and the Real Racists™. 

But even conservatives know that the blue cities to which they've been sending immigrants are already full of black, brown, and indeed every other kind of people, among whom we white neighbors live quite comfortably. Which is probably why they pulled the Martha’s Vineyard stunt – it’s easier to portray those non-urban toffs as the limousine-liberal-racists of their imagination. 

This is a version of the old conservative gag about how If You Love [People We Despise] So Much Why Don’t You Let Your Daughter Marry One. You may think they stopped doing this one in the civil rights era, but rightwing internet sleazebags have been doing it as Babylon-Bee-level "satire” for years -- only now they usually focus on Latinos; here's an example from 2018, “Seize Ivy League Dorms and Give Them to Immigrant Families.” You can go read it, but I’ll make it less painful for you by supplying my own contemporaneous, better-written description:

Zmirak's big joke thereafter is an image of Messicans nestled in a "glorious Gothic dining hall, with sixty-foot carved ceilings and iron candelabras," being served their food by the silly SJW students. Liberals made to serve the brownskins they pretend to love so much -- it's a classic conservative humiliation fantasy straight out of Birth of a Nation. To add cream to the jest, Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds pimps that shit to his own coprophages and, in their rush to assault their strawmen, they suggest things like "Just dump them all in Brooklyn" -- because that's where the hipsters live, see, and since they're all limp-wristed sissies they've probably never seen an immigrant, especially in the trendier nabes like Crown Heights and Bed-Stuy.

All that’s new about the routine now is that they've got their politicians doing it with them and – as has been the pattern for decades – they’ve gotten even more vicious and stupid about the whole thing, and the contempt in which decent people hold them is still more justified. 

•  BTW I just got out of a week-long Twitter jail sentence for this, inspired by Sullivan weeping over the Queen:

This Twitter claimed violated their "hateful conduct policy” – which anyone with a middle school education would recognize as an absurd misreading of my comment, unless Andrew Sullivan has become a protected class (beyond the prestige media world where he clearly is one, I mean).

I do not mention this to invite sympathy – no cancelculture crybaby bullshit for me! These morons can do what they like with their own property – but to remind you that Twitter constantly pitches people off for stupid reasons while turning a blind eye to actual hate speech.

I really don’t think it’s political in the sense that Twitter is picking one side or another; I think their poor decisions are partly due to shit algorithms, but mostly just ass-covering gestures – gestures toward ass-covering, I should say, because the owners of the multi-billion-dollar company know they’ll only get in trouble if their decision follow any kind of a pattern, even (maybe especially) if the pattern is simply logical. For example, if they got rid of all the genuine hate speech on their platform, they’d be hauled before Congress to explain their hostility toward conservatives. But if they keep on throwing people off for jokes they don’t understand, along with occasional real offenses, they will have shown themselves to have “done something,” and no one can accuse them of bias.

One day I expect they’ll toss me forever, perhaps for some equally innocuous comment, so if I go quiet there you should look for me, not in instructions behind a rock that has no earthly business in a Maine hayfield, but here at alicublog (or, better still, at REBID – subscribe, cheap!).

Also, as a treat, here's one more free issue that may be of use to those of you who will spend the weekend standing in line to see Lizzy in a box. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

As often, I feel like something spare and angular!

•  If you missed it yesterday, here's the first Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebie of the week, a report on the truckers and their grifts (as Jan Němec might have put it). No longer content to drive in circles on the beltway, some of the Rush-Hour Reenactors have invaded the area are going into town and honking their horns to general bemusement and middle fingers. Here's what the brain trust has planned for today:

Real Braveheart material there. Wonder how long before they realize their leaders have pocketed most of the donations? 

•  And for funsies, and as I am in the giving vein, a fanciful look at Fox News' attempt to damage-control Tucker Carlson's Putinphilia. It's hilarious, to me anyway, that the Russians are running Carlson's broadcasts as propaganda -- which, come to think of it, is what Fox has been doing, but the context really makes it obvious. And he's not the only one -- here's a good thread on Brexit conman Nigel Farage's Putin advocacy. Remember how Kevin McCarthy, before he was brought to heel, said he thought there were two people Putin paid, Dana Rohrabacher and Trump? He was really lowballing it. 

•  I could not let the day pass without observing the latest high-profile cancelculture crybabies -- and this time it's not just one of the New York Times' several rightwing symps, present or past, but the entire Times editorial board itself:

For all the tolerance and enlightenment that modern society claims, Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.

This social silencing...

Time out. What's the shaming and shunning? Someone talked back? People stopped hanging out with you?

Also, the Times has a poll that shows most Americans have been cancelcultured:

Consider this finding from our poll: 55 percent of respondents said that they had personally held their tongue over the past year because they were concerned about retaliation or harsh criticism.

I know how they feel. More than once I've had a strong urge to say, "You don't know what you're talking about, you stupid fucking asshole," or "Jesus Christ, that is one ugly bitch," and held my tongue. I'm a victim too! And if it's like that for me, a prominent Substack author, imagine how it is for racists and neo-Nazis! 

The thing's full of lulus like this:

Roy Block, 76, from San Antonio, described himself as conservative and said he has been alarmed by scenes of parents being silenced at school board meetings over the past year. 

Parents being silenced? I thought the big thing was parents raging at school board meetings and loudly demanding schools ban teaching the history of racism. I wonder whether the Times asked Block for a citation. But maybe that would be cancelculture too. 

“I think it’s mostly conservatives that are being silenced,” he said.

You do, huh. 

“But regardless, I think it should be a two-way street. Everybody should have an opportunity to speak and especially in open gathering and open forum.”  

I'd really like to know what open gatherings and forums are preventing him or anyone else from speaking. Maybe the Times could have asked... but there I go again, suppressing speech by asking impertinent questions.  

I broke down this shit a long time ago. "Cancel culture" is a propaganda ploy, and the working people whose speech is actually suppressed by economic need and at-will employment will gain nothing by the proposed remedy -- which, as near as I can tell from every single goddamn article these people put out about it, is to kiss the asses of blowhards who never stopped talking in the first place.

ROD DREHER'S ORBÁN RENEWAL, A MONTH IN.

As I have mentioned, Rod Dreher is in Budapest, ostensibly as a visiting fellow at the rightwing Danube Institute but, it would seem from his own accounts, to be turned and lathed by Viktor Orbán's agents for the international fascist movement. Among his many self-embarrassments that I have recorded has been his defense of the Red Chinese vs. the terminally "woke" West ("There’s an argument to be made that a country would be better off with ChiCom College than with the University of Baizuo [the Chinese term of derision for 'white leftists']"). Kinda makes sense -- the American conservative movement and the GOP have been turning hard against democracy; Rod's handlers are just getting him out in front. 

Well, after a month in Viktor's Orbit, Dreher has made great progress, emitting such fash aphorisms as "You cannot have a society in which people feel free to live however they like, and expect that society to thrive," and, as ever, raging against black and gay and trans people. He even turned over an entire blog post -- defending the new Chinese college Orbán brought in to replace the liberal arts college he drove out of the country -- to a more exprienced Orbánist operative to write, in prose even more clunkily propagandistic than his own, which must have really been tough for the logorrheic Dreher to sit for. Still, if he's going to play for the team, he's gotta learn when to warm the bench. 

