WHATEVERTRUMP.

Jonathan Chait has noticed (as I have) that a lot of the old NeverTrump guys have rolled on their backs and peed in submission to The Leader. National Review writers in particular were, back in the day, writing columns like "Is Trump a Double Agent for the Left?" and filling entire issues with demands that he be stopped, but even before the election began extending feelers ("He is a demagogue, but he might be our demagogue") and are now wholly bought in.

Some of the NR guys are crabbing about it. Kevin D. Williamson complains that Chait tied their movement to Ayn Rand, which is absurd because Rand's for babies -- mature wingnuts go for Charles Murray. Also, God: "Actual conservatives are more likely to be found in church, where, among other things, they exercise the philanthropic impulse in community." (Trump goes to church too, and even tried to drop money in the collection plate at least once, so I guess he's as philanthropic as Wilbur Ross and Kevin D. Williamson. Also, doesn't he have some sort of foundation?) Williamson does not otherwise describe the intellectual pedigree of modern conservatism, but judging from the insults with which he peppers his essay he might have named Don Rickles.

Better still is Charles Two Middle Initials Cooke, who has apparently been working on his House Englishman routine:

Here’s a fun theory, courtesy of New York magazine’s resident apparatchik, Jonathan Chait: Because they are devotees of the work of Ayn Rand, Donald Trump’s critics have begun to shut up.

I shan’t attempt to explain how ineluctability silly is this contention...

Oh, you shan't, shan't you? He goes on toffee-nosing like this ("I have seen it expressed elsewhere and think it needs nipping in the bud") for some time, but eventually has to get down to the real bullshit:

In order to answer these questions, one has to reiterate what exactly the Never Trump position entailed, as well as remember that it was never a pledge to reject conservatism or to join the Left on the barricades. Rather, it was a description that was applied to those rightward-leaning figures who believed that Donald Trump was a poor choice as the GOP’s nominee, and that he was an unfit candidate for president. Although I rarely used the term myself, it did apply to me as a practical matter: Throughout the primaries and the general election, I argued that Donald Trump was (a) an immoral man, ill-suited to the office of the presidency; (b) a political opportunist, likely to pursue policies that would seriously damage conservatism in the long run; and (c) a wannabe authoritarian who shouldn’t be trusted with power. As a result, I both opposed his nomination during the primaries and concluded during the general that I could not back somebody so manifestly unsuited to his coveted role.

Quite obviously, Trump’s victory rendered much of this moot — not, of course, because his victory has altered his character or because his success has impelled reconciliation, but because the role of Trump’s critics has by necessity been changed...

Go read the rest if you like, but it comes down to this: NeverTrump didn't mean NeverTrump, it meant UnlessHeWinsTrump, in which case he's like any other Republican, which is to say mostly dandy.

You may compare this posture to the conduct of Evan McMullin -- who was sufficiently NeverTrump to mount an insurgent campaign against him and, unlike many of his fans from that time, continues to kick both Trump and the Trumpified Republican Party in the ass. McMullin seems to have a different idea of NeverTrump than Cooke, based on principle and the plain meaning of words.

CE N'EST PAS UNE MAJORITÉ POPULAIRE.

Hillary Clinton's popular vote margin is now tallied at 2.8 million and rising -- which only counts in horseshoes, of course, but with the prospect of a possible Manchurian Candidate and definite buffoon as President the fact does rather cast an ironic pall. So many conservatives nervously downplay her higher total, with Michael Barone alone first saying it doesn't count because of California, then because it's all just coastal states full of cities and minorities. (This was also the heart of Breitbart's "DONALD TRUMP WON 7.5 MILLION POPULAR VOTE LANDSLIDE IN HEARTLAND" analysis. Apparently proximity to a Kroger or a meth lab makes your vote count extra.)

At PJ Media, Brian Boyer has a novel approach:

Let me make a bold statement: There is a reasonable chance that Hillary Clinton would not have won under a "popular vote" system, even though it seems clear that she currently has about two million more votes than President-elect Donald Trump. That's because the “popular vote” the media keeps talking about is not representative of what the popular vote would actually look like without the Electoral College. In fact, I believe that the Electoral College is actually skewing the “popular vote” in favor of Democrats.

I'll spare you: Republican turnout was low in California because they had no hope of winning ("Under the Electoral College system, if you are a Republican in California, why bother to vote? California’s 55 electoral votes are going blue whether or not you cast a ballot"); if those GOP voters were in a situation where their vote counted, they'd have come out of the woodwork in droves. Boyer doesn't explain why this same syndrome doesn't apply to Democrats in Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, etc. Maybe it's because Republicans are sensitive flowers who would rather hide in the cellar than face the prospect of defeat. Another reason why they should get extra credit for voting!

But out of all of them Kevin D. Williamson of National Review has my favorite bit:

Who lost (“lost”) the popular vote (“popular vote”) is irrelevant for all sorts of reasons. For one thing, it doesn’t have anything to do with the outcome of the election. For another, it doesn’t, strictly speaking, exist. We don’t have a popular presidential vote, or a campaign for that vote.

If only he'd had the balls to say that arithmetic itself is merely a concept by which we measure our pain! I have to say Trump's solution is more elegant -- he just says he won in a landslide. But then he has no need to convince people he's an intellectual.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Russian hack revelations and the rightblogger response, which is basically that MSM is "fake news" because Dan Rather so you can only trust PatriotButtMunch.com which sez TRUMP RULES. I'm not sure how much to trust an unsupported CIA claim myself, but I will say the folks calling this McCarthyism are way off -- back in the day, people got called Russian dupes for advocating civil rights and a nuclear freeze, not for arranging for the Soviets to make mad bank -- ask Armand Hammer! -- and publicly begging Stalin to spy on their opponents

I sort of wanted to work in an example of those bogus sites and was looking at PRNTLY: AMERICA’S TOP NEWS SITE -- specifically a post headlined “93% say Global Warming is #FakeNews, Liberals freak out as Trump picks oil CEO as Sec of State." Author (or as Philip Bump would say "apparent author") Shelby Carella writes, "a new poll out conducted online show that only 7% of voters actually believe in the fake news story of Global Warming.” I couldn't find a reference to or evidence of any such poll, but I suspect he means one of PRNTLY's own (catch those collateral clicks!): “It appears that by meeting with Leonardo DiCaprio, and Al Gore, Trump was opening up to environmentalist wacko logic, and was open to falling for the Global Warming shell game,” continues Carella. “To quote our New President? WRONG… Trump just humiliated every wacko environmentalist in US by meeting with Gore, then picking Pruitt.” (That would be Scott Pruitt, The Leader’s EPA pick. Wasn't the headline about Tillerson? Forget it, he’s rolling.) Carella finally suggests readers buy “The Perfect Christmas Gift: Trump 45 Hat,” and “share this story the media does not want you reading." Your rage- and dementia-addled grandma will be glad you did!

Also, I tried at one point to access a Joe Hoft story (yeah, he's still got his brother/alias on the payroll) at another site that was carrying it, teaparty.org; when I did so, I got a popover announcing “Donald Trump with Dr. OZ ‘This tiny pill gave me the mental and physical stamina that won me this election.’” In this ad Trump was alleged to have told Dr. OZ that “the brain is like a muscle, you got to work it out and use supplements just like body builders use, but for your brain…” It's fun to imagine Trump saying this, but even more fun to imagine it said by the guy it's elsewhere attributed to: Stephen Hawking.

