WELCOME, ROSEANNE, TO THE INTELLECTUAL DARK WEB.

You guys know how I feel about this stuff: Until you're ready to protect fast food and daycare workers from being fired for their social media speech, I'm not here from your blubbering over celebrities like Roseanne.

That's not a rhetorical offer, by the way, but a sincere one. I don't give a shit if the Hitler Channel wants to run Roseanne's Heil Hitler Racist Comedy Hour, where its sponsors and supporters can be noted and shunned, so long as ordinary citizens can flip off Trump and put it on Twitter without getting fired for it.

But they can't. So fuck her.

Even the usual suspects have, for the most part, looked at the facts and decided this was not the fake free speech hill they wanted to lie on. Rod Dreher, as you might expect, runs with the pack but can't even do that right:

“But,” you say, “that’s all the NFL owners are doing with the mandatory National Anthem rule: protecting their business interests.” You have something of a point, but the comparison is faulty. A quiet political protest is not the same thing as calling a black person an ape. Colin Kaepernick’s pig socks are in that ballpark, certainly, but the NFL kneelers on the whole aren’t wearing pig socks.

Like Moses, Kaepernick is denied entry to Dreher's promised land because of his pig socks.

It is a sign of civic health that someone who is making a fortune for a TV network can still lose her position when she indulges in disgusting rhetoric like that. Some things you can’t say in public without consequence. Where we draw that line will always be under contention, but we ought to all agree that Roseanne Barr crossed it.

I'll bet Dreher thinks the Beatles should have been driven from our shores after John Lennon said they were more popular than Jesus.

Others among the brethren find new ways to embarrass themselves -- Anthony Scaramucci, the erstwhile Trump mouthpiece who encourages people to call him "The Mooch," complained of being discriminated against as an Italian-American ("When I was called a human pinkie ring and a goombah while in the @Whitehouse that was deemed acceptable comedy. Double standard"). That's even better than when mobster Joe Colombo's Italian-American Anti-Defamation League went after The Godfather.

And rightwing pencil-neck Roger Kimball does the ooh-such-po-li-ti-cal cor-rect-ness simper-strut at The Spectator:

Uh oh. Was the tweet in bad taste? Indubitably. Was it racist? Yep. Was it the worst thing ever in the history of civilization? According to ABC, which hosted her new, extremely popular show, the answer appears to be, Yes: nothing so awful has ever besmirched the escutcheon of humanity.

You liberals act like racism is the very worst thing in the whole entire world but what about World War II, or that time a black guy glared at me?

Yes, it was in bad taste. So what? There was a time when bad taste was not a (professional) death sentence. Under the reign of political correctness, that time has passed.

Does one of you have the patience to explain to Kimball for me the difference between, say, the race jokes in Blazing Saddles and calling a black lady a monkey?* Best part:

I do not watch television, so I never saw Roseanne Barr’s show. I understand, however, that it was a breath of fresh air, not so much conservative as simply independent.

Percy Dovetonsils doesn't sully himself with idiot box emissions, but knows this show must be good because Trump likes it and the star is a racist.

UPDATE. *I thought everyone knew this, but apparently there are law professors who don't know, or affect not knowing, that calling black people monkeys is like Racism 101:

Yes, the problem of likening humans to apes, an interesting variation on the age-old resistance to the notion of evolution. We are primates, all of us, the same order as the apes. Bush was "Chimpy McHitler," and let's not forget that time Trump sued Bill Maher for joking that Trump was the son of an orangutan.

Speaking of law perfessers: "ABC hands midterms to Trump, GOP," says Instapundit Glenn Reynolds. Maybe they can get Tim Allen to call Michelle Obama a coon and get fired -- that'll really excite the base! Then they can all tell us that lots of different people are compared to raccoons, isn't that what Michelle Wolf did to Sarah Huckabee, you're the real racists, etc.

WON'T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE RACIST LAWYER?

Baseball Crank, writing under his pen name Dan McLaughlin at National Review, wants you to know he thinks Racist Lawyer Aaron Schlossberg "deserves public moral condemnation" for "letting fly a racially incendiary tirade at Spanish-speaking workers in a crowded Madison Avenue restaurant." (Actually Schlossberg told them he was calling ICE on them, which, given the viciousness of that agency toward even citizens who merely speak Spanish, is much worse.)

This being National Review, you knew there would be a "but" -- except McLaughlin uses the more highfalutin' "although of course" instead, because he is not just talking about some racist who "had the misfortune" to get caught racisting -- he's also stickin' it to the liberals with classy literary references!

See, says McLaughlin, when modern people read The Scarlet Letter they engage in "snickers, sneering, and judgmental tut-tutting at those awful Puritan prudes who would force an adulterous woman to wear an outward sign of the shame of her sin for her entire life and endure communal shunning over her violation of a social norm that we, in our own era, would not even regard as a crime." Not sure where B-Head has observed all this sneering and snickering -- maybe in fever dreams, or at a showing of that Demi Moore movie.

Anyway, this alleged sneerfest shows what hypocrites we moderns are because Schlossberg is like Hester Prynne. No, really -- when we are moved to condemn Schlossberg,

This is very much the same impulse that motivated the Puritans... In other words, we see it in exactly the same terms that the Puritans saw adultery, which could trigger violence, blackmail, and produce illegitimate children who could face infanticide or become wards of the state...  And just as today, the punishment is unequally distributed: Her lover’s identity is publicly unknown, so she wears the scarlet letter alone (just as Schlossberg is punished not just for his sin but for the happenstance of it going viral), yet it is also visited on her innocent dependent child.

You see what he's getting at: You modern sex people are the real Puritans, because just as Hawthorne's Puritans punished poor Hester for  premarital sex, you want to punish poor Schlosberg for racism. And this condemnation inspires the same pity and terror, at least in the breast of B-Head. Get a load:

Morally, Schlossberg deserves public moral condemnation, although of course it’s fair to ask — just as Hawthorne implicitly asked — how far we should go, and how indelibly the stain should endure. That’s a question our criminal justice system has wrestled with for years, but in some ways it’s an even harder one to answer when there’s no point at which an offender can say he has paid his debt to society. And of course, as critics of the Puritans fairly noted, we should consider leavening moral justice with mercy and some humility about our own sins.

 "How far we should go, and how indelibly the stain should endure"? Buddy, this all happened last week. There's plenty of time for Schlossberg, as a connected white guy, to move on from his noncriminal immorality. If Ben Domenesch can do it so can he!

But what is striking is the fact that the sorts of people most eager to exact punishment on Schlossberg are precisely the same folks who would lecture us no end about how terrible it is to be morally judgmental and how backward the world of the Puritans was...  People who say they don’t want to judge sin invariably just want to judge different sins.

Yeah -- the Puritans wanted to punish women for premarital sex, but you libtards are mean to a guy who yells racist abuse at people -- same diff!

I'm all for showing forgiveness, but as with Rod Dreher and the Barbecue Complaint Lady, I notice 1.) guys like this only ever plead forgiveness for bigots, and 2.) they only use forgiveness as a pretense to attack someone who isn't racist.

WON'T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE ASSHOLES?

That lady who called the cops on that black-people picnic in Oakland, got embarrassed, and cried, was pretty funny/sad, as have been the associated photoshops. But a man of God has asked that we spare a thought for the lady who called the cops -- the internet can be cruel, he says, and she must be suffering from all the negative attention, so let us HA J/K IT'S ROD DREHER so of course his brief pretense of Christian charity is really just a gimmick to get you to listen to how scared of black people he is:

Here’s a story: We lived in an apartment complex not too long ago. There were three young unmarried guys living in the flat above ours. They would get loud on the weekend. We decided that being good neighbors meant that we should put up with the banging and hooting until 10pm, but not after that, because that was bedtime. The first few occasions we went up to ask them to knock it off, they were nice about it. But then they got obnoxious, usually after they had been drinking. Finally one night, after multiple attempts to ask them to stop, we had to call the apartment security people. We didn’t want to be those neighbors, but they left us no choice.

