JUST WHAT MAGA V. TAYLOR SWIFT NEEDED: A LITTLE TOUCH OF DREHER!

It can’t last, so let’s all ride this MAGA Declares War on Taylor Swift thing to clicksville while the iron’s hot, shall we? Here’s a rare midweek freebie from Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, with a ripped-from-today’s-headlines account of the anti-Swift nerve center at Mar-a-Lago. Strictly for laffs! 

As I repeatedly remind you folks, conservative politicians and political writers have entirely abandoned policies and even normal constituent service in favor of lunatic culture war crap like this. Entertainers most of us think of as That Guy In that Movie or That Girl on Spotify are to them as demons sent to Make Everything Woke. This goes for the rightwing intelli-ma-lectuals like Victor Davis Hanson as well as humble clickbait farmers (“The Top 5 Most Overrated Liberal Comedians”), but also for bigtimers like the New York Times' David French, one of those conservatives who liberals simps think is OK, and author of a hair-raisingly weird Prince obituary (“For conservatives, Prince was ultimately just another talented and decadent voice in a hedonistic culture. He was notable mainly because he was particularly effective at communicating that decadence to an eager and willing audience…”).

I didn’t think this Swift thing could get any nuttier but I hadn’t counted on Rod Dreher. I’d more or less stopped paying attention to him since his nervous breakdown and departure from The American Conservative, but my attention was called to his latest Substack item, “Among the Swifties” – and if you sense a reference of Bill Buford’s Among the Thugs there, claim your prize because Dreher does indeed compare the young female fans of Taylor Swift to the soccer hooligans in Buford’s book:

Here is Buford himself, reflecting on what he learned about crowd dynamics by watching a thug leader he calls “Mutton Chops” at work…

This is interesting. It says that we cannot entirely blame Donald Trump, Taylor Swift, or any other “leader” who holds sway over a crowd; the crowd’s latent desire for someone to create them manifested in those individual figures being propelled to leadership. Don’t misread Buford here; he’s not absolving crowd leaders of their actions…

Someone should ring Buford and ask him if he absolves Taylor Swift of her crimes. 

To put it in Buford’s terms: there was a huge crowd of young females who shared a common emotional experience (“the collective female unconscious”) that settled on Taylor Swift, a supremely gifted creator of pop songs, as their leader. Taylor Swift played her role, of course, but Buford would say that Swift was summoned by the latency within the crowd that would later become Swifties.

I bet Dreher imagines “Swifties” as rampaging Valkyries doing Wokeness to the innocent. The thing’s full of howlers, with patented Dreherisms like his regret that he cannot experience the “liberating pleasure of ego death” he imagines sports, Swift, and Trump fans enjoy – “The only time I’ve ever had that experience as part of a crowd was at the U2 concert in Baton Rouge…” The jokes just write themselves! Nonetheless I had a go at REBID, if you can use a chuckle, however mordant. 

UPDATE. Finally realizing that maybe this has all been a terrible mistake, some of the conservative Shuck Troopers are trying to turn it around. Washington Times:

We're not nuts, you're nuts! Well, on their readership it could work. Also Erick Erickson is trying his insufficient best:

Never mind that it hurts Donald Trump. Never mind that it makes the Republicans look deeply unserious. Never mind the political fallout. On a day that Cori Bush has been targeted by the Justice Department, a Democrat progressive targeted by Joe Biden's Justice Department, we're all having to talk about the Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce thing because of what these idiots have done online. 

Oh, I'm sure none of them will mind that the Swift Purge is distracting from the fact that the DOJ, which conservatives constantly accuse of being politically weaponized against Republicans just because they did some so-called "crimes," is investigating prominent Democrats like Bush and even charging Democratic Senator Robert Menendez as well. Screening out inconvenient facts is as important to their whole paranoid vision as the manufacture of lunatic fantasies.

UPDATE 2. Lol, I forgot that conservatives have been raging at Swift for at least ten years now. Here's my 2013 post on the Power Line proto-Catturd Hindrocket doing close analysis of Swift wearing a onesie -- is it a comment on Pajama Boy?? And get a load of all the anti-Swift articles at rightweing rat's nest The Federalist: Imagine going to an editor with a pitch like "Taylor Swift’s Disappointing Arc Is Generationally Representative" and having her slam the desk and cry, "THAT'S GOLD, JASHINSKY! GOLD!" Finally, lest we forget: Mark Hemingway's sad boomer review of Swift. Now that's funny! 

FRIDAY ‘ROUND THE HORN: CRAZY PEOPLE LOSE ELECTIONS EDITION.

Still the best version.

Another week in the books, and what a week it was here in God’s Country, with people getting fired or muscled for showing sympathy toward massacred Palestinians and yet, somehow, not a peep from Bari Weiss or any of the usual cancelculture crybabies in their defense! Why, it’s almost as if the whole cancelculture thing were bullshit. 

Speaking of that, I went to last weekend’s Palestine rally in DC and my account of it is one of the week’s two (2) Roy Edroso Breaks It Down posts FREE TO THE PUBLIC thanks to a generous donation by General Dynamics. 

The theme of our other free REBID essay is Election Day and all the Republicans who got their asses kicked because their whole party be acting all crazy. As Jamelle Bouie writes it’s their whole “culture war shtick” that voters seem fed up with, as seen by the defeats suffered by the book-banning Moms for Liberty and various transphobe dickweeds. But abortion is clearly the deal-breaker – the kind of thing that gets red staters to vote against the will of their overlords as they did decisively in Ohio on Tuesday. I’m convinced it’s not just that these voters want reproductive rights – they also know that the people who are desperate to take these rights away from them are out of their minds and cannot be allowed that kind of power over their lives. 

As mentioned in my essay, it’s clear a lot of conservatives have been driven to despair and/or madness by this turn of events. Our old pal Hindrocket from Power Line, for example, headlines his post-electoral-debacle item “WHY DEMOCRATS ARE PANICKING,” which certainly is a counterintuitive take, and Yells At Cloud:

Currently, the most popular position a politician can take, even in red states like Ohio, is enthusiastic support for abortion, as often as possible up to and including the moment of birth. In several states, like Minnesota, abortion after birth–infanticide–has been made legal.

I have heard the up-till-birth-abortion bullshit many times, but “legal” “infanticide” in Minnesota is weirdly specific. Anyone know what he’s talking about? Also, how long after birth can you do it, because I have some suggestions.  

More ominously, I note Republican politicians are working overtime to keep voters from getting any more chances to make their preferences law by referenda -- and to take away those rights even after they're voted into law. That, too, is a thing with Republicans these days – preventing untoward electoral outcomes by force – so don’t let mere awareness that most Americans agree with you make you too confident of the outcome. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: MEMORIAL DAY 2023 EDITION.

He had no one to fall on but me.

What was once a somber tribute of our fallen men is now, whee, a three-day holiday weekend! This strange dichotomy plays on my mind and I write about it now and then; here’s the latest iteration. Whatever it means to you, I hope you get to enjoy it.