Speaking of which, I see John Bolton is suggesting the alleged Russia hack was a "false flag" operation by Obama. False flag! Next he'll tell us about the chemtrails. Can't wait to see Bolton guest-host for Alex Jones, especially if he tries to make the same ridiculous faces.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Jesus and Mary Chain meet Galaxie 500. Nice.
(That reminds me, J&MC have a new one coming.)
•   Guess what, future Social Security beneficiaries -- looks like the Republicans plan to cut your benefits. Like the man says, take a peek at Table B2 of this letter from the SSA Chief Actuary, estimating the impact of the GOP’s Social Security Reform Act of 2016 -- which, I remind you, faces no meaningful obstacles once Trump is in office. Find your AIME (you can calculate it here), then look on the table for the Proposal Schedule Benefit/ Percent of Present Law relevant to yours and see how you'd be affected. Seems like most of us except for the lowest earners with the already-lowest benefits will take a haircut. Make America Sleep on a Grate Again!

•   Maureen Mullarkey, last examined here for her contention that we only countenance abortion because we want fetal tissue to make us immortal, has got with the New Age and sold The Federalist one of those you-artists-are-only-making-us-love-Trump-more stories. The record-scratch here is Mullarkey herself is an artist, she says, though she doesn't seem to like other artists, particularly young ones, sniffing that "second-year MFA students are invited to a 9-day frolic dubbed 'Barefeet and Birthday Suits: MFA in Berlin'" while she toils in her lonely cold-water atelier without even clothed-and-shod love from the cognoscenti. Subheds include "Your ‘Education’ Consists of Indoctrination" and "I Thought Artists Were Against Censorship." She is especially mad that "Trump’s victory has affected even the artists’ listserv I belong to" -- they all talk about how bad Trump is and artists' complex Westbeth even suggests they "donate to four recommended charities. The character of Westbeth’s policy preferences is clear in their selected endorsements," Mullarkey notes with disgust: "Planned Parenthood; the Ali Forney Center for gay and transgender teens; God’s Love We Deliver, a service for HIV/AIDS patients; Cabrini Immigrant Services, a boon companion to illegal aliens seeking social services." Gross, right? Mullarkey apparently has enough brains not to flame her fellow painters where they can see it, and instead vents for the more appreciative wingnut crowd under the subhed "You’re Fueling Trump Again, People":

Here is a pitch-perfect sample of the elitist self-regard that contributed to Trump’s victory. The writer, a painter, takes for granted his own rectitude. He also assumes his audience is equally offended by an election that went against the grain of worthier preferences. Worthiness, you see, is a natural result of intellectual superiority. It comes with those special gifts and unique strengths unavailable to lesser sorts.

How different that is from the Trump voter, who thoughtfully considers the equality of all creatures and respect for the viewpoints of other before pulling on his "Fuck Your Feelings" t-shirt and going out to harass Muslims.

ROD DREHER VS. AMERICA, AGAIN.

If you haven't looked in on Rod Dreher at The American Conservative lately, I have to warn you: as difficult as this may be to believe, he's gotten creepier. It may be due to the added difficulty he must anticipate in peddling his coming Benedict Option book (basically, monasticism with wi-fi) now that Trump's in, because its entire potential readership is now thinking, hey, racist shitgibbon elected = problem solved!

Obviously Dreher's aware of this; before the election, when he thought Trump's nomination was a sign that even his beloved GOP is now godless, he was spieling out flimflam like "When the smoke clears after November, the Benedict Option will be all we will have left." But since the election, while Dreher is naturally pleased that a reactionary is in power (though his image demands he be dainty about it -- every third post is "I didn't vote for Trump, but I'm glad because [insert jubilation over liberal suffering here]"), he's also obviously sweating the pre-sales:

Trump is not a religious man, but I hope that with Mike Pence whispering in his ear, he will make good on these hopes.

I can easily imagine Pence whispering in Trump's ear, "If thou therefore wilt worship me, all shall be thine," and Trump saying, "you have my attention."

It is also to be hoped that a Trump administration, which will replace Scalia, can also replace one or more other SCOTUS justices, and lock in a court majority solidly in favor of strong religious liberty protections. So far, so good, I think. 

But this surprise Trump win in no way obviates the need for the Benedict Option. All it does is buys us a little more time, and maybe a little more space within which to build it. My great concern is that conservative Christians who were beginning to perceive the danger to our faith coming from an aggressively secularist government will now allow themselves to believe that everything is fine, because we are going to have a GOP president and a GOP Congress 

Nothing could be further from the truth!

The inappropriate boldfacing, I am embarrassed to tell you, are Dreher's. Anyway, now that BenOp is off, get-rich-quick-wise, it's back to Dreher's Get-Ready-Man Routine, where he yaps that the world is a-comin' to an end and only Throne and Altar will save you.

Now, aficionados may recall that Dreher is as strong an anti-Islamist as Pam Geller except when it comes to the prospect of liberals in power, which quickly turns him fundy-ecumenical, e.g., "I probably have, re: fundamental morals, more in common with the first 500 people I'd meet in Cairo, Damascus or Tehran than the first 500 people I'd meet in Park City, UT, during festival time," etc. Better to co-reign in Allahworld than to serve fags a wedding cake!

Well, Islamists are not much in the news lately, and Dreher has a short attention span, so he's turned to a new authoritarian avatar: Vlad the Election-Hacker. Check out his post called, I ain't making this up, "Putin, Our Tsar-Protector?"

Dreher is troubled by a New York Times story about the corrupt cooperation of Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church (which is also Dreher's current faith). "Framing Putin sympathy in such stark and alarmist terms — as the media tended to frame Trump sympathy — obscures far more than it illuminates," he whines. Then he tells us about "two young Catholic men" he met on one of his frequent Benedict-Option-related vacations "who expressed sympathy for Putin" because....

...[they] had come to believe that European governing elites did not have their interests at heart, and who (the elites) were committed to de-Christianizing Europe at every opportunity... they respected the fact that [Putin] is a strong leader who embraces his country’s Christian religious heritage, and seeks to defend it and its teachings, especially against cultural liberals whose views on sex and gender are destroying the traditional family.

They sound like agents sent to tantalize Dreher. It seems to have worked, though: "And you know what?" he says. "I agreed with them, broadly." Then he quotes "the neoreactionary writer Ash Milton" and Megan McArdle, who agree with him that liberals want to oppress Christians with homosex. Then:

So: Vladimir Putin is a global leader who openly rejects and defies this memeplex, which dominates Europe even more than it does America. Finally, religious people may say, somebody stands up without apology to these people who are trying to crush us.

I try to imagine the working-class Catholics with whom I grew up in Bridgeport, Connecticut saying, "Thank God for the Russian dictator who will stand up for our values!" but can't.

...We have to keep our eye on the ball here: that the Russian state really is using culture and religion as a propaganda weapon against the West. But that doesn’t make the moral and religious ideas the Russian state weaponizes wrong or illegitimate! Never forget that the United States does the very same thing to advance secular liberalism, especially LGBT advocacy...

Sometimes I feel like giving up on America, but then I look at something like what Dreher wrote and think: You know what -- why should I? It's those assholes who gave up on America, not me; so fuck 'em -- I'll stand with America against them.

