PARDON MY FRENCH.

Are you shitting me:

Conservative columnist Bill Kristol is working to recruit David French, a writer for National Review, as a third-party presidential candidate, CBS News has confirmed.
"A group approached French, he's considering it seriously and is in contact with lots of serious people," a source with knowledge of the effort told CBS News.

I have followed French's career at National Review for years and will just quickly tell you that he's not only against gay marriage, he's also against Griswold v Connecticut, the decision that invalidated laws against contraception ("Is there a single legal doctrine that can stand against the quest for personal sexual fulfillment?" French thundered); that he denounced the widespread mourning of Prince's death on the grounds that "Prince was ultimately just another talented and decadent voice in a hedonistic culture... notable mainly because he was particularly effective at communicating that decadence to an eager and willing audience"; that he has compared Kim Davis, that crazy clerk who refused to sign gay marriage licenses, to "men like Martin Luther, John Calvin, and John Knox — the men who first put the 'protest' in 'Protestant'"; that he -- well, I'm out of time for the moment, but you can peruse the archive for more if you can stand it. The point is, he makes Trump look like Eisenhower.

UPDATE. I see Kristol's plan to elect David French President of the United States is getting a lot of press, from reputable outlets as well as from rightbloggers. Already there has been some controversy and an accusation of dirty tricks.  T. Becket Adams of the Washington Examiner announces, "Politico reporter badly mangles anecdote about David French's marriage, Iraq deployment." Kevin Robillard of Politico, it turns out, posted a screenshot -- a screenshot! -- of a passage from a Kathryn J. Lopez item on French in National Review that claimed French wouldn't let his wife communicate with men by email or use Facebook at all while he was deployed overseas because "David knew, with his 'stomach clenching,' that 'the most intimate conversations a person has are about life and faith' — and that 'spiritual and emotional intimacy frequently leads to physical intimacy.'" The screenshot is not faked, but Adams claimed Robillard "badly misrepresented" the passage  on the grounds that... well, he has no grounds; maybe he meant it was quoted out of context, but Adams reproduces more of Lopez's story and it doesn't make it look any less weird. I guess Adams means that when a wingnut's own words make him look bad, it's a smear job. (Update: A commenter notes the issue is the implication that Pere French laid down the rules for Mere French, as it was portrayed as a mutual decision. Good point, but still weird, and The Federalist's Mollie Hemingway doesn't make it less weird, raging that the Liberal Media think "David and Nancy French coming out of a deployment with an intact marriage is something we need to highlight and scoff at," whereas Bill Clinton had sex with an intern etc.)

Anyway I don't care about the guy's personal life, I only care about his ideas, which are insane. I'll be back with more, but for now I'll leave you with another screenshot, which I assure you is also not faked:

 

I know, authors don't choose their heds or graphics, but believe me, the article doesn't redeem it.

UPDATE 2. For French newbies, more on his interesting beliefs: After Dylann Roof's racial mass murders in Charleston, French wrote a post called "If One of the Churchgoers in Charleston Had Been Armed . . ." and it's just what you imagine, ending in a Paean to The Gun:

Don’t just carry. Don’t just go to the state-mandated training, buy a weapon, and then forget about it... Practice with a handgun until you can take it from a position of safe carry to active engagement within seconds. Then practice that again until you’ve beaten your best time. Then practice again. And realize that practice isn’t a burden but a joy...

Shudder. When people started feeling creepy about Confederate symbols because of Roof, French offered a qualified defense of the Lost Cause ("We of course agree that the Confederate states should not have left the Union, but it should be noted that the notion of secession was hardly universally condemned, even in the North").

French is also sour on academic tenure because it lets liberal professors teach without getting fired, but doesn't want it ended until he and his buddies are done "overhauling departments" (i.e., stuffing them with conservatives affirmative-action hires). He thinks you shouldn't worry that black people get killed so often by cops because, after all, so many of them are criminals, or at least suspected of crimes. And Lord how he hates them Mooslims.

In short, he's wrong about everything -- sometimes in entertainingly loony ways, but always wrong, which may explain his attraction for William Kristol. Nothing else does, though. The only thing French's candidacy can possibly achieve is the further normalization of the psychosis on the right.  Hmm -- maybe Kristol's smarter than he looks and this was his plan all along?

UPDATE 3. Well, he's got the crucial Quin Hillyer endorsement.

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!

NEVER THEIR OWN FAULT.

As regular readers will know, David French is awful -- a theocrat who not only denounces Roe v. Wade but also Griswold v. Connecticut (not to mention Prince, whom French considers a "decadent voice in a hedonistic culture"), and rants about devil worshipers like a regular Rod Dreher, and is the author of "If One of the Churchgoers in Charleston Had Been Armed," etc. (There's a short list of some of his dumber columns here.) But he also likes to play the reasonable NeverTrumper moderate, which is really the most annoying part of his shtick.

Here's the latest issue of French's newsletter -- it's called The French Press, har, and it's on substack; they let anyone have one, it seems! -- and the title of this edition kind of says it all --

The Necessary, Kabuki-Theater Impeachment

-- but only kind of so let's look at it a bit.

The president of the United States is likely to be impeached today (and may be impeached by the time you read this newsletter), and outside of America’s subculture of political hobbyists, nobody seems to care. 

(No citation given, wonder why.)

It still matters, though, and it’s still important to lay down a marker—even if the nation is replaying 1998, but with the partisan roles reversed. 

Shaking down a foreign head of state for dirt on my political opponents on the one hand, a blowjob on the other -- yeah, pick 'em.

But let’s not focus entirely on the president. Bernie Sanders is surprisingly resilient in the Democratic primary, so it’s time to ask him: Why are so many anti-Semites orbiting his campaign? 