Also unlocked from Roy Edroso Breaks It Down (my premium site, and subscriptions make a lovely gift!) is another dispatch from Bolt Upright and Received Opinion, celebrating the Republican Vice-Presidential I Mean Presidential Candidates of Color. As I’ve said many times, the as yet unannounced Rep. Byron Donalds is only national-profile GOP POC who’d be an asset to the inevitable Trump ticket – he’s as evil as Scott, Haley, and Ramaswamy, but unlike them competently emulates normal human behavior. Scott in particular is a beaming, slow-witted goofus – exactly the sort of person Trump would hate too much to entertain – so naturally Peggy Noonan thinks he’s swell: 

“He is a breath of fresh air,” former Sen. Rob Portman told me by phone.

And he should know! 

…[Scott is] from South Carolina, a frisky conservative state, and watched his fellow senator, Lindsey Graham, be batted about for independence on various issues and early opposition to Mr. Trump. It left Mr. Scott cautious. 

Or “cowardly.” That works, too. Noonan on DeSantis is even worse:

On transgender issues, it is hard to resist a destructive ideology while maintaining, in public ways, respect and affection for those who are wrong. And who don’t necessarily want your respect and affection. But you have to try anyway. Because it’s right and nice, and we’re human beings, and people can see good faith, sometimes in time and often reluctantly. And because it keeps those you’re opposing from arguing, persuasively, that you’re just playing a culture-war card and they’re only road kill on your highway to victory.

Maybe I’m not giving the old bat enough credit – maybe she knows full well that DeSantis is definitely not going for “right and nice,” nor “human being” nor “good faith.” He has never said a good word about LGBTQ people and never will, because he believes that what the Republican base has been missing is overt permission to hate those people and slur them out loud. That’s what the whole trans thing was about, and why it segued so quickly and smoothly to attacks on drag queens (who are not by and large trans) and why MAGA shitheads are now smashing up Gay Pride displays at Target. Like smart people have long been saying, they were never going to stop with trans people. 

So it’s possible Noonan is trying to be ironic. Haha, who’m I kidding? Her real kung fu is describing the lives of trans people as a “destructive ideology” while insisting Republicans act nice to them. There’s the Riefenstahl of Reaganism in action. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 5/5/23.

Flow!

•  What a week, eh? It seems like the well of rightwing judiciary corruption stories is inexhaustible. The latest -- with the direct involvement of Federalist Society kingpin/nation-wrecker Leonard Leo, Trump lie diffuser Kellyanne Conway, and Clarence Thomas’ insurrectionist wife – is a humdinger: 

Conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo arranged for the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to be paid tens of thousands of dollars for consulting work just over a decade ago, specifying that her name be left off billing paperwork, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post.

In January 2012, Leo instructed the GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway to bill a nonprofit group he advises and use that money to pay Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the documents show. The same year, the nonprofit, the Judicial Education Project, filed a brief to the Supreme Court in a landmark voting rights case.

Leo, a key figure in a network of nonprofits that has worked to support the nominations of conservative judges, told Conway that he wanted her to “give” Ginni Thomas “another $25K,” the documents show. He emphasized that the paperwork should have “No mention of Ginni, of course.”

The “landmark voting rights” case was Shelby County v. Holder, the one in which Leo’s SCOTUS toadies shanked the Voting Rights Act. (It’s also worth mentioning Conway, Thomas, and Leo are all members of one of those DC fascist affinity groups to which such people flock.)

Man, they’re just crooks, right? And of course we’ve got the usual fash fluffers sputtering “how dare you” at anyone who dares to notice this crime spree. 

This was grist for my mill in one of this week’s two Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies: A scene in which some leading influence peddlers and their clients meet up at a billionaire mansion to conduct business with a longtime alicublog figure of fun.

•  The other free issue is a meditation on the latest object of rightwing hero worship: The man who murdered an obstreperous subway hustler in cold blood. Just when you think conservatives have bottomed out morally, they manage to saw through the floorboards and find another sub-basement. 

The Twitter creeps are vile enough, but the paper-trained pundits of the right who’ve gotten in on this are even worse. Abe Greenwald at Commentary may be the current nadir: He jerks off at length about how his pet murderer was a manly Marine, dammit (“courage is their defining trait… there aren’t many like them”) and fantasizes about having a Subway Strangler floor show of his own:

I’ve been on a few trains where “something was happening,” and if a Marine had suddenly appeared and taken matters into his own hands, I’d have bought him a steak dinner.

Eeeeyikes. The murderer, meanwhile, is alleged to be huddling with a prominent Republican lawyer politician-lawyer (anti-Bragg, just the way Trump likes 'em!), and the crew is preparing for Bernie Goetz redux for some electoral juice -- not in New York City, where such people are justly despised, but in the boondocks and Bumfucks where New York is hated and feared as the Land of Ooga Booga. Of course this ain’t 1984 and George Floyd is much fresher in the minds of potential jurors. Maybe the creeps' model will be Kyle Rittenhouse, with lots of burble about Big Scary Cities and Standing Your Ground. 

•  Finally, since I love a good callback, let me note this blubberfest at the Moonie Washington Times:

Conservatives excluded from 2023 commencement invites

Conservative speakers, already a rarity on college campuses in recent years, may be even more of an anomaly this spring as the nation’s universities hold commencement ceremonies featuring an array of educators, entertainers and politicians drawn from the left — and essentially devoid of anyone from the right.

Whether you’re a respected scholar, a Supreme Court justice or even a former president, the message from most of the country’s colleges is clear: No conservatives allowed.

Boo hoo, the mean college students won’t pay to listen to us bitch about uppity minorities and how no one wants to work! 

This is a return to form for conservatives – in fact it goes back to the days when they were retooling their “political correctness” shtick into “cancel culture” crybullying. I wrote about it for the Village Voice in 2014, when they were outraged that students didn’t want to be regaled by war criminal Condoleezza Rice. In the same column I found conservatives yelling because they weren’t getting the Hugo Award nominations to which they felt themselves entitled, and also this eerie harbinger of Wingnut Shtick To Come: 

For example, last week New Hampshire father William Baer was arrested for disrupting a school board meeting. He complained about the assignment of Jodi Picoult’s YA novel 19 Minutes in his teen daughter’s class because it had a sex scene in it. As the video shows, after Baer had finished his allotted two minutes, he refused to shut up, so the board called the cops, who took him away…

Some people might think the board overreacted; others may think they did right to keep Baer’s heckler’s veto from stomping everyone else’s right to speak. Rightbloggers, however, thought the board had infringed on an important Constitutional right: The right to take over a public meeting if you feel really strongly about it, and are right-wing.

This was, of course, before they invented “Moms for Liberty” to hide their totalitarian agenda behind apron strings. But the basic grift is the same.  

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 3/10/23.

I'm a late 20th-Century guy and this is my jam

Omigod it's almost the Oscars! And, as I have been doing for years now, I'm going to try and guess the winners, and as prep have seen nine of the ten Best Picture nominees (I will dutifully see the Tom Cruise thing this weekend and report on it here, though I regard the prospect much as Pee-Wee regarded the snakes in that pet shop fire.)  As a favor to you, my public, I have brought my reviews of those films out from behind the Roy Edroso Breaks It Down paywall so you can read them:  The Fabelmans, Tár, The Banshees of Inisherin, Women Talking, All Quiet on the Western Front, Avatar: The Way of Water, Elvis, and Everything Everywhere All at Once. 

