NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the conservative male rage over female-only Wonder Women shows.  It's a small thing but very typical of the new conservatism which, as I mention in the column, appears to eschew normal conservative politics (which Trump has rendered embarrassing) in favor of culture-war bullshit.

WANKS FOR THE MEMORIES.

Trump has really taught conservatives to turn on a dime and accept new realities that were once (if you ever believed a word they said) disgusting to them. Remember when it was a wingnut rite of passage to hatewank over Lena Dunham? (My detailed examinations here, here, and here.) Now that her show Girls has ended with her character apparently getting a ridiculously impossible academic job and a kid, the brethren are in love with her.

Well, it's a kind of love. They want to have their cake and eat it too -- and in this their attempt is very like what they do with Trump as well: They say mildly bad things about her, but endorse her policies -- that is, endorse what they think her show's conclusion means in the purely political terms they think apply to every area of human life. Here's Erika Andersen at The Federalist:

Don’t Tell Her, But Lena Dunham Just Made A Pro-Life Season Of ‘Girls'

See, Andersen says, in the real world Dunham's a baby-killer -- "I don’t know for sure if she supports abortion up to 9 months of pregnancy," she says, "but let the record show, she probably does." (Despite the vinyl revival, Andersen doesn't seem to know what the word "record" means.) But the Invisible Hand of the Art-Marketplace forced Dunham to call for the repeal of Roe v. Wade, culture-war-wise, by having her character have a baby:

They could have thrown in a late-term abortion (and wouldn’t the pro-choice media just love the “stigma-reducing” that would showcase?), but they wouldn’t dare go there. 

Why not? It’s her body, right? Because it’s not, and everyone — yes, EVERYONE — knows it. 

Every time a character on TV has a baby, it's a thumbs-up for the Republic of Gilead. (Except Murphy Brown -- she's still a whore.)

Meanwhile Kyle Smith -- National Review's new culture-scold hire, probably enlisted to appease the readers who are confused and angered by Armond White -- praises "Lena Dunham’s Ultimately Conservative Message." Dunham, you see, is the bad Hannah -- "[she] says unconscionable things, just like her narcissistic screen alter ego" -- but "Dunham the writer," ah, she's almost as good as Jonah Goldberg, and "Hannah’s reckless, destructive self-absorption" betrays Dunham the writer's awareness that Dunham the slut is a filthy slut and abortion is murder. Maybe in her next project, Dunham the writer will kill Dunham the slut, like Dr. Jekyll did Mr. Hyde! In the meantime, comrades, let's keep our wits sharp with our guiltily-retained Fappening files!

Of course, the show's not over till Chunky Reese Witherspoon sings, and one can only approach Ross Douthat's contribution with a certain Hell No. Take this:

Tony Soprano pining for the days of Gary Cooper set a tone for all these stories, which then echoed and re-echoed in the Louisiana swamps of “True Detective,” the New Mexican borderlands of “Breaking Bad,” the halls of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. Again and again the viewer watched a male protagonist trying to be a breadwinner, paterfamilias, a protector and savior, a Leader of Men; again and again these attempts were presented as dangerously alluring, corrupting, untimely and foredoomed...

On “Girls,” though, something very different was going on. The fall of patriarchy had basically happened, the world had irrevocably changed … and nobody knew what to do next.

You young people today -- Destroy! Destroy! When are you going to find time to build! By the time you get to Douthat's fuzzbeard Catholic version of Lena Dunham is Conservative ("True, this was motherhood solo, without a mate or male provider. But the male absence felt more like a signifier of masculine failure than feminine empowerment") you have...

Who am I kidding -- I'm sure nobody ever actually gets to that part; why bother to read that far? (Certainly not for the pleasure of the prose!) In the end, these exegeses are unneeded: the people who liked the show will bid it adieu and go watch something else, and the culture warriors will just scan the headlines and quickly flip ahead to the Ann Coulter column, taking it on faith that their public scribes have properly informed History how everything they like -- TV shows, Clint Eastwood movies, choc-o-mut ice creams -- is further proof that tax breaks for the wealthy and persecution of minorities are God's holy will.

Anyway now they can move on to Emma Watson. She too is a libtard, and hot, and ripe for conversion fantasies. Which of them with be the first to write that Beauty and the Beast shows the good Emma's desire to be done with Pajama Boys and instead enjoy the violation of a true conservative mangoat? My money's on Rod Dreher!

RACIST WITH AN EXPLANATION: STEVE KING EDITION.

Iowa's Steve King has gotten so obnoxiously and overtly racist -- defending his "we can't restore our civilization with somebody else's babies" tweet by raving about "our stock," predicting race war, and recommending The Camp of the Saints -- that even conservatives have started to inch away from him.

Wait, did I say "inch"? I mean millimeter. I mean micromillimeter. Because in today's conservative movement no one's really racist, at least not in the upper tier -- they're merely Racist With an Explantion.

At The Federalist, David Harsanyi tut-tuts King's "confused and contradictory statements." I don't see any evidence King is confused about nor inconsistent in his racism at all, but Harsanyi detects a cleavage: While King's wrong to talk about "culture as blood," says Harsanyi, he's right about the "clash of cultures" with Islam. Harsanyi, you see, is also down with holy war against the Musselmen (see here, there, and everywhere).

But the real villains in this affair -- the ones Harsanyi devotes most of his column to criticizing -- are liberals:

So King deserves the condemnation he’s been getting for making the immigration debate about people rather than their ideas. Yet most coverage of congressman’s statement also seems to take offense at his defense of “Western civilization.” Once it was merely in poor form to claim our system was better. Now, evidently, it’s racist.

He offers as his sole, shoddy proof a tweet by Rep. Judy Chu that does not in any apparent way denounce Western Civ but says this: "Steve King is wrong: Civilization is threatened by racism & xenophobia that divide us & encourage violence. I condemn hate & welcome all." To you this may seem admirable if anodyne, but Harsanyi doesn't go for Chu's hint that hatred of The Other might be uncool:

Fact is, the modern Left debates immigration using the very same ethnocentric and racial ideas as King, but for entirely different reasons.

Harsanyi loved when Gillespie told Tibbs "Man, you're just like the rest of us, ain't ya?" in In The Heat of the Night, and still thinks it's a winner.

While one side adopts it for exclusionary purposes, the other uses it as a cudgel of relativism.

The cudgel of relativism double-slaps you with one-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand action!

These days, there is precious little difference between ideas and identity on the Left. So we are asked to treat Islam as a racial or ethnic designation rather than a philosophical/religious/ideological one.

See, The Left made Muslims into a race just so they could beat up innocent guys like Steve King! Wait, what were we talking about again?

At National Review Jonathan S. Tobin says what's "dangerous" about King's palaver is that it "undermines American exceptionalism." No, really. The lede is killer:

What is at stake in the long-running battle over illegal immigration? The answer from the overwhelming majority of Americans who worry about it is “the defense of the rule of law.”

I wonder what poll he got that from. Pollster: "Why do you oppose illegal immigration? Pick one. A., It --" Lutiebelle C. Festus: "GODDAMN MESSICANS! I mean, defense of the rule of law!"

