FRIDAY 'ROUND THE HORN.

Mama had this record. Whole thing's great, but I particularly like the part

with the Leslie'd organ and what I believe is choked-pick percussion git.

•   National Review's John Miller is again pimping Liberty Island, the website whose politically-driven belles-lettres we've examined before, so I figured I'd have a look. Among recent offerings is the winner of its recent Memorial Day writing contest, a story called Bait, in which he-men with Marine training use a sissy Hollywood actor to break up a super-sophisticated dogfighting ring, and then see to it that the sissy gets beat up because he's a sissy. The author demonstrates a great deal of knowledge about armaments, and sympathy for dogs if not Hollywood sissies; if you're going to be cruel at Liberty Island, it pays to be sentimental, too. Fave line: "Hell, there was even the rock god my kid sister had worshipped in high school [at the dogfight]. I guess meat was only murder sometimes." Picture Morrissey crying "ten thousand quid on the pitbull with the faraway eyes." Also in rotation: "WILL YOU SURVIVE IF (WHEN?) THE POWER GRID GOES DOWN?" which I think is sponsored content but with this bunch you never know. Oh, and an announcement for a new Book of the Year contest, sponsored by the Conservative-Libertarian Fiction Alliance, for people who like their art-product vetted by ideologues.

•   Elizabeth Warren says "the game is rigged" and she's right, says National Review's Jim Geraghty, "but she’s off-base in her assessment of how it’s rigged" -- it's you liberals and your so-called "education" that rigged it! Geraghty points to an article in The Economist called “America’s new aristocracy: Education and the inheritance of privilege," and tells us,

...the liberal-dominated world of higher education has turned itself into the exorbitantly expensive entry gate to the middle class, setting aside quite a few slots for the offspring of current elites.

Wait a minute -- colleges are expensive, and the children of the rich get unfair advantages in them? This is brand new! Thanks, Obama! Wait, it gets worse: Geraghty says the article also tells us

...law firms, investment banks, and consulting firms tend to hire applicants from well-known universities who were already “culturally similar” to the institution. “Employers sought candidates who were not only competent but also culturally similar to themselves in terms of leisure pursuits, experiences, and self-presentation styles. Concerns about shared culture were highly salient to employers and often outweighed concerns about absolute productivity.” In other words, if you don’t remind the elite employer making the hiring decision of himself, you’re less likely to be hired for the big job.

It sounds as if Obama has changed human nature itself! In the old days, you could just search the candidate's chest for the right class pin or school tie; now I suppose you have check out his "self-presentation style" -- to see if it's liberal! Next Geraghty will read somewhere and rush back to tell us that under Obama rich people eat fancy food while ordinary Americans eat sammiches. This could break the election wide open for whichever rich theocrat the GOP nominates!

•   I'm tired of doing all the hard work around here, so I'll just point out that in this Michael Brendan Dougherty column the job of proving, or even making an argument, that letting all kinds of people (including gays and singles) have babies will lead the disaster is entirely left to the framing device, which talks about an abandoned baby left in a bag -- another thing that never happened before Obama! -- and then shock-cuts to the tale of a child-support suit against a sperm donor and proceeds to other such curiosities, none of which, so far as the column tells, are related to the abandoned baby except in that abandoned babies are bad and these things near it are, in Dougherty's view, also bad. I knew these guys were feeble in the logic department, but couldn't they take a weekend course and learn something about metaphors at least?

HEY, I READ SOMEPLACE LINCOLN WAS GAY.

Remember Stella Morabito, covered here last year for a magnificent column in which she compared advocates of gay marriage to Symbionese Liberation Army members raping and brainwashing Patty Hearst? Sample passage:

If we step back and take this all in, there should be no question that coercive persuasion can happen on a mass scale in America. Those pushing the [gay marriage] agenda first cultivate a climate that creates social punishment for dissent and social rewards for compliance. Label anyone who disagrees as a bigot or a “hater,” a non-person. Reward those who agree with public accolades. Before you know it, even well-known old conservative pundits who fear becoming irrelevant sign on to it, and thus contribute to the juggernaut.

Soon we'll have Pat Buchanan in assless chaps! Well, Morabito is still writing, and still obsessed with guess what and conservative treason to the cause:

LGBT Activists Arm For Further War On Free Speech

Apparently Morabito read a story about some folks who are campaigning for "a major federal nondiscrimination bill that protects people from prejudice based on sexuality and gender identity," and has decided this means homosexualists will ban Americans from saying things like "we don't serve your kind here, faggot." The whole thing's a joy -- Morabito's writing style remains fever-pitched and prone to metaphor metastasis ("There’s so much to unpack here, but if pressed to dissect this vat of worms...") -- but this is my favorite part:

The LGBT lobby has always known that it needs to get Republicans, conservatives, and evangelicals on board—through their leaders—because they still command a wide swath of America, and, worse, some people might not be intimidated enough to refrain from saying things not in line with the lobby’s agenda. 

Hence, there are infiltration efforts like “Log Cabin Republicans,” whose sole purpose has been to promote the LGBT lobby while claiming to be conservative.

The Log Cabin Republicans! Most of us think of them as charmingly ineffectual, but we're apparently just brainwashed by the liberal media, who cover for their true Mattachine machinations. I like to imagine them back at their founding in 1977, no doubt in some tastefully-appointed sex dungeon, rubbing their hands with glee and telling one another, "yessss, it's a long game, but the rewards will be sooooo-cialistically delicious!"

I wonder who's doing more to hurt the anti-gay-marriage campaign: the LCR, or stuff like this? Or maybe Steve Wiles is a double agent. This thing goes deeper than we imagined! 

ALSO, WHY DO PEOPLE KEEP TELLING ME TO LOOK UP "LEMONPARTY"?

Pretty much everyone has noticed that violent mass events starring white people get handled differently in the press from violent mass events starring black people, and Waco/Baltimore comparisons seem to fit the pattern. Surely you must have been wondering: what is the libertarian position on this? Take it away, Ed Krayewski of Reason:

The comparisons to the police reform protests are the more problematic of the two. The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates seemed to make that comparison in a series of tweets Monday night that emulating right-wing reactions to the police protest movement. One curious tweet asks "Why won't America's biker gangs be more like Dr. Martin Luther King?" What is the comparison Coates is trying to draw? If there were violent protesters in Baltimore with legitimate grievances—and they were urged by some to be more peaceful—does Coates believe the bikers, too, had some kind of legitimate grievances at the Twin Peaks restaurant? If he doesn't believe so, does he believe there are white people out there who believe that? I certainly haven't heard or read anything about either the bike gangs allegedly involved or anyone in the press trying to ascribe legitimate grievances to the thugs at the restaurant.