As to non-cultural REBID offerings released free of charge for this week, I have just the one, about a National Review author trying to hold aloft that publication’s Conservatives-with-Good-Taste banner while the actual conservatism outside NR’s castle walls grows increasingly vicious and feral. It’s good, of course, but there’s plenty where that came from if you have taste and $7/month (cheap!). 

The week brought more madness in the form of Tucker Carlson’s Selected Shorts from the Jan. 6 Tour-Group Visit to Our Nation’s Capitol. The grift is clear from the lunatic responses to this Dinesh D’Souza tweet: Wingnuts show brief video clips of quiet moments among the mob, then say that proves the hours of mob violence that day – notwithstanding that these are also documented on video – no longer mean anything because “MSM” “lied.”  

If it were an argument it’d be self-refuting -- as it is, it’s just more evidence that conservatism has descended even further: As it has abandoned policy for dumb culture-war stunts, it has also abandoned common sense for magical thinking -- literally looking reality in the face and calling it fantasy, and vice-versa. Which is why our politics now depends on standing up for reason as well as for specific political positions. Fortunately in my case these mostly coincide! 

I did get some encouragement, though, from a new USA Today/IPSOS poll that shows most Americans don’t see what’s so bad about being “woke.” Not sure what other differently-worded or -implemented polls would yield – as we’ve seen from ridiculously loaded polls, like the New York Times one that claimed “some Americans do not speak freely in everyday situations because of fear of retaliation or harsh criticism” as a sign of rampant cancelculture rather than of ordinary good manners, these things can be rigged or willfully misinterpreted. But it’s nice to know that however many bots and creeps pollute social media with claims that everything from M&Ms to the military is killing us with wokeness, some of us still have our heads on straight.

Another bonus: the poll enraged ham-faced pundit Erick Erickson, and sent him sputtering to his fanbase with this doozy:

What I find more telling about the country’s true view on the term woke comes from standup comedians who make a living saying out loud what their audience is thinking. From Chris Rock to Dave Chappelle to Bill Burr to Neal Brennan, almost every progressive comedian is ridiculing woke ideology on progressive platforms like Netflix and Hulu.

Yeah, who cares about a poll of normies when you can get vox populi straight from these rich comedians telling the boomers who paid $200+ a seat to listen to them that something the kids like is bad? 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN ON A SUNDAY: 2/26/23.

Yum.

•  Sure, why can't "Friday 'Round-the-Horn" happen on a Sunday? We had one on a Saturday once, remember? Wasn't that crazy? We're pretty quirky and unpredictable here. Sky's the limit! 

•  Anywho: The major freebie from Roy Edroso Breaks It Down from last week is this one about a Zoom meeting between the GOP leadership and their policy chief. I notice that in recent weeks the alignment of the Republicans with Russia is getting tighter. Maybe you saw Matt Gaetz's House resolution calling for the U.S. to stop helping Ukraine repel its invaders. (It's actually called the "Ukraine Fatigue Resolution," as if their House propagandists didn't bother to change the name from the talking point that inspired it.) And you may have seen that preeminent conservative intellectual CatTurd2 advanced the theory that he Ukraine war is actually some sort of false flag operation ("Biden fake air raid sirens and one famous actor or politician a day happily prancing around Kiev with Zelenskyy with no helmets"), to the approbation of his millions of fans. 

And last week the Head Defenestrator in Charge himself, in announcing his withdrawal from the START Treaty, gave what amounts to a 2023-style U.S. Republican campaign speech:

Look what [Western nations] are doing to their own people. It is all about the destruction of the family, of cultural and national identity, perversion and abuse of children, including pedophilia, all of which are declared normal in their life. They are forcing the priests to bless same-sex marriages...

But here is what I would like to tell them: look at the holy scripture and the main books of other world religions. They say it all, including that family is the union of a man and a woman, but these sacred texts are now being questioned. Reportedly, the Anglican Church is planning, just planning, to explore the idea of a gender-neutral god. What is there to say? Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.

Ron DeSantis couldn't have done it better! And the rubes are eating it up: the account in the hard-right Trumpist Christian Post, for example, tells the story from the Putinist POV ("Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a stark warning over what he called religious attacks from Western culture Tuesday...") I keep making jokes about Putin following Orban to CPAC, but at this point I'm expecting him to speak at their next National Convention. 

•  Whew, that's depressing. So here, here's a straight-up fun thing from REBID, about books you don't read so much as graze. Got any like that? Tell it to the comments box! (And subscribe -- it's cheap!)

•  Finally I want to thank the universe for the gift of laughter, courtesy of Scott Adams telling the world what he thinks about those pesky black people and getting his "Dilbert" thrown out of a bunch of newspapers. Guess he decided 2023 was a good time to go full racist -- the Bund will remember and reward him comes Der Tag. 

Adding cream to the jest are all the cancelculture crybabies like Thomas Chatterton Williams and Cathy Young rushing to tell us that oh, no, Adams getting chucked for his beliefs isn't cancelculture because race hatred is something we all condemn -- you know, like trans health care. I predict Bari Weiss' next scam will be a guide to which firings and dismissals qualify as cancelculture and which don't -- and no one will realize it's just the Republican national platform. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 2/17/23.

While I produce five days a week of high-quality content at Roy Edroso Breaks It Down (go over and have a look, subscribe if you like, it’s mighty good eating for the pennies it costs), productivity at the old alicublog plant has been down a while. I regret it, but between REBID and my other editorial work there’s not much room left for bodily functions, let alone the kind of funsies for which this site became known back in 1953, when “blogs” rolled off Henry Ford’s assembly line and, due to their tendency to roll rather than locomote, wound up in the dustbin of history, a short distance down the road to oblivion and turn left. 

But sometimes a red flag can get this old bull to charge. Erick Erickson, a longtime figure of fun in the alicublog rep company, has an even more ridiculous than usual item up today. The headline is:

We Cannot Reject Sabotage On Rail Lines Just Yet

Let us tiptoe past Erickson’s long preliminary yammerings about how Joe Biden is trying to blame everything on Donald Trump (though given Trump’s rollback of rail freight safety features he’s certainly blameworthy) and Biden LIED about the CHINESE BALLOONS (“The Administration that lied repeatedly about the Chinese spy balloon wants us to trust them on it not being sabotage, just Trump”), and cut to the 19th graf:

The reality is these incidents are probably not sabotage. Buttigieg, for all his whining, has a point. There are many train derailments every year. We’re more sensitive to them now because of media exposure.

This is the next best thing to “it was all a dream.” 

So why was Erickson going on about sabotage? 

But the point is that this Administration regularly tries to blame Donald Trump for everything, has lied repeatedly in the past few weeks about the Chinese spy balloon, has done such a bad job dealing with these issues too many Americans now know the Transportation Secretary’s name, and we simply cannot believe them.

