LETTERS FROM REPENTHOUSE GOES BIG-TIME!

 Here at alicublog we've been having fun for years with Rod Dreher's Letters to Repenthouse -- those too-good-to-be-true anonymous "reader" "letters" Dreher posts that have the same breathless I-never-thought-it-would-happen-to-me vibe that made lonely teenage boys hot and Bob Guccione a fortune. Through this shoddy journalistic device Dreher thrills and chills readers with honest-to-gosh you-bet real scenes of "obviously transgendered" he-shes grooming a child at a Dallas showing of a Captain America movie, "a 13 year old girl in his church who came to the pastor and asked innocently if it was worth it to give a boy a blow job in exchange for a meal at McDonalds," etc.  

A classic of the genre is the MAGA Gryphon -- a Liberal who has suddenly decided to turn right-wing, like a Letters to Repenthouse "reader" who said he was "anti-NRA, pro-Obamacare to an extent, and detest[s] the Republican Party generally" but was now ready to "vote for a sort of lower-key Trump (someone like Ben Shapiro)." JustTheTip Trumpers like Dreher love this bit, as it convinces them they're not alone in wanting those sweet, sweet Handmaid judges without the indignity of owing it to the thuggery of Trump Republicans. 

This has been a niche entertainment for years, but I guess us hipsters couldn't have it to ourselves forever: Bret Stephens is taking it mainstream --

Meet a Secret Trump Voter
‘Being a lesbian who’s voting for Trump is like coming out of the closet again.’

Gotta say, it's a clever twist on a classic formula; Dreher hates gay people, so he's unlikely to use them in his fantasy stories. And it's found money, because there's nothing rightwinger readers love more than a persecution narrative, and the idea that the MAGA Lesbian is forced to "come out again" for Trump (which must be painful, right? I mean we made coming out gay hell on earth!)  must tickle their innards.

Much of Stephens' script, though, is straight out of Dreherville:

It’s worth understanding where she’s coming from.

Start with the economy. “I haven’t seen double digit [gains] in my 401(k) since the internet boom of the late ’90s,” she says. “It went up 19.6 percent” in the year before the pandemic. 

That's like saying the car felt like it was flying before it plummeted to the ground. 

“Look at the stock market,” she says. (Up about 35 percent from four years ago.) “Look at gas prices.” (About the same as what they were when Trump took office, but well below the $3.31 per gallon at the midpoint of the Obama administration.)

That last part is great -- I wonder if Stephens went back and asked MAGA Lesbian if "the midpoint of the Obama administration" was what she meant. More:

"...I care about having a job. I care about having health care through my company."

Wow, normally you have to be in a Koch Brothers front-group ad to explicitly insist your health care come "through my company."

"I was out of a job a few years ago. Obamacare priced me out [of private insurance]. It was like, $560 a month. Then Obama’s website blew up. He can’t get the website right?”

How about that website, huh? I'm still thinking about that. And Obama with his Grey Poupon! As always when a conservative sets his scene the Big City, the topic turns to bums and poop: 

What worries her more are the effects of the response to the pandemic in a liberal city like New York. “Crime is in my neighborhood now. There’s a homeless encampment near me that’s growing and growing. They have a living room and a shower curtain and that’s where they go to the bathroom. I have a guy who walks in front of the store every day. In a diaper!"

Yeah, gay New Yorkers are shocked to the tits by this sort of thing. 

I ask Chris whether Trump’s behavior has ever come close to being a deal breaker for her. She asks me to name some of the lowlights.

“Grab ’em by the. …”: “Didn’t bother me at all. For every cad out there, there’s equally a gold digger who will let you do it.”

I imagine Stephens' readers in Fritters, Alabama smiling broadly: "I betcha that Anne Heche was a lesbeen gol'-digger. Whut's a 'cad'?" And they ain't seen nothin' yet:

The media as the enemy of the American people: “These days, yeah. Whenever I read a front-page story and I get to a disparaging adjective, I stop reading.”

Definite city slicker stuff. "I didn’t believe Christine Blasey Ford for one second," "“The Clintons’ fingerprints are all over this," etc. -- yeesh, at this point I bet even Dreher's going, "Whoa, tone it down, guy." And here comes the piece de Resistance:

You don’t have to agree with Chris on any of these points. You can note some of the inconsistencies in her views, most of all between her support for Sanders...

Stephens has never shown much talent for writing or argument, but I'll say this for him: He's sure got nerve.

IF IT WEREN'T FOR MOTIVATED REASONING, HE'D HAVE NO REASONING AT ALL.

I think Rod Dreher has no more to teach us about how bad Rod Dreher is -- that is, he does not show unplumbed depths of mendacity, bad faith, and derp, he just does them like usual but sometimes dumber. We've talked a lot about his "reader" "mailbag" shtick, where he blockquotes passages allegedly sent to him by people who he sometimes vouches for ("a reader of this blog writes as a decades-long resident of the New York Congressional district just won [effectively] by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez") and which are often from liberals who are disgusted with liberalism, which always gives Rod some prodigal-son pep, and which are obvious bullshit -- either made up by Dreher himself or sent to him by conservative operatives or possibly trolls playing a deep game.

Anyway here's his recent account of a Thing He Saw On The Internet:

This is both sad and infuriating. It’s from an anonymous academic who posted it on Twitter as @publicola17:

1/ Woke anti-racism is child abuse.
My family is living the antithesis of @thomaschattwill's Self Portrait in Black and White. And I fear it may damage my children irrevocably.
Let me explain
2/ I'm white, my wife's black. When we met, we "saw each other's race," but we didn't think that was the most interesting thing about us. We foolishly thought our children would be part of a post-racial future, in which all Americans could just be human beings to one another.
3/ Then came Trump. I decided I should try to learn more about my fellow citizens, who I now realized were completely opaque to me. In contrast, my wife decided she was at war with an immutably white supremacist America.
4/ My wife began to read authors like Nikole Hannah Jones and Michael Harriot. She had a "racial awakening," concluding that she'd been "inauthentically black" all her life...

I actually had to C&P this from elsewhere because Dreher only provides a screenshot of this thing, which goes on to detail the alleged destruction of this poor guy's family as his wife does things like "regularly explain to our kids that the police want to kill black people" because "NHJ [Nikole Hannah-Jones] and [Ta-Nehisi] Coates are always telling her how traumatized she should be just because she's black in America," while the husband -- I shit you not -- looks forward to the day when his tykes can read Thomas Chatterton Williams and get clear.

Are your bullshit detectors ringing? Not Rod's! (Even though the @publicola17 account has disappeared.) He goes on for hundreds of words about what's "bizarre and twisted" about the woman and how "this is what the identity-politics left is going to bring to all of society: ruin, hatred, endless suspicion" and the Bible story about "when Jesus frees a demoniac by casting the evil spirits out of him, and sending them into a herd of swine," etc.

