WHITE MAN SPEAK WITH FORKED TONGUE.

So now she's not Indian enough:

In the immortal words of Jay Silverheels, ugh. I wrote way back in 2012 about rightwingers' woo-woo-woo jokes about Pocahontas Warren (“You Won’t Have Elizabeth Warren To Kick Around By Indian Summer,” said Dan Riehl shortly before she was elected Senator) and today was the first day they even slightly altered their shtick. Warren could split open and Sitting Bull himself emerge from the husk, and conservatives would say, "hyuk, she was pretending to be a chick all along to get that sweet affirmative action!"

There is no reasoning with these people, nor any point in taking them seriously.

UPDATE. I see the credentialed and formerly respectable conservatives are playing the same stupid game. National Review's David French, who recently completed his turn to Trumpkinism by telling the world  Trump calling for his opponents to be jailed was nothing compared to liberals being mean to Ted Cruz, is now pretending to be outraged by what he calls Warren's "resume fraud." French talks as if her criminality were obvious to all True Sons of Liberty, which is what these putzes do when they're nervous that no one is listening to them. Finally, the last refuge of a NeverTrumper turned Tip-InTrumper -- he says Warren's the real Trump!  Can you imagine Tom Cruise once made people think JAG officers were cool?

UPDATE 2. In my newsletter today (Subscribe! Cheap!) I explain, among other things, why this is Bad News for Donald Trump:

Trump uses insults like this to neutralize his enemies, but by showing she had some Native American blood — not 1/32nd or three generations back, as her family had told her, but between 1/64th to 1/1,024th, or six to ten generations — Warren showed her good-faith claim was based on reality, and good faith and reality are to Trump as garlic and crucifixes to a vampire, as shown by his even more petulant than usual response: claiming "who cares" — a weird response to something he normally goes out of his way to make a big deal of — and that he never made a promise to pay a million dollars if Warren's Indian heritage were proven even though his promise is on tape. ("It was in the context of a future hypothetical debate and wasn’t actually a promise to give one million to her charity if she actually did a DNA test," homina-homina'd the ball-washers at The Right Scoop.) 

In other words, Trump couldn't even act like he was on top in this situation —he just blustered, something he's actually always doing but, in this instance, was so clearly doing it that even the redhat dummies might notice.

I would also add that, as with French and this Breitbart schnook, the fallback position among conservatives is that the Lame Stream Media, though malice or stupidity, missed the real story, which is that Warren and not Trump is the real crook. Not only is this message not a compelling one,  but they're delivering it to a small audience that already despises Warren and could not despise her more; normal people with memories of the schoolyard will appreciate her fighting back.

THE LADYKILLERS.

As I've said, and keep saying in my latest newsletter (subscribe! It don't cost much), it seems all conservatives are now solidly on board with Brett Kavanaugh and the Tit and Clit Club and, when it comes to their arguments in defense of the accused attempted rapist, the sober mainstream types are more or less indistinguishable from the crazy he-man woman-haters club types on the fringe. Dig professional harrumph machine David French, for example, arguing in the allegedly legit National Review that the real problem is not Georgetown Prep Republicans who think they own women, but liberal jazzbos who "stripped away moral prohibitions against extramarital sex, celebrated youthful experimentation, combined it with similar celebrations of drug and alcohol use — even at early ages — and then have been shocked — no, stunned — at the sheer amount of groping, grabbing, coercion, and assault." Yeah, elite males getting drink and rapey are the fault of Hugh Hefner; before the 60s, they only raped low-status females who were easily paid off and no one was the wiser.

But give the low-class conservatives credit; while guys like French are matching them in misogyny, they can't keep up with their expertise in plain old insanity.

Take Robert Stacy McCain, who I last noticed attacking Sarah Jeong for racism against whites -- "No one at Harvard or at the New York Times will speak a word in favor of white people, Christians, heterosexuals, or police officers" -- which was pretty ballsy of him, considering McCain is a neo-Confederate.

Well, sure enough, the American Spectator enlisted McCain to tell this mouthy Christine Blasey Ford a thing or two. A large part of his rap, you will not be surprised to hear, involves the Rolling Stone/UVA case -- when Men's Rights types can't get it up for normal porn anymore, they can always get a stiffy over that.

But the meat, as it were, of McCain's argument is that Kavanaugh's accuser has no right to be in a position to make such an accusation -- and the fact that she is in such a position suggests that she's lying:

It is perhaps not a coincidence that Judge Kavanaugh’s accuser is a university professor. The former prep-school girl Christine Blasey went on to obtain two master’s degrees and a Ph.D. in psychology, marry an engineer named Russell Ford, and thus become Professor Ford of California’s Palo Alto University. 

That's how women get doctorates and professorates: Marrying titled men!

Having spent her entire adult life working in academia, Professor Ford is eminently qualified as a representative of the mentality that currently prevails on our nation’s university campuses, where male students are presumed guilty of rape as soon as any female student accuses them.

Interesting. And what mentality is represented by Kavanaugh, who has spent his entire adult life as a factotum to Republican Party bosses? Why should his predictable careerist rise be any less suspicious than hers? It would seem the main difference between Kavanaugh's and Ford's position among the "elite," in McCain's view, is that hers is absurd because she lacks a penis.

This mentality was what led to the debacle at the University of Virginia in 2014, when a Rolling Stone reporter destroyed her career...

Let us draw the curtain, or close the men's room door, on McCain, and look in on Dennis Prager at National Review. Prager is a total idiot who has in the past argued that wives owe their husbands sex ("Why do we assume that it is terribly irresponsible for a man to refuse to go to work because he is not in the mood, but a woman can -- indeed, ought to -- refuse sex because she is not in the mood?"). I wouldn't say he's topped that in his pissy column "The Charges against Judge Kavanaugh Should Be Ignored," but he comes close. First he pretty much accepts that Kavanaugh tried to rape Ford but shrugs it off because he's been such a good boy since ("No matter how good and moral a life one has led for ten, 20, 30, 40, or even 50 years, it is nullified by a sin committed as teenager"), and that anyone should think otherwise is just "another example of the moral chaos sown by secularism and the Left." But here's the money part, and by "money" I mean nuts:

When my wife was a waitress in her mid teens, the manager of her restaurant grabbed her breasts and squeezed them on numerous occasions. She told him to buzz off, figured out how to avoid being in places where they were alone, and continued going about her job. That’s empowerment.

If only gals would learn to dodge their bosses' advances like Andy dodged butt-rape in The Shawshank Redemption, then come home and gave their husbands the blowjobs they deserve, we'd have the little gender thing fixed up PDQ.

THE WHITE WORKING CLASS WHISPERER HITS A SNAG.

I recently noticed that one of my 2017 tweets -- about a fanciful story by one of my favorite subjects, White Working Class Whisperer Salena Zito -- was suddenly getting a lot of play. Then I saw new Twitter threads and old stories suggesting Zito is, how you say, full of shit. People began making fun of her now-infamous gas station anecdotes. Also she's being defended by Bethany Mandel, which, like the appearance of a famous mob mouthpiece at a gangland trial, is not probative but certainly suggestive.

Let me state for the record that, in my coverage of Zito's writing, I've never accused her of fabrication. I have observed that many pronouncements she attributes to her allegedly salt-of-the-earth subjects sound a mite canned ("It took me a while to realize those words weren’t theirs, but skillfully crafted sentences that had been massaged and focus-group tested by a full staff of speechwriters and strategists..."); in fact even her paraphrases sound too good to be true. Also, I noticed her referring to Republicans as Democrats for apparent conversion-narrative purposes back in 2016, a tendency for which the new jacks have found more examples.

