FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

For a while in the 1980s I had a girlfriend with a Farfisa.

•   Conservatives are tumbling to the fact that if anything's gonna save 2016 for them it's stone cold racism. National Review's David French, a bless-your-heart I'll-pray-for-you Christian, does his bit with a post that shocked even me, and I've been reading his wormy shit for a while. It's called "The Hidden Reason Why Americans Dislike Islam" and that reason seems to be: Because Muslims are no damn good. Seriously. Reflecting on his spell in the Army, French writes:

I spent enough time outside the wire and interacting with tribal leaders to get a sense of the reality around me, but the younger guys on the line spent weeks at a time living in the heart of the local community. I remember one young soldier, after describing the things he’d seen since the start of the deployment, gestured towards the village around us and said — in perfect Army English — “Sir, this s**t is f**ked up.”

It is indeed. While it’s certainly unfair to judge Indonesia or Malaysia by the standards of Iraq or Afghanistan, it’s very hard to shake the power of lived experience, nor should we necessarily try.

Let that last clause sink in for a moment. Maybe his Muslim accountant is okay, but that'll never shake his ugly memories of the sub-humans whose homeland he was kind enough to invade and occupy.

After all, when we hear stories from Syria, Yemen, Gaza, the Sinai, Libya, Nigeria, Somalia, Mali, Pakistan, and elsewhere they all fit the same depressing template of the American conflict zones. Nor is the dazzlingly wealthy veneer of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, or the other Gulf States all that impressive. Tens of thousands of soldiers have seen the veritable slave labor that toils within the oil empires and have witnessed first-hand their casual disregard for “lesser” life.

You all know how depraved the Saudi princes are, right? Well, even the poor ones are like that!  The next graf is amazing:

But this same experience has caused us to treasure the Muslim friends we do have — in part because we recognize the extreme risks of their loyalty and defiance of jihad. That’s why American officers fiercely champion the immigration of local interpreters, even to the point of welcoming them into their own home. That’s why there’s often an intense connection with our Kurdish allies, the single-most effective ground fighting force against ISIS.

As French has said before, lest anyone think him racist, there are a few good ones -- and they're all named Gunga Din! In fact, I'm beginning to think French watched that movie before he slagged the entire world Muslim population:

I bet he's looking forward to a gig with President Trump's Department of Mooslim Relations. (Bonus: At one point French says, "Even more disturbingly, it seemed that every problem was exacerbated the more religious and pious a person (or village) became." If only his programmers had put in a capacity for reflection!)

•   Camille Paglia in the Hollywood Reporter! On "girl squads"! Well, this should win her a brand new audience! Imagine the sunshine people reclining poolside and opening their HR to this:

Given the professional stakes, girl squads must not slide into a cozy, cliquish retreat from romantic fiascoes or communication problems with men, whom feminist rhetoric too often rashly stereotypes as oafish pigs. If many women feel lonely or overwhelmed these days, it's not due to male malice. Women have lost the natural solidarity and companionship they enjoyed for thousands of years in the preindustrial agrarian world, where multiple generations chatted through the day as they shared chores, cooking and child care.

Paglia has the soul of a gossip columnist but not, alas, the chops.

•   Jonah Goldberg's newsletter today:

Now, I’'m not necessarily saying we should meet ISIS at Dabiq and give them the Islamist Ragnarok they want. But I'’m not saying we shouldn't either. My point is if they want to have one big mano-a-mano fight between the forces of the West and Mordor, it’s purely a tactical question whether we should give it to them...

Oh Jesus. You can read the rest if you like; it's nearly quitting time.

TERRORISTS IN OUR MIDST!

Among the respectable conservatives climbing on the Trump Muslim-ban bandwagon is Byron York, who quotes a Pew study to suggest that even though statistically small, the percentage of Muslim abroad and even at home who say violence in the cause of Islam is acceptable is too high:

"Muslims mostly say that suicide bombings and other forms of violence against civilians in the name of Islam are rarely or never justified, including 92 percent in Indonesia and 91 percent in Iraq," Pew reported. On the other hand, in some countries, the "justified" answers are quite high. In Afghanistan, for instance, 18 percent say such violence is often justified, 21 percent say sometimes justified, 18 percent say rarely justified and 40 percent say never justified. Four percent say they don't know. 

Read the numbers however you like. Some stress that large majorities of Muslims in the United States and in some other countries oppose such violence under all circumstances. Others point to those Muslims in the United States who believe it is justified in at least some cases — 13 percent — and say that is an unacceptably high number...

You know who else thinks violence in their cause might be justified? From a 2013 Fairleigh Dickinson University survey report:

Partisan divisions on gun control go deeper than the legislation being fought over in
Congress. Supporters and opponents of gun control have very different fundamental beliefs about the role of guns in American society. Overall, the poll finds that 29 percent of Americans think that an armed revolution in order to protect liberties might be necessary in the next few years, with another five percent unsure. However, these beliefs are conditional on party. Just 18 percent of Democrats think an armed revolution may be necessary, as opposed to 44 percent of Republicans and 27 percent of independents.

So who's more likely to shoot the place up -- Muslim-Americans, or Molon-Labe-Americans?

UPDATE. In comments (excellent as always), Andrew Johnston points to a 2011 Gallup poll in which, confronted with the question "Some people think that for the military to target and kill civilians is sometimes justified, while others say that kind of violence is never justified. Which is your opinion?"  Americans who were Muslim were more likely to say "never" (78%) than those who were Protestant (38%) or, indeed, of any other religious persuasion -- though atheists were ahead of the curve with 56% (but don't tell Dawkins, he'll get a swelled head).

This'll mean nothing to the meatheads, who if they've been properly propagandized will tell you it's all lies because Taqiyya and how your Muslim pediatrician, newsstand vendor, and co-worker are all ready to cut your head off at a word from the Imam. (If they haven't been properly propagandized, they'll just say of course violence is justified if you're a white Christian -- specifically the right white Christian; specifically, them -- and leave it at that.)

A THIN CROP.

I guess it's time for another stroll around Acculturated, the wingnut welfare training school for the shock troops of the cultural revolution. But there's less overt craziness there these days, it seems; maybe they've given up on trying to get attention outside the WW community. For example, what is one to do with something like "Celebrities, Please Stop Talking About Menopause," which author Charlotte Hays asks because, well, who knows -- this is as close as she gets to a reason:

But embedded in the current menopause talk is the notion that menopause was once a stigma from which women are now boldly freeing themselves. No, it was never a stigma. It was a fact of life. But it was private.

There are certain things about which one simply does not talk because they are disgusting -- like defecation, or menopause. And definitely don't tell your little girl that she can be anything she wants when she grows up, that's just too "vacuous" and "tiresome," says Carrie Lukas (seen before here). Sometimes I think the brief at Acculturated is "Advocate for a world in which no man ever learns anything about women except they're supposed to smell nice and wait for marriage to fuck them."

Thank God, then, for Mark Judge, who tells us that the new James Bond movie is really about "what is arguably the modern social problem that is at the root of all other social problems: fathers abandoning their sons":

Whereas Steve Jobs won’t acknowledge his own daughter, being too busy creating machines that will turn people into petulant narcissists, Bond ventures into the world, throwing himself into danger and accepting the mantle of father figure – and not just for one child, but for an entire civilization. Beneath his cynicism Bond loves Britain and Western Civilization. In his designer suits and gold watches he is a brutal but sophisticated guide for the soft boys and weak Millennials of today... 

In his novels, Bond creator Ian Fleming gave 007’s family a motto: “The world is not enough.” This reflected Bond’s Scottish-Catholic roots – the idea that the things of this world are not sufficient to attain happiness or salvation.

That's why he was always helping those pretty ladies say their prayers at night, see. Now that's the kind of thing we expect from Acculturated! Maybe we should think of this as a rebuilding year and come back later.

