NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the firing of Bill O'Reilly and the end of Lena Dunham's Girls and the strange secret they share!

I refer glancingly in the column to two of our favorite terrible writers, who join a few others in running away from the now-toxic O'Reilly as fast as possible. “I have lots of conservative friends in my age cohort who complain about the effect heavy Fox watching has on their parents,” says Rod Dreher at The American Conservative. “The general complaint is that their folks have become a lot more opinionated about political issues, and a lot angrier and more bombastic.” You can see how this puts them out of phase with a conservative movement whose most successful proponent is President Donald Trump. (Dreher adds, "If I had cable TV I would definitely watch Tucker Carlson’s show, because he’s fresh and unpredictable." Yeah, that's some Next-Gen shit right there.)

And at National Review David French laments that O’Reilly was steeped in “a toxic culture of conservative celebrity, where the public elevated personalities more because of their pugnaciousness than anything else,” leading to “a loss of integrity and, crucially, a loss of emphasis on ideas and, more important, ideals” — which, near as I can figure it, means that O'Reilly is no true conservative because true conservatives don’t act like that.

THE JUNIOR ANTI-SEX LEAGUE IS BACK IN BUSINESS.

Between the fallout from the fall of Milo Yiannopoulos and Attorney General Boss Hogg's rescission of transgender students' bathroom protections, conservatives are really letting their freak flag fly. There are no pale pastels in their sexual politics now. The betrayal of their former sassy gay friend Milo has sent them fleeing back to the snuggly safety of their old bigotries, and the power play against trans kids has reaffirmed them in their new ones. It's like they can at last be free of even the feeblest pretense at toleration.

(Not so Rod Dreher who, while kvelling over the bathroom ban -- and casting Betsy DeVos, for her brief bullshit feint at protecting trans students, as part of a treasonously tolerant tradition that "surrendered intellectually and in terms of authentic discipleship one or two generations ago" -- yet protests for thousands of words because an Atlantic writer noticed he's obsessed with gays; heavens, no, he doesn't hate them, he says, he just considers them an abomination and an existential threat -- why, he says, "one of my oldest and dearest friends is gay." I wonder if the guy's parents know.) (Which reminds me: There's a Lenny Bruce bit that's apparently not online in which he talks about a friend who's "so queer he's a truck driver"; when Bruce goes to see his clueless yiddishe momme and she says "you wouldn't believe about my son," as Bruce is bracing for it, she says, wonderingly, "he didn't get married yet." Lenny Bruce was the greatest.)

I'll keep my powder dry for the Village Voice column. Suffice to say every wingnut in Christendom is harrumphing like David French does today at National Review: "Not long ago, if school policies purposefully exposed girls to male genitals, they’d be subject to a backbreaking sexual harassment lawsuit," blah blah, as if 1.)  a scared trans pre-teen who's bucking several century-tons of social prejudice to be whom she believes herself to be is the same thing as a grownup child molester, and  2.)  the ladies room were some sort of open-air genital display area.

I find it hard to believe even the dimmest gomer in Fritters, Alabama thinks that's how it is, let alone a fucking Ivy League White Working Class Whisperer like French. Yet still he pretends. Jesus Christ, sometimes I want to just grab these people and tell them what Chris in All My Sons tells his father: Don't you live in the world? What the hell are you? You're not even an animal, no animal kills his own, what are you?

But for now, let's go back to Milo, and not even the Milo-deniers whose sudden knee-weakness is so gutless and amusing, but to D.C. McAllister, one of the dimmer bulbs at The Federalist, whose pro-Milo column actually begins with "Editor’s note: This article contains graphic descriptions of sex crimes."

OK, thinks I -- I'm not a reactionary, I know Yiannopoulos does not admit to molesting children and claims he was abused as a boy, and I'm open to counterpoint. Alas, McAllister is not interested in defending Milo as a human being, but only as a cudgel to beat liberals:

Yes, he’s provocative, contrarian, outlandish, and offensive, poking his finger in the eye of just about everyone around him. But he also conveys a message that the Left finds unacceptable. His attacks on feminism and identity politics, his fierce defense of free speech on college campuses and freedom of personal choice without being policed by those who are politically correct—all of these ideas offend the Left...

[The Left's] outrage is what it has always been—hatred for anyone who opposes them. And Milo certainly opposes them, often and with flair.

The Left is so bad, I'll even back a flairy against them! But worse is yet to come: McAllister gets into the Liberal Hypocrisy shtick and, after shaking a fist over Roman Polanski -- whose exoneration on rape charges was, I believe, part of the 2016 National Democratic platform -- takes a wrong turn at Albuquerque:

It seems our culture is more apt to defend the sexually immoral than to scorn them—unless they’re outside the liberal cabal, of course. Except that’s not always the case either, something that should make Republicans who are also attacking Milo stop and reflect. Libertarian Camille Paglia often speaks on college campuses, writes for magazines, is often quoted favorably by conservatives, and sells books—all of which Milo has now been denied in one form another. Yet, Paglia unapologetically supports pedophilia.

