RFRA ROFL: MORE WRECKAGE FROM THE INDIANA CRACK-UP.

Some of the libertarians are getting very worked up over this Indiana thing. Makes sense; after all, the real issue behind all the cake-and-florist agitation is public accommodations as a civil rights issue and, as you may remember from Rand Paul's spirited if temporary stand against the Civil Rights Act, libertarians have never fully accepted the justice of making white people do business with black people, so making straight people do business with gay people must seem to them a gruesome flashback.*

Timothy P. Carney, for example, has thoroughly melted down at the Washington Examiner, doing a better impersonation of Carol Newquist from Little Murders even than David Brooks:

Religious liberty is the terms of surrender the Right is requesting in the culture war. It is conservative America saying to the cultural and political elites, you have your gay marriage, your no-fault divorce, your obscene music and television, your indoctrinating public schools and your abortion-on-demand. May we please be allowed to not participate in these?

Gays, abortion, jungle music -- the injustice never stops.

But no. Tolerance isn't the goal. Religious conservatives must atone for their heretical views with acts of contrition: Bake me a cake, photograph my wedding, pay for my abortion and my contraception.

This will make a great schtick for pride parades: Big Gay puppets lumbering down Fifth Avenue hissing BAKE ME A CAAAAKE!

But for sheer entertainment value you can't beat the religious maniacs. The Anchoress claims she's been busy with some holy shit and after a brief Indiana post scuttles back to it, but in between riddles us this:

There is a staggering amount of hysteria and outrage being spewed about Indiana’s RFRA by many of the same people who — just mere weeks ago — were spewing in hysterical outrage about the nation’s growing so-called “rape culture”, and this despite disputed claims that 1 in 5 women are raped on college campuses, and a highly dubious accusation of gang rape on a college campus.

See, you and your gay friends are all liars. Rape liars!

Rape, of course, is an indisputably heinous act; because it forces a woman to engage in something she does not want to do, it must always be roundly decried and despised by all sane people.

That's kind of a strangely mild description of rape, isn't it -- "forces a woman to engage in something she does not want to do"? Makes it sound like dusting, or going to her boyfriend's office party. Eventually we see why Thee Anch portrayed it thus:

But, that being the case, what shall we make of the fact that, for the most part, the very same entities who (disputed “rape culture” claims aside) quite rightly insist that a woman should never, ever be forced to engage in acts against her will, have pivoted toward Indiana to demand that “other” people be forced to engage in acts against their wills?

Should governments, or new agencies, or pundits for that matter, really be positioning themselves over people and telling them that if they do not submit to what is demanded of them — and engage willingly — then they will be forced to take it, and like it?

 This is the real War on Women: dusting, rape, and gay cakes.

Doubtless someone will say, “these two issues are not at all the same.”

Wow she's pyschic!

I’d argue that to the people being shoved down, they look exactly alike. 

I’m going back to my project. Comments remain closed.

SLAM! When she comes back, watch out for the spraying hot chrism.

UPDATE. Normal comments policy is, when we delete a troll, we also delete comments in response, but I must say those comments are still pretty funny out of context, so carry on and good job all around.

UPDATE 2. * That's why Ramesh Ponnuru is so calm about the nearly-even split in public opinion over this issue. In the context of the fake story these guys have been pushing -- evil libtard homos versus Christianity -- this would be a disturbing result, since it would suggest America is divided over "religious liberty." But in view of the real goal -- which is to trim back our traditional understanding of civil rights -- it's actually an advance.

LIBERTARIANS: IS THERE ANYTHING THEY CAN'T MAKE WORSE?

As should shock no one, on the Hobby Lobby decision libertarians come down unanimously for the rights of corporations over those of women who need medicine. Megan McArdle:

Otherwise, according to the reasoning of that [anti-decision] tweet, I am being denied something every time my employer refuses to buy it for me: cars, homes, Hummel collectible figurines. And don’t I have a First Amendment right to express my love of round-faced Bavarian children doing adorable things?

Two things: first, McArdle trying to be funny is a natural emetic; and second, as awful as she is I'm still surprised to see her promoting the ridiculous idea that health insurance benefits amount to "free stuff" (as the conservatives who don't bother to call themselves libertarians have unfailing come to call it) whenever it specifically benefits women's health. (Sample witticism: "My company won't pay for my toothpaste. I'm going to be forced to have cavities now.").  Then, McArdle goes on about how unreasonable other people are being. I guess I'll have to downgrade my opinion of her, if such a thing is possible.

McArdle also suggests that Obama wanted to lose the Hobby Lobby case so his free-stuff-fueled slut-minions will vote Democrat in November. So does McArdle's husband Peter Suderman at libertarian flagship Reason, only presumably he's got a sense of shame because he's more evasive about it:

To be clear: I am not at all suggesting that the administration was hoping or intending to lose in court. But...

[sigh.]

...this does help explain, at least somewhat, why the administration was so eager to pursue the case... It’s the political/legal equivalent of online clickbait; it grabs the attention of large numbers of people, sparks their interests and passions, and gets them engaged (or at least enraged). That doesn’t mean the administration set out to lose, or doesn’t care about having lost. But it does potentially change the calculus about whether and how hard to press an issue like this by offering some real benefits just for fighting the fight, even in the event of a defeat.

If the smell didn't tip you off, the incoherence of the last sentence is a glaring tell that you've just been handed a load of bullshit. What real benefits are offered, and by whom to whom? Also, what were they supposed to do, press less hard? As for the ruling itself, Suderman's all smiles:

The big question isn't whether the contraception mandate violates the religious freedoms of some faceless corporate entity entirely separate from the individuals who own that company -- it's whether the requirement would violate the free exercise of religious for the particular people who founded and now run the company... 

As Alito writes in his opinion, "A corporation is simply a form of organization used by human beings to achieve desired ends....When rights, whether constitutional or statutory, are extended to corporations, the purpose is to protect the rights of these people." 

In seeking to defend the requirement, the federal government had argued that Hobby Lobby, as a for-profit corporation, was not eligible to challenge the rule under the RFRA because corporations are "separate and apart from" their individual owners and operators. They were distinct, and not "people," and therefore ineligible for the protections of a law designed to shelter "a person's exercise of religion." Alito says, more or less, that this is nonsense: "Corporations, 'separate and apart from' the human beings who own, run, and are employed by them, cannot do anything at all."