One of the more bizarre tropes of Dreher's residency has been his obsession with a statue -- a replica of the Statue of Liberty back home in the corrupt West, painted in rainbow colors with "Black Lives Matter" on her plaque. He's mentioned it no fewer than five times - starting with this:

I spoke to a Hungarian man about that recently, and he said, “This is why I stand by Orbán, even though I don’t like some things he’s doing. We can see that our Left is trying to bring the same things here. Did you know that there was a Black Lives Matter statue here in Budapest? The far right tore it down, but it was there for a day, and had Lady Liberty in a rainbow flag. What is that doing in Budapest? We don’t have any black people here, but the Left is trying to import American issues.”

Of course. It’s a globalist left-wing ideology: gender fluidity, racial consciousness, soft totalitarianism. And it’s all being pushed by elites in the media and in institutions...

Then again ("Another Hungarian today brought up in conversation the recent construction of a Black Lives Matter/LGBT Statue of Liberty") and again ("the fact, though, that the left-wing Budapest city government erected a Black Lives Matter/LGBT Statue of Liberty as a protest against the Orbán government is not a good sign") and again ("Did you know that there was a Black Lives Matter statue here in Budapest?") and again ("as I wrote last week, the anti-Orbán Left recently erected a mock-up of the Statue of Liberty").   

You have to wonder why the thing eats at him so much. Maybe it's like Giuliani when he was Mayor and the "Sensations" show at the Brooklyn Museum drove him to sputtering rage back in 1999 -- only, unlike Giuliani, Dreher has no complaisant press (well, besides his high-profile buddies like David Brooks and so far they haven't gone for this one) to amplify his crusade stateside, so he signals madly like a castaway at a distant ship. Or maybe the Orbán agents who keep coming up to him and saying shit like "pardon me, stranger, I'm just a poor shopkeeper who wants everybody to live in peace but the decadent West must be purified by cleansing fire" see some percentage in working him up to mentioning it every week.

BTW, here's an article with some background on that statue from German media outlet Deutsche Welle (h/t @David_Jorgonson at Twitter). Highlights:

As a non-partisan mayor [of Budapest district Ferencváros] supported by the opposition, [Krisztina] Baranyi says she's used to being condemned by the pro-government media. But now she is being insulted on all channels and threatened with rape and acid attacks, she told DW. "All we wanted was to give young Hungarian artists a chance to show their art in public," the district mayor said.

Yeah, that tracks. Also:

Commentators on Hungarian television contributed to fueling the controversy. One of them compared the artwork to erecting a statue for Adolf Hitler. Origo, the largest government-related online news site, described the sculpture as the beginning of "incitement and hatred against whites and Christians" in Hungary. Zsolt Bayer, a notorious right-wing media figure and co-founder of Orban's Fidesz party, even threatened to destroy it.

There was also criticism of the sculpture from the government itself. Minister at the Prime Minister's Office, Gergely Gulyas, called the Black Lives Matter movement "fundamentally racist" because it does not see white people as equals. "So it's not the ones who oppose a statue to BLM that are racist but the ones erecting it," Gulyas declared in December. [emphasis added] 

You're The Real Racists™, aka Routine 9! I don't know why the boys in the bund bothered with Dreher -- it looks like he and they were already reading from the same playbook.  

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

For years I abjured this kind of 70s rock but I'm kinda getting back into it.

Special kudos to Dee Murray; sometimes hyperactive bass is actually cool.

Not only have we had a good laugh about Ted Cruz's Cancun Adventure, it seems the whole world has.  Even conservatives seem to realize it's too perfectly on-brand, for Cruz and their own movement, to defend, and dummies like Dinesh D'Souza and Ben Shapiro have been reduced to bizarre, "Hey, it's not like Ted Cruz is any use at all in a crisis anyway" arguments -- as usual not likely to convince anyone but, unusually, not apparently designed to appease the yahoos who bay at their troughs either, just pro-forma ass-covering bullshit. 

Hell, some rightwing talking heads like Meagan McCain have denounced Cruz, and the Murdoch New York Post is covering him like he's Andrew Cuomo.

I'm not starry-eyed about this apparent consensus on Cruz. First, no one actually likes him; Texans are simply unable to vote for Democrats, lest they question the unreasoning belligerence that passes for manhood there. Cruz was so unloved by national Republicans in 2016 that, despite his muscling to the front of the line, they nominated an ignorant New York grifter rather than let themselves be represented by him. Genital warts aren't a "bipartisan issue" just because no one wants them. And the Cancun story plays to the simplest kind of American resentments -- people who were unmoved by Cruz's many political outrages, including his support for a fascist insurrection, are pissed that he left his poodle home in the cold.   

Also, in the bigger picture, Americans seem unsure about what to do with the Republican conservative creed that Cruz and his contempt for the needful embodies now that they've shaken off Tubby. It's not that I'm optimistic -- if America could turn back to the GOP after Bush Jr., it could do so after Trump, too. But the coup attempt seems to have shaken most of them, and they may have noticed not only that Republicans are largely OK with an attempt to murder their elected officials for Trump, but that the hardcore Republicans are busily trying to minimize the attempt, and even suggesting that the mob didn't actually kill Officer Sicknick and were generally just having a bit of a lark and that Nancy Pelosi was actually to blame for it -- an impression anyone who saw the impeachment insurrection footage would find obscene. 

This tracks with when I'm seeing in the Rush Limbaugh death coverage. I had my say about that at Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, and I do believe he'll remain a totem of the rancid misogyny and racism of conservatism, and be honored as such by rancid misogynists and racists. But the brethren aren't exactly mobbing his cortege as if he were some meathead Verdi and singing "Barack the Magic Negro." In fact while they all claim to have loved his "humor," few of them are actually publicly saying, "Remember when he called Chelsea Clinton a dog? Hah? Come on lady, I laughed when you came in!" 

Apart from the outright apparatchiks blubbering over his catafalque, have you noticed how many credentialed conservatives like Michael Brendan Dougherty seem to either want to get past the subject quickly or feel obliged to admit that yes, much of what El Rushbo said went a bit too far? Peggy Noonan today, after briefly praising Limbaugh's influence ("There was a joy to it. His patriotism was real"), said this:

To have a show such as his you had to be The Guy With the View, and knock down others’ views. In the past 15 years my views on important issues diverged from his; he came to see me as an apostate and attacked me for my criticisms of Iraq policy, Sarah Palin, George W. Bush and Donald Trump. His attacks turned personal: I was an elite fancy person, an establishment character of rarefied background who looked down on honest people like him and his listeners. His criticisms were at odds with the facts of our lives, and he knew it; for one thing he was damning me from his vast Palm Beach, Fla., estate. Like many male conservative media figures he made a game of pretending to class sensitivity and implying he’d had to scrap his way up. The radio station where he got his start was co-owned by his father.

Now, Noonan remains utter shit, and her complaint is of course animated by personal grievance. But this is one of those cases where "the personal is the political" really applies: How many American women, or men for that matter, noticed over the years with what cold contempt the yahoos for whom Limbaugh spoke had come to regard them? For a moment at least Noonan grasped that her years of service to The Cause counted for nothing if some other Reaganite goon, one whom she doubtless considered less talented that she, condemned her as a rich bitch, accent on the bitch, and got over with it because he had a penis. (It apparently shook her no much she no longer believes repealing the Fairness Doctrine was a good idea!) 

It's like they all had been insisting since childhood that Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In was the height of sophisticated comedy and then someone made them watch it again.