And if “we” (Erickson and his tapeworm, who I gotta say has his work cut out for him) can’t trust Joe Biden, maybe we’ll trust Erick Erickson’s self-refuting innuendos. Oh, and if you took the side-bet on “Hunter Biden’s laptop” being in the story? Collect your winnings. 

But the real prize this week is Peggy Noonan, who has been on fire (regrettably not literally) with her rambling silver-alert takes. This week’s starts with snipage at Nikki Haley, who recently launched her Vice-Presidential (whoops, I mean air-quotes Presidential) campaign:

On Wednesday Nikki Haley announced her presidential campaign in Charleston, S.C. I found myself thinking not about her candidacy but about the launch itself, which was creepily stuck in the past. A horrible, blaring song from a Sylvester Stallone sequel pumped her in as she strode out in the white suit and there were adoring fans on the rafters behind her, with whom she briefly interacted before turning toward the audience and doing the point—standing there and pointing to individual members of the cheering audience as if she knew them and was being natural. An introducer said she will “lead us into the future”; she added, “America is falling behind.” It was all so tired, clichéd, and phony. It was national politics as it has been done circa 1990-2023.

1990? How about the 80s, Peggy, when as Ronald Reagan’s handler you filled his mouth with uplifting bullshit and helped engineer spectacles like Nancy waving at Ronnie on the telescreen at the 1984 Republican Convention? That's when propaganda was propaganda, you young punks! 

Speaking of bullshit, this seems to be about the only thing Noonan likes about Haley: 

In her speech she said some nice things: “Take it from me, the first female minority governor in history: America is not a racist country.” Everyone who scrambles over our border knows that; it is good when elites say it.

…until said scramblers-over-the-border get driven back over by Greg Abbott’s vigilantes or dragged up north to use as pawns in a cruel culture-war stunt. Honestly, I can’t imagine even her Republican readers don’t immediately think this. 

Then there’s a long grumble about those horrible ads on the teevee during the Super Bowl – they made America look like “a nation of morons” (don’t bother waiting for the penny to drop, guys), whereas back in the day they had Mean Joe Greene being all nice and cuddly for Coke and that was the real America, real Ronnie-and-Nancy koochie-koo kitsch, not this nutty, noisy stuff:

I’m here to say I’ve met America and that’s not what they want. What they want is “Help me live, help my kids live, help me feel something true.” 

Sorry, lady, but would you like a new car, soft drink, or diabetes management app? These are the damn ads. I’m convinced Noonan was just turned off by all the rock and rap (“the music shifted, screamed, and the mood became discordance”). It's a miracle the Journal kept her from fulminating on Rihanna. Look, Grandma, they aren’t pitching this shit to me, either, but I know better than to Blame Society.

Oh, but her closing… man; she gets on Will Smith and starts pitching to write his Oscar 2023 speech:

Here is how to turn that moment into something helpful. It doesn’t involve “image rehab.” It involves constructive honesty. Will Smith should walk in and say this:

“It is painful in life when you embarrass yourself. It is horrifying when you do it in front of tens of millions of people. Last year I did something bad to a guy who was just doing his job, and I am here to acknowledge it from the same stage—to admit that in attempting to humiliate him, I humiliated myself. I showed a number of things, including sheer bad judgment…

Two more grafs of this! I give it five barf bags! I doubt Noonan is even expecting the call (though I love imagining her on the phone, pinching her nose, and droning “This is Miss Noonan’s answering service”); I expect the play is to wait for Smith to deliver what promises to be a perfectly anodyne and expected (though less white!) apology-like spew, and then sigh contentedly: “Ahhh, he took my advice!”

SATURDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 1/14/23.

I know there are a lot of great versions;
I just like this one.

Look, you’ve been busy, I’ve been busy – sometimes a Friday ‘Round-the-Horn is out of the question. I have found a moment on Saturday, and it’s all yours! 

There are two free Roy Edroso Breaks It Down stories for you from this past week. (Reminder: Subscribers, who pay an absurdly low $7/month, get this stuff five days a week.) The first is a fanciful meeting of the minds between two of the nation’s worst people, cancelculture crybaby queen Bari Weiss and Florida Minister of Propaganda Christopher Rufo, on the campus of the freshly wingnuttified New College of Florida in the not-distant future.

Michelle Goldberg recently interviewed Rufo and he’s even more inclined to say the quiet parts out loud than most conservatives these days – probably because he’s not elected, and so doesn't have to pretend that the consent of the governed, not to mention common sense, means shit anymore. Rufo expresses an intention, in his political-correcting of New College and whatever other schools his confederates can get their hands on, to “steal the strategies and the principles of the Gramscian left, and then to organize a kind of counterrevolutionary response to the long march through the institutions.” I remember when conservatives thought there was a marketplace of ideas, and were pretty triumphalist about conservative capitalism’s victory therein (in part because they had a well-funded marketing campaign). But when it became apparent people were no longer buying their bullshit, they decided outside agitators led by long-dead boogeymen like Antonio Gramsci had made that marketplace obsolete and that it was now time for a command economy of ideas instead. As Adam Serwer has pointed out, this tracks with their current conception of democracy in general: it's OK to be free so long as their preferred result wins; otherwise it's time for the boot and truncheon. 

The second freebie is straight from the Congressional Record (in my mind!): Marjorie Taylor Greene, now a respectable elder stateswoman of the GOP, demanding an investigation into an ancient menace and this time it’s not The Jews (not directly, anyway). The House GOP has gotten crazier quicker than even I predicted – they’ve even jumped directly on the “Joe Biden Try’n Steal Mah Gas Stove” bandwagon with – this I am not making up – “H.R. 263, the Stop Trying to Obsessively Vilify Energy (STOVE) Act.” 

Again pointing back to former conservative talking points,  I remember when they all chortled along with P.J. O’Rourke that Congress was a “Parliament of Whores” because Dan Rostenkowski got free stamps; now, as we have seen from the spreading George Santos tsimmis, the House is even more corrupt than before but, unlike in the old days, its members can’t even serve the nation’s interests properly and indeed seem hell-bent on sabotaging them even as they play at culture war. It’s still funny but this ringside seat on the Death of the Republic is getting a tad uncomfortable. 

TWO FOR THE ROAD.

I haven’t been too attentive to recent developments at Roy Edroso Breaks It Down because I’m doing my usual year-end review series, in keeping with the Auld Lang Syne spirit. But there are two things I want to address right quick:

First, George “Catch Me If You Can” Santos. Before his grift blew completely wide open I had a bit of fun with the idea of the guy at House Freshman orientation:

[KEVIN] McCARTHY: Well, Walter, we may have to finesse that one a little bit. For one thing, we want to be absolutely clear that while the Party is against the corruption of children it is not against gay people. In fact I see we have a gay freshman here today — George Santos from New York. Stand up, George. [Pause] George, stand up please.

[Necks crane toward GEORGE SANTOS, who looks bewildered.]

SANTOS: There must be some mistake. My name is Henry White.

McCARTHY: George, I met you at the Vanderbilt Room last week, come on.