Wow, okay, I thought at first, good for her, she's willing to own up to Paglia, whose long status as a rightwing nutjob I've written about at length. Little did I know that, after listing a bunch of Paglia's man-boy-love encomiums, McAllister would come to this:

Paglia has given us more than anything Milo has said on the topic, yet he’s run out on the rails. Why? For one thing, Paglia has been around awhile and has cred with many liberals.

??????

As they have always done, they not only ignored her deviant views but embraced them. However, if she were an avid Trump supporter in the same vein as Milo, opposing liberals at every turn and writing those things in this climate, you can be sure the torches would be lit up for her as well. She would be facing opposition greater than any outcry she experienced in the past, which came mostly from conservatives on truly moral grounds.

Wait -- you mean the Camille Paglia of "Feminist Camille Paglia slams ‘disaster’ Hillary Clinton: ‘She is a woman without accomplishment’"? The Camille Paglia of "I was wrong about Donald Trump: Camille Paglia on the GOP front-runner’s refreshing candor (and his impetuousness, too)"? The Camille Paglia of "Camille Paglia: PC feminists misfire again, as fearful elite media can’t touch Donald Trump"? She's getting dissed because she's a liberal?

Sometimes I think I should just show a picture of a florid wingnut and a projector every day and just leave it at that.

YOUNG IDEAS.

I saw Bryan Curtis' story at The Ringer, "Sportswriting Has Become a Liberal Profession — Here’s How It Happened." It's got some interesting history, and the observation that more sportswriters are liberal now than in the days of Dick Young has to my knowledge not been remarked on before, so good for him.

 At the same time: So what? It's not like it gets in the way: If I want to follow a sports story I go to the New York Times and, though the Good Grey Lady is supposed to be the nerve center of the Liberal Media, I don't receive any discernible propaganda with my box scores. Look at this story about the DeMarcus Cousins trade, for example: There's nary a call to resistance nor an #IAmMuslimToo hashtag in the thing. I understand they put a little more mustard on the stories at Deadspin, but if I want straight sports I know where to get it.

Well, at The Week Michael Brendan Dougherty bursts a blood vessel over this because

Predictably (and perhaps self-interestedly), I think the increasing ideological uniformity of sports writing is bad for sports journalism and for sports themselves. And in the way that it encourages conformism and intellectual laziness, it is probably bad for causes dear to liberals in sports.

We might have stopped at "self-interestedly" -- Dougherty does some sports journalism himself, and he's no less inclined than any other type of wingnut scribe to indignation over how the Lefties run the intellectual professions. And that "bad for causes dear to liberals in sports" is concern trolling you could spot from an airplane. And the bit about "conformism and intellectual laziness" -- this is sportswriting we're talking about, right? It's not all Grantland Rice; hell, it's at least as loaded with hacks as any of the other departments. Besides, to the extent someone tries to bring social perspectives into a sports essay, he's actually doing more work, not less, so I'd hardly call it lazy.

Dougherty seems to sense he hasn't got much there, so he tries a twist on the old Liberals Are Soulless Technocrats spin, claiming that liberal sportswriters are all front-row tryhards so they identify with manicured college-boy front-office types ("the liberalism on offer on sports pages is rather infatuated with the norms and aspirations of the class of people from which journalists are drawn") whereas, one supposes, conservative sportswriters like Dougherty come from dockyards out of an old black-and-white Warner Brothers movie and get along so great with the players that they all go to titty bars together.

On and on it goes, and like all wingnut liberal-media bitchfests reaches the point where the author, in his righteousness, disgorges a howler:

The lack of intelligent conservatives in sports, or at least their relative shyness about their ideas, also allows progressive sportswriters to advance ideas without challenge, sometimes all the way into dead ends. Take the debate about Native American mascots in logos. Of course it makes perfect sense to remove or alter any logos that offend people. But all mascots are reductive caricatures. Was the problem that the logos were offensive or that there is so little representation of Native Americans in our culture that their presence as mascots seems mocking by default? 

He's got a point. Look at the '40s White Sox logo -- that's one weird looking honky! If white people can take that, what are all you injuns complaining about? Hang on, sports fans, Dougherty ain't done cogitating:

Has no one stopped to notice there is something odd about an anti-racism that will cause an evermore diverse country to declare rooting for white-faced mascots the only safe thing to do? How will this deletion of all non-white faces look in 50 years?