But do enjoy that Limbaugh bit, as well as my other Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebie from the week, "A Message from the John Bitch Society." We could all use the laffs. 

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!).

SYMPATHY AND THE DEVIL.

I read that Washington Post "White, and In The Minority" story. Excerpt:

She went to him. They kissed and sat side by side, legs touching. Flipping through Facebook, she told him about the meeting, how uncomfortable it had been. 

“They don’t give a rat’s ass about people with white skin,” he said. 

She nodded, feeling better. This was exactly what she had needed. Someone who understood, and Venson always did. She first met him last July. For months, she had called over any mechanic — most of whom were white on her shift — repairing a nearby machine, just to have someone to talk to, and then one day it was Venson. He told her he’d gone to the same high school she had, and it felt so good to connect that they soon had a relationship going, one whose core was their shared experience at Bell & Evans.
“Half of them know English and they just don’t show it,” Venson continued, pulling on a cigarette. 

“They do,” she agreed, smoking her own. 

“You get pretty much overlooked,” he said. 

She sighed and leaned her head against his shoulder, feeling tired, and then the two of them were quiet as the trucks carting away the chicken rumbled off and the final minutes of their break ticked down to nothing.

Like many of you I've had it up to here with mainstream papers obsessing over the feelings of racist white Trumpkins.  Maybe in this instance I was just more responsive to reporter Terrence McCoy's craft, or to the specific literary pedigree markings of his story, but I really think his empathy for the disgruntled white folks working at Bell & Evans Plant #2 in Fredericksburg, Pennsyltucky, is humane and appropriate, and that he's not championing Heaven's and Venson's sad white-minority resentment as a serious point of view we're supposed to nod sagely over and try to make accommodations with for the sake of national unity -- you know, that way that idiot Margaret Renki did at the Times -- but simply showing us what's going on with these people, the way real writers can.

Nonetheless, as I expected, white supremacists have seized on the story on message boards --

If you are white,then YEP! You aren't allowed to be among your own people because that's RACIST! The government will FORCE DIEversity down your throat or force it with the barrel of a gun but you WILL obey their dictates! Fight back or settle for this.

-- and at straight-up, not-even-kidding Nazi sites like Stormfront:

This is just sad, but read it carefully, for this is the future in a land where the Whites who built it are a small minority... 

That article is just propaganda designed to demoralize whites and boost the morale of any (((liberals))) reading it... 

It's nothing more than Jew/Marxist gloating, and I for one can't wait to see these "journalists" proven wrong. Whites will rise up against this perpetual onslaught of anti-White BS, and we're eventually going to WIN! Sink that into your demonic skulls, Washington Post...

The problem is not that the Post portrayed, apparently accurately,  the bitter lives of American racists; real journalism, like real art, is never the problem, in fact we're ever in need of more of it. The actual problem is, as I see it, twofold.

One problem is that America is as suffused with racism as it's ever been, but also more aware of it than it has been in a long time -- and the more some of us own up to it, the more others of us just own it, convinced that, if the liberals they've been trained to despise are against it, then they're by God for it.

The other problem is that our nation suffers from shitty education and shitty politics. If we were where we were at in the 1960s on both counts, we'd still have racists, but we'd be able to recognize them as such, and we'd be able to recognize a story like McCoy's as being an examination of racists, and maybe a glimpse into our own sick souls. As it is, our crap politics tells us that racism isn't racism, but Heritage, or the White Working Class, or This Is Why Trump Won, or some shit; and our miseducation tells us that anything that makes you better understand and even empathize with anyone -- including the racists in McCoy's story -- is a piece of propaganda for them and what they stand for; if you feel for them, you have to stan for them, and if you won't stan for them, then you can't feel for them.

This literally infantile way of relating to the world is killing us just as surely as the whole miasma of insane, ignorant policies is killing us. In fact I am convinced that it's where our troubles begin. Which is why, instead of just shaking my fist, I take the time to try and think these things through and explain them.

INDIRECTLY ABOUT THE COHEN TAPE.

"Fake Interview With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Was Satire, Not Hoax, Conservative Pundit Says," reports The Intercept.  Smart people are skeptical for reasons I can understand. The perps are basically bad faith personified, for one thing, and the reaction of the Trumpenproletariat gives the impression  — which may not be quite accurate, and I’ll get to that in a minute — that they’re swallowing it whole:

Before the satire language was added, the video spread throughout Facebook. Presidential candidate Lee Newton Rhodes shared the post, writing, “This is what the liberals democrats would rather offer the voters than me.” It was also shared -- seemingly as if it were real -- in numerous conservative and pro-Trump Facebook pages and groups, with some describing Cortez as “the new face of the Democrats” and saying the footage shows Democrats “are even stupider than I thought.” Commenters on the posts wrote that Ocasio-Cortez is a “stupid bitch,” “Dumbo the clown,” a “complete idiot”, a “dumbazz” and “dumber then (sic) dog poop,” and said she has “been lickin to (sic) many toilet seats”and that her “house play nts probably help her complete crossword puzzles.”

This portrayal by Media Matters' Alex Kaplan suggests these commenters have been hoaxed -- else why would they talk as if the debate were real?

But I don't think so. Certainly the thing from the CRTV network is not satire in any sense that Juvenal, Waugh or Swift or even Harvey Kurtzman would recognize; the fake interview, in which Allie Beth Stuckey says things like "Do you have any knowledge, whatsoever, about how our political system works?" and they cut to Ocasio-Cortez looking stupid, is a form of schoolyard humor similar to Bart making Moe in The Simpsons' "It's a Good Life" parody say "I'm a stupid moron with an ugly face and a big butt and my butt smells and I like to kiss my own butt."

That is, it's childish fun for those so inclined, and only something you'd profess to believe authentic if you were either a.) cognitively incapacitated, and thus really fooled by it; b.) an unscrupulous propagandist looking to lead such poor souls into error; or c.) in general indifferent or even slightly hostile toward the truth in certain areas of your life, like a woman who can’t deal with the fact that she’s about to lose her job or a man who’s in denial that his marriage is falling apart.

The thing is, while there may be a certain, even large number of mentally disabled people pimping this thing, and God knows plenty of con artists who might prey on their credulity, life experience tells me that most of the fake’s boosters know it’s fake and simply don’t care, and would consider your attempt to correct the record an unwarranted and unsportsmanlike attack on their good time.

Conservatives have been asked to believe nonsense for a long time -- that tax cuts for the rich trickle down and pay for themselves, that we'll be greeted as liberators, that there's no more racism, etc. These were tough lifts, but they had the help of intellectuals, or magazine writers who passed for them, to give them a line of gab that made these things sound reasonable, at least to themselves.

Recent years have not been kind to these beliefs, and Trumpism kind of blew the whole scene -- not just by being so mind-bendingly, outlandishly at variance with observable reality, but also by  presenting them with unitary Republican control of the government, thus making American politics a perfect playground for their fantasies.

Now instead of using the line of gab, they're just mouthing absurdities. Trump's budget-busting tax cuts have done nothing but damage to the economy yet they insist it's going to lift all boats. His racism is obvious and effective, yet they insist the people who point it out are the real racists. They've dropped the pretense of war as a tool of liberation, and now celebrate it as bloodsport and an electoral stratagem, and insist it's the road to peace. Etc.

It's like the entire George W. Bush administration happened in a couple of months, and no one had time to work on their second thoughts.

