WHO'S AN ASSHOLE?

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

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

The obvious answer is “political correctness"...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AND NOW FOR THE LIBERTARIAN PERSPECTIVE ON TRUMP...

...Robby Soave of Reason says you liberals -- 'scuse me, you "smug, entitled, elitist, privileged leftists jumping down the throats of ordinary folks who aren't up-to-date on the latest requirements of progressive society" -- made Trump president with your political correctness. The proof is that "I have warned that a lot of people, both on campus and off it, were furious about political-correctness-run-amok." I mean, there are no stats, but Soave knows Milo Yiannopoulos and he's totally against it.

You might be wondering what Soave means by political correctness. Here:

Example: A lot of people think there are only two genders—boy and girl. Maybe they're wrong. Maybe they should change that view. Maybe it's insensitive to the trans community. Maybe it even flies in the face of modern social psychology. But people think it. Political correctness is the social force that holds them in contempt for that, or punishes them outright.

No link to support "punishes them outright," so I guess he means (in addition to the usual dirty looks and lack of universal approval that libertarians always consider P.C. oppression)  in some places they may have to use a public restroom that's also used by members of the opposite sex. Or maybe if they go to certain colleges they might get made to apologize for saying "trannies." No wonder  these poor people snapped.

If you're a leftist reading this, you probably think that's stupid. You probably can't understand why someone would get so bent out of shape about being told their words are hurtful. You probably think it's not a big deal and these people need to get over themselves. Who's the delicate snowflake now, huh? you're probably thinking.

Boy, it's like he's reading my mind.

I'm telling you: your failure to acknowledge this miscalculation and adjust your approach has delivered the country to Trump.

It's like those other privileged leftists back in the 50s -- they wanted their friends to use the same drinking fountain as they did and hey, Robby gets that, but if you'd just recalculated you'd never have had  Orval Faubus and he's all your fault.

P.C. B.S.

I keep hearing from conservatives that political correctness is ruining everything. For example, at National Review, which runs stories about PC at about the rate The Federalist runs stories about Caitlin Jenner, Ian Tuttle extrapolates from an advice column at a site you never heard of that the peecee people "would do much to crack down on the number of Fitzgeralds or Faulkners or Cormac McCarthys" and supplant their brilliance with "the Afro-Cuban lesbian experience," har har; also,

No doubt over the next several years book clubs across America will pore over many a bestseller fitted to Gabbert’s advice, in the process sacrificing better authors — e.g., Homer, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton.

If Ian Tuttle knows where the next Shakespeare is, he should tell his editor, so they can use him to replace Kevin D. Williamson, Dennis Prager, or one of National Review's many other shitty writers. (For perspective: previously Tuttle told his readers "If you’re looking for a genuinely open-minded academic experience, Brooklyn College may not be the place for you" because the school refused to take money from the Koch brothers.)

Anyway, a lot of prominent liberals (including Amanda Marcotte, conservatives' favorite feminist voodoo doll) are saying Laura Kipnis got a bad rap from hypersensitive apparatchiks-in-training at Northwestern, and good for them (the liberals, not the apparatchiks). The other day Edward Schlosser had a long piece at Vox, of all places, complaining about student noodges. You'd think that if PC were as much of a menace as it's been portrayed, conservatives would be happy to at last have bipartisan support in fighting it. Well, here's James Taranto at The Wall Street Journal:

As we read the Schlosser piece, we felt more Schadenfreude than sympathy, and we wondered if that reflected poorly on us. (Spoiler: Nah.)

Instead Taranto complains that liberals like Schlosser are only upset because they're getting it in the neck, and are fundamentally incapable of understanding the pain of censored "outgroup" conservative academics like Glenn Reynolds, Ann Althouse, Harvey Mansfield, William A. Jacobson, et alia. Taranto explains:

Social systems have existed—think of the American South under slavery and Jim Crow—in which a dominant ingroup governed itself in accord with liberal principles while subjecting the outgroup to a combination of oppressive rules and often-cruel whims.

Time for a Poor Wingnuts' Campaign! Back at National Review Charles C.W. Cooke says

Of course Jonathan Chait is turning against political correctness and campus self-indulgence. Of course Vox’s editor, Ezra Klein, is now peddling lefty academics who are willing to stand up to the mob. Of course the good denizens of Jezebel are beginning to wonder aloud whether a feminism that eats the likes of Laura Kipnis is useful. If neo-McCarthyism “becomes a salient part of liberal politics,” Schlosser writes in his conclusion, then “liberals are going to suffer tremendous electoral defeat.” The American Left has started to rebel at the exact moment that its own interests are being hurt? Naturally. This isn’t about standards; it’s about power.

Cooke's essay is called "Is the Tide Turning against PC?" but it's not clear that he wants it turned if it means linking arms with those people. So I guess PC must not be such a big deal after all.

Sympathetic as I am toward Kipnis, I never thought so myself -- if some dumbasses want to play thought policeman in select programs at elite colleges, I figure, let them waste their parents' money and God help them when they graduate. And let those other dumbasses turn their tattered propaganda equity now this way, now that, trying to catch the wind. (Good luck explaining the menace of "social justice warriors" to downsized factory workers!) We who have free souls, it touches us not.

UPDATE. Comments are all glorious, but special thanks to commenter atheist for invoking La Rochefoucauld: "Our hatred of favorites is but a love of favor, and our scorn of those who enjoy it is only a balm to our vexation at being deprived thereof." Conservatives had their way exclusively for several centuries before the Enlightenment, and have been sore ever since they lost the franchise.

UPDATE 2. What causes political correctness on campus? Joseph Bottum at the Weekly Standard:

It’s possible to ascribe the situation to the presidential elections of 2008 and 2012.

Ain't even kidding.

The guidelines for Title IX issued by the Obama administration have shifted power to the outraged, and everyone seems to know it.

Everybody Joseph Bottum talks to at the Club, anyway. But wait, Bottum allows that the roots of PC do go deeper:

The reaction to Bill Clinton’s sex scandals, leading to his impeachment in 1998, may have been the first hint of a new choosing of sides, followed by an abiding anger over the outcome of Bush v. Gore in 2000. But the fate of the Democrats is not quite the same thing as the fate of radicalism, and to find the real springs of what is now washing over the nation’s schools, you have to go back, I think, to the fall of the Iron Curtain, 26 years ago.

Everything Democrat causes everything bad, and the same goes for the Soviet Union! In fact the title of Bottum's column is "I Still Blame the Communists." I expect if you swapped out "political correctness" for "riots in Baltimore," "Ebola," "potrzebie," etc., it wouldn't have to be changed much. Sometimes I think they work from Mad Libs.

KIDS TODAY ARE INTO CASUAL SEX, SNAPCHAT, AND THE GOLD STANDARD.

Much as I'm enjoying the lamentation of the wingnuts over Trumpism, let's not forget there's nothing in Rightwing World that can't be made worse by libertarians. In a Reason article called "How Political Correctness Caused College Students to Cheer for Trump," Robby Soave seeks to tell us how Il Douche's rise may be good for the Makers Up Takers Down Cult. To this end, he claims that "at a recent Rutgers University event, throngs of students erupted into cheers of 'Trump! Trump! Trump!'" and follows with several grafs about how political correctness is yuck and The Youngs are getting sick of it I bet I bet. But eventually Soave is forced to provide the context for the chanting:

To be clear, this was a pre-sorted group of non-liberals: conservative and libertarian students affiliated with the campus's Young Americans for Liberty chapter. The occasion was a visit from Breitbart's [Milo] Yiannopoulos, a social media celebrity associated with the GamerGate and online anti-feminist movements.