Ugh yeah, in the second stage of this crap-missle French does the whole Noah Rothman-Tiana Lowe bullshit about how Sanders is, well he's not saying an anti-Semite buuuuttt d'jever notice how he's surround by "anti-Semites" (French's word for "Muslims")? But I digress, which is easy, believe me, with someone this nightmarish. Back to his impeachment bosh:

In my adult lifetime, I’ve supported impeaching two presidents—one Democrat and the other Republican. In both circumstances, I knew there was zero chance the president would be convicted. 

And in both cases it had zero chance of affecting his career, so why not?

Yet, in both circumstances, the president was clearly guilty of serious misconduct. Partisanship saved Bill Clinton. Partisanship will save Donald Trump. 

Again, the blowjob-blackmail conundrum! One of French's go-to bits is assuming we've all agreed to some absurd point he then just breezes past.

Then French does several paragraphs about Clinton's Chinese fundraising and Whitewater -- look, he's a lifelong conservative factotum, they drill them on this stuff like Russian ballet students -- and then says,

In context then, the impeachment of Bill Clinton wasn’t just an indictment of his conduct surrounding a single sexual harassment case -- though that conduct was certainly impeachable -- it represented the culmination of a long train of scandals and a declaration by one elected branch of government that this man did not belong in the Oval Office.  

So, see, you oversexed liberals may not think getting his dick sucked was such a big deal, but there was a bunch of other stuff he really deserved to be impeached for, so it was only just. And now French, not at all obsessed with the Clintons, is really just sad as a good patriot that Clinton got away with it because (deep sigh) thanks to him Trump will get away with it too:

Watching Trump today, I’m reminded of the movie Patton. Squinting through binoculars as he watches American forces defeat the Germans in North Africa, Patton memorably says, “Rommel, you magnificent bastard, I read your book!”  

There’s Trump, squinting back in political history, declaring “Bill, you magnificent bastard, I read your book!” Trump did read Bill’s book. So did Republicans. So the Trump presidency will survive, even if it shouldn’t, and Republicans may well regret their defense.

If you're wondering what that last huh-what clause is about, the answer is that French is about to pull a fast one, and he wants to make it look related to everything else he's been talking about with a quick last-minute feint so you don't catch on:

Not long ago I had dinner with a Clinton loyalist, someone who stood by his president back in the day. I was amazed when he frankly (and with some emotion) admitted his error.

His name: Favid Dench.

“We could have drawn a line,” he said. “Instead, we helped erase the lines.” That comment has stuck with me ever since. And that’s the choice today—and it’s the choice that Trump will keep giving Republicans. Draw the line? Or erase the lines? 

See, this is why, though JustTheTip Trumpers are the absolute worst, the NeverTrumpers aren't really much better: Their whole moral pose is entirely cost-free. There's nothing brave about it. Because for these guys, it was really the best career move they could make. Trump didn't need Max Boot -- he already had fake intellectual warmongers like Seb Gorka, so of what use was Boot? Similarly, Trump's surrounded by snake-handling, tongue-speaker Christian nutjobs -- what's he need David French for? So naturally French went off and did the wilderness act.

But even in his wilderness, French gives absolutely no evidence that he knows why conservatives flocked to Trump, or that conservatism has anything to do with the problem. Hell, French approves of a lot of stuff Trump does -- tax cuts and Jesus-freak judges? Thumbs up! -- and, much like the JustTheTip guys, mainly focuses on Trump's rude behavior -- like he was Mayor Jimmy Walker, a charming roué rather than a vicious thug. Go find me a piece where French mourns the immigrant children Trump has locked up and in some cases sold to Christian families -- and I don't mean a Obama-did-it equivocation like his column "Trump Moves to Obama’s Position on Family Detention, Democrats Outraged." Trump's cruelty is only disturbing to French because it makes conservatives look bad, not because of the damage it does to the untermenschen. And French only disapproves of conservatives' embrace of Trump because in his view it means they're acting like liberals -- while really, as the evidence shows, they're acting like conservatives who've found their dreamboat -- more senile than Reagan, more crooked than Nixon, and even more outrageously fake-Christian than George W. Bush. Hell, I wouldn't be shocked if French felt the same way and just couldn't hear to admit it; and maybe that's not entirely careerism -- it could also be self-care.

FRENCH TWIST.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Impudent liberals! Only Jesus can explain the news!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heather Mac Donald says it well:

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

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

BUTCH, PLEASE.

A new study shows grip strength among young people today is not as good as it was among people of their parents' generation.

Part of me interprets this to mean that the Modern Youts are sissies, not like me when I was a lad -- well, actually I was kind of a sissy, but still I was compelled by the social pressures of that get-out-the-house-kid era to perform physically demanding jobs, loading trucks and slinging hash and the like, and I bet my grip-strength then could beat the band (had I but known to have it measured so I could wave it in you young punks' faces!).

That is, as I say, how part of me interprets it, for a few seconds anyways; but, like any sensible, grown person who is still troubled by ridiculous, juvenile reactions like this, but also has matured enough to take them in stride,  I remind myself that every generation feels the succeeding generation to be degenerate and weak by comparison; and that even if I don't approve of the way modern parents raise their kids, it's their business how to raise them, not mine.

In other words, not that being a little less of an asshole than I might be is much to brag on but I'm apparently a little further along the evolutionary scale than erstwhile Presidential can'tdidate and eternal pain in the ass David French of National Review, who reads the grip-strength report thus:

If you’re the average Millennial male... You’re exactly the kind of person who in generations past had your milk money confiscated every day — who got swirlied in the middle-school bathroom... Welcome to the new, post-masculine reality

Once upon a time it was only selected sissies who got the dick-wagging locker-room treatment -- now David French will take all you millennials on! Look what a tough guy he was in high school:

I look back to my own childhood. In 1985, I was 16 years old, and I was a nerd’s nerd. I toted graph paper and 20-sided dice to school to play Dungeons & Dragons at lunch. (I like to think I was the finest dungeon master Scott County, Ky., had ever seen.) When I wasn’t playing D&D, my nose was buried in Lord of the Rings, or the Shannara books by Terry Brooks, or the Dragonriders of Pern by Anne McCaffrey...