You all remember how, when politically correct liberals chased Stepin Fetchit out of the movies it wiped out opportunities for black actors, and a starstruck kid named Sidney Poitier had to pack up his "Lay Z. Shine" character, move back to the Bahamas and sell insurance.

Yeah, the sports pages are really missing this guy. But to prove it can always get worse, David French picks up the theme at National Review:

Sure, [Curtis is] tolerant enough to leave room for a “David Frum or Ross Douthat of sportswriting,” a person with “wrong-headed but interesting arguments.” But here’s the caveat: Curtis is tolerant “as long as nobody believe[s] them.” If the Ross Douthat of sportswriting developed a real following, would the profession unite to excise the political malignancy?

"Ross Douthat here, calling the Michigan-UCLA game, a paradigm in which we may perceive the fallen state of man. As Chesterton once said --" [sound of massive wedgie]

I bring up Bryan Curtis and sportswriting because you simply can’t understand Milo Yiannopoulos...

HOOOONK oh sorry there goes the buzzer!  Tune in next week when Charles C.W. Cooke denounces the media for not employing more rightwing fashion writers. 

WORST NEO-CONFEDERATE EXPLANATION YET.

Today at National Review it was Ben Shapiro's turn (perhaps he lost a bet) to bitch about the removal of Confederate icons from campuses and town squares (in this case, Yale's removal of the name of John C. Calhoun from a college), and simultaneous explain why it wasn't because he was racist but because blah blah blah. We've seen some sad entries in this line, particularly after the Dylann Roof massacre -- see here for David French's insistence that the flags and statues must stay because in addition to slavery and treason they commemorate "Confederate valor." But Shapiro doesn't have the balls to be that bald-faced, and takes up an educational angle, which makes him sound like a 60s nudie movie producer telling prosecutors he was just trying to be Frank About Sex:

Calhoun’s name on buildings reminds us that Calhoun was once honored for his perspective rather than derided for it. It is a reminder that evil once held sway in our world, and that we cherished it. It also reminds us that brilliance and patriotism and good and evil can all exist in the same human being: Calhoun’s slavery advocacy existed alongside his desire to build up a strong, robust American military; he created the Bureau of Indian Affairs at the same time that he stumped for the expansion of slavery into the Western states.

So I guess all those gomers waving the Stars and Bars (or getting it tattooed on their bodies) are just trying to show us how bad slavery was! Or how evil and goodness can co-exist in the same person, e.g. themselves ("But wait a minute! Hot dog, love's a-winning!").

If only we needed to be reminded but, alas, these guys refuse to disappear.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE ACTRESS VS. THE WITCHFINDERS.

I guess the brethren will be going on for the rest of the week about how Meryl Streep assaulted their snowflake sensibilities by saying it was bad when The Leader made fun of that crippled guy -- and, worse yet, did so using her evil devil-sent acting talents, rather than (as God intended) with high moral stiffness, like a pundit on a Commentary podcast:

On the first of this week’s podcasts, we dilate [!-ed.] upon Meryl Streep attacking Donald Trump and Donald Trump attacking Meryl Streep and how Trump represents a different kind of combative conservative—one who has his own form of pop-culture reach that is beyond the capacity of the Streeps to silence or control.

I'm not going to spend half an hour of my precious drinking time experiencing a dilated John Podhoretz -- that time I braved a Nick Gillespie podcast on how Trump could be good for libertarianism was bad enough. But what a pitch! Trump will not be silenced by the Streeps! He is beyond the Streeps capacity! He's taking it to the Streeps!

There are plenty of these idiots enraged over the mild criticism of their buffoon-king, but so far the worst (to be fair it was always a safe bet, though Dreher is a close second) is David French at National Review:

I have no particular affection for Trump, but I positively loathe the condescension, alarmism, ignorance, and self-regard of the wealthy Hollywood Left, and each of those elements was on full display in Streep’s speech.

As a believing Christian, I can't quite come out and say I love the pussy-grabbing Putin pal, but if there's one thing I positively loathe (you hear me, plain people? Looooathhe) it's elitism, at least as long as the bullshit-populism thing we got going now still plays. (Why he didn't just say "ah don' lahk me no fancy big-city actress nohow" and spit, I can't guess.)

French's arguments against the actual speech are ridiculous. Get a load:

Streep raised the specter that Trump would expel “outsiders and foreigners,” leaving Hollywood bereft of talent. Yet is anyone proposing deportation of legal-immigrant Hollywood actors?

That's even stupider than usual for him, because he's just making shit up -- there is nothing actually genuinely offensive in the speech except what he projects onto it, which is his own stark terror that anyone can claim the attention of an audience who isn't a beady-eyed Witchfinder General like himself or a blow-dried con man like the politicians he serves. And so he does the Whore of Babylon bit to get the rubes quaking:

Hollywood sells the best cultural drugs. Truth is optional, self-indulgence is a virtue, and bullying is bravery. And last night it was all wrapped in Streep’s alluring package, an emotion-laden call to arms that stirred the hearts of millions.