Finally:

UPDATE: Some of you believe that the Publicola narrative is fake. You might be right. It resonated with me because, as I’ve said, I’ve known people in marriages like that...

More such gush; then --

Even if the anonymous man Publicola’s narrative is nothing but an exercise in creative writing, it still tells a truth.

 Punchline: Dreher's upcoming book, which he pimps endlessly, is called Live Not By Lies.

ROD DREHER & GLENN REYNOLDS: A LETHAL COMBINATION.

It's Pride Month, so of course Rod Dreher is flipping out extra-spicy over the Homosexual Menace. (Regular readers of me and others whose eyes are watching Rod will know Dreher believes gay people are murdering Christianity, and so howl ye for the day of judgment is at hand, etc.) Here's one example: The New York City Department of Health encourages local gays to be frank with their doctors about their sexual practices for obvious reasons. Dreher says:

A reader who sent this item in says [emphasis his]:

Many of these legal rights are positive or unobjectionable, but one is highly problematic: “Have your gender identity and gender expression recognized, affirmed, documented and accommodated.”

This, the reader says, will make it much harder to be a traditionally religious doctor in New York City.

"Traditionally religious doctor in New York City" sounds like a fish-out-of-water comedy: Thet there Department o' Health got plumb mad 'cuz when this l'il girl asked for birth control I tole her she's a slut an' wrote her a pre-scription fo' church!

Another one:

A small but telling example: the announcement that the US men’s and women’s national soccer teams will be wearing pro-gay jerseys: 

[Picture of rainbow letters on soccer jerseys] 

And notice how the Fox Sports journalist described this move: 

U.S. Soccer has dropped some spiffy new rainbow kits to raise money for a good cause, coinciding with LGBTQ Pride month in June.

What if you are a US Soccer player who is Catholic, Evangelical, Muslim, or otherwise religious, and objects morally to celebrating gay pride (even if you have no problem at all with gays and lesbians playing professional soccer)? Too bad for you. If you objected publicly by refusing to wear the jersey, you would put your career at risk.

Or how about if you're a religious hockey player drafted by the Los Angeles Kings and you refuse to wear their jersey because God, Not Man Is King? Your career will suffer too, curse this fallen world! [Scourges self]

So: violate your conscience or suffer professional consequences. This is one example of how coercive political correctness moves throughout the system.

From there Dreher goes into a grand mal tizzy:

The rising Left is bound and determined to crush or at least permanently sideline people it deems heretics — in particular, whites, males, orthodox Christians, and skeptics of the LGBT project...

Yeah whatever ya big Dairy Queen, but here's the punchline -- he's actually outdone by Glenn Reynolds. Yes, Ole Perfesser Instapundit has in his dotage gone full culture-warrior, and he takes off from Bre'r Rod's post thus:

The thing is, you don’t get Hitler because of Hitler — there are always potential Hitlers out there. You get Hitler because of Weimar, and you get Weimar because the liberals are too corrupt and incompetent to maintain a liberal polity.

Put another way: See what you queers did? You made me Hitler! Remember, now, what me and my klavern are doing to you is all your fault.

I'm not sure whether it's more accurate to say Trump has emboldened them or unhinged them. Hmm, why not both?

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

What do you think of the new Garbage album? I like it.

•  OK, OK, here’s some free content from the Roy Edroso Breaks It Down daily newsletter (though really you should subscribe, fresh copy five [5] days a week from America’s most underrated writer for approximately 35 cents an issue is ludicrously cheap): First, some future National Guard deployments we can expect since Kristi Noem rented her troops out to some gazillionaire wingnut to play Border Patrol with -- real fall-of-Rome stuff, but I got some laughs out of it. And here’s a speech from a recently released sex offender! I’d say “trigger warning” but really, these days I’d say a TW is implicit in just about any national news coverage, straight or fanciful, wouldn’t you? 

•  Speaking of triggers, Pride Month has ended, which I hope will reduce some of the intense pressure Rod Dreher seems to have been under. You will recall he’s been in Hungary studying up on how to prepare Orbán fascism for export, and though Big Vik has been banning all the gay he can ban, the persistence of happy homos abroad seemed to bother Dreher all the more – as if living the dream of anti-gay persecution in Hungary made him all the more painfully cognizant of those corners of the globe where homosexuality was not suppressed. It’s been fun, but my favorite Moment of Dreher this past week is more racism-driven, as well as a classic example of his “reader mailbag” shtick:

I had a conference call on Sunday night with two guys back in the US. Both are young conservative Christian friends who worked for the same major American media company (one still does, but the other quit a few months back). They are white males. They reached out to me via a mutual friend after my book Live Not By Lies had an impact on them. They agreed to talk to me for the record if I consented to keeping their details private. What follows is my record of our conversation, revised to honor their concerns. I sent the draft version of this post to them both to make sure I had written down our conversation accurately, and that I had protected them both. The one who still works for this company (I’ll call it ACME) has a family to support, and can’t afford to lose his job.

I will call these men Rick and Charlie. Their real names aren’t even close to this. I hate that I have to write like this, but these are the stakes. People are scared to death for their careers – and they have reason to be.

Reminds me of this:

Anyway, these two Swear To God They’re Real guys had the devil’s own time at ACME, what with all the post-George-Floyd wokeness:

Rick says that in these endless strings of meetings, ACME executives would give black people an opportunity to voice their frustrations and anger, and to talk about their “lived experiences” with racism, or what they perceived to be racism.

“Some of these things really were racism,” says Rick. “Others weren’t specific to race, but were everybody’s lived experience. Everybody gets treated badly in the same way at some point. But you couldn’t say that out loud. I sat through countless hours of that kind of meeting.”

The intended effect is, no doubt, to get readers to envision some strapping young buck bitching that his dented fender was racism, and poor Rick Nothisrealname having to listen to it for hours with his head chained up like the kid in the old Radio Free Europe ads. Anyway ACME decides to hire black people and surprise, they’re a pain in the ass:

There was one case in which the team had the budget to make a hire, and considered taking on a freelancer who had done superb work for them in the past, under budget. The problem: he was a white male.

“Someone present in the hiring meeting said, ‘White people had it good for 400 years – it’s about time they felt the sting,’” says Rick. “None of the people leading the meeting said a word about that.”

I know, you folks in corporate life hear that sort of thing all the time! 

There was another case in which a team was carrying out an expensive shoot in an environment in which a black actor hired for the shoot decided on the set that they didn’t want to subject themself to a minor inconvenience that was part of the contract. After the shoot ended, ACME offices were filled with lamentations over how racially insensitive ACME was to expect a black person to do something they didn’t want to do — even though the request was extremely minor, and the actor had signed on for it. As Rick put it, expecting a black actor to honor a professional commitment was considered intolerably racist by ACME staff.

I guess the buck wanted Van Halen treatment. So touchy, these blahs -- excuse me, those blah-lovers! 