The next time someone talks to you about corporate personhood, remember that entire fiction gets dropped as soon as it's convenient to portray the corporate citizen as a mere painting on a scrim, which when rear-lit reveals Ma and Pa Jesus, smiling, waving their snakes, and crooning "we's jes' simple folk, tryin' to get right with the Lord"; when it's time for mega-million-dollar political donations, the scrim gets front-lit again and Ma and Pa sneak offstage to count their loot.

Also at Reason, Shikha Dalmia addresses Jonathan Cohn's suggestion that a single payer system would stop all this my-employee's-medicine-is-against-my-religion crap. Dalmia begins:

One: By calling Obamacare a “new entitlement” and a “public program” he has basically accepted that the program constitutes a de facto government takeover of one-sixth of the economy, a conclusion that liberals have generally resisted. Leftists, notes Cato Institute’s Michael Cannon, have been trying to convince Americans that Obamacare is not a step in the direction of socialized medicine as opponents claim because it uses private insurance and relies on market forces to deliver coverage. Cohn’s candor is both refreshing and clarifying, so thanks, Jonathan, for that.

The dream of Obamasocialism, and that any normal people give a shit about it, will never die in Galt's Gulch.

Eventually Dalmia gets to the point: single payer is just how "libs" go around "playing their brother’s keeper... and demanding generous subsidies," probably while wearing their I'M A STUPID LIB shirts and going "durr hurr," whereas libertarians want to "unleash market forces to lower soaring costs without resorting to price controls or rationing" -- which judging from Dalmia's sourcing means a tax credits and vouchers scheme similar to Paul Ryan's Medicare plan, which nobody wants because, like libs, they don't understand freedom.

Meanwhile big libertarian Rand Paul (he only wants to kill foreigners with drones, remember?) praised the decison; Cathy Young said "there are many women who believe the birth control mandate infringes on religious liberty -- among them Hobby Lobby co-founder Barbara Green," that Planned Parenthood should stop lobbying because it's "divisive," and bunch of other stupid shit; and -- well, why go on? You knew the minute I said "libertarian" how this was going to go.

UPDATE. Among conservatives who don't mind admitting it, today has also been a festival of pedantic shirt-retucking. Ramesh Ponnuru on Ruth Bader Ginsberg:

[Ginsberg says] “It bears note in this regard that the cost of an IUD is nearly equivalent to a month’s full-time pay for workers earning the minimum wage.” Who truly believes that this cost plays any role at all in Ginsburg’s analysis? It’s expensive, so she cites it to show that employers have to pay for it; if it were cheap, she’d cite it to show that employers aren’t burdened by it.

I suppose she'll tell us next that gold is expensive because gold just happens to be expensive! Jesus, it's like Ponnuru is taking lessons from Jonah Goldberg.

Also I'm grateful to commenter Glock H. Palin, Esq. for pointing out that Rand Paul actually doesn't mind killing a citizen with drones, after all. Maybe he's still a libertarian because he likes Drew Carey or something.

THE BATTLE OF SIT-ON-YOUR-ASS.

Ole Perfesser Instapundit's waving the stars and bars at USA Today under the title, "Americans rising up against government." The column is accompanied by a picture of someone poking a Gadsden flag out of a bunch of umbrellas -- maybe them folks under the umbrellas is all a-decked out like Ben Franklin and the Tea Party is back!

"America's ruling class has been experiencing more pushback than usual lately," the Perfesser commences. "It just might be a harbinger of things to come." How so, Perfesser? Three things:

• "First, in response to widespread protests last week, the Department of Homeland Security canceled plans to build a nationwide license plate database." Funny, I don't remember any such protests -- oh, the Perfesser means widespread  in the press and among "lawmakers and privacy advocates," not Ma and Pa Tricorn marching on Washington.

• The FCC's Multi-Market Study of Critical Information Needs, which was going to question newsroom personnel, went down because "the blowback was sufficient to stop it for now." Again, this was not achieved by a popular uprising, but by the press, with its paranoid conservative wing and normal-people wing united in defense of its own interests.

"Meanwhile, in Connecticut a massive new gun-registration scheme is also facing civil disobedience." Ah, now we're getting somewhere! Tell us about it, Perfesser:

• "As J.D. Tuccille reports: 'Three years ago, the Connecticut legislature estimated there were 372,000 rifles in the state of the sort that might be classified as 'assault weapons,' and 2 million plus high-capacity magazines. ... But by the close of registration at the end of 2013, state officials received around 50,000 applications for 'assault weapon' registrations, and 38,000 applications for magazines.' This is more 'Irish Democracy,' passive resistance to government overreach..."

Really? Sounds to me like a bunch of people sitting on their rear ends. In fact, none of this "uprising" involves... anyone doing anything.

And yet here's how the Perfesser characterizes it:

Though people have taken to the streets from Egypt, to Ukraine, to Venezuela to Thailand, many have wondered whether Americans would ever resist the increasing encroachments on their freedom. I think they've begun.

Us and the guys at Tahrir Square and Maidan Nezalezhnosti! We just have different styles: Furriners do uprising by putting their bodies on the line in lethal mass demonstrations, whereas American patriots sit on their asses and wait for the heroism commendations to roll in.

The timeline of conservative derangement is long and complicated, but I think I can trace this particular strain of gibberish back to Human Achievement Hour, in which conservatives portrayed Americans who did not change their normal everyday energy-use patters as implicit supporters of their anti-environmentalist cause, and the Battle of Chick-Fil-A, in which conservatives showed their hatred of homosexuals (or love of freedom, whatever) by gorging on fast food and deputizing everyone they saw at the mall as co-conspirators. It's the perfect form of activism for a movement largely composed of agitated geriatrics, shut-ins, and people who think they're entitled to everything, including revolutionary status, without raising a sweat for it.

UPDATE. From commenter Fats Durston:

The Revolution Will Be Sitting In Front Of The Television
You will be able to stay home, brother.
You will be able to plug in, turn on and cop out.
You will be able to lose yourself on Xanax and
skip out for beer during commercials, if you haven't DVR'd
Because the revolution will be sitting in front of the television.
The revolution will be sitting in front of the television
Brought to you by Xbox...

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.

BIRTH TRAUMA. At Sadly, No! Gavin does a fine job of twitting Pat Buchanan's latest Death of the West column. Buchanan is concerned that the Jewish people are being outbred by the jihadists, and blames the secularization of many Chosen, specifically "American Jews themselves, who have led the battles for birth control and a woman's right to choose."