In other words, the libertarian position is they don't understand jokes unless they're in Klingon.

UPDATE.  Kevin D. Williamson does a version of this at National Review, with arguments on the order of oh, you're against calling black rioters "thugs" well what about Tupac libtards etc. Also, why doesn't "America’s most stridently progressive mayor, Bill de Blasio" shut down the Hell's Angels clubhouse on East Third? I might tell him that the Angels have been keeping that block clean and righteous for decades, as opposed to shooting it up Waco-style, but then I'd be playing Williamson's neither-Holy-nor-Roman-nor-an-Empire dork game with him, and life is too fucking short.

A SUREFIRE WAY TO GET CONSERVATIVES TO STICK UP FOR YOU.

A Duke professor wrote comments on a New York Times editorial that got negative attention. Sample:

So where are the editorials that say racism doomed the Asian-Americans. They didn’t feel sorry for themselves, but worked doubly hard. 

I am a professor at Duke University. Every Asian student has a very simple old American first name that symbolizes their desire for integration. Virtually every black has a strange new name that symbolizes their lack of desire for integration. The amount of Asian-white dating is enormous and so surely will be the intermarriage. Black-white dating is almost non-existent because of the ostracism by blacks of anyone who dates a white. 

It was appropriate that a Chinese design won the competition for the Martin Luther King state. King helped them overcome. The blacks followed Malcolm X.

Never mind that you can see that and worse in the comments of any online article that mentions race -- in fact, look at the comments under this story at WorldNetDaily and elsewhere -- the point is that Hough's an academic and from the left, so needless to say conservatives have a new hero. Ole Perfesser Instapundit:

SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER... Even being an old commie apologist isn’t enough to keep you from being savaged over this badthink.

"Savaged" means, in this context, some people disagreed publicly with his comments and he wasn't fired. (Hough was on leave working on a book when this thing blew up, though some of the usual suspects have sought to convey the impression that Duke pushed him out after the fact.) Don Surber:

Telling the truth online gets you in trouble in America. Consider Duke University political science professor Jerry Hough made the mistake of pointing out that Asian-Americans are as a race doing better than African-Americans in general. For that people are calling him racist. 

Part of the reason is Asian males are not shooting one another up like inner city black males are.

Surber knows how it is to be vilified for what folks 'round here jes' natchurly knows. Nicholas Stix at more-mainstream-conservative-by-the-minute VDare:

As a result of the school’s racist hate campaign Hough’s life is in danger on and near the North Carolina school’s campus. During the 2006-2007 Duke Rape Hoax, which was also rabidly promoted by the school’s administration and faculty, racist blacks in Durham exploited the hoax as a pretext to commit violent hate crimes against white students, simply for breathing while white.

He's like MLK in Selma except, you know. Maybe Stix can get up a posse from the Bundy Ranch to protect him. The libertarian position is expressed by Robby Soave at Reason:

These are gross, nonsensical statements (Asian names are better geared for integration than black names? What?). But to say that they have “no place in civil discourse” is going too far. Is hearing, contemplating, and rejecting his claims not a worthy exercise for university students?

The problem with higher education is that Harvard students are not exposed to the opinions of Professor David Duke, that they may wrestle with them to their intellectual profit.  How will they defend their mollycoddle anti-racism when confronted with an argument on the order of "nigras has funny names"? Liberalism has much to answer for.

You know, I'm beginning to think that these guys weren't really into Charlie Hebdo for the free speech part.

SEASON 7, EPISODE 14.

Is the ending a joke?

Actually, the whole thing is. Someone on Twitter said, as if surprised, that she was laughing more at the Mad Men finale than she had at any other episode. Part of that, I assume, was the petit finales for the other principals' stories, which came off fairly breathless, not to say rushed, like the wrap-up of a Sixties sex comedy. The Peggy and Stan resolution in particular seemed like fandering (THE MOMENT YOU'VE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR), but sure why not, especially with Elizabeth Moss and Jay R. Ferguson so game about the funny romantic stuff. (From her phone takes especially, it would appear Moss has been studying Ross Hunter.)

Surewhynot, too, with Joan bravely going it alone with her wimmyn-owned company and Roger and Mrs. Megan in Paris Quebec. As I've said before, these characters were never going to achieve enlightenment: They were just working out career and personal issues, and though the times a-changin' made their challenges and opportunities bigger than they might have been, in the end they're no more fraught with meaning than any other TV officemates, just better written than most. (Betty and Sally are a slightly bigger deal, but that set-up came last week. Nonetheless I appreciated their Don scenes as fine examples of that other type of TV staple, the emotionally purgative phone call.)

The real story has always been Don Draper, and after all that drama, all that identity crisis, and all those harbingers of bardo, it was a shock to find, first of all, people from Don's Old Life not only talking about him ("He's not dead! At least I don't think so") but also chatting with him on the phone, and secondly, after a few rounds of Don doing Don stuff -- fucking a stranger, barking life lessons -- to come to that cynical comedy ending. But the thing that saves it is Leonard. How this Joe Average got to Thinly Disguised Esalen I can't guess, but when he started talking about his dream of being in the refrigerator and Don went to embrace him, you could be forgiven for thinking Don had learned some new kind of empathy that would help make him whole. After all, he had just cut all ties with his Old Life people; he gave Peggy the same spiel on the phone that he'd given her, basically, in "The Suitcase" (she even responded the same way: "That's not true"), and then hung up; even Stephanie, his last link to Anna Draper, took off and left him with hippies. And here he was, not working out his angst with a sexual conquest but in the embrace of Leonard, another desk guy who can't quite believe in love even when it's at the table with him.

But surprise, it's not a new empathy for a new life, it's the same empathy that made Don great at selling cigarettes to potential cancer victims and plastic wheels to sentimental families. Don has always been an empath who, because of his emotional damage, is uniquely attuned to the pain of average citizens, and when he sees a valuable crop of it he gets in there and grabs and holds it close to drain its essence. And then turns it into a commercial. He is what America has instead of artists. And that's why, despite all the historical signifiers that made the show look like the chronicle of a New Day Dawning, nothing much has really changed. Don has not rediscovered Dick Whitman -- he has, after a crisis of confidence, rediscovered Don Draper. And gone back at work.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

•    You may remember him for his later, lush 'n' luxe blues stuff, and that's all very fine. I love B.B. King, now passed, for his slightly cheesy "B.B. 'Blues Boy' King" stompers from the 50s like the one above. Sure sounds like him and the "Orchestra" are having a good time. I expect some of my readers have their own favorites to recommend.