The White Whatstheirnames also suffered from the persecution of not being Free To Be MAGA Me:

Rick is also a conservative, and was a supporter of Donald Trump. “On set, I would hear people dogging Trump supporters and Christians. I didn’t say anything. This made friendships so hollow. You just knew that if these people knew this little thing about you [your politics or religion], they probably wouldn’t want to be friends anymore.”

Think for a minute of actually believing that if the people you spend all day with knew what you were really like, they would hate you. Would you say the problem was them or you? If you said “them,” yewwww miiight be whoever's feeding this stuff to Dreher.

It goes on like that – one Whatshisname quits ACME to stay true to his beliefs, which is a big deal because “his star was on the rise,” claims Dreher – “I looked him up online at the ACME website, and he seems to have been a rising start at the company.” Meaning I guess that his company bio was flattering, as opposed to all the company bios that make their subject look like duds. 

I wonder: Do even Dreher’s loyal readers believe this shit? Or is it all an unspoken conspiracy to keep going along with the gag, in the hope that some poor dopes will wander in and mistake it for the truth? 

THE RETURN OF ROD DREHER. A reader wrote to inform me of the demise of Rod Dreher's Crunchy Con blog. Halfway through the second bottle of champagne, I noticed that Dreher had actually started a new blog at Beliefnet. So I went to see what this back-to-the-land, Benedict-Optioning, cult-friendly enemy of modernity is up to, and found:

OK, I'm going to confess to you now that Santa Claus brought the Dreher chirren a Wii for Christmas -- and it was a fantastic purchase, for the most part. The kids are getting actual exercise...

A fucking Wii? I'm a rootless goddamn cosmopolitan and I don't have a fucking Wii. What would Solzhenitsyn say? And why aren't his kids building their muscles by chopping wood and drawing well-water?

I understand he's moving to Philadelphia. I wonder if anyone told him they have a lot of black people there?

UPDATE. Now that I think of it, Dreher reminds me of this panel about George Hamilton III from Peter Bagge's Hate comics (click to enlarge):

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Weird to see them show-bizzin' it up here-- I always imagined them
all serious, even pained, in a church. Shows what I know!

•  I've been asked more than once this week what I think about Rod Dreher getting greater-than-usual dissemination in the mainstream press for his recent bizarre reminiscence about being in third grade and ogling his black classmate's "primitive root wiener when we were at the urinal during recess, because it was monstrous." But I have followed Dreher for many years and frankly this doesn't even make my Top Ten wacko Dreher moments, such as his friend's wife's exorcism ("his wife’s face contorts into expressions that he has never seen in her, despite their nearly two decades of marriage"). Besides, as far as racism goes, the Mandingo root weiner may be funny, but I've seen so much of the guy's less-funny racism, such as his suggestion that if airlines hire more black pilots, airplanes will "start falling out of the sky" (because, come on, black people flying planes!), that it has lost it charm for me. Meanwhile Dreher's still dropping gibberish like this on the regular:

A reader who grew up in communist Czechoslovakia said the letter from the National School Board Association to President Biden, asking for the feds to move in to protect school boards from angry parents, reminds him of this August 1968 letter that the Communist leadership of his native country sent to Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, fraternally requesting an invasion to protect them from the Czech people...

But while this comparison of a DOJ investigation into violent threats by rightwing freaks against school board members for purposes of intimidation to the crushing of the Prague Spring is clinically insane, it's well within the range of mainstream conservative opinion, so we can count on the prestige press to continue to fluff Dreher the way they have Hugh Hewitt and other such ogres as fascinating contrarians. 

•  I have cleared only one Roy Edroso Breaks It Down entry for readers who are not paying subscribers -- the latest in a series of conservative columns about how you liberals are just silly to worry about another attempted Trump coup (bringing to mind the old Tom Lehrer lyric: "Once all the Germans were warlike and mean/ But that couldn't happen again/ We taught them a lesson in 1918/ And they've hardly bothered us since then"). It's been such an action-packed week that you should really consider subscribing. I mean, take today's entry on the new political party/grift created by Andrew Yang. (Here's a free column of mine from 2019 about how I knew Yang was no good. Sometimes the gift of prophecy is a curse!) That alone is worth the $7 monthly subscription rate -- and it's just one of the twenty (20) issues you get for that price! It's almost wasteful not to subscribe! 

DREHER IN THE TERTIARY STAGE.

Rod Dreher's been on a tear lately. He is of course over the moon about the possibility of overturning Roe v. Wade. He knows he owes Donald Trump for this, so in his usual "I'm no Trump supporter but"/ "I'm no Trump fan but"/ "I didn't vote for Trump but," plausibly-deniable testimonial to the President, this time he lets in considerably more than the tip:

I will say that Gorsuch, plus whoever is coming next, is, are two facts that Trump-voting social conservatives can and ought to use to beat Trump-skeptical conservatives like me over the head, in a we-told-you-so fit of vindication. I find it harder to justify my sitting out the presidential election in light of the facts of this tweet...

If only he could confess his secret love! I think ol' Rod's gonna wake up Trump-pregnant, and will of course bring it to term, while steadfastly, like Hester Prynne, refusing to identify the father.

But the real fun with Dreher is his "reader""mailbag," and the victory of Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York has his alleged correspondent in this instance, who honest to God lives in Ocasio-Cortez' district, in stitches, or perhaps a straitjacket:

The Department of Transportation, a bunch of crazy far-left progressive activists, and the Mayor were trying to force these bike lanes down our throats despite a huge outcry, and we pushed back enough where Joe Crowley said no and our local councilman ended up not supporting the project. Now with Crowley gone, the snowflakes who demand these bike lanes might become emboldened again.

Dreher's audience, which probably hates cyclists even more than it hates pedestrians and drives to go to the bathroom, is no doubt sympathetic, and wonders why all the Archie Bunkers they imagine populate all of Queens couldn't vote in Crowley. After a feint at claiming "big money was definitely backing [Ocasio-Cortez]" -- despite the well-known fact that she refused PAC money while Crowley was up to his eyeballs in major donors-- Alleged Correspondent suddenly goes full bull-goose racist:

However, what was really bizarre for me was the fact that the overwhelmingly majority of activists who were campaigning for her like a bunch of fanatics were WHITES! 

When I see stuff like this, I can’t help but think that whites, especially white liberals, have some sort of in-built suicide complex, where they want to give away their own country to non-whites. It’s absolutely mind-boggling to me. And it’s going to be hilarious watching these whites eventually be pushed out of the Democratic Party and straight into the hands of the alt-right.