UPDATE. In our comments, which are as always very good, some readers note that Judge includes the Steve Jobs movie in his paradigm, with Jobs symptomatic of the wages of fatherlessness, and Bond, who was adopted and had, in essence, two daddies, of the blessings of fatherfulness. "Somehow, James Bond is the well balanced personality, and Steve Jobs is an empty husk of failure," observes Downpup E. "Imagine an editor, staring blankly into the void, and finally shrugging: 'Hopeless. Just run it as it is.'" Some funny stuff about Orbis non sufficit, too.

HE MAY BE A FOOL, BUT HE'S YOUR FOOL.

Now that the Republican Presidential front-runner has anted up his bigotry, conservatives are trying harder to disown him. But it really cuts against their grain. When Trump proposed keeping Muslims out of the U.S., David French had just put up a post at National Review all about how dangerous Muslims are -- the title, in fact, is "Dispelling the ‘Few Extremists’ Myth – the Muslim World Is Overcome with Hate." Among the choice bits:

...jihadists represent the natural and inevitable outgrowth of a faith that is given over to hate on a massive scale, with hundreds of millions of believers holding views that Americans would rightly find revolting... 

To understand the Muslim edifice of hate, imagine it as a pyramid — with broadly-shared bigotry at the bottom, followed by stair steps of escalating radicalism... 

The base of the pyramid, the most broadly held hatred in the Islamic world, is anti-Semitism, with staggering numbers of Muslims expressing anti-Jewish views... 

The next level of the pyramid is Muslim commitment to deadly Islamic supremacy. In multiple Muslim nations, overwhelming majorities of Muslims support the death penalty for apostasy or blasphemy...

Etc. To be fair, he stops short of calling them vermin. If you said something like this about Christians, French would file a hate-crime complaint. You can imagine some goon reading this and thinking Shee-it, them Muslims sound awful, I better vote for Trump an' keep 'em all out!

But today French is trying to distance himself from Trump. Not on the grounds of their mutual beliefs, mind you -- French reiterates that "it’s foolish to admit a class of refugees when we know the world’s leading terror army is attempting to infiltrate the displaced masses or recruit from their ranks." But the ones that are here already, they can stay, French says -- and we can let in a small, select group of "good" Muslims, such as "interpreters who’ve laid down their lives to serve our warriors downrange... members of allied militaries who are training to be the Muslim 'boots on the ground,'" et alia. Everyone else can go die in the sea.

Oh, then he talks about what a menace political correctness is. Which is weird, because he and they are really just waiting to put in a nominee who can be as racist as Trump but keep his mouth shut about it.

UPDATE. As has become his habit of late ("We Didn't Start The Fire: Who Created Trump?"), Matt Lewis of The Daily Caller emerges again to tell us that Trump's strong support among Republicans is bad for Republicans, especially when they were getting so pumped up denouncing Obama after his pro-reason terrorism speech:

Yesterday, the media cycle was focused on radical Islamism and President Obama’s inability to counter it. Today, Donald Trump has changed the subject. But it’s not just that. Yesterday, the view that radical Islamism was a serious threat that President Obama has not taken seriously (polling backs this up) was a persuasive mainstream position that evoked sympathy and agreement. Today, it’s marginally harder to make that argument.

Now when Ralph Peters calls Obama a pussy, people will think we're intemperate! At the end Lewis admits Trump will probably get a boost from his statements -- another case of Republicans being unfairly made to look bad by other Republicans!

UPDATE 2. At The Federalist, Ben Domenech:

It is no accident that President Obama’s America has given rise to Donald Trump.

It defies explanation, but I'll try: Everyone thinks Obama's a failure and hates him (never mind showing Domenech polls that suggest otherwise, those are all run by liberals), and "our modern elites respond to that rational distrust by smearing it as vile hatred, which further divides and toxifies our politics." In other words, if you point out that their argument is wrong, that just makes Republicans more insane and racist -- so it's all your fault! "And Trump is a perfect personality to exploit these divides," Domenech goes on, "offering the promise of an authoritarian who represents the people in place of an authoritarian who represented the elites." I hope you're proud of yourself, liberals!

Like the rest of our subjects, Domenech basically agrees with Trump; he, too, thinks Muslims are toxic and "elites" are losing the War on Whatchamacallit with their "tolerance" bullshit ("Republicans have spent much of the past three years wringing their hands over how to win the white working class – Donald Trump is showing them how: by confronting and rejecting the values and authority of the elites..."). But he got the Trump-bad memo, so he portrays Trump as a menace while embracing his message. Look, it's at The Federalist -- it's not like it has to make sense.

UPDATE 3: You see this shit:

"The author advises Marco Rubio’s campaign for president." Presumably he advises on non-sequential thought, because his column is just the usual rightwing froth crowned with an "if it weren't for Joel Grey singing 'Wilkommen' there'd have never been a Hitler" assertion. And actually that's not new either: Conservative factota have been trying to blame Trump on Obama, or draw parallels between the two men, since Trump became the front-runner, and because they've saturated their little world with this false equivalence, there's no longer any reason to even pretend to back it up with evidence.

UPDATE 3. What have I been telling you people.

DAWN OF A NEW AGE.

Some days back I wistfully mentioned that a once much-esteemed member of the alicublog rep company, Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters, had moved on to Fox TV commentating, and since it's a mug game (or Media Matters') to scan that shit for gold we weren't having him anymore, and would move on to new hypermacho nutjobs like Kurt Schlichter.

Well, wouldn't you know it, Ol' Blood-'n'-Guts has found a way back into print:

Fox News analyst Lt. Col. Ralph Peters did not mince words when expressing his displeasure with President Barack Obama Monday morning, saying on Fox Business’ Varney & Co. that he was a “total pussy.”

Maybe fans will start watching more faithfully for him, as they once did for Howard Beale.

Peters was moved to obscenity by Obama's Sunday night speech, in which the President tried to be reasonable. (He did talk a little about killing people, but not enough to qualify as a Fournier-grade leader.) I see Obama also caused some lady on Fox to also make a swear:

"His speech was an epic fail," [Stacy] Dash said on the Fox News Channel show "Outnumbered." "It was like when you have to go to dinner with your parents, but you have a party to go to afterwards, that's what it felt like."

Watch your back, Peggy Noonan.

"I did not feel any better. I didn't feel any passion from him," Dash said. "I felt like he [couldn't] give a s--, excuse me, like he [couldn't] care less. He [couldn't] care less."

I don't know what's the bigger outrage here: Stacy Dash's swears, or that Newsmax corrected her perfectly acceptable colloquial use of "could care less."

I like to think this is the beginning of a new era of conservacursing. Obama's trying to keep the lid on, and conservatives have been trying to pry it off with belligerent talk about killing everybody and their wives and children with a third-time's-the-charm Middle East invasion. It must be frustrating to have that much rage dammed up inside without the near prospect of an armed conflict to relieve it. So I can't wait for, say, Mike Huckabee to go, "Jesus fucking Christ on a crutch, when the fuck are we gonna nuke these cocksuckers?" on live TV. Then maybe we'll finally get a full run of "Ow! My Balls!" and handjobs at Starbucks, as was prophesied.

UPDATE. The Washington Free Beacon put up a collection of Peters' TV work, confirming my original instinct -- while it is provocatively stupid, it lacks the the keening nuthouse poetry of his prose efforts.  Well, he wouldn't be the first artist ruined by television.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the San Bernardino shooting and rightblogger attempts to wrest benefits from it. The War on Whatchamacallit angle was expected since the assailants turned out to be Muslim, but the "prayer-shaming" bit was something new and unexpected. I mean, it fits their classic template -- since they lost their 9/11 juju rightbloggers have perfected the rhetorical soccer dive, and Lord knows they like to pretend they're oppressed because of their Christianity, as we saw after the gay marriage ruling. But whereas their gay-marriage victimhood claims were based on the possibility that The State would make them do something -- bake cakes for gay weddings, for example -- the prayer-shaming shtick is nakedly about people making them feel bad. Adding to the jest: Many of the complainants, like Peggy Noonan, simultaneously denounce college kids with their trigger warning as budding fascists. Self-awareness would be a positive liability for a conservative columnist these days.