Tobin goes on about how it's okay for Geert Wilders to worry about "about how a national identity rooted in a homogeneous ethnic and religious culture can accommodate newcomers" and "whether those who don’t share a common ethnicity and who practice a different faith will transform the nation into a place that isn’t Dutch" -- maybe it sounds racist, but he's in Europe, which is crawling with those "no-go zones" you read about on Breitbart. But here in America, says Tobin, we don't have that problem, even though "The Left is attempting to portray as xenophobic President Trump’s temporary travel ban from six countries that are terrorist hotbeds" -- boy, that The Left is always trying to make us look racist just because we keep trying to keep Muslims out!

 Tobin goes further than Harsanyi, even admitting that

the shift toward a less-white America is already baked into the country’s demographic cake. If conservatives wish to continue governing in the future, they must reject talk about “other people’s babies” and promote their ideas with enough confidence that Hispanics and other minorities will eventually embrace them.

Tobin must have been thinking, "Who cares? By then I'll be dead!" But he really distinguishes himself in the closing:

Modern American conservatism was founded by the willingness of some to “stand athwart history yelling stop,” but William F. Buckley and his colleagues were not seeking to yell stop to Americans who were not white.

Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha no really, he said that.

What these guys are doing is the for-real version of something they're always accusing their enemies of doing: By showing just a pretense of toleration, they're distinguishing themselves against the loud-'n'-proud racism of their comrades (e.g. "As media-spooked GOP piles on, Rep. Steve King stands by his remark") -- in other words, they're virtue signaling.

UPDATE. I have far less reason to doubt the sincerity of Nick Gillespie's anti-racism, but I had to laugh when I read him bragging on his ancestors' immigrant roots:

Mostly, they worked hard as hell and provided for their children under difficult circumstances (prejudice, economic depression, war). The first job my grandfather Nicola Guida had in the promised land of America was chiseling rock with a hammer and sledge somewhere in eastern Pennsylvania (he and his fellow workers were never told exactly where they were to make it harder to run away). He would be so tired that he would piss and shit himself as he slept at night, unable to get up to use the facilities.

Wow, sounds like a libertarian dream! Maybe that's why Gillespie endorses these conditions for today's workers -- nostalgia!

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Super Bowl and the brethren's traditional culture-war bitchfest over it. They have unitary control of the government, and they're still mortally offended that people can express contradicting opinions in TV commercials.

Among the outtakes, John Nolte complains at The Daily Wire that liberals were “ruining” the Super Bowl by allowing its producers to hire leftists like Lady Gaga and the Hamilton cast as entertainment, which he finds perverse because the Super Bowl “reeks of thematic (not partisan) conservatism.” Thematic conservatism, Nolte explains, means “masculinity, patriotism, the reading of the Declaration of Independence, a winner and a loser, the pursuit of excellence, men of all races competing in an environment where skin color isn't an issue” -- things of which no woman nor liberal could possibly approve, apparently; when we play poker, it's not for money but the journey, and Lord knows we're not butch specimens like Harlan Hill. Anyway this is why libtards are always “intruding into, childishly stomping on, and just plain ruining everything that once meant relaxation and coming together as a country.” Future generations will ask the tough question: Who lost concussionball? And what answer shall we give?

UPDATE. They kept bitching into Monday, natch. Tucker Carlson, mid-dudgeon about the Hamilton women, claiming "I'm as pro-sisterhood as anybody, more than most women, probably, actually,” would be the highlight, but Conservative Review had a story called "THE PATRIOTS DIDN’T JUST BEAT THE FALCONS. THEY CRUSHED THE LIBERAL MEDIA," which is like when your asshole friend wins a talent contest by farting into the mike.

But let's give a participation trophy to the insufferable David French, who explains why the heartwarming Super Bowl ads about immigrants and little girls whose fathers want them to succeed just make conservatives angry:

The ads above are like college brochures, full of smiling, happy faces from every nation, tribe, and culture. But behind the smiles is all too often an icy, heartless resolve. The diversity that matters is only skin deep. The “diversity” they celebrate is one where communities of different colors, genders, and sexual practices come together around a uniform ideology — and there is zero hesitation to be as intolerant as necessary in the name of tolerance. (I once sued a major public university that actually declared that “acts of intolerance will not be tolerated.”) My fellow believers look at those ads, understand the worldview they express, and rightly know there’s no room for them in the Left’s utopia.

Translation: No one liked them in college -- even minorities were more popular! -- and they've been buttsore about it ever since.

PANTLOAD DESNUDO.

This may be the most Jonah Goldberg line of all time:

And yet, defensive though it may sound, I think the claim that I got “everything wrong” in 2016 reveals more about my detractors than about me.

This is not just a Goldbergian farrt, it is a Kent Treble Bob Major farrt. Backstory: Trumpkins are telling Goldberg they "forgive" him for getting "everything wrong" about Trump. As seen above, Goldberg puts up a bit of slap-fight defense, then backtracks:

That said, I already feel comfortable admitting that, beyond my electoral prognosticating, I got some things wrong about what a Trump presidency will look like. Though many on the left and in the media see his cabinet appointments and policy proposals as cause for existential panic, as a conservative I find most — but by no means all — of them reassuring.

As long as Trump gets billions of federal budget dollars diverted to conservative crony contractors, he's okay with Jonah! Then Goldberg feels the sharp wind on his shapeless buttocks and senses he's been stripped of his pride -- and with hundreds more words to go before Mom will let him play video games! So he scoops this garbage out of the gutter, holds it in front of his junk, and asserts his dignity:

And that brings me to what I think I got right: Trump’s character. I am not referring to his personal conduct toward women, a culture-war weapon that Trump and Bill Clinton together have removed from partisan arsenals for the foreseeable future. Nor am I necessarily referring to how he has managed his businesses, though I think those patterns of behavior are entirely relevant to understanding our next president.

Trump's pussy-grabbing doesn't matter because Clinton dur hurr, and neither does his grifter status notwithstanding that he's about to enter the national henhouse with an axe.

What I have chiefly in mind is that rich nexus of unrestrained ego, impoverished impulse control, and contempt for policy due diligence. I firmly and passionately believe that character is destiny. From his reported refusal to accept daily intelligence briefings to his freelancing every issue under the sun on Twitter — including, most recently, nuclear-arms policy — Trump’s blasé attitude troubles me deeply, just as it did during the campaign. 

On balance, I don’t feel repentant. 

"Trump’s blasé attitude troubles me deeply," please make sure to get that in the record, bracketed in harrumphs. But then again let's not beat a dead horse, there's a country to wreck:  

But I acknowledge that Trump has surrounded himself with some serious and sober-minded people who will try to constrain and contain the truly dangerous aspects of his character. If they succeed, I’ll happily revisit my refusal to ask for forgiveness.

And he marches off the stage, trailing dead leaves and McDonalds wrappers and a cloud of methane, head held high. You may think it's for nothing -- most of his National Review colleagues dropped the act long ago -- but I bet whoever collects the checks and cruise ticket receipts for NR is relieved; there's no money in old-tyme conservatism now, subscribers actually thrill to the New Order, and the smart play is to go full MAGA (with some erudite gush along the margins so the high-end users won't actually feel they're actually rubbing elbows with those beasty Breitbart types). That requires Goldberg to eat shit. And there's the benefit to the guy being so dull: He probably thinks he has craftily avoided an apology, while his handlers realize all he has to do to show obeisance is humiliate himself, and that's a safe bet even on a good day.

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!

FRENCH TWIST.