The difference is that those bad neighbors were causing actual harm, yelling and banging on the floor and playing loud music until late in the night. The people grilling in the park were not harming Barbecue Griper one bit. Still, had the jerks upstairs been three young black guys, not white guys, I wonder if I would have said anything to them at all, for fear of them turning it into a racial confrontation. If I had called apartment security on them, like I eventually did with the white guys, after they ignored our repeated requests to stop banging on the floor, etc., would they have confronted me in the parking lot with a smartphone camera, calling me a racist, and distributing it to social media, and turning me into a racist pariah?

Too bad about that lady, but the real victim is Brother Rod who is persecuted in his fantasies by race-card-wielding black revelers who are much worse than the actual white people who gave him a hard time.

Later in the column Dreher yells at Ta-Nahisi Coates, as one does, then gives us one of his patented "Reader" "Letters" in which some guy says that first, "This lady is NOT white. It is clear to me from her facial features and body type that her racial and ethnic background is mixed " -- trust him, he's spent a lot of time on these things! -- and barbecues in Oakland are a fire hazard ("Oakland Hills fire of 1991 anyone? Google images. I survived it") and "people regularly, openly and brazenly break the law in Oakland and asking them 'nicely' to desist DOES NOT WORK" -- you Rod Dreher readers all know what he means and if you don't, he inevitably makes it clear:

Oakland, especially the area around Lake Merritt, is in a state of complete lawlessness. And no one cares. In fact, the lawlessness is celebrated as a kind of teenage, immature, passive aggressive rebelliousness. You can’t tell me what to do! Especially if you’re white – because that’s, you know, intrinsically racist. Their sad battle cry…..

It's the old story: I'm a white guy who has lived among the savages, and Breitbart says liberals all live in white places, so take it from me, they're sub-human. It's only a matter of time before Dreher moves his blog to Stormfront.

BELLS, SMELLS, AND INCELS.

I'm an old fart and in many ways think like one; I am pleased, for example, when Pedro Martinez bitches about pitchers who save their pwecious widdle arms with short starts. Sure, the world and the game have both changed, but I'm an old fart, dammit, and there's not much left for me except the prospect of withering death, Gold Bond Medicated Powder, and the right to complain!

But I tell you, boys and girls: While I at first found the prospect of music and movie stars doing the Vatican drag at the Met Gala a tiny bit embarrassing -- not so much for the Church, though I am ex-Cath, as for the Met (since it's charging the little people more money to get in, I feel it shouldn't be glamming so hard) -- I was talked out of it pretty quick by all the wingnuts screaming sacrilege. Of course no one was more protective of the Mother Church than religion-hopper Rod Dreher, who starts by suggesting that one reason he became Catholic was the stink-eye he got from an old priest when he tried to touch him up for some old vestments for Halloween; the priest's "visibly shocked" refusal was "teaching me something about sacredness," says Dreher -- no doubt that it's a powerful weapon to use against the psychologically crippled.

And now we have rappers wearing mitres! Look, says Dreher, here are some dirty lyrics from a dirty, dirty Rihanna song: "Sticks and stones may break my bones/But chains and whips excite me." Gasp! Normally one only finds such disgusting sentiments on greeting cards, aprons and coffee mugs.

But Ross Douthat manages to top him: The Gala, he muses, is the fault of Vatican II.

It was the church’s own leadership that decided, in the years following the Second Vatican Council, that the attachment to the church as culture had become an impediment to the mission of preaching the gospel in the modern world. It was the leadership that embraced a different approach, in which Catholic Christianity would seek to enter more fully into modern culture, adopting its styles and habits — modernist and even brutalist church architecture, casual dress, guitar music...

And these concrete cathedrals and folk masses took the majesty out of the Magisterium:

The secular culture welcomed the church’s Protestantization and demystification and even secularization, praised the bishops and theologians who pursued it, and then simply pocketed the concessions and ignored the religious ideas those concessions were supposed to advance. Meanwhile, that same secular world maintained a consistent fascination, from “The Exorcist” down to, well, the Met Gala, with all the weirder parts of Catholicism that were supposedly a stumbling block to modernity’s conversion…

See, the plebes still go for that disused liturgy and pomp -- 'member when everybody bought that "Chant" record? And this, Douthat says, shows an opportunity for Churchy wingnuts:

Thus the only plausible approach for Catholicism is to offer itself, not as a chaplaincy within modern liberalism, but as a full alternative culture in its own right — one that reclaims the inheritance on display at the Met, glories in its own weirdness and supernaturalism, and spurns both accommodations and entangling alliances (including the ones that conservative Catholics have forged with libertarian-inflected right-wing political movements).

The future of conservatism: Bells, smells, and incels! I wonder whether Dreher or Douthat or any of the other crabby cons have considered even for a minute that what they're promoting is basically a fetish, and that what they appear to love about the Church has nothing to do with Jesus (the world's first SJW, after all) and everything to do with grandeur and power of a sort promoted by Donald Trump -- he's into all-gold stuff, too.

SEX MAD.

A few people have asked me about that Ross Douthat "Redistribution of Sex" column but there's not much to say. His tropes are tedious as usual. For one thing, he tries to hitch a ride on the contrarian zeitgeist by saying that the dull, middle-of-the-road types -- that is, people who found Robin Hanson's "Incels Have a Point" essay to be creepy and misogynist and creepily misogynist -- are old and tired, and that the real truth is only known by "the extremists and radicals and weirdos" -- that is, guys like Hanson.

Then Douthat pulls what he no doubt imagines is a fast one -- another enlightened weirdo, he posits, is Amia Srinivasan, whose thoughtful essay on changing attitudes toward and standards of sexual desirability he (to be polite about it) reinterprets as something about "revolutionary architects" grimly working to ensure that comes the Revolution "sex would be more justly distributed than it is today." That is, he's trying to draw a parallel between the masculinity-poisoned killer virgins and people who are sexually adventuresome -- those who believe "the greatest possible diversity in sexual desires and tastes and identities should be not only accepted but cultivated" -- just so he can say, see, you liberals want sex with fat people and cripples to be sexy because you're into "diversity" sex, well what if my revolution is I want to have sex with robots or prostitutes?  Because all you liberals (Douthat took a poll) believe that "sex work is work," maybe Douthat will dress a prostitute like Less Chunky Reese Witherspoon and do, ugh, whatever Douthat does with women -- and there's nothing you can do about it!

Douthat's upshot, as always, is to suggest we'd all be better off under a theocracy where sex is policed by the Church, while everyone else suggests we'd be better off without Douthat.

But Douthat's the least of  it. Rod Dreher:

I want to share with you the most disturbing thing I have read in a very long time. You need to know about it. 

I learned about it via the Twitter feed of a UK radical feminist. In Britain, radical feminists, including TERFs (Trans-Exclusive Radical Feminists) are taking an insane amount of abuse from transgenders and their allies. But on that issue, they’re right. This particular feminist has uncovered something shocking — beyond shocking — about how pedophiles intend to use the same strategy that worked, and is working, for LGBTs, for the sake of legitimizing pederasty.

And then he quotes at length from a document these people purport to be this pedophile group's blueprint for legal kidsex, in which they say things like "In truth, access to the media is what you need most. Without the help of liberal and progressive Hollywood, there will be no campaign." In other words, it's very obviously The Protocols of the Elders of NAMBLA -- bullshit meant to jack up people like Rod Dreher.

And oh my brothers and sisters, the updates:

UPDATE: A couple of you have written to say that this document sounds like a right-wing fake. It might well be. But for the sake of argument, how would we respond if some pro-pederasty groups and individuals adopted this proposed strategy? You can’t say, “It will never happen here.” It absolutely could. The sexualization of children and the removal of sexual inhibitions via popular culture is happening...