Anyway please read the column, it's got two Jonah Goldberg references and some jokes even.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

I owe this one to Chuck Gilligan, 

who thinks he was late to Lampchop but beat me to it.

•  The response to the San Bernardino shoot-'em-up has been everything we could expect -- that is, a nightmare. For one thing it's a gift to hardcore Muslim-haters like Robert Spencer, who was completely mum about the Planned Parenthood massacre but believes that because these latest in a series of  shooters are Muslim- instead of honky-American it's not gun-craziness but jihad that killed all those people. (I wonder what Spencer wants for Americans who are Muslim? Concentration camps? Expulsion? He likes to tantalize on the subject, perhaps waiting for the day when something more intemperate may catch fire.) We also have propagandists like Mollie Hemingway saying that if you dare make fun of gun nuts who offer prayers over the red harvest, you're actually being religious yourself -- to the "god of federal government," whom we know to be false because legislation "never solves the problem of man’s fallen condition," so it's useless -- once every head has bowed and every knee bent to Mean Conservative Jesus, he'll fix this mass murder thing, maybe, if he feels like it, and if he doesn't there's a good, unknowable reason. Theodicy!

•  If conservatives are all a little crazier that usual in their reaction to these massacres, I think it's because the gun-control ground has shifted a bit under their feet; the bill Senate Democrats put up to ban terror-list people from getting guns was a stunt -- nobody expected it to pass, so it was just meant to heighten the contradictions -- but it was a clever stunt, as the long moratorium on serious gun control and some high-profile incidents have begun to wear on the public. Conservatives are in the position usually held by liberals -- armed with the evidence that gun violence has actually diminished, but unable to make the sale, as liberals have been when it comes to violence against police -- and conservatives aren't used to it; also, rage is a key part of their shtick, not to mention their psychological profile, so that's what they double up on in times of uncertainty. Longtime readers will know I'm much more bearish, not to say despairing, on the subject; as long as everything else that's wrong with this country makes citizens feel powerless, they're not going to let go of the hope that they'll either be rich some day or at least sufficiently well-armed to feel secure in their persons.

RISIBLE DENIABILITY.

Here's the pitch from Matt Lewis at The Daily Caller:

We Didn’t Start The Fire: So Who Created Trump?

You can't blame conservatism for anything these days -- not the mess in the Middle East, not anti-abortion terrorists, not racism -- and, Lewis is here to tell you, certainly not the jingoistic, pro-torture, pro-bombing blowhard Archie Bunker/Reggie Van Dough hybrid who's been leading Republican Presidential polls for three months. Why not?

Trump is not a conservative, although his perverted version of conservatism currently represents a very vocal minority of the GOP base. Historically, America’s Right and Left have both had moments when strains of nativism and populism were more or less prominent. This is one of those times.

Both sides do it -- populism, that is. Don't you remember Henry Wallace hollering that we had to torture people and steal oil from the Middle East?

Today, for a variety of reasons (none of which indict conservatism as a philosophy) the environment is ripe for a master demagogue to exploit... 

...the liberal media and President Obama’s disastrous presidency are part of the story. Liberals aren’t responsible for the Republican base’s decisions, but if the goal is to understand this phenomenon, it’s fair to point out some of what we are witnessing is a backlash. This is a scary time, both domestically and internationally, and people want to find a strongman to fix the chaos that weak men have created.

This reminds me of how  back in the day Moral Majority types would tell you the Weimar Republic caused Hitler -- by which they did not mean hyperinflation and instability were among the forces that led to his rise, but that there were a lot of homosexuals in Cabaret so God punished the world with Nazis. And by the way, the late Obama Administration ain't Weimar; a 46% approval rating isn't great but it's not Helter-Skelter-she's-coming-down -fast either. Maybe Lewis is thinking of the previous President? Or Congress?

We are also undergoing a continued cultural revolution that began in the 1960s. This might have begun on the Left, but the degradation of traditional family values is now ubiquitous. We once prized virtues like humility, wisdom, experience, and prudence. Now, we value celebrities.

If it weren't for Woodstock we wouldn't have Trump.

But I want to get back to where we began, which is with the notion that Trump-ism is somehow the inexorable denouement of conservatism’s historical arc. If liberals can get this notion to stick, then they will have discredited the Reagan era, which brought us an unparalleled time of peace and prosperity.

Well, there's the real reason Trump can't reflect badly on conservatism -- liberals would benefit if he did! But don't worry, Matt...

Some of the people pushing this narrative have ulterior motives; others are frankly just sincerely (mis)guided by a liberal worldview. This is one of the reasons why the subtitle of my book—“How the GOP Betrayed the Reagan Revolution to Win Elections (and How It Can Reclaim Its Conservative Roots)”—is significant.

...however the party does next year, you'll still be able to work the crowd for shekels -- and if the book doesn't work out, you can always sell them gold and survivalist supplies.

NOT ENOUGH TINFOIL.

As soon as I saw the title -- "10 Resources For Hack-Proofing Your Mind" -- I knew it would be by Stella Morabito, an alicublog favorite who thinks liberals are using mind rays to make you liberal. She seems at first to be comparing campus protestors with ISIS ("But if we’re honest, we can see that these cases represent different stages along the same well-worn path of tyranny"), but eventually she admits maybe the campus kids are less dangerous than ISIS -- they're just "easy targets for mind-rape by the elites and lobbies who can use them for mass mobilization behind various agenda items." The real menace is those elites and lobbies (and I doubt by the latter she means oil and gas!), for whom the students, zombie-like, serve "as deployable agents for hacking the minds of others. Kind of like a Borg."

Now to the service-journalism part of Morabito's essay:

Ten Resources to Jumpstart Conversations about Mind-Rape Prevention

Whaaa...

Why not start a mind-rape prevention book club?

How about a mind-rape prevention happy hour instead? Or maybe Morabito could start a little slower -- like teaching students the difference between fact and opinion (though I hear that this is no longer acceptable to many conservatives), and encouraging them to read and discuss great works of literature and philosophy, rather than psych and sociology textbooks, and thus strengthening their minds, rather than putting coats of armor on them.

But this would be like telling an NRA official  it's more important to learn to get along with others than to fill your house with weapons -- it simply wouldn't compute. Because for some people it's more important to be perpetually on guard than to identify what's worth protecting.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP....

...about rightblogger reactions to the Planned Parenthood shooting. I stuck in a bit about the Minneapolis BLM shooting, mainly because I can't believe how little coverage that got, but also because it shows how skilled these guys are at obfuscating even the most self-evident products of bigotry into some sort of conspiracy against themselves and their pals. (Among the credit-roll outtakes: Gateway Pundit's headline, "5 Black Lives Matter Protesters Shot AFTER REPEATEDLY Beating White Videographers." Videographers, eh? Love to see some more of their work; where's it playing, the Stormfront Film Festival?)

For the clinic their main tools were misdirection -- pretending that a murder spree at a Planned Parenthood had nothing to do with abortion, or actually happened somewhere else -- and whining that all the talk this event was generating about extremism against abortion providers was hurtful and unfair to people who call women baby-killers. Some of the crazier ones used the opportunity to work on their baby-killer-calling skills. Some Guy at RedState, for example, starts out all reasonable-like -- "What Dear did is evil and wrong in any circumstance" -- and then begins to froth:

I am vehemently in opposition to abortion, safe, legal or otherwise. Abortion is really a double-murder. It physically murders the baby, and it simultaneously spiritually/emotionally murders the mother. It’s not only a murder, it’s also a poison, that rots the souls of those who practice violence and barbarism toward innocent unborn human beings, robbing them of a whole lifetime of potential. 