ANOTHER FRESHMAN: Hey, George, I saw you at S.O.B’s last week! Eu sou Brasileiro, dude!

SANTOS: What is that? Is that some Brazilian thing? Because I’m not Brazilian and I’m certainly not gay! And I don’t represent New York, I represent the 2nd District in Oklahoma as a proud Cherokee! My parents were in the Trail of Tears —

McCARTHY: Alright, alright, all that to one side, let’s see what else we can think of that will capture the imagination of ordinary Americans…

But that was before more details on the scope of his fraud became known, elevating the situation from “haw haw” to “damn.” One thing the prestige press ain’t saying much about, even when they express mystification by Santos’ unexplained (given his work status) wealth, is Santos’ Russian oligarch connections, as described by Daily Beast reporter William Bredderman on November 30:

But unreported until now is that by the time Devolder-Santos [as he was then known] made these statements, his congressional ambitions had already received a $32,800 boost from a controversial figure linked to the uppermost echelons of the Russian regime—and that support would more than double in size during the months ahead.

The cash came from Andrew Intrater and his wife, who variously listed her occupation as “homemaker” and “analyst” for Falcon AI, one of her husband’s subsidiary firms.

Intrater’s main venture is today called Sparrow Capital, but it previously used the name Columbus Nova—and its primary function has long been to manage the investments of Intrater’s cousin, Viktor Vekselberg, one of Putin’s wealthiest and most influential courtiers.

So tightly intertwined is Intrater’s business with that of his relative, who snatched up swaths of Russia’s aluminum and fuel industries during the post-Soviet period…

Etc. The “statements” to which Bredderman refers are Santos’ pimping for Putin as the injured party in the Ukraine war, which as you know is one of the hallmarks of the MAGA new breed and which makes his Russkie cash connection even more piquant – as it does the well-covered Tulsi Gabbard throwdown against Santos. Could it be that Gabbard, who went full feral wingnut a ways back and has her own unseemly Russian connections and affiliations, was dispatched to take down a former asset who had become a liability? Or was it a throwback to her anti-gay past (and, I should add, present)?

Anyway, like I always say: Your Republican Party, ladies and gentlemen! (I should also note the attempt by many conservatives to whatabout this by referring to Elizabeth Warren as Hashtag Pocahontas, the stupidity of which should be apparent even before you consider that while our Native American tribes also have good reason to want to overthrow the U.S. government, they have not the means that Vladimir Putin and his many not-even-sleeper agents have.)

Second: Rod Dreher’s latest stinkbomb. Having learned (or simply being unable to ignore any longer) that his father was a Klansman – which adds an interesting sidelight on Dreher’s obvious racism – Holy Rod has unleashed another instant TL;DR (exhaustion of the critic is part of his arsenal). It’s all awful, but two things are especially noteworthy. First, Dreher admits his old man was racist but also says he got along better with black people than he did. I know, when you put it like that it’s very funny, but it also sets up Dreher’s shtick about how being a conscious anti-racist white person is worse than being a racist because it ain’t natural:

Specifically, as much as I hated to admit it, my dad, who had grown up in rural Louisiana, and who had spent his career as the chief public health officer for our parish, knew more about actual existing black people and their culture than I did -- because he had lived among them all his life! For me, black people were mostly an abstraction. I had allowed the living, breathing human beings to be assimilated into an idea of Blackness -- specifically, of black people as the eternal victims of white people.

Then he talks about reading a Flannery O’Connor story about some jacked-up young Southerner who turns his back of his patrimony, which brings a blush to his cheeks. 

I also knew from reading that story that my dad understood things about black folks -- at least in the rural South -- that I did not, despite the fact that he was blinded by his own unconscious prejudice. The point is that I too was blind, but my blindness carried with it the taint of moral superiority. O'Connor showed me that both my father and I were guilty of making abstractions of black people to suit our own conflicting senses of moral order. She also showed me that this is the way it is with us human creatures. We are all at risk of assimilating our fellow creatures into ideas.

So, you see, Daddy was a Klansman, but his son had erred, too, by trying to be something he wasn’t (namely an anti-racist). Both sides! It appears to have never occurred to Dreher that trying to overcome a negative. indeed damaging, heritage might involve some work, some mistakes, and some embarrassment – or maybe the embarrassment was just more painful to him than the racism.

Further down Dreher gets into how “the Left” has turned his back on Martin Luther King (unlike Daddy, who’d never let one o’ them get the drop on him like that), and the obligatory Dreher Black Crime Chronicle:

This past summer, I met a young South African white man, a Christian, who told me the story of how his grandmother and his younger brother back home had been stripped, beaten, and held hostage by black robbers who were sure they knew the combination to the safe (they did not). This young man was under no illusions about the evil of apartheid. But he was also under no illusions that black South Africans were somehow collectively innocent, and free from sin, because his white ancestors had collectively benefited from an evil system.

But then, the world today, which correctly paid so much attention when it was white South Africans brutalizing black ones, prefers not to know what is being done to white South Africans in the post-apartheid period…

His father’s son, alright. Also obligatory is a cameo from Dreher’s exorcist – but it comes with a wrinkle that, so far as I know, is new to Dreher: a warning on the deviltry of Freemasons! 

There's something eerie here too. Just last week, in conversation with an Orthodox priest back in America, a cleric who is also an exorcist, the priest told me how he had discovered in his exorcism work how wicked Freemasonry is. He has seen people become possessed through it. I told him about my Catholic friend in New York whose grandfather was a high-level Freemason in Italy, and who had become possessed through the curse he brought onto the family (which destroyed her father and his generation within the family, and had wreaked havoc on hers). In this conversation, I mentioned to the exorcist my belief that my late father, a 32nd-degree Mason, had been involved with the Klan in the Sixties, and how I suspected that had a lot to do with his prior involvement with Freemasonry. The exorcist told me that I must pray for my father's soul every day for the rest of my life. I agreed to do this.

The problem isn't racism, it’s masonism! Time for Dreher to storm the Vatican to petition his former religion to bestow sainthood on William Wirt.

AND WE'RE GONNA GET BORN.

Just dropping by like a poor relation with a thermos of Irish coffee and Big Star to carol ye Merry Gentlefolk as we did in days of olde.

True, the world is full of human shit:

Several busloads of migrants were dropped off in front of Vice President Kamala Harris’ residence in Washington, DC, on Christmas Eve in 18 degree weather late Saturday.

An initial two busloads were taken to local shelters, according to an administration official. More buses arrived outside the vice president’s residence later Saturday evening. A CNN team saw migrants being dropped off, with some migrants wearing only T-shirts in the freezing weather. They were given blankets and put on another bus that went to a local church.

Tatiana Laborde, managing director of SAMU First Response, said her group was prepared for Saturday night’s arrivals. Busloads of migrants have been arriving in Washington weekly since April.