•    Many conservatives, even ones who are not Rod "The Get-Ready Man" Dreher, are bitching about that poll showing a slightly smaller percentage of Christians in America than once there was. At National Review David French knows why: "Why Does ‘Organized Religion’ Get a Bad Rap? Because the Elite Lies About It." Evil liberals say Jesus people are obsessed with cultural issues like gay marriage, but the truth is Christians contribute heavily to charity. Yes, it's the old "society claims I'm a pedophile, but I bought twenty tickets to the Policeman's Ball" argument. More interesting to me is this claim:

Sexual politics is simply not a dominant topic compared to scriptural study, discussions of family, or exhortations to serve the poorest and most disadvantaged members of the community. If I were to critique the church, I’d say we need to discuss the sexual revolution issues a bit more — to equip kids and families to face the cultural onslaught.

Don't talk about it enough, huh? Let's look at the past few examples of French's own writing at National Review. What picture of Christianity do you get from it? There's not a lot about charity in there -- in fact, I found no David French posts at all promoting alms to the poor. (Come on, it's National Review!) Here's what I did see:

"The Clintons, Tom Brady, and the ‘Scoreboard’ Life" (Shorter: Libtards cheat because they don't have Jesus);
"When Crusades Meet Courtrooms" and "Three Recent Lawsuits Challenge the ‘Rape Crisis’ Storyline" (Shorter: Rape is not the fault of the men lying bitches falsely accuse of raping them, it's the fault of the sexual revolution);
"Why a Huckabee Loss Would Be a Win for Religious Conservatives" (Shorter: Because all the other GOP candidates hate gays and fornication as much as Huckabee does. Eat it, libtards!);
"Obama’s Crackdown on Dissent Has Made Conservatives a Little Paranoid — and Rightly So" (Shorter: If Ted Cruz was President libtards would so be just as paranoid about Jade Helm as we are, except we aren't paranoid because Obama really is a monster);
"Comedy, Cowardice, or Both?" (Shorter: SNL libtards didn't draw Muhammed! Sure, it was funny, but what's that got to do with anything?);
"Liberals Peer into Your Heart and See the Darkness Inside" (Shorter: Libtards are mean and hateful. Not like us!)

Etc. And here are the records from the other times we've caught French's culture-war act. (This one will do if you can't read them all.) All told I'd say the biggest PR problem Christianity has isn't "Elite Lies About It" -- it's people like David French.

•    OK, here's the advertising portion of the program: A friend of mine in New York is between freelance gigs DON'T RUN AWAY SHE DOESN'T WANT A HANDOUT only another freelance gig. Métier includes branding, marketing, research, strategy, communications, social media, digital product development, content and product creation, etc. Drop me a note if you've got something for her.

•    Melissa Langsam Braunstein of The Federalist testifies to "listening to a panel at AEI on Monday night, during which several contributors to The Dadly Virtues: Adventures from the Worst Job You’ll Ever Love discussed their take on fatherhood." Sounds like a corker:

I cannot imagine a similar panel of mothers laughing as they described purposely breaking their child’s leg, as P.J. O’Rourke’s son believed he did, while regaling the audience with the saga of teaching that young son how to ski. The experience taught O’Rourke that he’s better off being the breadwinner who can afford ski lessons.

And this:

Tucker Carlson’s presentation may have been the most different from what a panel of mothers might offer. Amidst his lighthearted remarks, Carlson repeatedly mentioned that he’s not reflective about his parenting and takes no responsibility for any of his four children’s failings; he believes any mistakes his children make are strictly their own, and he does never holds his wife or himself liable.

And this:

Jonah Goldberg sounded endearingly clueless...

Stop to take a breath here.

.... – since we gather his daughter’s alright now – as he described a fall she took during toddlerhood that resulted in a sizable forehead gash. Apparently, Goldberg was still new enough to parenting that he didn’t realize his daughter’s bloody face needed to be stitched up professionally. Luckily, his sister-in-law was able to advise via telephone and pass along the good advice to wait for a plastic surgeon at the hospital.

Braunstein's conclusion:

This is all to say: fatherhood sounds rather liberating. Whatever our cultural expectations of men, it seems our standards for fathers are less exacting (and crazy-making) than those for American mothers. Having listened to the fathers on this panel, I dare say that difference is largely driven by the fact that men aren’t critical of one another’s parenting in the same way that women can be...

Either than or these guys are just a bunch of fucking idiots.

AN ILL WIND THAT BLOWS NO ONE SOME GOOD.

There's been a lot of sputtering among the brethren as Republican Presidential candidates run screaming from W's Iraq War (Washington Times: "As GOP hopefuls flee Iraq War, Rubio to tout hawk credentials"; The Hill: "Rubio: I wouldn't go into Iraq either"). The prize, however, goes to Quin Hillyer at National Review. After some stuff about how Saddam Was a Very Bad Man and there were so WMD (or "weapons of mass murder... WMM — a better term than WMD" -- Hillyer has some marketing skills), he gets to the money shot:

Fifth, while this is only a satellite effect of our involvement in Iraq, it actually served as a net-plus politically for George W. Bush in his re-election effort against John Kerry — a net-plus without which Bush probably would not have won. This is from memory, but I think the “for-or-against” Iraq poll questions in that campaign were about a net wash, but the “who do you trust to be strong in defending American interests” question still favored Bush significantly enough to have made the difference — along with high turnout in anti–gay-marriage initiatives — between winning and losing. And if anybody thinks that subsequent Bush performance made that a pyrrhic victory, I have two names for them: Roberts and (especially) Alito. As frustrating as the Supreme Court is, imagine how badly off the country would be if Justices Rehnquist and O’Connor had been replaced by justices Laurence Tribe and Hillary Rodham Clinton. And imagine how much more badly bungled so much other domestic policy would have been under Kerry. Ugh. 

So, hundreds of thousands dead and Iraq and our nation's foreign policy credibility in smoldering ruins, but at least Bush got reelected and a couple of wingnuts on the Court. Purple fingers all around, not all of them caused by gangrene.

UPDATE. In comments, Jay B shorters this one "I like to think your son died so that Sam Alito can deny you healthcare." (All the comments are good, definitionally.)

Plus I'd like to correct "Iraq and our nation's foreign policy credibility in smoldering ruins"; Iraq's may still be smoldering, but the ruins of our credibility are not; they're cool, have kudzu growing over them, and show little evidence of their former exalted state, besides mass.

TWENTY MINUTES WASTED WITH GOLDBERG AND MURRAY.