The humans -- she makes them feel things -- it must be the drugs! French rails about the baleful power of "culture" not because he knows what it is, nor why the human mind and soul invented it, but because he senses its power and sees it as a threat to his own.

What a sad way to live.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

It was better before, before they voted for What's-his-name.
This must be the new world.
•  Even among the other freaks, thieves, and mountebanks Trump has been hiring, the name Katy Talento, slated to advise The Leader on health care policy, stands out. First, she's a contributor to The Federalist, which as regular alicublog readers know is a bad sign right off the bat. One of her posts on the subject of health care is called "Ladies: Is Birth Control The Mother Of All Medical Malpractice?" and in case you're wondering, she thinks it is (h/t Jason Millman). Romper and Talking Points Memo do a good job of debunking her physiological ideas, but even laymen may gape at her connection of birth control with "economic and relational devastation that has left women and children abandoned by men who now feel entitled to consequence-free orgasms." This nut is telling Trump about women's health care and Congress is defunding Planned Parenthood. So much for the Trump third way, huh? But at least Julian Assange is happy!

•  At National Review, Jim Geraghty:

The worst among us do not represent us as a whole, thankfully. William Calley doesn’t represent men and women in uniform. Ward Churchill doesn’t represent professors. Jeffrey Dahmer doesn’t represent chocolate factory employees. Aaron Hernandez does not represent the New England Patriots. 

Most of us know that. Most of us understand that it’s unfair, inaccurate, and a smear to take the worst individual in a group and contend that all members of a group are “like that.” James Holmes is rare among gun owners. Eric Rudolph is rare among abortion opponents. Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik are rare among Muslims.

Come let us reason together! When have you ever seen a wingnut show charity toward Ward Churchill before this? But then Geraghty takes a graf-long detour for a Seinfeldesque didjaever-notice "authorities keep acting like they never want to admit that a mass shooter is Muslim?" and with a weary Not this bullshit again we are reminded that Geraghty is not a healer but a propagandist and his show of reasonableness is a ruse to soften white readers up for his energetic flame-fanning over those black guys in Chicago who tortured a white guy. It's a typical Trumpian "there's-something-going-on" routine -- encouraging listeners to stretch a specific incident into a general indictment without the assistance of logic. Geraghty also links the usual pull-your-pants-up bullshit from David French, whose dogwhistle is nearly split from overblowing; for one thing, the title is "Chicago is Breaking" but the URL is "black-thugs-torture-white-disabled-man-speak-truth-leftists." For another, French finds room in the middle of his customary Obama's-Chicago ululation for this:

Outlets such as Buzzfeed — ever vigilant in the quest to hunt down and expose celebrity Christians who might actually believe the Bible — write fawning articles about hip-hop celebrities who write and produce some of the most vile music imaginable.  

It’s all part of underlying liberal squeamishness about attacking anything that can be labeled authentically “black.” Music “from the streets” is worshipped, no matter its content.

The relevance of French's jungle-music criticism to a crime (the perpetrators of which, I remind you, have been swiftly apprehended) is not immediately apparent unless you're on the same Ooga Booga wavelength as French and his colleagues -- which is just one more reason why it was always a sure bet that, for all their #NeverTrump bullshit, the NROniks would fall in line with The Leader: Game recognize game. Proper conservative clubmen they may be, with good manners and manicured nails, but deep in their shriveled hearts they're delighted to have the cruder Trump and his deranged apparatchiks reverberating their slurs.

MINE, BY THE RIGHT OF THE WHITE ELECTION.

The Federalist cheerfully declares:

This Election Marks The End Of America’s Racial Détente
Jamelle Bouie is right about one thing: the racial social contract we’ve had is over. Whites aren’t content to let everyone but them get special treatment any more.

Wondering WTF? Got you covered: The article is by David Marcus, who had previously regaled us with "How Anti-White Rhetoric Is Fueling White Nationalism," in which he complained that black people were inexplicably harshing on his white brothers and sisters:

What is new is the direct indictment of white people as a race. This happened through a strange rhetorical transformation over the past few years. At first, “white men are our greatest threat” postings tended to be ironic, a way of putting the racist shoe on the other foot. They were meant to show that blaming an entire race for the harmful actions of a few individuals is senseless.

Then the tenor changed. What started as irony turned into an actual belief that white people, specifically white men, are more dangerous and immoral than any other people. Loosely backed up by historical inequities and disparities in mass shootings, this position has begun to take a serious foothold.