The YAL and men's rights activism! Now there's a groundswell. I hear the kids now eschew the beach at Spring Break, and congregate instead at Sharon, Connecticut.

The crowd at Rutgers -- and at Yiannopolos's other appearances -- certainly suggests that some students are sick to death of the liberal orthodoxies being drilled into them during every waking moment of their time in school. What if millions of Americans feel the same way?... 

Matthew Boyer, a Rutgers student, leader of its YAL chapter, and organizer of the event, told Reason that the people chanting "Trump," were "individuals who have been railing against political correctness" and identify with "Trump's recent actions as part of the anti-PC movement."

Why, we might be on the verge of another... LIBERTARIAN MOMENT! [Crowd breaks into Lambada, the forbidden dance.] Thereafter it's all bitching about safe spaces and #FreeStacy, but no evidence that young people are going libertarian -- indeed, such evidence as we have suggests they're headed the other way. Here's Soave's closer:

One person who is definitely having a good time is Yiannopoulos. He doesn't mind that protesters scream at him wherever he goes—in fact, he welcomes it. He enjoys it. 

"The whole thing was pandemonium," Yiannopoulos told me, recalling the Rutgers event. "But a wonderful spectacle." 

Pandemonium, but a wonderful spectacle. Would anyone deny that the same could be said of the 2016 GOP presidential race? 

You know who to thank for that.

The only meaning I can discern from this (aside from "please keep paying me, Nick") is that chaos is good for the movement -- maybe in the confusion you can slip a pamphlet into someone's pocket, or grab a tit.

UPDATE. Comments are already fun! whetstone, using the old template: "I used to be a centrist, but ever since I had to read a bell hooks essay in freshman comp, I want to ban Muslims from entering the country."

Also worth your while is the link to In These Times' story on the Young Americans for Liberty -- here's one especially ripe passage:

The [YAL] convention featured a number of sessions devoted to growing the YAL movement on college campuses. But it included others focused on attracting the roughly 300 attendees to seek employment in one of the many different arms of the conservative movement, like the series of sessions on Friday afternoon devoted to “A Career of Liberty.” The Campaign for Liberty sponsored a panel on “Working on the Hill,” the Institute for Humane Studies sponsored a panel on “Becoming a Professor,” and the Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation and State Policy Network all organized a panel on “Working for a Think-Tank.” 

At that last session, panelists offered advice on how to market oneself to think-tanks and discussed the benefits of their respective organizations.

What I'm wondering is, when it's time to intern for Justin Amash how do they get these kids out of their Skinner boxes?

JONAH GOLDBERG'S LOVE GOSPEL.

Ladies: Grateful to be considered something more than an object, but nostalgic for old-fashioned romance?  Jonah Goldberg has good news: Conservatives may be willing to treat you nicer. In fact, look at the sacrifice he's prepared to make:

Political correctness can actually be seen as an example of Hayekian spontaneous order.

The guy who wrote Liberal Fascism is saying nice things about P.C.!  The need to peel some unmarried-female votes from the Democrats has been judged an all-hands-on-deck situation at Camp Conservative, I guess, and Goldberg must move with the times. But he can still keep his Hayek! Also he can portray himself as a thought-leader:

I wish more conservatives recognized that at least some of what passes for political correctness is an attempt to create new manners and mores for the places in life where the old ones no longer work too well...

Identity politics is only part of the story, and not even the most important part. Medical, technological, and economic changes are almost surely far more important than changing demographics alone...

The New Conservatives are watching their pressure gauges and tracking the New Mores. Apparently these studies are desperately needed (and possibly eligible for a grant!), because the New Conservatives are locked in a Mores Race with the liberals to see who's got the best political correctness, and Goldberg wants potentially donors to know that the libs' sexual Sputnik is still in orbit:

Democrats recognize this, which is why they’ve cynically exploited changes in family structure, female labor participation, and reproductive technology and declared that Republicans have declared war on women.

This is like saying "Democrats cynically exploited growing tolerance of minority groups to make us look like bigots."  There's a step missing there, Goldberg, can you guess what it is?

Progressives are steadily dismantling the beautiful cathedrals of traditional manners and customs, arguing that they’re too Baroque, too antiquated. They use the sledgehammer of liberation rhetoric to destroy the old edifices, but their fidelity to liberty is purely rhetorical. In place of the old cathedrals they build supposedly functional, modern, and utilitarian codes of conduct. But these Brutalist codes are not only unlovely, they are often more prudish than traditional approaches...

It's like he knows us, right? To capture chick votes we smashed the cathedrals of courtly love! Which was awkward, you know, because all those apses and semitransepts are so vaginal, but it was worth it to get rid of that meddling Christ. Then we put up a Government Fucking Center. A bit sterile, but it does the job, especially after you put down the hemp mats.

Goldberg thinks he can do better:

What I would like to see from conservatives is recognition that some of the cathedrals are outdated. But instead of arguing that they should be razed and replaced with Jacobin Temples of Reason with rites and rituals grounded in abstraction, why not argue for some long overdue updating and retrofitting? I guarantee you more women prefer a modified version of the traditional process of wooing, courting, and dating before sex than the “modern” schizophrenic system of getting drunk enough for a same-day hook up but not so inebriated to forget to get a signature on the consent form. Traditional notions of romance and respect are far better tools than the mumbo-jumbo campus feminists have to offer. The problem is that the mumbo-jumbo feminists are fighting largely uncontested.

I look forward to seeing this conservative modified version of the traditional process of wooing, courting, and dating before sex. "I'm here to read you some pastorals." "OK [continues texting]." Later: "I swear by my life and my love of it I won't cum in your mouth."

Just not being a dick was never an option, I suppose.

HOW BULLSHIT WORKS, PART 7,833,929.

Remember last month when, at Reason (the flagship of the Eternal Libertarian Moment), Robby Soave told us "Political Correctness Caused College Students to Cheer for Trump," and then --way far down in the article, where only the hardiest spelunkers would find it -- revealed that the cheering kids were not ordinary collegians gone spontaneous Trumper but "conservative and libertarian students affiliated with the campus's Young Americans for Liberty chapter" attending a rally for men's rights nut Milo Yiannopoulos?

Yesterday Soave did an easy layup on the latest stupid campus PC thing, Trump-chalked-on-the-sidewalk at Emory U*, with the subhed "It's enough to make you root for Trump. Well, almost." He closed with this:

It's enough to make you want to grab a piece of chalk and scrawl "Trump 2016" on an Emory sidewalk, huh? No wonder so many non-liberal students are cheering for Trump—not because they like him, but because he represents glorious resistance to the noxious political correctness and censorship that has come to define the modern college experience.

The "so many non-liberal students are cheering for Trump" line is linked to Soave's "Political Correctness Caused College Students to Cheer for Trump" story.

You may ask: Why's Soave acting as if young MRAs cheering for Trump is a meaningful anomaly? I would expect the little shits to like Il Douche -- he's everything they want to be when they grow up. Come to think of it, why would anyone find it strange that a libertarian like Soave could "root... well, almost"  for Trump? As I've said before, libertarians are just conservatives with social anxieties. If Soave decided not to eat his Gary Johnson spinach, and instead voted for Trump just to stick it to those SJW bitches, who'd be shocked? Well, Ole Perfesser Instapundit would at least pretend to be, for The Cause:

Congratulations, Emory Screaming Campus Garbage Babies. If you can make Reason writers think about voting for Trump, you’ll probably swing the election for him.

alicublog commenters mostly seem to think Trump will win the GOP nomination (I'm still bearish) and that most of the conservative #NeverTrump types will run to kiss his ass when he does. I don't know about that, but I expect Soave's fellow libertarians would quickly find the silver lining. After all, none of the regular candidates are going to give them the policies they claim to want, but Trump at least will be an asshole to women and minorities, and I'm sure for a lot of these guys that's at least as important.