In updates, Dreher does his usual "What, you think that's racist? Well, takes all kinds" thing.  But he does a little of the racial heavy lifting himself in a later post,  pointing out the ooga-boogas in Ooga-Booga Land are multiplying rapidly, white people aren't squeezing out enough little Crusaders, and reckoning is inevitable:

Where are those Africans going to go? They’re going toward Europe, which is depopulating. Miguel said that given the geography of the Mediterranean, it’s going to be very, very hard for Europe to keep African migrants from entering. I suggested that given the unwillingness of European elites to confront the hard facts of what’s happening, in part because it conflicts with their liberal ideology, this will make the inevitable reckoning even more violent and traumatic than it would otherwise be. 

The massive migration of barbarians into the Roman Empire, in the 4th through 6th centuries, changed European civilization permanently...

Poor guy -- he's about to have his female-crushing wet dreams fulfilled by the Supreme Court, and yet he still can't stop thinking about being overwhelmed by the fecund, dusky hordes! Well, there's some of God's justice, perhaps; with all that privilege and power protecting him, he still can never feel safe.

THEY MADE ME A NEO-NAZI!

Hey it's another Rod Dreher "Reader" Mailbag! As with previous editions, you have to believe everyone who writes to Dreher has approximately the same literary style and language skills level. It's possible! And anyway it's more fun if you suspend disbelief. Ready? Good! Today's a double feature -- two guys who are thinking of joining a White Identity cult because the blacks and the liberals turn them off!

This is from Baby Skin #1:

I’m a white guy.

Let's get that straight right off the bat!

I’m a well-educated intellectual who enjoys small arthouse movies, coffehouses and classic blues. If you didn’t know any better, you’d probably mistake me for a lefty urban hipster.

Dunno, but I have a feeling once you start talking the mystery's over, Mr. I'm A White Guy.

And yet. I find some of the alt-right stuff exerts a pull even on me. Even though I’m smart and informed enough to see through it.

Well-educated, and smart and informed! And white! I can see why we're all paying attention to him.

It’s seductive because I am not a person with any power or privilege, and yet I am constantly bombarded with messages telling me that I’m a cancer, I’m a problem, everything is my fault.

Then maybe it's time you made new friends. Maybe try that before becoming a Nazi! I mean it's a big decision.

After telling us he's not rolling in dough, and has to mow his own lawn despite his brains and education -- ha, tell me about it, bro! -- Baby Skin #1 tells us what's really ticking him off.

But oh, brother, to hear the media tell it, I am just drowning in unearned power and privilege, and America will be a much brighter, more loving, more peaceful nation when I finally just keel over and die.

Maybe he's more broke than he lets on and the only "media" he has access to is an old Black Panther newspaper he found at a yard sale. More likely he's one of those conservatives who lost his TV remote during the Clinton Administration.

Trust me: After all that, some of the alt-right stuff feels like a warm, soothing bath. A “safe space,” if you will. I recoil from the uglier stuff, but some of it — the “hey, white guys are actually okay, you know! Be proud of yourself, white man!” stuff is really VERY seductive, and it is only with some intellectual effort that I can resist the pull.

But though intellectual effort should come easy to a bright feller-me-lad like him, he's not sure how long he can hold out against the pull of his Aryan heritage. And if he can't, guess whose fault it'll be?

...It baffles me that more people on the left can’t understand this, can’t see how they’re just feeding, feeding, feeding the growth of this stuff. They have no problem understanding, and even making excuses for, say, the seductive pull of angry black radicalism for disaffected black men. They’re totally cool with straightforwardly racist stuff like La Raza. Why are they unable to put themselves into the shoes of disaffected white guys and see how something similar might appeal to them? Or if they can make this mental leap, why are they so caustically dismissive of it — an attitude they’d never do with, say, a black kid who has joined the Nation of Islam?

And we're about to lose him -- he, who might have been such a ornament to The Left! -- because we were too nice to blacks and Latinos and the TV was mean to Mr. Charlie. But I gotta ask: if he's so mad at liberals and so torn about going White Pride, why can't he compromise and just become a regular conservative?

Sorta answers itself, don't it?

We don't have to spend much time with Baby Skin #2, since he seems cut from the same cloth (or typed on the same laptop) -- he says libs made him Bund-curious, and you'll be real sorry when it happens (he even ends, I swear to God, "What follows from all of this cannot bode well"), but let me give you the flavor:

I totally get where [Baby Skin #1] is coming from. I’m in his shoes for the most part: white, Christian, male, straight. Add to that that I’m a Southerner. But I’m also a PhD candidate in the humanities...

The new Nazis -- they're so schooly!

...in a discipline where my whole demographic configuration is routinely and openly disparaged as being the fount of all evil in this world.

I've been saying this for years, but why do these guys never take their studies at Liberty University or Bob Jones instead of liberal hellholes where everyone hates them? It's almost like they seek this treatment out -- maybe so they can write about it in wingnut magazines and websites! Maybe both these guys are just woodshedding for their eventual gigs at The Federalist. Or for a book: White Like Me! They better hop to, I bet Dreher's already shopping it.

UPDATE. Comments to this post are up to the usual glorious alicublog standards. Don't miss one by Jeffrey_Kramer that begins, "Maybe we aren't even meant to imagine there's an individual consciousness behind these 'letters'; maybe it's sort of along the lines of those old Reader's Digest pieces like 'I am Joe's Kidney.'"

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

You probably already know this 1965 Waterloo gig,

but it was new to me. I love Chuck coming in late,

but still ripping it up like a pro.

•   I have to admit the statue-toppling thing going on is mostly funny to me, especially eloquent de-plinthings like the one Edward Coaston got in Bristol. Sure, take down all the Confederate Columbuses you like -- but I'd trade all that just to put Trump, Mnuchin, Barr, DeVos, and a few others on a dunking stool over an acid bath. In fact I'll be "moderate" about it and compromise: I'd accept seeing them tried in an honest court.

But if we can't have that, iconoclast away! It's not like we've got a Rodin or Saint-Gaudens Jefferson Davis to protect on aesthetic grounds. And as for the unloved items now defended disingenuously by terrified wingnuts, they don't seem to have suffered much at all. Here's Micah Mattix at The American Conservative:

HBO Max drops Gone with the Wind from its archive because to keep the title available “without an explanation and a denouncement of [its racist] depictions would be irresponsible.” Ah, yes, let’s avoid “irresponsibility.” 

I’ve never seen the film and have no desire to see it...

LOL. I've seen it twice, it's not so hot. At least Birth of a Nation is well-made!

...but it’s now the number 1 film at Amazon and number 5 at Apple. Pamela K. Johnson reminds us that Hattie McDaniel, who played Mammy, became the first African American to win an Academy Award. “I’ve sat through GWTW exactly once as research for a historical novel in which McDaniel is a character. I don’t like the film either. At the same time, it is sad to see the actress get canceled along with the movie. She endured so many trials to stand, briefly, in the spotlight.”

This is a pathetic dodge (but a popular one among conservatives now), using the long-dead McDaniel as an excuse to protest Gone With The Wind being "canceled" on... [checks notes] HBO Max. Plus which Mattix's same damn item says you can STILL GET GONE WITH THE WIND AT AMAZON AND iTUNES.