Marcus went on to warn us that if blacks didn't cut it out, him and his honkies were going to get "tribal" on them. From the new column, it would appear he thinks the Trump election proves Der Tag has come. At first he moons over Jamelle Bouie's "White Won" election post-mortem with the performative empathy of David French or Rod Dreher mooning over Ta-Nehisi Coates, then catches Bouie's observation on American whites and blacks that "I thought this meant we had a consensus. It appears, instead, that we had a detente." Darn right, says Marcus:

The rules of the deal were pretty straightforward. For whites, they stated that outright racist statements and explicit appeals to white racial identity were essentially banned. Along with this, whites accepted a double standard about the appropriateness of cultural and political tribalism. For obvious and reasonable historical and economic reasons, black and brown people explicitly pursuing their own interests was viewed differently than whites doing the same thing.

Finally, the answer to the ancient "how come they can say 'nigger' and we can't?" riddle! But when Trump got away with racist shit in broad daylight, says Marcus, that showed "the white acceptance of legitimate racial double standards had dissipated, and without it the détente could not stand." And that's because black folk got out of hand, and started "calling everyone a racist" -- white people got pissed and now you people have to accept their terms. These terms are left vague -- some bullshit about listening to each other, which probably means no more kneeling at ball games, and definitely no getting upset about an elected official cheering the idea that Michelle Obama is an ape -- come on, we let Chris Rock make fun of the way we talk! Marcus attempts to sweeten the deal with some poetry:

The détente was far from perfect. It often allowed quieter racism to lurk unchallenged. In some ways, it was a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. But Band-Aids have a role to play in treating bullet wounds...

Yeah, this guy should definitely be at the table for the negotiation of the New Detente, right next to Attorney General Rudy Giuliani.

THE FUTURE OF BIRTHERISM.

The whole Trump idea of a "rigged" election is giving mainstream-esque conservatives fits. David French tries to explain to his readers that the American system is so darned robust that even a monster like Hitlery Klintoon cannot damage it -- notwithstanding that just last month he wrote "Hillary Clinton Is Even More Dishonest than You Thought" and that if she were, forbid it almighty God, elected Presient, "Americans will either be exhausted by the drama or so thoroughly hardened to dishonesty and scandal that our politics will be debased for a generation." The "exhausted by the drama" choice seemed strange to me at the time -- we'll either be tired or a lost generation! -- but I now assume French knew he'd eventually need to write, well, what he just wrote, when the election was no longer in doubt and the apocalypse had to be put back in the toy chest till next time.

A betterworse example is Allahpundit at Hot Air. He predicts, in the wake of a Trump defeat, "a splintering on the right on basic questions of the opposition’s legitimacy" -- and I can't guess what he means, since Republicans have been casting doubt on the legitimacy of Democratic Presidents since 1992; I really expect some bright boy on their team to declare that Hillary is "no man that's born of woman," so according to Shakespeare she's illegitimate. But the last paragraph pretty much shows where Allahpundit is at.

I recommend this piece by Joel Pollak of Breitbart...

Yeah I know, but bear with me:

...on the ways in which the election is, and isn’t, rigged. “Rigged” in terms of a deeply slanted media? Most definitely. “Rigged” in terms of Hillary Clinton being let off scot free after committing a felony in mishandling classified information? Absolutely, and it’s worth noting that every day. “Rigged” in terms of vote counts being manipulated next month? Ah, no. Exit question: Since when is Barack Obama a fan of manning up and taking responsibility for one’s own political problems? He’s been whining about Republican obstructionism every day for seven and a half years.

Basically his POV is that of course the election is rigged, just not the way Alex Jones and Trump think -- they're crazy, not like us sensible, mainstream, center-right conspiracy theorists. (And even in the solitude of his writing chamber he's compelled to throw sand in the eyes of an invisible adversary: Oh yeah well what about Obama he complained about things too!)

With these guys, anytime anything doesn't go their way, it's because it was rigged.

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.

FRENCHIE NEEDS A SAFE SPACE.

With Jonah Goldberg in a parlous state, David French is charging hard in the paint for the honor of being National Review's biggest dumbass. Earlier today I thought he'd outdone himself with this post, in which he discovered a study finding more self-identified conservatives among millennials than heretofore suspected and, despite having written umpteen articles about what little liberal shits Millennials are -- e.g., "Blame Parents for Millennials’ Laughable Fragility," "A Note to Entitled Millennials in the Workplace: Give Humility a Try," "Do Millenials Dislike Capitalism Because It’s Not a Safe Space?" and so on -- suddenly declared the kids are all rightwing; in fact, despite what he'd been writing for years, French claimed he'd been seeing this New Trend for years:

But roughly five years ago, I began to sense a change in the wind. I was encountering not one or two truly counter-cultural students but entire roomfuls of young conservatives who were openly disdainful of the dominant social trends in their peer group. Where their peers demanded participation trophies, these kids threw them in the trash. Where their peers dismissed traditional social conventions, these kids (particularly in the South) were reviving the use of “sir” and “ma’am” in conversations with elders...