[Blink. Blink.] I'd like to give him credit for 'fessing up, but still I have to ask: if French was such a numpty as a teen, why is he barking out butchness lessons to young people now?

But none of my nerdiness relieved me of the responsibility of learning how to be a man — a protector, builder, and fixer. So that meant spending my Saturdays hauling out the ramps to change the oil and oil filters on all our cars.

Cars, plural? Look-surey!

That meant helping my dad build a new back porch or constantly wrestling with immense piles of firewood. (We heated our house with a wood stove.) I made extra money working in neighborhood yards. Being a guy meant doing manual labor...

Ah, so like many of us fossils French had chores, and after-school and summer jobs. How nice. But so what? Some generations back, kids could count on being bound to their parent's serfdom and poverty till the day they died. That was manhood then. We have progressed, and now that fate is less common in America than it was -- including for French (Harvard Law, 1994! Dungeonmaster's come a long way).

So why does it bother French so much that the new breed have it easier than he did? If you're a generous sort, you might think he's just concerned that kids today are deprived of the pleasurable experience of useful labor -- of joy in their own physical strength and a job well done. But French is a wingnut: Promoting pleasure, let alone the physical kind, is the furthest thing from his mind. He snarls, he nags, he kvetches -- never does he suggest they're anything rewarding in physical labor except the opportunity to escape his bitching about it.

You can see hints of what's really eating French when he leaves off grousing about yardwork and starts... veering in an interesting direction. For example:

In the age of zero-tolerance school-disciplinary policies — where any kind of physical confrontation is treated like a human-rights violation — [young men] have less opportunity to develop toughness. Today’s young males don’t have common touchstones for what it’s like to grow up to be a man.

The modern boy's teacher helps him get out of the locker into which, doing only as God and nature intended, bullies have stuffed him, and thus is he emasculated! Why didn't these teachers-union ballbusters let him figure out himself how to deal with bullies? Chances are he'd come out tougher -- well, actually chances are he'd come out emotionally crippled, perhaps suicidal, but at least he'd be a man! Perhaps even a Dungeonmaster! Speaking of which, later French brags that he and his D&D buddies could, despite their nerdom...

...pop the hood of a car and get to work right alongside the future mechanics of my high-school class. We weren’t as good or as knowledgeable, but we held our own. And there were no social-justice warriors shrieking that there was no such thing as distinctively male or masculine pursuits.

Social justice warriors! So that's the problem! Modern boys might be manly enough to suit French -- they might want to work on car engines -- but they're being stopped by Zoe Quinn, Sarah Silverman and their fellow SJWs, who swarm like emasculating Valkyrie over Shop Class, wrestle the boys away from their Ford Fairlanes, and make them write essays for Vox. In their pajamas!

Bottom line, French is a rightwing hack factotum, in fact a hacktotum, and this latest stray datum is only meaningful to him as an excuse to shake his fist at feminists and non-homeschool-educators -- and, mostly, at millennials, because it seems they've turned against conservatism in a big way. In other words, the butch is a bitch.  And not even the fierce kind.

UPDATE. Comments are all very funny, but if you must choose start with the dialogues invented by Pere Ubu and Andrew Johnston ("You are enjoying tankards of fine ale when two orcish barbarians who look just like those assholes who hang around on the north side of the building come up...").

BEARING WESTBORO.

I know, fellas, he's in here a lot, but once more, David French:

Debunking the ‘Born This Way’ Myth

It about time someone smacked down that Lady Gaga or Googoo or whatever she's called!

A new study challenges progressives’ tall tales about sexuality. 

Here is the world according to the LGBT Left: Just as there are black and white, there are gay and straight. One’s sexual orientation, like one’s race, is fixed and immutable at birth. The process of “questioning” one’s orientation isn’t a process of deciding but of discovering...

Cut to the chase: Libtards think gay people have to be gay, and there's such a thing as "transgender," and they call it "science": "This, you see, is science. Anyone who contradicts it...isn’t just ignorant, but bigoted," says French, echoing his passive-aggressive "denying that science not only makes you a Neanderthal, it makes you a bigot" shtick from the previous week. Liberals are always using science against the godly, and it's so unfair, because they also have "the academy, pop culture, progressive corporate America, and, lately, the Supreme Court" on their side. What a bunch of bullies!

Well, this time David French will show them some science: Behold, a study, from The New Atlantis, a wingnut "journal of science and technology" which is not peer-reviewed (indeed, is against peer review as a concept), but whose authors have gone through a bunch of papers and found that gays can be straightened and a good thing too because being gay makes you sick. Q.E.D., faggots!

There's a little pantomime of nuance ("Human sexuality is not so neatly and cleanly divided and determined") to give readers who are unfamiliar with French's shtick the impression that it's really the homosexualists who are rigid and inflexible -- but inevitably French can't keep it up, and he returns to the Old Rugged Crock of theocratic certainties:

Here’s ["the Left's"] vision, in a nutshell: Consenting adults should be able to do what they want with their bodies, and the resulting physical or emotional harm is either reasonably tolerable or can be alleviated through a combination of government programs and public re-education.

It may sound like freedom to you sodomites, but it ends in re-education! See, it's right there at the end of the paragraph. Be grateful French didn't put "the Holocaust" instead -- Jesus put him in a generous mood!

The Judeo-Christian model, by contrast, is aspirational, calling on people not to do what they want, but what they should.

And the reason they should is something something hey where's everybody going.

Admittedly, this path is far easier for some than others...

Some of you men do not love the cilice. Weaklings!

...but there has always been some play in the cultural joints.

???

The Left’s response is alluring, but it offers a self-indulgent path down which lies cultural ruin. The LGBT Left is driving us there just as fast as it can depress the gas pedal, but thanks to [study authors] McHugh and Mayer, we now know they most assuredly are not doing so in the name of “science.”