But! I bring you tidings of great joy, or at least provisional optimism. I have previously said my say about the Republican troll governors who torture these poor souls for political lulz – but also on the blowback: that Americans, who are mostly not the scumbags Abbott and DeSantis take them for, by and large don’t share their viciousness : 

I think [Byron] York is even more wrong than (I’m sure) he secretly knows himself to be. I think Americans generally have heard all the screaming about immigrants, and all about Abbott’s and DeSantis’ use of these poor broke-ass refugees as props in their culture war, and decided they knew who the bad guys are, and it wasn’t the folks who were trying to give these people who fled poverty and God knows what else a break.

So on Christmas -- which if it’s anything is a story about how God lives among the despised and neglected -- which comes near the solstice – which is about turning the corner toward spring -- it’s good to reflect that, as Alex Chilton and the boys sang, “the wrong shall fail and the right prevail.” Now egg your nog, drain your grog and many happy returns. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN (ON A SATURDAY!): 10/22/22.

That French station again! Wacky versions of classics
like this the missus calls “singer competing with song,”
but for me this one’s pure pleasure.

•  Well, why not Saturday ‘Round-the-Horn, huh? I was busy yesterday, sorry.

We’re in the psycho-nutso phase of the election campaign, with a lot of sketchy polling to rile the rubes. Here’s a MAGA douchebag trying to portray himself as beating Letitia James for New York AG based on a poll from Trafalgar Group – who, as I discussed in June, predicted Trump would win in 2020, and have a weirdly opaque method...

…which includes “proprietary digital methods we don’t share publicly,” nudge nudge, as well as “methods to accommodate the ‘Social Desirability Bias’” which they say “allows us to obtain a poll participant’s true feelings in situations where we believe some individuals are not likely to reveal their actual preferences.” In other words, it corrects results to account for the terror of cancel culture that allegedly animates rightwing nuts nowadays — how, they don’t say, but I wouldn’t be shocked if it involved some “wait a minute, this guy’s white, he can’t possibly mean it when he says he thinks America fought on the right side in World War II, maybe antifa is holding him hostage” judgement calls.

For the usual reasons, things do look bad: Midterms are traditionally poison for the party in power and God knows the Prestige Media are pushing rightwing fuckery especially hard now. I don’t counsel hope, so much, as a continuing insistence on the truth because, if the bad guys win, what you really don’t want is for people to forget where the ensuing unpleasantness came from – because you know conservatives, who rely heavily on bamboozlement, will either try to portray it as Just The Way Things Have Always Been, or blame you.

•  Now for the Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies – which were generous this week, because I’m a hell of a guy: First, a plausible Herschel Walker scenario, given his “I meant to do that” follow-up on his toy sheriff badge thing; second, a shorter and more enjoyable version of Rod Dreher’s latest lengthy blubberfest over why he has to forsake his beloved Dixie (and wife and children) for the Führer of the Moment. I mean, can't you just imagine Jean-Jacques Rousseau telling Dreher, “TMI, buddy"?

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 9/30/22.

Lou Rawls got into some heavy shit during his Axelrod years.

•  So much going on these days -- Vlad P’s little “I now declare these territories conquered” ceremony, Clarence Thomas’ crackpot wife just straight-up telling the House committee Biden stole the election, and Trump’s bought judge further demonstrating her indebtedness, etc. – so the whole rightwing pants-shitting spectacle over Lizzo playing Jemmy Madison’s flute comes as an amusing diversion and a suitable subject for a free issue of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down (Subscribe! Cheap!).

Watching dullards like Matt Walsh and Ben Shapiro dig with their sputter-spoons an ever-deeper hole is fun, but it also reminded me of the old days when I used to pay closer attention to the Konservetkult and Sons of Zhdanov, and what has changed since. Back then the ridiculous fist-shaking communiques conservatives regularly issued about how corrupt our “culture” was and how, once the lumpen were suitably indoctrinated with rightwing wisdom, it would become again fresh and pure were just funny – an endless series of reminders that these clowns were as morons before the Muses, that they had no idea what works of art were for and thought they could hector people into accepting their shabby substitutes. As I’ve said more than once, when they say “culture war” they always mean a war on culture. 

That’s still mostly true and the cream of my jest. But in the Trump age there’s been a slight and disturbing change. First, as has happened generally since I began on this beat, the one-time rightblogger small fry have advanced within the conservative movement, so their ravings receive greater attention from the High Command. Once, George H.W. Bush would just make a dumb crack about how Americans needed to be “a lot more like The Waltons and a lot less like The Simpsons” and let it go at that. But in the Reign of Tubby, their fantasies were promoted at the highest levels; for example, they started to push through a Garden of American Heroes --  a sort of anti-woke Disneyland where tourists could stare at heroic statues and get Cultivated. Albert Speer might have blushed.

And Trump’s arts-beat acolytes got more belligerent. When a Public Theatre Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar imagined, reasonably enough, Caesar as Trump, the wingnuts went wild because in the play Caesar gets assassinated – and they thought (or pretended to think) this meant liberals (because artists are all liberals) were calling for the assassination of Trump. In one of the creepier Trump-era writings, National Review Zhdanovite Kyle Smith cheered when sponsors began withdrawing funding from the Public and crackpots like Laura Loomer began interrupting performances because it meant that “Lefty Actors Are Beginning to Fear Donald Trump” – that is, the Trumpkins were terrorizing the Entarte Kunstlers, the logical endgame of culture war when you can't produce any real culture yourself.   

So yeah, it’s still funny that Lizzo and the Founding Flute can set off these clowns (and don’t let me spoil your enjoyment of the story!), but it’s also a reminder of how far they’ll go if they get any power. 

•  Speaking of culture war, one other thing I wanted to mention was the latest entry in the conservative hate-on-for-cities sector: An essay promoted by the hapless Steve Inskeep and written by Hillsdale legacy pledge Carmel Richardson about how all you stupid liberals complaining about housing prices should move to a big house in redstate Bumfuck like she did. Like all her kind, she describes cities as hellholes (“There’s a reason literature’s greatest protagonists [Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, for one] go off the rails while living in seedy rented rooms”); Richardson’s innovation is to attribute the continued – indeed, timeless – appeal of cities to fads spurred by social media:

With the rise of social media and online journalism, key housing markets have become trendy in a way they never could have before. A classified ad now has a national audience, and bougie neighborhoods a ream of TikTok viewers. People are moving to areas they have no connection to and no relatives near because they saw it online and thought it looked cool. I know a few. This has the effect of driving up prices in areas that otherwise would never have known such demand.

Actually, the top end of this price-gouging is driven not by Tik-Tok but by realtor greed, absentee tenants, sub-tenancy gone wild, and other late-capitalism pathologies. But, perhaps owing to her youth (ha, I’m kidding, she’s an apparatchik and must know better), Richardson misses that the big cities she excoriates are always more expensive than cowtowns for a simple reason that people prefer the cities to the cowtowns and people pay more for what they prefer. In fact, she offers as evidence of the attractiveness of Oklahoma and West Virginia that those states are offering cash bonuses to people who come and settle there – as if she’d never heard the old saying “I wouldn’t live there if you paid me.” 

Her closing is a marvel:

It is true that builders cannot keep up with the demand in places like Colorado, Florida, Tennessee, and Northern Virginia, but in the Midwest and other rural regions across the country, in towns no one ever visits on vacation, countless homes stand for sale and empty -- old, beautiful, and undesired by most.