And these New Millennials will "sir" and "ma'am" our great country back into its pre-homosexual greatness:  "...this new counter-revolution is ultimately built on devotion to God, enthusiasm for our nation’s founding principles, a healthy respect for tradition and our nation’s most valuable cultural institutions, and hard work. This revolution won’t be televised, but it will be on Snapchat..."

Gag. But I looked again tonight and, amazingly, French has topped himself. Get a load:

Free Speech Is Killing Free Speech

Has he changed his mind about Citizens United? I wondered. Ha, j/k -- that kind of free speech is great. But when the NBA moves the All-Star Game because it doesn't support North Carolina's anti-anti-discrimination laws, that's double plus ungood free speech. It's bullying! It's both micro and macroaggressive!

Increasingly, Americans are using their right to free speech to destroy free speech. Rather than seeking to inform, they intimidate. Rather than seeking to persuade, they publicly shame... 

It seems odd, given the widespread trolling on social media, to assert that America’s culture of free speech is under threat, but the cumulative effect of shame campaigns and intimidation strategies is that millions of people simply flee the field, leaving the battle to the most extreme voices or to those people who’ve slowly developed the thick skins necessary to maintain a public presence...

And God forbid people like French should have to develop thick skins -- that's for libtards like Katie Couric, who should roll with his punches as God intended. Just as French turned on a dime to declare Millennials soldiers of Christ, so he's flipped on the much-derided concept of a safe space; it's great, he's now decided, so long as he's the one safely spaced.

UPDATE. Comments are (as always) well worth your time, Mr. and Mrs. Blog Consumer. trex does us the favor of noticing that back in 2015, before he got the PC bug, French was all for offensive speech that cut a certain way, e.g.:

In 2007 San Francisco State University put its chapter of the College Republicans on trial for desecrating the name of Allah. At an anti-terrorism rally, members of the College Republicans stomped on paper representations of the flags of Hamas and Hezbollah, which contain the name “Allah” written in Arabic script. Bear in mind, this is a school where activists routinely burn or otherwise desecrate the American flag. Students charged the College Republicans with “attempts to incite violence and create a hostile environment” and “actions of incivility.” 

At the time, I worked for the Alliance Defending Freedom, and we filed suit, seeking an injunction against California State University–system policies that mandated “civility” and prohibited conduct that was “inconsistent” with the university’s “goals, principles, and policies.”

Which would be fine, albeit assholish, if French weren't now bitching that the spectacle of liberals boycotting Chick-fil-a is "progressive bullying" and diving into his den of coloring books and videos of frolicking puppies.

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!

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."

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...").

WHO'S AN ASSHOLE?

At National Review David French laments that "Donald Trump Confirms Progressives’ Worst anti-Conservative Prejudices," and boy does he ever, but not for the reasons French thinks. He starts with standard-issue bitchery about PC:

In the aftermath of both the Orlando and Dallas massacres, millions of Americans have been absolutely dumbfounded at the response of the Obama administration. In one instance, a Muslim man openly and repeatedly pledged allegiance to ISIS. In the other, a black radical openly and repeatedly declared his intention to kill police officers as retribution for alleged police abuse. In both cases, the administration stated that it may be difficult to discern the attacker’s true motives. Yet when Dylann Roof murdered nine black Americans in Charleston, there was no reluctance to ascribe motive. Why?

The obvious answer is “political correctness"...

I'm guessing the "millions" of dumbfounded Americans were about 98% white. I'm also guessing this is the part of Obama's speech after the Dylann Roof massacre that French is complaining about:

The fact that this took place in a black church obviously also raises questions about a dark part of our history. This is not the first time that black churches have been attacked, and we know the hatred across races and faiths pose a particular threat to our democracy and our ideals.

So to avoid political correctness, after Dallas Obama should have talked about America's dark history of black people oppressing and murdering white people. Fair's fair! (Actually I think French is just pissed that after the Charleston murders people got down on the Confederate flag, despite his eloquent defense of it.)

Anyway eventually French says that his and his buddies' own "reason and truth" would carry the day among the American people were it not spoiled by people like Donald Trump -- the Presidential nominee presumptive, you may recall, of the Republican Party:

The result is a movement built on spite, in which the desire to enrage progressives creates a continuous font of speech and conduct that works mainly to confirm the progressive world view. In the name of defying political correctness, Trump and his fans do absolutely nothing to temper the worst progressive impulses and do much to appall and repulse everyone else. They leave the American people without a morally defensible choice. It’s the scold versus the asshole. The scold feels vindicated, the asshole feels gleeful, and everyone else feels despair.