UPDATE. Comments are glorious. Among the best, from Ted the slacker: "You'd think if The Donald was such a student favorite, there'd be a 'Trump University students for Trump' movement. I wonder why there isn't."

Also, whetstone asks, "There's been endless analysis of what Trump's coalition is, but what if it is: assholes? Can we get some social scientists on this?" I always assumed so, and that it's not much discussed because the overlap with Republicans is nearly total.

Plus, many commenters wonder how I think Trump can be stopped. Convention skullduggery, of course! Though I wouldn't put assassination past them.

*UPDATE 2, 3/28: I should have known that Emory story was bullshit. I wonder whether Reason will correct... aw, who am I kidding.

YOU'RE INVISIBLE NOW, YOU GOT NO SECRETS TO CONCEAL.

I see Milo Yiannopoulos' friends have turned on him. Just kidding -- they were never his friends; just a bunch of conservatives and libertarians who took him up because, one, he hated things they also hated (liberals, women, the transgendered, et alia); two, he celebrated things they also celebrated, primarily the vicious, spiteful treatment of anyone weaker than themselves; and three, because he was ostentatiously gay -- indeed an old-fashioned caricature of homosexuality straight out of the Liberace playbook -- and allowed himself to be associated with them, which gave conservatives and libertarians two things they thought would advantage them in the dreary Culture Wars they're always pursuing: glamour and victim status.

Looking through my few writings about him, I find some tellings details. When Harry Potter actress Emma Watson stood up for feminism at the United Nations, a bunch of wingnuts laced into her, and Yiannopoulos was right in there with his Breitbart essay, "THE UN'S RISIBLE #HEFORSHE CAMPAIGN: POINTLESS SELF-FLAGELLATION FOR SEX-STARVED BETA MALES":

Emma Watson, the UN’s chosen cheerleader, who of course takes radical steps to avoid conforming to male ideas of female beauty, as the picture above illustrates, gave a speech to launch this otiose initiative while wearing perhaps the most expensive, figure-hugging overcoat I think I have ever seen. Is this the sort of person from whom we now take lectures on the sexualisation of women’s bodies?

I hate to be crude, but is it possible the Harry Potter star wears those ten-thousand dollar outfits, with jackets cut perfectly to accentuate every curve of her body, her hair snipped and tousled by the most exclusive stylists in the world, because she in fact really rather likes, and financially profits from, the idea of men waving their wands at her?

She wore nice clothes; she was asking for it. We hear this kind of sick glurge from wingnuts all the time, and even people who never heard of Freud or Germaine Greer know what brackish swamps of sexual frustration it comes from. But when Milo did it, you couldn't just say it was because he wanted to hate-fuck little Hermione, and conservatives loved having him for cover. Here was a he-man woman-hater with a gay pass!

And that went double for Gamergate, that festival of rape and death threats by suckling Pepes. Yiannopoulos was all the way up in that with essays like "FEMINIST BULLIES TEARING THE VIDEO GAME INDUSTRY APART." Once again he could say the things straight choads were embarrassed, or vaguely felt they were supposed to be embarrassed, to say: "These women purposefully court – and then exploit – boisterous, unpleasant reactions from astonished male gamers and use them to attract attention to themselves..." You heard Milo -- she was leading us on! "Let’s be honest. We’re all used to feeling a niggling suspicion that 'death threats' sent to female agitators aren’t all they’re cracked up to be." Bitch lied, she set us up! Listen to our sassy gay friend!

It makes perfect sense that Yiannopoulos became a patron saint of libertarians like Robby Soave of Reason, who lovingly described how Milo mao-maoed the liberal fascists. "No, Yiannopoulos isn't disparaging gays (though he wouldn't care if they were upset)," Soave wrote: "he is gay himself, a fact to which he makes frequent (and X-rated) references." Boo-ya, libtards, who's got the sassy gay friend now! And Yiannopoulos's spectacular public appearances -- crowded as they were with opportunistic reporters, excited neo-Nazis, and black bloc protesters -- to Soave suggested "that some students are sick to death of the liberal orthodoxies being drilled into them during every waking moment of their time in school. What if millions of Americans feel the same way?"

As you may have guessed, that was where Soave connected Yiannopoulos with Trump --  because they were both against Political Correctness, which Soave found refreshing and perhaps redemptive. "Trump's backers despise the political correctness of liberal elites," he said. ."..at least with Trump, they can enjoy the show and collect some small measure of vengeance against their PC overlords."

Well, Trump did win, and so did Milo, for a while. But Trump has an advantage over Milo: that of actual power. Both men get over with outrageous shtick -- they're  contrarians, provocateurs! Their backers despise the political correctness of liberal elites, it says here!  And when they go too far, usually they just have to say you didn't hear them right, and they can go on their merry way, confident their followers will blame whatever outrage they've caused on Fake News.

Milo tried to do that with his pedo-tapes (in "a note for idiots" -- ha, that Milo!) -- but found that he was suddenly no longer the Right's sassy gay friend. Not because he had sex with children himself -- there's no evidence he did; interestingly, it seems he was the one exploited as a child --  but because, from the conservatives' perspective, he did something worse: He embarrassed them. It was fine when he was whooping up those wanton cruelties and bigotries a normal American can get away with. But pedophilia is a Hard Limit, at least socially.

Conservatives could have done a love-the-sinner, hate-the-sin thing, but that would have required charity, and bitter experience has taught us all that in America this is not a Christian precept.  They could have said that though Yiannopoulos had put himself beyond the pale, his principles were still sound, and they could put aside his failings the way intellectuals put aside the anti-Semitism of Mencken or the racism of Larkin, and cleave instead to his aesthetic legacy; but when his book deal and CPAC spot evaporated, it became obvious that there was nothing like a principle or an aesthetic legacy at all left to defend -- just a savage clown show that no one wanted to see anymore. (Even Soave is edging away from him. Did I say "even"? Ha, I meant "of course.")

Remember this if you remember nothing else about what happened, for Milo sure knows it: even if they let you into their clubhouse, these people are not your friends.

AND IF YOU LISTEN CLOSELY, YOU'LL FIND HE HAS A SLIGHT LISP.

Jonah Goldberg explains that Donald Trump isn't the "politically correct" he-man he purports to be:

So first let me say, as I said to the caller, that I agree that political correctness is a huge problem, one I’ve written about many times (often punctuated with many un-PC jokes). 

One can imagine. ("So black not even The Man can keep it down!")

Second, as I also said to him, maybe I’m not the one who is befuddled. Perchance Trump fans are the ones who are confused, while I see the man more clearly... 

It is a lie that Donald Trump stands athwart political correctness, yelling Stop. For example, you may recall that Donald Trump and I got into a Twitter fight a few months back. At one point I wrote that he was “relentlessly tweeting like a 14-year-old girl.” 

How did Trump respond? If you guessed with Churchillian statesmanship, you guessed wrong. If you guessed with anti-PC fearlessness, you guessed wrong again. 

Instead, he played the political-correctness card. He said my tweet was a “horrible insult to women. Resign now or later!”  

I still love the “or later."

He followed up with more demands that I lose my job because of my insult to women.