The abortionists have done this over 50 million times in America, and Cowart calls it “safe and legal.” The only people glad Dear chose an abortion clinic to commit his hateful and evil act seem to be abortionists, because someone else committing murder salves their seared souls and masks their own sin.

Shoot, is it any wonder a sensitive soul would want to go to war with Planned Parenthood -- or, hell, all them evil liberals: "There is a cult of death that hates America," starts Some Other Guy at RedState's column on the subject --

It worships what it sees is the right of man to give and take life when it becomes a threat to its way of life. This cult has been aiming to see the end of America as we know it for a long time, but lately it’s become much worse. 

This cult is not ISIS. It isn’t violent, extremist Islam. It is much closer to home. It is the modern American Left.

Eventually RedState will be all KILL LIBERALS in block letters, gifs of Louie Gohmert stabbing his Jane Fonda doll with a knife, and the occasional Erick Erickson column on how it's not too late for Rick Perry.

But enough of my yakking, please read the column.

THE NEW BLOOD-'N'-GUTS.

Fresh from his bizarre WOT slash-fic "Wildman" story about how a real-man President will bomb the Middle East into powder and win a grateful nation's respect, Schlichter is here to tell us "Why the ‘Jon Stewarting’ of America’s Youth Is Awful For Political Discourse." Right out of the gate:

Of all of the many plagues Obama’s reign has unleashed upon America...

Come on, tell me that wasn't impressive.

...the way he and his TV acolytes have empowered stupid people to smugly share their lefty wisdom may be the most tiresome. Firmly resistant to facts, evidence, and truth, his fans have been liberated to unleash their numbing dumb without the shame at their own ignorance that once would have deterred them from sounding off. As a result, America becomes a little more annoying every time some aspiring assistant barista tweets out a link to a YouTube clip titled, “John Oliver TOTALLY DESTORYS racist Ben Carson!”...

There's culture war, and then there's culture total war, and Schlichter's approach here is, like that of Wildman and President Cruz, indiscriminate carpet-bombing. He rages that, because his enemies "can’t argue, they seek to silence," but instead of explaining silence how? he leaps for the throats of the "Millennial doofuses" because they "have crummy jobs, crushing student debt, and no future. They have zero money or fame..." Not like when he was a rich and famous kid! It's like Peter Boyle in Joe underwent a Flowers for Algernon transformation, then took a bunch of meth.

No one thinks this stuff is actually funny; it’s all about solidarity. You never hear real laughs on these political shows, just cheers of approval.

You'll laugh when Schlichter tells you to laugh -- like in his previous column, "Let’s All Laugh As Liberalism Commits Ritual Suicide On Campus" ("And we will sit back and point and laugh as the weak-willed, spineless liberal losers of academia abase themselves before their whimpering student bodies..."). But here's where it really gets weird --

I recently posted a column on a plan to destroy ISIS which involved actually destroying ISIS. One gentleman in the Washington Post pointed out some flaws in my ideas, I think incorrectly, but certainly fairly. This is called an “argument.” But the Jon Stewarties had to pipe up too. I don’t expect them to be retired Army colonels or War College graduates, but I do expect them to know some basic facts about the subject before weighing in. Yet their ignorance was no deterrent.

The "gentleman in the Washington Post" is to all appearances Daniel Drezner, who treated Schlichter's Wildman column as a serious proposal and politely offered a conclusion ("To put it gently, that’s a horrible assumption"). Maybe Schlichter was holding a gun on him.

So: Schlichter apparently regards his macho fantasy as the equivalent of a paper from the Army War College and, when people make fun of it, he fact-checks their jokes -- or rather alludes to facts against which he has, at some undisclosed location, checked and found the jokes wanting.

Schlichter calls to mind one of my old favorites, Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters. Peters does most of his fulminating on TV these days, alas, and I've missed his jacked-up columns. But Schlichter has come into his own and may serve as my go-to military lunatic now as we head toward Gulf War III.

STRANGE NEW RESPECT.

One thing I didn't make too much of in this week's column (though I teased it out a bit here) is the rush among conservatives to defend Donald Trump's ravings about Muslims. Instapundit stringer Ed Driscoll pushes the line that, though there mmmmmaybe weren't "thousands and thousands" of Muslim-Americans cheering 9/11 in Jersey City, Muslims were cheering in the Middle East, which proves media bias, therefore Trump is right where it counts -- that is, he could, in Driscoll's estimation, beat Hillary Clinton (to whom Driscoll compares Trump, in the fine, incoherent tradition of modern conservatives eager to tar their opponents by free-association):

Both [Clinton and Trump] in their own way are prone to speak in outrageous hyperbole because they have little fear of serious repercussions from their wild utterances. But as Steyn writes, given a choice between two crazed exaggerations — one where “thousands” of New Jersey Muslims celebrated on September 11th and another where “Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism,” and given our current president’s ongoing escape into fantasyland, who would you count on to keep you safe in the coming years?

Sounds like Driscoll's thinking the once-unthinkable about Candidate Trump. Oh, and guess who else is? National Review's Rich Lowry, who once teased Trump that Carly Fiorina had cut his balls off, has a column up called "Donald Trump — The Jacksonian Candidate." "Jacksonian" is wingnut code for "white people who don't give a shit who has to die to keep their asses in Barcaloungers," and Lowry is downright respectful toward its new avatar:

Finally, national honor is a paramount value for Jacksonians, a concern that can be heard in Trump’s signature promise to make America great again. He will out-bully and out-fox our adversaries and, as for ISIS, he will bomb and water-board it into submission.

It is tempting to see Donald Trump as something wholly new, the reality star who represents the merger of entertainment and popular culture. He is also something centuries old, the populist railing against a corrupt and ineffectual elite that will, through his chastisement, get the comeuppance it deserves.

Cutting your balls one minute, sucking them the next, these people.

This Strange New Respect for Trump owes much to the temper of the times: Since the Paris attacks, conservatives have been doing their damnedest to re-instill in voters the 9/11 fear that stood them so well in the Bush years. Though they have had their problems with Trump in the past, Il Douche is great for fear-mongering and projecting an image of Making Things Happen By Being Rich and Barking Orders (or, as conservatives know it, strength).

But I think there's more to it than that. Even Trump's non-fans are being extraordinarily gentle with him. Others have noted how media outlets are reluctant to call Trump a liar even when he self-evidently lies. At Commentary, John Podhoretz talks about all the "entirely impressionistic memories" that went on around in New York shortly after 9/11 (though I vas dere, Cholly, and don't recall anything like that), and compares Trump's Jersey City cheering-Muslims bullshit to that:

So, to sum up: There were many hysterical and made-up stories afoot in New York City during that week and the weeks after. People believed anything they were told, and others simply made stuff up... Which suggests not so much that Trump deliberately told a lie in order to rev up a crowd – but rather that he’s very, very gullible.

Actually, Trump claiming to see something that reflects outrageously badly on Muslim-Americans when it didn't actually happen is the opposite of gullibility -- it's mendacity counting on the gullibility of others. It's not even like Podhoretz is covering for some idiot relative with a penchant for story-telling -- he's defending Donald fucking Trump with this well-ya-gotta-understand guff.

I think they've tipped over from Trump-can't-win-if-we-all-growl-at-him to this watery state, soon to be followed by "What sort of President will Trump be?" articles. There are only three things that motivate these people to this kind of behavior: love (ha); fear (def); and money (or the promise thereof in the Treasury-looting Trump Administration).

UPDATE. Allow me to quote me! From Nov. 4, after the CNBC-was-mean-to-us scandal:

As I've said before, in these guys' world truth is no defense against accusations of media bias. I'm not sure the Trump juggernaut can endure long enough to panic some of them into a Strange New Respect for Il Douche, but it would almost be worth a Trump Administration to see it. I mean, the country's fucked anyway, right?