UPDATE. You know who else will defend Pooty-Poot against those who question him -- even if they're Soviet refugees? Dana Rohrabacher, California Republican and Trump Secretary of State short-lister:

Bianna Golodryga: When you talk about human rights abusers in China much can be dsaid about Russia in that regard as well.
Rohrabacher: Oh, baloney ― where do you come from? How can you buy that?
Golodryga: I come from the former Soviet Union, that’s where I came from. I came here as a political refugee. That’s where I came from.
Rohrabacher: Oh, OK. What country did you say you came from?
Golodryga: I come from the former Soviet Union, from Moldova
Rohrabacher: Oh, well then that’s good, then the audience knows that you are biased.
Golodryga: I’m biased because I am an American citizen who was born in a foreign country?
Rohrabacher: Yeah yeah, when you start saying that Russia... Did you know there have been no poitical reforms in China? None.
Golodryga: I'm not saying... I'm not advocating that China be our best friend. I'm talking to you about Russia right now.
Rohrabacher: You just said that Russia and China are the same. I'm sorry, they are not.
Golodryga: I said they are both human rights abusers. How am I wrong?
Rohrabacher: How are you wrong? In China they don't have opposition force?
Golodryga: And Russia isn't accused of murdering journalists?
Rohrabacher: Okay, look. I’ll let the public decide with that last comment where you are coming from. The bottom line is what’s good for America is to prioritize, as I did when I worked with Ronald Reagan. I wrote most of his speeches on this issue.
Golodryga: And what would Ronald Reagan think about your thoughts about Vladimir Putin?
Rohrabacher: He would love it. Maybe you forgot that Reagan was the one who reached out to Gorbachev with his hand open... and...
Golodryga: Are you comparing Gorbachev to Vladimir Putin?
Rohrabacher: Absolutely I am.

There are some lessons in this -- first, about what Rohrabacher clearly thinks is the right kiss-ass message to portray about Russia and China (or, as The Leader says it, "CHAI-na"), and about how Perestroika Mike is like the resucitator of the KGB.  Also, it's fascinating to see how dismissively Rohrabacher treats a Soviet refugee. I'm old enough to recall a time when, if a liberal suggested a change in our Soviet policy -- even after Nixon's detente and Reagan's glasnost -- conservatives would haul out Solzhenitsyn or Mindszenty and go how dare you! These people were in the gulags! And we, poor saps, felt we had to respect their experience.

So it's instructive to see Rohrabacher dismiss Golodryga's experience as "bias" -- and not just because of its breathtaking hypocrisy; it also suggests a way for liberals to fight back on issues where conservatives presume a natural advantage. For instance, when they tell you Keith Ellison can't be DNC Chair because people like Alan Dershowitz claim he's anti-Semitic, try saying "So?" and "you are being very bias." What the hell -- it worked for Trump.

FEAR OF A RAD PLANET.

You folks have probably seen some debate over the Electoral College, and how some people say it's a vestige of slavery, and others say Hamilton the musical Founder meant it to save us from people like Trump and now look, etc. Well, Michael Barone has a new angle for you:

Ditching Electoral College Would Allow California to Impose Imperial Rule on a Colonial America

California Über Alles! You can tell he's got a strong thesis from the front-loaded slurs:

They're still counting the votes, going on four weeks after the election, in California. In Brazil, a nation with much more challenging geography, they manage to do it in five hours. 

The seemingly endless dillydallying of California's (presumably union-represented) public employees has obscured two interesting things about this year's presidential election.

I know, you were thinking Little Deuce Coupe and I Left My Heart in San Francisco, but Michael Barone's California is a bureaucratic dystopia where you can't even get votes counted for Chrissakes because the Vote-Counters Union demands a papaya and tantric sex break every couple of hours. Anyway, first "interesting thing" is sure she got a majority but not as big a one as some guy in 1876, and second...

...the most populous state was a political outlier, voting at one extreme in the national political spectrum. 

You can see this easily if you array the states in order of Democratic percentage. At the top, before any state, was the District of Columbia, where 91 percent of voters chose Clinton. Next, some 5,000 miles away, was Hawaii, which went 63 percent for Clinton. Then came giant California, the nation's most populous state. As I am writing this, the latest count has California at 62 percent Democratic.

And the United States, using the same metric, is also more Democratic than Republican. But that doesn't count because California is too Democratic -- not like normal folks who are only Democratic when their parents and pastors aren't looking:

Well, yeah, you might say. California has been called the Left Coast for quite a while. Just about everyone in the Silicon Valley except Peter Thiel and in Hollywood except Pat Sajak supported Clinton. White middle-class families have been pretty much priced out of the state by high taxes and housing costs, and the Hispanic and Asian immigrants who have replaced them vote far more Democratic.

The "white middle-class families" have all left, replaced by "Hispanic and Asian immigrants." One wonders why all the rich stars and computer nerds haven't abandoned this Third World hellhole and moved to Fritters, Alabama, where you can open your car elevator and see white people! That alone would make the constant drone of neo-country tolerable.

Barone rolls out some old electoral maps and shows us California and some other big liberal states used not to be that liberal -- they even voted for Reagan! -- so it was okay if they were on the winning side sometimes, but now that they're reliably Democratic -- unlike such famously purple states as Mississippi and Kansas -- if they were on the winning side it'd be tyrannical because they have the unfair advantage in population (unlike Texas) and because, need he remind you, they just ain't normal.

...The case against abolition is one suggested by the Framers' fears that voters in one large but highly atypical state could impose their will on a contrary-minded nation.

You mean like Florida in 2000? Wait, he's got a point -- their will was thwarted!

...California's 21st-century veer to the left makes [the Electoral College] a live issue again. In a popular vote system, the voters of this geographically distant and culturally distinct state, whose contempt for heartland Christians resembles imperial London's disdain for the "lesser breeds" it governed, could impose something like colonial rule over the rest of the nation. Sounds exactly like what the Framers strove to prevent.

Actually that's the current state of the nation under the cruel tyrant Obama, who craftily got Imperial Cali to vote for him twice. For nearly eight years honest crackers have been forced to endure colonics, Mexican food, and wind farms. Some of them, no doubt suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, began treating members of minority groups with respect, and doing yoga. But now, Trump time is a-comin', and these real non-Hispanic-and-Asian-immigrant Americans can go back to hog jowls and hate crimes, like the Founders intended, and inhale the meth fumes of freedom.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Breitbart-Kellogg's beef and what it says about the new post-truth, post-fact, post-sense Trump reality all the kids are talking about. Actually after years of covering rightbloggers I find this pathology very familiar. It's similar to the famous knock that George W. Bush guy put on the "reality-based community" back in 2004. But it's gotten jacked up a bit since then, in part because, in addition to their traditional contempt toward liberals, the brethren seem to be feeling more resentment -- especially as Hillary Clinton's vote tally grows and more people demonstrate that they're not going to put up with Trump quietly.

Last weekend someone showed up at Comet Ping Pong with a gun because he bought the Nazi Frogs' Podesta pedophile gibberish. The Kellogg's thing has so far unleashed a less threatening insanity. WorldNetDaily, for example, blames Kellogg’s withdrawal (characterized by them as a "blacklist") on an activist twitter account called Sleeping Giants, which “features raised black fists that resemble those used in 1969 posters of the Black Panther Party.” WND further reports that Sleeping Giants “followed only 23 Twitter users — some of whom are actively helping Sleeping Giants publicize its campaign against Breitbart. And nearly all are linked directly to President Obama, left-leaning publications or far-left causes.” WND named the 23 being-followed accounts (usual suspects like Rachel Maddow, David Plouffe, and Michael Moore), but didn’t say which of them were “actively helping Sleeping Giants” — the clear implication is that any of them might have, since they had already committed the crime of being followed by a Twitter account. Maybe soon someone will go to Battle Creek with a sawed-off and a Confederate flag to strike a blow for Fat Goebbels.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN, EXCEPT ON SATURDAY.