Outsiders look at this and think Trump's followers are bamboozled and perhaps brainwashed. But that assumes they really believe this stuff. I think their political philosophy has obliged them to pretend to believe it. When they complain about fake news, they're not saying it's not true; they're saying it's a Bad Thing they can wave away. It's only a very thin membrane of self-respect that prevents them from just saying "So what" instead.

As the title indicates, this has something to do with the Cohen revelation. The brethren seem rather rocked back on their heels about it -- even reliable propagandist Jim Hoft can only chase the headlines -- because it's extremely hard to explain away. I think some sentimental liberals may think this will get Trumpkins to see at last what a monster the guy is and start questioning their support -- like they're hypnotized and this might be the salutary shock that brings them round. But they're not hypnotized, though some of them may pretend to have been in the aftermath. Just give them time. They'll develop a spiel for this. Probably, as with the FBI investigations of Trump, the story will be that a corrupt party is trying to take down our beloved President through nefarious means -- that is, the story Trump's pushing -- and some garbled misapprehension of "fruit of the poisoned tree." Then, back to MAGA until the midterms, when the marshals break down the door.

UPDATE. Here's a good one -- Giuliani says they're actually saying "Boo-urns":

“It’s a little bit hard to hear, but I assure you that we listened to it numerous, numerous times, and the transcript makes it quite clear at the end that President Trump says, quote, ‘Don’t pay with cash,’” Giuliani told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham. He also countered Cohen’s attorney Lanny Davis’ calls to the CNN audience to hear the evidence for themselves. “Go online. Listen to your broadcast… The third time you play it, it’ll become clear,” Giuliani said.

This fits nicely with Trump's insistence -- absurd but accepted by the diehards -- that "I said the word 'would' instead of 'wouldn't'" in his Putin press conference last week. Looks like we're getting closer to that long-anticipated "I was never president" moment.

MASTERS OF THE BLUFF AND MASTERS OF THE PROPOSITION.

I know Tim Kaine is the kind of tryhard MOR liberal Democrat that makes us smart-alecks want to go all worser-the-better helter-skelter but holy shit as of last night’s primary he’s running against an actual Republican white supremacist:

In 2012 during his run for lieutenant governor, [Corey Stewart] bragged about Prince William County’s “crackdown” on undocumented immigrants via a 2007 law that required police to check the immigration status of anyone detained or arrested if there was “probable cause” that the person might not be a citizen…

And for Stewart, with Trump has come an all-out embrace of neo-Confederate viewpoints and the alt-right. In 2017, he attended the “Old South Ball” in Danville, Virginia, and gave a speech saying Virginia was the state of “Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson,” adding that the Confederate flag “is our heritage, it’s what makes us Virginia, and if you take that away, we lose our identity”…

After the violence and racism of the Unite the Right rally, in which a young woman, Heather Heyer, was murdered, Stewart was alone among Virginia Republicans in refusing to criticize the alt-right rally attendees and instead called out his fellow Republicans for being “weak”…

And then there’s Stewart’s relationship with anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, too-racist-for-Twitter Wisconsin Republican House candidate Paul Nehlen…

In case you needed more evidence Stewart’s a racist, he went on CNN to accuse the Democrats of “playing the race card,” which in my experience is dispositive. Further evidence, as if it were needed: Trump endorsed him, and Stewart celebrated his nomination by leading a chant of “Lock her up.” He also wants to put Tim Kaine in prison, for no reason he felt the need to articulate.

In short, Stewart is one of those flaming garbage candidates like Roy Moore who have flourished under Trump, so naturally Stewart received a defense at The Federalist, in this case from David Marcus. Though Marcus appears to find Stewart’s “apparent complete lack of concern over the death of [Heather Heyer]” a net negative, and admits Stewart’s ties with obvious racists “offered no nuance,” still, he says, “the question of whether Stewart is a racist is a complicated one.”

You and I both already know, even before Marcus explains himself, that this is bullshit because, having paid attention to Republican politics for a minute, we know the current vogue is neo-Nazis as “very fine people,” black people who protest police brutality as "sons of bitches" who should be thrown out of the country, tearing immigrant children from their parents and telling refugees fleeing threats on their lives to go back and die to scare them off and thus whiten up America for the edification of the dying racist dotards who elected Trump etc. The chances that Stewart only appears to fit this template, the way a kid might only appear to have been beating off because he happened to be holding his dick a funny way, and to have spilled Baby Magic on it, are vanishingly slim.

But thanks to our sappy, gotta-have-both-sides tradition, we're compelled to give Marcus a hearing, so let’s take this one for the team:

But do these things qualify him as a racist today? At a time when even slight, unconscious actions earn that label, indeed when many on the Left argue that racism is the natural and unavoidable state of all white people, who is a racist? And who, if anyone, isn’t? Do we need some new term for “really, really bad racists,” or do we need to scale back the rate of such accusations?

Uggggh yes it was just as bad as I imagined. Readers more scrupulous than I can continue further down through “both sides have gone off the rails," “Democrats taking photos with Louis Farrakhan or Jeremiah Wright,” etc. But I am old and feel keenly the shortness of life.

The time has come to acknowledge this hard fact: conservatives have gone nuts and will continue to be nuts until crushed. Republicans will continue to nominate Nazis and Klansmen; conservatives will continue to tell us that the Nazis and Klansmen are not so bad and anyway you liberals are the real Nazis and Klansmen; unless prevented by vote-thieves, Democrats will, thanks to this conservative habit, continue to beat most of these Nazis and Klansmen in elections (as happened last night in Wisconsin, despite Scott Walker’s best-and-by-best-I-mean-viciously-undemocratic efforts to prevent it); conservatives will come back and tell us that liberals with their swearing and socialism are making them nominate Nazis and Klansmen, and indeed all America shares their This Is Why Trump Won feeling, despite our many post-Trump victories, and stand contentedly on this chosen ground with their arms folded as they are buried in an avalanche

Like so much these days, it puts me in mind of Dylan:

Well, my baby went to Illinois
With some bad-talkin’ boy she could destroy
A real suicide case, but there was nothin’ I could do to stop it
I don’t care about economy
I don’t care about astronomy
But it sure do bother me to see my loved ones turning into puppets
There’s a slow, slow train comin’ up around the bend

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Been a while since we had any Uncle Dave.
• There's a corner at The Federalist for lonely nerds embittered by the liberal provenance of old science fiction franchises who shake their fists and choke back tears every time a black or a chick does something in a Star War. One such is Robert Tracinski, author of "Why They Can’t Ruin Star Wars," "Why Mixing Harry Potter And Politics Ruins Them Both," "All An Ayn Rand Hero Really Wants Is Love," etc. Here's his latest:

Last week, I wrote about how those of us on the right can be Star Trek fans despite its supposedly “progressive” politics.

Dry those tears, kulturkampfers!

Partly, this is because good art is about a lot more than a didactic political message.

!!! Baby steps, Bobby.

But...

Uh oh.

...it also struck me how much of the message of Star Trek is consistent with the values of many of us on the right. The original series was not “progressive” but “liberal” in an old-fashioned sense, celebrating freedom and individualism and opposing censorship and conformity. This means that Trek also turned out some cautionary tales that are relevant today — and surprisingly prescient — about the conformist agenda of big tech companies like Google.