So in what sense is it "canceled"? A better word (and Mattix being one o' them-there intellectual conservatives should use it) would be "disfavored." And that's the whole grift here; they're not angry because they can't have their totems, but because their totems have been shown, vividly, to be out of favor, and they can't have the warm satisfaction of believing that everyone else was watching GWTW or tolerating a slaver's monument not because it happened to be on or because they were polite, but because they, too, secretly and in their heart of hearts, loved the Old Ways and the lash and chains and state violence that enforced it. Fuck these snowflakes.  The mob, of which I am now in charge, decrees: You'll take having to click on a different website than before to get your product, and you'll like it!

•  As mentioned previously, Rod Dreher has been flipping out over the Dusky Hordes and their SJW Dhimmis swamping his Backyard Republic -- but he's still got his wits sufficiently about him to do the occasional "reader" "mailbag"! In the latest, one "reader" tells us she knew Nikki Oliver, one of the leaders of Seattle's Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, in high school, and that Oliver "used to be an outspoken Christian who attended a non-denominational megachurch," but alas the megachurch was not truly godly -- "theology was fairly shallow," presumably lacking hellfire and tongue-speaking -- and Oliver's high school was "very diverse -- racially, socially, and economically... incredibly secular," which presumably explains Oliver's heathen radicalism; the "reader," conversely, found the Real Jesus and now hopes Trump's reelection "delays the rise of the leftist totalitarians until 2024."

Better still is the story told by a "reader" whose friend, can you believe it, turned into a white nationalist! And guess whose fault it is:

This transition began with his own reactions against the elite anti-racism movement and the Democratic party.

Totally reasonable, right? I mean, no one likes Democrats, or anti-racism either, it's so elite. All that having to watch what you say, like no using "colored."

At first I was able to have very interesting conversations with him about his concerns, his growing sense of isolation, and his defensiveness and anger (which I completely understood and in many cases agreed with). It was even refreshing to have conversations with him.

Ha, I'll bet he didn't watch his language!

But then it somehow tipped into strikingly different territory. He crossed a line into what I’d actually call white nationalism.

"Buddy, I find your positions refreshing, but do you have to wear the armband in public?"

This is a heartbreaking thing to watch: to see a previously sensible, smart, kind, and nuanced person descend into spewing a sort of ethnocentric vitriol that denigrates others, while using valid concerns that I truly agree with as their justifying axioms. It feels like you’re going insane.

Emphasis in the original, amazingly.

I had honestly always imagined (wrongly) that a white nationalist looked a certain way (like a mug shot of a serial killer, essentially), and had just always existed as such...

But then I looked in a mirror. Ha! Just kidding.

...but my friend’s journey in that direction was slow and subtle and even influenced by such small things as a couple of first coffee dates with super-woke girls he didn’t like...

In the world "reader" never enters, this is known as a Red Flag. But aside from incel-unfriendly dates, what set this lovely fellow on the road to Quiet Parts Out Loud?

But with the woke movement pushing more and more destructive dynamics (and showing no sign of slowing those), I see whispers of the potential for these beginnings in other people as well...

Of course!

I suspect that when he realized what was happening – that people like him had become the scapegoats for woke elites’ claims that, by and large, were actually a violent power grab made in the name of “justice” – he just cracked at some point and likely threw his lot in with the only folks he saw who would offer him a valued place in their group.

So you see, your honor, this is really a good boy gone bad -- driven into the arms of Hitler by social justice warriors who cruelly attacked him -- well, not him specifically, but things he believed in, like, you know, umm err -- well, good things like I believe!

But it is very frustrating talking to moderate or progressive friends who look at me like I’m crazy when I suggest that the anti-racism movement may be furthering white nationalism, giving fodder to a fringe movement that welcomes people like my old acquaintance, who may believe they have no other safe place to go.

Yeah, if you push that "anti-racism" thing, you've gotta expect people to go racist, it's like you're asking for it. Why can't we compromise and just be sorta racist?

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.

BREEDER MAILBAG.

It's hard to pick a favorite among the many obsessions of Rod Dreher. His flat-out support of tyrants so long as they're religious ("Putin, Our Tsar-Protector?") is pretty good; his terror of the trans menace (“an older transgender said to him, ‘You’re just a kid now, but when you turn 21, we’re going to take you out and get you broken in’”) is even better. But for my money, his tendency to sputter over porn is the richest vein. I thought he had spiked his meter for good some years back, when that "2 girls 1 cup" thing was happening -- anyone who'd been around the block even once knew it was just the Fetish of the Week, something to épater the squares to be replaced with some other woo-woo the following month, but Dreher went so nuts over it that he appeared to be promoting it:

(I know that the way I'm writing about it will make lots of readers want to see the clip. I'm sorry about that, but there's really no other way to write about it. If you are bound and determined to let your curiosity win here, please at least go to the Wiki entry to understand what kind of images you are going to have burned into your brain forever if you watch the clip.) 

What kind of society do we have when that kind of information is easily available to people, especially to children? What kind of society can we hope to have?

Hur-ray, hurr-ay, hur-ray, only one tenth of a dollah! This week Dreher's on a real tear, fueled by his Reader Mailbag routine that's brought us so much pleasure in the past. In the first installment, one of several alleged correspondents says he grew up going to church but, stuck as he was in the "very liberal, atheist Pacific Northwest," what chance did he have to avoid mega-porno-sin:

I had my first encounter with Marijuana in a church parking lot. My friends from youth group turned me on to pornography at the age of 11 (perhaps one of the worst decisions I ever made, but more on that later). These same friends taught me how to swear, catcalled the girls in our youth group, and gave me a pretty good compilation of dirty jokes (I confess, I still enjoy the jokes)...

Haw haw, not much harm in dirty jokes -- they mostly just reenforce stereotypes, which is godly, rather than get you hard, which is not!

...I’m the oldest child in my family and have always had deeply conservative views on life (again, contradictory to my lifestyle).

Brother, if America only had a dime for every time it heard that one. Things got worse for our correspondent:

From about 16 through to November-December 2016 time frame, I lived a life of pretty pure hedonism. I struggled with romantic relationships (I’ve had one successful, long-term one, but even that was clouded by the girl’s inability to commit–I’m unfortunately still pretty madly in love with her).

Her inability to cum what? Eventually our hero got religion, but there's a stumbling block:

I easily gave up cocaine, nicotine, binge drinking, and casual sex. But I cannot give up pornography.

Maybe if he hung in with casual sex, he wouldn't need the porn. Well, to each his own. There are other witnesses:

I confessed my addi[c]tion over and over again in the confessional but still got no relief. Then God entered the picture again in the form of another book: Be A Man by Father Larry Richards. A sermon from Fr. Larry is like a punch in the mouth.

I have to say, nine times out of ten a punch in the mouth will stop you beating off. Next:

Porn made me impotent.