In our debased era, portents of societal decay are all around us, like confetti at a Rip Taylor show. But this is a doozy: The author of a book about how liberals are fascists telling his Donald Trump fans that they should abandon their new idol because he played the war-on-women card like a PC sissy. Yeah, that'll move the needle. Doesn't Goldberg realize that none of Trump's followers, dumb as they may be, are so very dumb that they would take that "insult to women" stuff seriously? They recognize it for what it is, a mean joke -- because among guys like them, what else could a profession of sensitivity toward women possibly be?

If this is how Goldberg expects to keep the punters in the National Review tent, things must be worse than I thought. Perhaps it's time to drop the prices on those NR cruises, and add more proletarian on-board entertainments, like Goldberg on a dunking stool.

THIS LEFT-WING POLITICAL CORRECTNESS IS GETTING OUT OF HAND.

Following last week's rush of enraged conservative misdirection after Sacha Baron Cohen made a bunch of them look stupid, I thought wingnuts would lay off awhile -- how much mileage can there be in attacking a popular comedian for outwitting you? -- but here's Nancy French at National Review with a new angle: "Sacha Baron Cohen’s Sexual Harassment, in the Me Too Era." Now what, I wondered when I saw that headline,  could she mean?

So I read down through French's introductory huffing and puffing ("Apparently calling sexual harassment 'satire' not only gets you a free pass, it sometimes gets you famous") till I got here:

It’s time for [Cohen] to deal honestly with the filmed sexual harassment of Texas congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul during a 2008 interview. If you didn’t see this scene in his Bruno movie, I can assure you it was hard to watch.

Blink. Blink.

She means this:

French didn't embed the YouTube clip -- not because it's "hard to watch," I'll wager, but because a lot of her readers would play it and laugh, as audiences did when the movie was in theaters, especially when Paul runs out of the room screaming "He's a queer!"

French indignantly compares Cohen to "Matt Lauer, Harvey Weinstein, [and] Kevin Spacey."
Part of me hopes Ron Paul will go along with this -- that he'll call out Cohen as a predator, become a victim advocate and start doing #MeToo tweets rather than his, ah, traditional material. As it stands, it'll be interesting how many conservatives who normally moan about political correctness run amok will pretend to buy this nonsense.

UPDATE. Several commenters remind me that Nancy French was the as-told-to author of a Bristol Palin book; since, as my Voice column notes, Sarah Palin was one of Cohen's more recent targets, I assume French's bad-faith attack is a courtesy vendetta on behalf of, or perhaps part of her ongoing service to, La Famiglia.

One could fill several volumes with examples of conservatives pretending to accept liberal moral paradigms, either as trolling or, as French does here, with a straight face. Here's Toby Young, a disintegrated remnant of the Tory literary tradition, doing the former:

Also you libs love Eloise so much, well she's rich 'cause she lives at the Plaza durr hurr! Young's sally is the rhetorical equivalent of flaming poo left on a doorstep; I suspect French actually hopes to rally troops of pseudo-activists, though so far she's just got the dopes at Free Republic ("Sacha will be yucking it up right until the moment one of his victims clubs him like a baby Harp seal"). 

This seems to be more rightwing Alinskyism; as I showed years ago, conservatives claim liberals regularly use Alinsky's Rules for Radicals as a playbook, yet most liberals have never heard of the guy, while it's usually conservatives who get caught calling the plays. 

HILLBILLY SNOWFLAKES.

Rod Dreher, who thinks a professor saying "Fuck you, asshole" to an anti-gay colleague is "Leninist and Stalinist," also thinks some effete writer-fella portraying Mike Pence as a rube in The New Yorker is a good reason to vote for Trump:

Holy J.D. Vance, Batman. They really don’t get it, do they? Their contempt. They really do believe they’re punching up, when in fact they’re punching down.

If Trump wins this election, the only comfort I will take from the victory is knowing that Douglas McGrath and the [New Yorker] editors who find that snotty condescension towards middle Americans funny will be wailing and gnashing their teeth.

Have I got news for Dreher! "Li'l Abner," "Snuffy Smith," Them Hillbillies Are Mountain Williams Now, The Beverly Hillbillies -- it's been going on for decades! And some hillbilly jokes have even grosser punchlines, too ("Get off'n me, diddy, yer bustin' mah cigarettes!"). It's a holocaust, culture-war wise.

One thing I always thought about country folk, though, was that they were tough, and that they gave us city slickers as good as they got in the humor department. But that was before such as Dreher became their spokes-snowflakes. (On second thought, let's not blame the honest Tobies of the hinterlands for Dreher's conniption fits -- I'm sure most of them have never heard of Dreher, which is just as it should be; much of the time I wish I'd never heard of him either.)

UPDATE. Speaking of snowflakes, wingnut blowhard and Congressional sore loser Allen West was slated to speak at St. Louis University and, as part of his pre-show publicity, told his followers "Folks, I’ve just been CENSORED" because his operatives "were not allowed to use the words 'radical Islam' on any advertisements for the event." And isn't that what John Peter Zenger fought for -- the right to control collateral materials for his upcoming speaking engagements at a private college? West further raved:

I along with the [Young America's Foundation] activists will not back down from this challenge. And if this is just a case of ill-conceived political correctness, we’ll rectify that. But, if this is a case of the influence of stealth jihad radical Islamic campus organizations such as the Muslim Student Association, an affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood, then you will be exposed. And I recommend to the President of St. Louis University, you do not want it known that a radical Islamic organization is dictating speakers on your campus — that is not the type of PR you really want.

To recap: Because his hosts won't have "radical Islam" on the flyers for his speech, West accused its Muslim student association of "jihad" and threatened to denounce SLU as enablers thereof. In West's world of perpetual grievance that's what fills seats -- and also empties them, it would seem, because when it came time for West to speak a huge segment of the audience walked out.

Try to imagine how someone with an ounce of wit or class would have responded to that; a humble "well-played" is the least you might expect. But this sputtering I'm not the snowflake, you're the snowflake! response at Right Wing News is typical:

The students were members of the SLU Rainbow Alliance and the Muslim Student’s Association. Now let’s remember these are the Lefty folks who preach tolerance of other perspectives to all of us. And now look at them acting like immature children plugging their delicate ears with their sticky little fingers so they don’t have to hear the horrifying fact that not everyone, gasp, agrees with them! Good thing they left the venue. They probably had to be checked into the children’s program and go do some crafts and drink apple juice.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: The true definition of "political correctness" is "someone refused to endorse my racist bullshit."

(Since SLU is a Jesuit school, I expect this will eventually be portrayed as part of Tim Kaine's Jebbie treason.)

SIX IMPOSSIBLE THINGS BEFORE BREAKFAST.

You think being a conservative propagandist is easy? Well, maybe if you're brain-damaged, but otherwise think of how tough it must be to suppress your mental gag reflex at some of the things you're expected to pretend to believe. From Dave Blount at Right Wing News:

Last Jedi Chokes on Its Own Political Correctness 

Critics love the latest Star Wars movie. Audiences, not so much. This is in part because The Last Jedi is saturated with in-your-face political correctness. Therefore, it is not the movie’s fault if fans don’t like it; it is the fault of the fans, many of whom are probably the worst of the worst — that is, white males, just like the villains in the movie.

Wait a minute... "audiences, not so much"? People don't like The Last Jedi? Let's look at Box Office Mojo:

Total Lifetime Grosses
Domestic: $278,710,009 48.6%
+ Foreign: $295,000,000 51.4%
= Worldwide: $573,710,009

It opened less than a week ago and it has already made half a billion dollars. I should be so unpopular!