David French is on fire this week, by which I mean more ostentatiously nuts than usual. (Can you blame him? Strategery Presidential candidate Evan McMullan seems to be making some progress in his bid to take Utah and, if the prognostications of Josh Gelertner mean anything (spoiler: they don't), throw the election to the House. French, who rejected the Billy Kristol Party presidential bid earlier this year, may be eating his heart out over what might have been.)

One French post is about the depressed viewership of NFL games on TV. French naturally blames Colin Kaepernick and other protestors:

While it’s difficult to explain the behavior of millions of people by reference to any single cause, I’m dubious of the NFL’s attempt to rule out player protests as offering any explanation for the ratings drop. The NFL isn’t the NBA. Its fan base isn’t as clustered in progressive urban centers but is far more equitably distributed across the country.

As the Coach says in That Championship Season, basketball is no longer the white man's game, so You People in your urban hoop-ghettos can protest all you want, but we white men out here in the Big Suburb demand you calm your black folk down or it's bye-bye Pennzoil ads.

Thus, it plays a doubly dangerous game by embracing the social justice left. It stands to alienate more fans than it attracts, and it’s in bed with a cultural force that ultimately despises the league itself. Social justice warriors hope to destroy football. They don’t want what’s best for the league or the sport. Instead, they want to use it until they kill it.

The National Football League -- betrayed from within! You fellows in the executive suites are deceived -- Those People aren't your friends, they're trying to kill you. In NFL, pass-catcher mau-maus YOU!

Sometimes I think modern conservatism is just one long riff on the word "nigger-lover."

Elsewhere French gets into the pussy tape, and echoes Trump agent Betsy McCaughey and others with a oh-yeah-well-you-libtards-love-sex defense. Remember, this guy professes to despise Trump, so this shows how insanely devoted to culture war he has to be:

This is one for the Vox record books. The liberal site — which purports to “explain” the news...

Impudent liberals! Only Jesus can explain the news!

...— is now trying to explain why some conservative Christians are sharing Beyoncé lyrics and passages from Fifty Shades of Grey in response to the Trump tapes. Their explanation? Christians view dirty words and sex assault as basically the same because, well, read it for yourself...

French argues theology with the Vox quotes for a while ("all sins are certainly not 'equally' bad in their moral gravity or their earthly consequences") before proving their main idea right:

Second, regarding pop culture, it’s not that pop culture is just crass — it celebrates perversion. Fifty Shades of Grey seems to describe its own sexual assault. Here are key passages, via Rod Dreher:

Imagine David French and Rod Dreher examining the evidence! "Look, Rod, have you seen this?" "Wow! I don't even know what that is and I'm gettin' a boner! [stabs self in leg with penknife]"

I’m not even going to attempt to quote Beyonce’s lyrics. They don’t describe sexual assault but instead a quid pro quo-style sex relationship where she grants all kinds of favors to men she has sex with — the kind of relationship that women have forever rightly condemned as sexual harassment.

You libtards say you're against sexual assault but she took his ass to Red Lobster -- according to the Bible that makes her both a whore and a whore-monger!

At the heart of the conservative critique, however, is something very real — calling out a Left that has helped sexually debase our culture to such an extent that only one moral norm remains, and even that’s truly optional in the right context. All the Left cares about anymore is consent, but its icons (like Bill Clinton) get a pass even then, and if a novel gets popular enough — like Fifty Shades of Grey — then it exists in its own exempted, subversive category.

David French answers your "consent" argument with unproven allegations and fiction! Now who's a dirty bird?

Heather Mac Donald says it well:

Ugh. All you need to know about that is Mac Donald has taken time out from her usual job -- warning white America of the national Negro uprising -- to explain that women are whores ("Now why might it be that men regard women as sex objects? Surely the ravenous purchase by females of stiletto heels...") and parse Beyoncé and Jay-Z with a Talmudic intensity seldom seen outside a Black Studies seminar or the writings of Victor Davis Hanson. Mac Donald is also mad at Amy Schumer: "She confesses to a 'weakness for orgasms.'" In short, the Clenis and Hollywood made everything badsex and we need to get back to "the chivalric ideal that gentlemen should treat females like ladies," which comes with permanent inferior status for women but, on the bright side, maybe marginally fewer rapes, at least outside of wedlock or the manor.

Imagine a normal person reading these posts, and you'll see why their movement is in trouble.

HILLBILLY SNOWFLAKES.

Rod Dreher, who thinks a professor saying "Fuck you, asshole" to an anti-gay colleague is "Leninist and Stalinist," also thinks some effete writer-fella portraying Mike Pence as a rube in The New Yorker is a good reason to vote for Trump:

Holy J.D. Vance, Batman. They really don’t get it, do they? Their contempt. They really do believe they’re punching up, when in fact they’re punching down.

If Trump wins this election, the only comfort I will take from the victory is knowing that Douglas McGrath and the [New Yorker] editors who find that snotty condescension towards middle Americans funny will be wailing and gnashing their teeth.

Have I got news for Dreher! "Li'l Abner," "Snuffy Smith," Them Hillbillies Are Mountain Williams Now, The Beverly Hillbillies -- it's been going on for decades! And some hillbilly jokes have even grosser punchlines, too ("Get off'n me, diddy, yer bustin' mah cigarettes!"). It's a holocaust, culture-war wise.

One thing I always thought about country folk, though, was that they were tough, and that they gave us city slickers as good as they got in the humor department. But that was before such as Dreher became their spokes-snowflakes. (On second thought, let's not blame the honest Tobies of the hinterlands for Dreher's conniption fits -- I'm sure most of them have never heard of Dreher, which is just as it should be; much of the time I wish I'd never heard of him either.)

UPDATE. Speaking of snowflakes, wingnut blowhard and Congressional sore loser Allen West was slated to speak at St. Louis University and, as part of his pre-show publicity, told his followers "Folks, I’ve just been CENSORED" because his operatives "were not allowed to use the words 'radical Islam' on any advertisements for the event." And isn't that what John Peter Zenger fought for -- the right to control collateral materials for his upcoming speaking engagements at a private college? West further raved:

I along with the [Young America's Foundation] activists will not back down from this challenge. And if this is just a case of ill-conceived political correctness, we’ll rectify that. But, if this is a case of the influence of stealth jihad radical Islamic campus organizations such as the Muslim Student Association, an affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood, then you will be exposed. And I recommend to the President of St. Louis University, you do not want it known that a radical Islamic organization is dictating speakers on your campus — that is not the type of PR you really want.

To recap: Because his hosts won't have "radical Islam" on the flyers for his speech, West accused its Muslim student association of "jihad" and threatened to denounce SLU as enablers thereof. In West's world of perpetual grievance that's what fills seats -- and also empties them, it would seem, because when it came time for West to speak a huge segment of the audience walked out.

Try to imagine how someone with an ounce of wit or class would have responded to that; a humble "well-played" is the least you might expect. But this sputtering I'm not the snowflake, you're the snowflake! response at Right Wing News is typical:

The students were members of the SLU Rainbow Alliance and the Muslim Student’s Association. Now let’s remember these are the Lefty folks who preach tolerance of other perspectives to all of us. And now look at them acting like immature children plugging their delicate ears with their sticky little fingers so they don’t have to hear the horrifying fact that not everyone, gasp, agrees with them! Good thing they left the venue. They probably had to be checked into the children’s program and go do some crafts and drink apple juice.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: The true definition of "political correctness" is "someone refused to endorse my racist bullshit."