Which is hilarious, but kind of beside the point. When I'm not regaling you good people here and at the Voice I work on trade publications ("It's a living" -- bird on The Flintstones), and I can assure you that, in that homely branch of journalism, attributions are taken very seriously. But I know pundits like Zito get a lot more slack -- hence the Alan Bromleys and Friedman cab drivers of the world, dispensing unverifiable swear-to-Gods in the service of verisimilitude. I can't imagine any reader of even normal intelligence will fail to hear the clang of poorly-written dialogue any time one of these writers' simulacra speaks. They'll believe if their need to do so is great enough, in which case no Twitter expose is going to change their minds.

So Zito's alleged journalistic crimes I take in stride. If anything I've been much more amused by her sneakiness -- like using a rich surgeon's family as an example of down-to-earth Trumpiness ("On the wall, she was adamant: 'Build it'") by referring to them as "upper-middle-class suburban voters who live in a blue-collar, upper-middle-class exurb," which is almost adorable, like seeing a melting ice cream cone dripping behind the back of a kid who's trying to pretend he didn't steal it. I'm also impressed by how committed Zito is to her Trumpkin shtick-- even allowing herself to look dumb and incoherent in defense of The Leader's gibberish (and, when the jig is up, she knows how to diminish expectations on his behalf -- this act can travel!). Not to mention the (to me) most important fact: that, even by the slithering standards of rightwing propaganda, she's a God-awful writer. But I'm a terrible cynic; your mileage, and that of the nation's editors, may vary.

ALL MOD CONS.

I have yet to hear a convincing explanation why Scott Pruitt was finally egressed. John Fund's at Fox, expectedly, makes the least sense: "pressure rose for Pruitt to step down," he claims, "when his travails shifted from the merely humiliating to potential legal violations." This suggests -- from a normal person's point of view (which, I will explain in a minute, may not be the way to look at it) -- that Trump was aware of a year's worth of "humiliating" events and just shrugged them off, or told Pruitt to stop it and Pruitt said "sure t'ing boss" and got even worse, and Trump only noticed this week.

Fund suggests Pruitt having people falsify his official calendar was the back-breaking straw -- but he doesn't mention that it appears Pruitt fired one of his schedulers for making a stink about his fraud which, call me over-sensitive, I think makes it so much worse. Nor does Fund mention that Pruitt made his employees cover his hotel bills and then failed to pay them back. It's almost like Fund doesn't find it especially noteworthy when a made man in Trumpworld screws his poorer subordinates, which given what conservatives are like these days makes sense.

Anyway, Pruitt's maladministration of the EPA was terrible and will lead to lasting damage to the planet, but his successor will pretty much keep up the planet-killing work with a lower profile -- in the same way that, when high-living HHS Secretary Tom Price finally got too embarrassing to keep, they just slotted in pharmaceutical executive Alex Azar, who yakked about how he and his phrama buddies really wanted to keep drug prices down and who has overseen a bunch of price hikes which, Politico hilariously observes, "cast doubt on whether Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar can pressure manufacturers to voluntarily drop prices without the threat of specific consequences."

Well, bad, even destructive administration is par for the course with this lot, but Pruitt's trail of grifts is the stuff of legend and we should take a moment to marvel at and perhaps learn from it. It has long been my theory that Trump's administration is so overwhelmingly corrupt because a.) no one with anything to lose, reputation-wise, would have anything to do with him in the first place, and b.) there is honor among thieves, and Trump's understanding with them is, if he goes down they're going with him.

I still think that's about right, but the volume, scale, and exoticism of Pruitt's scandals -- his wild impulse purchases, from his cone of silence to his tactical pants; his muscling of business for personal favors; and his aforementioned, vicious exploitation of his employees -- are extraordinary even for this administration. Indeed, his behavior would seem, under normal circumstances, evidence of mental instability -- surely no one sane would go that far in a cabinet post under the full glare of national publicity.

Maybe so, but let us be charitable and imagine that Pruitt was not just greedy, but actually responsive to an existential imperative. Here he was, a man of limited talent of intelligence, not only placed far about his deserts and abilities but set among some of the greatest crooks of his time in the great candy shop of the public fisc. Being a Republican, he was already accustomed, indeed trained, to think of anything in a public Treasury as ransom held by liberal commies and queers that should by right and in the name of Reagan be liberated into the Private Sector, preferably through the medium of one's own pockets (doing good by doing well, haw!). And certainly when one is set about such work shoulder to shoulder with such as Ben Carson and Ryan Zinke, one is encouraged to go hard about it rather than gentle. What if Pruitt had a moment of poetic insight -- for these can happen to all kinds of people -- and saw, in the midst of otherwise quotidian graft, what this implied about life itself. Maybe he saw then that all was madness -- that men die and they are not happy -- and was driven by that insight to buy the tactical pants, to cheat even his own aides, to grift until even the God of grift said, no more. Let us at least accept the possibility that Pruitt was not merely greedy, but touched by the madness of Camus' Caligula.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the imprisoned, immiserated immigrant kids and the Cult of Civility outcry that has ridiculously ensued. If you tried to explain to a normal person how a racist administration's notorious abuse of children and shameless defense thereof led our Guardians of Groupthink to admonish, not the guilty parties, but the liberals who mildly expressed their frustration to the guilty parties, he might not understand you, so I have tried to explain it for the masses.

I didn't have time to stick in other examples of woe-is-me snowflakery, like complaints over Seth Rogen rebuffing Paul Ryan ("The stoner comedy stalwart has built a career on playing the over-his-head everyman," foams Conservative Tribune, "...yet is shockingly clueless about everyday America in real life. During a recent appearance on Stephen Colbert’s increasingly leftist late-night program..."). Like Ryan didn't just assume Rogen was merely protecting his brand! They're both big boys.

As usual, Rod Dreher is ridiculous on the subject. He's mad that Maxine Waters encouraged people to give "anybody from that cabinet" a hard time. Trump's cabinet is basically a supervillain cabal whose members' only superpower is immunity from prosecution, so I can't fault Maxine; if we can't prosecute the bastards, let us at least tell them to go fuck themselves. But Dreher thinks this liberal Helter Skelter. He soothes himself by having a talk with some nice lady he came across in Boston:

“I’m only sorry that I wasn’t here long enough to have any Massachusetts oysters,” I said. “They’re the best in America.”

“You’re right about that!” she said. “My husband is in the restaurant business, and we both love oysters.”

I bid her farewell, and told her I look forward to coming back to Boston when I have time to eat. She smiled at me, wished me a safe flight, and went off down the street with her dog.

Boston being Boston, she’s probably quite liberal. She might have accurately figured me for a conservative, given that I’m from Louisiana. It didn’t matter. We had a lovely conversation about our shared love of dogs and oysters.

That is America.

Awwww. I wonder how the conversation would have gone if Dreher were the DHS Secretary, his agents had snatched the lady's kids and put them on a plane to God knows where, and Dreher was on record saying that's just what happens to people like her. Maybe it still would have been sunshine and lollipops!

UPDATE. I should note that Dreher quotes in support of his point a CNN received-opinion group grope as described by Mediaite:

RealClearPolitics editor A.B. Stoddard kicked off the CNN panel by pointing out that Waters is set to take over a highly important position in the House as chair of the Financial Services Committee — and "she’s doing everything she can to prevent her own promotion."

Gasp! It's almost as if Waters doesn't share the priorities of a bunch of careerist shits!

“This is beyond overreach,” Stoddard said. “It is so outrageous that she is trying to motivate voters on her side to be as divisive as President Trump...."

Only Trump can be divisive -- your job is to be a spineless wimp and go "gee, fellas, I don't know about these concentration camps," as Republicans stampede you en route to sacking and looting the country. It's in the script!