This sort of thing comes up fairly often in conservative circles. Along with everything else the West is doing wrong, it isn't having enough children. Yet I have seldom seen a mechanism proposed for solving the problem. Criminalizing abortion is usually implied, but not often stated outright, perhaps because the moment such authors find themselves typing a simple declarative sentence stating that we must force people to have babies so the West can outnumber its enemies, they start to imagine how normal people would react. Better to just throw up the numbers and let the punters figure it out themselves.

Some authors, of course, are not so reticent. Way back in 2000 Steve Sailer proposed a very specific program of incentives and disincentives, including this:

Start a campaign telling citizens it's their patriotic duty to have more kids. Most Europeans are probably too self-destructively sophisticated to respond to this, but the Greeks might, since the Turks give them somebody to hate and fear.

But you see the problem. Hate and fear may be a sufficient aphrodisiac in some cultures, but we in the decadent West are, by Sailer's own admission, too self-destructive for this demographically-driven sort of hate-fuck, and prefer scented candles and maybe a nice dinner with wine. Maybe by now Sailer has moved on to edible body paint subsidies; I haven't got the stomach to look.

The most comprehensive program I ever saw was Stanley's Kurtz's, which involved reversing or destroying enough social programs that "people will once again begin to look to family for security in old age — and childbearing might commensurately appear more personally necessary." In fact, on at least an unconscious level, the Republican Party seems to have been following this plan for years. But they've been getting a lot of push-back lately, so the collapse of the safety nets that encourage birth control may not be effected in time.

If they were really serious about all this, they might consider a different approach.

For years conservatives complained about the babies welfare mothers were having on the public dime. We got welfare reform, and conservatives have been cheered by what they see as the resulting decline in our illegitimate birthrate, especially among black people.

Maybe it's time the demographic-suicide wing of the movement communicated to their brethren at the City Journal and the Heritage Foundation the pressing need for more American children, and proposed a welfare counter-reformation to jack up the birth rate by any means necessary. In fact, if they really think the issue is as important as they portray it, maybe our welfare programs should be made more generous than before. What matter that many of the babies may be illegitimate and impoverished? All the better for the "hate and fear" conditions that will make committed anti-jihadists out of them.

This will be expensive, but we are at war, after all. Instead of fooling with untried plans and issuing dolorous rants, why not go with what has been shown to work in the not-so-distant past?

UPDATE. Commenter aw points out that Australia has already got a "baby bonus" program in place. But, alas, the new Labor Government is chipping away at it. Next year they introduce a means test, so upscale parents will have no incentive to procreate. And if a Centrelink officer thinks a household suffers from one or more of a list of social maladies, their payment is broken into fortnightly payments, presumably to keep the parents from spending the loot on plasma TVs, and the Government is pushing to substitute vouchers for cash payments in some hard cases.

With Australia's birth rate at a 10-year high, this seems no time to go wobbly. If Mama wants a wide-screen telly and a full bar for her efforts, I say let her have them.

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

Hey, it's happy hour and this is just nice.

Another hard week for America, folks, but at least some of us get the weekend off! Not me, though – I’ll be busy on the weekend getting a head start on next week’s Roy Edroso Breaks It Down issues. Speaking of which, let me unload the freebies for the week just passed – first, the Dilbert Diaries, the next logical step in Scott Adams’ career; I am convinced he’s convinced that the full fascist takeover is imminent, and he wants to be New Hitler's Court Jester. 

He may not be wrong! Ron DeSantis has been tearing it up, declaring himself Lord of Disneyland, and planning his destruction of the press and continuing his persecution of trans, gay, and educated people (the Democratic base!) in his mosquito-gator-and-mortgage-fraud kingdom. I half believe that he and Trump are working together, and the governor’s lunacy is meant to make the ex-president look less dangerous so when they nominate him some of the independent voters (the dumb ones who ruin everything) might say, well, he’s not so bad.  

Conservatives don’t see the downside, though, and except for a few apostates they’re all in for the full fash. I actually think they’re excited by it – I mean, Trump was a blast for them, but he only shat on Latinos and foreigners – this guy is a literal queer-basher!  (Fun project: Try to find any DeSantis assurance that he’s not attacking LGBTQ people with these programs. He simply doesn’t do it. What does that tell you?) 

I was directed to Hot Air, which had been an unremarkable wingnut site for so long that I hadn’t even looked at it for years. They got a guy there now called David Strom who has a post about gay and trans stuff called “The Hershey Highway to Hell.” OOOH HOW EDGY. Also he calls the trans woman Faye Johnstone “he,” always a sign of moral clarity/dorkism. (Imagine him among normal people; I put the time between his first deliberate misgendering and his ejection while shouting I’M BEING CANCELCULTURED at about two minutes.) At one point Strom gets after the trans lady’s non-profit:  

“Supporting youth-serving organizations across Canada.” Literally, the only phrase that makes sense in the entire business description is about getting access to children. On that point, alone, is the description comprehensible. Access to kids.

Ever notice how it’s always about the kids? These trans folks don’t like HAVING kids, but they apparently like being with them quite a lot. Preferably with as few clothes on as they can get away with.

There is nothing in fact or reason supporting this slur, but yelling groomer is what they do now instead of lectures on limited government. Oh, and elsewhere at the site addressing the DeSantis Don’t Say Gay bill is an old alicublog figure of fun:

This really, really bothers some people.

Most of the bill concerns the rights of parents, which really, really bothers some people, too.

Hint hint. There are all kinds of ways to call your enemies groomers, and Jim Lileks, being an old-fashioned type, really, really prefers the really, really eyebrow-waggle. 

Hey, but let’s lighten up – here’s another REBID bit, this one about movies you saw when you were younger that take on whole new resonances when you see them later in life. I did Night Moves, but you can do your own in the comments. It’s a community, see; you really ought to subscribe (cheap!).

BOO FUCKING HOO.

The latest martyr to the cause of No Homos is Ryan T. Anderson. Unlike Brendan Eich and the Duck Dynasty guys, though, Anderson has no inherent celebrity or entertainment value: I guess they've gotten to the point where they no longer even need avatars people might know, and are just breeding victims in their own propaganda labs.

Previously known mainly to people who cover anti-gay gasbags for a living ("Says Glee corrupts youth: 'We should be as concerned about what the FOX TV show Glee has done to corrupt a young generation as we are about anything the Court has done'"), Anderson recently received flattering coverage in the Washington Post (strange are the ways of the liberal media! I thought they were all in the tank for Gay ObamaHitler) as "a fresh voice on same-sex marriage," "fresh-faced" and "millennial," who tours the country lecturing on "anthropological truths that men and women are distinct and complementary," illustrating his points with polygamy scare-stories from The New York Post.