A day late, but I did it. Here, have some vintage live Black Flag for your trouble.

•  I finally got into the National Museum of African-American History and Culture this week. It’s very much a typical, signage-heavy Smithsonian museum — long on curios, display cards, and uplift. At first I thought the slavery history galleries were a little too talky, and should have had some of the grim immersive effect of the U.S. Holocaust Museum. (I feel the same way about the National Museum of the American Indian, which always feels like it’s hiding something, genocide-wise.)  But then I noticed the place was packed, mostly with black families, and they were reading the history with great interest, so maybe they neither need not want to be smacked in the face with the horrors of slavery and segregation. To be fair, there are some coups de muséologie like the Emmett Till casket, and also images with quieter, more melancholy power; for example, a large wall projection of a photo of an Emancipation Day Parade in some city in 1905; a sea of black folk, neatly dressed but showing no sign of revelry or even celebration, seeming in fact somber, for reasons we are moved to imagine. And once you gets upstairs to the cultural section, all is bliss and wonder; special credit to whoever designed the groovy light boxes in the 70s-radical section. I take Steven Thrasher’s point about “respectability politics,” but it is on the nation’s biggest tourist strip, and you could do worse with four hours. (Oh, and like the American Indian Museum, the food is very good.)

•  I have to thank Steve M. of No More Mister Nice Blog (which you really should be reading, especially lately) for alerting me to the latest by culture-war clown Christian Toto appearing at the once-proud The Hill:

Film 'Miss Sloane' another reminder of Hollywood's liberal smugness

We warned you effete liberals, by our glorious election of The Leader, that we didn’t want to see anything but Batman vs. Superman vs. Wonder Woman’s Tits XVIIIVXI from now on, but you preemptively ignored us during the production cycle of this movie (or as you sissies call it “film”).

Now, the industry hopes a new film will change the public narrative on gun control. When will celebrities learn their one-sided sermons rarely change hearts or minds?...

Eventually Toto pretends to actually review the film and, surprise, says it’s bad on the merits, which is as may be, but clearly that isn’t why he finds it worth talking about because 1.) he’s Christian Toto 2.) he keeps sticking in talking points like “never mind that the National Shooting Sports Foundation recently revealed that women are the nation’s fastest growing group of gun owners,” and 3.) It’s in The frigging Hill, not Cahiers du Cinéma.

The film suggests most Beltway types want more gun control, but the gun lobby strong arms senators to make them do their bidding. Off screen, there are forces on both sides, each with its own resources and forms of persuasion. Like glossy Hollywood movies…

Like glossy Hollywood movies! From Hollywood! What a bunch of hypocrites.

Hollywood didn’t bother to ask why some Americans thought Trump, flaws and all, might be the change agent they craved. And “Miss Sloane” refuses to consider any NRA member’s arguments regarding the Second Amendment…

He seems to want advisory councils brought in to make sure the artistic product doesn’t challenge the Trumpenproletariat, at least not without an appearance by a raisonneur named Tistian Chroto to explain why conservatism rocks. In show biz they call these focus groups, and that’s how we get Batman vs. Superman vs. Wonder Woman’s Tits XVIIIVXI (in IMAX^®!). Which I guess will be the ideal entertainment for the New Age.

•  As for the Carrier deal, you know what? First and foremost I’m happy for those guys who will get to keep their jobs. It sucks that many of the Carrier employees are losing their jobs and no one seems to give a shit, and that the propaganda Trump is making of it is probably a model for his general kleptocracy cover, and (most of all) that nothing about him and his factota suggests there’ll be anything like a policy that would generate better-than-subsistence-wage jobs for those hinterland honkies who thought voting for him was gonna fix everything. But in this round of winners-and-losers at least somebody who isn't a billionaire won something; also, we get to hear the hardcore wingnuts sputtering that it’s not real conservatism — and their Twitter followers snarling back at them. It's an ill wind that blows no one some laffs!

TODAY IN WINGNUT WHINING.

Sean Davis of The Federalist says the evil libtard media doesn't care about the fires raging in Gatlinburg and elsewhere 'cause it's only crackers getting burnt:

Ravaged by months of drought, huge swaths of the southeast United States are on fire, but you wouldn’t know it judging by national media coverage... 

The lack of rainfall has led directly to the scores of fires currently burning throughout the South. 

The scene in Gatlinburg is nothing short of terrifying... 

But because it’s not happening in New York or D.C. or Los Angeles, it doesn’t really count as news. When a few snowflakes begin to fall in Washington, it’s a national emergency. When Los Angeles has a lot of traffic on Thanksgiving, it requires an international APB. But when tens of thousands of acres are burning in the South following months of drought, it barely warrants a shrug.

So what does Davis care? I keep hearing that the MSM is discredited and full of lies, and real patriots only watch Fox and read hate sites.

I opened up Google News and saw this at the top of the page:

Also, if you look up "georgia fire" or "tennessee fire" on Google News you get hundreds of thousands of references at present. They're not mostly from Hillarypedophile.com and nazifrog.net.

Oh, just for grins I looked up "fire" on the front page of Breitbart.com. I got "Theismann: Fire Any GM Who Trades for Tony Romo," "Levi Strauss: Do Not Bring Your Legal, Concealed Carry Firearms Into Our Stores," and "Top Cleric Criticizes Egyptians For Rejoicing At Israeli Forest Fires."

And you know what's eating up Breitbart's front page right now?

Apparently Breitbarteers, enraged that Kellogg's stopped advertising on their site, are tweeting pictures of their Fruity Pebbles and Frosted Flakes in the garbage so people will know they're serious. Why doesn't Breitbart tell their readers to send their cereal to Gatlinburg instead? At the very least they can try dropping it on the conflagrations from helicopters; given the texture of the stuff, it'll probably work just as well as that foam they normally use.

No pleasing some people, though I guess they get something out of being displeased.

UPDATE. From comments, Jimcima:

The scene in Gatlinburg is nothing short of terrifying....but when tens of thousands of acres are burning in the South following months of drought, it barely warrants a shrug. 

And that fire is barely half the size of just the last fire we had to evacuate from where I live in San Diego. 

Before that? 

The Cedar Fire burned 280,000 acres, which is 17x bigger than the Gatlinburg fire. It killed 26 people and we lived in the parking lot of the local high school for almost a week. 

I don't recall the national news coverage but I distinctly remember commenters on conservative websites saying how "stoooopid" we fucking Californian fruits were for living in a wildfire area.

A THREAT FROM THE REAL VICTIMSTM.

It appears some advertisers are pulling out of the Breitbart ad streams:

Kellogg’s has announced that it will pull all advertising from the site. 

The company cited concerns that Breitbart News, which has been described by many as portraying alt-right ideals, does not align with its values... 

Kellogg’s isn’t the first brand to pull its advertising from the website. That growing list includes Allstate, Nest, EarthLink, Warby Parker and SoFi.