Baby faw down go boom. I'll spare you, but he's on about the one with Landru -- " Just substitute, 'Are you woke?' for 'Are you of the body?' and you’ll get the idea" -- and thinks Political Correctness and Google are making us "sit down and shut up while in the presence of someone woker." Next he'll be telling us Jim Kirk is really a symbol for Trump because he's brash and a shitty actor.  God, wait'll someone tells these dorks about real life! You, you must be almost 30... have you ever kissed a girl?

•  Rightwingers are saying that if Roseanne Barr should be fired for calling a black lady a monkey, Samantha Bee should be fired for calling a Trump lady a cunt. Everyone with any sense seems pretty clear that Roseanne's racial slur is categorically worse than Bee's genital insult -- in fact, The Federalist's Ellie Bufkin goes as far toward acknowledging it as can be expected of a rightwing factotum:

While calling a white woman a “feckless c–t” doesn’t have the same racial charge as comparing a black woman to an ape, it was plenty ugly and absolutely uncalled for, particularly as it was in reference to a photo of Ivanka and her toddler.

But Bufkin stops just shy of saying a white-on-black racist slur is worse than a girl-on-girl genital slur, because 1.) she's working for The Federalist so, I feel comfortable assuming, she doesn't think it's worse, and 2.) if she did acknowledge the genuine difference, she'd blow up her whole column, which is devoted to insisting the two comments should be treated the same way:

Barr’s tweet was completely unacceptable, and ABC was absolutely right to sever ties with her over her awful comments. Yet why aren’t television executives considering the same consequences for Bee? True, referring to a woman as a “c–t” isn’t racist, but it is plenty hateful. To dismiss this as her creative right is to truly embrace that we live in a time of a media double standard.

One's racist and the other isn't, but since the one that isn't is still "plenty hateful," we have to treat them the same -- otherwise it's a double standard. Well, when you're just writing propaganda, erasing logical distinctions is most of the game -- and give Bufkin credit for nerve, if not the skills to back it up, because she ends with an attempted free speech defense:

Simply put, if saying unsavory things about a person with a particular political affiliation gets someone fired, then the same should be true in reverse. Of course, if we could actually hold every person in the media to an equal standard, frying someone over a belligerent comment would soon leave us in a very vanilla world where few would feel safe or comfortable exercising their right to speak freely.

No chance of us living in a vanilla world, lady, with the President himself calling women cunts on the regular. What's more likely is, wingnuts will keep on demanding liberal misdemeanors get treated like conservative felonies, and keep working the refs to rachet it down -- sure, our guys said black people are sub-human, but some black guy said Jared Kushner had white privilege, we demand you fire him, you're the real racists, etc. Well, fuck that; I made my position on this clear a long time ago.

WELCOME, ROSEANNE, TO THE INTELLECTUAL DARK WEB.

You guys know how I feel about this stuff: Until you're ready to protect fast food and daycare workers from being fired for their social media speech, I'm not here from your blubbering over celebrities like Roseanne.

That's not a rhetorical offer, by the way, but a sincere one. I don't give a shit if the Hitler Channel wants to run Roseanne's Heil Hitler Racist Comedy Hour, where its sponsors and supporters can be noted and shunned, so long as ordinary citizens can flip off Trump and put it on Twitter without getting fired for it.

But they can't. So fuck her.

Even the usual suspects have, for the most part, looked at the facts and decided this was not the fake free speech hill they wanted to lie on. Rod Dreher, as you might expect, runs with the pack but can't even do that right:

“But,” you say, “that’s all the NFL owners are doing with the mandatory National Anthem rule: protecting their business interests.” You have something of a point, but the comparison is faulty. A quiet political protest is not the same thing as calling a black person an ape. Colin Kaepernick’s pig socks are in that ballpark, certainly, but the NFL kneelers on the whole aren’t wearing pig socks.

Like Moses, Kaepernick is denied entry to Dreher's promised land because of his pig socks.

It is a sign of civic health that someone who is making a fortune for a TV network can still lose her position when she indulges in disgusting rhetoric like that. Some things you can’t say in public without consequence. Where we draw that line will always be under contention, but we ought to all agree that Roseanne Barr crossed it.

I'll bet Dreher thinks the Beatles should have been driven from our shores after John Lennon said they were more popular than Jesus.

Others among the brethren find new ways to embarrass themselves -- Anthony Scaramucci, the erstwhile Trump mouthpiece who encourages people to call him "The Mooch," complained of being discriminated against as an Italian-American ("When I was called a human pinkie ring and a goombah while in the @Whitehouse that was deemed acceptable comedy. Double standard"). That's even better than when mobster Joe Colombo's Italian-American Anti-Defamation League went after The Godfather.

And rightwing pencil-neck Roger Kimball does the ooh-such-po-li-ti-cal cor-rect-ness simper-strut at The Spectator:

Uh oh. Was the tweet in bad taste? Indubitably. Was it racist? Yep. Was it the worst thing ever in the history of civilization? According to ABC, which hosted her new, extremely popular show, the answer appears to be, Yes: nothing so awful has ever besmirched the escutcheon of humanity.

You liberals act like racism is the very worst thing in the whole entire world but what about World War II, or that time a black guy glared at me?

Yes, it was in bad taste. So what? There was a time when bad taste was not a (professional) death sentence. Under the reign of political correctness, that time has passed.

Does one of you have the patience to explain to Kimball for me the difference between, say, the race jokes in Blazing Saddles and calling a black lady a monkey?* Best part:

I do not watch television, so I never saw Roseanne Barr’s show. I understand, however, that it was a breath of fresh air, not so much conservative as simply independent.

Percy Dovetonsils doesn't sully himself with idiot box emissions, but knows this show must be good because Trump likes it and the star is a racist.

UPDATE. *I thought everyone knew this, but apparently there are law professors who don't know, or affect not knowing, that calling black people monkeys is like Racism 101:

Yes, the problem of likening humans to apes, an interesting variation on the age-old resistance to the notion of evolution. We are primates, all of us, the same order as the apes. Bush was "Chimpy McHitler," and let's not forget that time Trump sued Bill Maher for joking that Trump was the son of an orangutan.

Speaking of law perfessers: "ABC hands midterms to Trump, GOP," says Instapundit Glenn Reynolds. Maybe they can get Tim Allen to call Michelle Obama a coon and get fired -- that'll really excite the base! Then they can all tell us that lots of different people are compared to raccoons, isn't that what Michelle Wolf did to Sarah Huckabee, you're the real racists, etc.

*5 SECONDS LATER* WE REGRET TO INFORM YOU THE FREE-SPEECH WARRIOR IS RACIST.

Everyone's crazy for the latest member of the Intellectual Dark Web, napping black-woman monitor Sarah Braasch!

The woman who called 911 to report that a Yale University student was taking a nap in a graduate student dorm has a history of making racially charged statements, and had also previously called police on another African American graduate student in the same building... 

According to Braasch’s Yale biography, she is currently pursuing her fifth degree, an MA in philosophy, to “address the sub-human legal status of the world’s women at the source.” However, a trawl through some of her previous writings reveals some troubling examples of racist dogma. In a 2010 post for the blog Humanist, Braasch brags about how she won a middle school debate on the pros and cons of slavery — while on the side advocating it.

“I led our team to victory,” she wrote. “The pro-slavery contingent defeated the abolitionists because, in a democracy, in the land of the free, who are we to tell people that they can’t be slaves if they want to be?” Braasch goes on to mention that she is a “vehement opponent of hate crime legislation.”