"Is it time for civil disobedience? Charles Murray says yes!" So begins Jonah Goldberg's interview of Murray, whose new book about bureaucracy attempts to give a modish civil-rights frisson to the fight against our fascist government's onerous regulations on drinking water, workplace hazards, and other things that should be left to the wisdom of capital. It's in the form of an American Enterprise Institute video, alas, but I have nutshelled it for you:

Goldberg, who increasing resembles Sig Ruman, says he'll start with the riots in Baltimore, which he describes as Murray's "wheelhouse"; as Murray is best known as the author of a book claiming to scientifically prove that black people are stupid, you can imagine the gooseflesh among the brethren in attendance.  Goldberg's got the fever and tries to insert as a topic of conversation the alleged "debate about whether or not it's racist to call people thugs" -- though the closed caption guy has other ideas:

At first it seems as if Murray will oblige. "I'm old enough to remember what Watts was like," he says, and adds that he acknowledged at the time  "there was something really different about inner city neighborhoods," which shows just how far he was willing to go for Those People, but now after all the years you have the "same litany of complaints" despite "overwhelmingly Democratic control implementing Democratic solutions," i.e., using whatever  money is left over after the city or state has delivered all its subsidized stadiums, office parks, and other emoluments for the deserving rich to build an occasional playground or put another bench in the courthouse/cash extraction center. And now, says an indignant Murray, "I'm supposed to be moved when President Obama says 'we know how to cure this if only we had the will'?"  By God, he acknowledged something really different about Watts, but a man can only do so much! 

Goldberg informs Murray that  "I monitor a lot of mainstream media," aka "enemy broadcasting," and he has seen such hard leftists as Joe Scarborough citing the Kerner Commission, as if race had anything to do with it, which Goldberg attributes to a "lack of self-awareness" -- that is, "they all appreciate the irony but they don't appreciate the depth of the irony," which is that black people were happy under Giuliani, or at least terrified into silence. "You have solutions that are tried to no effect," sighs Murray, but "cold-blooded, hard-headed evaluation" shows there's "no effect" cuz look, a riot.

At this point someone must have held up a sign saying PIMP BOOK ABOUT BUREAUCRACY because Goldberg praises Murray for his assertion that "complexity from the federal government always backfires." "Complexity has a whole bunch of different aspects," Murray charitably concedes. Then he gets to his signal example of intolerable bureaucracy, and if you guessed "military" or "housing court" you must be new around here.

"Teaching kids is a pretty simple thing," says Murray, but teachers for some reason want to keep disruptive children in their classrooms. No citation, but Murray assures us there are "six different school of education theories" about "why you should leave that chaotic child in the classroom." Plus even if you get these monster children out, there are "25 pages of regulations" about how to get them out, not like back when Old Man Murray was a boy and you just threw them out a window. It's about "complexity of rules... a rule for everything" -- why, Murray chortles, "I bet there's a long list of guidelines about how much physical contact you are allowed in getting that kid out of the classroom, and if you violate any of those you got a problem." (In their Idaho Barcaloungers, his audience mistily dreams of dishing out some physical contact to young troublemakers.)

Goldberg offers that public schools are "a reward for the guild and less about students." Murray generously allows that for teachers "there's always an internal rationalization for doing what you're doing," but -- look out, "what I'm about to say is not data driven about their feelings"  -- "what it looks like is people making a pretty good salary relative to what they could make in the private sector," that magical place where PhDs are forced to work at Starbucks and millionaires only break a sweat during squash or rough sex; and not only that, these overpaid child-minders have "pretty good job security" (but not for long under President Walker!). Oddly, despite all these unfair advantages, teachers are also  "demoralized" and "cynical," not because they're trying to educate children in a country that spits on knowledge and prizes conformity but because, well, aren't villains always miserable in spite of their ill-gotten gains? Murray even imagines an interior monologue for these demoralized public-sector tycoons ("I have the ability to make trouble for you..."). Ugh, teachers, why were we ever nice to them?

Someone hits Goldberg with a spitball, signalling him to announce that while Murray's book is at odds with "the intellectual Zeitgeist," normal hard-working Americans sit on girders eating sandwiches out of metal lunch pails and extol his wisdom. Then Goldberg suddenly claims that there is some overlap between the Tea Party and Elizabeth Warren, and offers to "characterize" Warren's point of view, which he does thus: the "bureaucrats and the lawyers and the politicians" are "the people who are trying to help" while the real culprits are "the one percent and the billionaires and Wall Street and the fat cats" who are "pulling all the strings." To be fair, as he said this Goldberg did not roll his eyes and speak in a grating falsetto.

You can guess what Fishtown Murray thinks of that! He allows there's a "nugget of truth" in Fake Elizabeth Warren's argument, in that the "big banks and big corporations are in bed with the government," case in point Dodd-Frank (which, in real life, every leftist from here to the Finland Station wants replaced with good ol' Glass-Steagall if not tumbrels and guillotines). The real problem is that corporations are behaving wrongly "with the help of government," whereas on their own they're great, giving us proles "ever more reliable cars, ever more powerful computers," and "Exxon cannot come to my door and say fill up your tank with super or you're going to jail." (No, says Goldberg -- that's "the Obamacare model.") In the end, Murray claims he has "as many complaints about the way capitalism is practiced as Elizabeth Warren does," but this thing you lefties think is capitalism isn't really capitalism, it's a "perversion of what capitalism ought to be," and it's the government's fault. Goldberg, caught up in the intellectual fervor, adds his own gloss on a famous Adam Smith quote: two tradesmen, or a multitude of them, "can't collude against the customer very long without the government helping [them]." Look at the ethical utopia that was the Gilded Age!

Then it's time for Goldberg to ask Murray if he's an optimist or a pessimist. Had he any guts, Murray would have said that since he'd been successfully peddling this hooey for decades and there's no reason why the suckers shouldn't buy this latest bunch of it,  of course he's an optimist. But Murray's a salesman to the end, and so tells the punters  that two hundred years from now "we're probably going to be way wealthier than we are now," allowing his audience to believe that "we" means them, too, and not just a tiny sliver of neo-feudal overlords including Charles Murray IV.

Finally Goldberg has to deliver on the opening pitch, and tells us the book encourages "civil disobedience," though of course it's not the kind with "sit-ins and lunch counters" -- he and Murray share a laugh over that: Imagine us at lunch counters, like some low-IQ you-know-whats! You can read about this in Murray's WSJ essay, but basically, if all of us few remaining middle-class white people get together and don't fill out form 47-B, we can take this motherfucker down!  Murray explains this in terms honkies can understand: that is, with speeding tickets and NBA officiating as examples. Then another shared laugh about putting body cameras on bureaucrats -- ha ha, again with the you-know-whats! -- and we're out. Next week: The people united will never be forced to provide wheelchair access! 