Blount supports his theory that The Last Jedi is unpopular despite its humongous grosses with a link to a story that says "On Rotten Tomatoes, The Last Jedi currently has an audience score of 60 percent, which is a stark contrast from its 93 percent Tomatometer score."

What do you think is a better sign of a movie's popularity -- how many millions of people pay money to see it, or the percentage of people who bitch about it on a film nerd site?

But then, what do you expect -- these are the kind of people who look at the 2017 elections, when Democrats ran the table, and a Democrat beating a Republican in a freaking Alabama Senate special election, and think, "Yeah, 2016 second-place finisher Donald Trump is more popular than ever." I guess they think about box office the same way they think about elections -- that they can always cheat.

UPDATE. I should have known, but had to be tipped off by commenters:

A Facebook page called Down With Disney’s Treatment of Franchises and its Fanboys is claiming responsibility for tanking the Rotten Tomatoes audience score for the latest “Star Wars” film, alleging that it used bots in a concerted attack against the Rian Johnson-directed movie...

The page moderator HuffPost spoke to, who did not provide his name, said he launched this supposed bot campaign to protest the way “The Last Jedi” diverges from the franchise’s so-called Expanded Universe...

“Regarding female heroes: Did you not see everything that came out of Ghostbusters? That is why,” he said. “I’m sick and tired of men being portrayed as idiots. There was a time we ruled society and I want to see that again. That is why I voted for Donald Trump.”

What a fucking dork. Well, like the Trump campaign -- and smaller related phenomena, like that Hollywood wingnut whose tiny anti-liberal poster campaigns are mysteriously always given star treatment by The Hollywood Reporter -- this really does fit the conservative pattern: fraudulently portray yourself and your positions as popular, then denounce actual evidence that you're not as the real fraud.

WHAT IS IT WITH THESE P.C. COLLEGE AUDIENCES? THEY'RE P.C., YET NONE OF THEM USE P.C.s! THEY USE MACS! AND THE FOOD THEY SERVE...

I love Jerry Seinfeld, but if the kids don't dig him anymore, maybe it's political correctness, maybe it's not, so what? The hippies didn't dig Bob Hope either -- that is, as they say, show business. Bitching about it makes you sound like Lenny Bruce's Comic at the Palladium when the Brits don't laugh -- "well, Freddy boy, I see it's a little squaresville tonight, real squaresville for the first show..."

I notice Aziz Ansari isn't having trouble drawing college crowds. Maybe different audiences just like different things. They're not obligated to like you, and if they don't it's not the same thing as oppression, as conservatives seem to think. The kids have not been "unwittingly drawn into a cult they cannot escape." They are young, they like what they like, and they think old people smell.

UPDATE. Hey, remember that crazy shrink or psycho-sociomologist or whatever she is Stella Morabito from The Federalist? She has another the-PC-end-is-near rant ("Ignorance was cultivated in the schools through political correctness and squashing free debate," etc. skree), and in it she acknowledges that the peecee people do in fact laugh, but at bad things that it's bad to laugh at:

I think the reason there is so little “comedy” that’s funny today is the genre itself has been hijacked by the humorless PC crowd. Why is their humor so unamusing and so dependent upon mean-spiritedness? 

Also, the music they listen to these days, you can't even make out the lyrics, and what's with those baggy pants. Increasingly it looks like this whole P.C. boo-hoo is just a weaponized version of Those Were The Days.

UPDATE 2. Enjoy some libertarian Mad Libs from the Fonzie of Freedom at Reason:

To be sure, San Diego State student Anthony Berteaux also insists in his letter that, hey, he likes edgy and funny folks such as Amy Schumer and Louis C.K. and George Carlin and that Seinfeld should "Offend the fuck out of college students. Provoke the fuck out of me. We'll thank you for it later." 

But this doesn't just ignore the chill that is already upon campuses when lefty feminist profs like Laura Kipnis gets dragged into Title IX hearings about sex on campus in The Chronicle of Higher Education...

If you don't laugh at this AARP member's jokes, Laura Kipnis goes to the gas!

...viewings of films as mainstream and honored as American Sniper are replaced by Paddington, and students call for trigger warnings before reading The Great Gatsby.

Regular readers know how sick I am of all the culture-war bullshit, but Fonzie has it exactly backwards. College students saying they don't like your act isn't oppression. If the kids want a different leisure time activity than American Sniper, which made gazillions of dollars without their help, who gives a fuck? You don't have a Constitutional right to student activity board funds. Incursions into the curriculum and the rights of professors, on the other hand, are about the new consumerist approach to education, whereby students are regarded as customers to be satisfied rather than seekers after knowledge; "social justice" is just the MacGuffin.  The bad ideas you should worry about are the ones that created this system, not some teenager's insufficiently deep understanding of racism.

FUN WITH WORDS.

I thought I'd seen some far-out iterations of the "liberals are the real racists/sexists" schtick, but Ann Althouse has pushed out the frontiers. Charlie Pierce did a fun election night round-up, full of lively insults ("James Lankford... a red-haired fanatic who believes that welfare causes school shootings.... Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage their midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin..."), and Althouse complains:

1. Why is "red-haired" considered acceptable as an insult?

?

2. Why is it considered okay to call attention to what seems to be an eye disorder? Whether something is wrong with Scott Walker's eyes or not, the epithet "goggle-eyed" is disrespectful to all of the people who suffer from conditions like esotropia.

??

Eventually she explains, sort of:

(By the way, "escadrille" is how you say "squadron" or "small squadron" in French. I'll refrain from adding an anti-French kicker, given my attention to political correctness above.)

After running this through BabelFish, I have determined that she means you liberals are all into political correctness (yes you are libtards you like to kiss it and hug it), yet you yourself are being offensive to red-haired people plus squinting is a medical condition etc. Who's the real esotropia-ist now?

I see a bunch of people in the news calling for compromise between the camps, but it's hard to know how to even begin a conversation with people like this.

(She also thinks it's bad to make jokes about hayseeds for some reason. I'm sure glad no one ever told Paul Henning!)

THE SEDUCTION OF THE IDIOTS.

Remember when Amity Shlaes told her fellow conservatives to make rightwing comics to re-educate the littlebrains? The Comintern seems to be responding: The two comics creators she hired to turn her anti-FDR book into graphic nonfiction, Chuck Dixon and Paul Rivoche, have been given a platform at the Wall Street Journal to tell us our favorite comics heroes were turned into a bunch of anti-American bums by liberalism, and that it's time for conservatives to "take back comics":

In the 900th issue of Action Comics, Superman decides to go before the United Nations and renounce his U.S. citizenship. " 'Truth, justice and the American way'—it's not enough any more," he despairs. That issue, published in April 2011, is perhaps the most dramatic example of modern comics' descent into political correctness, moral ambiguity and leftist ideology. 

We are comic-book artists and comics are our passion. But more important they've inspired and shaped many millions of young Americans. Our fear is that today's young comic-book readers are being ill-served by a medium that often presents heroes as morally compromised or no different from the criminals they battle. With the rise of moral relativism, "truth, justice and the American way" have lost their meaning.

Comics are apparently a public good (unlike, say, water) which must be kept pure so "young comic-book readers" hear only what a mid-20th-Century censor would approve. No, literally:

In the 1950s, the great publishers, including DC and what later become Marvel, created the Comics Code Authority, a guild regulator that issued rules such as: "Crimes shall never be presented in such a way as to create sympathy for the criminal." The idea behind the CCA, which had a stamp of approval on the cover of all comics, was to protect the industry's main audience—kids—from story lines that might glorify violent crime, drug use or other illicit behavior. 