Make no mistake, Trump is not beating political correctness; he’s feeding it.

Again I remind you: Trump is the Republican candidate for President, and all the talk about how he's not really a conservative because he once talked about taxing the rich (only to back right off later) is a load of bullshit. Trump is actually the best possible avatar of contemporary conservatism. Because aside from the license to be an "asshole," as French puts it, what does conservatism have to offer voters? A sound economy? That was revealed as nonsense in 2008. Foreign policy? Ask your Republican aunt how eager she is for another Mideast war. Social policy that reflects the public will? Straights are cool with the gays now, and conservatives are outside the group hug screaming about bathrooms; white Americans are even starting to get what black people go through, which explains why conservatives keep stepping on their dicks explaining themselves on the issue.

No, political incorrectness -- that is, being an asshole -- is the only big seller left on the shelf. That's why the top career politicians in the Republican Party are flocking to Trump. Unlike the guys in the PR Department, they don't have to pretend to be nice.

UPDATE. Comments are marvelous, as usual. smut clyde notes, "If Trump is any guide, the central weapon of the War on Political Correctness is the call for the Wahhmbulance after any criticism he receives from others." Just so. Attend, for example, the weeping and wailing (led by the New York fucking Times!) over Justice Ginsberg calling Trump out. Few of the brethren noticed that the Judicial Code of Conduct that might restrain such comments does not apply to Supreme Court Justices (why should they, when Times reporters don't notice it?), and none could admit that Ginsberg is 100% right about Il Douche and truth, in the book of all wise men as well as in defamation cases, is an absolute defense. Instead they snarl about "Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s unhinged assault on Trump" (Seth Lipsky, New York Post) etc. One of my favorites is the Daily Caller's "[Andrew] Napolitano: Ginsburg’s Trump Comments ‘Damages The Reputation’ Of The Court." Andrew Napolitano! That's like Dwayne Johnson saying what a shitty actor Daniel Day-Lewis is. It's something, isn't it, that the people who in this life have the most need of shame possess so little capacity for it.

FOR HONKY FOLK WHO HAVE CONSIDERED SUICIDE/WHEN DONALD TRUMP IS ENUF.

Just read Rod Dreher's rhapsody on Hillbilly Elegy, an autobio by one J.D. Vance about how he, a son of Appalachia, escaped the depredations of the holler thanks to Mamaw and the U.S. Marines. Dreher's main take-away seems to be that hillbillies (the ones who didn't get out) are lazy, sexed-up, stupid, and self-deceiving and they need Jesus and Brother Rod's Benedict Option, in stores soon. Here's just one depressing piece:

Vance plainly loves his people, and because he loves them, he tells hard truths about them. 

(That's the bless-their-hearts part.)

He talks about how cultural fatalism destroys initiative. When hillbillies run up against adversity, they tend to assume that they can’t do anything about it. To the hillbilly mind, people who “make it” are either born to wealth, or were born with uncanny talent, winning the genetic lottery. The connection between self-discipline and hard work, and success, is invisible to them.

Plus they's always a-fuckin' and a-feudin' -- "Marriages rarely last, and informal partnerings are more common," he tsks. Why, they're as bad as the blacks!

Is there a black J.D. Vance? I wonder. I mean, I know there are African-Americans who have done what he has done. But are there any who will write about it? Clarence Thomas did, in his autobiography. Who else? Anybody know?

Maybe the job of Black Wingnut doesn't pay as well as it used to -- I mean, I'm sure this guy (author of "If You Don’t Want Police To Shoot You, Don’t Resist Arrest") gets lots of high-fives from Young Republicans, but I doubt he's making Clarence-level bank. But whatever Dreher's problems with black folk, this is just a brief detour for him; clearly white worthlessness is his hard-on here; he loves that the enlightened hillbilly Vance got out because it shows how shiftless the rest of them are. In fact, he references Kevin D. Williamson's infamous hymn of hate for poor whites --

I criticized Williamson at the time for his harshness. I still wouldn’t have put it the way he did, but reading Vance gives me reason to reconsider my earlier judgment.

Thank you, Rod "Imitation of Christ" Dreher. (Isn't it perfectly Dreheresque that, though he feels himself closer to Williamson's hatefulness, he wouldn't "put it the way he did"?)

As I mentioned when I wrote about Williamson's column, Dreher's review is part of a growing wingnut literature on how badly the poor honkies have let them down. There are a couple reasons why it's growing. For one thing, obviously, the rise of Trump has got these white-collar conservatives scared -- for years they applauded Joe and Jane Sixpack (remember them?) because they thought the Sixpacks were sufficiently racist, sexist, and otherwise class-resentful that they would reliably return Republican electoral majorities; then, however, it appeared they'd lost control of their Monster.