SEASON 7, EPISODE 13.

First thought: Is Max Gail the new Brad Dourif?

I understand the necessity of the VFW scenes and even enjoyed the details, like the low-rent strip tease and the Hill's Coffee donation can (though Weiner made the room itself look Overlook Hotel bleak; if he weren't so eager to get cosmic, what would these scenes look like?). It's important for Don's journey that he tell somebody about what happened in Korea when he doesn't have to tell it (just as it was important that he spill his guts about his childhood to the guys from Hershey), and it's important for the cultural mirror people keep telling us Mad Men is that he express it, and the other vets receive it, as a fragging story of a sort that would become familiar after Vietnam. (But forgive me: I've known a few veterans; if one of them tells another vet he doesn't want to talk about the war, doesn't that normally end the conversation?)

Speaking of cosmic, Betty has revealed herself to be kind of Zen, albeit Westchester Zen: "Why was I ever doing it?" is a brilliant insight, and not accidental. (I bet she's a really good psych student.) Have I been mistaking her remoteness for severe emotional damage all along, when it was actually just a different kind of strength than what the Joans and Peggys have been trying to work their liberated selves up into? The matched shots of Betty bravely struggling up the stairs, even giving a gracious greeting through pain as she climbs, with Sally reading her letter seem to say so. I guess both things can be true. Remember all those times Joan gave Peggy frost for what she read as Peggy getting above or at least ahead of herself ("all you did was prove to them I'm a meaningless secretary and you're a humorless bitch")? Joan was insisting that, despite lacking the tools and opportunity Peggy had, she was also entitled to dignity. With these scenes the show does that on Betty's behalf. I wish there could be a Sally spin-off so I could see what she does with this knowledge.

As far as end-tying, this is by far the most elegant of the series, and what I'm guessing is the Pete Campbell resolution is the least. I'm not even a Campbell hater, but there's only one way his Trudy-in-Kansas fantasy makes sense to me: as a pale echo of Don's proposal to Megan -- an attempt to enforce normality and stave off the shadow of death. It may work out better for Pete than for Don because he has a smaller secret. Oh, yeah, that one: We have one more episode for that mantelpiece gun to go off.

I doubt that it will, though: Pete's drama can't be as big as Don's. The night this episode debuted I followed the stunned Twitter reactions to his Oklahoma adventure but when I finally watched the episode, it made perfect sense -- including Don's disposal of the Caddy. Keep in mind that so far Don hasn't really "lost it all" -- he's still very well-off and if he took a bus back to New York he could work his investments, maybe write a book, and wait out the McCann non-compete. All he's done so far is a bit of ritual self-mortification; the phonebook beatdown is a bit severe, but he seems to bounce back pretty good from it.  The weirdest part of this journey is that so far the America Don left behind so he could reinvent himself in New York still looks, upon his return, like a hell -- it's much richer than it was in Dick Whitman's childhood, but the people are still vicious and stupid. That's why Don blesses that Li'l-Abner punk. "You're lucky you feel guilty," he tells him, "that's the only difference between you and those animals right now." As far as he can see, that's the only difference between Don and the animals he grew up with, too. Giving the kid the car is a weird way to shine a light, but it was available and it cost him little. We'll see in the finale if he has to give up something that costs more.

FRIDAY 'ROUND THE HORN.

Friday I got Monday on my mind.
•   Last summer Michael Webster took some photos at Coney Island and, as is usual with him, saw the scene differently than your average joy-popper would. The package is at Burn magazine and is called "Too Many Black People in One Place." I wrote the accompanying essay. All the work predates Ferguson and Baltimore but still holds up pretty well. Give a look when you get a chance and tell me what you think.

•   As we all know, my credentials as an equal-opportunity blasphemer are impeccable. Jonah Goldberg's position is similarly consistent -- that is, he was a moron before the Pamela Geller uproar and remains one today. His latest, "Progressives Love Anti-Religious Art — as Long as It’s Anti-Christian" is just another fatty serving of the same congealed ressentiment he's been dishing for years -- it even contains references to Piss Christ and "Mapplethorpe’s hide-the-bullwhip oeuvre." (It's like his mother was scared by a Duchamp readymade while she was pregnant.) Goldberg knocks people who don't think Geller has a Constitutional right to her bullshit, but who's that?  Just a tiny sliver of idiots. Most normal people don't much care how the avatars of the world's major superstitions are portrayed (at least not the ones they don't believe in!) and, I would imagine, consider Geller an nuisance on the level of Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church, looking for chances to stir the shit. (You think reactionaries like Peter King are turning on Geller because they love Mohammed?) But Goldberg portrays the real problem as snotty bohos with their so-called "art" who get fans and grants while he has to float in the oceans with nutcakes and humiliate himself with his shit writing on a regular basis.

BRINGING A CORKED FORK TO A CULTURE WAR.

Remember when some nudniks put up a few posters of Obama as The Joker Except Socialist and declared a groundswell? No? Well, that's understandable.

How about anti-Obama billboards, which moved such dignitaries as Jonah Goldberg to exegesis ("In an academic setting, one could defend at least some of the ideas captured in the billboard; Lord knows I've tried")? No? That's understandable, too.

How about those Miss Me Yet billboards? Come on, they were all over the news and still have a Wikipedia page! They're the reason Obama didn't get re-elected in an alternative universe.

How about those other times when a couple of guys put up some posters about Obama or some other Democrat and it was big news among the belligerati?

Well, guess what:

‘STENCH OF CORRUPTION': ANTI-HILLARY STREET ART HITS L.A. AHEAD OF FUNDRAISERS

Several pieces of artwork critical of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton have appeared around Los Angeles and Beverly Hills ahead of a trio of pricey fundraisers the candidate will attend this week...

Did you hear that? Breitbart.com says several pieces!

Of course, anti-Hillary street art is nothing new; just last month, an unknown artist posted signs all around Brooklyn that lampooned Clinton supporters for claiming certain words used to describe her were sexist.

Everybody to mom's basement for the afterparty! And wait'll the sheeple get a load of the #Benghazi blimp!

IN WHICH ROD DREHER COMPARES THE PLIGHT OF BLACK PEOPLE IN AMERICA TO GUESS WHAT?