You don’t say. Why “undesired”?

The towns they fill are thinly populated, and the old storefronts are mostly dark. What would happen if we started buying and living in these towns, dusting out the cobwebs and bringing in new life? One has to wonder what kind of people we would have to become to choose a quiet life over nightlife, and a county fair over a $75 brunch.

You stupid libtards with your brunch and nightlife, why won’t you move to a big house out in the middle of nowhere HURRY PLEASE COME KEEP US COMPANY I’M GOING MAD. Maybe the journalism thing is just a front and Richardson is actually working for brokers. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Never go wrong.

•  Got TWO free Roy Edroso Breaks It Down items here, but listen, after this I’m cutting you chiselers off, so make with the subscriptions! First there’s my thoughts on the seemingly evergreen polls showing religion taking a dive in this country, and the kind of churches that are not taking a dive because they don’t ask members to do anything Christlike – just make the pastor rich and hate liberals! Then, one about the polio case in Rockland County and how I expect America’s anti-vaxxer movement to promote his brave stand against protecting oneself from life-threatening diseases with leftist medicine.

•  Busy week and I’m tired, but I have to say I found this story pretty typical of the way conservatives think:

Shortly after the Supreme Court ruling that overturned the right to abortion in June, South Carolina state senators introduced legislation that would make it illegal to “aid, abet or conspire with someone” to obtain an abortion.

The bill aims to block more than abortion: Provisions would outlaw providing information over the internet or phone about how to obtain an abortion. It would also make it illegal to host a website or “[provide] an internet service” with information that is “reasonably likely to be used for an abortion” and directed at pregnant people in the state.

Legal scholars say the proposal is likely a harbinger of other state measures, which may restrict communication and speech as they seek to curtail abortion. The June proposal, S. 1373, is modeled off a blueprint created by the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC), an antiabortion group, and designed to be replicated by lawmakers across the country.

As the fall of Roe v. Wade triggers a flood of new legislation, an adjacent battleground is emerging over the future of internet freedoms and privacy in states across the country — one, experts say, that could have a chilling impact on First Amendment-protected speech.

Conservatives like to say that reliable Democratic voter groups, such as women and black Americans, have been bamboozled into it (“the liberal plantation” etc.), but it’s pretty obvious that these folks get more out of Democratic governance than they do out of Republicans. That’s why the GOP is trying everything it can to keep black people from the polls and women from having control of their own bodies.

But Republican voters don’t get much from Republicans either. Red states have the shittiest government benefits and services, and even when Medicaid expansion makes a better shake possible for them, their rightwing overlords bat it out of their hands. 

We know that what Republicans give their vassals instead of a decent life – along with the traditional assurance that their black neighbors will always have it even worse -- is culture war crap like CRT and trans panic. But it’s not enough to feed them lies – the scam requires that the vassals be kept in the dark so that they never acquire the data to figure out they’ve been rooked. That’s why they continually dump on blue states and big cities – places where they could experience the benefits of liberal models (culture, education, soap and toothpaste) for themselves if they hadn’t been scared out of it by Republican disinfo.

But keeping them in ignorance requires constant vigilance. Since the Dobbs decision, blue state governments and activists have been doing outreach to help women in red states who need reproductive care. It’s a tough lift, but like the blue cities called upon to harbor immigrants kicked out by Texas shitheels, the allegedly godless liberals always seem to be coming up with the Good Samaritanism when red state “Christians” fall down on the job.

As you may have heard, some red states are trying to keep their women from even leaving the premises to visit blue states for legal abortions. The Commerce Clause may make that impossible (until the Supreme Court decides it can be waived because they say so, that’s why). 

But also, insofar as is possible, they don’t want their brood-sows to even know there’s help available among their neighbors, as this repellent legislation shows. Their further hope is that, if they can pull this off, over time their residents won’t even remember that there even exist places where the help they’re denied is offered, or if they do remember they’ll also be imprinted with the message that such places are evil and liberal and full of immigrants and bums and college professors who look down on them and that they didn’t want any of that anyway. They’d really like to force all of us to live this way, of course, but for now this will do. 

I SHOULD BE SO "CANCELLED."

 The New York Times’ latest tongue-bath of cancelculture crybabies may be their best yet. The cancellee in question is Joshua Katz, late of Princeton, which fired him for long-ago inappropriate behavior with a student -- though since Katz is also a “Racism? What’s all this talk about racism? The black students are the real terrorists” gasbag, he has been elevated from faculty lounge horndog to brave truth-teller by the sort of people who think “Don’t Say Gay” laws and rightwing donors dictating curricula aren’t worth mentioning.

But Katz is not the star of Anemona Hartocollis’ Times story. That’s Solveig Gold, who according to the headline is “Proud to Be the Wife of a ‘Canceled’ Princeton Professor.” She too was one of the professor’s sexual mentees while at Princeton, but unlike that other no-doubt-jealous bitch who got him fired won the glittering nuptial prize. 

Gold is a pip:

She did not anticipate the force of the backlash against her husband, Ms. Gold said, because she had voiced controversial opinions before, and had not been shunned. As an undergraduate, for instance, she wrote an essay criticizing the women’s march for providing a platform only for supporters of abortion rights. She attributes this new feeling of hostility to a culture of lock-step thinking ushered in by Gen Z, the generation right behind hers.

Sure, that must be it.

You may be shocked to learn from the story that Mr. and Mrs. Cancelee are not living hand to mouth off odd jobs while jewel-encrusted social justice warriors sneer and laugh at them, but rather have just “returned from a brief decompression trip to Amsterdam and Cambridge, England, where Ms. Gold is completing her Ph.D. in classics” and are throwing a dinner party attended by other brave truth-tellers, photos of which ornament the story. 

One such attendee is Professor Robert P. George, who Hartocollis informs us the New York Times Magazine once called “the country’s ‘most influential conservative Christian thinker,’ for his role in laying the intellectual groundwork for the fights against marriage equality and abortion rights.” George’s intellectual groundwork is something I’d seen before – he’s given to statements like "masturbatory, sodomitical, and other sexual acts which are not reproductive in type cannot unite persons organically” and of course has been driven to mad rage by the progress of same-sex marriage -- "Another flagrant and inexcusable exercise of ‘raw judicial power’ threatens to enflame and prolong the culture war ignited by the courts in the 1973 case of Roe v. Wade,” he sputtered when Prop 8 passed in 2010.

Professor George and his buddies may well celebrate, because at least one SCOTUS Justice is openly with him on that (and who knows what his colleagues will do when they see that the coast is clear). And as long as the Times and all the other prestige media outlets portray these assholes as victims of persecution, rather than as privileged and pampered lunatics pushing unpopular policies on an unwilling nation, the wins will keep on coming. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Feel so alive when no one is around

Here’s one (1) Roy Edroso Breaks It Down free shot for non-subscribers* about the next step in the culture war. (If you missed my mention of it a few days ago, it's news to you!) I’m just impressed with myself that, the way things are going, I was able to get it out before events caught up with me.