I know what you're thinking -- someone has to take the bad side in debate club, and even though the members who get a liiiitttle too excited about defending slavery tend to be, um, of a certain personality type, there's no reason to assume that --

Be Careful What You Wish For (Why I Hate Hate Crimes Legislation, But I Love Hate Speech)

Never mind. More from Braasch's 2011 Pantheos posting:

I saw a woman in niqab on the UC Berkeley campus the other week. I was shocked. I didn’t approach her. I didn’t speak to her. She was with two other women in hijab, on the opposite side of a wide walkway. 

But, I was shocked. And, appalled. Here was a woman (or, at least, I assume she was a woman), in the heart of what is arguably the most politically liberal university campus and city in the US, a fount for civil rights and 60’s hippie culture, engaging in a brazen act of gender segregation and slavery in the egalitarian public space of a secular, liberal, constitutional, democratic republic...

Yeah, that's what I think when I see a Catholic nun in a habit. "You're as guilty as your oppressor!" I think, and I want to rip the slave cowl from her head, revealing the luxuriant hair underneath. I've never had the guts to do it but, like this brave free speech warrior, I can share my brilliance with you on the Intellectual Dark Web (or would if the New York Times, Washington Post et alia would publish me), which is what really counts.

For the rest of my life, if I should ever get into any kind of a dispute or altercation with anyone who claims to be Muslim, I could conceivably be prosecuted for a hate crime. My vehement anti-religion, and especially anti-Islam, ramblings on facebook, my personal blog, the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s website, and Daylight Atheism could be used against me in a court of law.

Well, one can always hope. Then she'd really be in solid with the Dork Web! Up next: A Twitter goon who likes to tell Democrats they're the real racists -- while calling himself Stonewall Jackson! The woods are full of free-speech warriors -- Bari Weiss will never want for copy!

WHY SO SERIOUS?

Among the many similarities between the Trump people and the more overt alt-right is their common impulse to cover their more repulsive sentiments as jokes. Look at Trump's recent declaration that Democrats who didn't applaud him at the State of the Union might be traitors, and his spokesman Hogan Gidley's assurance that Trump was -- obvs! -- just kidding. The brethren took the hint; Dan McLaughlin of National Review portrays Trump's statement, unimaginable from any previous President, as gentle if totalitarian ribbing -- "the subversive, somewhat cleansing but ultimately corrosive part of Trump’s brand of political performance art," McLaughlin puts it, trying as best his shitty prose skills can manage to soften the "corrosive" part with an invocation of a Lenny Bruce for Bigots -- and asks the libs Are You Triggered:

...if you watch the actual video, you can see the flippancy here. Trump is plainly not being serious about treason – he’s playing this for laughs, and getting them – and liberals going to DEFCON 1 as if he is are yet again proving how little interest they have in distinguishing between tyranny and mere boorishness. The loss of perspective is just wearying to watch at this point.

I can imagine McLaughlin at the computer, musing: Am I wearied by the loss of perspective or amused by it? I assume he eventually flipped a coin.

This treason-amirite stuff is of a piece with other apparently serious and horrific Trump comments that his factota later disown as gags -- like asking Russia to steal Hillary Clinton's emails -- or that Trump himself laughs through, either to cover the violence or because he genuinely finds it funny, as when he light-heartedly told cops to smash suspects' heads into car doors.

And it really reminds me of the trollery of alt-right icons like Milo Yiannopoulos, a professional asshole who pretends, semi-successfully, that his slurs are a type of stand-up, and such elaborate kidding-not-kidding as the Chuck Johnson crowd claiming the OK sign as a white power symbol, then denying they did it.

I'm not sure to what extent these alt-right guys get encouragement from Trump,  or whether their outrages, fed to Trump in his morning memo, give him encouragement (though I'm pretty sure Trump's Me/Not Me development is sufficient retarded that, if he likes something, he assumes it originated with him). But the real meaningful resemblance between Trumpism and the alt-right isn't their compatible bigotry and viciousness; it's in their similarly bland insistence that it's all just a joke that you'd be a Fool and a Chump and Triggered to take seriously (unless you're people like the Kochs and DeVoses who have big money to promote it, in which case please take it very seriously indeed!). It's like every up-and-coming wingnut is, in the manner of Trump advisor Stephen Miller, that one friend everyone had in high school who made outrageously vicious statements and, when he didn't get laughs, told everyone to lighten up -- only expanded into a movement with millions of followers.

Now even some old-time, credentialed conservative writers are picking this up. Here's Robert VerBruggen on the recent analysis by Washington Post reporters who found, sure enough, the immigration restrictions Trump has promoted with volley after volley of racist vomit would in fact keep America whiter for a few more years -- which news, I don't think it's unreasonable to believe, would thrill a substantial portion of Trump's base, if they ever read high-falutin' big-city papers like the Post.  Now, VerBruggen is one of National Review's more obvious racists, but still paper-trained in the classic Buckley manner so he's unlikely get kicked out for being too obvious like John Derbyshire -- and now that he's caught on to the New Breed's why-so-serious style, he's got a fresh new way to cover his tracks:

Now the Washington Post has done the yeoman’s work of calculating how the [Trump] framework would affect the demographics of the nation as a whole, and you won’t believe how pale everyone will be a quarter-century from now if we let Orange Hitler have his way... 

In 2044 this country will be only about 47 to 49 percent nonwhite, instead of 50 percent. The Make America White Again plan could delay the dawn of a majority-minority United States, currently expected to arrive 26 years from now, by one to five years. In wanting to stop immigrants from bringing over chains of distant relatives with no regard for their skills, Trump is clearly motivated by nothing other than — come on now, don’t be shy to say it — racism.

Ha? Well, I didn't say he was smooth about it. But that doesn't matter. In fact, a certain clumsiness goes with the territory -- to successfully tell a joke, after all, you have to have at least a little joy in your soul that you wish to express, but to these guys, "joking" is just a formal strategy for the very serious business of realizing their will to power. I mean, look at The Daily Wire's response to Jimmy Kimmel's gag about conservatives not being smart enough to do late night TV -- "7 Conservative Talk Show Hosts Who Are Smarter Than Jimmy Kimmel." (Here's a taste: "Dennis Prager is the longtime host of The Dennis Prager Show and author of eight books on theology, history, and politics..." Stop, yer killing me!) Trying to disprove Kimmel's point with actual humor isn't even an option. Humor isn't their strong suit. But, like the Soviet functionaries who used to squeeze out Krokodil every month, they'll pretend, because they dimly perceive that it brings down the defenses of those Earth People they're trying to sucker. And, who knows, maybe it even helps them fool themselves.

BUT IN THE END, THEY'RE ALL LOSERS.

The Oscar nominations are out, and if I get some time I hope to watch more of the nominated films and luxuriate in stupid prognostication like I used to do back when I was single and had nothing to do but attend the ci-ne-ma. Speaking of nerds, I see the wingnuts are having their usual allergic reactions. Kyle Smith, who went from pretending to be a film critic at the New York Post (and sometimes a theatre critic -- see his review of Will Ferrell's one-man George W. Bush show, "Is it too much to ask for Hollywood's leading comic actor not to use the deaths of our troops in combat for a giggle?" Never forget!) to full-blown kulturkampfer at National Review, tells his readers what they want to hear, i.e. that the nominations prove "#OscarsSoWoke" and are all about appeasing the dark gods of liberalism: in this "highly politicized year... Academy voters are going to be very eager to send a duly left-wing cultural message" and so, Smith predicts, moviecommies will vote for The Shape of Water which he says is leftwing -- because of the human/nonhuman miscegnation, I guess. Then he says,

As for Get Out, I think this is a very fine movie that is being hugely overrated because it’s about racism and I can’t imagine Oscar voters, who are mostly senior citizens, will be as impressed with it as critics have been.

