WHO'S NEXT.

The end of O'Reilly's TV show means nearly nothing to me. Big-ticket rightwing rageclowns like him are like blockbuster movies and reality shows, just gargoyles for gawkers, and we who have free souls it touches us not.

I'm more interested in the conservative pseuds who try to explain it all on the internet, and so far their take seems to be that the preferred viewing choice of your aged relatives who send you pictures of Obama with a bone through his nose doesn't have anything to do with conservatism.

"He Was a Centrist, Not a Conservative," claims Joel B. Pollak at Breitbart. But look where Pollak's baseline is, via his approving quote of some wingnut chin-stroker:

What if we could magically remove the metaphoric glass and see, face-to-face, the average American, once his political views are no longer distorted by media bias? What would we see? 

The answer, basically, is Ben Stein.

Tell your aged Obama-hating relatives that their avatar is Ben Stein and they'll smack you. I won't even accept that slander on them! Hell, if the average American were the chinless Stein, we'd have receded into the primordial ooze years ago. (Try to imagine Ben Stein without money. He'd be raving next to an overpass. Or at least whining loudly.)

The others are worse. I include the worthless Chuck Todd who, seeking to impress Hugh Hewitt for some reason, "agreed" with him according to this Daily Caller report that O'Reilly wasn't a real conservative, that is, not a fancy intellectual like Hugh Hewitt:

“He was — to me, what he did — he was the tone-setter,” Todd continued. “He was sort of that anti-political correctness.” 

[facepalm]

“He was the opening act that brought the crowds, but he became almost more fun to watch than the concert itself, sometimes, but he was the entertainer, probably more entertainer than any of the others.”

Similarly, gameshow buffoon Trump isn't conservative either -- he just pumps out rightwing policies self-identified conservatives eat up, but he ain't got good taste so when the smart guys stand around in cigar bars with snifters and talk about the Glooory of the Mooovement & Burke & Hayek &tc they shove Trump into a coatroom and blame the smell on the dog.

Plus there's Mark Judge at Splice Today -- "The left is cheering the demise of O’Reilly, but liberals have nothing to boast about," he says, because someone got raped at Occupy and what about that bitch who said she was raped but wasn't, huh libs? And Scott Lehigh at the Boston Globe: "Bill O’Reilly types aren’t just a conservative problem," because all those liberal TV hosts are sexual harassers too and the only reason we don't have proof like with O'Reilly is because chicks lie to protect libtards to keep their precious abortions.

At National Review Ian Tuttle tries a variation: Sure, the old-fogey conservatives go for O'Reilly, but we youngs are modern and a-go-go and we think O'Reilly's trad, dad:

This rough-and-ready genealogy might even include a third generation, emerging now — one whose world was shaped by September 11, Iraq, economic recession, and the hyper-partisanship of the Obama years. These conservatives are not Bill O’Reilly; they’re Ben Shapiro, Mollie Hemingway, and Mary Katharine Ham. Their media are podcasts and Twitter, and while they’re certainly combative, they are more interested in a savvy, cosmopolitan conservatism that goes toe-to-toe with progressivism on its own turf (consider Shapiro’s popular campus-speaking events) than in the countrified, bigger-government, populism-tinged conservatism embodied by Mike Huckabee.

"Ben Shapiro, Mollie Hemingway, and Mary Katharine Ham??" cry the youth of today. "That's all I needed to hear. Direct me to the scene of their symposia, where I will vape, denounce socialism, and maybe beat up some antifa chicks!"

At least Tuttle's got enough sense to be ashamed, but not enough to see that O'Reilly isn't the problem. You still need someone; that someone could be younger, and maybe even female (sexual harassment is a nice-to-have, not a need-to-have for this gig!) or non-white (the murderous psycho Sheriff David Clarke might even do). But you will need someone to summon the clans, and he or she will have to be a scumbag -- and, since this is the age of Trump rather than the age of Reagan, that person also has to let the slavering masses know he or she is a scumbag. Because St. Ronnie wouldn't make it today; they'd see through his unctuousness right away and despise him for thinking them dumb enough to believe he's a nice guy. Shit, even conservatives don't believe in "trickle down" or "law and order" or any of those magic words anymore -- you can imagine what the marks they've been bilking for decades think!

No, for them only the Savage Messiah will do. And if the prissier among the Movement Conservatives have to stand off the side, look as innocent as their careers as childhood snitches taught them, and say oh no this is not what we meant at all, well, they can afford to pretend it's strategy instead of self-deception -- after all, they still get paid.