Nice lede! But...

I have been married nearly 25 years, and for most of the first 20 years ours was a “dead bedroom.” Despite the fact we managed to have some kids we would go months in between intimacy. On at least one occasion we went a full year. Many people would have left the relationship but I determined I was going to stay for the sake of my kids, and I wasn’t going to cheat because that could lead to all kinds of complications (like divorce and not being able to see my kids).

But porn – porn was available to satiate the sex drive.

...I'm not sure you thought out what was making you impotent. I thought Dreher would be spent for a while after that, but damned if he didn't come back today with more tales of porn horror:

Our daughter was asked by a boy to provide oral sex for him at recess… in first grade.

Another great lede! If these guys get tired of working for Letters to Rodhouse they can make some real money in the clickbait farms.

...The 3rd, 4th and 5th grade students at the local elementary school were using their school district-confirmed google accounts (for google drive to send homework back and forth) to sign up for youtube and some of them were posting videos of them dancing naked for all the world to see with their google/district email displayed. Most of the parents and school employees were totally unaware this was going on! The overwhelming majority of parents are clueless to what their little darlings are doing.

I'm still trying to figure out what actually happened here. Are these 8-to-10-year-olds actually taking videos of themselves nude and posting them on YouTube with their contact information? Has this correspondent alerted the parents, or the police? If not, what's stopping him? Is he afraid they'll take them down?

This other guy, I have to admit, paints a compelling picture of his youthful porn encounters back in the days of the horse and buggy:

Later, when we migrated to the burbs, a full blown Playboy was somehow acquired (God knows how). It was placed in the woods, under a giant pile of illegally dumped concrete. EVERYONE knew where it lived. By everyone, I mean every boy in a 2 mile radius. Occasionally, someone would say, lets go to the rock. Whence we sallied forth as a group to flip a few (maybe 9-10 total) pages of a dirty (I mean actually dirty) magazine. Then, almost in a daze, the magazine was placed back in the rock, and we left.

And today these men are in the Order of DeMolay and pillars of their community -- but share a terrifying secret! (I would so have preferred their version of I Know What You Did Last Summer to the one they actually made.)

I write this Thursday night; will Dreher be able to get it up again Friday? Come on, Brother Rod -- third time's the charm!

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.

ROD DREHER ON THE GAY MENACE, WHICH MUST BE MET WITH ARMS. Oh, go ahead. You'll never guess why Rod Dreher keeps a gun in his house. Gay people! Someone wrote in the Washington Post about anti-gay-marriage people who were not chaw-drooling Cletuses; some readers strongly objected. Maggie Gallagher, as usual, says gays are the real bigots. Dreher says:

She's right about that. Trust me on that one. It's one reason I have a gun in the house. I've let a couple of you trusted readers -- same-sex marriage supporters who believe I'm very wrong on this issue, but who are civil about it -- know what I'm talking about.

I was hoping he'd tell us about the roving bands of sodomites who rattle a stick on his picket fence at night, but apparently he restricts this info to the Righteous Homos in his congregation. But he's an equal opportunity armorer:

It's why I support fully the intention of Celtic Dragon Critter, a transgender reader who believes people like me are badly mistaken on same-sex marriage, to maintain the means and the will to shoot anyone who crosses her threshold to harm her or her family. There are people on both sides of this issue so crazy with rage that they will stop at nothing to punish those they hate.

The spirit of madness and hatred now rising in this culture is prominently on the right of late, but not exclusively on the right.

Dreher's idea of gay violence is presumably this:

Mark Shea points to this video of a small group of peaceable Christians who had to be protected by a phalanx of San Francisco police as they walked through the gay Castro District in San Francisco. Otherwise, it's clear they would have been assaulted even worse than they were before the riot police arrived.

This is terrifying. This ought to be on the national news. If this were a Christian mob surrounding gay-rights campaigners, it certainly would be -- and should be, as no peaceful protester in this country should be subject to this threat. (And no, this wasn't a made- up thing: here's how a local SFO TV station covered it).

Watch this, and tell me these people [Update: by which I mean the enraged activist core, not all gays -- RD.] aren't going to come against churches full force once they have the civil rights laws on their side:

I don't advocate meeting mere offense with violence. But one of the ways we ordinary people get along is this: I don't take a group of people to a church picnic and make a show of telling the folks there, one way or another, that their lifestyle disgusts me. The Christians in question have a certain right to behave provocatively, as a drunk in a bar has a right to tell you your mama is ugly, but they dissemble when they say it's not a provocation.

To compare this to the constant threat some people face just by being perceived as gay is somewhere south of offensive.

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.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

People laugh about "yazz flute" but Bobbi Humphrey ain't no joke.

•   I'm releasing another edition of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down for you non-subscribing folks. In this one I imagine a meeting between Tom Perez and his party's major donor, Michael Bloomberg. As I've been saying for years, Bloomberg sucks. Here's me in 2007 when people were also talking about a Bloomberg presidential run:

When we imagine the archetypical Rich Prick, we generally think of vulgarian clowns like Donald Trump, but Bloomberg is a better example of that breed: he doesn't have to even stir himself to sneer. As we saw during the last Mayoral Debate, he effortlessly radiates contempt for anything that is not his will. When he gives press conferences, his manner is bland, because he knows there's nothing to get excited about: he is right, you are wrong, and he will prevail.

As Mayor he has blithely exercised his will, or his whim, on matters ranging from trans-fats to the razing of neighborhoods for private profit. And nearly everyone rolls over for him. All the major dailies endorsed him in his last Mayoral race. (He spent over $75 million on the campaign.)

No wonder he's interested in the Presidency. Experience has taught him that very little is beyond his grasp. So he will patiently go on accumulating power...

Fortunately a lot of people (including Elizabeth Warren, bless her) are pointing out his shortcomings now -- his erstwhile stop-and-friskiness and the transparent insincerity of his apologies for it, his blaming the 2008 financial crisis on black people, etc. He's clearly hoping his billions and free-spending thereof will do the trick like it did back in New York. I couldn't stop the guy back then, but maybe everyone's gotten a little more wised up in the interval.

•   Readers of this site will know I've long suspected authors of "reader email" to Rod Dreher (or as I like to call them, "Letters to Repenthouse") are pulling his chain, and now I suspect they're sending Sacha Baron Cohen in a variety of disguises to prank him. From his latest:

But I have to tell you about something deeply shocking I learned tonight in conversation with one of the conferees [at a Nashville conference]. There’s nothing funny about this at all. It’s the kind of thing that makes me want to write a book called Benedict Option II: Head For The Hills.

Gasp! What a come-on. Gather round, Jesus fish!