I have to ask: What is this intended to achieve?  No one who isn't already standing on a pillar with maggots in his legs, or aspiring to pretend to do so, will find the proposition attractive as French puts it. This is strictly "the heathens will be sorry" material. All I can figure is, the idea is to keep the Saving Remnant seething with resentment at the unbelief of the unbelievers so that, if an opportunity arises (such as global conflagration, fantasies of which wingnut grifters like to use to shake down suckers, and which French might just be crazy enough to believe in), they'll be juiced and ready to fan out and effect the gay-straightening themselves, with pliers and pruning hooks.

Again, remember that in addition to being a National Review writer, the man was considered by Bill Kristol and other prominent morons to be Presidential timber. And they wonder why the whole rotten enterprise was vulnerable to Trump!

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

•    You may remember him for his later, lush 'n' luxe blues stuff, and that's all very fine. I love B.B. King, now passed, for his slightly cheesy "B.B. 'Blues Boy' King" stompers from the 50s like the one above. Sure sounds like him and the "Orchestra" are having a good time. I expect some of my readers have their own favorites to recommend.

•    Many conservatives, even ones who are not Rod "The Get-Ready Man" Dreher, are bitching about that poll showing a slightly smaller percentage of Christians in America than once there was. At National Review David French knows why: "Why Does ‘Organized Religion’ Get a Bad Rap? Because the Elite Lies About It." Evil liberals say Jesus people are obsessed with cultural issues like gay marriage, but the truth is Christians contribute heavily to charity. Yes, it's the old "society claims I'm a pedophile, but I bought twenty tickets to the Policeman's Ball" argument. More interesting to me is this claim:

Sexual politics is simply not a dominant topic compared to scriptural study, discussions of family, or exhortations to serve the poorest and most disadvantaged members of the community. If I were to critique the church, I’d say we need to discuss the sexual revolution issues a bit more — to equip kids and families to face the cultural onslaught.

Don't talk about it enough, huh? Let's look at the past few examples of French's own writing at National Review. What picture of Christianity do you get from it? There's not a lot about charity in there -- in fact, I found no David French posts at all promoting alms to the poor. (Come on, it's National Review!) Here's what I did see:

"The Clintons, Tom Brady, and the ‘Scoreboard’ Life" (Shorter: Libtards cheat because they don't have Jesus);
"When Crusades Meet Courtrooms" and "Three Recent Lawsuits Challenge the ‘Rape Crisis’ Storyline" (Shorter: Rape is not the fault of the men lying bitches falsely accuse of raping them, it's the fault of the sexual revolution);
"Why a Huckabee Loss Would Be a Win for Religious Conservatives" (Shorter: Because all the other GOP candidates hate gays and fornication as much as Huckabee does. Eat it, libtards!);
"Obama’s Crackdown on Dissent Has Made Conservatives a Little Paranoid — and Rightly So" (Shorter: If Ted Cruz was President libtards would so be just as paranoid about Jade Helm as we are, except we aren't paranoid because Obama really is a monster);
"Comedy, Cowardice, or Both?" (Shorter: SNL libtards didn't draw Muhammed! Sure, it was funny, but what's that got to do with anything?);
"Liberals Peer into Your Heart and See the Darkness Inside" (Shorter: Libtards are mean and hateful. Not like us!)

Etc. And here are the records from the other times we've caught French's culture-war act. (This one will do if you can't read them all.) All told I'd say the biggest PR problem Christianity has isn't "Elite Lies About It" -- it's people like David French.

•    OK, here's the advertising portion of the program: A friend of mine in New York is between freelance gigs DON'T RUN AWAY SHE DOESN'T WANT A HANDOUT only another freelance gig. Métier includes branding, marketing, research, strategy, communications, social media, digital product development, content and product creation, etc. Drop me a note if you've got something for her.

•    Melissa Langsam Braunstein of The Federalist testifies to "listening to a panel at AEI on Monday night, during which several contributors to The Dadly Virtues: Adventures from the Worst Job You’ll Ever Love discussed their take on fatherhood." Sounds like a corker:

I cannot imagine a similar panel of mothers laughing as they described purposely breaking their child’s leg, as P.J. O’Rourke’s son believed he did, while regaling the audience with the saga of teaching that young son how to ski. The experience taught O’Rourke that he’s better off being the breadwinner who can afford ski lessons.

And this:

Tucker Carlson’s presentation may have been the most different from what a panel of mothers might offer. Amidst his lighthearted remarks, Carlson repeatedly mentioned that he’s not reflective about his parenting and takes no responsibility for any of his four children’s failings; he believes any mistakes his children make are strictly their own, and he does never holds his wife or himself liable.

And this:

Jonah Goldberg sounded endearingly clueless...

Stop to take a breath here.

.... – since we gather his daughter’s alright now – as he described a fall she took during toddlerhood that resulted in a sizable forehead gash. Apparently, Goldberg was still new enough to parenting that he didn’t realize his daughter’s bloody face needed to be stitched up professionally. Luckily, his sister-in-law was able to advise via telephone and pass along the good advice to wait for a plastic surgeon at the hospital.

Braunstein's conclusion:

This is all to say: fatherhood sounds rather liberating. Whatever our cultural expectations of men, it seems our standards for fathers are less exacting (and crazy-making) than those for American mothers. Having listened to the fathers on this panel, I dare say that difference is largely driven by the fact that men aren’t critical of one another’s parenting in the same way that women can be...

Either than or these guys are just a bunch of fucking idiots.

FRENCH FRAUD.

David French is always awful but lately he's really been outdoing himself. First there was his article in The Atlantic (har) about how both the right and the left were giving him and his wife a hard time about the little black girl they picked up in Ethiopia. On the right, there was the kind of neo-Nazi viciousness that we've all come to expect from the conservative avant-garde -- racial slurs, gas chamber imagery, the works.