(Since SLU is a Jesuit school, I expect this will eventually be portrayed as part of Tim Kaine's Jebbie treason.)

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Presidential debate prep -- that is, rightbloggers trying to prepare Americans for the idea that facts are bullshit and it's just the exhilarating hatred Trump makes you feel that matters.  I used last week's ridiculous fist-shaking over Samantha Bee as an objective correlative, but I could have picked any of several dozen equally stupid controversies, including Zack Galifianaki's “Between Two Ferns” interview with Hillary Clinton, much in the manner of the one he did with Obama that enraged rightbloggers in 2014. The effects of the Hillary int were similar. Take Nick Gillespie of Reason, for example: “‘Between Two Ferns’ is a comedy bit, so nobody's expecting anything remotely tough,” he said in a brief moment of clarity, before lapsing into “but for it to actually be funny there's need to some edge…” Libertarianism and culture war -- the worst of both worlds! Others, like The Liberty Beacon, seemed not to know what they were looking at (“Hillary Furious after Comedian makes her Look Ridiculous in Interview!… Comedy and sarcasm have never been so poignant”).

Or I could have used the opening of the new Museum of African-American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., which inspired Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media to list “Exhibits You Won’t Find in the New National Museum of African American History and Culture.” Among these: “Martin Luther King Jr.’s womanizing, plagiarism, and communist advisers,” “Unpatriotic black sports figures,” “The Democratic Party’s history of slavery,” etc.  In a follow-up, Kincaid answered the common charge that slaves built the White House by pointing out that in the War of 1812, slaves helped burn it down, so really it all evens out.

In any event, I have to say I'm in some sympathy with the debate commission's Janet Brown and her much-derided comment on big facts and little facts. Whatever the moderators might do to keep things honest, wingnuts will litigate the hell out of it -- like they did in 2012 with Candy Crowley, whose fact-check on Romney they continue to blame for his defeat -- in fact, their butthurt over that led to the GOP debate reforms that, one might argue, led to the nomination of Trump. So Brown's in a tough spot. This is what happens when you're forced to do business with shitheels. Here's hoping the voters have not ceased to recognize such people for what they are -- and, if they do, revile rather than identify with them.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Luscious Jackson got in my head this week and hasn't left.
Not complaining.
•   The New York Times has a story on Vladimir Putin's drive to make the Russian Orthodox Church into, as one observer puts it, "an instrument of the Russian state." The Church's shock troops are medieval in outlook -- one of its bishops "warned worshipers that new biometric passports, required by the European Union in return for visa-free access to Europe, were 'satanic' because they contained a 13-digit number" -- and of course favor the persecution of homosexuals, as Putin does. This gives Rod Dreher yet another opportunity to tell us how he really feels about secularism and its inferiority to the Every Knee Shall Bend model of governance. While he claims "it troubles me deeply to see the Church become an instrument of State policy," nonetheless...

...as Western societies disintegrate under aggressive secularism, individualism, materialism, and hedonism, it’s hard as a traditional Christian not to sympathize with the general thrust of what Russia is doing, if not in certain particulars... 

The West is losing the idea of marriage and family, and now, even the concepts of male and female — and all this is hailed as progress. Young people are ruining their hearts and minds by dosing themselves heavily with pornography, and there’s nothing in Western culture to stop them. And on and on. How could the West be a positive model? 

Russia does not have the answers, but it is asking necessary questions...

I understand why Glenn Greenwald et alia object to what they see as the revival of a Red Scare in this country, but come on: At least people who sympathized with the old USSR thought they were trying to advance human liberation. Dreher sympathizes with today's Russia for the opposite reason.

•   Donald Trump recently attacked the Food & Drug Administration as the "food police." Who knows why he does what he does anymore, but it gave us a chance to hear some straight-up bull-goose looney libertarianism from Nick Gillespie of Reason:

You get rid of "official" food inspectors and you know what will happen? To the extent that customers demand any sort of certification beyond public reputation, private-sector and nonprofit groups will be created to provide this or that level of inspection. We see that already with kosher and halal food prep, of course, not to mention other sorts of watchdog groups (think Fair Trade coffee and the like). Yelp or some other rating system would likely add some sort of Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval-style process as well.

The yelpification of food poisoning! I can't put it any better than Kia on Twitter: "I would have given these diet pills one star but I am dead."

• Jonah Goldberg complains about the obstreperous black guy who is interfering with his mild interest in football ("entertainment more than passion," Jesus Christ is everything about this guy terrible?). His premise is that "particularly among men, sports talk is a kind of safe space and common tongue all at once" and politics isn't supposed to interfere. He quotes and comments on a 2003 E.J. Dionne column:

And then [Dionne] added: “Politicizing everything from literature to music to painting and sports was once a habit of the left. The Communist Party’s now-defunct newspaper once had a sports column called ‘Out in Left Field.’ Now, it’s the turn of the right to politicize everything.”

I’m not sure that was entirely true then, but it’s definitely not true now.

Oh yeah? We need not get into the wider world of wingnut culture war here -- just remember that from 2011 until someone wised up, National Review ran a sports blog called "Right Field." This is from the inaugural post:

The facts of life are conservative, and in no sphere is that truism more manifest than in the world of sport. In the games we play, the same rules are meant to apply to all — and we are outraged at the injustice when they are not. There are winners and losers, and we don’t agonize over the self-esteem of those who do not prevail: We expect them to learn from defeat and improve...

Yuk. To this day we have conservatives like Matt K. Lewis claiming that sports blogs are "dominated by liberals" because no one wants to hear wingnuts snarling about political correctness instead of keeping their eye on the ball. (Yes, like every other thinking person in America I know about today's David Brooks column and his strange conviction that black people will be moved to reconsider their sports protests because they might make bigots mad and his Thanksgivings harder to enjoy, but by claiming conservatives don't go in for this sort of thing, Goldberg has effectively out-stupided even him. There can be only one!)

TODAY IN CAREER ADVANCEMENT.

I saw this Yahoo headline...

Trump campaign brings on A.J. Delgado as a senior adviser

...and thought, oh no -- not our A.J. Delgado! I first noticed her in 2012 when Breitbart.com pimped her culture-war book called, I swear to Christ, "Hip to Be Square: Why It's Cool to Be a Conservative." This repurposed press release tipped us to some of Delgado's hipsquare proof points: "An analysis of three 'South Park' episodes blasting the Left," "'The Lord of the Rings' and its conservative message," "Johnny Rotten, Siouxsie Sioux, and Bob Dylan defending Israel," etc. When I made fun of her about it, she came to alicublog to say I'd proven her point "about the general nasty tone of liberals these days."

I should have known then that Delgado was a rising star of her movement. She got picked up by National Review, for which she produced a bunch of Kulturkampf crap -- for example, a review of a film about Jim Jones and the People's Temple in which she asked the crucial question, "Does the film represent the truth — i.e., Jones’s leftism?" and decided it had because in some scenes Jones "bemoans issues at the top of any leftist’s top-gripes list: 'poverty, violence, greed, and racism.'" And what conservative would think those were bad things?

For National Review Delgado also did a screed against Nicki Minaj with lines like "gents might need a cigarette after watching the video," "How is this even sexy, rather than sad, desperate, and repulsive?" "This openly sexual, anything-goes mentality may have taken off several years ago, with Katy Perry’s 'I Kissed a Girl,'" "Beyonce, who once profited off her good-girl image, buried that persona last year under half-naked magazine covers," etc. Pitchfork really missed the boat on this one.