I had a minute, so I figured I'd go look at Rod Dreher's blog for some crazy. He's nothing if not reliable:

There’s a racist joke that speaks to an ugly truth here: “Q: What do you call a millionaire black brain surgeon? A. [racial slur].” The idea is that for people who hate black folks, nothing that black folks do matters; it’s who they are that the racist cares about.

Got that? OK. Take a breath. Now:

Similarly, for many (though certainly not all) modern people liberal conviction, it doesn’t matter that orthodox Christians serve the poor, or do good in their own communities. What matters is their stance on homosexuality.

Him and the New Black Panthers ought to rap about this. Keep building bridges, Brother Rod!

CONSERVATIVE OUTREACH TO WOMEN AND MINORITIES CONTINUES.

You may have noticed the snit libertarians had over "vagina voters" who weren't giving us menfolk a chance at the presidency because misandry. The term had been used by assholes before ("Thanks, vagina voters. Thanks a pantsload. Enjoy your unregulated vaginas..."), but Brendan O'Neill's article at Reason spread the usage till it reached the attention of Rush Limbaugh, emperor of its natural constituency, who did what you'd expect with it ("you know me, just trying to stir the pot out there" ah shaddap).

Over at PJ Media (aka "Roger L. Simon's Tax Write-off"), Susan L.M. Goldberg ("a writer with a Master's in Radio, Television & Film") asks "How Will the Republicans Combat Vagina Politics?" After complaining that today's sheeple "don’t know a thing about [new AG Loretta] Lynch beyond the fact that she is black and a woman" -- not like in the dear, dead citizen-scholar days of Alberto Gonzalez! -- Goldberg prescribes:

In an increasingly visual culture, what candidates will the Republicans proffer to fit the demographic bill? Even Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio are too white and too male for this tough crowd. If they took a few lessons from Sofia Vergara they might stand half a chance. You know, jazz up that accent, tease the hair, get loud with the wardrobe, be ethnic. Sure, it was a strategy that kept your demographic out of office for the past 200 years, but times have changed. Race is in. Desi Arnaz would stand a better chance than these family values-laden dudes.

Happy Cinco de Mayo! Other conservatives focus on the racial mixture of the Freddy Gray defendants, which appears to prove to them that there's no racism except against Whitey. The best exemplar is neo-neocon:

But I can’t help but reflect that this case might have gone down differently if this information about their races had come out earlier.

How?

But although their names were released early on, their races were not.

Yes. How?

Not only that, but most of the speculation I read prior to learning their races indicated, or at least hinted or guessed, that they were all white. Typical is this article that appeared in the April 22 Atlantic:

And she gives us a quote that says lots of Baltimore cops are black -- that is, it implies the opposite of what she says. Maybe she's not actually trying to make a point at all, just... well, effusing would be a polite word for it.

...I also wonder what would have happened had Freddie Gray been white, with the same set of fact circumstances otherwise.

You mean if White Freddie Gray got killed? Not much chance of that.

Would there have been much of an outcry? 

Or what if all the officers had been black; would that have defused the protests entirely? Or would it not have mattered?

Or what if all of the officers had been white...

And so on, into "who would win in a fight, Bon Jovi or a blade of grass" territory. Anyway, neo-neocon finally tells us how mad she is that black Baltimoreans were happy to hear about these indictments ("something like a reverse OJ Simpson phenomenon") -- though I don't know why, given the mixed racial composition of the defendants; maybe she assumes the citizens don't know about that, just like they don't know Loretta Lynch's credentials -- and eventually starts calling these citizens a "mob" (four times in two grafs! I hear neo-neocon's a shrink in real life; wonder if she'd consider that some sort of a tell if a patient started doing it?).

Personally, I don't see how they have any choice now but to nominate Ben Carson.

FUCK YOUR BLOODTHIRSTY GODS, CONT.

I hear Pam Geller held a Draw Mohammed event in Texas which drew some unwanted attention (well, unwanted by normal people, anyway -- I'm sure Geller is delighted). I wonder why she didn't invite me -- I have after all been the internet's boldest, baddest blasphemy-be-unto-him artist since 2006:

I'm joking, of course -- the noted rageclown Geller doesn't do free-speech events, she does skree-kill-Mooslims events, in which I have no interest. Nonetheless, I defend to the death their right to harrumph harrumph harrumph. Now where's my medal?

UPDATE. Nobody likes Pammy.

SEASON 7, EPISODE 12.

The very best thing in the entire episode, and maybe in the series, was the scene at the Wisconsin house, and the dark daughter lurking in the shadows of the home of Di the Death Waitress' ex-husband: blandly resentful, shaggy, never giving a sign of being part of these waxy, pale Christians (and vice versa), she gave me real chills.

The ex-husband was pretty good too, not ostentatiously crazy, merely vicious -- a man with a good enough explanation for his ugliness that you might not at first consider how horrible a husband he must have been, and must still be (did he really say in front of his wife that she didn't know any better?). I begin to see not only why Diana left, but also why Don is so obsessed with her -- her horrible pre-life replicates his own, except she had no magic to escape it with. Don is retracing his own steps through her.

In the home stretch Mad Men is getting stranger, and it’s easier to see why it has to in Don’s scenes than in anyone else’s because he’s the haunted one — everyone else is trying to figure out the life they’re in, and Don is trying to figure out the life he never had. Several people have speculated that Don is already dead (“and he’s finally realizing it”), and that’s getting to be a good bet, but for the moment I’m looking at it as a simpler proposition: Don knows that the life he took up is not his, that it’s unsustainable, and he’s leaving it behind.

His departure from the Miller meeting signals this by being super-weird; no one makes anything of the newly-imported hotshot leaving in the middle of a presentation except Ted, and his reaction is absurdly inappropriate — it looks like, “Oh, that son of a gun.” (I thought people would beginning clearing their throats when Don spent all that time staring out the window at the crucifix in the sky.) And Don is super-weird through most of the episode; tightly-wound in his meeting with Boss Hobart, hallucinating Bert, unconvincingly lying and apologizing at the Wisconsin house, there’s nothing comfortable about him until he decides to make that detour.

Maybe after a while the heightened scenes with Peggy and Roger will seem as necessary, but like I said, Peggy has a more real-life problem to figure out, so the roller-skating and badass slo-mo strut are jarring. Peggy’s become such a knotted-up, suffering careerist that she’s earned a more genuine nervous breakdown. Joan’s fight with the arrayed forces of sexism is more realistic, and it’s interesting in a trad TV social-commentary way. But we came here, or at least stayed here, not to see the Sixties spin out, but to see what happens to Don. It won’t be long now.

THE NEW ABNORMAL.