*And, heads-up to subscribers: I’m off duty next Monday-through-Friday, so your subscription is “paused,” meaning your subscription ends a week later than scheduled and you’ll get as many weeks as you paid for at the same dirt-cheap prices. (How do I do it? Low overhead!) 

Speaking of my prescience, Elon Musk’s show of buying Twitter only confirms my long-held belief that he will sooner than later emerge as a Republican presidential candidate. (I know he’s foreign-born, but since when does the GOP give a shit about the Constitution?) The purpose of the display is to demonstrate that, as a billionaire and a dick, Musk is the one the few people with both the power and the inclination to stand up to what conservatives have convinced themselves is the cause of America’s problems, “Big Tech” (i.e., the only kind of rich people whose asses Republicans won’t kiss). I don’t care if he succeeds and I doubt he does either; he’s got rich people’s ADD, and can only focus on things that are immediately gratifying to himself, which means Twitter’s poison pill trick is a suitable tactic -- if they can hold out long enough he’ll get irritable and go buy something else big to fill the Void. But either way he will have shown that, unlike the Republican politicians who gripe about Big Tech but never produce the promised anti-BT legislation, Musk is Willing To Do Something About It. That and his built-in appeal to a growing sub-generation of rightwing tech choads should have him buying votes in bulk soon. Read my essay and see if I’m not right! 

COURT AND STARK.

I have released today’s Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, which manages to convey all the thrills and much of the bullshit of the Ketanji Jackson Brown hearings in just a few minutes. 

As I mentioned earlier on Twitter, Republicans have brought culture war gibberish to SCOTUS confirmation hearings before, but the level of it in these hearings is off the charts, and I know why: Because if conservatives revealed in these hearings what they really want out of the Court, normal Americans would recoil in horror. (In fact, outside the chambers, Republican Senator Mike Braun denounced Loving v Virginia and Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn denounced Griswold v Connecticut; it was as if they compelled to expose themselves -- or to test the waters.)

Thus they wave children’s books and quiz the judge on female anatomy to distract from their malicious judicial agenda. Their rubes, instead of complaining that their Senators didn’t stop this black lady from furthering darkening the Court, will feel satisfied that they made a big stink against Wokemob Cancelculture, and (they hope) ordinary people will only notice that the usual dull yammering noise about the usual stupid topics is going on, and ignore their more sinister purpose.

AID & COMFORT CONSERVATIVES.

Back after 9/11, when America itself was attacked, conservatives demanded we invade a country that had nothing to do with it and called those of us who said “hey, wait a minute” traitors. 

This memory adds piquancy to the roll call of prominent conservatives who, in the wake of his unconscionable invasion of Ukraine, are loving up Vladimir Putin. Tucker Carlson:

Tulsi Gabbard:

Glenn Greenwald:

Steve Bannon:

And the leader of the opposition:

A former president praising a foreign dictator's invasion. Well, you get old enough, you live to see it all. 

And this is just a partial list. Some of it's based on the longstanding Putinphilia of the American Right, but there's even weirder stuff behind it. Rod Dreher, "mainstream" conservatism's favorite religious maniac, has utterly flipped; while dropping in "I don't approve" every so often (his primitive idea of ass-covering), Dreher explains Putin's invasion: 

So, when I read these days that much-quoted line Vladimir Putin uttered some years back, in which he lamented the tragedy of the USSR’s demise, I think of Trianon and the Hungarians. Though he was a KGB man, I don’t think Putin is a nostalgist for Bolshevism. He’s a nostalgist for Greater Russia — a Russia that was bigger, more powerful, and prouder on the world stage. If I had not come to Hungary last year and learned about Trianon, I am sure I would not have been able to grasp what this means to people whose countries have been dismantled or disempowered by war and historical fate.

Similarly, it has helped me to understand why so many Southerners feel so bitter about the Civil War and its latest iteration — the demonization of Confederate monuments and Southern culture.

So, see, this invasion isn't just imperialism or psychosis -- like Dreher's hero Viktor Orban, Putin just wants a return to the Old Order, which when you think about it is true conservatism. More than that, it reminds Dreher of the nostalgia for the Confederacy in his neck of the woods. Talk about bringing it all back home!

Another aspect of today’s news that we Americans should consider, but rarely do: the role of Ukraine, especially Kiev, in the Russian religious imagination. We simply have nothing to compare it to.

It's religious, people. And we have to stretch our concept of "freedom" and "right and wrong" to accommodate it, because as we all know religion can't have any bad consequences. 

As has also become his habit, Dreher reminds us that the West is rotten and Putin at least has Christian values (i.e., persecutes minorities):

But what about the Western empire today? To my eyes, we are decadent, and ruled by an elite that despises our own history, traditions, and the unwoke deplorables among us. We are ruled by an elite who think of many of us as savages: racist, transphobic bigots who must be brought to heel...

Putin is an authoritarian who uses Western decadence in the same way the Soviet regime did: to justify its own repression. Nevertheless, that decadence really is there!

 I'll only add this bit from a post Dreher put up the night before:

Now, if you think the US can funnel military supplies to the Ukraine resistance without suffering any consequences from Russia, you are being a fool. Russia’s cyberwarriors would devastate American institutions. We are not nearly as strong as we think.

When, as I said, conservatives (including Dreher) were denouncing those of us who opposed America's invasion of another country as un-American, if any citizen had talked about how the United States had better not tangle with Saddam Hussein because we were sure to be "devastated," that person would probably have been spirited away to a black site. Things sure have changed. 

UPDATE. Just wanted to get this in here: 

Now she's blaming it on Hunter Biden. Jesus. I can imagine if she were starving or her family were in danger, but otherwise there's really no excuse for sinking this low except an absolute lack of human decency. 

UPDATE 2. This cannot be an exhaustive list but just wanted to get this fuckface in here:

WINGNUTS VS. ARTIST, PART 453,409.

I have released to gen pop my Roy Edroso Breaks It Down essay on the Neil Young/Spotify thing, which controversy has some interesting (and by interesting I mean stupid) political facets but is mainly significant as a reminder that for conservatives “culture war” is actually a war on culture. 

It is something to see rightwingers (and other idiots) attack Young, first on the ridiculous grounds that he is somehow “censoring” Joe Rogan, and then, in the manner of old Superman TV show villains ineffectually emptying their guns on Superman and then throwing the guns at him, claiming he’s a shitty musician. Even worse than the Twitter morons who say he sucks because [citation needed] are wingnut enforcers like Armond White in National Review who claim Young is inferior to, I shit you not, Kid Rock because the latter is more authentically anti-establishment (i.e. worships Trump):

Yes, a brief time between culture wars produced the lovely, singular Americana Are You Passionate? and Greendale, but now it’s disappointingly clear that Young’s facile politics often lacked moral foundation.

“Young’s facile politics often lacked moral foundation” -- barring a few translation issues, Andrei Zhdanov couldn’t have put it better himself. For White music as such doesn't even exist except as a vehicle for appropriate propaganda. In this war I’ll stay on the side of culture, thanks.