Delgado tried her hand at bullshit libertarianism, too, with "It’s Time for Conservatives to Stop Defending Police," presumably to give herself plausible deniability in case that Libertarian Moment thing that was going around took off. It didn't, of course, and now Delgado is with Trumpbart, where she is peddled as Trump's "Latina" advisor, e.g. "A.J. Delgado: Why this Latina is for Trump." She's also involved with Trump's female-voter outreach and was front-and-center for the unveiling of Trump's maternity-leave scheme -- which would be awkward if anyone knew what she was saying about maternity leave a few years ago.

But it doesn't really matter -- Trump's plan is just another grift, as is Delgado's support for it. And Trumpbart is just another place for for junior wingnuts to earn their stripes. Well, as those stressed-out-looking birds on The Flintstones used to say, it's a living.

I WILL EXPRESS MY CONTEMPT FOR LIBTARDS WITH THIS ACTION FIGURE BALLET.

How goes the Culture War, soldier? Hilariously! Kurt Schlichter, aka Wild Man, has up a piece of ordnance called "Liberals Are Neidermeyer and That Team the Bad News Bears Played." Real rebels are right-wing, see! The Bears were "incredibly politically incorrect," just like the Delta boys in Animal House, meaning if they were real live people instead of movie characters they'd want to build a wall & no Mooslims:

In other words, they are kind of like Trump voters. They are deemed unfit for polite company, begrudgingly accepted, and generally treated like dirt by their betters. And they are expected to go hang out forever with Muhammed, Jugdish, Sidney, and Clayton, with whom they will have plenty to talk about.

Especially Muhammed! "What you doin' in our country, raghead? Pow pow pow!" As for the Bears, didn't they have a girl on their team? Yuck, PC cooties! But Schlichter keeps at the fanfic:

And Hillary? She’s the sorority mean girl, a frosty, neurotic, mid-western over-achiever whose freaky daddy issues compelled her to marry a guy who treated her with the same contempt as Pops. She’s the a bitter, striving, hard-four Mandy Pepperidge who hooked up with a cleaned-up Bluto because she knew he was going places, but then finally broke him and forced him to become a vegan.

I was sort of with him until he introduced Bill Clinton as Bluto. Canon has to count for something, Wild Man.

Considering he's always bragging on his "hot wife," I don't get why Schlichter's so hung up on angry-teenage-nerd fantasies. Maybe he believes he owes it to La Causa. But who's going to be convinced by this stuff? Are any of them old enough to vote?

CULTURE WAR IS WAR ON CULTURE, PART 1,927,922.

So I'm idly flipping through National Review when I find this by Ian Tuttle:

Novelist? Essayist? Short-story writer? From our friends at Taliesin Nexus, for creative types who love liberty...

"Love liberty" is the hi-sign -- like "getting a little dark in here" and "I hate fags." There follows a prize pitch familiar to readers of Writers Digest: "Calling the next great American author! If that’s you, then September 9 – 11, 2016, have us fly you out to New York City, put you up in a hotel, and spend an entire weekend developing your work at the Calliope Authors Workshop..." This connects us to Taliesin Nexus which, it turns out, was previously pimped at National Review in 2015 by John J. "50 Greatest Conservative Rock Songs" Miller as "a 'safe space' for libertarians, conservatives, and other right-leaners who want to work in the arts." I guess they've gotten secretive, since you know how Liberal Fascists are always oppressing rightwing artists.

Anyway, Taiesin Nexus connects us to a delightful blog, "a (loosely affiliated) beta project of Taliesin Nexus," called Smash Cut Culture. Its slogan is "Liberate the Culture" -- in case you haven't caught on that what's happening here is culture war, as opposed to what the libtards call "culture" -- books, movies, pah! What's wanted is wingnut propaganda essays, and Smash Cut Culture's got loads. Here's one:

Sexy Panties and Prison: What Orange is the New Black Can Teach Us About The Regulatory State

Wait, don't go yet -- let's give author Anne Butcher a chance!

If you are a fan of Netflix’s Orange is the New Black, you already know that far too much of Season 3 was spent telling the tale of Piper’s Prison Panties. As a fan of the show, I was a bit sad that the screen time invested in this plotline was not spent on some of the more interesting ones. But as a libertarian, I must say that the way this story concluded in Season 4 provides a great parable for how regulation hurts people in the real world.

Yeah I want to run too, but wait -- she's talking about an ep where the female prisoners sell their used panties to pervs (though Butcher seems shy about saying so). Let's see what the libertarian angle is!

At the start of Season 4, Piper has gotten cocky. After mercilessly disciplining some of her rogue employees, she loves her new position of power within Litchfield. But as in the real world, money-making ideas breed imitators. Just like Apple inspired Microsoft, and Coke inspired Pepsi, Piper’s Prison Panties inspired a copycat business as well. This new business, lead by Maria, draws many of of the Latina inmates into the illegal panty trade, and Piper is not happy about it. 

In the real world, there are constantly new startup businesses challenging more established ones. This is a good thing, as it can inspire all businesses to be more innovative, gives the consumers more options, and give employees more freedom to leave unfair employers. Of course we’ll never know if that’s what would have happened to the used panty industry of Litchfield Prison because like other established business people before her, Piper decided restrictive rules were preferable to a free market.

THEY'RE IN PRISON! THEY'RE SELLING PANTIES DRENCHED IN THEIR COOZE BECAUSE THEY'RE IN PRISON! THERE IS NO FREE FUCKING MARKET IN PRISON!

..In real life, protectionist regulation doesn’t just hurt the businesses that challenge more established competitors. It can hurt the consumers who have to pay higher prices.

Yeah, freaks who buy cooze panties from prisoners. Fuck, what's the use of talking to this nutty chick. Elsewhere at SCC:

The Original Ghostbusters: More Than Just Busting Ghosts?

BE NICE, author Brodie Cooper is not like the fedora-heads in your building, bitching about bitches who ruined their childhood. This is about the original, and stupid in a mostly different way:

A lot of public frustration over the government bureaucracy tends to stem from its inaction or overaction resulting in the loss of an individual’s ability to control his or her own decisions. In the case of Ghostbusters, the EPA, which represents bureaucracy, ends up interfering and shutting our heroes down. 

Oh fuck -- the planet is being boiled like a frog, and Cooper is still all about William Atherton getting slime dumped on him because statism.

A recent New York Times poll found that 54 per cent of Americans believe over regulation has stifled economic growth. Furthermore...

OK, Brodie Cooper has ruined my youthful Ghostbusters experience  -- except she's a woman, so yay feminism, it's Thatcherrific. Let's see what else they have --

South Park’s Stance On Censorship: More Relevant Than Ever?

AHGGGHH! OK, I quit, let's go to Acculturated and make fun of Mark Judge.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Look, I've been in a middle-late Residents fugue state for weeks,
you're just going to have to roll with it guys.
• I see conservatives are attacking Obama for not keeping France, the 51st State, safe from a truck terror attack. What I often wonder is, what is their plan for stopping such terror -- besides rhetorical muscle-flexing like "peace through strength," I mean, or promising to torture more detainees? Fortunately Newt Gingrich is around to fill us in:

“Western civilization is in a war. We should frankly test every person here who is of a Muslim background and if they believe in sharia they should be deported,” Gingrich told Fox News’ Sean Hannity...