This was especially hilarious to me because I last paid attention to Anderson in 2007 when, as an assistant editor at First Things, he was already on the moral-panic beat, complaining that Princeton freshmen had to watch a sexual assault prevention program that had gross stuff in it like "sexual skits, innuendo, 'coming-out' scenes, gay kisses, and other nonsense that some students don’t want to be forced to sit through." If only they'd make sexual assault prevention programs that even rightwing plants can enjoy!

Along with the sex angle, Anderson was (even then!) working the victim-status angle. From my post:

Anderson spends the rest of the article complaining that liberals make jokes about him and his buddies. Normal people learn to shrug this kind of thing off, but for wingers snide comments are hate-speech or bad-touch or something. "Professor [Lee] Silver’s attack wasn’t really aimed at Professor [Robert George]; it was aimed at the students," Anderson claims, because a laff on a prominent conservative buffoon sends students "a message about which points of view are acceptable and which are unacceptable. 

Well, little Ryan has grown up, and advanced from vicarious sufferer over the martyrs of his movement to abused saint himself.  After the Post story came out, his old high school first publicly acknowledged this accomplishment, then ham-handedly rebuffed him. To you and me, this would be tsk-worthy, but to Anderson's brethren it is the iron boot of repression.

"The shunning of Ryan T. Anderson: When support for gay marriage gets ugly," thunders Damon Linker at The Week. Rod Dreher needs two posts to wring his hands over it: "Intellectually bankrupt, morally corrupt," sputters Dreher. "Illiberal elitist liberalism at its ugliest. These people have the power, and will have the power." (He's talking about high school administrators, remember.) At The Federalist, credentialed wingnut Joseph Bottum plays the old trick of telling us he's cool with gay marriage, more or less, but since the Facebook posts of Anderson's high school he's outraged by Chappaquiddick: "Our lives and our discourse are narrowed to only a trickle of intellectual light if we encounter someone like the intelligent and serious Ryan T. Anderson—and simply close our eyes in holy dread." Etc.

I'm not sure what the long term strategy is here: Maybe they just want to get this idea spread around enough that young conservatives for whom there is no room on the wingnut-welfare gravy train can go out on the street with a tin cup and a cardboard sign that says PLEASE HELP, I AM A NO HOMOS MARTYR and wait for donations. Or maybe they think people will go back to persecuting homosexuals because they feel sorry for conservatives.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Local radio was playing a bunch of power-to-the-people tunes.
I know this one's cheese, but I love it.

•   OK, kids, here are the Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies for the week -- this scene at Mar-a-Lago, in which Tubby talks turkey with his least favorite in-law; and today's fresh-as-daisies ripped-from-today's-headlines item on how the wingnut handling of the Lab Leak story fits with their Rigged Election fantasy -- and the part played in it by éminence Grey Goose Peggy Noonan. Yes, it's not just the Brown Shirts and the von Papens anymore -- even the little von Hindenburgs are getting into the act now. Exciting times!

Precisely why you should subscribe. I actually withdrew one story that had been made public because I'm through being Mr. Goodbar, people. It's not like I'm making Andrew Sullivan money, because unlike Captain Caliper's Substack mine does not flatter the imaginary grievances of honky douchebags, but tells the hard truth to a uncomprehending and contemptuous world with the satire and exegesis it, alas, is too depraved to know it needs. Get in on the ground floor of my lost cause and subscribe!

•   Couldn't we all use a little good news? Of course, that any one of these gruesome specimens will probably be an Ohio Senator is not good news, but it's nice to see that even Buckeye Republicans can apparently smell the fraudulence of Thiel-backed fascist J.D. Vance:

I've had this guy's number from jump (a Rod Dreher endorsement is usually as much warning as you need). And while I can sort of understand the appeal of some GOP assholes -- I've read enough Nick Fury comics to get why a certain kind of guy would like the insufferable Dan Crenshaw, for example -- so many of the media's favorite rightwing grifters are so obviously repulsive that I can't imagine normal people cottoning to them, whatever their politics. Ron DeSantis, for instance, seems to me a replacement-level 50s B-movie goon whom Lee J. Cobb told to get a manicure and a nice suit and try and look gubernatorial. Mike Pence is a wet sack of nothing and Greg Abbott is a pig-eyed creep. If any of these people tried to sell you an encyclopedia, tell me you wouldn't shut the door in his face! So it's encouraging to know that people see through at least one of these wet noodles.

WE PLAY ALL THE HITS.

Shorter Jonah Goldberg: Now that it's painfully clear that nobody cares, let's have a Benghazi Bullshit clips show!

In other words: Since "Nobama and Hitlery murdered Christopher Stevens for Saul Alinsky" isn't catching on with normal people, it'll be repurposed as a mantra for conservative basement services until 2016, by which time it might be retro enough that people will find it cool.

UPDATE. May I quote me? From those days of Republican Hope and Change, when they thought Obama might be impeached over Benghazi:

"It was the cover-up, as history records, that eventually brought about Nixon's resignation in disgrace," said WorldNetDaily's Bob Unruh. "Now, Congress is investigating an alleged cover-up of the terrorist attack Sept. 11, 2012..." Unruh cited some prominent conservatives, including Mike Huckabee and Ted Nugent, who predicted Obama's impeachment. Plus in a separate column Unruh revealed WorldNetDaily's exclusive poll showed 44 percent of Americans wanted Obama impeached -- and that was back in March! The numbers must be off the chart by now...

"The last time something of this magnitude happened, a U.S. president stepped down," said Susan Brown of Right Wing News." "Is Benghazi Becoming a Watergate, or Iran-Contra, or Both?" asked Victor Davis Hanson at National Review. "May be the biggest federal cover-up since Watergate," said his colleague Deroy Murdock. And in case the association didn't sufficiently excite, there was the all-purpose slogan: "Nobody died in Watergate."

Where are the snowjobs of yesteryear?

UPDATE 2. With Goldberg it never rains but it pours -- or, since it's him, I guess we could say it never farts but it sharts. He has a new Goldberg File column out (no link, I get the wretched things by email), in which he gets philosophical and explains how (I swear to God) Curly in City Slickers was wrong that you should find one thing in life that matters because life requires "balance." He makes several lunges at apposite metaphors for this, finally collapsing into the following:

As you get older you change the mix in your portfolio, in the same way people near retirement move more heavily into bonds and away from stocks.

There's a man from whom you want to take life lessons. But why did he even bother?