Actually the idea was to protect publishers from the moral panic engendered by Fred Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent.  Thanks to the CCA, "there were still good guys and bad guys," sigh Dixon and Rivoche, but "the 1990s brought a change" -- though the change actually came in 1960s, starting with R. Crumb and Zap, and giving rise to a comic artist community that wanted to stretch the medium  beyond kiddie comics, not just in the underground but also in their own workplaces -- and by the 90s they had the power to do so. Whatever you think of the result, that change has clearly meant more choice in what buyers can find in the market -- but Dixon and Rivoche portray it as censorship and "political correctness," and themselves as victims:

The industry weakened and eventually threw out the CCA, and editors began to resist hiring conservative artists.

[Cite please.]

One of us, Chuck, expressed the opinion that a frank story line about AIDS was not right for comics marketed to children. His editors rejected the idea and asked him to apologize to colleagues for even expressing it. Soon enough, Chuck got less work.

And that's why everyone has AIDS today -- because the comics commissars blacklisted Dixon and Rivoche and turned the means of production over to loyal Party members like Frank Miller and Alison Bechdel, who Seduce the Innocent to this day. George F. Will may think being raped is the coveted victim-status of our time, but among his conservative colleagues the fashionable victim card is always that liberals refuse to do things their way, which they inevitably portray as censorship.

I can't blame them too much -- they have a book to sell and, as I have observed before, comics is a hard dollar. I'm mainly surprised that conservatives are still peddling the purification of culture. Their traditional appeals to racism and sexism I can understand, but do even Mississippians want the swears and sideboobs driven from their TVs?

OUR CONTRIBUTION TO THE NEW POST-PARTISAN ERA. Dropped a note at the Voice about early rightblogger reactions to the inauguration, and one of my japes drew the ire of Jay Nordlinger, who seems to think I was calling him a racist in the old-fashioned sense. I figured it would too much inside baseball to explain at length to Voice readers what Nordlinger's real stock-in-trade is, though I did link to this Nordlinger quote:

A quick comment on the Rush business -- on the quarterback business. [Limbaugh had said sportscasters overrated Donovan McNabb because he's black -- ed.]. I’m reminded of something that I’ve discovered in recent years. I work in Conservativeland, and I’m used to speaking freely. I’m used to not having to abide by a speech code or any other restriction of political correctness. And then sometimes I leave Conservativeland, and continue to speak freely--and sincerely--and then find that I startle people. They’re not used to hearing it.

Now, it seems to me that what Rush said is rather obvious: that people root for the black player, in whatever field, to succeed. That’s not necessarily wrong, incidentally. It may even be admirable. But it’s so...

[snip description of other silly liberals doing other silly things]

Rush considers himself a free man, and said simply what he thought was true. And I imagine that what he said is, in fact, true. And this is a great man, as can be judged, in part, by the quality of his enemies.

Nordlinger's world divides between those who are pleased to see members of minority groups succeed, and those (such as himself) who consider that to be "political correctness." As these things go, it's not Bull Connor. It's just the sort of defensive imputation of reverse racism that we've been hearing for years, and apparently haven't seen the back of even with the election of a black President of the United States.

UPDATE. Now Nordlinger claims himself wronged by Newsweek. Why doesn't he just write letters to the editor? But I am happy that this post brought "Conservative Guy" back to the comments boxes. Welcome home, prodigal son, we will kill the fatted calf.

HOPPED UP ON GOOFBALLS! Longtime readers will remember Barry Rubin, the Pajamas Media guy who claimed his kid's school was actually forcing its soccer team to lose on account of Political Correctness until interim coach Barry Rubin taught the lads how to play like capitalists.

Unfortunately Rubin's story was not picked up by Adam Sandler for a heartwarming film comedy, and he has been forced to go back to the PJM drawing board. This time he offers a darker dystopian fantasy about a lost generation of racially-oversensitive children.

A pre-teenage boy, living in the United States with his affluent family from South America, attends an American public school in the eastern part of the country...

Recently, he was raising money for the homeless with a friend at a school fair. At the first of the tables he passed, the salesman invited him to take a look at his merchandise — soccer balls and shirts. The boy became very upset.

“That’s racist,” he complained to his friend.

“Why?” asked the schoolmate.

“That’s what they think of us Mexicans. All we are interested in is soccer and tacos.”

In other words, he innocently had turned a simple situation — a guy wanted to sell merchandise, for charity, to boys of a soccer-crazy age — into a racist incident.

And that little boy grew up to be Baracko de Obama-Jimenez! And it's not just the Hispanics, folks, though they do make for the most lurid anecdotes ("one eleven-year-old girl from another South American family told her classmates: 'We hate America, but our parents are making us live here'") -- no, thanks to "indoctrination" in public school, even white children know nothing about America except that it's a racist hellhole. Take a look at the evidence -- that is, unimpeachable eyewitness testimony from Coach Barry:

• In one fourth grade class, "their sole reading on September 11 was a story on how Kenyans reacted to the event — with no identification of who had carried out the attack."
• "A math exercise in which the teacher uses a deck of playing cards, each of which is marked 'Vote Obama' on the back."
• "On Memorial Day, son draws pictures of soldiers during free time in school; teacher confiscates, makes and files photocopies, and warns him never to do that again."

My favorite: A young man doesn't even know what "The Star-Spangled Banner" is ("Daughter helpfully sings, “You know, ‘Oh, say can you see …!’ Son: 'What’s that?'"). Presumably the school has forbidden male children to attend baseball games, lest they grow up heterosexual; or maybe this particular incident took place in California, where all ballgames commence with "Canta, No Llores."

With the kids all hopped up like this on Political Correctness, you'd expect them to be having non-stop rumbles and socialist petting parties. I figured Rubin had to have seen at least one misguided youth hauled in for killing puppies like Sal Mineo in Rebel Without a Cause. Alas, all Rubin produces are grim warnings about the future, where a "mentality of perpetual victimhood, endless grievances, and bitter divisiveness is set to cripple the United States." (You know -- like the Sarah Palin media team.) Oh, Coach -- you're never going to get to Hollywood this way! Can't you at least give us a villainous Julian Assange having Sex By Surprise with the homecoming queen? You might as well -- it's far too late to worry about making it believable.

PERSECUTION ENVY.

The Federalist:

Sri Lanka Attacks Highlight Growing Worldwide Persecution Of Christians

Author Kenny Xu leans hard on a Pew Research Center report -- but does not link directly to it, preferring for some reason the British Church Times, which screams "Christians are the most persecuted religious group in the world, says Pew report," though even the figures it chooses to pick from Pew aren't as cut and dried as that:

The Centre’s report on religious harassment in 2016 found that Christians were harassed in 144 countries, up from 128 the year before, while Muslims were harassed in 142 countries, up from 125 in 2015.

So it looks like Jesus and Allah are neck-and-neck! (The Pew report is headlined "Global Uptick in Government Restrictions on Religion in 2016," which is not nearly as good Republican ragebait.) After yelling about Muslims a while ("Few groups have suffered as Christian minorities have due to the rise of Islamist political parties such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and ISIS in Libya"), Xu makes the bold leap:

While many European journalists rightly blame mass migration from majority-Muslim countries for these religious persecution issues, migration is not the only factor here. Just as significant is Western Europe’s culture of enforced secularism, a world where religious speech is policed and religious symbols (such as burqas) are not allowed in French public schools or German business settings.