UPDATE 2. Now the shtick for conservatives is that they're ascared Maxine Waters and her liberal friends will kill them, so their factota circulate bullshit stories supporting this delusion. Hack of hacks Paul Bedard at the Washington Examiner:

Trump aides urged to get a gun 

Facing a new wave of potentially dangerous threats, called for by a top Democratic lawmaker, legal and gun experts are calling on top Trump aides to get their concealed carry permit and back it up with a pistol, 

"There are simply not enough police in D.C. or Virginia or Maryland to protect all Trump officials at their homes and when they go out to restaurants. Getting a concealed handgun permit would be helpful to protect themselves and their family,” said John R. Lott Jr., president of the influential Crime Prevention Research Center.

John R. Lott -- possibly the most notorious lyin'-ass bitch among the gun nuts' pet scholars! Still, I endorse Trump officials following his advice and getting guns because, seeing what fuckups they are, they'll probably just shoot themselves with them. It's win-win!

DEFENDING THE EVEN-MORE-INDEFENSIBLE-THAN-USUAL.

Trump's brown-baby-stealing proceeds apace and, as we saw in my Monday Village Voice column, conservatives are really reaching to make it try and make it look good -- or, I should say instead, since nothing can make this abomination look good, to try and distract people from noticing how evil it is and they are.

Part of their shtick has been, amazingly, humor, as we saw when former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski reacted on CNN to the seizure of a disabled 10-year-old girl with a comedy sound effect. That Lewandowski refuses to apologize for being an obvious asshole -- demanding instead, in the long tradition of Trump factota, that someone apologize for people "killed by illegal aliens," some of whom were presumably 10-year-old girls with Down Syndrome -- shows, just as Ilsa She-Wolf of Homeland Security's choice of restaurant last night shows, that their intention is to act as if those of us with basic decency are the ones who are fucked up for protesting their treatment of the untermenschen.

In the category of long-form humor, here's John Zmirak of The Stream demanding -- wait, you'll love this -- we "Seize Ivy League Dorms and Give Them to Immigrant Families." Ha! "Lest Laura Bush, Catholic bishops, and Planned Parenthood throw another public tantrum about how the U.S. is Nazi Germany or something" -- keep your chuckles down, punters, the real gags are on the way -- and because Democrats just loooove the "little brown kids" because though they're "a little too old for Planned Parenthood to dismember and sell in Styrofoam coolers" they're perfect to use as "human shields for open borders policies" -- because why else would anyone care what happens to the little shits, amirite? Come on lady, I laughed when you came in! -- then, Zmirak zmirks, we should "Fill the Lavish Dorms with Migrant Families, and House Students in Tent Cities."

Zmirak's big joke thereafter is an image of Messicans nestled in a "glorious Gothic dining hall, with sixty-foot carved ceilings and iron candelabras," being served their food by the silly SJW students. Liberals made to serve the brownskins they pretend to love so much -- it's a classic conservative humiliation fantasy straight out of Birth of a Nation. To add cream to the jest, Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds pimps that shit to his own coprophages and, in their rush to assault their strawmen, they suggest things like "Just dump them all in Brooklyn" -- because that's where the hipsters live, see, and since they're all limp-wristed sissies they've probably never seen an immigrant, especially in the trendier nabes like Crown Heights and Bed-Stuy.

A bunch of them are weeping over the heckling of Ilsa -- "PUNDITS, ACTIVISTS CELEBRATE HARASSMENT OF FEMALE DHS SECRETARY" screams The Daily Caller; you libtards are supposed to love females! -- with the apparent, fond hope that readers will find a straight-up fascist government functionary forced to hear the complaints of her constituents for a couple of minutes more sympathetic than children torn from their parents and stuck in cages because Trump wants to Look Tuff. Well, with readers of The Daily Caller I guess they have a shot. With normal people, not so much.

UPDATE. Looks like Ilsa wants to walk in the sun again. Let's see what else we can get these assholes to back off of.

YOU GOTTA FIGHT FOR YOUR RIGHT TO PRIDE PARADE.

The Trump era was made for such as Rod Dreher. He likes to protest that he's not a Trumpkin, but no one else on God's green earth has as many "I'm not a Trump supporter but..." qualifiers in his writing as he does. Part of this has to do with his Benedict Option racket -- how can he sell the rubes on his monasticism-plus-wifi palaver if Trump has sanctified the land and removed the need for holy retreat? But mainly it's that Trump is Dreher's secret dream: He's embarrassed by Trump, but he loves what Trump is doing for America -- that is, making it easier for bigots like himself.

Lately Brother Rod's been especially hard on the blacks and the gays. Recently he found a Quillette article by a black wingnut at Columbia where the kid, Coleman Hughes, actually asks: if Rihanna gets to have an all-black band, why can't a white person have an all-white band? The obvious answer is GO TO ANY GODDAMN MUSIC FESTIVAL IN AMERICA OR THE U.K. THEY DO IT ALL THE TIME! But Dreher's excited, thinks Hughes is "very, very brave" -- though I can't guess why, because black wingnuts are worth their weight in gold these days -- why, with such credentials you can commit felonies and, if you're sufficiently vituperative toward liberals, there's a good chance Trump will pardon you. (Dinesh D'Souza is so juiced about his pardon that, to reward his benefactor by making him look racially sensitive, D'Souza actually inferred that he himself is a person of color, which I don't believe I've ever seen him do before; usually he hits black people with racial slurs.)

Anywho, Dreher thinks Hughes is the bees knees and, though there's nothing in the Quillette article about gay people, he hauls them into the target area too:

[Hughes] focuses on blacks, but as a general matter, if you read the mainstream press, you’ll find there’s a tendency to treat gays and other minority groups favored by liberals with kid gloves — as if they were symbols, not real people, with the same virtues and vices that everybody else has.

"Mainstream media" being here an obvious, redundant synonym for liberals, this is a callback to an ancient trope that I've been hearing all my life -- probably most familiar to you via Tom Wolfe, but known to me by the yammering of the bigots I grew up with: That liberals, who are always assumed to be white, must not see blacks as fully human -- because if they did they would, like conservatives, despise them. But this Dreher column is the first place I can remember seeing gays pulled into this if-you-really-knew-them-you'd-hate-them-like-me paradigm as well.

The gays have been on Dreher's mind much of late, thanks to Masterpiece Cakeshop's SCOTUS victory over the same-sexers who thought they had a right to buy a wedding cake from them. Over several posts Dreher pee-dances over the decision because it was narrow and does not guarantee a wider right to discriminate against Sodomites (and to keep alive the BenOp shtick, natch). It's all disgusting, but one section particularly leapt out at me: Dreher quotes with approval (that is, he says the author "nails what's happening") R.R. Reno of the theocon magazine First Things on Masterpiece:

That two gay men in Denver can bring to bear the full power of the state against a baker who does not wish to bake them a wedding cake is the height of absurdity. The gay couple do not belong to a vulnerable class of Americans. IRS data show that male-male married couples filing jointly have dramatically higher family incomes than other married couples, to say nothing of the disintegrating working-class families who don’t enjoy the benefits of marriage. Empowering a segment of the upper class to beat up on those who don’t approve of their sex lives is a recipe for social fragmentation.

This brought to my mind the triumphal citation among normal people of gay earning power and corporate acceptance as a sign that gay rights are here to say. I actually got a taste of this today at the corporate cafeteria I visited for lunch, where they were giving away Pride t-shirts, festooned with anodyne (and mostly too small to read) pro-gay hashtags and the (large and readable) company logo on the back. The innocuous ubiquity, or ubiquitous innocuousness, of this sort of thing may give the impression that the battle has been won.