So Academy voters are too "senior citizen" to vote for Get Out, but "woke" enough to vote for some other woke movie? Maybe there's something in there about Hollywood liberals being The Real Racists™ -- I'm stunned Smith didn't tease that out!

In another post called "The Anti-Trump Oscars" (these guys are nothing if not subtle) Smith explains why The Post can't win even though, if we follow his Zhdanovite logic, its journalistic-heroes-beat-Nixon story would seem to be the obvious choice: "Perhaps the Academy found the film just a bit too by-the-numbers... or voters thought the film was a bit too blatantly intended to capitalize on the anti-Trump mood. The Oscars are a fan dance..." It's all so complicated! Or maybe it's actually simple: the whole idea of everything that happens in movieland being a proxy battle between Republicans and Democrats is a bunch of bullshit. C'mon, Agent Smith, think outside the box!

Also, while I think people who mope about "snubs" because their personal love-objects didn't get Academy recognition are silly, at least they're just harmlessly indulging fan-crushes; Zachary Leeman's "Conservative Movies Snubbed by the Academy" at LifeZette, on the other hand, is like a cross between 1984 and Tiger Beat. For example, Leeman tells us Wind River is conservative because it's "about the mental and physical stability and fortitude still needed to survive in some parts of the country." You know, like Cimarron or Walkabout! Thus it "deserved recognition for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay," and because it didn't get it Leeman has thrown himself on his bed sobbing and kicked off all the frilly pillows. (The other snubbed movies were ignored, Leeman says, because they have uniformed personnel in them, and Oscar never honors servicemembers except for The Hurt Locker and Platoon and Saving Private Ryan and Platoon and Patton etc. etc. [voice trails off])

Speaking of snubs, if you thought Wonder Woman didn't get any nominations because, news flash, not every big-budget comic-book movie gets the prestige awards that lonely dorks holed up with their "light saber" and a box of Kleenex believe it should, Brandon Morse of RedState is here to tell you it's really because "Hollywood, being the left wing haven that it is, couldn’t stomach a few of Wonder Woman’s glaring politically incorrect flaws." That seems weird, as I remember when the movie came out conservatives were mainly tumescent with rage at all-female showings of the film. But no, Morse tells us,

For one, feminists didn’t seem to think Wonder Woman was suitable as a rep for their narrative. She was too sexy and too beautiful.

And when he unsheathed his light-saber, an usher threw him out of the theater.

Others among the brethren run their own little fantasy factories -- like Victory Girls' Kendall Sanchez saying Get Out is about "how progressives attempt to understand the cultural experience of African Americans." I know, that's what we all took away from it. Also, while Kyle Smith thinks Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is "about a vengeful feminist looking for answers after her daughter’s murder and also has a racist character" and therefore is "just as woke as The Shape of Water" -- a damning assessment, indeed! -- Kendall thinks "it’s a great movie about a desperate mother urging police to find her daughter’s murderer. I went into the movie thinking it would be a giant slam against police" -- and therefore bad! -- "but it turned out to be a humble and empathetic story that emphasized all humans are 1) intention-driven and 2) both good and bad." Ebbing, Missouri is a land of contrasts!

Maybe Smith and Kendall can do a podcast where they argue over whether a movie is conservative-therefore-good or liberal-therefore-bad. That'll really show the libs and send the walls of Hollyweird tumbling down, and our children's children's children will have nothing to watch on the telescreen but Veggie Tales, God's Not Dead 1-3,927, and the Two Minutes Hate, as God intended.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: For conservatives, culture war is not a war for culture but a war on culture.

YEAH, BUT OTHER THAN THOSE WHITE SUPREMACISTS...

A couple weeks back another three-named honky allegedly left a bomb at Asheville Regional Airport ("Man suspected of planting airport bomb 'wanted to start a war on US soil'") and in Shelbyville, Tennessee white nationalists are planning a white power rally for this weekend. But you know what the real problem is, says Megan McArdle:

Be Careful Who You Call a 'White Supremacist'
If you've cried wolf too many times, no one will listen when you actually see the real thing

McArdle claims liberals are only talking about white supremacy because their old terms for white people who think black people are inferior aren't working anymore: "'Institutional racism' conjures up images of beige-carpeted offices and rows of desks; 'systemic racism' sounds like some sort of plumbing problem," tee hee! Even the milder term "racism" is also de trop;  "increasingly broad uses of the word 'racism' have made it less effective than it used to be at rallying moral outrage." So liberals, desperate for attention, are using "white supremacist" for its shock value.

This just makes racism (which sort of exists, McArdle seems to concede, just not anywhere liberals and black people see it) worse. And guess what, This Is Why Trump Won, because even though McArdle, like all conservatives with enough brains to cover their asses, was firmly Against Trump and "shouted to no avail as Trump coyly flirted with hardcore white supremacists," she couldn't stop Trump's election — because liberals used up their race cards on Mitt Romney, forcing white people to vote for Trump,  so this is all liberals’ fault. (Though McArdle is of course grateful for all the Trump policies and appointments of which she approves, nonetheless there are other Trump policies she doesn't like, such as... um... er... well, she did shout to no avail.)

Just for shits and giggles, let's put "white supremacist" in Google News and see what kind of fake outrages we can find that silly liberals are creating with it:

Public Radio International: "Poland's right-wing nationalist government objects to visit by US white supremacist Richard Spencer." Not sure if Spencer's one of the "hardcore white supremacists" McArdle acknowledges as genuine -- probably not, since I'm bringing him up and I'm a liberal.

The Hill: "Former McConnell aide defends labeling [Steve] Bannon a ‘white supremacist.’" Now, don't get excited, maybe Josh Holmes is a liberal -- I'm sure Trumpkins think so! -- rendering his analysis null and void. I mean come on -- Steve Bannon a white supremacist?

Vice: "Reddit Is Cracking Down on Nazi and White Supremacist Groups." Political correctness is clearly the real problem here! Social media sites like Reddit should be required by law to allow you-only-encourage-them-by-calling-them-white-supremacists to rave on their site -- no less a free-speech authority than Steve Bannon says so.

Snopes: "White Supremacist Rally Attendees Arrested After Shooting at Protesters." Oh yeah, those three dudes who "were arrested after shouting 'Heil Hitler' and opening fire on a group of anti-Nazi protesters, according to arrest documents." Look, no one got hit; once again, just liberals blowing things out of proportion and distracting us from the real racists.

NJ.com: "White supremacist group posts recruiting fliers across Rutgers campuses." Well, if you liberals weren't so mean to them they wouldn't need to recruit.

I could go on, but why bother? Long story short: McArdle just wants you to be to be careful who you're calling a white  supremacist because she's afraid one evening she'll be at a dinner party and Jamelle Bouie will be giving her the stink-eye.

MR. BROOKS' CLASS WAR.