Now I could swear there was a real point I was building up to... Oh, right, politics isn't everything and everything isn't political.

This he demonstrates by telling us liberals suck:

The true danger of progressivism is that it is "one thingism" hiding in the camouflage of diversity talk. Every institution is free to do its thing, so long as its thing is defined in progressive terms and guided by the State. Diversity means lots of people with different skin colors and dangly bits, who all think the same way... For conservatives, diversity actually means different people, individually and in communities, pursuing different things. 

I don't know why he didn't just say "My name is Ima Liberal, I'm a big four-eyed lame-o and I wear the same stupid sweater every day." I guess prominent conservative intellectuals just can't use that kind of shortcut. Farrrt.

THE BOY WHO CRIED OBAMAHITLER.

At the New York Post, Kyle Smith is enraged that some young woman who used to play violin (oooh arty farty!) is now "senior policy advisor at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy," and part of something Smith calls the "Nudge Squad" because its mandate is to gently encourage better behavioral choices based on the ideas in Cass Susstein's book Nudge.

Smith is pissed for a couple of reasons. For one thing, this initiative proceeds from the same thinking that got Bloomberg to make fast food joints post calories, which doesn't appear to change patrons' eating habits, at least not in the short term we've had to observe its effect. Fair enough, though letting people know something about what's in the food they eat is a pretty benign intervention, and seems to work well enough with packaged food labeling, unless you think citizens have no business knowing whether their dessert topping is mostly chemicals or if an energy bar will send them into anaphylactic shock.

But what really seems to bug Smith is something he mainly expresses with old rightwing memes and overwrought innuendo: that the Nudge Squad is oppressive. For instance:

This person was a senior at Yale as of 2007, but now she gets to tell you how to live your life. Sorry: encourage you to make choices that will make you happier... 

Remember when FDR, more or less admitting he was clueless about economics, promised, and delivered, an era of “bold, persistent experimentation”? Obama means it literally. We’re all being targeted for “behavioral interventions.” But only after randomized, controlled trials. Which don’t sound scary. At all. (Just don’t say that in a German accent.)... 

...[Susstein] was boasting in a Harvard working paper that [the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs'] central responsibilities, as defined by Obama’s Executive Order 13563, amounted to “a kind of mini-constitution for the regulatory state.” That sounds a bit immodest. And aren’t constitutions, even cute mini- ones, supposed to come up for a vote?

Similarly, shouldn't people walking around with stapleguns have a concealed-carry permit? Inevitably:

The new paternalism of Obama appointees is very much in tune with the boss. In a neverending series of campaign speeches, he’s taken to saying things like, “That means whatever executive authority I have to help the middle class, I’ll use it.” And, “We’re going to do everything we can, wherever we can, with or without Congress.”

It's all part of the seamless garment of ObamaHitler. By the way, Smith refers to the recruitment e-mail of the Nudge Squad, properly known as the Behavioral Insights Team, but does not link to it. Here it is, and here are some of the previous interventions the Team uses as models:

Increasing college enrollment and retention: Providing streamlined personal assistance on the FAFSA form (e.g., pre-populating forms using tax return data and following up with a personal call) to low or moderate income individuals resulted in a 29% greater likelihood of their attending college for two consecutive years... 

Improving academic performance: Students taught to view their intelligence as a “muscle” that can grow with hard work and perseverance (as compared to a “fixed trait”, such as eye-color) experienced academic boosts of 1/2 a letter grade, with the largest effects often seen for low-performing students, students of color, or females in STEM-related courses.

Why, that's just how the Third Reich started.

Conservatives are always wondering aloud why they couldn't win in 2012 against a sitting president with a shit economy, and I keep explaining that it's because people think they're nuts. I used to assume they couldn't hear me because I don't have large BUY GOLD ads on my website, but I'm beginning to think no one can reach them.

Smith had a small but perfectly legitimate grievance -- that the government might be wasting money on an unproven social-science boondoggle -- but he knew that, as a Post columnist, he couldn't hold his barking readership's attention unless he laid on the totalitarian imagery good and thick. The result pleases people who agree with him that politically-correct race-pimping arugula-muching Liberal Fascists have turned America into a Union of Soviet Socialist Community Organizers, but when they try it on normal people it sends them backing nervously out the door. Even a dim person would have figured this out by now; I begin to think they're not serious about winning.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

 

Billy was the real thing. 

•   They say Tubby got the virus but since they're completely untrustworthy we have to consider alternatives: 1.) It's the truth; there were too many leaks and loose ends to keep it quiet; like what would they tell his next audience of virus-targets if he's too sick to show up? 2.) They're just plain lying, using a get-well-soon story as a distraction from his disastrous campaign week; 3.) They're mixing truth with lies -- like maybe he just hit a serious cognitive drop and they're calling it COVID as a cover. Well, whatever it is, the guy will be low-key for a little while his goons do the talking. Byron York at the Washington Examiner:

Then there is Trump's role as candidate. Remember that the president, and a lot of Republicans, too, have mocked rival Joe Biden for "hiding in his basement" and appearing mostly in virtual events. Well, it now appears that coronavirus will force President Trump to adopt a Biden-style campaign, at least for the next 10 to 14 days. The Trump campaign can still gather big crowds, which he can address via video. But there will be an undeniably different dynamic to those events, because the president always feeds off the energy from a big crowd, and he can't get the same effect sitting in front of a camera.

LOL yeah, let's schedule big rallies where Trump's loyalists can watch him on TV! How heartwarming. It'll be like the GOP Death Cult version of Spartacus, or Stone Soup: The President can't give you the King's Virus himself, but several of you are probably teeming with COVID-19, so you can give each other coronavirus in his name! It's a Trumpmas miracle! 

If you prefer your idiocy mainstream, here you go:

Does Biden suspend his campaign as Trump is quarantined? Is the White House failure to observe protocols a reason for Biden to continue his campaigning?

— Jeff Greenfield (@greenfield64) October 2, 2020

•  Meanwhile, from slightly before Corona Don time, here's Rod Dreher:

Here’s why Donald Trump is not out of the game yet. It’s a ruling from two months ago, by the federal 11th Circuit, brought to my attention just now by a reader:

A Florida school board’s refusal to allow a transgender boy to use the bathroom matching his gender identity was unconstitutional, the 11th Circuit ruled Friday...

Dreher actually thinks his frothing hatred of trans people is shared by normal people and will be a game-changer in the election.