But this tendency slightly pre-dates Trump -- Charles Murray's book about the plight of white "Fishtown" punters (and David Brooks' effusions over it) go back to 2012. So there are clearly other reasons, and I can see them, too. First, the demographics that created the second Obama victory shattered mainstream conservatives' belief that whiteness might yet save them another time. Second, white-collar conservatives noticed that when they raved about lazy, sexed-up, stupid, and self-deceiving black people, everyone under 60 years of age gave them the stinkeye -- but if they just ported their viciousness over to another out-group, no one except obsessives like me paid any attention.

In fact, poor whites' very status as an out-group may have been the clincher. When it came out that white working-class people had begun committing suicide at an alarming rate, the first reaction of David French at National Review was to blame liberal hippies for making crackers feel bad.  But four months later French had changed his tune: "No one is making them do it," he had decided; "...The economy isn’t putting a bottle in their hand. Immigrants aren’t making them cheat on their wives or snort OxyContin..." They were, rather, only the victims of their own "self-destructive moral failures."

In many ways, my friends, it's no fun to get old, but there is some grim amusement to be had seeing people who thought for years that hate had made them safe learning God's truth the hard way. (You may think I'm talking about the poor whites, for whom I have much sympathy -- after all, I come from them -- but I'm really talking about the guys who've just thrown them overboard and are about to find out that the mainsail won't hoist itself.)

PERMANENT REVOLUTION.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No wonder they're so crabby.

THE BOYS IN THE BUND.

David French isn't the only rightblogger who's been playing in the (enclosed children's area of the) big leagues. You may know that Jeffrey Lord, a really terrible American Spectator columnist, began showing big Trump love last year ("Donald Trump is seen by many Americans as the very embodiment of the American Dream"), and started going on TV to sing Il Douche's praises, in one instance memorably telling Van Jones that Trump's not the racist Democrats are the Real Racist^TM  infinity. Well, Lord has according to TPM been promoted to Trump campaign "surrogate," which sounds appropriately repulsive, and today he outdid himself:

A top surrogate for Donald Trump said Tuesday that House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) was "playing the race card" for condemning Trump's recent attacks on a federal judge because of his Mexican heritage. Earlier in the day, Ryan called Trump's comments about the judge the "textbook definition" of racism. 

"Speaker Ryan is wrong and Speaker Ryan has apparently switched positions and is supporting identity politics, which is racist," Trump supporter Jeffrey Lord, a member of the Reagan administration, said on CNN Tuesday when asked about Ryan's concerns.

Trump as a political phenomenon may be unusual, even unique -- but as a political cause, Trump is just the same rightblogger nonsense I've been covering for years: bigotry, self-pity, and tax breaks for the rich. Now that he's turned his racist bilge on a Republican judge, Republicans are up in arms, but in few days some transgender chick will go to the wrong bathroom and everybody will shake hands and head back to the barricades.

No wonder few of French's rightblogger buddies pledged themselves to his momentary cause -- except to bitch that the liberal media was smearing him, a bait they'll rise to anytime for anyone, though Commentary's Noah Rothman was in this case stirred to especially sputterific rage:

Like an amateur anthropologist mishandling an artifact with a cultural significance they fail to grasp, the self-styled arbiters of American political standards glibly denigrated French’s traditional values with a child’s recklessness.

Pee yew.  Rothman also lashed out at liberals "who consider themselves enlightened and effete." Heretofore I have been happy to let others call me effete, but if you guys are starting to own it maybe I will too. Reclaim the E word! Spiro's had it long enough.

Over at National Review Eliana Johnson writes a heroic account of those Six Days in June when French, tormented by "the terrible thought that Americans would be left with the choice of two of the most corrupt leaders in politics," considered a run. There are several highlights. For example:

What counsel did [Mitt] Romney, who has publicly excoriated Trump, have to offer? Well, not to run. “As a data-driven guy, it was hard for him to see how this is possible,” French says.

As a data-driven guy! "Let's see -- zero plus zero, plus zero -- let's not forget the zero -- and here's another zero -- gosh darn it, call me Poindexter but I don't see how this adds up." Also:

“I have no idea who he is, but he’s already got my vote, because I don’t like the other two candidates,” another woman, an African-American, told NBC.

See, he was already doing outreach. Ah, what might have been!

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the late, lamented David French alt-alt-right Presidential campaign. Most people knew all along it was a lost cause, but I see at least one reason why someone (if not Billy Kristol, whose idiocy remains inexplicable except perhaps by neuropathologists) might have wanted to pimp French, who as my studies have shown is among the worst rightbloggers: Seeing that the Republican Party has gone utterly mad, they expect freaks like French may play a role as possible future avatars of "true" conservatism, and hope his military background and cute adopted African daughter will distract future voters from the stark insanity of his politics.

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.