But the very thing that looks like victory -- and should mean victory, given that America advertises itself as a place where honest commercial and financial success are all that matter -- is what Reno is using to attack gays: the notion that they "do not belong to a vulnerable class," and in fact "beat up on" the "disintegrating working-class families" (always presumed to be white and straight) who "don’t enjoy the benefits of marriage"  -- that is, have chosen not to get married, which in the minds of Reno and Dreher must be the gays' fault -- or that of the liberals (always, also, presumed to be white and straight) who, perversely and disloyally, side with the gays. As for the beating-up, why, that is done by gays merely by being gay, and being so rude as to insist on what in other contexts are called Constitutional rights.

In short, these people will do anything to destroy gay rights, and the easiest path for them now is to pretend they're doing so on behalf of less fortunate white straights -- in other words, that segment of the population shown to be most susceptible to Trump's bullshit. If they can convince these poor white, het dopes that gays are stealing something from them -- Straight pride? Jobs that might otherwise be reserved for heterosexuals? The right to beat up and/or rape a class of people that had been fair game in their pappy's day? -- then they just might be able to hitch the Trump Train to their retro mission and pull things back to the way things were before members of the same gender could hold hands in public, let alone all that other stuff.

What I'm saying is, happy Pride, but be prepared: Stonewall was a riot, and it looks as if we may have to pick up some paving stones ourselves.

RETURN TO NORMALCY.

Sometimes it's just good to shut out all the jibber-jabber and look at the situation as if we were all still normal people.

Trump's at one of his stupid events and some sheriff mentions MS-13; Trump, doing the usual stream-of-semiconsciousness slurring he does whenever foreigners of a certain hue are mentioned, says something absurdly offensive. Times being what they are, I have to reproduce the relevant section -- not for the Trumpkins who are deaf to evidence, but just to remind you and me what actually happened:

SHERIFF MIMS: Thank you. There could be an MS-13 member I know about — if they don’t reach a certain threshold, I cannot tell ICE about it. 

THE PRESIDENT: We have people coming into the country, or trying to come in — and we’re stopping a lot of them — but we’re taking people out of the country. You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals. And we’re taking them out of the country at a level and at a rate that’s never happened before. And because of the weak laws, they come in fast, we get them, we release them, we get them again, we bring them out. It’s crazy.

The meaning is not really in dispute. We can't even say that it would be different if someone other than Trump said it, because if someone other than Trump said it and it were pointed out to that person what it sounded like, unless that person were a Nazi or the near equivalent, he or she would attempt to explain themselves and probably be slightly embarrassed that he or she had allowed themselves to be so disgracefully misapprehended.

But instead wingnuts screamed that Trump meant only MS-13, for what else could a sensible person like Trump mean, and in fact the Real Outrage is that liberals are supporting MS-13. The first proposition is asserted by replacement-level douchebags like this --

-- and the even further-out secondary proposition is asserted by Times-endorsed "cool kid philosophers" and Intellectual Dark Websters (you know, morons) like this --

In response the mainsteam media falls all over itself to appease and agree, yes, the President could not possibly have meant what it sounded like he said; and Trump lopes a hammy arm around the neck of the mainstream media and says oh, yeah, right, I meant that other thing.

I'm never a fan of the 11-dimension-chess POV where natural reactions are treated like Machiavellian gambits, notwithstanding this has become everyone's default POV in the Age of This Is Why Trump Won. And in this case, in which you have a million wingnuts screaming not only that Trump would never slander immigrants (when that is self-evidently most of his shtick and his appeal) but also that liberals are in favor of MS-13, I think it makes even more sense to step back and try to imagine: What would a normal person -- of which we have millions more in the country than political obsessives, thank God -- think about this? Would he or she really look at Trump, who's been what he's been, and the Democrats, who've been what they've been, and think: You're right, Trump's just being fair and the Democrats are openly supporting Latin American drug gangs?

If you first reaction is to say that's exactly what they think, that's an understandable mistake -- the mainsteam media is so far up Trump's ass that it daily, unthinkingly disseminates the impression that Trump is normal and all America is one big Trump rally. But neither the vote totals nor the poll numbers support this -- and neither does my, nor your, experience of ordinary people -- and I don't just mean (though I certainly don't exclude) academics and intellectuals and public union employees, but also carpenters and crossing guards and waitresses and landscapers, and other folks who are not included among the caricatures of American voters we read about in the major newspapers that tell us the Real Americans spend all days siting in Pennsyltucky diners telling New York Times reporters how Obama let the Ordinary Diner-Sitting American down -- notwithstanding that Democrats have been flipping dozens of Congressional seats since Trump got in.

In other words, the American People may not agree with you on everything, but that doesn't make them dumb -- and certainly not as dumb as wingnut crackpots want you to believe they are. So don't you believe it. Hold fast, have faith, tell the truth, and shame the devil.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Cranky old David Thomas totally bailed emotionally when the band did this last Thursday in D.C., but fortunately we have the artifact.
It may be that I am insufficiently woke, but the story of Al Franken kissing a woman who wasn't into it seems more sad than monstrous to me; as for Franken pretending to grope her, we'll just have to agree to disagree whether that's a criminal matter. I do notice that numerous liberals have rushed to demand Franken's resignation and some Democratic Senate colleagues (and Franken himself) have demanded he be formally investigated. Rightwingers, meanwhile, either accused liberals of covering up for him or laughed at them for being stupid enough to fall for their feigned outrage ("Can you imagine how the left must be twisting up as they are turning on one of their own? Al Franken has been thrown under the bus"). The worst response so far, however, comes from Jonathan V. Last of the Weekly Standard, whose headline, "Al Franken: Even Worse Than You Think," should be actionable under Truth in Advertising laws. Last opens by quoting Franken about his time at Saturday Night Live:

There was not as much cocaine as you would think on the premises. Yeah, a number of people got in trouble. But cocaine was used mainly just to stay up. There was a very undisicplined way of writing the show, which was staying up all night on Tuesday. We didn't have the kind of hours that normal people have. And so there was a lot of waiting until Tuesday night, and then going all night, and at two or three or four in the morning, doing some coke to stay up, as opposed to doing a whole bunch, and doing nitrous oxide, and laughing at stuff. People used to ask me about this and I'd always say, "No, there was no coke. It's impossible to do the kind of show we were doing and do drugs." And that was just a funny lie that I liked to tell. Kind of the opposite was true, unfortunately, for some people, it was impossible to do the show without the drugs.

Here is how Last responds to this mild it-was-the-70s anecdote:

So Franken liked to tell funny lies about not using drugs when he wasn’t writing a book castigating Republicans which was titled -- this is so great -- Lies: And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. Maybe now when he says that he “doesn’t remember” his encounter with Tweenden the way she describes it, this is a funny lie, too.

He also suggests that Franken was guilty of "distributing" drugs because John Belushi did some of his blow. The "funny lies" bit is perfect enraged-dorkspeak -- sputter, you took drugs and yet didn't turn yourself in, now John Belushi is dead and it's all your fault, so what else are you lying about Mr. Funny Liar??? Speaking of your high school guidance counselor, Last is also mad that Franken slurred Spiro Agnew:

I mean, sure, Agnew fought in the Battle of the Bulge and was awarded a Bronze Star. And yeah, I guess it’s true that as governor of Maryland, Agnew repealed the state’s laws against interracial marriage. But you know, he was a double-plus bad Republican and Franken was a coked-up, 20-something comedian in New York. So he really showed that guy.