UPDATE 2. Jim Geraghty is trying to preserve some plausible deniability on the Jersey City Jihad thing. Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds has his own, rickety spin:

JIM GERAGHTY: Why the Facts of American Muslims and 9/11 Matter. “We cannot be a party or a movement that gets its understanding of the world from chain-e-mails from Uncle Leo.” 

I dunno, it worked okay for Obama. And I think anger at that fact is why so many people don’t care about Trump’s various excesses. You want no rules? Okay! No rules it is! That’s not good for the country, of course, but then, few of Obama’s legacies are.

Not only is Trump Obama's fault, so are "chain-e-mails from Uncle Leo." But this is of course an old racket for both Geraghty and Reynolds.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about rightbloggers's mortal enemies, the Syrian refugees, and why what looks like pangs of conscience in their xenophobic columns are actually the rhetorical equivalent of gas pains. The apparent agreement of ordinary citizens with their anti-refugee gush is depressing for a  number of reasons -- not only because it represents a shameful reversal of the best American values, but also because it recalls the engineered panic of the Iraq War run-up. If this groundhog sees his shadow, we get ten more years of war.

As usual, due to my meticulous attention to compositional integrity, some corkers had to be left out of the mix -- like this stop-the-presses headline from Fire Andrea Mitchell:

Syrian refugees coming to US automatically put on welfare

They could crawl up out of the surf, watch their hair in a public toilet, and get straight to a job interview, but no! Coddling's what I call it.

Also, there were more apparatchiks than Byron York and John Hinderaker weeping over poor Donald Trump and how the media was trying to make him look like some kind of Nazi -- e.g., PJ Media's Michael van der Galien, "CNN Selectively Edits Donald Trump's 'Muslim Registry' Comments to Make Him Look Like an Anti-Muslim Bigot" (presumably written before Trump kept agreeing with what he was allegedly tricked into saying, but with this bunch who knows), and National Review's Jim Geraghty who, like Hinderaker, admitted it was weird that Trump claimed stadium-size crowds of Jersey Muslims were cheering the 9/11 attacks, but then shifted the blame to "certain conspiracy-theorizing liberals" who "offered a nonsensical charge" that Muslims, or at least some sort of Arabs, were not cheering... in Jerusalem. So see, both sides do it -- Trump says Muslim-Americans cheered out of hatred of America, liberals say Palestinians didn't, so let's split the difference and invade Iran.

Anyway, column's up for your delectation.

UPDATE. Wow, Hinderaker's going all-out in his defense of Trump, harassing the Washington Post over the relative meanings of "a number," "several," and "thousands." Maybe Hindrocket's bucking for a job in the Trump Administration as head of the Department of Bullshit. He should stay alert -- I expect Glenn Reynolds will nose his way to the front first.

UPDATE 2. Ann Althouse thinks Trump may have seen thousands of Muslims, even though others didn't, because he had access to a "high-floor penthouse in Manhattan" where "I presume he has telescopes to gaze out upon the glorious long views." Trump did say he saw it "on television," but maybe he had to stand on his television set to get to the telescope. Anything's possible, right?

The racket is this: Pretend Trump slandering Muslim Americans is really just a misunderstanding, instigated by the liberal media to further their evil pro-Muslim agenda. Their fans already believe the media is evil, and probably already hate Muslims, so it's an easy twofer.

Oh, and later on, write thousands of words about how students are only pretending racism exists.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

The greatest movie awards song medley of all time.

•   It's a small blessing, I guess, that most of the other Republican candidates have distanced themselves from Donald Trump's Muslim registry idea. All it really means is that these shitheels calculate Americans would not approve of it, but that's still positive -- it's when they start calculating that Americans would approve such a thing that things are grim. (You know, like the way many Republicans talk about torture as if it's an American value, instead of something that, once upon a time, we insisted we didn't do.) Of course there's always one skunk at the picnic:

"But the mosque piece of it is the controversial piece, so where do you stand on that?" [Megyn] Kelly jumped in to ask. 

"Well, I think it’s not about closing down mosques. It’s about closing down any place, whether it’s a cafe, a diner, an internet site, any place where radicals are being inspired," the senator [Marco Rubio] said. "The bigger problem we have is our inability to find out where these places are because we’ve crippled our intelligence programs."

I don't know whether he's just that dumb or whether he or one of his campaign people decided this was the best way to distinguish him from the rest of the field on the subject. Well, he's got Breitbart.com's John Nolte on board anyway:

Proving once again that the DC Media lies are no longer effective when it comes to emotionally blackmailing Republican politicians, presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) picked up right where frontrunner Donald Trump left off on the issue of closing radical mosques.

I know Nolte represents some kind of constituency, but won't most of them be thrown out of their polling places when they insist on marking their ballots with pistol fire?

•   The perfect anti-Obama froth is an unachievable Platonic idea, but the second graf of this David Gelernter full-body thrash at National Review (the classy conservative magazine!) gets closer than most:

The reviews are in: the whole world, friend and foe, left and right, east and west, north and south, understands the President of the United States to be a naïf and a fool. The outstanding question is only whether he is a good man over his head (as the global Left seems to believe) or — as the evidence suggests — he has always looked at America and Americans with snide condescension. That seems to be his favorite emotion.

I know what you're thinking. Alas, there is no link to support the claim that everyone, left or right, feels the way David Gelernter feels, and a good thing, too, as that would qualify as a genuine mental health crisis. I think the little sputtering side-rage at the end -- "that seems to be his favorite emotion" -- really makes it; you're not really frothing unless you flail out at least one irrelevancy. But your mileage may vary. Next!

BOOBY PRIZE.

You have probably seen some of the rightwing hate-ons for Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me in recent months. National Review has posted what seems like dozens of them; my favorite is by David French, entitled "White Liberals Love Black Radicals — That’s Why They Love Ta-Nehisi Coates." (You can guess.)

Expect the sputtering rage to redouble now, because Coates' tome won the National Book Award yesterday. The first volley, which will be hard to beat, comes from an email newsletter called Prufrock from the The American Conservative. The item is by Micah Mattix:

The National Book Award winners were announced yesterday, and, of course, Ta-Nehisi Coates won the non-fiction award for Between the World and Me. Sigh: http://bit.ly/1NF58zj. I have read a few poems from Robin Coste Lewis’s Voyage of the Sable Venus, which won the poetry award, and was not particularly impressed. (I haven’t read Adam Johnson’s Fortune Smiles, which won the fiction award, so I can’t comment on it, but the reviews are interesting.) Anyway, if you know the Koch brothers, can you please tell them that a $500,000 gift to start a book award that honors actual literary merit, not identity politics, would do America a hell of a lot of good?

I've often thought that's just what they should do, and if the Kochs are big enough suckers to fund it then why not?  We can be sure "honors actual literary merit, not identity politics" is code for  "lifetime achievement award for Tom Wolfe," and that the inaugural field of Ayns or Ronnies or whatever will be swept by Hugh Hewitt, Dennis Miller, and Kurt Schlichter, creator of "The Wildman." Shortly thereafter, the budget will be repurposed to fund Ted Cruz robocalls, and the awards themselves will be made available to any customer for each thousand dollars he spends at Goldline.

I'D RATHER BE RIGHT.

Obama said this about Republicans who are trying to protect America from pathetic refugees:

"Apparently they are scared of widows and orphans coming into the United States of America," Obama said of Republicans. "At first, they were too scared of the press being too tough on them in the debates. Now they are scared of three year old orphans. That doesn’t seem so tough to me."

Also:

"I cannot think of a more potent recruitment tool for ISIL than some of the rhetoric coming out of here in the course of this debate," Obama said... 