A few hours later:

UPDATE: Re-reading it, I doubt it’s authenticity. For me, the “tell” is how the author writes about the media. Still, the fact that even some liberal readers here are not sure that it’s real or fake tells us something about the current cultural moment, and what has become plausible...

Very like the Douthat strategy -- some of you liberals (or whatever kind of liberals hang out at Dreher's site) sorta believed this caricature I swallowed hook, line and sinker, so in a way I was onto something! But with more whining.

PUTTING THE "CHRIST!" BACK IN CHRISTIANS.

Rod Dreher doesn't get why other Christians are being such saps about these so-called "refugees":

A journalist asked the two presenters how we determine how many migrants we are to allow into the country. Sister Norma [a nun] responded by saying that she was speaking to a group of kindergarten students at a Catholic school, and asked them what they thought we should do about all the migrants at the border who are fleeing terrible conditions at home. 

The children said, “Let them in,” the nun said. She added, “I don’t know that Jesus would leave anybody out.” 

And that was it. This is not thinking. This is emoting — and it is emoting just as much as the kind of rhetoric that Trump and his ilk use when he discusses immigration. Sister Norma is a vastly more genial person than many of the anti-immigrant hotheads are. But it’s still substituting emotion and sloganeering for hard thought about difficult questions.

Jesus actually said "Shaddap, the little children," and also "Fuck the Samaritans -- they don't vote for us."  Later, in an update:

I’m halfway through approving comments, and it is frustrating how so many readers believe that Sister Norma’s simply telling stories and asserting that Jesus would probably agree with her approach was sufficient.

"Come on, Jesus, what do you mean 'the last will be first, and the first will be last'? I've already written a 9,000-word post explaining why that's not rational. Why won't you engage my argument?"

Maybe Dreher's right to moan about Christian persecution, because real-life followers of the Man from Galilee seem rather thin on the ground.

NEW FROM ROD DREHER'S "READER" "MAIL."

It's always a treat to see the first-person Dear-Benedict-Option-I-never-thought-it-could-happen-to-me narratives Rod Dreher portrays as reader mail. Yesterday in a unsurprisingly worthless Roseanne post about how homosexuals are defaming America's Sitcom, Rod finished off with such a missive:

You are so right about how Roxanne Gay’s comments typify the rancor and
illiberalness that is tearing apart families. 

I am one of 25 first cousins out of a Scots-Irish “clan” from deep in the mountains of [Appalachia], people like J. D. Vance who made it out into the broader world through hard work and education, mostly conservative Presbyterians. We were doing fine for generations…until the gay lawyer cousin joined a PCUSA church that transformed him into a LGBT bully who publicly shames family members on Facebook for any view they hold contrary to him. 

He has become the family terrorist. 

Now this fine old family gathers for weddings and funerals in little polarized clumps, if they gather at all. I can hardly believe I’ve lived to see a tight-knit family torn apart by political views and ideology. I can’t help wonder how many families are experiencing the same sort of strife. 

You hit on something in your blog that currently plagues scores of American families.

One question: How did this lone "LGBT bully" shatter bonds forged over generations and shared by an apparently large number of godly hill folk? My guess is, he tattled.

FRIDAY ‘ROUND-THE-HORN.

Well here's a rabbit-hole for the weekend.• I know I've spent a lot of time on Dreher already this week but the guy's just been so awful. It's like he came back from the week or two he spent in Hungary pimping his book crazier than ever. While he was there he seemed happy enough and mostly posted gush about how great the Saving Remnant in godless Eastern Europe are (and of course how great the food is -- when this Benedict Option thing blows over he can be the new Jeff Smith). But something put a burr up his ass -- maybe he found out fellow theocon Michael Brendan Dougherty said mean things about Viktor Orbán just as Dreher was ready to come out for him, and it spoiled his high. Since then he's been raging on the usual stuff like the Trans Menace, but also displayed a particular hard-on for Pope Francis, who is the head of one of the many religions Dreher has belonged to, albeit not the current one. All wingnuts hate Francis, of course, but Dreher's goes above and beyond; he seems especially mad now that Francis did not strongly refute a reporter who said Francis does not believe in hell ("Francis is winking"). Example:

Think back to 2013, when he made his famous “Who am I to judge?” remark about gays in that press conference. A reader of this blog who teaches religion at a Catholic high school wrote to say that in a single stroke, Francis destroyed all the work that he (the teacher) has done with the kids in his classes. The students all concluded from that remark that they could believe anything they wanted to about sexuality, because even the Pope said, “Who am I to judge?”

This is Francis’s way. Remember his drawn-out answer when a Lutheran woman married to a Catholic man asked why she couldn’t receive communion in a Catholic church?

In other words, Francis refuses to stress hell, gays, and intermarriage -- that is, the parts of Catholicism that nobody, including Catholics, likes. I assume Dreher's mainly mad that his ex-religion has, as Jack puts it in The Ruling Class, forgotten how to punish -- what's the fun in being godly if you can't feel confident that your opponents will burn for all eternity? It perhaps also stirs Dreher's dreams of being himself the first modern-era cross-cult Pope -- I bet he daydreams about a scenario like that West Wing episode where John Goodman was President for a couple of days. Then again, maybe he's just logrolling a fellow God-botherer's book. In any case, I look forward to his next conversion, hopefully to Sufism so he can work off his nervous energy by whirling.

• Remember when brave National Review editor Rich Lowry got all the conservative stalwarts to contribute to an "Against Trump" issue in 2016? And how most of them started going over the side before Trump was inaugurated? Today Lowry makes it official in "The Never Trump Delusion":

A realistic attitude to Trump would acknowledge both his flaws and how he usefully points the way beyond a tired Reagan nostalgia.

Goodbye "Reagan" macro; hello MAGA macro!

...The hold that Trump has on the GOP has a lot to do with his mesmerizing circus act, but it’s more than that. He’s been loyal to his coalition on judges, social-conservative causes and gun rights. His desperation to get a border wall speaks to his genuine desire to deliver on a signature promise. The same is true of his tariffs this year.

The last two items underline Trump’s heterodoxy, although he isn’t as ideologically aberrant as Never Trumpers would have it.

Liberals have known this all along, of course -- Trumpism is just conservatism with the gloves off and a screw loose. It's about conning the rubes by beating up their perceived inferiors and promising windfalls that never come. Some of Trump's con games eschew wingnut orthodoxy -- you won't hear him giving lip service to the magic of the market -- but the end result is the same: tax cuts for the rich and the poor get screwed, with a new war a short-odds favorite before 2020. As I've been saying since this started, the deal is he signs their bills and they let him grift. With few exceptions, the conservatives who have been wringing their hands over Trump's bad manners have been as sincere as Noah Cross' show of sorrow over Evelyn's death in Chinatown, and now they're skulking away with their prize.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the March For Our Lives and rightwing reaction thereunto. I wrote it last night and there's been a lot of froth since; Rod Dreher's post, mentioned briefly in the column, has metastasized with many updates since I first saw it into a full-body freakout, including supporting quotations from Jonah Goldberg (!), a reference to "Piss Christ," and more of that patented Dreher "I Don't Endorse Trump But Because of X I Endorse Trump" routine. But the real howler is this bit:

One more thing about all this. As longtime readers know, I lived in New York on 9/11. Stood on the Brooklyn Bridge and watched the first tower fall. Smelled the sweetness in the smoke for days, and learned from a friend who had lived through the war in Beirut that it was burning human flesh....

I cringe to think about some of the things that surely must have come out of my mouth in the year that followed. David Hogg-like stuff, no doubt. The hate felt good. It really did. It also felt good to hate those who cautioned me and others about our rhetoric. Fools and cowards, they were, as far as I was concerned.

I allowed that righteous anger to justify my cheerleading for the catastrophic Iraq War. I was the fool, and I was the coward, because I was afraid to interrogate my own rage. I regret bitterly being so eager to hate, and thinking of myself as someone who got a free pass on that, because hey, I lived a mile or two from Ground Zero, so who are you to tell me that my feelings are wrong, huh?!