You are more likely to know Agnew as a guy who pleaded out of a kickbacks charge and had to resign the Vice-Presidency, but that's probably because you're a damn cokehead.

THE DEATH OF THE PET ROCK.

Y'know, most of the time I occupy myself here by making fun of Jonah Goldberg and other mentally defective sinecure jockeys, and part of the reason for that is I don't want to just come to you good people with my opinions. I understand pure opinion, untainted by close reading or analysis or even evidence that the opinionator has walked a time or two around the block, is the real high-stakes game in today's media, and that's why Chris Cillizza is making, what, eleven million dollars to put out shit like "It took Hillary Clinton five days to issue this statement about Harvey Weinstein" (She has, so now we can go back to waiting for Greg Gutfeld to denounce Roger Ailes, I guess) and "Donald Trump is acting like a fifth-grade bully" -- boy, that'll twirl some tassels in the head office, huh fellas! Get a load:

Lyin' Ted. Lil' Marco. Low Energy Jeb. Crooked Hillary. Little Rocket Man. Pocahontas. 

It worked like a charm in the campaign. Trump's voters loved his lack of political correctness. They loved that he called politicians out. They loved that he refused to apologize for anything. 

The laughs Trump got from his name-calling masked a far darker -- and more toxic -- iteration of Trump's bullying.

"Far darker"! [yells into kitchen] Honey, did you know about this? GTFOOH. Trump has been like Pere Ubu meets Idi Amin for two years and suddenly Cillizza is playing Edward R. Murrow.

So I don't want to be that guy, in general and on principle, but you know what, it's been a long day and the last column was pretty good, so what the hell, I figure I can take five, stretch out and bloviate like the big boys a while. So here's what I think about this latest ooh-Trump-did-bad-this-time shit.

The hundred-dollar haircuts have been telling us for months that all the anger at Trump is coming from overeducated sissies like themselves and is therefore invalid -- that you millions-and-in-fact-majority of voters who hate Trump should just get with the Wisdom of the People and accept that squirrel-gun gomers rule America, lauded by their herald Salena Zito (let's see if she's still at it -- "who in D.C. or New York goes to a 'Gun Bash?' Plenty of people do in the West Newtons of the country..." ugh, guess she is). It may have seemed a lot to ask us, to read this defeatism week after week in their magazines and watch it on their newscasts, but the production values were excellent and besides, $100 Haircuts don't care -- they can afford to be self-abnegating, because their post-broadcast cocaine, hookers, and microneedling always lifts their self-esteem considerably. And anyway there were the funny news shows to indulge our alienation and outrage, so the serious newsies could stay all Questions Remain and This is When Trump Became President.

But all of a sudden now everyone is noticing Trump's approval isn't so hot anywhere -- not even in squirrel gun territory. Previous polls had a pall -- maybe those bad numbers were just all those educated, non-crazy majority voters, and we all know they don't count! Now even Bumfuck was standing down. Suddenly the White Working Class Whisperers aren't get the phone calls; J.D. Vance can't get his circus of star-spangled opioid addicts booked till Christmas.

Are the yokels coming around? I have a hunch on which I would so far lay only small money but, like I said, it's my day off so here goes: I don't think anybody has changed their minds. I think what they changed was the channel.

There have been plenty of people who would roar "hell yeah" every time Trump peed in the pool and a pollster asked about it. But it wasn't because they loved him. What America experienced last November was not so much a groundswell as a shrug: why not, at least it'll be fun. And it might even work.

I still believe a lot (not all!) of them are racist, sexist shitheels -- I believe this because I've seen them. But even shitheels have lives to live, just like the rest of us. And like the commercial fads that used to briefly animate the heartland in the dull years between conflagrations -- disco and boot-scootin' and C.B. radio -- Trump had his moment. I wouldn't say he jumped the shark, if only because "jumped the shark" has jumped the shark. But the numbers are running the wrong way. I mean, heartland Americans are acting sympathetic toward Puerto Ricans even though Trump specifically told them not to -- he even said "Puerto Rico" like it was black dialect at a Young Republican picnic to remind them that he was white and they weren't. Yet they sided with Chico against The Man. What's that tell you?

The thrill is gone. Women's marches and Trevor Noah didn't have much to do with it, and neither did common sense. The guy just wore out his welcome.

That doesn't mean he won't rise again in the polls. He'll kill some people, or applaud their killing, and that'll animate the base; he'll probably start a war, too, and some will always follow the bloody flag. But the cycles will be more normal, more responsive to the usual social and economic fluctuations than the testosterone surges of '16. Trump will golf and blab and tweet and roar just as Hammer had to haul out the parachute pants year after post-glory year. He'll still do a lot of damage, sure, but don't they all?

In short, the battle will be what it always has been, in reality -- against the rapacious, gun-crazed, life-hating, prion-diseased Republicans who need to be marched into the sea if we are to live. Probably a good thing we got the focus back on that.

HORRIBLE CONSPIRACIES.

As you would expect, wingnuts deprived of a dark-skinned boogeyman to blame the Vegas shooting on have already assumed their Defend The Guns posture, with The Federalist's Sean Davis assuring his readers that libtrads r dum because they're worried about automatic weapons, which are highly regulated (and expect Davis to strongly protest this fascist abridgment of the Sacred Second, once things have cooled down!), so you don't have to worry about those except when you do. It is easier to get semi-automatic weapons, but don't worry, those "will fire only one round per trigger pull while preparing the gun to fire another round when the trigger is pulled again," and how many people can you kill with that from a high window overlooking an outdoor concert before the cops get to you? You have to change the magazine every 30 rounds, and then you have to reload, or grab one of the other guns you have at arm's reach. Why, it may as well be a pea-shooter. Davis closes:

The sooner we can all agree to debate the facts, rather than be ruled by our emotions, the sooner we can work together for a solution to the problem of gun violence.

Given how much his guns have gone through, I'm glad Davis hasn't lost his sense of humor.

The weirdest thing, though, is David French at National Review:

Before I begin, let me clearly state two things. First, as I note in the title of this post, my observations are based on early reports, and early reports are often wrong. Second, do not read this post as implying any sort of conspiracy theory of any kind. I’m merely noting the facts as we currently understand them — and how they differ from recent mass shootings.

Sounds like the beginning of every Ancient Aliens show, doesn't it? French isn't saying it was aliens but...

So, a person who’s “not a gun guy” has either expended untold thousands of dollars to legally purchase fully-automatic weapons, somehow found them on the black market, or purchased and substantially modified multiple semi-automatic weapons — and did so with enough competence to create a sustained rate of fire. This same person also spent substantial sums purchasing just the right hotel room to maximize casualties. I cannot think of a single other mass shooter who went to this level of expense and planning in the entire history of the United States.

Soros, right? Must have been Soros. Or maybe it's just good old-fashioned American ingenuity! Come on, buddy, we put a man on the moon! Also, the shooter "doesn’t seem to fit any normal profile of a mass shooter" -- at least not the gibbering Muslim profile in French's head. French is a little behind Alex Jones in this regard, but give him time.

UPDATE. French has updated to note that ISIS has "tripled down" on its claim of responsibility for this old white man's attack -- that is, they jumped up and down three times as long as usual and even claimed the guy had a Jihad name, like Ish Kabibble or some shit. It's a clear sign of frustration that no one believes them, yet French is actually doing the old Questions Remain shtick ("a claim I initially discounted"), even reproducing a screengrab of an alleged ISIS communique (issued by "Abu Umayer," which I understand is Farsi for Heywood Jablome) because if this bullshit can misdirect even a few readers who were beginning to wonder why this country is so fucking gun crazy, it'll be worth it. "We’re only scratching the surface of a sad and horrible story," French closes before whipping out the Hypno Hate Wheel and crooning "you are getting sleeeepy, Moooooslims are coming to kiiiiiiill you."