On the left? Under Obama the IRS audited people like French who took the adoption tax credit -- never mind that the IRS had legitimate fraud concerns with it (refundable tax credits are a particular risk, something conservatives like to point out when the refundable credit is, say, the Earned Income Tax Credit), and French apparently kept his deduction. But that's not all: French also heard what he perceived as unkind words from lefties -- not racial slurs, but scholarship! Kathryn Joyce wrote a "blistering attack on the evangelical adoption movement, claiming that the adoption industry was rife with corruption," which to those of us who've gotten a load of evangelicals lately is like, yeah that makes sense, but to French it just means more persecution: "We quickly discovered that if you’re the white parents of an adopted black child, and you’re in the public eye at all, men and women will viciously criticize you for having the audacity to believe that you can raise your kid."

Joyce has kicked French's ass pretty good on this, but no one will care, as French is taking his The Left Was Mean To My Little Black Child act on the road:

If you want to know what the hell BLM has to do with any of this, you too are being mean to his widdle girl.

Also, French has leapt onto the Impeach Pope Francis bandwagon. (He even demands that the Pope "cooperate fully with impartial investigators," at which anyone with even a glancing acquaintance with the history of the One Holy Catholic & Apostolic will LOL.) Rod Dreher has of late been devoting the full flow of his logorrhea to this cause, obviously because he perceives Francis as insufficiently gay-hating to lead the Church of which he was briefly a member; also I expect Dreher dreams of one day being named both Grand Patriarch of his current religion and Pope, in a sort of SCTV Man Who Would Be King Of The Popes scenario. As for French, his shtick is to compare Francis to Donald Trump. I shit you not:

If a person becomes more powerful, does his character matter less? Or more? Increasingly, it seems, the answer from partisans is resounding and unmistakeable.
It’s less. It’s so much less that it’s doubtful character matters at all. 

You think I’m talking about Donald Trump, don’t you?... 

For more than two years now, progressives have been screaming to conservatives that the truth matters. Character matters. You cannot — must not — turn a blind eye to real wrongdoing, even when the stakes seem high. In other words, after selling out to protect Bill Clinton in 1998...

Oh yeah. Francis is like Bill Clinton, too, because of liberal hypocrisy. (French even uses the line, "Is that the progressive Christian version of 'But Gorsuch'?")

The upshot is, one of the made men of the Church has accused Francis of shielding one of the big pedo Cardinals, and French and all the wingnuts are beating pots and pans for Francis' ouster. Because the big liberal units like the New York Times have not joined them in beating said pots and pans, they are pedo-Pope Francis' enablers ("They’ll even overlook sex abuse — until the cry of the victims is too great to be ignored").

Me, I left the Church long ago, and we who have free souls, it touches us not. Still I marvel that these non-Catholics are so exercised. The clergy were fucking altar boys 24/7 throughout the reigns of Saint John Paul II and Benedict XVI, and back then wingnuts were content to mutter about This Fallen World etc.; now they demand to impeach the Pope. It reminds me that conservatives see everything as a means to their own power; hell, that's why Steve Bannon is waddling around Europe, trying to rev up every local Bund he can get to, and sweetening the deal for credulous reporters with dirt on celebrities. It's also why they oppose doing anything about climate change -- rather than admit any advantage to scientists (who, being intellectuals, they associate with cursed intellectuals and thus with cursed liberals), they'd rather see the Earth fry and rule the cinder. Well, humanity had a good run; I'm nearly out of the game, but leave my sympathies for your poor kids.

PARAGRAPH OF THE WEEK.

It's from National Review's David French, NR's house testosterone junkie whose prose always purples up when he's talkin' man-talk. The title of his latest emission is pretty good -- "Understanding the Inescapable Reality of Masculinity" -- though the story is the same as usual: A man, Oscar Stewart, did something mainly (chased the latest synagogue shooter! Didn't catch him, but M for Maneffort!), which is offered as evidence that boys are "more aggressive than girls, and more violent than girls, and they take greater risks than girls," and that's good because we need boys to do that because girls, well you know, sugar and spice.

(French actually mentions that at the synagogue "a courageous woman named Lori Kaye lost her life shielding the rabbi from the incoming bullets" and never for a second acknowledges that this fact blows his whole stupid thesis.)

But the nut graf, and it is nuts, is thing of beauty. It comes after French is forced to admit that most men aren't cowpunchers and roadhouse bouncers and opportunities to butch up don't come easy in today's modern, sissy world. Attend:

But what used to happen more naturally must now happen more intentionally. Men need to cultivate physical strength even if physical strength isn’t necessary to their daily lives. They should identify as protectors even when immediate threats aren’t evident. Did Oscar Stewart believe he was in immediate danger when he went to his synagogue last Friday? And our culture and our people need to stop mocking and belittling men when they pursue stereotypically “manly” hobbies and activities. Male friendships are vital, and male friendships flow organically from male pursuits.

"Cultivate physical strength" -- you mean like Jack LaLanne? I hate to tell French but there's this thing called health clubs and it's sweeping the country. Maybe he thinks men should do less cardio and more weight training? [Checks cover of magazine -- this is supposed to be about conservatism, right?]

"Stop mocking and belittling men when they pursue stereotypically 'manly' hobbies and activities" is good too, though I wonder what activities he's talking about -- drum circles? Model airplane building? Jack-off clubs? Well, that would explain "flow organically from male pursuits."

UPDATE. Commenter Andrew Johnston makes a great point: "If all of this is 'natural' to men, then why do you need to teach it?" Maybe someday we'll get a David French book explaining how liberals made all the boys girly and conservatives are trying to bring 'em back to butchitude with crossfit, cigars, and Fetal Pain bills.

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.

SEX MAD. This is one of those post-modern stories where we start with the bloody, chaotic finale  --

We social conservatives hold the line on same-sex marriage not because we think it is more destructive than abortion and no-fault divorce (obviously it is not) but because all of these trends are rooted in the same destructive ideological and spiritual impulses that lead us to discard natural law, privilege adult wants over all other values, and erase even our most long-held liberties in the name of sexual desire.