That’s what’s happening here too.

So, to recap: in 2001 Dreher favored blowing up Ay-rabs because the 9/11 bombers were Ay-rab, and because he was in Brooklyn and smelled the WTC. (I myself lived in Brooklyn then and also smelled the WTC, yet never called to blow up Ay-rabs. My immunity is called "common sense.") Now Dreher repents, and compares his intemperate, racist foamings to David Hogg's rather tame and definitely not racist calls for gun control. This is, in form anyway, the sort of stop-and-think by means of which Christians are traditionally encouraged to "judge not, lest ye be judged" -- but even Jesus can't stop Dreher from judging, so he doesn't withdraw his judgment that Hogg is a "disgusting little creep," or anything else: Instead he just calls his younger self names, too, and bids his readers attend his current wisdom, which is sure to be infallible.

The punch line is that Dreher spends a lot of his time ragging on other religious conservatives for endorsing Trump. Those guys are certainly hypocrites, but at least they're not nuts.

UPDATE. Dreher just can't let go -- from a new damn-kids post:

Second, this movement is not going to stay focused on gun control. The passions of the left, and the media, won’t allow it. Emma Gonzalez gave a memorable speech at the rally. But the media can’t let the speech stand for itself. They’re already celebrating the intersectionality of Gonzalez, a self-defined bisexual who has shaved her head...

Dreher was, too, going to come out for gun control, really he was, but then the liberals had to turn him off with a bald lesbo.

DOGS AND CATS, LIVING TOGETHER!

There's been a lot of nonsense written about the Oscars, but Rod Dreher has surpassed everyone and even himself, through the agency of a "reader" "mail":

“The Academy used to play it safe with controversy, but now it’s moving the Overton window faster than in real life,” he wrote. “Who’d have thought one decade ago that the most prestigious award in the film industry would go to a film about bestiality, and casting it in a positive light?”

Yes, he's talking about The Shape of Water, which I told you about here -- but even if I hadn't, if you've had a halfway decent liberal arts education you'd recognize it from even a summary as a fable, like Ovid's Metamorphoses or Penny Marshall's Big.

But not Dreher. "I don’t pay attention to the Oscars, or Hollywood," he sniffs, "because I’m interested in other things' -- oooh he's an intellectual, look at his eccentric glasses! -- but though actually exposing himself to Hollyweird mindrot is beneath his dignity as a pedant, Dreher asks his readers to tell him about the movie -- and then he can’t even wait for that expedient before giving forth with the crack-brain hooey:

Could it be in this film, what happens at the Occam facility is Elisa, who works there as a janitor and first encounters the creature, learns to separate morality from matter, so that she can open herself to a sexual relationship with an aquatic creature? In other words, if there is no intrinsic meaning to matter, including humanity, then we can do with it whatever we want. Including submitting sexually to animals, or any creatures that give us pleasure and affection?

Here's another clue for you all -- the Walrus was Paul.

I don't know whether Dreher's gurus actually let him watch movies except to get something to yell about-- I remember him denouncing The Hours in 2003 as an "apologia for evil" -- but I like to imagine him leaping from his seat at A Midsummer Night's Dream when Titania makes love to the donkey-headed Bottom, screaming SACRILEGE, LIQUID MODERNITY! (I could go on like this all day -- e.g., Dreher sees Carl Dreyer's Day of Wrath and when it's over cries "I knew it! Witches are real!")

Imagine getting this far in life, and in a writing career no less, and having no fucking idea what art is nor what it's for. As I've said many times before: For these maroons, culture war is war on culture.

UPDATE. Dreher got mad because people made fun of him:

You guys, knock it off with “you didn’t see the movie so you don’t have the right to say anything about it.” I conceded early on that I hadn’t seen the film, and that my comments are based only on the Wikipedia description of its plot, and things both the director and others favorable to the film have said about it. Of course I could be wrong! If I’ve made a mistake in my description of the plotting, then I welcome correction. Nobody has yet said that I got that wrong...

It says right here in the review that she fucks a fish, so it's propaganda for fish-fucking -- because what else could it possibly be?

UPDATE 2. I saw a headline at Media Matters -- "Fox News keeps running columns from the same guy explaining, 'I'm a Democrat but [insert agreement with GOP]' -- and it put me in mind of two things: First, Harlan Hill; second, Rod Dreher, whose "reader" "mail" from Liberals Who've Had Enough is legendary. And he has a beautiful one today! Excerpts:

I read what you said about having spoken with four people recently who didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 but are considering it now because of the left’s recent behavior. I’m not quite in that camp, but am close to it; I suspect my progress on the issue largely resembles those of your friends and (I suspect) a substantial minority of other Americans as well.

Oh that's another thing -- all Rod's apostate liberal "readers" have their finger of the pulse of America.

...I’m certainly not a typical Trump supporter — I believe in climate change and America’s responsibility to take policy steps to reduce our contribution to it, I’m anti-NRA, pro-Obamacare to an extent, and detest the Republican Party generally. The day after Trump got elected, I posted a scathing denunciation of everyone who had voted for him, which got the millennial social capital gold: hundreds of likes and almost 40 shares, including by several people I didn’t even know.

This is where all the folks on the Mourner's Bench go "oooooh!" 'cuz they know a conversion narrative's a-comin'.

...But leaving the nuclear issue aside, the Left’s behavior in the last year has pushed me steadily more and more in the direction of being willing to vote for a sort of lower-key Trump (someone like Ben Shapiro)...

I wonder if Dreher owed Shapiro a favor; if I weren't quite sure he's humorless, I would suspect him of making a joke.

UPDATE 3. Just had to share Dreher's sputter-back in his Shape of Water comments section:

I wonder if Rod really means to posit the Ancient Greeks as his socio-sexual model.

DREHER GETS WITH THE NATIONAL FRONT.

Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, the granddaughter of French literal fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen, spoke at CPAC last week, and Rod Dreher went gaga for her. Yet he has trouble admitting that she's pretty much what you'd expect National Front royalty to be -- he keeps saying he just doesn't know enough, though he really likes her! I think there’s more than one reason for that.

Calling Le Pen's CPAC speech "dynamic," Dreher swooned, "she went on to condemn euthanasia, gender theory, and transhumanism." She even quoted Mahler! "Continental conservatives in the Le Pen mold are more traditionalist, focusing on natural law, religion, and culture," Dreher explained approvingly.

But he wanted it made clear: "To the extent that she represents his racist, anti-Semitic views, Marion ought to be ashamed," said Dreher later. Still,  he said, "despite having read Bill Wirtz’s TAC piece about her, it is not clear to me what she believes on race and Judaism." Wirtz's piece notes that in 2016 Le Pen's National Front "ran on banning the kippah in public places" -- though he did not cite, possibly because he could not find, Mademoiselle Le Pen explicitly affirming (or, for that matter, denying) her party's position.

"I prefer the flawed attempt of Marion Maréchal-Le Pen to address from the traditionalist right the most pressing problems of our time to the doubling down on the same tired dogmas of the US conservative establishment," said Dreher. Again, he really, really wanted it known that he abjured her grandfather -- "To be clear — pay attention here — Jean-Marie Le Pen is an actual fascist, an anti-Semite, and a disgrace" -- and said elsewhere that he also doesn't like "her secular nationalist aunt Marine, whom I find unappealing" (though he was much more sympathetic to her when she ran for the French Presidency).

And, to make his gutless equivocation even more obnoxious, he added, "Do not take me as endorsing Marion Maréchal-Le Pen! I honestly don’t know enough about her to do such a thing, and I certainly condemn the racism and anti-Semitism of her grandfather — and, if she espouses it, then her own racism and anti-Semitism."