"When you start seeing individuals in position of responsibility suggesting Christians are more worthy of protection than Muslims are in a war-torn land that feeds the ISIL narrative."

Naturally I am very pleased to see this, not only because Obama is usually much too nice to these assholes, but also and mainly because it's a refreshingly strong defense of common sense in the normally common-sense-free War on Whatever. When was the last time you heard any other top-tier elected official call bullshit like this?

Nice Guy Democrats like Kevin Drum think it's a bad idea, though, because mindless fear is a "political winner"; presumably we should all get on board with terror-hysteria so as to keep the love of the people. Say, Joe Lieberman's still alive, maybe he can run for President.

I realize that, as circumscribed as he's been, Obama has accomplished some good things for the country. The trouble is, they're mostly half-measures. Take Obamacare. We only have this shaky Rube Goldberg system because the insurers and the AMA had to get paid off or national healthcare would never fly -- Senators and Congressmen have to get their contributions from somewhere, y'know! Single payer has been and remains the choice of the American people, but in the name of prudence and moderation we have instead a system nobody's entirely happy with, and because they're not happy Republicans get to exploit it while scheming to bring back their preferred Pay or Die healthcare system.

This is what you get when you've been thinking half-loaves so long you treat whole loaves as some sort of Bridge Too Far. What would the American people do with a whole loaf? Isn't there a danger that they'll choke?

Now Republicans are yearning so bad for another war that they're willing to use France, home of socialized medicine and the Axis of Weasels, as their casus belli. (Never mind that France has decided to go ahead and take more Syrian refugees.) Should I, in an attempt at comity, acknowledge their imaginary concerns, and then the next set of imaginary concerns, until finally I'm saying well, if the U.N. is willing...? Fuck it.  I didn't go for it in 2003 and I'm not going for it now. Besides, look at Some Guy from RedState reacting to Obama --

It takes a particular level of gall to be on foreign soil and criticize your political opponents. It is even worse when one is on foreign soil and openly treats political opponents with a level of contempt and anger that would be better served directed at terrorists. President Obama went there and after calling the terrorist attacks in Paris a “setback” and getting pissy with the press on Monday, has begun to lash out at GOP Governors...

I know, art of the possible and all that, but I'm not making common cause with this douchebag. Like Christy Mahon said, if it's a poor thing to be lonesome it's worse, maybe, to go mixing with the fools of the earth. I'll just keep on as I have been, and if God is kind I'll be around in a few years to hear Megan McArdle explain that I was just lucky. And who knows? By then maybe a few more citizens will have caught on.

UPDATE. Here's an interesting approach, from "Captain" Ed Morrissey at Hot Air:

Predictably, the President continues to cheap-shot his opposition via straw-men arguments (while overseas) while demanding we believe what has been proven to be a false narrative, rather than come home to deal with the crisis with actual dialogue and some honesty. The person who is serving refugees worst at the moment is Barack Obama.

I can see "Captain" Morrissey dressed as a simple dogface in WWII, leaning down to the orphaned Dondi with a Hershey bar: "Ya gotta understand, kid -- we didn't want to leave you to die, even though we kept saying that we did. But that Obama -- he went to the Philippines, and he was mean to us! When you're starving to death, remember who's really responsible. [Dondi reaches for the candy bar; Morrissey snatches it back] Psych!"

UPDATE 2. SWEET JESUS CHRIST ALMIGHTY ROD DREHER IS ACTUALLY DIGGING DEVIL LYRICS OUT OF EAGLES OF DEATH SONGS:

Evil is not a game. Evil is not to be messed with. If you call up the devil, sometimes, he will come.

Then he gets into it with his commenters about whether "Sympathy for the Devil" also summons evil. If you guessed "No, 'cause Rod likes the Stones," you guessed right: "And the Stones song was inspired by Bulgakov’s novel 'The Master and Margarita'. It’s not literally expressing sympathy for the devil, but rather disclosing his familiar presence throughout the history’s human atrocities..." It's a still life watercolor, of a now-late afternoon... Really, what's the level after self-parody? Escape velocity?

UPDATE 3. Perhaps he was inspired by Kurt Schlichter's widely-mocked WOT slash-fic, in which Republicans bomb everybody and win the day -- but not before "ISIS sleepers in America had struck at shopping malls" and, while those gunless losers in Los Angeles and Chicago got mass-murdered, "the killers in Phoenix and Dallas had been unable to murder more than a half dozen because of armed citizens..." Whatever the inspiration, Erick Erickson popped a gunboner:

After Paris, I Want to Take My Gun to Star Wars

Ain't even kidding.

...But just to be safe, I plan not to go to opening day. My theater will not let me take my gun with me. There are none in my area that would allow it. So I will wait for a late showing after the crowds have died down. People can scoff and claim this means the terrorists have won. Honestly though, thinking about safe and unsafe situations is something we should all do anyway. If the opening of “Dark Knight Rises” could spark a nut a shoot up a theater, I expect opening day of the biggest film premiere in modern history could do just as much, if not more. Besides, I don’t mind spoilers, so I will wait.

Frankly, I assumed Erickson never went out in public areas where walking was required. Can't he just download a script and act the thing out with his action figures?

CULTURE COPS PATROL PARIS.

Speaking of that awful Mollie Hemingway column, one of her Paree peeves is that people aren't mourning the right way. For one thing, they play and listen to "Imagine" by John Lennon. Though she admits people get some comfort from the song, the culture cop within her cannot approve, because she finds it "embarrassingly juvenile as well as godless and communistic." Why can't Parisians go around howling Dies Irae and beating their breasts like her?

At National Review, Stephen L. Miller also disapproves of "Imagine," and of that Eiffel Tower-peace sign thing that's been going around. Like Hemingway, he acknowledges (or has been encouraged by his programmers to acknowledge) that the traumatized masses like this sort of thing, but he asks that they stop sniffling and listen to his critique: "Spreading a cool graphic can bring a moment of comfort, but it also assists in placating the masses to the point where they do not acknowledge or address the cause of the attacks." Then he goes on about emojis and The Culture and whatnot.

Back at The Federalist, M.G. Oprea takes the biscuit, though. She bitches out Charlie fucking Hebdo for not responding appropriately to terrorism with their funnies:

In a cartoon, they discussed the importance of naming one’s enemies, and in the next breath said our enemies are “those who love death.” Certainly. But in this case, that moniker belongs to militant Islam.

God knows what they think would be appropriate -- maybe something like Twisted Sister's "We're Not Gonna Take It" video, only with lots of ragheads exploding, culminating in a speech by Paul Wolfowitz. I guess they think when we all get back to 9/11land, they'll get sinecures in the Department of Judeo-Christian Values propaganda division, and churn out scolds by the carload. Then, by God, they'll "win" the "culture"!

HE CALLS THAT RELIGION BUT I KNOW HE'S GOIN' TO HELL WHEN HE DIES.

As always happens after a terror attack, we're seeing a lot of Christians like those asshole Governors  and  Rev. Mike Huckabee ("'It's time to wake up and smell the falafel,' Huckabee told Fox News' Bret Baier... 'We are importing terrorism'") reinterpreting the Golden Rule to conform more closely to Republican policy, i.e. the Good Samaritan was a schmuck.

At The Federalist, Mollie Hemingway thinks we have no business noticing this if we're not in the Moral Majority:

One of the hottest responses to the Parisian terror attacks was to not just stop talking about ISIS by talking about all the refugees you care about more than the other guy. And one of the most popular ways to do that was by referencing Mary and Joseph not finding a room at an inn when they traveled to Bethlehem for the census. 

So this abortion enthusiast [Jill Filopivic], for instance, offered: "This refusing to offer refuge to fleeing Syrians reminds me of a story, something about a pregnant couple and innkeepers w/ no room?" 