-- and, working our way backwards, try to answer the question: Just how could this character, or anyone, become convinced that homosexuals and fornicators are conspiring to "erase even our most long-held liberties in the name of sexual desire"?

It's a losing battle. The perpetrator is National Review's David French, a nut. Recall him in May shaking his fist at Griswold v. Connecticut, in which the wicked Supreme Court condemned America to freely-available birth control: "Think for a moment of the awesome power of the sexual revolution over law and logic," thundered French. "Is there a single legal doctrine that can stand against the quest for personal sexual fulfillment?" Recall also his 2011 stab at Kim du Toit butchliness, in which he told us that, due to a "collaboration between radical feminism and a particularly sappy and sentimental Christianity... the ideal man becomes—in many essential ways—a woman: emotionally available, always eager to talk, never afraid to shed a tear, and ready, willing, and able to shoulder the household workload."

So we're never going to get a coherent narrative out of this. But we can at least get this frisson: It turns out French's premise is loonier than his conclusion. It's not merely or even mainly the removal of legislative chains from their straining libidos,  nor a perverse desire to destroy David French's liberty, that has all these homos and heteros getting it on with such ferocity.

The Sexual Revolution Depends on Big Government

I ain't even kidding.

Our fatherless kids are being fed breakfast, lunch, and sometimes now even a school dinner, and why not ban Happy Meals if there’s no competent parent around to say “no”? In fact, much of the apparatus of state entitlement is built around the presumption that citizens should enjoy a certain standard of living regardless of their personal choices and conduct.

If citizens were forced to bear more of the weight of their sexual decisions, would those decisions be different?

Were ours again a godly Republic, wastrels such as these would be starving, unable to summon the energy to stiffen or lubricate, much less mount. But like an indulgent parent, Big Government willfully feeds them till, fattened into strapping bucks and welfare queens, they fuck till freedom is no more. (Presumably some of them got a little extra feed, went totally nuts and demanded gay marriage.) This must be why Michelle Obama wants them to eat fresh vegetables -- once they're full of spinach, their genitals will engorge like Popeye's forearms, and their jackhammer couplings will shake America to its very foundations!

This brings to mind a lovely story told by Danny Hutton of Three Dog Night in the Brian Wilson doc, I Just Wasn't Made for These Times, about the night he and Iggy Stooge went over to Wilson's and the addled Beach Boy had them singing "Shortnin' Bread" for over an hour. Hutton says Iggy turned to him and said, "I'm gettin' out of here -- this guy's nuts!" I like to imagine Robert George saying that about French.

THIS FALLEN WORLD.

David French seems to have taken over National Review's Rod Dreher Chair for Manic Street Preaching. Today French tells us that some observers believe young men should be kept away from porn because it warps their sexuality. This French dismisses as "progressive morality":

When sexual liberation in one area leads to less sexual pleasure in another, no one on the left knows quite what to do. After all, the new anti-porn activists “are all at pains to make it clear that they are not anti-sex.” Well, that’s a relief...

Lost intimacy, however, is but one piece of the puzzle. Step-by-step, pornography decays moral character, and when character decays, so does culture...

Yet our nation builds morality around consent, not character, and it is strangely puzzled when the result is an ocean of heartache.

Don't eschew porn because you want a healthy sex life -- eschew it for the "culture," which from all I can tell means a world where no one laughs when David French yells from a soapbox through a bullhorn, and all the balls are blue.

Rare is the person who lives the libertine life but suddenly becomes responsible the very moment they "fall in love."

If you've been impure, you are rendered incapable of falling in love except in scare-quotes. But here's the bestworst part:

There’s a reason why so many romantic comedies end mere minutes after the promiscuous jerk vows to change his ways and runs through the rain to carry his “true love” to the world of happily-ever-after. Keep the camera running for six months, and you’ll find that same guy alone in a dark room watching celebrity sex tapes on his iPad before flipping through his Tinder options.

Oh God, wouldn't you like to see those Director's Cuts? Like, I don't know, Silver Linings Playbook -- six months after the dance contest, Bradley Cooper's back up in his attic bedroom whacking it to hentai and Jennifer Lawrence has joined a convent in despair. "That's a crap ending," says some kid in the audience; "No better than you deserve," says Feargod French, taking down the kid's name. "Wait'll you see what we've done with Bridget Jones."

FRIDAY ROUND-THE-HORN.

•  At National Review the ever-excitable David French has a post called "Why Do Liberals Have Trouble Understanding the Pure Evil of Jihad?" Excerpts:

I continue to be discouraged by how few Americans — and especially how few of my friends on the left — truly understand (or even try to understand) what the world faces... 

Why is this the case? Why can’t so many liberals understand the pure evil of Islamic jihad? I can think of three reasons: 

First, they’re often in the grip of a strange kind of moral relativism. I say “strange” because it’s not true moral relativism.

Not even true relativism! That's how bogus these leftist friends of David French are.

Second, relativism drives the quest for justifications. Since there is no way that Western culture can be superior to Middle Eastern cultures...

Third, the quest for justification drives deception and willful ignorance.

To me the big question here, besides "why do I even read this shit," is: David French has "friends on the left"? I've treated this phenomenon before, and am surprised at its persistence: They express the most bitter contempt for them, yet refer to them as friends. I wonder if it's a little trick they're taught at Propagandist Academy, the purpose of which is to make them seem reasonable, despite the evidence of their ideas. Look, we have liberal friends! We have them over for tongue-lashings on Thursday evenings.