Elsewhere French tells human interest stories to make you feel warm and fuzzy about the oceans of blood -- the title of his post, honest to God, is "‘Greater Love Hath No Man’ — Amidst the Horror of Las Vegas, There Are Stories of Courage and Sacrifice." From the Other Side, Cecil B. DeMille is scowling, "too much." Maybe in addition to clouding the issue it'll earn French some royalties on a few made-for-Christian-Cable movies. At least enough time had passed by then that French had more material to work with than poor Rich Lowry, who last night could only regale his readers with a story about a guy who chugged a beer and gave the shooter the finger. Shortly thereafter the Central Committee decided even the dummies who read National Review wouldn't go for the yee-haw angle, and started laying on the tinny piano music.

THEY'RE EVERYWHERE -- IN EVERY NOOK AND CRANNY! AND ME OUT OF TINFOIL!

Sometimes, long as I've studied them, I'm still amazed how deeply devoted your average conservative is to his own victimhood. Whether out of office or, as now, enjoying nearly unprecedented control of the levers of power, your conservative will performatively cower before mouse-shadows he'll claim are the Alinskyite hordes, and plead for your sympathy and probably a fundraiser donation.

Have a look at David French's latest at National Review, about how all the colleges are aflame with anti-Milo riots and, in that small part of the country not occupied by burning campuses, Ta-Nahisi Coates conducts his vast honky pogrom; in other words, a typical David French column. Except in this one, French actually acknowledges that liberals have tumbled (about time, too) to their outrage machine -- that, in the polite words of David Remnick, conservatives "take some examples of exaggerated identity politics… and blow them up on Fox or Breitbart" till they're all thrashing in their Barcaloungers, self-soiled with rage and ressentiment.

To this French gives his defense, or rather his belligerent nuh-uh:

When I read words like that, I think they just don’t know.

Picture French in a James Dean red jacket, kicking a hole in a portrait of Hillary Clinton.

Or maybe they know — but don’t care — the extent to which a hostile, illiberal brand of identity politics has seeped into every nook and cranny of American culture. It’s not the case that conservative Americans sit ensconced in their immense privilege, raging at an irrelevant fringe hyped up by Fox News. Rather they experience identity politics at their jobs, hear their children and grandchildren describe experiencing it at school, and find it so omnipresent on television and online that they can’t seem to find any space (aside from conservative media) where someone isn’t mocking their values or accusing them of being complicit in historical atrocities.

Sounds like a nightmare! Yet, amazingly, absolutely no one I know shares French's experience. If "every nook and cranny of American culture" really were taken over by the ultraleft, people who were not directly employed by the wingnut outrage industry would also notice. Yet the young people I know who are in school don't report being forced to abjure or condemn (as the case may be) whiteness. Neither I nor any of the other working schlubs I know are interrupted at our jobs to troop down to the Cesar Chavez Auditorium for our mandatory two-minutes hate against Trump and the Bible. And given the enormous number of channels on "television" and the infinity of offerings "online," I can't even guess what French means by "can’t seem to find any space... where someone isn’t mocking their values or accusing them of being complicit in historical atrocities," unless he has some haywire version of Parental Controls that has him locked into Rachel Maddow and Lawyers Guns & Money.

The way I see it, were French to acknowledge that his odd theory -- that a country ruled by Donald Trump and a mob of ultraconservative Republicans is actually groaning under the yoke of a leftist hegemony -- is not shared by many more people than subscribe to his magazine, he would have but two possible rejoinders: That libtards like myself and David Remnick, old and white and male as we are, "just don't know" French's pain because we're so numb to the constant social justice warring and Antifa and Black Lives Matter and George Soros that it sounds normal to us -- or we're in on it with them and are lying to protect our international socialist masters and to make it look like French is the crazy one! 

Actually there's a third option: French is just full of shit. Now, why didn't I just go to that first? Hey, I guess in a way his whining worked!

IS YOUR WIFE A GOER? SAY NO MORE, NUDGE NUDGE?

Your moment of Dreher, Part 3,209:

Note the caption. Hey, you should have seen the cover they wanted to use!

Dreher's inspirator this time is Mark Regnerus, who reports that women with liberal views desire more sex than women with conservative views (or at least report something like that on whatever survey he's using; when it comes to this sort of thing, the grains of salt come extra large). This Regnerus attributes not to circumstances or experiences, but to philosophy: "it is a moral good to express one’s sexuality in actions of one’s own free choosing. Pleasure is reached for and should be." This attitude, which may sound healthy to you heathens, Regnerus anathematizes; normal people only have sex when God or grandma demands children, whereas liberal women DENY THE LIVING GOD, and all His works (and probably grandma and her works too, yea even the Pie Baked From Scratch), and thus "have a difficult time attributing transcendent value to aspects of life such as work, relationships, children, and daily tasks.” Look at women with ten children — you never see them wanting sex! And your lady CEO is famously sexless, until the Right Man comes along and she takes off her glasses and shakes out her hair [guitar riff]. In the end, they want more sex only because “they feel poignantly the lack of sufficient transcendence in life” they could have had from Joel Osteen and vacuuming if only they weren't so liberal.

Maybe there's a corollary -- you won't feel like having sex if you have a column to wank several times a day.

FUCK YOUR FEELINGS AND YOUR THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS.

The middle-of-the-road wingnuts are running to convince us that no, that's not what they meant. For years David French has thundered against "SJWs" as the aggressors against poor defenseless conservatives. He called for "a cultural and political war against the intellectual and legal corruption of the university Left" and, having gotten those ass-covering modifiers out of the way, asked "Which GOP presidential candidate will fire the first shot?" He lamented how "painfully easy" it would be "for leftist activists to position themselves close to a group of strategically-chosen Trump supporters, initiate a disruption, and then resist the instant the crowd tried to push them out" and make his people look bad. Now that what was really going on all along has followed its natural progression and a young SJW is dead at the hands of a Nazi, he tells us at National Review (where another front-page story tells us, "Whatever the campus mob wants, the campus mob gets"), that "America is at a dangerous crossroads."

David French can go fuck himself. The guy who shot Steve Scalise was a lone nut wandering the world with a gun, not remotely typical of liberals and denounced immediately and unequivocally by the man he claimed to follow; Heather Heyer was killed by a member of a real mob that goes around invading college campuses to wreak havoc on college kids because guys like French told them there was a war on.

Fuck Erick Erickson too, who couldn't BothSides hard enough:

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. As the left-wing social justice warriors have created mobs across America intent on destroying lives for daring to engage in wrong-think, an equal and opposite white supremacist movement has risen up. Both would silence the other side for wrong-think. Both work at the extremes of American politics.

He blames Heyer's death on "the planned white supremacists rally that turned into a day of violent clashes" -- on an event -- no, not even an event, the sequelae of an event, not on her actual assailant. Things just got out of hand! Also, Erickson predicts "the reaction of the social justice warriors will be equal to what is on display in Charlottesville, which in turn will force another reaction from these boys." What the neo-Nazis did was terrible, but no worse than what the other side is going to do in my paranoid fantasy!

The actual neo-Nazis are almost comically inept at defending themselves. Here's far-right nutjob Angelo John Gage, described as "Marine Veteran Angelo John Gage" by Truthfeed, in a video admitting the Unite the Right rally brought in “kooks,” but also some people he didn’t think were kooks — like indentitarians (Spoiler: They're white nationalist kooks), whom “I agree with,” said Gage, because they’re “simply people who believe that everyone has an identity that’s worth protecting. If you don’t believe that, then you think certain identities don’t have a right to exist and therefore you’re a supremacist and you’re a bigot…” Gage then blamed the violence on the neo-Nazis being “stripped of their First Amendment rights" and the local government, which “failed to protect United States citizens which led to fatalities..."