A little walk down memory lane:

In January [2014] Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit addressed some Obama conspiracy theories: “…that the NSA may have been relaying intelligence about the Mitt Romney campaign to Obama operatives, or that Chief Justice John Roberts' sudden about-face in the Obamacare case might have been driven by some sort of NSA-facilitated blackmail.” 

Yeah, you might shrug, there are plenty such crazy notions out there. But Reynolds went on: “A year ago, these kinds of comments would have been dismissable as paranoid conspiracy theory. But now, while I still don't think they're true, they're no longer obviously crazy. And that's Obama's legacy: a government that makes paranoid conspiracy theories seem possibly sane.” 

Reynolds’ main theme was the IRS “scandal,” one of a long series on alleged wheels-within-wheels Obamaspiracies that have not gotten the traction he and his colleagues think they deserve. But it’s his idea that crackpot theories about Obama are somehow legit because of other crackpot theories about Obama that’s really interesting...

This week you may have heard about the U.S. Army exercises in Texas and how that state's governor, apparently inspired by conspiracist wackos like Alex Jones anticipating the Day of the FEMA Camps, has instructed the commander of the Texas State Guard "to keep a watch over the exercises and help keep local law enforcement agencies and their citizens informed."

What's Reynolds' opinion? Dunno, but his hired hand at Instapundit tells the troops:

This is why I love Texans. And kudos to Abbott for doing what he thinks is right, knowing the onslaught of mainstream media criticism to come. A healthy dose of suspicion is warranted, especially with this Administration.

You can read the explanation from the Army here, but they haven't overthrown the tyrant Obama so their word is no good.

These people used to issue tinfoil dispatches like this from the darkest corners of public discourse. Now it's part of mainstream conservatism. It's as if Robert Welch had challenged Eisenhower for the 1956 Republican Presidential nomination and gone on Face the Nation to demand Ike answer charges that he was a Communist dupe. This will be a difficult period in American history to describe to our descendants, if we have any.

A CHANGE OF SCENE.

Hey look, Rod Dreher took a moment off from his endless war against the gays to address the Baltimore riots! His first instinct is to tell us the rioters have "lawlessness in their hearts," but list ye, sinners, for "the rest of us are destroying the basis for self-governance and order in our polis too." What can this mean? Later Dreher amplifies: He knows a religious school where they have a sexual assault problem, and the obvious reason is that society at large no longer adheres to "the concepts and the language of the Bible," which Biblelessness has apparently been transmitted atmospherically (you know, like Ebola!) to the religious school or something:

...the school’s leadership refuses to use the language or morality, or moral absolutes. It couches everything it says in the language of liberalism, which is to say, in consent and procedure...

Whereas previously the Holy Ghost wrote the disciplinary policies. This is also, per Dreher, why we don't have another MLK; I thought it was because we tend to shoot them. Inevitably:

This is why what is happening in Baltimore is linked to what is happening on Capitol Hill at the Supreme Court today. America in 2015 is a culture that defines the good as whatever the individual says it is.

Son of a gun, he brought it back home! Eventually, Dreher revisits:

It’s society’s fault. It always is. In this view, poor black people are always acted upon, and are never moral agents.

Also, Freddie Gray "was a layabout who had a bail bondsman the way other people have an auto mechanic," thugs, black fatherlessness, etc. -- why, it's as if Dreher remembered there were other people besides homosexuals for him to hate! He ends thus:

...we will get absolutely nowhere toward harmonizing our badly fractured communities if all we do is blame Somebody Else, or some abstraction — White People, Black People, History, Social Injustice — for our own sins and failings, both individual and collective.

If self-awareness were a virus, scientists could build a vaccine off Dreher's immunity.

UPDATE. Many alicublog commenters note the howling irony of Dreher complaining that a sexual assault policy is based on "consent and procedure." ("The language of 'consent and procedure' officially became the basis of our legal system in 1215," says Gromet. "Leave it to Dreher to find the High Middle Ages too liberal.") The lack of clarity among conservatives on the concept of consent is well documented, but it will always be worse with Brother Rod, an every-head-shall-bow-and-every-knee-shall-bend type who probably left Catholicism because they wouldn't let him into Opus Dei.

Kudos to Megalon: "You better watch it, America! The Rod From God is THIS CLOSE to opening a serious can of smite ass!"

Oh, and Dreher has a new Baltimore post up, basically a new entry in the Longest Way To Say 'They're Animals' Competition. And he cites Kevin D. Williamson as a moral authority! Here's an example of Williamson's writing on the riots:

Translation: All liberals are white (blacks are Mau-Maus or something) and they're all as scared of black people as I am.

LOOTERS.

As you may expect in the wake of the Baltimore riots, on the right it's all ooga-booga all the time. The Mayor of Baltimore said that in giving citizens space to demonstrate, the city had also given "those who wished to destroy space to do that," which to normal people means that if you choose to have a free society, as opposed to a police state, some people will abuse the privilege. To professional bullshit artists like Paul Mirengoff, however, it was evidence that the Mayor was telling rioters to go nuts. Fox's Lou Dobbs said the mayor had "basically have given a free pass to those who are tearing up property," and his guest Keith Ablow responded, "if you want to tear down the system, you might be taking your cues, by the way, from a president who has given the appearance that there is every justification for any level of anger at our country because we're such despicable people." Further proof that ObamaHitler is responsible, from Warner Todd Huston: "Priorities: Obama Sends THREE Reps to Freddie Gray Funeral–Sent ZERO to American Sniper Chris Kyle’s and British PM Thatcher’s Funerals."

At American Thinker, Thomas Lifson decried the "paltry number of arrests" in Baltimore, and quoted his colleague, racial obsessive Colin Flaherty, who said that it didn't matter that crime has gone down in Baltimore, what's important is that "in Baltimore, police will not arrest black criminals" (apparently they were just giving Freddie Gray a lift -- as they've done frequently to others), and the cops, the statisticians, and the media are all siding with their friends the Negroes against persecuted white people:

The idea that crime in Baltimore is going down comes up every time a case of black mob violence hits the local news. Which is pretty much all the time. Everything except that black part, that is, which they leave out.

This, folks, is the modern conservative movement -- a toxic stew of racist paranoia and Nixonian lawn-order. It has nothing to do with that "libertarian moment" PR campaign from last summer, the memory of which gets more grimly funny every month. There's an election coming up and they need to get as many horrified honkies as possible into the van.

Speaking of libertarianism,  here's Robby Soave at libertarian flagship Reason having a rap session with the Baltimoreans:

Violence is violence, and it’s wrong. That’s a foundational principle of libertarianism, for one thing.