Gingrich also said that the attack in Nice is the “fault of Western elites who lack the guts to do what is right, to do what is necessary,” and suggested that mosques in America need to be monitored.

The Washington Post showed some guts, at least, by pointing out that "Gingrich’s proposal, which made no distinction between U.S. citizens and noncitizens, would violate scores of First Amendment-based Supreme Court rulings as well as civil rights laws..." But since we are not at one of those rare "libertarian moments" right now, I doubt the yahoos care. Maybe a war on Tunisia, where the assailant is from? Or, hell, on Iran, that's a popular favorite. If this becomes the Id Monster Election, Trump has it hands down -- which would be okay, because if we fall for this we're finished as a society anyway.

• I subscribe to a wingnut newsletter that connects me with some of the lesser-known culture war scolds, and today it brought me a lulu: At Standpoint, one of those fancy journal only Ross Douthat impersonators read, Daniel Johnson raves at hyperlength about the usual stuff: for example, how Trump is a betrayal of some much classier True Conservatism, the through line of which Johnson hilariously traces "from Edmund Burke to William Buckley, from Samuel Johnson to Paul Johnson, from Irving Kristol to Bill Kristol" -- a classic culture-war tell of conflating the Great Ancients with one's, er, less exalted buddies. But he really gets churning when he reaches a favorite subject of the chin-pullers, How the West Has Lost Its Way and Only My Scolding Will Save Her. Hark:

There are numerous viruses attacking the Western body politic, but only one medicine. To face the future unflinchingly, we must return to the past: listen to the patriarchs and prophets, the ancestral voices of our literature, break open the arsenal of our intellectual history, and mobilise the resources of righteous indignation against the dominions, principalities and powers of darkness that threaten to overwhelm us. The great books, from Homer to Shakespeare, from Plato to Pascal, from Dante to Bellow, must once again not only be assigned to every student, but learned where possible by heart. The music of the masters, from Gregorian chant to George Gershwin, from Sebastian Bach to James MacMillan, from Palestrina to Arvo Pärt, must not only float across the courts and quads of our colleges, but fill our airwaves and headsets.

From Shakespeare to James McMillan! Yessir, Johnson sure loves that trick. Note how perfectly this expresses the culture warrior's idea of art as ordnance. Not only in Johnson's imagining is it an "arsenal" to use against the Muslims and the Marxists, it's also a scourge with which to drive Western Youth into battle with them; their headsets must be filled with music selected by the Committee, even if they prefer Drake or 2Chains; they must memorize passages from It All Adds Up, et alia. For them art is not pleasure, and you can't expect even your own people to embrace it; it must be pounded into their skulls. Johnson imagines that by this he will save the West, but can a more despairing view of Western culture even be imagined?

• Oh, yeah, there's a writer named Tom Block who is looking down the barrel of a very tough diagnosis and he is not so financially secure (I mentioned he's a writer, didn't I) that he can be sure of a safe and comfortable place from which to fight it. If you're looking to drop a mitzvah, you could do worse.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

For the weekend of the glorious Fourth, the obligatory.
• At The New Criterion James Bowman is mad that obituaries of the recently departed Michael Herr often refer to Herr's Dispatches as "the definitive account of the war in Vietnam." Stuff and nonsense, huffs Bowman; it was instead a definitive liberal media put-up, as was Herr's contribution to Apocalypse Now. Says Bowman:

Neither the book nor the movie tells us anything about the war that the media, echoing the anti-war movement, hadn’t already told us. On the contrary, both existed to confirm our prejudices about the war as senseless, savage, insane, and criminal.

How else would people get a negative impression of war, if not from mendacious liberals? Bowman also laughs at Herr for having a nervous breakdown over the war, which Herr saw close up as a correspondent ("[we] were all 'traumatized' by Vietnam just like poor Mr. Herr..."]. Bowman is "well known for his writing on honor," according to his bio, which mentions no military experience. I'm pretty well accustomed to conservative culture-war gibberish, but it's always something of a surprise to find it in their actual cultural journals; it's as if Film Comment contained nothing but YouTube comments.

• Good old Nancy Nall reminded me about Jim Lileks the other day and I realized I hadn't read him in a while. So I pulled up a 2016 Bleat more or less at random and there he is complaining that the Oxford American had chosen to write about Terry Southern:

But the hangers-on - who had limited talent, if any, and whose purpose was to flatter the guy who Did That One Thing, would somehow believe that they were part of a great creative era because they had gotten high with the writer while he talked about Mick Jagger, who was interested in this project. Mick Jagger, man! He knows Mick! And the people to whom he's telling the story think then his dope must be really good.

There's a deadness at the heart of the period. Endless hours of unlistenable psychedelic music, endless pages of unreadable prose, cheap movies...

This from a guy who apotheosizes old matchbooks. Here's part of a more recent one:

Lest you think all Traders Joe clerk-customer interactions are a model of sparkling wit and bright banter, I had a disconcerting exchange the other day...

Yes, it's another in Lileks' endless series of insufficiently understanding service workers. They're still letting him down! He told that rapscallion about "Halt and Catch Fire" all right. Then on to Brexit:

The idea that a transnational organization is superior in its nature to a government that arose organically from a thousand years of culture and reflects the national will and character is wishful thinking, and there's one big example that comes to mind: the USSR. No, the EU is not the USSR, but given their druthers they'd love the scope of control the USSR had. Over the proper things. For the Good of the Many, of course.

You should see those gulags where they sent people who wouldn't use metric! Well, that visit will do for a few years.

• I have Monday off, so like many of my fellow citizens of this wretched neofeudal society I am being crushed with work to make up for that tiny respite, so that does it for this week's 'round-the-horn. This weekend celebrate your country as you see fit: as something to be seized by the dictatorship of the proletariat, by radical Islam, by the glorious sexual revolution or whatever -- remember, it's our dreams that make us Americans!

PERMANENT REVOLUTION.

Hey, guys, am I wrong or was the "Sexual Revolution" back in the 1960s? Wikipedia says it went "from the 1960s to the 1980s," which seems a bit long; I think once birth control pills came out, that was pretty much the whole ballgame.

Reason I'm asking is, conservatives have been using the term a lot lately and speak of it as something that's still going on. Here's Rod Dreher when the Texas abortion decision came down:

The bottom line, it seems to me, is that the Supreme Court will never let any state restriction stand meaningfully in the way of the Sexual Revolution. Ever. No federalism, no democracy, not when it comes to defending the Sexual Revolution.

Now, we all know Dreher is crazy, but he's far from the only wingnut talking about the Sexual Revolution as a live issue. When SCOTUS refused to hear the case of the pharmacist who wouldn't dispense Plan B, National Review's David French seethed, "to anti-Christian bigots, it is intolerable that Christian professionals exist unless they bow the knee to the Baal of the sexual revolution..." Also at National Review, we have Mary Eberstadt, who says liberal women's reactions to the Texas decision ("quasi-religious euphoria, a gnostic rave... intoxicated as maenads in the Bacchae") proves "secularist progressivism" is now "a religious faith grounded in theology about the sexual revolution," in the service of which we liberals gather regularly to celebrate abortions like Masses or Quaker Meetings:

The cold-blooded, untoward jubilation over yesterday’s Supreme Court decision is one more proof that in the matter of abortion, as in all else pertaining to the perceived prerogatives of the sexual revolution these days, the secularist-progressive alliance does not wage politics as usual. It instead orchestrates a bloodless religious war — bloodless, that is, apart from its central sacrament.