Breitbart.com says Kellogg's is "blacklisting" them:

“Kellogg’s decision to blacklist one of the largest conservative media outlets in America is economic censorship of mainstream conservative political discourse,” it said in a statement. “That is as un-American as it gets.”

That would be a fair analogy if, say, Zero Mostel and Millard Lampell were able to keep making movies even if some producers didn't like them, and Breitbart were thrown off the internet.

Interestingly, the response from Breitbart's CEO, per the Hollywood Reporter, is more belligerent:

"We'll handle this the way we always do — war," Breitbart CEO Larry Solov told The Hollywood Reporter (founder Andrew Breitbart, before his death in 2012, declared "war" on what he called the "Democratic-Media Complex," his term for a liberally biased news and entertainment industry)... 

"Our readers are mainstream America and, frankly, that's who these advertisers risk alienating," Solov said of Kellogg's and Allstate. "They're creating economic censorship of conservative discourse. They say we don't represent their values — but we represent American values."

To review: A commercial entity is declining to buy ad space from a publisher. The publisher proclaims itself a victim of a "blacklist." Its CEO says it will go to "war" over this. And the chairman of the publisher is chief strategist to the President Elect of the United States. 

In other words, wingnut business as usual -- professing victimhood while wielding power and making threats. 

I doubt Solov means a boycott -- if we've learned anything from conservative consumer activism, it's that you can get them to consume more of what they already gorge on, but not to consume less of it. No one's going to stop buying Frosted Flakes to glorify Steve Bannon. But when his boss, who does not seem like the type to observe ethical niceties, comes to power, maybe we'll see what Solov does mean.  

GOEBBELS COMES BACK AS A LESS-CHARISMATIC DON DRAPER.

I don't normally do a second post on Pimp Village Voice Column Mondays, but I found something I wanted to make sure was noted before we're all thrown into gulags. You may have seen that the Associated Press -- whose business is clarity of thought expressed by clarity of prose -- laid down standards for use of the term "alt-right" that make clear AP will not accept use of the term as the disguise for which neo-Nazi goons like Richard Spencer obviously intend it, and counseled editors thus:

Again, whenever “alt-right” is used in a story, be sure to include a definition: “an offshoot of conservatism mixing racism, white nationalism and populism,” or, more simply, “a white nationalist movement.

Enemies of clarity such as Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit erupted as one would expect:

Don’t be fooled – The left is doing this so they can label all Trump supporters as racists. This enables hateful liberal reporters to label all Trump reporters as evil racists. The AP can go to hell.

So I guess Hoft will stick with the "Grammar & usage R for fags" stylebook he's been using all along.

Not causally related but very relevant is something CNN ran, by one Brad Todd, identified there as "a founding partner at OnMessage, Inc., an advertising agency where he has produced ads for Ron Johnson, Rick Scott, Bobby Jindal, and many others."

So, already, an obvious scumbag -- but one with an interesting Age of Trump angle:  He famously said on one of the talk shows that "voters take Donald Trump seriously but not literally, while journalists take him literally, but not seriously." So far as it goes it's an astute observation of the poetic sense of political rhetoric. But Todd wants to take it further:

Months later and on the far side of the election, the press is still taking Trump more literally and less seriously than voters do. The most recent case in point is the furor over his baseless claim on Twitter about voter fraud, that "millions of people who voted illegally" cost him the popular vote. It's the latest instance of the media buying into Trump's outrage-tweeting strategy. 

And journalists keep falling for it because they, like politicians, over-value words -- and they are now covering a politician who does not. President-elect Trump still takes the same cavalier approach to verbal description as he would in hawking a condo tower that's yet to be designed. And more than enough voters don't seem to mind.

Those of you who value words as -- well, as what they were meant for: a means of honestly communicating with your fellow man -- are just being silly and precious, says the adman: words are just a sales tool, something to put on a brochure with the pretty pictures and every bit as suitable for Photoshopping:

Trump has spent a career interacting with journalists, but as the first president never to serve in the military, the cabinet, or another public office before his election to the White House, he's never been immersed in the word culture that drives political journalism.

Translation: He can't read. Hey, but who cares! What's "word culture" got to do with leadership? And look at those chumps who can read and their childish concerns:

Journalists are conditioned to believe that words are the ultimate product, to be curated, sweated, grinded and polished. The profession slavishly follows the Associated Press Style Manual...

Boo! Hiss!

..which is hotly debated on every revision, to achieve industry-wide consensus on exactly which words are forbidden and which verbal shortcuts are allowed. Any exceptions to that manual come in the form of a style manual unique to each publication or network, a supplemental set of inviolable stone tablets.

You've heard this kind of talk before -- not so much from other admen, who (like David Ogilvy) are usually in favor of clearer communication, as from neo-reactionaries such as Mencius Moldbug and Rod Dreher, who denounce "The Cathedral" of people who maintain intellectual standards ("stone tablets") because they don't serve the racist revanchism in which Moldbug and Dreher believe and are therefore illegitimate. The only reason they can imagine anyone would pay close attention to words is to advance propaganda; the idea that anyone would value the symmetry of words and meanings for any higher purpose or pleasure eludes them, probably because (as their prose betrays) they take no such pleasures and their purpose is lower than shit.

Todd's pretty much the same way, philosophically -- he thinks you're only grinding and polishing words to peddle something, just like he does, see! -- but (thank heaven for small favors) he's not as addicted to spooky pseudo-mysticism as Moldbug and Dreher. He's a sunny salesman! And he's here to tell you, Mr. Gloomy Old-Fashioned Journalist, to get your head out of the clouds -- stop "writing endless columns on this or that flip-flop based on Trump's conflicting rhetoric," because you're "wasting the time" of readers -- "also known as 'customers'" -- who see Trump's words "differently than journalists do. They, or at least the members of his winning electoral coalition, see Trump not as a politician but as a businessman.... They may have met other real estate professionals in their own lives and they know better than to take the words of ad hoc marketing seriously."

In other words, it's all bullshit, and you shouldn't harsh the customers' mellow by trying to give them anything else:

Donald Trump's electoral coalition has shaken up American politics in ways few expected. Smart operatives in both parties are already trying to adapt practices and metrics to better suit the wave of change Trump rode. 

The Washington press corps, already suffering through a decade-long decline in viewer trust and consumption, would be foolish to not adapt as well. If the press covers Trump the way it covered prior presidents -- too literally -- it may find its own customers take journalism itself a lot less seriously.

[flaps hand at Mr. Smartypants Journalist] C'mon, get with it! Quit pretending you're better than flacks like me! Be a smart operative! Here are the talking points, now don't fuck things up by checking them against your precious "facts." Do you like your job?...

You know, I turned away from the Church many years ago, but I still can't get over the feeling that the Devil is trying us.

UPDATE. Todd's idea has caught on, at least in some crippled form, with one of the dimmer rightbloggers -- "Trump Punks Media With Claim Of 'Millions Of Illegal Votes.'," writes William Teach of Right Wing News. "Could Trump be correct? Probably not," admits Teach. But that's not important -- what's important is, Trump spurred a "Typical Media Freakout," which shows that "the media still do not get Donald Trump." Boo-yah!

Teach hasn't quote grasped the Tao, though -- he goes to the trouble of trying to explain Trump's bullshit:

But, hey, without an examination of the tallies in places like California and New York, how do we know that they didn’t have millions of illegal aliens, felons, people voting two or more times, and legal aliens voting?