•  Usually around this time of the week I start thinking about what the Voice column's going to be about. One obvious choice is the U.S. mission to aid the Yazidi in Iraq, but I'm not sure I can work up the enthusiasm for it. On the one hand, there's something grimly funny, at least, about conservatives demanding action in the very hellhole that made them unelectable, and then looking stupid when the Administration actually provides it. But the big joke of our foreign policy in general is that we can no longer afford to do things the way we used to. One explanation for Obama's quietism in the Middle East is that he's figured: if things are going to be fucked up, why spend trillions to make sure it's fucked up the way we prefer -- especially since that seems not to work anyway? As much as the prospect of the next Republican Administration's economic policies fills me with cold dread, I worry more about its foreign policy, because whatever moron is installed will probably have Billy Kristol and other such vampires pushing him to bomb someplace just to show how butch he is, and not enough sense to resist. (I wouldn't be surprised, BTW, if our Iran Avenger didn't turn out to be Rand Paul, a fraud from start to finish.)

•  I'm torn. I'm against this ridiculous, ginned-up de Blasio bashing on principle. But if it drives the toffs out and makes New York affordable to me again, I say swindle, comrades! Hell, let's get Larry "Wild Man" Hogue out of retirement, fuck shit up, and drive the hipsters back to Syosset.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whichever way, the conclusion isn’t flattering.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


UPDATE 2. French is getting weirder:

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

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

LIBERTARIANISM FOR PEOPLE WHO HATE LIBERTARIANISM.  David French notices that lots of U.S. servicemembers are donating to Ron Paul's campaign. But he has an explanation that will allow his more old-fashioned wingnut readers to feel good about this.

First, these brave men and women aren't contributing to Paul because they're antiwar hippies -- "the idealists who seem to believe that just one more irrigation project, or one more new school, or a few more cups of chai (with some nice intercultural dialogue) will turn the corner in the Area of Operations." No, they're antiwar because, like David French, they hate towelheads.

The Middle East is a savage place that views human life cheaply and will never, ever be worth fighting to change, and in fighting to change these cultures, we simply make more enemies. So long as they don’t try to kill us at home, they can do whatever they want to each other, and if they do try to kill us at home, the response shouldn’t be nation-building or invasion but overwhelming punitive force designed to destroy our enemies, not transform cultures. We’ll call this school of thought “Rubble doesn’t cause trouble”...

Almost every Ron Paul supporter I’ve ever known in the military (and I know quite a few) is in the “rubble doesn’t cause trouble” camp. They’re not idealistic about peace, and they don’t necessarily believe the rhetoric that if we leave Iraq and Afghanistan, we won’t get attacked. They instead think we responded the wrong way to 9/11 and that the last ten years of costly war have proven them right.

French doesn't agree with them there -- he still wants America to roam the world looking for inferior people to fuck with. But because he respects our men and women in uniform (and needs them to do the actual fucking-with for him), he'll defend them against charges of being interested in peace.

Well, look, if Glenn Greenwald can use Ron Paul for his cause, why can't French use him for his? It's not like the crazy old fuck is serving any other useful purpose except posing for "Well, ya gotta admit Ron Paul is right about..." stories.

TRANS DERP EXPRESS.

I hate to go to that well again but goddamn, David French is on a roll. In this case he tackles the transgender menace. Apparently a lot of kids are goin' trans nowadays -- it's "fashionable," a fad, like pop rocks and rainbow parties -- and like them incredibly dangerous!

Indeed, transgender diagnoses have become so fashionable that doctors are sometimes stampeding to prescribe life-altering drugs even to kids — and then later, when the kids grow up, recommending mutilating surgery. In other words, doctors aren’t necessarily waiting for evidence of “consistence, insistence, and persistence"

"When the kids grow up" means "when they're adults," by the way. Oddly, I haven't heard of any American parents being forced to let their kid's dick get sawed off -- please let me know if you have! -- nor even to let him or her take the initial "life-altering drugs" (I assume French means hormones, but he doesn't specify, perhaps hoping his readers will imagine an Instant Pussy Pill that alters your young'un in a puff of smoke and with a sound effect like twink).

In fact, so far all French can offer for data is a vague reference to the number of minors in the U.K. some anti-trans group says are seeking counsel for gender dysphoria, which is up hundreds of percent -- though when you trace his source you see that means it's gone from 94 to 969, out of a population of 64.1 million.

So what does he have as evidence that the Transmanian Devil is sweeping America?

Here in the United States, the evidence is more anecdotal...

Uh huh.

...but the anecdotes are disturbing. Rod Dreher...

Rod Dreher! There's the tell. You may have read some of Brother Rod's anecdotal Tales of Trans Terror, but if you know his work at all you'll know that for hysteria he outstrips even French, especially when it comes to sexual apostasy.

Now assuming, as I said, that no one is forcing this stuff on the families of the prototrans kids, what is French's beef? It's not as if people can't judge for themselves whether they want it for their kids; aren't Republicans, after all, of the party of personal responsibility? Even a whiner like French can't pretend that Ma and Pa Kettle would let their boy Jethro take pussy pills just because he saw Caitlyn Jenner on the teevee and felt unbidden feels.

It seems what's really enraging French is really that transgenderism is acknowledged and (especially) that it is acceptable among people he can't successfully marginalize. The tell is in lines like "It’s all science, you see. And denying that science not only makes you a Neanderthal, it makes you a bigot," of which the wretched thing is full.  His sputtering rage is not that something is being forced on him and his, because it isn't, as much as his desire for unearned sympathy compels him to pretend -- it's because someone else chooses it, and when he tries to bully them he finds himself unsupported, because bullying such people has gone out of style. How that must sting!

UPDATE. Early in the morning and already comments are glorious. Here for example is Big_Bad_Bad_Bastard, with an apposite reference to French's earlier obsession: "Anecdotally, the vast majority of male-to-female transpersons are millennial boys who were ashamed of their low grip strength. Now they have perfectly acceptable female boomer grip ranges."

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.

WATERING THE TREE OF LUNACY WITH THE BLOOD OF CHILDREN, PART INFINITY.