An “ultra-liberal gay atheist university professor from Massachusetts” wondered “How many conservatives who now turn away desperate Middle-Easterners seeking refuge will soon be putting up a Nativity?”...

Like you, I love being lectured about human decency by people who defend Planned Parenthood. But since when did liberals decide the Bible should be the basis of public policy? Imagine the implications for marriage law!

Put it this way: Though I fled the Catholicism in which I was raised long ago, I have retained what the snake-handlers call a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. That is, though I stopped believing he was God, I haven't abandoned the Golden Rule. Maybe it's just a sentimental attachment -- fish don't know they're wet and all that. But I think of it more as one of the legacies of our civilization, like Shakespeare or Mozart, that affirms its truth whenever you revisit it in the right spirit.

Hemingway finds that insufficient -- how can you be a real Christian if you don't go to her church, or are gay or pro-choice? But really, fuck her. He doesn't have a patent on morality. She doesn't even have a patent on Jesus. She's just got a badge and thinks it means she has a jurisdiction.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about Paris and how it's the fault of Democrats and soft-hearted Europeans who think refugees are human beings who should not be left to starve or drown. On this subject rightbloggers were an embarrassment of riches, not to mention a plain embarrassment, and some of their offenses, though unsuitable for my immediate thesis, deserve a wider airing. For example, while I could work in the National Review writers who perceived Syrian refugees as just another breed of Messican to throw out of white people's countries, the ravings of Jim Talent were sui generis and had to be omitted. His literal nut graf:

We know that these groups are extremely media savvy, that they watch what our government, and the European governments, are doing. When our President declares red lines and doesn’t enforce them, they notice. When the Congress waters down the Patriot Act, they notice.

Take that, Rand Paul!

When America wins a war in Iraq and the president decides not to leave a base there because he wants to “nation build at home”, they notice. When they kill our ambassador and personnel in Libya, and the administration’s top officials call it a spontaneous reaction to a video, they notice...

Wow, a Paris-#Benghazi connection! Someone's getting a bonus check.

Meanwhile Jim Moran has got out in front of the pack and is yelling at the French for not being jingoistic enough.

Some of these young intellectuals will be mugged by reality and wake up to the truth. It happened here after 9/11. PJ Media’s Roger L. Simon was one such leftist whose eyes were opened on 9/11. Christopher Hitchens was another.

I used to consider myself a socialist but thanks to 11/13 I'm outraged at Algeria.

But you sense something even more discouraging: a loss of energy in defending their heritage.

True, the French have sent bombers after ISIS, but they haven't picked out a totally irrelevant nation to invade and spend a trillion dollars destroying -- clearly they have a civilizational death wish!

In 1940, Hitler was able to literally walk through the French army because the nation had been so traumatized by the horror of World War I that they had lost the psychic energy to protect themselves. 

You get the same feeling of hopelessness from many Frenchmen today.

Get ready for Freedom Fries II.

UPDATE. More of this now:

Whenever I see this stuff, I can't help it, I think of Say You Love Satan.

UPDATE 2. "Governors of 4 U.S. states say no to admitting Syrian refugees." Every one of these guys a "Christian," natch.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

THE YAM IS THE POWER THAT BE

•   The right-wing commentariat has gone absolutely bonkers over the college kids with their microaggressions and their safe spaces and whatnot -- especially since the Missouri crisis got a significant number of black people involved. It's like S.W.I.N.E. meets the Black Panthers! Hence, headlines like "The First Amendment is Dying" (National Review), "The Self-Destruction of the American University" (Weekly Standard), "A Generation that Hates Free Speech" (Commentary), etc. NR drama queen David French has a good one: Before inviting his fellow nuts to purge the universities of liberal taint ("Conservatives possess the power of the federal purse... It’s time for a cultural and political war against the intellectual and legal corruption of the university Left"), he tells this cautionary tale of the commie campus and what it did to a friend's kid:

Years ago, I left my law firm — where I worked as a commercial litigator — to defend free speech, religious liberty, and due process on campus, first as president of FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), then as director of the Center for Academic Freedom at the nonprofit Alliance Defending Freedom. As I left, a friend asked why I’d give up my practice to take on higher-education reform. He was incredulous. His daughter had just been accepted to an elite college, he’d just visited, and he found the school to be everything he imagined — expensive, yes, but beautiful, prestigious, and fun.

In less than a year, he apologized. He understood my career choice. His daughter had come home for the holidays, transformed. The vibrant, joyful Christian girl who’d left for school had returned sullen and depressed. She hated her family’s values, she resented her parents, and she was obviously drinking too much. The school had stripped down her value system — all in the name of “critical thinking” — and replaced it with angry groupthink. Life and hope were replaced with fear and loathing. A social-justice warrior was born.

The kid went to college and rejected her family's values. Obviously they should have sent her to a Christian finishing school instead of an "elite college." Now it'll take a shitload of reprogramming to get her to sing hymns and hate paupers again! [shakes fist] Liberal academia, you have made a powerful enemy! We won't rest until Yale and all those radical hotbeds teach nothing but Reagan, God and Jesus!

•   I'll tell you the real problem with the kids today. Many years ago I lived at 174 Rivington Street in the Lower East Side. You'd think there'd be a plaque there, but no. Instead, according to the New Yorker, there is this:

Like its spiritual hero, Ron Burgundy, of “Anchorman,” this popular new Will Ferrell-themed bar on the Lower East Side is a loud, swinging, bad-taste good time. Fan art hangs on the walls; a nook in the back is decorated with lava lamps, cowbells, and a (jazz) flute. But, like Ferrell’s George W. Bush, the bar can be fuzzy on strategery. Where Ferrell’s characters joyfully mock obnoxiousness, Stay Classy celebrates it, serving sweet cocktails whose jokey names (Smelly Pirate Hooker, Dirty Mike and the Boys) are printed in all caps on a laminated menu...

I weep for this generation.

•   Real quick, for theater fans in New York: The Ivo van Hove production of A View from The Bridge is stateside now. I saw a simulcast of it from London some months back. I'm always nervous when a classic text gets the whoopee treatment from an ambitious director, and when the actors came out barefoot into what looked like an oversized bocce pit, I steeled for the worst. But it turns out turning the dial up one or two notches on the subtext, and even getting a little Grotowksi with it, actually helps this already-weird play a great deal, especially with brave actors like these embodying the furies. I bought it all, including the quasi-choral handling of the climax, and when it was over I felt like I'd been somewhere and I don't mean Red Hook. Recommended.

JONAH GOLDBERG'S SCHOOL DAYS.

All the cool conservative kids are talking about how college student activists are the new Hitler. Since Jonah Goldberg has already established that all liberals are already double-Hitler, infinity, he has to go another way. So:

Campus Commotions Show We’re Raising Fragile Kids 

...Consider play. Children are hardwired to play. That’s how we learn. But what happens when play is micro-managed? St. Lawrence University professor Steven Horwitz argues that it undermines democracy. 

Free play — tag in the schoolyard, pickup basketball at the park, etc. — is a very complicated thing. It requires young people to negotiate rules among themselves, without the benefit of some third-party authority figure. These skills are hugely important in life. When parents or teachers short-circuit that process by constantly intervening to stop bullying or just to make sure that everyone plays nice, Horwitz argues, “we are taking away a key piece of what makes it possible for free people to be peaceful, cooperative people by devising bottom-up solutions to a variety of conflicts.”

The rise in “helicopter parenting” and the epidemic of “everyone gets a trophy” education are another facet of the same problem. We’re raising millions of kids to be smart and kind, but also fragile.

Whereas Goldberg is dumb and mean, but also muy macho (in a sedentary sort of way) because he was raised right in the rough-and-tumble New York City political operative's kid scene. So that today's social-justice sissies may feel bad at what they missed, here are some vignettes from Goldberg's childhood:

Young Goldberg at a playmate's carpeted rooftop playground, getting up a game of Firing Line: Okay, you be Michael Kinsley -- just act like a creepy faggot -- and I'll be William F. Buckley Junior! (grunts) Shoot, I can't get my legs to cross! OK, forget it, let's play HUAC -- I'll be Whittaker Chambers and you -- hey, where's everyone going?