Similarly, how do you know I wasn't kidnapped by aliens, and that these cops who claim I was driving 100 mph drunk aren't in on it? Without a major outer space exploration to check out my assertion, we'll just have to agree to disagree.

So Teach still has traces of oldthink in his system -- to go that extra mile, he has to accept that even dishonest explanations are unnecessary and may even be injurious; best to follow up only with chants of "U.S.A.!" or those bouquets of emojis, hashtags, misspellings, and conspiracy theories with which Trump followers respond to The Leader's tweets. From the evidence of his writing, Teach is not so devoted to "word culture" that he can't get with this program -- especially when he sees how much less effort it takes.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the "normalization" of Trump, and the rightbloggers' resistance to any indication that Trump is anything but normal (or superhuman).

In the column I noted Peggy Noonan pretending to be mortally offended by Trump's multiple conflicts of interest. Had I room I would have also treated her later, even worse column, "What to Tell Your Children About Trump." I should mention here, for readers who have not long followed the woman I used to call the Crazy Jesus Lady, how absolutely full to bursting Noonan is with shit. In an earlier, post-election column, she whimpered that "Donald Trump doesn’t know how to be president" and implored the citizenry, "Help him," as if the practiced grifter would not cheerfully help himself every chance he got.

Then came the column I cited, professing to keep an eye on the fellow lest he (inadvertently, no doubt) rob the Treasury. "What to Tell Your Children About Trump" probably came after many cocktails and/or stern warnings to get normalizing if she knew what was good for her. It came with this peculiar illo:

The attempt to make the vicious, hate-faced Trump look avuncular in this image is, amazingly, even more repulsive than the actual Trump's real-life rictus when clutching horrified children, because it shows a more benign countenance than Trump has ever managed to show at any time; it's as if he had died, and had his face wrestled by an undertaker into a cheerful, Uncle Toby grin for the casket, and then someone thought it would be nice if, before he was planted, he could be crunched into a seated position, then surrounded by children who have been promised $10 not to scream in terror while the scene was photographed.

Even more artificial is Noonan's historical analysis. "The legacy media continues its self-disgrace," she claims, because they aren't showing Trump the proper deference -- "Any journalists who are judicious toward Trump, who treat him fairly or even as a human being, are now accused of 'normalizing' him." And what could be abnormal about a crooked grifter elevated to our highest office? Instead, decrees Noonan, the media should "respect" the "happiness" of "60 million people" who "haven’t taken to the streets... they haven’t broken car windows..." which I guess is Noonan's way of saying they're all white, though they are in a sense a minority.

Then comes the kind of Noonan bullshit that makes you proud to be an American, where even the most unbelievable I-walked-with-an-immigrant bullshit can net you seven figures:

Five days after the election I met an Ethiopian immigrant on a street in Washington.

"Hello, drunk white lady! Let us share our stories."

We got to talking. He spoke of how bad it was in his old country, all the killing. He’d been here 15 years. “I love America,” he said. “It gave everything to me.” But he was deeply concerned by the election. He has two sons, 8 and 6. The younger got up Wednesday morning, saw the TV and burst into tears. Trump won! The boy calls Trump “the mouth man.” How could a bully be president? “He wept,” said the Ethiopian. “How do I explain it to him?” 

I thought. Finally I said, “Tell him to trust America.” Tell him that we are the world’s oldest democracy, that we are a good people, that we’ve been through shocks and surprises, and that we have checks and balances. “If it turns out good,” I said, “we’ll be happy. If it turns out really bad, America has a way of making your stay in the White House not too long. But tell him to trust America as you did, and it gave you everything.”

Later Noonan tells us about what a lovely chat she had with Trump -- "how charming, funny and frank he was—and, as I say, how modest. How actually humble," and I see the people who can afford a Wall Street Journal subscription nodding and thinking, of course, he addresses the crowds as the idiots they are, but when he speaks to one of us he is probably as charming as I am when I joke with my caddy about his inferior genes!

I wonder if she'll get to share this touching story with the Ethiopian before he's thrown out of the country to make a swing-state honky feel better about his employment prospects.

Meanwhile the Next Noonan, Megan McArdle, says for Thanksgiving you should be nice to people different from yourself. No, not liberals, silly -- they're scum! But:

...the first thing I’m choosing to be grateful for this year is the strangers I’ve met who were nothing like me, but nonetheless did me some extraordinary kindness. The people who hate everything about my politics, but who have reached out, again and again, to wish me well and even offer me money or expert help when I was going through some sort of crisis. Those people I’m grateful for, and America, you have a lot of them.

Someone offered McArdle money? Did her Thermomix break down?

(Do read the column, it's pretty good.)

THINK OF YOURSELVES AS INTERNS AT THE PRESTIGIOUS UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!

When a Texas judge stops an executive order granting overtime rights to millions of workers, you expect the usual suspects to rush to yell hooray; though I see Megan McArdle is a little slow off the mark this morning, National Review got Carrie Lukas on the case pronto. Unfortunately, Lukas' bullshit dispenser wasn't warmed up. After announcing the injunction is "good news for workers," she falters in the crucial "make it look good" part of the routine. After trying the old employers-will-just-reclassify-those-workers bit -- at least that's what I think she's trying to convey with that Tammy McCutchen quote -- she gives us this:

Moreover, many workers simply don’t want to have to track their time and inform their bosses exactly when they are leaving early and when they are working late. Moving to an hourly position entails a loss of prestige for some workers, who prefer to feel as though their contributions to the company are bigger than just their time logged.

Sure, you would have gotten a higher rate after 40 hours, but you'd have had to record your hours! And if you're like me -- a rightwing factotum -- you hate bureaucracy more than you need to feed a family! Also, think of the loss of prestige -- imagine your "walk of shame" from the paymaster's office as your coworkers glare at you; you can even hear some of them saying, "yeah, looks like old Smith's only slaughtering pigs for the money!"

Well, there's one real upside: We should stop hearing about economic anxiety any day now.

UPDATE. Hi, guys, Disqus seems to have deleted a bunch of comments I did not ask to be deleted, and I cannot yet figure out how to get them back up. Working on resolution now. New comments seem to work, so feel free to blow off steam here.

THE LITTLE PEOPLE.

Salena Zito has a habit of going among Pennsylvania Republicans and delivering the big news that they're for Trump. In this September 26 article she claimed Trump was convincing "undecideds and Democrats" in Westmoreland County, which she characterized as "formerly or traditionally Democrat-blue" even though it's been voting Republican for President since 2000.

Since Trump took Pennsylvania she's been certified by the credulous as a White-Working-Class Whisperer. Today she's here to tell us that "Trump’s voters love his Twitter rants against popular culture." To this end she spoke to four Pennsyltuckians, who say things like "but he did the right thing, and the media and the elite still keep making the same mistakes" and "“Trump is standing up for the so-called deplorables, intolerables and irredeemables excoriated by Hillary and the left,” which totally don't sound like they came out of a talking point factory.

Just for grins I looked up one of her sources on Facebook and found him (or, to be fair, maybe someone else with the same name in the same town who's FB friends with Zito) talking about how most of the anti-Trump protests are paid "orchestrations of the left," and that he saw this one lady protesting and asked her "exactly she was protesting as the election had already taken place on Tuesday. She refused to answer and just repeated 'I'm a woman.' She spoke with an accent (can't tell if it was real or not)..."