I spoke with a man who works with victims of human sex trafficking. This is not a world I have paid attention to. He was telling me that it is much, much worse than people imagine, because of the Internet. Online pornography, he said, is destroying the hearts and minds of so many young people. He told me about a 13 year old girl in his church who came to the pastor and asked innocently if it was worth it to give a boy a blow job in exchange for a meal at McDonalds. She was holding out for Applebees, and wondered if it she was overshooting.

One waits in vain for the rimshot. Apparently Rod is buying this. Emboldened, his interlocutor goes further:

He said that in his line of work, he hears from fertility doctors — not one fertility doctor, but several — that they are having to teach married couples how to have normal sex. Normal, as in penis-in-vagina sex — this, if they want to conceive. These young people have been so saturated in pornography, and have had their imaginations so thoroughly formed by it, that the idea of normal reproductive sex acts are bizarre to them.

“This one doctor told me that she has to prescribe only doing penis-in-vagina sex exclusively for six months, so they can learn to feel normal about it,” he said. He wasn’t joking. He said that the first time a fertility doc told him that, he thought it must be a one-off thing, but he’s heard it from fertility docs from around the country.

I am old and out of it in many, many ways, but I would bet folding money that young people can figure out how to fuck no matter what they see on the internet.

I almost feel sorry for Dreher. Sooner or later his credulousness is going to affect his career trajectory. Imagine him going to some classy conference where someone brings up the declines in teen pregnancy, and Dreher explaining this is because young'uns don't know that the pee-pee goes in the hoo-hoo because porno. Imagine the astonished stares as David Brooks whisks Dreher to a waiting limo!

2018: THE YEAR IN BULLSHIT, PART 1.

[See Part 2 and Part 3 as well.]

© 2014 Sean P. Anderson used under a Creative Commons license

10. The (Blessed) Silencing of Alex Jones. Remember that brief moment last summer when Alex Jones became the new John Peter Zenger because Facebook and YouTube "censored" him and all the top wingnuts nailed their colors to his escutcheon? You don't? Well, maybe that's because after a brief inital burst of caterwauling they all fucked off and left him to rot in his (still highly visible and lucrative) exile.

Here in December 2018, it's hard to imagine that conservatives were blubbering over Jones' removal from platforms that did not want him aboard. National Review's Theodore Kupfer did the old unintended-consequences thing: "Facebook can’t make Alex Jones go away; banning him might add to his support and further radicalize his fans." Others cried lefty censorship: "This is absolutely the first stage in a coordinated plan to deplatform everyone on the right," declared Instapundit Glenn Reynolds. All agreed Liberals were the Real Fascists.

Reynolds' prediction, alas, has not come true, and there are still rightwing nutcakes all over the damn place -- and while claiming they've been unpersoned or deplatformed has become a rite of passage for them (see Laura Loomer chaining herself to Twitter HQ), even bigtime conservatives have for the most part stopped playing along. You don't see many REMEMBER ALEX JONES memorials on the Right.

It's easy to see why: As it becomes increasingly clear, especially since the midterms, that relying on only the nuttiest Americans to lift them to victory is not a repeatable strategy, conservatives are not as eager as once they were to be represented by crackpots and carny clowns. Speaking of which: keep an eye out because their abandonment of Jones will probably serve as a model for their abandonment of the ever-less-popular Trump.

© 2018 Mark Dillman used under a Creative Commons license

9. OMG AOC! I know the "Fill In The Blank Derangement Syndrome" template has been going since the Dawn of the Clintons, but look: Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez is merely a freshman Congressmember from a safe seat in New York City, yet conservatives have gone ballistic over her. In fact they've been deranged since she beat the stand-pat Democratic incumbent for the nomination in July. Back then they were rattled that she was an unashamed Democratic Socialists of America member -- notwithstanding that a lot of other DSA candidates have been winning elections. (Which may be part of the reason for the syndrome -- a glimmer of awareness on the Right's part that Trump has made conservatism so toxic voters will run further to the left than Hillary Clinton ever dreamed of going.)

But even worse from a rightwing perspective, this socialist is popular: AOC is good on the stump and has fired up thousands of fans, which makes attacking her kind of a "this thing everyone likes is bad" proposition. Here's Virginia Kruter at The Daily Caller -- "YES, ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ ‘INSPIRED’ ME. NO, NOT IN THE WAY SHE THINKS... So, Rep.-elect Ocasio-Cortez, you did inspire me... You inspired me to fight the creep of socialism with everything I have. And you inspired me to raise my children to do the same." That's totally the kind of argument winners make.

Also, AOC is cute, Hispanic, *and* unafraid to clap back at dull-witted wingnuts, which attributes, taken together, probably ring at least a dozen psychosexual bells for conservatives. Did you see how she smacked a Washington Examiner facotum for his "creep shot" analysis of her walking down the halls of Congress in a dress? Imagine being a rightwing player accustomed to treating young women like chattel getting that kind of lip from a young Puertorriqueña with a House seat as thousands cheer.

Not only do liberals talk about how AOC drives conservatives crazy ("Why conservatives love to hate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez" -- Jane Coaston, Vox) --  so do conservatives ("Conservatives Keep Giving Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Exactly What She Wants" -- Jim Geraghty, National Review). It's like they figure there's nothing they can do about it except sluice off some of the clickbait.

My favorite in that genre is Kevin D. Williamson trying to turn it around with his traditional snotty patter -- "Ocasio-Cortez describes herself as a socialist," he quips, "a declaration mitigated somewhat by the fact that she doesn’t seem to know what the word 'socialist' means." There is only one thing worse than being witty, and that is not being witty. But even this notorious troll seems to sense it isn't working and finally goes full corncob, telling his fellow conservatives "if they were smarter, they’d be grateful [that]... this callow dilettante is the best the other side has to offer." That should be some comfort as she continues to kick their sorry asses.

8. The Kavanaugh hearings and the end of the Roe repeal boom. When SCOTUS "swing vote" Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement in July, wingnuts cheered the imminent end of the right to abortion. "The central mandate for the man or woman who will take his seat, and for all the justices," Glory-Hallelujah'd the Washington Examiner, under the unambiguous headline "Repeal Roe v. Wade," "is to wipe away a disgrace that ranks alongside Dred Scott, and overtun [sic] Roe and Casey.”

As Trump replacement Brett Kavanaugh was exposed as a groper and a goon (and, I was shocked to learn, a buddy-pal of longtime alicublog figure of fun Mark Judge), we heard more talk about all the women Kavanaugh didn't rape, and about how it was actually someone else disguised as Kavanaugh who tried to rape that lady, and less about how he was going to make rape victims bear their rape-babies. Theocons like Ross Douthat have kept the faith, but other conservatives have been tucking their hands in their pockets, whistling, and walking away -- and since Kavanaugh appeared to help Planned Parenthood in a recent SCOTUS decision, we're even seeing headlines like "Brett Kavanaugh is not the pro-life savior you're looking for" at the Washington Examiner.