Fight the power! Next week he'll tell them about the grave injustice of affirmative action and the Civil Rights Act.

SEASON 7, EPISODE 11.

The key moment was when Jim Hobart from McCann told the SCP partners they'd "died and gone to advertising heaven" and they all sat there looking miserable. Actually I take that back -- they looked like they didn't know how they should look. In fact I think even the actors didn't  know how they should look -- because the feeling was too ambiguous. The moment was clearly meant to show that, though advertising is what they do all day, are good at, and claim to care about, Pete, Roger, Joan, Ted and Don (well, maybe not Ted) are only now acknowledging that it's not really that important to them.

But what is, then? Joan's got the clearest gripe about the move -- McCann's a sexist shithole and she'll have trouble there. Roger -- well, his name was on the door, and so was Don's for a while. But neither of them ever showed any thirst for permanence before -- shit, they're both practically estranged from their children. And Pete's reaction looks like nothing but pique. Really, Jim's right -- this is like minor leaguers complaining they got sent up to The Show. The only reason to complain is if you're sick of baseball.

So what do they want? I fear Joan and Rich Cracker are going to be spun off into an entrepreneural love nest. Pete may devote some of his spare time to becoming a better human being, and I have to admit his tip-off to Peggy (coming after a mommy-baby flash that was very well handled) and his chivalry with Trudy make that look like an interesting project. (Question: Pete told Peggy about the McCann move but Don didn't?) Sterling can have a sitcom with Mme. Calvet, something like Green Acres in Québécois.

But what about Don? I think showing up at the Waitress of Death's apartment red- faced drunk in the wee hours was about the most human thing I've seen Don do, and the most pathetic. If it means anything, it means Don's going to have to bottom out before he can get anywhere else. But that's a big if.

I liked Peggy's truth-telling scene with Stan, and all honor to the undersung Jay R. Ferguson, who has a certain preening, thoughtless sort of art-monkey down cold, and who showed here that even a doofus can get institutional sexism if you give him absolutely no chance to evade the point -- like, have someone he loves make it. (At this point his relationship with Peggy seems more realistic to me than Don's.) I guess the only problem with it was the truth-telling; to me, it's a sign the show is ending and people are going to start spelling out what they want. And I fear it's going to be things like respect in the workplace, a financially comfortable family life, and a bunch of other dull shit that's perfectly fine in and of itself but hardly worth all that artistic effort. Shit, maybe Draper will go back to Pennsylvania and make that old whorehouse into a Hilton.

P.S. There's been a Campbell at Greenwich Country Day for generations, but suddently family history is an issue? What'd I miss? P.P.S. With Trudy's eloquent complaint, it's official: Women in 1970 are sick of this shit. Was it Virginia Slims?

IT CAN'T MISS.

From: Central Committee
To: The Brethren
Re: Bruce Jenner - Next Steps

Now that Bruce Jenner has come out as both a woman and a Republican, we find ourselves at a crossroads. Some of us are apparently sticking with the traditional conservative approach toward LGBT issues. In fact we’ve heard from a few of you who disapprove of our use of the term “LGBT,” suggesting we revert instead to the schoolyard phrases favored by our movement's founders. But the Central Committee thinks these comrades are missing a big opportunity.

We direct your attention to John Nolte of Breitbart.com. John is no friend to gay and trans people, as shown by his columns such as “GAY MARRIAGE IS THE MEDIA'S VEHICLE, DESTINATION IS TO DESTROY THE CHURCH” and “BULLYING GLAAD GOES ON ANOTHER CENSORSHIP RAMPAGE,” and his Homer Simpsonesque jokes about homosexuals. Yet when Jenner came out, John grasped the nettle. First he announced that liberals are the real bigots. This is SOP, though we give John credit for claiming that “the last person to use the word ‘fag’ in my presence was a liberal celebrity, and the look on my face made vocalizing my disapproval unnecessary.” Imagine, John hanging out with liberal celebrities, let alone intimidating them with his facial expressions! We applaud his nerve.

But John pushed things further in a way I’m not sure many of us fully appreciate. Please note this line from his column:

Unlike the elite media, conservatives and Christians are the true liberals.

And this one:

Like sex outside of marriage or lying, homosexuality is a sin, being gay is not. 

Now, to an outsider this will sound like gibberish, or perhaps even typos; but if you’ve been attending our workshops, you will recall our maxim, “You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few logical chains.”

Let’s be honest: Gay rights has been a disaster for our movement; we’re losing share on it every day, and for various reasons (cough deep south cough) we can’t back down on policy. But John’s assertions may flip the board for us if we follow up properly.

First, if we can get voters to accept, even on a subconscious level, John's proposition that conservatives are the real liberals and that being gay is not the same thing as being homosexual, we may shake up the current paradigm to the point that voters don’t know what to believe.

And that’s when we’ll activate our follow-plan — one we caution must remain top secret until after the roll-out, and for which we are currently seeking volunteers.

The theme we’ll be promoting is this: Conservatives are not only the real liberals — they’re also the real gays.

You will notice the people identified as “gay” at present are mostly college-educated and high-earning, and favor hair and clothing styles most citizens cannot afford either financially or socially. They also have a strong interest in the arts. It should be clear that these so-called gay people are actually just liberal elitists, pretending to be gay because they think it makes them look like victims, which is the highest aspiration of the liberal (see also their tiresome identification with black people and women).

Many of these “gays” even go to the extreme measure of having sex with members of their own gender, often on a regular basis, which only shows how desperately they pursue the mantle of victimhood.

Conversely, real gays (that is, conservatives) don’t need to make a show of their status by having gay sex. They are good Christian people, married or attracted to members of the opposite gender, who oppose gay marriage and the liberal fascist attempt to force other Christians to make cakes for them — and just happen to be gay.

Volunteers for this project will be expected to come out as gay. You may let it be known, in a casual way, that you’re not that kind of gay, but you must be disciplined enough not to make a big deal of it. If your status is challenged, simply say: Who are you to define me, to tell me how to define myself? Show sympathy for their blinkered vision, and pray (good and loud, and where people can hear you) for your oppressors to learn toleration.

Keep your temper as liberals sputter and make themselves unattractive over this; soon enough, when the idea has taken hold, you will be able to post photographs of your opposite-sex partners with captions like “I love my gay husband” so no one gets the wrong idea. After a while, when gay marriage bans and RFRAs have been instituted with the support of us gays — and our straight allies — people will come to wonder what all the fuss was about back in the dark, dead days of discrimination. Then we will truly be able to say that we have overcome.