Can't you just feel the economic anxiety? The best part is Zito's explanation of this phenomenon:

Here is what the cosmopolitan class still does not get: It’s not just Donald Trump you are making fun of, it is people outside your circle, the voters whose sentiments and values that have been the punch line of Hollywood’s jokes for their entire lives.

I do in fact get it: I am indeed making fun of the handful of people she quotes, mainly because they're doing a hilariously piss-poor job of pretending to be the Common Clay.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about Mike Pence's poor reception at Hamilton, and Trump's simultaneous machinations behind the scenes. Don't mistake me for one of those guys who think the Hamilton thing is a mere "distraction." I mean, obviously you couldn't put it past Fat Goebbels to gin up an effete-East-Coast Kulturkampfire for that purpose, but I hardly see the need: Trump's got so much wrong with him in so many ways, yet months of experience show it doesn't mean anything to his marks; they've always known he's corrupt as hell, and don't expect high office to change him. They just want to swim, maybe drown, in his bullshit. That's how it is with the better class of fascist -- they spew scum from every orifice, till everything is a distraction from everything else, and those so inclined may surrender.

Rod Dreher makes an appearance in the column. All weekend long he ejaculated over poor innocent American Pence and the fascist arty-farties who oppressed him. Sample:

I mean, is it the case that liberals believe that artistic performances — theater, music, and so forth — must be limited only to people who share their moral and political views? If I were worried that the Trump administration was going to be hostile to minorities and gays...

(Pause to imagine a Rod Dreher "worried that the Trump administration was going to be hostile to minorities and gays," unsuccessfully)

...I would have gone out of my way to make Mike Pence feel welcome at Hamilton, and hoped and prayed that the power of art moved his heart and changed his mind. But that’s not how the audience saw it.

That, Brother Rod, is because the audience weren't morons. They knew Pence wasn't going to see a fucking play and go, "Wow, suddenly I see minorities and gays in a whole new light, no more gay-straightening for me!" More likely he'd think, heh, them sub-humans sure do sing and dance good, and then cheerfully go back to Washington to fuck up their lives even worse. In other words, some people you can't and don't try to convince; with them all you can do to them is warn. For starters.

Extra negative points to Dreher for adding a column about why we should applaud his toleration in going to see Brokeback Mountain and writing an incredibly shitty column about it.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

I thought the only lonely place was on the moon.
•  You know it's trouble from the hed and dek:

Why This Twitter Purge Is Okay with Me
In the case of Richard Spencer, the media jackboots are getting it right.

And make no mistake: National Review's Ian Tuttle still thinks that, while libtards kinda-sorta-maybe have a right to invite or disinvite whomever from their own social media networks and college commencements, they're still liberal fascists because liberals are fascists Q.E.Duh. Here's Tuttle's extremely unfortunate object lesson:

Those of us on the right spend our time trying to loosen the very real clamps that exist on speech, for instance, on university campuses. And that’s important work. DePaul University has the right to forbid Ben Shapiro from speaking, as it did this week. But conservatives oppose DePaul’s doing so because they object to the idea that Ben Shapiro is somehow morally beyond the pale. He’s not. He’s a mainstream conservative, working within a delineable tradition of conservative thought.

Actually Ben Shapiro is a fucking asshole, and DePaul needs no better reason than that to disinvite him. You don't have a Constitutional right to be the skunk at someone else's picnic. I've been saying this since wingnuts wept because Rutgers students didn't want war criminal advice from Condi Rice,  but they never seem to have a better answer than Yer Hitler. Anyway, Tuttle approves of the (still fascist!) Twitter throwing a bunch of neo- and crypto-Nazis off their rolls because he doesn't like them, which he justifies with a lot of gloopy talk e.g.,

Communities form a consensus about what is right and wrong based in part on public debate, but also on custom and taboo and religious practice and a whole lot of other factors that were built on syllogisms and that are not entirely subject to rational debate.

"A whole lot of other factors." That's really threading the needle, buddy. Well, I guess one benefit of our increasingly post-logical environment is that intellectuals don't even have to pretend to try, and we will know them only by their tweed and shitty attitudes.

• From "Annals of the Age of Trump," a continuing series: Larry O'Connor of Hot Air announces Jeff Sessions' AG appointment, then cackles, "And right on cue, the mainstream media and Democrats (redundant) are shouting 'racist!'" Ha ha, stupid libtards, always with the racism! Then O'Connor quotes CNN to show how they're all worked up over nothing:

The former US attorney for the Southern District of Alabama and Alabama attorney general isn’t without controversy. His appointment to a federal district court by then-President Ronald Reagan sank when a former Justice Department employee testified that Sessions had made racially tinged remarks.

He had denounced the 1965 Voting Rights Act and had labeled the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP “un-American” and said the organizations “forced civil rights down the throats of people.”

A black Justice Department staffer said Sessions had called him “boy” and claimed he had thought the Ku Klux Klan “were OK until I found out they smoked pot.”

Maybe O'Connor didn't read it. Maybe he assumed none of his readers would read it, since it was printed in a grey box. There are other possible explanations, none of them flattering. (I think we can rule out economic anxiety, though.)

FOR A BAG OF SALT.

Now that Trump has won the election, says Megan McArdle, we must all come together as a nation for the sake of her and her buddies's careers:

I don't see a moral obligation for anyone to serve in a Trump administration. But people who opposed Donald Trump, on both the left and right, should commit right now to one thing: We will not tar good people for joining the Trump administration. Their motives will not be questioned, and if things do turn out as some of his critics fear, the people in his foreign and domestic policy apparatus will not suffer guilt by association.

And no fair sending them to Den Haag for war crimes.

It is just too important that Trump have good advisers...

..He is going to have to staff regulatory agencies. He is going to have to decide about policy priorities, and push legislation to advance them. If smart, competent people refuse to be a part of that, because they think it’s likely that they will suffer permanent stigma from having joined his team, then Trump's administration will still do all those things -- but it will do them poorly, and the nation will suffer.

"You're way behind quota, General. Why aren't you torturing more prisoners?" "We're trying, Mr. President, but we suffer from a lack of competent personnel!"

...Good economists in an administration cannot come out and say “This is bad policy,” for obvious reasons; their job is to have those conversations internally, and then support their boss’s decisions. That will also be the job of an adviser in a Trump administration, and we want good people in there making the good arguments.

"This must be an error, Mr. President -- it says, 'No taxes on anyone making a million and up'!"
"No error. Get it done."
"But it doesn't make --"
"Do it."
"But I --"
"Now."
"Won't you at least --"
"Every minute you stand here, I deduct five grand from your salary. (The respected economist flees.) Buh-bye!"

I expect she's already given instructions for the design of her inaugural gown. (re: the title -- see the end of this review.)

UPDATE. A number of commenters (and comments are, as always at alicublog, excellent) wish it pointed out that McArdle opens her essay by praising Milton Friedman and his Chicago Boys' service to the brutal dictator Pinochet, when in fact their libertarian bullshit immiserated Chile.

MINE, BY THE RIGHT OF THE WHITE ELECTION.

The Federalist cheerfully declares:

This Election Marks The End Of America’s Racial Détente
Jamelle Bouie is right about one thing: the racial social contract we’ve had is over. Whites aren’t content to let everyone but them get special treatment any more.