It was fun to dream of damning women to unwanted children in the fall of 2018 -- but with elections and polls showing Republicans becoming even more unpopular, the idea of a sexual batterer repealing Roe v. Wade is suddenly less attractive to them. We don't know what the asshole will do in the clutch, but we do know he's not committed to anything so much as his career -- and probably the goodwill of the assholes who probably let him know they made him and can break him. So in one sense, at least, the Kavanaugh hearings may have done some good.

7. The Rod Dreher "Reader" "Mailbag." This is not a matter of national interest, but of my own desires (which are... unconventional), so give the blogger some: There's so much to enjoy about Benedict Option author/hyper-holy-roller Rod Dreher -- his racism, his gay panic, his love of fascist dictators. But my favorite Dreherism is his use of "mail" from "readers" to back up his points. These missives are often from a Democrat who now hates Democrats, a liberal who now hates liberals, or a Wiccan who now hates Wicca -- all of whom express themselves very clearly in a similar tone of voice.

One of 2018's great pieces of "reader" "mail" was the one in which the proud daughter of a "Scots-Irish 'clan'" laments that her family is being "torn apart" by an "LGBT bully" -- that is, a gay cousin "who publicly shames family members on Facebook." (Though this woman calls the gay cousin a "terrorist" she didn't say how or why his Facebook posts do so much damage. My guess -- assuming, for the sake of argument, that these people exist -- is that he described some family sleepovers.)

Another is from a "reader" who reports the nice young fellow down at the store was transferred to a distant location as punishment because he said he'd be uncomfortable using "transgender pronouns." I tell ya, it's a gulag out there ("there are some very obvious common threads between what happened in the early Soviet days and what we see today") for folks who want he-shes to know their place!

But here's my 2018 favorite:

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... 

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)...

Soon Brother Rod will notice those Beto-Bernie fights that currently inflame the internet and propose the Virgin Ben as a unity candidate. You read it here first!

Stay tuned for Part 2 and Part 3 over the next few days.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about rightbloggers' 9/11 and how it perked up when Hillary Clinton got sick. The revival of the wingnut trope that Hillary is too infirm to serve as President was almost as funny/sad as their pivot, once it was revealed that Clinton had pneumonia, to outrage that she had briefly concealed a temporary illness and thus made them all look like idiots. National Review's Rich Lowry, who earlier in the day had disputed Clinton's claims of dehydration ("It isn’t a particularly hot day in New York City today; in fact, it is gorgeous"), upon being informed of her illness sputtered:

Here’s hoping she gets well soon, but...

Ugh, that quick "but" says so much, doesn't it?

...1) not for the first time, a Clinton has made his or her supporters look silly -- they spent a lot of time and energy pooh-poohing the health concerns...

Sure, it was Hillary's people who looked silly.

...2) she was diagnosed on Friday -- when did she plan on letting everyone else know?

I wouldn't be surprised if she had loose stools sometime during her illness. Would Lowry like updates when these occur? Maybe they can send him samples. The rest of the brethren are doing what they can with it; the New York Post says her diagnosis "settles nothing" because OKAY BOYS BREAK OUT THE ALEX JONES SHIT AGAIN: "We hadn’t made much of Clinton’s long coughing fit last week, but that now seems more disturbing, too..."

I guess these days, fed as they have been on a diet of crap pseudo-news for decades, wingnuts are sufficiently addicted to conspiracy theories that they'll read something like that and go, "It's just like the black helicopters -- my friends told me they weren't real but then I saw that Transformers movie..." But are there enough of them to win a national election?

UPDATE. Rod Dreher brings the porch-biddy perspective: "A new angle. That poor woman." (Ha ha, oh please.) "Look at her, gone stiff. What on earth is wrong with her? Does pneumonia do that?" Earlier Dreher published one of his famous reader letters, in this case purportedly from a doctor:

It is with great consternation that I have seen and read physician evaluations of Mrs. Clinton in the news media. You should never make diagnoses like that without having the patient right in front of you...

All that being said – I am deeply concerned about this video.

It's like those "I never believed Reagan coins would cure my cancer until today" stories popular in wingnut media. Was Rod conned, or is he the con artist? Why not both?

UPDATE 2. That Dr. Vinnie Boombatz gets around! Like Dreher, Scott Johnson of Power Line also has an anonymous alleged doctor -- a "prominent internist" who, based on his study of YouTube videos, diagnoses possible "aspiration pneumonia," which is "commonly seen in neurological conditions like strokes and Parkinson’s disease" -- both, as it happens, popular wingnut conspiracy theories. Dr. Boombatz ends by saying "someone should demand full and immediate disclosure of her medical records... Every voter should know what’s at stake," which is a curiously stark political pitch -- but I suspect Dr. Boombatz had some assistance from his scribe.

STILL NOT GETTING IT.

Rod Dreher does another one of those "we must take the Kultur!" posts.

Still, it’s a dead end—creatively, philosophically, and politically—for conservatives to mimic left-wing storytellers. 

For one thing, conservatives today lack the artistic skill to tell stories as well as the left does. More philosophically, the business of a conservatism with integrity is not to impose an idealistic ideological narrative on reality but rather to try to see the world as it is and respond to its challenges within the limits of what we know about human nature.

It would seem from this that Dreher still thinks liberals have some kind of mysterious formula, transmitted to them by Satan, for turning their nefarious ideas into a magic weapon called Art that moves the masses.

Conservatism has within it the capacity to answer these challenges, but not if conservatives cling to stories that have lost their salience. We don’t need stories that offer prepackaged ideological answers to questions few people are asking.

Okay, now we're getting somewhere...

We need stories like the one told in the comments section of my blog on the American Conservative website by a Texas reader.

Oh shit. I'll spare you, but it's about how the guy's town was ruined by Big Gummint. But some of the policies that doomed the place were "authored by the New Dealers, others by Reaganites" -- so see, ambiguity! That's artistic, right? Throw in some jokes and we have a hit.

Another guy "hopes to start a literary movement dedicated to telling the stories of working-class people of the Rust Belt":

“Someone who is teaching can be the Allen Tate or John Crowe Ransom of this movement. Someone who’s working a factory floor can be the Wendell Berry. I’m not comparing myself to these guys, but someone needs to write about these things in a sustained way.”

Maybe he can place an ad in the New York Review of Books to hire someone to actually write the stuff.

This reminds me of Liberty Island, the Ben Shapiro conservative arts site that has a manifesto but no content anyone would want to read. These people want culture as a means; the end is to effect the horrible political ideas they spend 99 percent of their time talking about. And as to stories, what Dreher won't admit is that they've had those all along: The Welfare Queen, The Dirty Hippie, The Child-Corrupting Homo, The Tax-and-Spend Liberal, et alia. But these stories were not created to reveal the human condition -- they were created to gull rubes into hate-voting for their candidates.

If conservatives don't have the kind of stories that move people the way a great song or play does, it's not because liberals took over the arts; it's because they don't really want them.