But he kept on about her. In another post contemptuously dismissing Mona Charen and other anti-Trump and anti-Le Pen conservatives as dainty "Principled Conservatives," Dreher wrote, "Marion Maréchal-Le Pen’s [CPAC] speech can only sound like blood-and-soil nationalism to Principled Conservative ears... whatever the sins of Marion Maréchal-Le Pen and her family, Anglo-American conservatism has something important to learn from the European conservative tradition, and needs to think about it, does not make one an anti-Semite or a blood-and-soil nationalist."

Among other things, Le Pen said at CPAC, "We do not want this atomized world of individuals without gender, without mother, without father, without nation" -- a quote that was promoted on Twitter by the straight-up Nazi Defend Evropa. In fact, Defend Evropa was altogether more forthright about what Le Pen was about and why they liked her than Dreher in their own coverage of the speech:

Marion talked about pride, guilt, atomization of society, identity, enrootment to the land, peoples, legacy, survival of nations, family and many more. A beautiful speech, well received from the American public. The tide is turning, Le Pen reminded us, the Nationalists, why we should fight. And we will fight!

DU also cheered when Le Pen condemned the European Union as "an ideology without land, without people, without roots, without soul, and without civilization." She didn't mention blood, though, so Dreher's still in the clear.

And that's what his hard sell with soft details is all about. Dreher's always tergiversating about Trump -- saying he dislikes his "vulgar" style, but implying that maybe there's something valid about his movement; doesn't he attack the same people Dreher reflexively hates, after all? -- and he does something similarly sneaky with Le Pen, in fact, overtly associating Trump with Le Pen and not in a negative way:

The fact that we have Trump has a lot to do with the failures of establishment conservatives — and they still don’t seem to have any real idea why they failed. Is it really the case that the only reason people like Trump and Le Pen find traction on the right is racism and bigotry? The only reason?

You see what he's doing -- he's saying sure, maybe there's a leeedle bit of racism there, and maybe you find it disturbing -- but look, she represents a new kind of conservatism: She doesn't like trans people, either! And if that doesn't turn you on, she's also a nationalist ("Let me be clear here: I’m not offended when I hear President Trump say America first… I want France first for the French people!"). And if that doesn't do it for you... well, like he said, he's not sure what she really believes, we shouldn't judge her by her grandfather, and wasn't that speech stirring...

For her own part Mademoiselle Le Pen makes a valiant effort in her public appearances to keep the potentially less attractive features of National Front ideology quiet, but sometimes the mask slips -- as when The Guardian asked her about mixed marriages and she said, "I'm not against it... For me, marriage is a very personal choice. The only thing I'd say is that I know, from people who've told me firsthand, that sadly mixed marriages can be a bit conflicted on everyday issues. For instance, the naming of children – Muslims need children to take Muslim names, often they want women to convert to Islam..."

I'm sure Dreher knows, as it is not (yet) Le Pen's business to, how something like that might go over in the States -- like gangbusters with the Trump base, perhaps, but not so well with the more soap-and-toothpaste-involved middle Americans. But he also knows that you might could sneak it over the plate if you keep it vague and, if someone smells a rat, make sure to protest that you don't approve of the old version of this exciting new conservatism, from which the new thing is, in some ineffable way, just different. There'll be plenty of time to sort out the details later -- when it's too late.

GUN NUTS, PART INFINITY.

The latest NRA charmless offensive shows how bad the situation is. When the NRA found its normal post-massacre duck-and-cover routine -- that is, waiting until our attention was drawn away from the latest multiple-casualty Second-Amendment demonstration -- had left it vulnerable to the protests of telegenic survivors, they immediately went on offense, with Wayne LaPierre babbling about socialists and Dana Loesch lying at top speed at the Parkland town hall. If you want to know why LaPierre and Loesch chose not to take a more reasonable and conciliatory approach with the kids in the wake of the mass gun murder they'd just suffered through, dismiss from your mind the absurd idea that it's the natural product of principled advocacy; ideas that are right don't need to be defended with bullying and bullshit. The NRA's PR makes clear that they are not peddling an Amendment or a specific interpretation thereof so much as the fear of violation and the thrill of violence.

That's why they came hard -- not because they're tough, and certainly not because they're right, but because they're full of shit. And they count on their belligerence to convince Americans they're fighting for them, rather than fighting to keep up the nice livelihood gun manufacturers have bestowed upon them, and against "socialists" and other ooga-booga rather than against the young citizens who have seen the effect of their depravity up close and want it stopped.

Too many liberals seem to think shame or conscience is going to stop these guys. No. They have to be repudiated decisively at the ballot box and throughout public life. If they aren't, things will only get worse.

Depressing, isn't it? Thank God we've got Rod Dreher for lulz! Right out of the gate God's Gastronome gives us a striking comparison:

I get as annoyed with right-wing Second Amendment absolutists who insist that any attempt to control guns will lead to a civil liberties apocalypse as I do with left-wing First Amendment absolutists who hold that any attempt to control access to pornography is welcoming Big Brother.

You'll get my porn when you pry it from my warm, sticky hands, Dreher! Porn, or what passes for porn at the BenOp compound, turns out to be much on Dreher's mind: After suggesting school shootings are caused by kids going to large schools -- as opposed to the one-room schoolhouse where Rod's ancestors l'arned to read and cipher -- he suggests a connection to stories in magazines like The Lily and Teen Vogue "pushing polyamory," ass-fucking, ice cream douches and vibrators -- "the most tender, intimate expressions of love between a man and a woman, reduced to bestial gestures," preaches Rod; "...It’s almost as if the dominant culture and its institutions are radically dehumanizing teenagers, and are mystified as to why some of those teenagers don’t see others as human beings worthy of respect and care."

I wonder what's the mechanism of action for this -- do the antisocial young men who comprise the majority of mass murderers get corrupted by reading Teen Vogue and Vulture? Or do they somehow meet the sort of big-city gals who read these publications, perhaps at potential-mass-murderer mixers, and become intoxicated and corrupted by their intimate Ben & Jerry's scent?

As usual, the Dreher "reader" "letter" is the highlight:

UPDATE: Reader Matt in VA writes:

I am surprised that you don’t draw out the parallel between school shootings and another common theme on this blog — early-onset transgenderism.

The easy availability of machine guns can't be the problem; otherwise why would they be so much more scared by the monsters under their beds?

UPDATE. Who could have suspected that Rod would have a woody for third-generation French fascist Marion Maréchal Le Pen? She speaks French and hates homosexuals -- il se pâme! ["Lady Marmalade" plays] Voulez-vous détester les Noirs (ce soir)?

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

I made a mistake when  I looked over my shoulder/ Cromwell was right behind me, in the driving rain...
•  Well, I’m going for the Oscar gusto again this year. I've already discussed The Post, and will now treat Dunkirk, which I just saw. I said back in 2009, when Christopher Nolan made The Dark Knight, that unlike many other A-list Hollywood moviemakers Nolan could at least shoot an action sequence so I could tell what the hell was going on. He's gotten even better since then, and Dunkirk is a great opportunity for him to show off. From the Brueghelian bombardment of big ships crowded with drowning, burning, and leaping soldiers, to the strafing of a small boat full of shushed, terrified child-soldiers, to balletic dogfights, Nolan can orchestrate mass movement and violence like nobody’s business. And he is beautifully abetted in all the craft details, especially Hoyte van Hoytema’s photography, which combines high contrast with judicious color saturation to give things a edge alternately dreamlike and nightmarish, and Hans Zimmer’s score, which underpins good old-fashioned orchestral pumping with machine sounds and postmodern shrieks to juice the tension. Though the technique is modern and even modernist, the intent is antique-heroic — most clearly seen in the rah-rah over the Little England flotilla and the stiff-upper-lipped British officer class, each beautifully represented, no coincidence, by British national treasures Mark Rylance and Kenneth Branagh. That’s well-earned in both history and the movie, but as an American I found it odd that there was absolutely no humor — even Noel Coward’s In Which We Serve had jokes. Still, if the unrelenting seriousness makes it hard to take Dunkirk to heart, it does increase the effect of the ending, in which filthy, bedraggled survivors awaken on the train home to windows suddenly filled with hay-brightened English sunlight. And though I do look forward to Gary Oldham’s Churchill, I can’t imagine I will be as moved by his rendition of the “Never Surrender” speech as I was by Fionn Whitehead reading it haltingly out of a newspaper on his way back home from hell.