Old-fashioned straight-up racism is a tougher sell in the age of Black Lives Matter than it used to be, so racists (and the people hired to get votes from them) must modernize. Some conservatives (including the allegedly reformed Andrew Sullivan) remain quite comfortable saying or at least dogwhistling that black people are treated unequally in this society because they're Bell Curve inferiors. But even they must qualify it: Look, we're not racist because we admit Asians are smarter than us! Look, we're only defending Charles Murray's right to free speech!

There's always the "Liberals are The Real Racist" dodge. But that's usually an unsatisfying balm conservatives apply after they've been laughed off the stage. However, maybe they'll get more pro-active with it -- David Brooks is working in his sociological meth lab to strip the "white" out of "white privilege" and put "liberal" in instead.

How's he doing it? By taking out the actual political and philosophical parts of liberalism, and leaving only the stereotype of sissies who like fancy books, food, and leisure activities, think they're better than you, and have found a way to be rich without quite being capitalists (sneaky buggers!).

Brooks' column, generously titled "How We Are Ruining America" (it's the last acknowledgement of his own possible complicity, though), starts with a long wheeze about how "upper-middle-class" people are soaking up all the good things -- education for their kids, "behavior codes" (presumably like marriage, which makes you rich!), maternity leave, etc. While a socialist, or a Christian or a decent human being, might think, okay, then let's use government to give less upper-middle people better access to such things, Brooks explains that what's really causing these inequalities are "the informal social barriers that segregate the lower 80 percent."

This isn't about the black guy who can't get a cab -- why, the fact that he's presuming to hail one shows he's in the upper 20 percent, and thus just as much an oppressor as the whites. The real oppressors are the ones who can pronounce simple Italian words, or who don't freak out when they can't (a sure sign of effeteness):

Recently I took a friend with only a high school degree...

BULLSHIT BUZZER ALERT! Maybe she's his nanny.

...to lunch. Insensitively, I led her into a gourmet sandwich shop. Suddenly I saw her face freeze up as she was confronted with sandwiches named "Padrino" and "Pomodoro" and ingredients like soppressata, capicollo and a striata baguette. I quickly asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else and she anxiously nodded yes and we ate Mexican.

What sort of person is class-shamed by an Italian deli? Mmmmaybe the "friend" was Mexican; maybe she'd just come up from Gopher Holler, where they have a Chipotle but not a salumeria. Here's how Brooks explains it:

American upper-middle-class culture (where the opportunities are) is now laced with cultural signifiers that are completely illegible unless you happen to have grown up in this class. They play on the normal human fear of humiliation and exclusion. Their chief message is, “You are not welcome here.”

Those fucking Italians! Always trying to make you feel small because you don't know which gabagool to use for the fish course!

Even worse:

In her thorough book “The Sum of Small Things,” Elizabeth Currid-Halkett argues that the educated class establishes class barriers not through material consumption and wealth display but by establishing practices that can be accessed only by those who possess rarefied information.

That "rareified information" being the code to the security systems at their McMansions.

To feel at home in opportunity-rich areas, you’ve got to understand the right barre techniques, sport the right baby carrier, have the right podcast, food truck, tea, wine and Pilates tastes, not to mention possess the right attitudes about David Foster Wallace, child-rearing, gender norms and intersectionality.

I know what all this shit is; I must be rich. Rich and rareified! Yet I'm wearing a cardboard belt. Why don't I just leave this stupid job I'm stealing time from to write this, and live on information?

The educated class has built an ever more intricate net to cradle us in and ease everyone else out. It’s not really the prices that ensure 80 percent of your co-shoppers at Whole Foods are, comfortingly, also college grads; it’s the cultural codes.

I showed the cashiers that I know how to pronounce quinoa, but they still called security when I left without paying.

Status rules are partly about collusion, about attracting educated people to your circle, tightening the bonds between you and erecting shields against everybody else. We in the educated class have created barriers to mobility that are more devastating for being invisible. The rest of America can’t name them, can’t understand them. They just know they’re there.

If you're still wondering why Brooks downplays the role of money as well as the role of race here, I'll spell it out: His target is not people of color, who don't need David Brooks to tell them what time it is, but 1.) the Trump voters out in the heartland who might resent that they can't afford a block of Pilates classes (but let's face it, they don't read David Brooks nor even know who he is, and would take him for one o' them liberal sissies if they ever saw him); and, more likely, 2.) rightwing operatives who have been peddling arugula-Grey Poupon visions of liberalism forever, and hope that the recent uptick in class consciousness can be exploited against liberals rather than against their coprorate masters -- perhaps with "I am the 80%" t-shirts, and symbolic anti-elitist state-lege bills taxing reiki or requiring yoga studios sell cigarettes, and rhymes like "If you're lib, I like the cut of your gib, if you're centrist, you get a good dentist, but if you're Right, brother, good night, good night."

As America goes further down the crapper, a lot of people are going to get mad at the rich, and the donors might find it worth their while to fund propaganda that says "Don't guillotine you, don't guillotine me, guillotine that liberal hugging that tree." Maybe they'll outfit their Porsches to roll coal so the rabble know they're alright. Since saner policies are out of the question, it's worth a try.

UPDATE. Holy shit, every wingnut in wingnuttia rushed to defend Brooks' imbecilic column. Here's the crest of Megan McArdle's tweetstream:

I mean, all those liberals have to have the same exalted social status as she, haven't they? Otherwise why would Twitter allow them to talk to her? And she knows lots of genuine working class people, like that lady who said such nice things to her on the bus -- although, hmm, that lady was black, so maybe she was on welfare.

Chris Arnade comes in with his usual bullshit -- "I would add, where David Brooks uses upscale delis, I use McDonald's to show the difference in cultural capital between front-row & back-row" -- just in case Brooks is thinking of jumping line, Chris Arnade has McDonald's, bitch (and possibly a licensing deal -- "ba ba ba ba ba, white working class!"). On and on he goes about how oh, you liberals all sneer at McDonald's! Like we're all 23, have trust funds, and dine at Le Diplomate every night -- or that the amount of crap food one has eaten (and I've eaten plenty in my time) is the measure of one's authentic something-or-otherness, instead of a marker for pre-diabetes.

This may be Arnade's nadir: "The online reaction to David Brooks column is largely this -- Snark from people who have cultural capital but not economic."  As if we could ruin people's hopes and dreams by making snide remarks from our studio apartments and crappy jobs! Again, we see the insistence that money has nothing to do with it, and therefore money can't help. It's a great excuse for not supporting government interventions -- because the real power is in positive thinking, and if we just reward that and punish "snark," then by the law of supply and demand we'll Make America Great Again.

This brings us back around to Murray who, looking to diversify from his Bell Curve shtick a few years back, promoted that Fishtown/Belmont "bubble test" hooey, purporting to show that if you didn't watch the right TV shows and listen to modern crap country music (not that rap stuff, though -- only you-know-whats listen to that), you were an elitist and therefore had nothing to say to the Little People. This led to the spectacle of pencil-necked wingnuts imagining themselves butch because they knew the names of some pickup trucks. And now we have the logical end result of this ridiculous obsession, Donald Trump -- on the one hand, the People's Choice, whom no one would call elitist; on the other hand, a golden-palace-dwelling narcissist, the ultimate Bubble Boy. It is amazing what lengths we'll go to as a country to evade paying the butcher's bill -- but I have a hunch the butcher will get real insistent real soon.