Hundreds murdered in Sri Lanka, dress codes in school -- same diff! Also at The Federalist, David Harsanyi:

Islamic Terrorism Remains The World’s Greatest Threat To Peace

After sputtering over "Islamists" -- a usage I hadn't heard much since the glory days of the Iraq War, but which seems to be coming back -- Harsanyi, too, rages about secularists:

Yet the American left continues to downplay the danger, first by arguing that Islam has nothing to do with Islamic terrorism, then by lumping every white-skinned person who commits a terrorist act into one imaginary coherent political movement to contrast against it.

Actually, that "imaginary coherent political movement" of white supremacists is America's #1 terror menace, far outstripping Islamic terrorism, and it's spreading around the world. But Harsanyi has an explanation for that: Islamic terror only looks weak because our Middle East wars have been so successful!

It’s true that Americans have been spared much Islamic terror since 2002—a year that, curiously, nearly every graph media uses to measure domestic terrorism starts—but only because we’ve spent billions of dollars each year and immense resources, both in lives and treasure, keeping it out of the country and fighting it abroad.

Perhaps sensing that even the morons and yahoos who constitute most of his readership won't buy this, Harsanyi gets back to a trendier attack on godless libs:

Another reason the majority of Americans might not comprehend Islamic radicalism’s reach is the skewed intensity of the media coverage. Political correctness and a chilling fear of being labeled “Islamophobic” makes it difficult to honestly report on terrorism around the world.

If it weren't for liberals you good people would be shitting your pants in fear of Mohammed at the 7-11 or the pediatric clinic, just like you were in the great Nine-Elevening!  Yet now, despite conservative urging, you still haven't killed Ilhan Omar. This isn't the country Harsanyi once knew.

These guys are catching up with Rod Dreher, who is every bit as nuts as you'd imagine:

A liberal friend of mine was lamenting recently that the left has gotten so good at policing its own thoughts, and never letting itself notice things that contradict its narrative, that it is often being shocked by events in the real world. When things like the Sri Lanka attacks happen, the first thing that many American and British journalists think is, “Oh dear, this is going to cause a spike in Islamophobia.” They cannot imagine sympathizing with Christians. They really can’t. Yes, these dead Sri Lankans may be Catholics living on the other side of the world, and sure, they may have roots in their country going back to the 16th century (or earlier), but deep down, when many journalists imagine these people, they see them wearing MAGA hats, and carrying around invisible knapsacks full of privilege.

If only Dreher would actually fuck off to a Benedict Option survivalist compound where he could tell the kids, "Yes, Rachel Maddow and Kamala Harris used to throw rocks at us Christians and put us in concentration Bible camps!"

Meanwhile at National Review we get more of the same ("Islam remains the fount of the most virulent and violent attacks on Christians worldwide"), and Eli Lake at Bloomberg telling us "White Nationalism Is a Terrorist Threat, but Not Like Radical Islam," because "white nationalists have no territory they control, as Islamic State did until recently. Nor is there evidence of a state supporting white nationalist groups..." LOL, who wants to tell him about America?

American conservatives in the depths of their Trump phase are, like their fearless leader babbling about the unfairness of his dropping Twitter numbers, addicted to victimhood, and so it was only natural that they'd treat the Sri Lanka bombing as an excuse to talk about how persecuted they are. Sure, no one's mass-murdering them -- over here, that seems to only happen to schoolkids and black people and victims of gun fetishists -- but liberals are insufficiently respectful of them, and try to make them bake wedding cakes for homosexuals, which is just as bad. One struggles to imagine them confronted by Jesus as they flee their martyrdom, and declaring, "that's it -- I'll go back to my six-figure job and put up with my kids not going to church and swears on the TV! It'll be rough, but Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam!"

UPDATE. Relevant: "Steve King, censured by his colleagues for racist remarks, compares himself to Jesus... 'And when I had to step down to the floor of the House of Representatives and look up at those 400-and-some accusers — you know, we’ve just passed through Easter and Christ’s Passion — and I have a better insight into what He went through for us, partly because of that experience,' he said."

THE FIX IS IN. David Mamet has a new book, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture, which Andrew Ferguson at the Weekly Standard says "marks the terminal point of a years-long conversion from left to right that Mamet-watchers (there are quite a few of these) have long suspected but hadn’t quite confirmed." Hadn't quite confirmed? Mamet's "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal'" appeared in the Village Voice in 2008.

But that essay "was much milder than its title," insists Ferguson. "It was the work of a man in mid-conversion." (Mamet merely said, "I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind," called Thomas Sowell "our greatest contemporary philosopher," etc.) So never mind the high-level notice previously taken of Mamet's political journey; wait'll the libs find out he's really conservative now. Bet they'll be mad!

A hint of how this earth-shattering news might go down is seen in Ferguson's portrayal of Mamet's speech at Stanford, though it occurred "a couple of years ago." The speech contained denunciations of political correctness and "a full-throated defense of capitalism." Nonetheless, instead of ripping up the seats, "the students in Memorial Hall seemed mostly unperturbed," reports Ferguson. "The ripples of dissatisfaction issued from the older members of the crowd." Ripples of dissatisfaction! Also, some of the oldsters -- "the wives were in wraparound skirts and had hair shorter than their husbands’" -- walked out.

Boy, Mamet's in trouble now.

After reading The Secret Knowledge in galleys, the Fox News host and writer Greg Gutfeld invented the David Mamet Attack Countdown Clock, which “monitors the days until a once-glorified liberal artist is dismissed as an untalented buffoon.” Tick tock.

Concurring is Mark Steyn, who quotes himself on the topic; from Steyn's 2008 essay:

In The Village Voice the other week, the playwright David Mamet recently outed himself as a liberal apostate and revealed that he's begun reading conservative types like Milton Friedman and Paul Johnson. If he's wondering what he's in for a year or two down the line, here's how Newsweek's Jonathan Tepperman began his review this week of another literary leftie who wandered off the reservation...

Long story short, the political writer Tepperman gave Martin Amis' political book, The Second Plane, a negative review. There can be no possible explanation for this except payback for Amis' apostasy, just as there will be no other possible explanation for whatever brickbats Mamet may get after his book comes out.

Steyn's "year or two" timeline is a little off -- Mamet has since "'Brain-Dead'" had the star-studded Race on Broadway, which received mixed reviews, the slightly better-received film Redbelt, and some prominent revivals (including one of Boston Marriage which the New York Times recently puffed -- ah, if they only knew!). But we may expect someone to object to The Secret Knowledge, and this will be proof that the David Mamet Attack Countdown Clock has gone off.

Meanwhile Tony Kushner, the most obviously leftist playwright this side of Dario Fo, has just debuted a new play at the Public. This is from the review in (cue sinister music) the Times:

...few of these revelations feel surprising or particularly necessary. “Angels in America” established that Mr. Kushner is a great playwright. In “Guide” he registers mainly as a great conversationalist who keeps talking well after he has made his essential points.

Kushner got even worse at the Voice ("a high-mettled, frolicsome, intellectually challenging mess, certainly self-indulgent, but never drab" -- now there's a pull-quote!) and elsewhere.

What reason can there be for the liberal intelligentsia turning on their fair-haired boy? They must be laying the groundwork for the attack on Mamet; by denouncing Kushner, they're making it look as if their critics review works based on their merits, rather than on the orders of the liberal High Command!

Once you adopt the view that everything on God's green earth is about politics, so much becomes obvious.