•   On the Oscar theme, I should also mention Get Out: You've probably either seen it or heard enough about how great it is, so I don't have to go into how much I loved it. But I will say that one of the things I love about it is, though it's clearly about race, the central conceit is so powerful and expansive that, were it possible to show the film to people who had no experience or understanding of racism, they would still understand the terror, because it represents a fundamental anxiety: that of anyone entering a world that for whatever reason -- money, background, culture --  is so different from their own that they suspect and are quietly terrified by the prospect of psychic kidnapping and enslavement. Of course, even the slightest awareness of racism and its role in our national history inflames that anxiety considerably -- because it actually happened. This is not, as some morons have suggested, a politically evanescent phenomenon, but a real work of art based on the insanity of American life. 

•   OMG, here's another alleged "reader email" that God-botherer Rod Dreher is just passing along:

I’m a longtime (and recently wavering) atheist, but I have had a very devout evangelical friend of many decades. 

Suuuure you are/have.

He lives in Oregon. He couldn’t afford to send his daughter out of state for college. But he wanted her to go to college and experience the income and class benefits that had eluded him (as a GED holder) throughout his life. 

All this devout evangelical wanted was for his daughter to have the advantages he never had! But alas, to do so he had to send her to godless College, and though it was "the most milquetoast of the bunch from the political activism perspective," she had within a few months been brainwashed by Lesbo Hippies to "disavow her female gender." Perplexed pop's friend reports:

The pressure, he said, was too much, and from all angles—peers, instructors, campus organizations and media, etc. “Non-binary” was a taken-for-granted ontological reality, and to question it was bigotry. To fail to realize your own “non-binary-ness” was self-hatred rooted in bigotry.

Sure enough, by her junior year, she was a “non-identifying queer,” neither male nor female, and an activist. Their relationship is now essentially nonexistent, as she sees him to be a “Nazi"...

It's such a sad tale that I half expected it to end, "Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle. She died gender-fluid."

THE GLORY THAT WAS GIPPER, THE GRANDEUR THAT WAS COOTER FROM THE DUKES OF HAZZARD.

The President Oprah thing is already beginning to die down, but before the historic moment passes let us bring to Clio's attention one particular piece of related gibberish from Opus Dei conservative Michael Brendan Dougherty at National Review. It is, as one would expect, dismissive of Winfrey — “about how women are rising up to speak ‘their truth,’ telling ‘those men’ who have oppressed them that ‘their time is up’" is his sneer-quote-intensive description of her speech (Gad, isn’t it just like a woman to get pissy about rape and harassment!) -- and has a Big Idea about the Meaning Of It All, please God, but instead of sticking with the traditional mush about what celebrity culture hath wrought, Dougherty goes the extra mile to fix blame for celebrity culture on “wonks.” How ya figure, MBD?

The wonk’s role is well-fitted to the centrist political ideal in the post–Cold War West. For them, government is most highly admirable when it is totally denuded of questions of value or morality (these having obvious and uncontroversial answers), and reduced to a purely technical exercise. The politician working with the wonk finds that his job is reconciling the public with what’s good for them. 

Imagine — being so almighty arrogant that you want government to give people “what’s good for them” (like working bridges and highways, health care, etc.) instead of gifting them with your moral value decisions like “hmm, feeding these poor black people seems moral, but wouldn't it be more Christian to let their starvation and misery serve to spur others to thrift and industry?”

And this fits the machinery of the executive branch, which is filled with hundreds of thousands of civil servants, overseen by a much smaller retinue of political appointees almost all chosen from within the governing class of the country. 

He doesn’t mention private-sector government contractors, who soak the public fisc at least as well as any Gummint bureaucrat (no “what’s good for them” nonsense for those privateers — just good old-fashioned free-market self-enrichment!), because they are of Reagan, which is to say of the Lord.

Where this model of government is most advanced — in Europe — policy questions are routinely taken away from the passions of democratic peoples, and quarantined for expert management.

Dougherty is of the Dreher/Douthat school that wishes Eurocrats would stop thwarting the true will of white people and let neo-Nazis lead.

We could go on forever like this but ugh, let’s cut to the chase: according to Dougherty these silly “what’s good for them” government wonks are making a celebrity president like Oprah inevitable, while serious people like Dougherty prefer “the traditional politician, a person of judgment and charisma who represents the community from which he or she emerges, using his own wisdom in reconciling the diverse interests and needs of his nation and constituency” — you know, like Reagan and Trump. Or the have-a-beer-worthy George W., if you want to talk about genuinely manufactured celebrity -- for Bush Lite, who would have had neither business nor political cred without wealth and Republican handlers, was about as big a put-up job as Peter Lemonjello.

"Wonks are now the producers, behind the scenes," closes Dougherty. "The celebrities are just the talent, reading lines and leveraging their brand for the great project of governance." I don't know whether Dougherty saw Trump going off the reservation on DACA and being guided back to orthodoxy by Kevin McCarthy before he wrote that, but even if he didn't, he should know by now that you don't need good-government types to treat political leaders like the "talent"; simple goons and grifters are if anything even better at it.

WHAT PLANET ARE YOU FROM?

Now that the danger has passed, it will be something to recall and reflect how mere days ago conservatives were pee-dancing around Roy Moore, trying to look classy and moral while simultaneously endorsing a pedo. Rod Dreher had one of the worst takes: In "An Anti-Communist For Roy Moore," he told yet another of his patented "reader who doesn’t want to be identified" stories, this one about an Iron Curtain refugee who compared Moore to the persecuted souls back in the USSR, and explained why, given the chance, he would vote for him:

I would have no other choice. The reason being that if we accepted that a mere accusation — however credible — is the new basis of our political and legal systems, than we have already lost both. This principle was at the very core of the mechanism of communist terror. Did you neighbor have a better car? Well, you accused him of being a secret adherent of capitalism. That was enough. He would be done for, and with some luck, his car would be yours. We are not that far from it here …

I don't recall Dreher, or any of his alleged refugee readers, blubbering over Al Franken or giving him the benefit of the doubt -- in fact, quite the opposite ("Bring it on. This is necessary, and important"). But he was all sympathy for Moore, comparing him to Soviet show-trial victims, despite his more credible accusers.

One can guess why.

Of course when Moore lost Dreher gave a long gassy speech full of Moral Dignity, but barely a day went by before he returned to his lying-bitches theme, joining Claire Berlinsky in denouncing what they both characterize as a "Warlock Hunt." The least ridiculous thing about Berlinski's article is her acknowledgement that some of the powerful men brought down in recent scandals were accused of relatively minor offenses -- but she seems to think that, with the possible exception of Harvey Weinstein, none of them did much of anything wrong; in fact she is especially sympathetic toward the men who admitted they'd fucked up -- she assumes they only repented because feminism, like Soviet Communism, is so oppressive that it brainwashes true victims like Matt Lauer into thinking they're guilty ("The most profound mystery of the Moscow Trials was the eagerness of the victims to confess"). I bet feminists who hear this are wondering, like the Jews accused of running the world, when they will reap the benefits of this allegedly immense power.

Dreher of course makes everything hilariously worse:

It brings to mind the time I was accused of racism in the workplace on completely spurious grounds. This accusation would have been laughed out of any remotely fair-minded tribunal. But my accuser was a racial minority...