Another day, another bunch of dead kids, and Republicans reliably rush to aid and comfort the NRA. At National Review we have yet to hear Charles C.W. Cooke's traditional post-slaughter sermon about how you cahn't ban assault weapons, it's in the cawn-stuh-tyu-shun, but we have had proposed alternative solutions from other staffers such as David French:

Rather than tweet impotently, I’ve armed myself to protect my family and my neighbors; in my past role as a member of a school board, I’ve worked to better secure my kids’ school; and I’ve vowed that if — God forbid — I ever see evidence or warning signs of the darkness of a killer’s heart, I’ll have the courage to seek the intervention that can save lives.

That is to say: He bought more guns, and fantasized about what he'd do if he ever saw someone suspicious. That's usually the beginning of a success story, alright.

French's colleague Robert VerBruggen has a simpler solution: "Arm Teachers." I don't recall him suggesting that we arm preachers after the church shoot-em-up in Sutherland Springs last November, but maybe his condition has only recently advanced to this stage. VerBruggen elaborates:

[Training is] something a teacher could easily accomplish during summer vacation, even if schools insisted on rigorous training.

And why would they? Clearly any gun-wielding amateur marksman will be able to quickly take out a heavily armed mass murderer, and avoid shooting the wrong people or themselves in a panic -- they must be superhuman or else why would we pay them so generously?

If this sounds more like a recipe for Roddy McDowall in Class of 1984 than a sane society, remember that a sane society is the opposite of what they want: This is why they were so enraged to see New York City's crime drop after years of strict gun control, and why they're so eager to inject guns into polities that have benefited from their exclusion -- they want to make every part of America as hair-trigger gun-crazy as Fritters, Alabama, because that's how you breed Republicans.

UPDATE. Regarding French's I'll-know-one-when-I-see-one, Patrick Blanchfield makes a good point:

I wonder who David French and guys like him are likely to pre-cognize as a poison-hearted potential killer?

YOU CAN'T BEAT US, WE GOT CLETUS; OR, THE @NRO-CONFEDERATES.

Ed Gillespie's running a tight Virginia Governor race on a Yee-Haw-The-South's-Gonna-Do-It-Again platform and, as you can see below, Them National Review Boys are going all out for him on the front page:

Man, these fuckers love the Confederacy! To summarize their cases:

David French, a stars-and-bars enthusiast from way back, defends "Confederate honor" and the statues of slavers-'n'-traitors Ed Gillespie is using to draw gomer voters:

In the town square in Mount Pleasant, Tenn. — just a few miles from my house — there stands a weatherbeaten monument to a small Confederate unit nicknamed the Bigby Greys...

Cue the lonesome harmonica, the crack of the bullwhip and Rastus crying, "Cut it out, Massa, it tickles!" French doesn't see what you black and liberal people are bitching about -- look, they have a slave memorial nearby, too, and together these monuments celebrate the South at its best: French's confederate ancestors in battle dress and glory, and black people in chains.

Also, French speaks up for John Kelly, whose absurd defense of the Confederacy the other day convinced the last remaining "but Trump's got a few good people around him" holdouts to give it up. My ancestors were honorable just like Kelly says, insists French; only "the cause for which they seceded was repugnant and reprehensible," just like those poor dead German boys at Bitburg. But my, how gallant those French ancestors were, especially in their grey uniforms that were cleaned and tailored just so or else the slaves in charge of them would be whipped and their wounds washed with brine!

Also, it was after all a War of Northern Aggression with an "invading northern army ... attempting to restore the union by sheer force of arms," plus French's ancestors were scared the slaves would rise up in a "bloody, genocidal slave rebellion" and kill them -- and think how unjust that would have been! If you're shocked French thinks such an argument will sway you, remember it's not you he's trying to sway.

Meanwhile Ben Shapiro does a full column of YOU STARTED IT LIBS:

...as Hamilton also recognized, demagoguery provides an easier ascent to power than reason. The Left has known this for decades, which is why they labeled conservatives bigots in the 1960s, even as the Democratic party provided the base of support for segregation...

Yep, he's actually doing the Did You Know Robert Byrd Was In The Klan thing, just like his fellow conservative intellectual Dinesh D'Souza. Shapiro knows which way conservative discourse is going!

The Gillespie ad — the worst in political history — is merely the apotheosis of the trend.

I bet if you could get close enough to ask him, Shapiro would say the 1990 Jesse Helms "Hands" Ad was just a reasonable appeal to North Carolina voters' economic anxiety. In short, Shapiro blames liberals for tearing the country apart while simultaneously defending "the conservative desire to strike back at the Left," then flops on the soccer pitch holding his knee and crying "unity" ("Can the country survive such ongoing, bipartisan hatred?") and hoping the refs will buy it.

As for Michael Brendan Dougherty, as near as I can make out, he seems to think that statues are all that's holding America together, and though people like Jamelle Bouie promise that if we get rid of the Confederate statues they won't try and get rid of Jefferson and Washington, Dougherty knows Jamelle Bouie will get rid of them first chance he gets, and then we won't have any statues except maybe of black and Hispanic historical arrivistes, and thus falls the Republic because the Constitution cannot possibly survive if we don't have pigeons shitting on the Founders, just as Britain would fall into the sea if the statue of Boudicca were ever to be uprooted,.

He's seen it all before, Dougherty has:

When Vermont was considering legislation providing for civil unions for same-sex couples, not even the sweatiest, most paranoid snake-handler imagined that florists would be financially ruined by the government for refusing to serve customers whose nuptials violated their religious scruples. Yet here we are.

The Old Ones tried to warn you that if you fell for their persecution song-and-dance, homosexuals would complain if you said "we don't serve fags here." But nobody listened, and that's why "religious liberty, a liberal value and achievement, died and became doomed to a second ghostly life as a conservative preoccupation, one that makes both the conservative and the preoccupation seem more suspicious by association." And the proof of that suspicion by association is you're laughing at Dougherty instead of crying with him over iron replicas of Jubilation T. Cornpone.

It'd be funnier if there weren't a chance there are enough hayseeds in the hoots and hollers to carry it off.