Like I said earlier, Trump was a crazy man in last night’s debate, and was a disgrace. It says something terrible about our country that this is how our president behaves. But we should also keep in mind that the kindly, respectable Joe Biden represents something truly barbaric — in fact, believes that there can be no compromise on the issue.

This is about what it means to be a male, a female, a human being. And Joe Biden is on the wrong side of the issue. 

[Hysteria Bold in the original.] This reminds me of this previous bit of Dreher electoral analysis:

UPDATE: New CBS News poll finds no Kenosha bump for Trump, even in Wisconsin. People who want the situation calmed trust Biden more.

UPDATE 2: A friend who read this told me on the phone, as we were talking, that he finds it impossible to believe that there was no Trump bump from the rioting — but easy to believe that people who intend to vote for Trump would not admit it to a pollster. He’s probably right. I wouldn’t tell a pollster if I was going to vote for Trump. Is that paranoid? Maybe. But I don’t think people are wrong to fear that this information is being recorded, and might be used against them one day.

Not too paranoid, huh? Then he added one of his Letters to Repenthouse "from" someone who feels exactly the same way. I have my own feel-good ideas about how this election could go right, but it seems weird to me to watch the guy say over and over again that maybe fear and hatred will pull it out for the Party of God. Well, I guess it's better than admitting that voter suppression is their only real hope. 

•  Sorry, I can't let the subject alone -- it's too rich. I see the Washington Times is trying to stir shit by sending out a Breaking News alert about this:

It's very obvious UUURGK BAD BROWN LADY TALK BAD ABOUT LEADER stuff, but stop and think: Why would an appeal to sympathy toward Trump work on his fans? They always talk and think about him as superhuman -- an impression supported by his pointed cruelty and brutality, which proves his disdain for human weakness. He doesn't get coronavirus, he gives it! Think about those crazy Ben Garrison cartoons (and the weird Trump-as-Rocky Photoshop sent out by Trump himself) portraying this flabby tub-o-guts as a buff he-man. Can they even imagine Trump suffering from a mere disease? Maybe if it were cancer, that would work -- people "fight" cancer, so the image of a Swole Trump battering the Grim Reaper might play. But a flu virus? That's like a Rocky movie in which the boxer plans a comeback against Guillain-Barre Syndrome. Boring! I expect that when and if Trump pulls through his factota will tell the rubes thrilling stories of how he refused the wheelchair as he lumbered heroically to the snack machine in the lobby.  

MASTER DEBATERS.

Real quick, because I had to miss a bunch of this because of family stuff: Bernie Sanders grows on you. He's obviously not like the other candidates, in that he's not blow-dried or even (let us be honest) possessed of traditional political-theatrical gifts. But he handles very well the challenges thrown at him -- like the shady attempts to fault him on racial justice. His explanation on guest workers -- a solid laborite position based on the rights of both old and new residents -- was more granular and much, much more convincing than the other candidates' I am for a more generous and compassionate America bullshit. (Though when Clinton said let's stop and compare this conversation to what the Republicans are emitting, that was excellent -- as it was every time it happened.) I started by cringing at him, but after an hour I was looking forward to seeing him back on screen. You know why I think that is? Because he's honest. No, I'm not kidding. You don't see him changing the subject or scrambling to get around his own positions. He explained himself very clearly on gun control and it was to my satisfaction. Now, while I'm softer on gun control than most liberals, I'm not totally in agreement with his position --but at least I can respect his position because he respected me enough to tell me why he held it.

By the way, Anderson Cooper and his acolytes were very tough on the candidates -- and boy, what a difference from the Fox News tongue-baths the Republicans got! -- and while at first I was annoyed by the imbalance -- reminding me as it did of the old IOKIYAR dynamic -- over time I came to appreciate it. For one thing, it made Clinton defend her votes for garbage like, say, the Patriot Act -- and she did a lousy job of it. And that allowed Sanders to say, hell yeah, I'd get rid of mass surveillance, and make the case for it. It's nice, isn't it, to be treated with some respect as a citizen for a change?

Jim Webb has a hard time representing the Blue Dogs, but fuck him, he deserves a hard time; I'd hoped he'd try to invite the party toward a greater understanding of rural and exurban poverty and the voters Democrats are leaving behind because they can't figure out how to address it. But he wound up talking about how he'd fight the expansion of executive power and other crap Republicans who like to pretend they're smart complain about.  Really, fuck him. Lincoln Chaffee's a fucking idiot who isn't good even in the rare moments when he's right and should just kill himself.  Martin O'Malley has some good ideas but how the hell did he ever get elected to anything? Does he have gunmen working for him? Also he has a terrible habit of, whenever the others are talking among stuff like inequality, breaking in with WE NEED GREEN ENERGY!

All in all, any of these people, or their congenital fetuses in fetu, or the sweat off their balls, would make a better President than any Republican.

UPDATE. The National Review guys weigh in. Kevin D. Williamson:

The nurses all told basically the same story: They are doing fine for the moment, with a good union that secures for them good paychecks and good benefits. But they worry that the day after tomorrow something could suddenly change, that their hospitals and clinics will go under or be sold to evil hedge funds and that the terms of their employment will change radically for the worse, that their houses will for some reason be foreclosed on even though they’re current on all their payments, that college tuition will triple between now and the time their kids finish up at UNLV, that something bad is going to happen. That’s the Sanders voter, and, I think, the Democrat at large: terrified.

Stop and consider that for a moment. You know, because the author is conservative, that he thinks this is a knock on Sanders on his supporters. But really take a moment and focus on the fact that he thinks people with families who are in fear of losing their livelihoods, in a country where this can happen at the drop of a hat (or at the whim of a venture capitalist), are worthy of his contempt.

Now see with whom he compares them:

It isn’t just them. I was speaking with Sanders supporters almost literally in the shadow of a giant gold tower bearing the name “TRUMP” on the side—it is something of an achievement to create one of the tackiest things in Las Vegas—and the Trumpkins, like the Sandersnistas, are terrified: The big Mexican is gonna come and get them, the scheming Chinaman is gonna take their jobs, the surly Negro is leering at the white women. At both ends of the spectrum, we see terrified—terrified—Americans praying that Big Daddy will provide for them and smite their enemies. With sometime messiah Barack Obama having failed to deliver the goods, they’re turning to Government As God the Father Himself.

People who fear the loss of their jobs and therefore vote Sanders are the same as people who hate Mexicans and therefore vote Trump. Again, I ask: Do these guys even know any normal people?