Wondering WTF? Got you covered: The article is by David Marcus, who had previously regaled us with "How Anti-White Rhetoric Is Fueling White Nationalism," in which he complained that black people were inexplicably harshing on his white brothers and sisters:

What is new is the direct indictment of white people as a race. This happened through a strange rhetorical transformation over the past few years. At first, “white men are our greatest threat” postings tended to be ironic, a way of putting the racist shoe on the other foot. They were meant to show that blaming an entire race for the harmful actions of a few individuals is senseless.

Then the tenor changed. What started as irony turned into an actual belief that white people, specifically white men, are more dangerous and immoral than any other people. Loosely backed up by historical inequities and disparities in mass shootings, this position has begun to take a serious foothold.

Marcus went on to warn us that if blacks didn't cut it out, him and his honkies were going to get "tribal" on them. From the new column, it would appear he thinks the Trump election proves Der Tag has come. At first he moons over Jamelle Bouie's "White Won" election post-mortem with the performative empathy of David French or Rod Dreher mooning over Ta-Nehisi Coates, then catches Bouie's observation on American whites and blacks that "I thought this meant we had a consensus. It appears, instead, that we had a detente." Darn right, says Marcus:

The rules of the deal were pretty straightforward. For whites, they stated that outright racist statements and explicit appeals to white racial identity were essentially banned. Along with this, whites accepted a double standard about the appropriateness of cultural and political tribalism. For obvious and reasonable historical and economic reasons, black and brown people explicitly pursuing their own interests was viewed differently than whites doing the same thing.

Finally, the answer to the ancient "how come they can say 'nigger' and we can't?" riddle! But when Trump got away with racist shit in broad daylight, says Marcus, that showed "the white acceptance of legitimate racial double standards had dissipated, and without it the détente could not stand." And that's because black folk got out of hand, and started "calling everyone a racist" -- white people got pissed and now you people have to accept their terms. These terms are left vague -- some bullshit about listening to each other, which probably means no more kneeling at ball games, and definitely no getting upset about an elected official cheering the idea that Michelle Obama is an ape -- come on, we let Chris Rock make fun of the way we talk! Marcus attempts to sweeten the deal with some poetry:

The détente was far from perfect. It often allowed quieter racism to lurk unchallenged. In some ways, it was a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. But Band-Aids have a role to play in treating bullet wounds...

Yeah, this guy should definitely be at the table for the negotiation of the New Detente, right next to Attorney General Rudy Giuliani.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the brethren's reaction to the Trumpening. The focus is on the Trump skeptics who are now beginning their great suck-up. Some of them are pretending to be wary, but you know the old song: Their lips say no but their eyes say yes.

Watch what they do with Trump's appointment of Breitbart /alt-right kingpin Steve Bannon as chief White House strategist. Even wingnut rageclowns like Kurt Schlichter are complaining; Newt Gingrich and Ben Carson are cabinet material, but the pied piper of Nazi frogs makes the thing look bad.

But don't worry, Bannon's being normalized already. See Philip Wegmann at the Washington Examiner, who describes the struggle between the "establishment" and this crypto-Nazi creep as if it were a Hollywood catfight: "But if there's a fight, they will throw their weight behind the brawler from Breitbart," "the two champions have now entered the cliché Thunderdome," etc. The headline, "Tea Party bets big on Steve Bannon," refers to the Tea Party Patriots, a pack of grifters who skinned supporters so badly that, frankly, I've surprised they still meet even the drastically forgiving standards of the modern conservative movement.

So the brethren will come around, especially after the first time Bannon's strike force destroys (perhaps literally) some liberal who gives Trump a hard time. Then there'll be someone else to deplore -- maybe George Lincoln Rockwell IV -- until he makes his bones, etc.

The elevation of Bannon reminds me of the famous criticism Steve Jobs had of Xerox under John Sculley from PepsiCo:

So the people who make the company more successful are the sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the ‘product people’ get run out of the decision-making forums. The companies forget how to make great products. 

Conservatism doesn't do anything real for the American people anymore, so they're promoting their marketing people.

There were many outtakes from the column. I really wanted to fit in Reason magazine's podcast, “The Case for Optimism About Trump's Presidency,” in which Nick Gillespie interviewed libertarians on various Trump policy predictions.  One, Thaddeus Russell, was thrilled Newt Gingrich would be part of the Administration.  I know what you guys are thinking -- why is a libertarian backing an interventionist lunatic? True, Russell said, Gingrich is “a sociopath, generally," but he has “thoroughly repudiated neoconservatism and foreign military interventions generally” and admitted “the Bush Doctrine was a disaster.” And if you can’t trust Newt Gingrich to see the light, who can you trust?

Russell, who giggled nervously throughout his interview (and, whether it was nerves or drugs, who could blame him), also said in some respects “Trump’s foreign policy will be equally bad as Obama’s or worse” and that Trump will “let Putin have what he wants in Eastern Europe" but, on the bright side, “Trump is the first president to call bullshit on that claim that we have any moral reason to help anyone in the rest of the world,” so his foreign policy will be better than Hillary Clinton’s, which Russell had previously called “dangerously coherent.”

Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute was glad Trump wants to destroy Obamacare, but worried that Republicans might try to keep the ban on refusing people with pre-existing conditions, which Cannon called “price controls that prohibit insurance companies from charging actuarily fair premiums if people switch plans.” (“So it’s kind of like rent control for health care!”  a-ha’d Gillespie.) On SCOTUS, Randy Barnett predicted that Trump would appoint judges “more in the mold of Justice Thomas but perhaps even more so than he.” I tell you, the only thing that keeps libertarians from losing even their current tiny market share is the fact that no one besides me listens to these things.

Do read the column, though.

AND NOW FOR THE LIBERTARIAN PERSPECTIVE ON TRUMP...

...Robby Soave of Reason says you liberals -- 'scuse me, you "smug, entitled, elitist, privileged leftists jumping down the throats of ordinary folks who aren't up-to-date on the latest requirements of progressive society" -- made Trump president with your political correctness. The proof is that "I have warned that a lot of people, both on campus and off it, were furious about political-correctness-run-amok." I mean, there are no stats, but Soave knows Milo Yiannopoulos and he's totally against it.

You might be wondering what Soave means by political correctness. Here:

Example: A lot of people think there are only two genders—boy and girl. Maybe they're wrong. Maybe they should change that view. Maybe it's insensitive to the trans community. Maybe it even flies in the face of modern social psychology. But people think it. Political correctness is the social force that holds them in contempt for that, or punishes them outright.

No link to support "punishes them outright," so I guess he means (in addition to the usual dirty looks and lack of universal approval that libertarians always consider P.C. oppression)  in some places they may have to use a public restroom that's also used by members of the opposite sex. Or maybe if they go to certain colleges they might get made to apologize for saying "trannies." No wonder  these poor people snapped.

If you're a leftist reading this, you probably think that's stupid. You probably can't understand why someone would get so bent out of shape about being told their words are hurtful. You probably think it's not a big deal and these people need to get over themselves. Who's the delicate snowflake now, huh? you're probably thinking.

Boy, it's like he's reading my mind.

I'm telling you: your failure to acknowledge this miscalculation and adjust your approach has delivered the country to Trump.

It's like those other privileged leftists back in the 50s -- they wanted their friends to use the same drinking fountain as they did and hey, Robby gets that, but if you'd just recalculated you'd never have had  Orval Faubus and he's all your fault.