UPDATE. Much discussion of Mamet's work in comments. Don't misunderstand: I'm a fan. And I've known since I saw and admired the first New York production, years ago, of Oleanna with Bill Macy and Rebecca Pidgeon that he ain't exactly Dalton Trumbo, as would anyone else who was paying attention. And yet he wasn't blackballed by the nobs then. The first London production of Oleanna was directed by Harold fucking Pinter! The notion that a man of Mamet's attainments suffers, or could suffer, appreciably from liberal persecution is beyond ridiculous.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Saw Television at the 9:30 Club on Tuesday; they were in pretty good shape.  But they didn't play anything from Adventure, which I love. So here's some of that.
•   Matt Lauer is getting pounded from several directions for aggressively questioning Hillary Clinton while failing to impede Trump's river of bullshit.  One such complaint comes from Jonathan Chait, who says that the problem is Lauer's false equivalence: "television personalities like Lauer... are failing to convey the fact that the election pits a normal politician with normal political failings against an ignorant, bigoted, pathologically dishonest authoritarian..." At National Review Charles Two Middle Initials Cooke leaps on this; Chait has written against political correctness before, he informs us, and that the entertainment industry is full of liberals! Yyyeah, A. Normal Person might respond, so? What's that got to do with a lame journalist letting Donald Trump steamroll him? Because Matt Lauer is more widely seen than your average New Republic writer, says Cooke; hence he is pop culture, and since pop culture is you liberals' fault so is Matt Lauer:

Or, to put it another way: Most people aren’t reading “elite print news sources,” they’re watching mainstream television and going to the movies, and these sources are both teaching them what to think in ways that political-opinion magazines never will. 

Today, Chait is less “may or may not be unfair” and more “horrified.” Why? Well, because now he believes that pop culture — which is just as shallow and dumb as it’s always been; Lauer is no anomaly — is hurting him and his party. And we can’t have that!

Welcome to the club, comrade. 

Because Cooke has a British accent, some people may assume him cultivated, yet he lumps journalism in with "mainstream television" (as opposed to edgy, fringe television like The Five, I guess) and movies, just like your average dumbass culture warrior who takes it on faith that Field Marshall Chomsky Cloward-Piven Alinsky is conducting everything that appears before the public (except some brave truth-tellers like the staff of National Review) in one grand symphony of socialism, and that if one Liberal Cultural Agent does something that fails to advance the cause, all libtarddom is thrown into a tizzy, or at least will be when Charles TMI Cooke calls them out. How a grown man can get through life without apparently meeting an artist and understanding why he does what he does (hint: it's not on orders from Moscow), I can't guess; more evidence, I suppose, that these changelings are raised in vats and educated in Skinner Boxes before being sluiced into their editorial pens and wingnut sinecures.


• To some sad specimens of humanity, everything is politics. At The Federalist Rachel Lu gushes at first over the Minnesota State Fair, where she had the opportunity to display her vegetables, which make her proud if not eloquent ("My tomatillos were bursting with freshness, still wet with morning dew, and packed with the trademark tomatillo tang" -- sounds like a cigarette ad from the 50s) as well as some ornamental gourds, which won her a prize. But then, after the ceremonies, Lu is told that they throw away the exhibits and she can't have hers back. She has an extended fit, and finally reveals that this condition appeared in the rules of the competition, presented to her ahead of time; since she is a member of the Party of Personal Responsibility, this naturally cuts no ice with her:

I had read the rule book. My eyes had passed over those words. If I had back-checked all the numbers, I could have deduced that my display would be peremptorily confiscated against my will. I just made the ridiculous mistake of assuming the rules would make some sort of sense.

When it comes to entitlement, Lu makes Megan McArdle look like Albert Schweizer. But the best part is the inevitable connection of Lu's personal inconvenience with sociamalism:

As a conservative, I do feel a little foolish for having learned the hard way that bureaucratic rules are unreasonable. Hadn’t I read about the Sacketts and their fight with the Environmental Protection Agency? Did I need a personal one-on-one with Clive Bundy to get this?...

It could have been worse. I lost eight beautiful gourds that I grew with my own hands, and gained a salutary reminder that nothing lovely should voluntarily be delivered into the clutches of the state. When bureaucrats are involved, the rules will trump beauty, truth, and human feeling every time. Even at the Minnesota State Fair.

Maybe next year she'll start her own, privatized state fair, safe from the clutches of the collectivist Minnesota State Agricultural Society. The entry fees might be a little higher -- nothing good happens without a profit motive! -- but it'll be worth it because you won't have to follow rules that don't make sense (to Rachel Lu, anyway).

OFF THE ROPES AND ON THE MEND.

Hey guys, just letting you know I’m out of the hospital. My gratitude to the folks at the NIH Clinical Center for once again taking such good care of me. It just makes me more fond than ever of big government, and more contemptuous of jail-Fauci science-is-witchcraft Republicans like Rod Dreher and Ross Douthat.

Healing is happening, though more slowly than it did when I was a pup. But dammit, I can still type! So far I’ve answered muster on all this week's Roy Edroso Breaks It Down issues – here’s a freebie, about the exciting new trend of Republican officials acting like mob bosses, insofar as their social disabilities allow. As I’ve said in the past, Ron DeSantis suffers especially in this regard:

The problem with DeSantis is, he may be too much of an obvious goon to translate as leader material beyond the borders of his corrupt bastion of Florida Men. He reminds me of minor gangsters in old movies as played by Sheldon Leonard and Mike Mazurki, except Leonard and Mazurki had presence and even charm — DeSantis is more like Rondo Hatton. It’s telling that he so consciously copies Trump’s body language; on the one hand it shows the requisite shamelessness, but on the other it also suggests a lack of inner resources. Once Trump’s out of the way — and he will need to be, for anyone else to advance — the new champion will have to have some style and swagger of his own, and if DeSantis can’t achieve that he’ll go down the way the minor Warner Brothers hoods did.

Meanwhile I see at the Wall Street Journal that Barton Swaim has chivalrously rushed to the defense of Clarence Thomas’ Sugar Nazi, Harlan Crow. Swaim starts (under a gentle drawing of Crow clearly meant to make him look like a more charming Noah Cross) by tut-tutting the “political left” for what Swaim portrays as its penchant for “delegitimation”:

The habits of delegitimation have become so familiar that it’s easy to forget how antidemocratic they are: political correctness and, more recently, cancel culture; the invention of “phobias”—homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia—to characterize dissent as mental illness…

If you’re wondering how liberals got away with suggesting conservatives were stirring up fear and loathing of gays, Muslims, and trans people, you may have just awakened from a 20-year coma. 

…the wanton attribution of racism, misogyny, fascism and white supremacy; and of course the easy insinuation that any political figure of whom one disapproves is guilty of crimes.

Lately, of course, most accusations of Republican criminality are focused on Donald Trump, an obvious and widely-acknowledged crook. (By the way, somewhere Hillary “Lock Her Up” Clinton is laughing her ass off.) Swaim does mention Trump, but as a victim: He “rose to power by treating his adversaries exactly as they treated him, and indeed as they had treated George W. Bush: as de facto illegitimate.”  More sinned against than sinning! 

Swaim then travels to Crow’s estate for a tour and whattaya know, Crow’s got MLK and Lincoln memorabilia too, and he’s pals with Cornel West – see, it’s not just Nazis! Over sandwiches Crow tells Swaim how moderate he is – “I’m kind of a traditional George Bush type Republican… I’m moderately pro-choice—a first-trimester guy… So when people say I want to influence people on the court, I would say that if I were trying to do that, which I’m not, I’m not doing a very good job.” So Thomas and Crow can agree to disagree that people who aren’t them can have their rights taken away. It’s not like there’s anything important at stake. Just keep it civil, without delegitimation! 

Finally, I see Texas has gotten so gun crazy they’re mowing down cheerleaders, which in the Lone Star you would have thought were a protected species. What’s next, oil tycoons?