Elsewhere: "The Sexual Revolution, Like All Revolutions, Leaves A Wasteland Behind" (Brett Stevens); "virtually all of the opposition to Christianity and to religious liberty today derives from Christianity’s opposition to the sexual revolution" (Gene Veith at Pantheos); at Commentary, B. Richardson and J. Shields suggests campus rape is "the necessary price of the sexual revolution"; "Total destruction of everyone and everything that stands in the way of final annihilation of Western Christian foundations is the goal of the sexual revolutionaries," says some doofus at American Thinker. Etc.

What's behind it? I guess some of the more forward-thinking ones want to make sex look dull by associating it with revolutionary practice, like rifle cleaning and awful Chinese opera, and hence undesirable. But mainly I think it's because, as this blog continually shows, they can't help but fantasize political motives in every area of life, no matter how inappropriate, where they feel themselves at a disadvantage, such as culture and consumer choices. If only they could create an affirmative-action equivalent of sex, the way they come up with oddities like "The 50 Greatest Conservative Rock Songs" to make themselves feel better about art!

Alas, even if they're married and keep the lights off, any time they feel like fucking but don't really want to make a baby, or are tempted to stray from the kind of strict genital protocols of which Robert P. George could approve, they know they're living the sexual revolution. And the more society tells them it's no big deal, the bigger a deal it becomes for them.

No wonder they're so crabby.

RED LIGHTS ARE FLASHING AROUND ME/ GOOD LORD IT LOOKS LIKE THEY FOUND ME.

I'm beginning to think I've been too generous in my assessment of the Republican Party. I assumed they had enough ward-heelers, shoulder-hitters, and all-around goons to defend against the Trump onslaught, but it looks as if they can't even keep it close enough to steal.

Well, if I'm disappointed, you can imagine how actual Republicans think about it -- and by that I don't mean a majority of Republican voters, I mean Republican operatives who got #NeverTrump tattoos and whose media perches are now under threat. Bret Stephens at the Wall Street Journal seems to have suffered a brain injury. He's tut-tutting Trump's adoption of "America First" as if seven years of boob-bait articles about Obama's "apology tours" hadn't crossed his field of vision without raising so much as a Bretpeep. Oh, and get this:

Did Mr. Trump know anything about the history of the America First Committee before he seized on the phrase?... 

With Mr. Trump it’s hard to say: He has a way of blurring the line between ignorance and provocation, using one as an alibi when he’s accused of the other. Is he Rodney Dangerfield, the lovable American everyman pleading for a bit of respect? Or is he Lenny Bruce, poking his middle finger in the eye of respectable opinion?

I guess in this reading Rodney Dangerfield is the muse of ignorance and Bruce the muse of provocation, though I can't imagine how his editors let him speak better of Bruce than Dangerfield. Oh, but the follow-up makes it:

Whichever way, the conclusion isn’t flattering.

No wonder he's got it in for comedians -- in the depths of his seriousness the guy's a laugh riot.

UPDATE. Ted Cruz has dropped out, and the #NeverTrump gumps have gone gaga. National Review's primary Jesus freak David French weeps, as is such people's wont, over the "culture" that kept Trump prominent even while French was furiously writing nasty columns about him. If only we could do something about that damned culture! one imagines French seething -- though his own writing suggests that culture, as understood by normal human beings rather than culture-war dumbbells, had nothing to do with it:

The great tragedy of Trump’s Republican establishment is that — unlike mainstream media outlets that are built from the ground up to chase ratings — these “conservative” institutions and individuals were allegedly built around principles. Yes, they wanted eyeballs and page-views, but until this presidential race, many of them took great pride in their ability to attract an audience through the force of their ideas and the strength of their convictions. Indeed, these individuals and institutions used to pride themselves on policing the conservative movement, on calling out the “RINOs” and moderates in our midst.

And who are these "tragic" figures who once stirred the masses with the "force of their ideas and the strength of their convictions" -- like Burke, like Buckley? According to French, they are "Breitbart, Sean Hannity, Drudge, multiple Fox News personalities, Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter, and... Rush Limbaugh."

I'd say part of the problem, at least, is that conservatives have been grading tragedy on the curve.

Oh, for lagniappe let me mention that French also denounces (now that it hasn't worked for him) "furious rhetoric" because it's "polarizing." You can search my archives for evidence of French's moderation, but spare yourself and just take in this item about French denouncing Griswold v. Connecticut -- yes, the landmark 1965 birth control decision -- as a tribute to "the awesome power of the sexual revolution over law and logic." In short, French is nuts, and now he's standing in front of the Trump mob screaming I'M NOT NUTS, YOU'RE NUTS! Notwithstanding that this is the fall of the Republic, you have to admit it's damn funny.

Anyway, all hail Donald Trump -- Republican standard-bearer! It couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of guys.


UPDATE 2. French is getting weirder:

Now is an ideal time for the Libertarian Party to get its act together and nominate a truly serious candidate — a person who may not meet the party’s typical purity tests but who can at least make a serious argument and advance a range of policies that unite both conservatives and libertarians.

The Libertarian Party! This, from a guy who thinks birth control should be illegal. Well, libertarians aren't too into women's rights anyway; in fact, sometimes I think Reason magazine's refreshing opposition to trans bathroom laws is based on the fact that some of the persecuted parties have penises.

ANOTHER CULTURE WAR CASUALTY.

Remember that "Intellectual Case for Trump" made by Mytheos Holt at The Federalist a few weeks back? If you saw it, surely if nothing else Holt's tale of how he turned out a racist chick when she let him "probe her ideology" stays seared in your brain. Did you know that was only Part One? Yeah, I blocked that out too, but Part Two has arrived and it's even stupider. A lot of it is about how liberals got bored with free speech and now they're Hitler -- but God help us, Holt also has a Culture War angle:

For decades, the institutional Right has ceded American culture to the Left, in spite of many voices who pointed out ample areas where the Right could carve out a countercultural movement against leftist domination, or even co-opt some of modern culture for itself.

Not sure what "voices" have advocated a "countercultural movement" as Holt provides no link -- but the voices urging conservatives to "co-opt some of modern culture for itself" we have heard; they're the guys who write articles like "How Star Trek Explains The Decline Of Liberalism" in rightwing rags, and who come up with concepts like "South Park Republicans" to make their sponsors feel au courant.

Holt is true to the template -- he even devotes a paragraph to a South Park episode recap! -- and tells us that the problem with conservatism is that it has become infested with "young fogeys" who are no fun at all, which is why all the cool conservatives are flocking to Trump: "Trump is many things, but a fogie he is not." Trump makes liberals mad, see, just like us cool dudes make our parents mad; he's "taking his cues from his time as a pro-wrestling heel personality," and when all those WWE fans get old enough to vote they'll vote for him, or maybe for Triple H -- he's pretty awesome too.

Eventually Holt gets to the inevitable "choc-o-muts ice creams is conservative" list:

The Right doesn’t have to conjure up its own art from scratch. It can and occasionally has co-opted modern entertainment as well. After all, don’t films like Christopher Nolan’s “Batman” series make the most powerful statement about the tension between chaos and civilization since John Ford? Don’t Nietzschean fairy tales like “Breaking Bad,” “House of Cards,” or even “True Detective,” not to mention most video games, utterly brush aside the Left’s fantasies about Rousseauistic, universal human goodness?