In this land where women and minorities are forever oppressing white men, Trump is king. But, to paraphrase Adlai Stevenson, he needs a majority.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Al Franken imbroglio, as well as the attempts of some liberals to reexamine the Clinton impeachment, and the ways in which conservatives have attempted to weaponize these events for their own ends. I hope you won't think me ungenerous in saying that these guys are not interested in advancing the Believe Women movement. They're just trying to take the post-Weinstein moment, in which abused women are getting a little more attention and credence than usual, and exploit it. You can see it especially clearly in the pissy oh-yeah-you-libs-are-supposed-to-be-feminists routines from conservatives like Laura K Potter at RedState:

We’d at least expect former presidential candidate, Mrs. Hillary Clinton to express some sort of support for Ms. Leeann Tweeden, as a fellow woman and believer of all those who come forward, right?...

Nope. Nothing. Third wave feminism is showing, once again, that women deserve to be heard and respected if they hold they correct (read: progressive) viewpoints.

If you'e thinking, wait a minute, Clinton did make a measured and reasonable statement about Franken -- well, yes, but not at the moment when Potter was looking at her Twitter feed, and when you write for RedState there's no point in updating. (Potter's only subsequent article at this writing is, awesomely, "International Men’s Day Spotlight On Male Suicides.")

The culture warriors got into it, too: You saw here last week how Jonathan V. Last at The Weekly Standard took a journey through the past and ranted about the drugs these damn hippies were using on Saturday Night Live and the soiled honor of Spiro T. Agnew. President Trump himself brought up a sketch Franken and other SNL writers worked on, in drafts of which multiple celebrities get raped by Andy Rooney, as if it proved anything except SNL writers took a lot of drugs -- and, for the millionth time, that conservatives don’t understand the difference between fiction and reality.

But Rod Dreher, as usual, outstripped them all in Fallen World paranoia with a froth of outrage over one of the last really funny things SNL did, the 40-year-old "Uncle Roy" sketch with Buck Henry. What's that got to do with Franken? Get a load:

I tried to find out if Al Franken wrote that skit, but my research indicates it was his frequent writing partner, the late Tom Davis. I was wrong — as two readers who watched the Henry interview till the end point out, it was two women: Rosie Shuster and Ann Beatts. Anyway, the reader sends in this more recent clip of Buck Henry defending the integrity of laughing at pedophilia...

And here's a clip of W.C. Fields laughing at blindness! And what about Mel Brooks laughing at Nazis? All these Hollyweirdos are corrupt!

Again: Al Franken did not write the Uncle Roy skit, though he was part of the team that aired it. I’m not saying that Al Franken is soft of pedophilia! I am saying, however, that the 1970s and those who were at the leading edge of pop culture’s evolution back then are probably going to have a lot to answer for as more and more people come out about being sexually harassed or assaulted. I’m wondering if this purgatory spasm we’re living through is going to consume way more famous Baby Boomer males than we can even imagine.

The whole thing's a pisser but what's most amazing, or what would be amazing if we weren't so used to Dreher shattering the limits of ridic, is that he kept going even after admitting his whole premise was wrong.

Finally, to Andrew Sullivan: Dude, let it go.

UPDATE. One other thing that's struck me is the way the brethren deal with the lack of contact between Franken’s hands and Tweeden’s breasts in the famous photograph. Like Peter Hasson at the Daily Caller: “Franken’s defenders in the media have also given him credit for, they say, not fully groping Tweeden.”  I guess in sexual assault close counts, like in horseshoes. (I should add it's not only rightbloggers -- MSM types have fallen into it, too, like Nate Silver, who said the photo "appeared to show Franken groping Tweeden’s breasts while she was sleeping — not providing a lot of room for 'if true' statements about Franken’s conduct." If you're not watching that three-card-monte of a sentence closely, you'll come away thinking he's feeling her up.)

Also, thanks for Yastreblyansky and Sentient Al from the Future in comments for pointing out that the Menendez underage claims  to which Nolte alluded never panned out; I had something about that in the original but didn't feel the column would bear the time it would take to explain -- which is, come to think of it, how a lot of their shit gets over.

FOOD OF THE GOD-BOTHERERS.

Today in What's Rod Dreher On About This Time we find the Get-Ready Man inspired by James Poulos, whose bright idea is that, since America has been ruined for the Godly by atheistic sex freaks, maybe the Godly should leave America and go colonize Europe -- you know, the way religious cults used to take over territories in the American outland and establish monocultural enclaves like Rajneeshpuram and Ave Maria --

...growing numbers in the U.S. may conclude that the only way to retain the essential character of the West is to relocate to Europe...

Not every American will pose that question or act on it. But for those who can match a personal interest in doing so to a more cultural or ideological interest in helping “save” Europe from another traumatizing and turbulent break with its past, returning to the old world for the good of western civilization may hold a unique and powerful appeal.

Poulos briefly acknowledges that "the refusal of large numbers of Americans to seek their fortune outside their country even when it has become effectively impossible for them to live fruitfully at home" may owe in part to the fact that not every Godly-American is a trust fund kid with enough dough to take himself and his quiverful off to Belgium for a Gap Lifetime -- he even brings up drug addiction as an impediment because that's really hot when talking about the poors these days -- but finally realizes paupers don't read shit like this anyway and declares "the primary obstacle to seeking better fortunes overseas is probably a raw lack of imagination — an inability to conceive of a picture of a future outside the new world." So bootstrap your imaginations, Jesus peeps -- maybe run a for-profit education scam like The Leader to fund your travels, or better yet a Kickstarter! Hell, Kim Du Toit did it even before Kickstarter was a thing.

Nutty as that is, Dreher's reaction is ever better. First, he wistfully declares that if he were a younger man, he might do just this:

I don’t want Notre Dame de Paris to become either a mosque or a museum. There’s something in me that wants to resist by loving these things that we Christians in the West have been given, but have for far too long left uncherished.

I assume Dreher's idea of loving Notre Dame is banding together with like-minded morons in front of the place to form a cordon sanitaire against Muslims. Dreher also talks about how he loves all the old things you can see in Europe and "feel[s] at home in Europe in ways that I just don’t in America" -- he's not the only one wearing sandals, for one thing -- and as an unbidden bonus (maybe the old lady walked by, looked over his shoulder, and muttered, "Is it already time for another foodie vacation?"), leaps to a defense of his many gastrotravels:

Yes, it’s true that I love to take vacations to Europe. The food is something I love, but there’s a lot more to it than that. Aside from being delicious, the cuisines of European countries are expressions of deep and abiding traditions. I have a sacramental mentality, which means that I don’t sit down at a table in the Umbrian mountains and eat an antipasti platter of cured meats and experience them as merely delicious. I learn what I can about why cured meats, and cured meats in this particular style, came to be associated with this region, or this village, and what the cooking here says about the local culture and its traditions. I like to eat good local food and drink good local wine or beer. That’s one of life’s great pleasures.

See, when you ignorant peons eat fancy food, you're just gorging, but Rod's sacramental -- meaning, I suppose, that when he says grace he does so in a dreamy voice meant to convey his sacramentality.

No wonder his family didn't want his bouillabaisse; all that sanctimony probably spoiled the flavor.

THIS WOULD MAKE AN ATHEIST OUT OF MOTHER TERESA.

Do you retain a sentimental feeling for Christianity, despite the fact that many American Christians actually worship money and Trump and Rod Dreher exists? Here, this article at Reason may cure you:

Are Free Minds and Free Markets Compatible With Christianity?
A baker's dozen Christian libertarians weigh in

If you know libertarians, you may have some idea of the kind of "Christians" they would know. And no, there isn't a single hippie-dippy "Blessed are the poor" pussy in the bunch. Right out of the gate:

"In my mind, capitalism is what happens when you have the absence of initiated force, and that's perfectly compatible—beautifully compatible—with Christianity. Capitalism simply means the freedom of individuals to make contracts and to engage others in a peaceful and voluntary way. That's precisely what Christ taught." —Lawrence W. Reed, president of the Foundation for Economic Education and author of Rendering Unto Caesar: Was Jesus A Socialist?