This Big Gummint is the Real Killer excuse is spreading among the nut fringe, and any normal person will probably see though it and treat it with the contempt it deserves. But many of them will look at French's and Erickson's moderation act and take it at face value, and in due time they'll go back to talking about how SJWs -- not neo-Nazis, and certainly not the safety-net-slashing GOP nor the bought-off id-monster in the White House and his crackpot enablers -- are America's greatest threat.

THE HATE THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS PREMISES.

You may have seen Katherine Stewart's Times Op-Ed suggesting that the "government schools" theme beloved of modern conservatives has its genesis in slavery and segregation. Some relevant clips:

Before the Civil War, the South was largely free of public schools. That changed during Reconstruction, and when it did, a former Confederate Army chaplain and a leader of the Southern Presbyterian Church, Robert Lewis Dabney, was not happy about it. An avid defender of the biblical “righteousness” of slavery, Dabney railed against the new public schools. In the 1870s, he inveighed against the unrighteousness of taxing his “oppressed” white brethren to provide “pretended education to the brats of black paupers.” For Dabney, the root of the evil in “the Yankee theory of popular state education” was democratic government itself, which interfered with the liberty of the slaver South.

Flashing forward, Stewart touches on the influence of protowingnuts James W. Fifield Jr. and Rousas Rushdoony, and on the Brown v. Board of Education fallout in the South, where "some districts shut down public schools altogether; others promoted private 'segregation academies' for whites, often with religious programming, to be subsidized with tuition grants and voucher schemes."

Stewart also mentions the influence on this movement of Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, which insight appears to have twisted some of the brethren's guts -- for the same reason that, you may have seen, Nancy MacLean's recent book on another libertarian saint, James Buchanan, has enraged rightwingers from Reason to The American Spectator to Jonah Goldberg (and, in my view, if you were trying to triangulate the absolute worst of the conservatarian movement you could hardly pick three better coordinates).

Speaking of worst of the worst, Rod Dreher gets after Stewart today:

...I read this op-ed piece from today’s New York Times, in which Katherine Stewart says that people like us — parents who have chosen to withdraw their kids from public schooling, or not to send them there in the first place — are Jesus-crazed racists who hate democracy, or at best useful idiots of said villains. It is liberal crackpottery at its purest.

Then Dreher quotes two of his buddies (Andrew T. Walker and, God help us, David French) on how bad she is -- but he does not quote Stewart. At all. In fact, he doesn't even try to characterize her arguments, except as something he and his pals hate -- and his quotes from them don't mention her historical sources, except for an offhand reference to "tying [church schools] to a Confederate past" from French. Her point of view only appears, distorted, as a reflection in the shiny surface of their rage.

Even for Dreher this is a bit much. But I shouldn't be surprised. As we've seen time and time again, Dreher is pretty much a segregationist, and usually drenches that sentiment in many thousands of words of God-gab and crap sociology to make it hard for non-initiates to see clearly. But what makes him even more defensive and obfuscating in DJing this hatefest than he is in the normal course of his writing, apparently, is when someone catches on to the whole rotten shtick -- that the conservative movement (and the white evangelical movement that feeds it votes) is not just touched by racism, but relies, indeed is founded on it. Then he puts on the whole armor of God.

That's probably what drove him to such an extreme: It's a bit early for him and his comrades to reveal themselves -- after all, Trump's only been in six months; there'll be time enough to talk turkey when this godless democracy thing has been weakened sufficiently to be dispensed with. Meantime anyone who's caught on early has to be swatted like a fly.

UPDATE. I see Megan McArdle has gotten in on this, too ("Demonizing School Choice Won't Help Education," LOL), though she brings her own unique bucket-footed style to it:

One could quibble with some of Stewart’s summation. But it’s certainly fair to note that people opposed to desegregation decided that one way to solve the problem was to get rid of public schools, allowing racists to choose a lily-white educational environment for their children. Maintaining Jim Crow is a vile motive, and it can’t be denied that that was one historical reason some people had for supporting school choice.

Only the proper answer to this is, So what? You cannot stop terrible people from promoting sound ideas for bad reasons. Liberals who think that ad hominem is a sufficient rebuttal to a policy proposal should first stop to consider the role of Hitler’s Germany in spreading national health insurance programs to the countries they invaded. If you think “But Hitler” does not really constitute a useful argument about universal health coverage, then you should probably not resort to “But Jim Crow” in a disagreement over school funding.

Sure, some people want to get their kids out of public school because they're segregationists, but be fair -- some people want universal health care because they want to gas all the Jews.

IF IT COMES TOO EASY, WE DON'T WANT YOU TO HAVE IT.

When an article at The Federalist has a hed like this...

How Embedding Women With Contraception May Keep Them In Poverty

...you know it's gonna be a lulu, and this one sure is. For stretches it's semi-sane and only expectedly disingenuous; author Elizabeth Bauer objects to giving poverty-prone women price breaks on long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs) for reasons you might imagine -- and no, her reasons don't include the grim historical resonance of offering even temporary sterilization to black women; Bauer seems not to feel that at all. (Couldn't she have stuck in something about how Margaret Sanger was a eugencist? That used to be de rigueur. Maybe Federalist editors have decided, times being what they are, their audience doesn’t need them to pretend to care what happens to black people.)

Instead Bauer argues that LARCs might discourage them from using condoms, leaving them prey to STDs, and that there's no data supporting the judgment that not getting pregnant gives young women a better chance to thrive. Then things get weird: she suggests girls will be "pressured to use LARCs," perhaps by the all-powerful state; she claims somebody "dreams that every woman is automatically LARC’d until she is ready to plan her first pregnancy" but she never says who. Also, these women's "relationships with men" will be altered if they are perceived as “sexually available." I have not hung on street corners for a long time, but when I did I don't recall my fellow dogs trading tips on where to find chicks with IUDs, maybe with a magnet. Plus there's the traditional disgust with recreational sex -- by offering them long-term contraception, says Bauer, we're just telling these ladies "that being sexually active is a perfectly normal part of adolescence and young adulthood, something to explore and enjoy with no limits except ensuring all parties have obtained consent from the other(s)," etc.

It takes a while for Bauer to tell us how LARCs "May Keep Them In Poverty" -- but it's worth waiting for:

But there is another possibility, and that’s that LARC usage “short-circuits” the success sequence.

???

For pill or condom users, or for the non-sexually active in environments where the norm of one’s peers is sex, “not getting pregnant” requires self-discipline in one form or another, and this, repeated consistently, is self-reinforcing. Alternately, poor girls who make it through their teen and young adult years without pregnancy may succeed not due to their childlessness but because of the same personal characteristics that enabled them to avoid pregnancy. Consenting to having an implant or IUD is not the same. It may be that “lack of pregnancy” may mean little in isolation.

Translation: If you make not getting pregnant too easy for them, they lose valuable pussy-defending skills that would serve them well in today's competitive job market. Maybe they can put it on their resumes! It's bound to make a difference when they tell that interviewer, "No, no children -- and I did it the hard way!" with a big wink.

I invite readers to read and explain Bauer’s closing paragraphs, which I found almost indecipherable, but which seem to say that it's cruel to give poor women the idea that taking steps to avoid poverty (besides marriage, which makes you rich!) will help them get "middle-class" jobs, because --

Are there enough jobs at “middle class” pay rates? Who performs the low-paying jobs that for now still exist, and cannot all universally be taken by teens working part-time, or retirees, or by these young people, working at low wages only temporarily until they move on, or others who don’t “need” a support-a-family wage?