UPDATE 2. In comments (which are great), a nice summary by ChrisV82:

Here's what we've seen after 1 Democratic and 2 Republican debates: Democrats are deeply committed to fixing climate destruction, fighting wealth inequality, and making sure people are not discriminated against based on superficial (skin color, gender, etc.) reasons. Republicans are Neanderthals who bang stones on the ground to celebrate the sky god and show deep concern that foreign tribes will attack under the glow of the war moon to steal their furs, burn their huts and rape their birthing wives.

Just go in and roam around, with special attention to erstwhile Baltimorean dex explaining O'Malley.

WONKS PROPOSE AND MOBS DISPOSE.

As part of the mainstream media campaign to drown America in liberal lies, the New York Times prints Sam Tanenhaus' long, loving article on "reformicons" -- the Republican New Ideas grifters I wrote about a month ago at the Village Voice. This excerpt will give you some idea:

On Jan. 8, the day before the reformers met for their brainstorming session, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida stood in the Lyndon B. Johnson room at the Capitol — it was the 50th anniversary of Johnson’s declaration of a war on poverty — and announced a plan to create a “revenue-neutral flex fund” that would disburse federal funds to the states to spend as they wished on antipoverty programs. The response was mixed. A Brookings Institution scholar said the idea was workable, but liberals warned that bloc grants give too much power to the states. At the same time, a scholar at the Heritage Foundation argued that collecting money at the federal-government level and handing it out to states is the “exact wrong way to produce conservative policies.”

But for reformers, it was a breakthrough.

[Pause to reflect that these people have ridiculous life priorities, and need to be shaken like paint cans in old-fashioned department stores and told to 'reform' their own dork asses, starting out by taking some drugs and jumping into a fountain]

The plan wouldn’t save a dime in the short run — in fact, it would most likely increase costs — but it met the bigger ideological goal of “incentivizing” work, a pet theme on the right since the days of [Irving] Kristol and his liberal ally Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

Mmm, that's some good reform right there! But since so many white people are falling out of the middle class into poverty, will it be as easy as it was in Moynihan's time to convince them that the poor need bootstrappado?

The punchline to this reform bullshit is what conservatives are actually doing these days, as you can see just by reading the news:

• Celebrating a Supreme Court decision that yanks birth control coverage from women because Jesus;
• Blocking buses of immigrants from entering a California town;
• Calling for America to go back to Iraq.

So while reformicons play patty-cake, the people they will allegedly lead into an enlightened new age are dancing around the same anti-contraception, anti-immigrant, pro-war bonfires that exercised them in decades gone by. Meanwhile in Texas, which conservatives like to point to as a laboratory of Republican ideas, the state GOP has endorsed repealing the Voting Rights Act, among other boob-bait. Reform is just something to make the starched-collar crowd feel better about themselves.

UPDATE. "Reading through the comments, I see many of us hit on the 'incentivize work' nugget o' shit," says Derelict, and I can see how that particular bit of awfulness would give most normal people pause. The actual Room to Grow manifesto Tanenhaus and his subjects are pimping contains several similar New Ideas, like this, written by Michael Strain:

The federal minimum wage requires that potential employers take a $7.25 per hour risk on long-term unemployed workers -- workers who are already seen as quite risky compared to applicants who are coming from other jobs or have been employed more recently. The government should lower the risk associated with hiring long-term unemployed workers by temporarily lowering the minimum wage that firms must pay them.

Now, now, he did say "temporary":

Temporarily lower minimum wages for the long-term unemployed should be coupled with a temporary subsidy (through an enhanced Earned Income Tax Credit or a wage subsidy) to ensure that no one who works full time and heads a household lives in poverty.

Instead of subsidizing the peons, let's subsidize businesses so they can pay them less -- that's one beauty part. And there another: A hint of how long that "temporary" subsidy would last comes in another part of the same section written by Michael Strain, in which he bitches about Obamacare and its subsidies:

The law gives subsidies to households with income up to 400 percent of the federal poverty line (this year, that would mean up to $94,200 for a family of four) in order to help with the cost of purchasing health insurance. The more money you make, the smaller the subsidy you receive. Because a little extra work results in losing some of the benefit workers receive from the government, the “subsidy phaseout” operates as a tax that discourages work.

Were his EITC plan ever to pass into law, how long do you think it would take for Strain the Cutter to confront Strain the Giver and tell him his "subsidy phaseout" was making people workshy -- that sub-minimum wage workers were declining to bootstrap themselves to higher wages because their cushy government-subsidized jobs had deincentivized them -- and that it has to go? So it would -- and the workers would stay at their starvation wages, because why would Republicans restore a minimum wage they'd always hated and which their Reform scam had finally enabled them to kill?

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.

MLKKK: HAVE A RIGHTWING MARTIN LUTHER KING DAY!

Conservative MLK Day tributes are always hilarious. This year the brethren seem to have coordinated on the theme that King wasn't really as interested in winning rights for black people as he was in helping conservatives defeat social justice warriors.

A few wingnut outlets go old school: "Does Martin Luther King Day Honor a Communist?" asks a thing called Headline Wealth (one of the Senile Rageaholic Grandpa sites I used to cover), and avers that it does, because the ex-communist Stanley Levison gave him money, supporting "FBI claims that King had told Levison that he was a Marxist." They also repeat the FBI claim that King watched a guy commit rape and laughed, which has also been circulated by more prominent conservative outlets, who always act as if the vile charge were undisputed. 

But most of the brethren realize outright demonization of King is no go, and so try to portray him as one of them, or at least the enemy of their enemies. "The woke Left vs. Martin Luther King Jr." editorializes the Washington Examiner:

The cultural Left’s intersectionality crusade has separated the country into different corners: White people are not permitted to address racial issues, and men are forbidden from speaking about women’s matters (i.e. abortion).

This is exactly what King feared.

If a guy can't advocate white and male supremacy without getting yelled at, MLK's Dream is over.

...it's important also to acknowledge that those who claim to be carrying on King's struggle for justice in modern times have strayed far from his dream..

Instead, they have embraced an identity politics that veers from merely fighting against all forms of discrimination, to carving people up by race, gender, sexual orientation, and placing those distinctions above all else...

Imagine MLK coming back today and seeing people fighting for Latino, immigrant, and gay rights! Boy, would he be mad. The Examiner also says MLK sided with Israel against "Arabs" ("Asked about the argument advanced by a black editor who viewed Arabs as people of color and thus supported them against Israel, King was dismissive"), without noting that, in the very same interview the Examiner cites, King said "peace for the Arabs means the kind of economic security that they so desperately need" and called for a "Marshall Plan for the Middle East, where we lift those who are at the bottom of the economic ladder and bring them into the mainstream of  economic security," which is the opposite of what both the Israeli government and American conservatives endorse for Palestinians.