Reed's book is available online, and it'll make your average pig-eyed Jesus grifter doff his cap in tribute, full of stuff like this:

In his book, Biblical Economics, theologian R. C. Sproul Jr. notes that Jesus “wants the poor to be helped” but not at gunpoint, which is essentially what government force is all about...

This reminds me of the capital punishment bit in Beyond the Fringe, in which a warden argues for it while escorting a prisoner to his doom: [Warden] "You don't want to be cooped up for life." [Condemned prisoner] "Yes, I do want to be cooped up for life." [Warden] "Come along, now, you're playing with words."

Quotes from the other disciples of Ayn Christ include "Who nailed Jesus to the cross? The state!" and this, my favorite:

The more I read, the more I realized that there's nowhere in here where Christ attempts to use the tools of violence to accomplish his objectives. In fact, it was so extreme in the opposite direction that even self-defense wasn't used by Christ and the early Christians. They chose martyrdom.

I can see why he likes that. Blessed are the meek, they're easier to rob and kill! They talk a lot about how they, in the name of Christ, would not countenance government programs to feed the starving and house the homeless because that's violence, and violence is so ungodly it trumps their need to survive; but I bet if you went for their wallets (or even a crumb from their tables) they'd come up with a gun pretty quick.

I will only add that Kevin D. Williamson, one of the most vicious wingnuts going, is listed here as "National Review roving correspondent and a Catholic convert." As the old saying going, Jesus is alright but his friends are a bunch of fucking assholes.

TOGETHER AGAIN FOR THE FIRST TIME!

Rod Dreher's back from another of his extended Parisian foodie boondoggles -- I swear, for someone who's always going on about Little Ways and common people he spends an awful lot of time in Yurrup, and not doing missionary work neither -- and has resumed his usual Ben Op/Get-Ready Man routine, supplemented with great lashings of Harvey Weinstein because it fits with his Fallen World scenario. But give him credit -- I looked in because I always expect him to exceed himself, and by God he has delivered.

This post is mostly about how 1.) Mark Lilla would be perfect if only he accepted Christ as his personal savior, and 2.) Ta-Nehisi Coates is a racist. At first I thought this was the plum of the post:

Ta-Nehisi Coates and [neo-Nazi] Richard Spencer are both atheists who have found a strong source of belief in their respective races.

But as loony as it is, it's of a piece with other Dork Right attacks on Coates, like this woo-woo at The Federalist by Dimestore Douthatwith Threenames about how Coates, in his perfectly reasonable prediction that America's inequality might lead to violent confrontation, is "feinting toward violence as a means... of achieving social justice," as if Coates had done the interview bare-chested and bandoliered and simultaneously strangled a white man.  (I can imagine Threenames in 1963 hearing Malcolm X talk about chickens coming home to roost and muttering, "see, what'd I tell you about those people.") No, the plum comes at the end:

Only a strong Christianity can counter this nihilistic tribal religion. But this we do not have today. I am on record as strongly disapproving of some of the antics of Milo Yiannopoulos, but he and I are on the same page here, in this excerpt from an interview with America magazine, which he says they refused to print...

By "on record as strongly disapproving," Dreher means posts about Milo like "CPAC Welcomes Pederasty Advocate." But convinced as Dreher is that gay marriage will destroy America (see his Obergefell essay, "Democracy Is Dying; Persecution Is Coming") unless he and his God Squad can destroy it first, he's nonetheless pimping for this recently-gaymarried aging twink because in the alleged unpublished America excerpt (Milo is a master of persecution-as-self-promotion), he praises in his lubricious way things Dreher loves: the military ("Now the men in uniform are much better men than I"), muscular Christanity ("too many in the Church keep masculinity hidden or the subject of shame"), and Rod Dreher:

I’m with Rod Dreher: Anybody who only preaches a namby-pamby God, and not the highly masculine God of Scripture, is leaving young men vulnerable to the monstrous false gods of race and ideology.

Looks like Milo is eager to be gathered in from the wilderness, and has wisely pegged Rod as among the easier gatekeepers to grease. Hope he at least got a reacharound!

HOWL YE, FOR THE DUH OF JUDGEMENT IS AT HAND!

If it's The American Conservative and the headline and header image look like this...

...and the author is someone whose parents actually named him Addison, you might expect some kind of kulturkampf fodderstompf, but Young Addison exceeds expectations:

It is the cosmopolitan D.C. crowd’s version of a riot: a horde of young men and women descending Sunday morning onto hundreds of barely differentiated joints to swallow down the same bottomless mimosas and “small plates” fashioned from the week’s leftovers.

I thought the D.C. version of a riot was a riot. (Or any anti-Trump protest, since all such events are automatically classed as riots by order of the Central Committee.) Also, I'm not one of the juvey brights Young Addison endeavors to diss, but I have been to a brunch or two and they do not resemble the joyless trough-feedings Young Addison describes unless someone is forced to invite their parents.

It is known as “brunch,” but the refined flavor of that word no longer reflects what it has become. Today it’s about extending the party. Brunch food is hangover food, and brunch is the finale of the quasi-religious weekend trifecta: bar crawl, Tinder hook-up, hungover brunch and hair-of-the-dog Bloody Marys with well vodka.

Oh, so that's his complaint -- brunch replenishes them for more ungodly revels!

Of course restaurants don’t advertise it this way.

I don't see why not. If they told the locals brunch is really mandatory debriefing for sex and drunkenness, they'd be booked through Valentine's Day.

But brunch in D.C. has evolved to be little more than a way for the young urban elite (today’s yuppies) to make their messy weekends look neat, drunkenness hip, and materialistic desires something other than hedonistic. It is a peculiarly coarse, even uncivilized ritual, cloaked in the respectability of Sunday morning.

Oh no... oh you're kidding...

Brunch has replaced Sunday worship. The bottomless mimosa is the blood of Christ.

Hallelujah brothers, we've found Ross Douthat's backup scold! 

But Young Addison is not just mad at sex, alcohol, and ungodliness -- he's also mad at all the other things you'd expect a priss like him to be mad at:

This city (I refuse to call it “this town”) is supposed to be a seat of diversity, ever more valued in the era of the “Resistance”; it is anything but. The brunch spots, as noted, are all the same. So are the patrons.

My thumbed teeth and spray of holy water on your diversity, your resistance, your colloquial speech! And also -- he says, unballing his fist, smoothing his hair and affecting unconcern -- it's awl suh-o boring:

Washington, more than many cities, is home to hordes of young people—of every race and ethnicity to be sure—who watch the same television shows, wear the same clothes, spray the same perfume, bend their necks towards the same few websites on the same little screens...

Gad, what a bunch of phonies! Oh wait, he's not done:

...speak with the same clean, clipped, often-too-fast accent, practice the same American religion which glorifies the utterly unattached individual, and live the same aimless life in which overthrowing the President of the United States is a more realistic prospect than getting married and having a family.

It just goes on and on like that, but I must note one other thing: Young Addison suggests all these damned kids trying to get phoney-baloney desk jobs are wasting their time and should look into trade school instead; "there are thousands more graduates of political science and government relations than there will ever be political scientists and government relations managers." A quick check of LinkedIn shows Young Addison attended the University of Maryland School of Public Policy -- literally inside the Beltway -- rather that Loyola Gonzaga Ave Maria Unaccredited, then interned at the D.C. think tank Worldwatch Institute before taking a gig there, from which I guess Opus Dei reassigned him to TAC. Shop class for thee but not for me! Well, I do recall from my spell in the One True Faith that hypocrisy is one of the requirements.

I must thank him for one thing, though, besides the laffs: Longtime readers know I hate D.C., overstuffed as it is with soulless careerist shits and dull as dun next to my Old Home Town, so it's nice to be brought into sympathy with the place, even if only for a moment.

On, another thing: That Young Addison is denouncing brunch when his obvious model and TAC head boy Rod Dreher is in the midst one of his frequent Parisian foodie boondoggles is a howl in itself.