Young Goldberg leans out the window of his penthouse, yells at black people: THEY SAY THAT SHAFT'S A BAD MOTHER -- (ducks behind sofa; forty minutes later goes back to window) SHUT YOUR MOUTH!

Young Goldberg goes politely up to the line of bums waiting outside H&H for stale bagels; sotto voce: Hey guys, five bucks if you  do my Geography homework for me. (A bum steals his wallet; Goldberg runs home to his mother, who wipes away his tears and says, "Gee, that's terrible, kid. You want a cigarette?")

Plus the Goldbergs weren't on welfare and earned everything they had, fart.

UPDATE. In comments, DN Nation, considering Goldberg's compliant of an "epidemic of  'everyone gets a trophy' education" -- "Who do these educators think they are, anyway? Regnery Publishing?"

SISSY FUSS; SHRUG.

Some people are dealing with the age of BlackLivesMatter worse than others. At City Journal, which usually disparages cities only insofar as they allow black people to walk around free, our old friend Victor Davis Hanson of the Mexican-Stolen Chainsaw is allowed to disparage cities in toto because they are filled with sissy liberals, whereas the country, where he lives part-time, is filled with chesty men of noble purpose:

Rural living historically has encouraged independence—and it still does, even in the globalized and wired twenty-first century. Other people aren’t always around to ensure that water gets delivered (and drained), sewage disappears, and snow is removed. For the vast majority of Americans, these and other concerns are the jobs of government bureaucracy and its unionized public workforce. Not so in rural areas, where autonomy and autarky—not narrow specialization—are necessary and fueled by an understanding that machines and tools must be mastered to keep nature in its proper place. Such constant preparedness nurtures skeptical views about the role and size of government, in which the good citizen is defined as someone who can take care of himself.

That's how Jonah Goldberg got so conservative -- harvesting Cheetos in the noonday sun! Hanson seems to hope his message will spread far and wide and reverse a trend, which he notes with alarm, of Americans moving away from red-state garden spots like Fritters, Alabama and into the debauched Democratic cities. But, as Steve Allen altered the old song years ago, how you gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen the farm? And Hanson doesn't have a lot of tools for the job, alas (perhaps because they were stolen by Mexicans): he is dependent as usual on hoary wingnut tropes, in this case Sandra Fluke, The Life of Julia, and even that most risible of reactionary tropes Pajama Boy to get his story across:

Pajama Boy’s smirk and his message of arrested development and dependence, even if a con, offered a damning portrayal of what millions of urbanites now see as cool: getting up late, staying undressed, and sipping childhood drinks. America’s Marlboro Man he wasn’t.

No childhood drinks for VDH! And apparently no socialistic public water service either -- only pure well water replenishes his precious bodily fluids: "At my house, I worry constantly about whether the well will go dry," he tells us. "I lock the driveway gate at night, and if someone knocks after 10 PM, I go to the door armed." Guess Mexicans must be after his water, too.

One wonders why he spends half his time in the urban wastelands at all  -- perhaps, like many of the sissies he disparages, for the money? Or maybe it's a psychological issue. Attend this plaintive passage:

Half the week, when I live in downtown Palo Alto, I have no idea who else lives in the high-rise apartments—and no interest in finding out. I could be a felon or a saint and no one on the street knows or cares. That the rest of the time I live in the same house on the same farm where my great-great-grandparents lived is of no interest. I could dye my hair green and pierce my nose and the reaction would be “so what”—not “Old Victor Hanson out there on Mountain View Avenue finally went crazy.”

You can imagine Hanson walking the streets of Palo Alto, the heedless sea of humanity coursing around him, and thinking, "I could dye my hair green, pierce my nose -- no one would say a word!" Who knows what else he could do! That saloon he just passed is full of harlots, with only liberal sissies to keep them company. And in the alley, bums who would not be missed if they wound up in the river. If he can just get to the lamppost and back without succumbing...

Hanson also has one up at National Review inspired by that study of white working-class people in trouble. Of course he blames the "'hands up, don’t shoot,' Jorge Ramos, Sandra Fluke, Lena Dunham set," and takes care to let us know that black people get all the breaks:

As a professor at California State University, Fresno, over some 21 years, I had hundreds of conversations with working-class white kids from Merced to Bakersfield, who had stellar academic records in the humanities and who wished to go to top law schools or Ph.D. programs. I ended up offering them roughly the following caveat: “I’m afraid the chances of you as a white male from Fresno State being admitted to a top program are almost nil.” I was being neither alarmist nor nihilist, but simply reflecting the experience of my own lobbying efforts for brilliant students to gain admittance to top-ranked graduate programs.

Which is why university faculties and corporate boardrooms are chock-full of black people, while whitey must earn his living by the sweat of his brow. Unless he has a sweet half-the-week-in-the-city gig.

IF YOU'VE GOT A TASTE FOR TERROR, TAKE CARSON TO THE PROM.

There's something perfect about this latest Ben Carson "vindication." Carson was questioned, you may recall, by the Wall Street Journal for his story about winning $10 for being "the most honest student in class." That award came, he said, in this way: His class had been told that their examination books had burned up and they had to retake a test--

So I, along with 150 other students, returned to the designated auditorium where our test awaited us. Only it was a markedly different test. The questions were incredibly difficult, if not impossible to answer based on the lectures and reading assignments. 

"Forget it," I heard one girl say to another. "Let's go back and study this. We can say we didn't read the notice. Then when theygive us the test, we'll be ready." The two left the auditorium. Immediately, three others packed up and left. Within ten minutes, half the class had left, and within a half hour, I was the only student left. Like the others, I was tempted to walk out, but I had read the notice and couldn't like and say I hadn't. I just decided to do my best and pray to God to help me figure out what to write. 

Suddenlt, the auditorium door opened noisily. It was the professor, with a photographer from the Yale Daily News in tow. 

"What's going on?" I asked. 

"A hoax," the professor smiled.. "We wanted to see who was the most honest student in class. And that's you. Here." 

As the photographer snapped my picture, she handed me a ten-dollar bill. Clearly a gift from God, but I was about to receive an even better one.

Now BuzzFeed has found a guy who says --

"...I immediately said, to my wife and friend, ‘That was the prank we played at the Record! And Ben Carson was in the class,’” said [Curtis] Bakal, who noted he wasn’t actually present during the taking of the fake test. “We did a mock parody of the Yale Daily News during the exam period in January 1970, and in this parody we had a box that said: ‘So-and-so section of the exam has been lost in a fire. Professor so-and-so is going to give a makeup exam.’” 

“We got a room to do the test in and one of us from the Record impersonated a proctor to give the test,” he said... 

Because he did not witness the fake test, however, he could not confirm that Carson — or only one student — was there at the end of class. But Bakal also backed up Carson’s claim that “at the end what few students remained — it may have just been one or two, I wasn’t there — received a small cash prize.” Bakal noted a staffer from the Record “impersonated a proctor to give the test.” (Carson said a professor had given him the cash prize in his written account.)

So the truth would seem to be that, rather than winning an honesty contest against 150 people and getting a gift from God, Carson was pranked and given a pity prize. Carson recast this humiliation as a triumph for himself and his faith. And conservatives think this is great for Carson; "Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea for the media to rush to the conclusion that Ben Carson’s life story is a tissue of lies," huffs Rich Lowry at National Review.

It's as if, after slaughtering all those people at the prom, Carrie White only remembered how proud she was to be named homecoming queen. But it wouldn't be the first time that a feverish belief in his own destiny led a man past all difficulties unto the political heights.