-- society has already decided who gets those good jobs, and it's not poor black women.

MR. BROOKS' CLASS WAR.

Old-fashioned straight-up racism is a tougher sell in the age of Black Lives Matter than it used to be, so racists (and the people hired to get votes from them) must modernize. Some conservatives (including the allegedly reformed Andrew Sullivan) remain quite comfortable saying or at least dogwhistling that black people are treated unequally in this society because they're Bell Curve inferiors. But even they must qualify it: Look, we're not racist because we admit Asians are smarter than us! Look, we're only defending Charles Murray's right to free speech!

There's always the "Liberals are The Real Racist" dodge. But that's usually an unsatisfying balm conservatives apply after they've been laughed off the stage. However, maybe they'll get more pro-active with it -- David Brooks is working in his sociological meth lab to strip the "white" out of "white privilege" and put "liberal" in instead.

How's he doing it? By taking out the actual political and philosophical parts of liberalism, and leaving only the stereotype of sissies who like fancy books, food, and leisure activities, think they're better than you, and have found a way to be rich without quite being capitalists (sneaky buggers!).

Brooks' column, generously titled "How We Are Ruining America" (it's the last acknowledgement of his own possible complicity, though), starts with a long wheeze about how "upper-middle-class" people are soaking up all the good things -- education for their kids, "behavior codes" (presumably like marriage, which makes you rich!), maternity leave, etc. While a socialist, or a Christian or a decent human being, might think, okay, then let's use government to give less upper-middle people better access to such things, Brooks explains that what's really causing these inequalities are "the informal social barriers that segregate the lower 80 percent."

This isn't about the black guy who can't get a cab -- why, the fact that he's presuming to hail one shows he's in the upper 20 percent, and thus just as much an oppressor as the whites. The real oppressors are the ones who can pronounce simple Italian words, or who don't freak out when they can't (a sure sign of effeteness):

Recently I took a friend with only a high school degree...

BULLSHIT BUZZER ALERT! Maybe she's his nanny.

...to lunch. Insensitively, I led her into a gourmet sandwich shop. Suddenly I saw her face freeze up as she was confronted with sandwiches named "Padrino" and "Pomodoro" and ingredients like soppressata, capicollo and a striata baguette. I quickly asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else and she anxiously nodded yes and we ate Mexican.

What sort of person is class-shamed by an Italian deli? Mmmmaybe the "friend" was Mexican; maybe she'd just come up from Gopher Holler, where they have a Chipotle but not a salumeria. Here's how Brooks explains it:

American upper-middle-class culture (where the opportunities are) is now laced with cultural signifiers that are completely illegible unless you happen to have grown up in this class. They play on the normal human fear of humiliation and exclusion. Their chief message is, “You are not welcome here.”

Those fucking Italians! Always trying to make you feel small because you don't know which gabagool to use for the fish course!

Even worse:

In her thorough book “The Sum of Small Things,” Elizabeth Currid-Halkett argues that the educated class establishes class barriers not through material consumption and wealth display but by establishing practices that can be accessed only by those who possess rarefied information.

That "rareified information" being the code to the security systems at their McMansions.

To feel at home in opportunity-rich areas, you’ve got to understand the right barre techniques, sport the right baby carrier, have the right podcast, food truck, tea, wine and Pilates tastes, not to mention possess the right attitudes about David Foster Wallace, child-rearing, gender norms and intersectionality.

I know what all this shit is; I must be rich. Rich and rareified! Yet I'm wearing a cardboard belt. Why don't I just leave this stupid job I'm stealing time from to write this, and live on information?

The educated class has built an ever more intricate net to cradle us in and ease everyone else out. It’s not really the prices that ensure 80 percent of your co-shoppers at Whole Foods are, comfortingly, also college grads; it’s the cultural codes.

I showed the cashiers that I know how to pronounce quinoa, but they still called security when I left without paying.

Status rules are partly about collusion, about attracting educated people to your circle, tightening the bonds between you and erecting shields against everybody else. We in the educated class have created barriers to mobility that are more devastating for being invisible. The rest of America can’t name them, can’t understand them. They just know they’re there.

If you're still wondering why Brooks downplays the role of money as well as the role of race here, I'll spell it out: His target is not people of color, who don't need David Brooks to tell them what time it is, but 1.) the Trump voters out in the heartland who might resent that they can't afford a block of Pilates classes (but let's face it, they don't read David Brooks nor even know who he is, and would take him for one o' them liberal sissies if they ever saw him); and, more likely, 2.) rightwing operatives who have been peddling arugula-Grey Poupon visions of liberalism forever, and hope that the recent uptick in class consciousness can be exploited against liberals rather than against their coprorate masters -- perhaps with "I am the 80%" t-shirts, and symbolic anti-elitist state-lege bills taxing reiki or requiring yoga studios sell cigarettes, and rhymes like "If you're lib, I like the cut of your gib, if you're centrist, you get a good dentist, but if you're Right, brother, good night, good night."

As America goes further down the crapper, a lot of people are going to get mad at the rich, and the donors might find it worth their while to fund propaganda that says "Don't guillotine you, don't guillotine me, guillotine that liberal hugging that tree." Maybe they'll outfit their Porsches to roll coal so the rabble know they're alright. Since saner policies are out of the question, it's worth a try.

UPDATE. Holy shit, every wingnut in wingnuttia rushed to defend Brooks' imbecilic column. Here's the crest of Megan McArdle's tweetstream:

I mean, all those liberals have to have the same exalted social status as she, haven't they? Otherwise why would Twitter allow them to talk to her? And she knows lots of genuine working class people, like that lady who said such nice things to her on the bus -- although, hmm, that lady was black, so maybe she was on welfare.

Chris Arnade comes in with his usual bullshit -- "I would add, where David Brooks uses upscale delis, I use McDonald's to show the difference in cultural capital between front-row & back-row" -- just in case Brooks is thinking of jumping line, Chris Arnade has McDonald's, bitch (and possibly a licensing deal -- "ba ba ba ba ba, white working class!"). On and on he goes about how oh, you liberals all sneer at McDonald's! Like we're all 23, have trust funds, and dine at Le Diplomate every night -- or that the amount of crap food one has eaten (and I've eaten plenty in my time) is the measure of one's authentic something-or-otherness, instead of a marker for pre-diabetes.

This may be Arnade's nadir: "The online reaction to David Brooks column is largely this -- Snark from people who have cultural capital but not economic."  As if we could ruin people's hopes and dreams by making snide remarks from our studio apartments and crappy jobs! Again, we see the insistence that money has nothing to do with it, and therefore money can't help. It's a great excuse for not supporting government interventions -- because the real power is in positive thinking, and if we just reward that and punish "snark," then by the law of supply and demand we'll Make America Great Again.

This brings us back around to Murray who, looking to diversify from his Bell Curve shtick a few years back, promoted that Fishtown/Belmont "bubble test" hooey, purporting to show that if you didn't watch the right TV shows and listen to modern crap country music (not that rap stuff, though -- only you-know-whats listen to that), you were an elitist and therefore had nothing to say to the Little People. This led to the spectacle of pencil-necked wingnuts imagining themselves butch because they knew the names of some pickup trucks. And now we have the logical end result of this ridiculous obsession, Donald Trump -- on the one hand, the People's Choice, whom no one would call elitist; on the other hand, a golden-palace-dwelling narcissist, the ultimate Bubble Boy. It is amazing what lengths we'll go to as a country to evade paying the butcher's bill -- but I have a hunch the butcher will get real insistent real soon.