Boring a girl at a party with a rant about how your favorite TV show means Social Security sux is the revolution, comrade -- I mean bro!

These people are always going on about Saul Alinsky -- and The Frankfurt School and the Long March Through The Institutions and all those other wingnut equivalents of the Illuminati -- so naturally they think culture is not something to make, or even to appreciate and enjoy, but something to "co-opt."

UPDATE. Sorry, I can't leave out this bit from Holt's essay about Bill Clinton yelling at the Black Lives Matter guys and how it shows liberals went fascist:

In this, they break from the past in many respects. Bill Clinton himself revealed how significant this shift was when he challenged Black Lives Matter. Clinton was advancing a policy argument in defense of his approach to crime in the 1990s, in the face of protesters who would hear none of it. His arguments were based on the facts, where the BLM protesters’ signs were based on the equivalent of brand loyalty to a cultural movement. No matter how correct Clinton’s case was, it inevitably fell on deaf ears.

No, you read that right: he's really saying BLM's protest signs lost an argument with Bill Clinton. I'd say the signs were at a serious disadvantage; maybe they should have used dry-erase to reduce response time.

TODAY IN CONSERVATIVE INTELLECTUALISM.

I hate to do such a quick reprise of the "My Frontrunner is Your Fault" theme, but I can't let this Erick Erickson thing at The Resurgent pass without remark:

In other words, the one group to blame for Donald Trump is everybody.
Opportunity Lives and the Koch Brothers deserve blame.
The conservative movement deserves blame.
Republican leaders and the actual Republican establishment deserve blame.
Democrats deserve blame.
The media deserves blame.
I deserve blame.

It sounds like a suicide note, but alas! I'm pretty sure it's just Erickson trying to reassure his base, who (it's a safe bet) are suffering similar spasms of existential dread over Trump,  that the whole world's gone crazy and it's not just them. There are some blind-squirrel-nut moments like this:

Conservatives too, myself included, deserve blame. We have fought awfully hard against the establishment, but often decided we wanted to fight more than we wanted to solve the problem.

This from the architect of Operation Leper! It'd be even funnier if he meant it. Oh, and this:

Another perfect example of the one group to blame for Donald Trump is Barack Obama and his Democratic coalition. In 2007, Obama heaped scorn on white, blue collar workers in Pennsylvania bitterly clinging to their guns and religion. He went to war with them, dividing classes and races and putting a lot of blue collar workers in the energy industry on the unemployment line.

If only Democrats were actually serious about the needs of the white working class, they could have had those votes instead of Trump -- because, Erickson's argument clearly implies, his own party is totally shit at meeting those needs.

You know who else thinks Trump voters have been "left behind by liberalism" and #NeverTrump conservatives are missing a trick? The Federalist's Mytheos Holt, who starts by telling us about this straight-up White Nationalist chick, "Sylvia," who he was able to turn, guys (high five!). He came to her at first "in the company of another friend, who had made it his personal mission to deconvert her from her ideology, a task with which I agreed to help" (sexy already, right?), but then on his own:

I continued to send out feelers... so I could probe her ideology... After a while, she got used to me... she began to open up about her more risqué beliefs. So, this time with more gentle prodding, I started to make her doubt what she’d been taught.

Things got even hotter when Holt revealed to her that he's Jewish: "my ethnic revelation actually made her open up more to me rather than less."

After that revelation, gently poking holes in her worldview was out of the question, as I’d just metaphorically sent a cannonball straight through its foundation.

Boom! So, Holt reasons, if he can shoot his cannon of understanding into this racist chick, why can't other conservatives appeal to her co-racists? After all, they're not bad people, just misguided:

Ultimately, the biggest reason the pain that drove Sylvia’s family and so many like them into the arms of white nationalism is unfair is a pain that I, as a Jew, can empathize with. After all, once many Jews turned to communism as a way of trying to get political rights they didn’t think they could get any other way, and as a way of lashing out at a society that unfairly disdained them and their culture.

Even though this ideological shift made many people hate Jews more, at least the communists were trying to do something. Only that kind of desperation can make a radical ideology like white nationalism attractive.

Be sure to catch Holt's version of Fiddler on the Roof, in which Perchik turns into Norman Podhoretz.

On and on it goes, so let's wrap it up: Holt thinks conservatives don't complain enough about social justice warriors (I know! And at The Federalist! He's got nerve, I'll give him that), causing white proles to turn to Trump, so you squishes better drop the "Kemp-and-W-style 'bleeding heart conservatism'" and start Trumping it up --

Otherwise, the people damaged by multicultural, leftist attacks on Western civilization will be thoroughly justified in sneering at us as proverbial “cuckservatives” forever mentally masturbating with our own empty universalism while barbarism rapes Lady Liberty.

Maybe Holt should drop the politics stuff and devote his considerable talents to specialty porn. (In a way, isn't he doing that already?)

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Hey now.

•    Just a few months ago Garry Shandling was horsing around with Jerry Seinfeld about Robin Williams' suicide, and he made a joke: "‘63 is so young’ is a phrase you never hear relative to anything but death." Now that Shandling's dead, the New York Daily News calls the coincidence "chilling," but to me it's almost the opposite. Like all the classic jests on the big sleep, it's slightly discomfiting, especially if you're anywhere near the target, but overall it's reassuring, because it shows that someone else (as well as, hopefully, a number of people laughing all around you) understands that we're all in the same boat, and this makes death a slightly easier thing to live with. At its best, comedy does what seems like a cruel and selfish thing -- takes an individual and literally "makes fun of" him -- but produces a generous result: the shared recognition that we all have to occasionally make fools of ourselves, or fart, or sublimate, or die, and that's what being human is. Here's a pretty good Shandling monologue transcript (including the great "'I'm hot, I'm on fire' -- me, me, me!" gag), but we all know Shandling's great achievement was The Larry Sanders Show, in which Shandling's trademark insecurity not only spawned a great extended joke about the dysfunction that attends power -- I think The Thick of It and Veep actually owe a lot to Larry Sanders -- but one of the greatest comic characters since Moliere, Jeffrey Tambor's Hank Kingsley. A few names quickly come to mind when we think about the American comedians who ascended into artistry; some of them I'm sure we'd fight over. But for Larry Sanders alone I think we have to agree on Shandling.

•    Meanwhile in culture war woo-hoo, here's an essay from (naturally) The Federalist by the unfortunately-named Maureen Mullarkey entitled "What Vintage Pulp Fiction Covers Say About Today’s Vices." In short: The luridness of these old covers may be humorous to you sinners but it accurately portrays the wages of SIN ("However much titillation accompanies it, judgment is inexorable. And unsmiling"). Here's a choice excerpt:

Ignoble Layne made sexual bargains of all kinds to get ahead in the music and film industries. Alas, his infidelities brought on a lethal end. Was it AIDS before there was a name for it? Or did he run into the wrong guy? 

Either way, in 1965 even gay porn acknowledged the ancient insight that promiscuity comes with consequences. They were born too soon, Layne and Carrie. Today they could down antibiotic cocktails or protease inhibitors while they checked the hook-up apps on their iPhones.

Somewhere deep in a deep red state, a bright young fellow is inspired by Mullarkey to prepare a scholarly defense for when his mom finds his bondage porn stash.