At GraniteGrok, Steve MacDonald:

Today, equality, when invoked from the left, is about silencing free speech or ideas with which the Democrats disagree.

They empower their quest by calling it hate speech, bullying, bigoted, or even supremacist. As if there were a form of supremacy higher than using the power of the state to deny human beings the right to express ideas of which it disapproves.

Martin Luther King Jr. had plenty to say about that.

There follows an MLK quote in favor of free speech, which MacDonald interprets as a wicked burn on "The Democrat party, some in the media, the white tower, and more than a handful of street thugs" who "work diligently to deny you free association and expression even your right to free press –- as a creator, curators, or consumer." Again, if you have to go on Gab because Twitter won't publish your Nazi propaganda, the Dream is over.

The New York Post:

We suspect [King would] also be distressed by the hypersensitivity and growing political correctness of today’s discussions about race — the near-impossibility of honest dialogue and the insistence by too many to label any who disagree with them as racists...

And, while hailing the beautiful prose of writers such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, he’d be saddened by their pessimism about the possibilities for true and full racial reconciliation.

Picture King shaking his head at Coates: "Brother Ta-Nehisi, you have to give the white man a break. How can we achieve true equality if Stefan Molyneaux can't use Mailchimp to send his white supremacist newsletter?"

Maybe the best is by Jeremy Lott at The American Spectator:

About 30 years after King delivered his speech, a young white high school student in Tacoma, Washington, delivered fragments of that same speech over the school intercom. He did so by mimicking Reverend King’s great, deep voice, which apparently rubbed a few black students the wrong way. A friend warned him, “Do you want to get your ass kicked?” He was bumped into a few times and nudged up against a locker. He left by a different route than normal to avoid such a conflict.

That naive student was me, of course. It wasn’t the huge deal it could have become. Things didn’t escalate into the Great MLK Day Throwdown, thank God. By the next day, folks had let it go. Looking back, it’s really amusing. Still, it helped to reinforce in my mind an important lesson: dreamy idealism will get you only so far in life.

The message of Martin Luther King is boy, those black people are touchy!

UPDATE. Meanwhile in Richmond at the big gun fetishist flex,

Interesting argument pic.twitter.com/gYIDJW5xSI

— Jonathan Myerson Katz (@KatzOnEarth) January 20, 2020

 Won't someone please think of the militias?

UPDATE 2. I thought National Review's MLK tribute would be utterly anodyne, the magazine having been in a confused defensive crouch since the dawn of the Trump era. But Roger Clegg turns in a honey. He spends the first half of it praising Donald Trump, and eventually gets to the black people:

Black Lives Matter and Michelle Alexander’s polemics to the contrary notwithstanding, the reason there are a disproportionate number of African-American prison inmates is not because of racist laws or law-enforcers: It’s simply because a disproportionate number of crimes are committed by African Americans.

Um, Happy MLK Day?  Here's his wow finish:

Now, I said that Americans really aren’t hopelessly divided with respect to foreign policy, capitalism, and our constitutional structure: Am I exaggerating when I assert that there is such a division with respect to law, work, family, patriotism, and God?

Well, no doubt there are plenty of people who voted for Hillary Clinton and like at least a couple of items on that list. But I do think there is more of a division here, and certainly it’s more reasonable for a lot of Americans to perceive it here. In one way or another, the Left derides them all — and one major political party is unwilling to challenge the Left, because its politicians and leadership are afraid to.

I’ll end by saying that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., while not blameless in his entire legacy, did not intend to reject any of them.

So King was kind of a shit, just like the Democrats, but at least he did his damage unintentionally. Well, no black people read National Review, so no harm no foul.

I WANT YOU TO HURT LIKE I DO. Crunchy Rod Dreher is back from vacation -- which was not spent, as I had hopefully fantasized, scouting locations for the New Jerusalem, but in such normal yuppie pursuits as wine-tasting, restaurant-hopping, and driving an SUV. No sooner has he unpacked his cilices that he starts bitching about other educated white people whose attitudes perversely differ from his own.

See, while Dreher enthuses over Jesus and Montepulciano d'Abruzzo, some honkies choose to enthuse over what they call their "vibrant" neighborhoods "where blacks, whites, gays and Hispanics all live together." Dreher thinks they're just trying to make him feel bad:

White people who use the word "vibrant" to describe a piece of real estate on which ethnic or tattooed people live really want to make a statement about their own broad-mindedness or social progressivism (versus the supposed fear and closed-mindedness of suburban white people). This is why I'm so fascinated by the word. It's an elite white-people social marker, a sign that one-upsmanship is being attempted.

It's not that Dreher doesn't approve of or use the word "vibrant." He just doesn't like it when folks use it on multi-ethnic neighborhoods.

How then should we speak of these neighborhoods? Emulating Dreher's own example, we might speak of our Hispanic neighbors as a potential threat to our real estate values ("We are close, though, to a barrio... should I sell my house while I still can, or risk putting up with crime and the degradation of the quality of life in the neighborhood?").

Or of our gay neighbors as disgusting perverts ("I was amazed by how a city park in my neighborhood became a popular cruising grown for gay men seeking sexual encounters after dark... what are the rest of us supposed to think about gay male culture, and the degree to which it self-defines according to behavior that most people rightly find repulsive?").

To be fair, maybe it's not the racial or gender-preferential identity of specific neighbors that bugs Dreher. In a 2007 column he says, "the day will never come when we give [our children] permission to play unsupervised on our front lawn," because his neighborhood contains "halfway houses for sex offenders," "stray dogs," and "dodgy older teenagers from someplace else." Dreher laments that his urban nabe is not like the rural Louisiana hamlet in which he was raised.

You can understand why he'd object to "vibrant," or just about any other positive adjective applied to such places. Poor Dreher just plain doesn't like where he lives. He would prefer to live in Bumfuck or Coon Holler, so long as he could also have access to all the conveniences of a large city. It's bad enough that he can't have it all, geographically speaking. That some people who live in cities are content, even enthusiastic about where and how they live -- well, that just steams his vegetable dumpling.

I really hope he gets to exercise his Benedict Option, not just for the comic potential but also for his own sake. No man can serve two masters, and Dreher's unappeasable yearning to have the bright lights of the big city and the ol' swimmin' hole will eventually drive him crazier than he already is.