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 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.

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.)

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Luscious Jackson got in my head this week and hasn't left.
Not complaining.
•   The New York Times has a story on Vladimir Putin's drive to make the Russian Orthodox Church into, as one observer puts it, "an instrument of the Russian state." The Church's shock troops are medieval in outlook -- one of its bishops "warned worshipers that new biometric passports, required by the European Union in return for visa-free access to Europe, were 'satanic' because they contained a 13-digit number" -- and of course favor the persecution of homosexuals, as Putin does. This gives Rod Dreher yet another opportunity to tell us how he really feels about secularism and its inferiority to the Every Knee Shall Bend model of governance. While he claims "it troubles me deeply to see the Church become an instrument of State policy," nonetheless...

...as Western societies disintegrate under aggressive secularism, individualism, materialism, and hedonism, it’s hard as a traditional Christian not to sympathize with the general thrust of what Russia is doing, if not in certain particulars... 

The West is losing the idea of marriage and family, and now, even the concepts of male and female — and all this is hailed as progress. Young people are ruining their hearts and minds by dosing themselves heavily with pornography, and there’s nothing in Western culture to stop them. And on and on. How could the West be a positive model? 

Russia does not have the answers, but it is asking necessary questions...

I understand why Glenn Greenwald et alia object to what they see as the revival of a Red Scare in this country, but come on: At least people who sympathized with the old USSR thought they were trying to advance human liberation. Dreher sympathizes with today's Russia for the opposite reason.

•   Donald Trump recently attacked the Food & Drug Administration as the "food police." Who knows why he does what he does anymore, but it gave us a chance to hear some straight-up bull-goose looney libertarianism from Nick Gillespie of Reason:

You get rid of "official" food inspectors and you know what will happen? To the extent that customers demand any sort of certification beyond public reputation, private-sector and nonprofit groups will be created to provide this or that level of inspection. We see that already with kosher and halal food prep, of course, not to mention other sorts of watchdog groups (think Fair Trade coffee and the like). Yelp or some other rating system would likely add some sort of Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval-style process as well.

The yelpification of food poisoning! I can't put it any better than Kia on Twitter: "I would have given these diet pills one star but I am dead."

• Jonah Goldberg complains about the obstreperous black guy who is interfering with his mild interest in football ("entertainment more than passion," Jesus Christ is everything about this guy terrible?). His premise is that "particularly among men, sports talk is a kind of safe space and common tongue all at once" and politics isn't supposed to interfere. He quotes and comments on a 2003 E.J. Dionne column:

And then [Dionne] added: “Politicizing everything from literature to music to painting and sports was once a habit of the left. The Communist Party’s now-defunct newspaper once had a sports column called ‘Out in Left Field.’ Now, it’s the turn of the right to politicize everything.”

I’m not sure that was entirely true then, but it’s definitely not true now.

Oh yeah? We need not get into the wider world of wingnut culture war here -- just remember that from 2011 until someone wised up, National Review ran a sports blog called "Right Field." This is from the inaugural post:

The facts of life are conservative, and in no sphere is that truism more manifest than in the world of sport. In the games we play, the same rules are meant to apply to all — and we are outraged at the injustice when they are not. There are winners and losers, and we don’t agonize over the self-esteem of those who do not prevail: We expect them to learn from defeat and improve...

Yuk. To this day we have conservatives like Matt K. Lewis claiming that sports blogs are "dominated by liberals" because no one wants to hear wingnuts snarling about political correctness instead of keeping their eye on the ball. (Yes, like every other thinking person in America I know about today's David Brooks column and his strange conviction that black people will be moved to reconsider their sports protests because they might make bigots mad and his Thanksgivings harder to enjoy, but by claiming conservatives don't go in for this sort of thing, Goldberg has effectively out-stupided even him. There can be only one!)

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).

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.

PC FOR ME BUT NOT FOR THEE, PART 5,292,339.

OK, so what's the latest "waah, everyone's politically correct" glurge... oh Christ, it's Bruce Bawer. First he bitches about how Sarah Silverman, Amy Schumer, and Chelsea Handler are all making fun of Republicans when they should be, I don't know, marching around in prison stripes going "Rawr, I'm Hitlery Klintoon and I killed Benghazi." (I'm kind of shocked at his focus on female comics -- I thought beating them up was a straight wingnut obsession. He even goes on about "the odious Lena Dunham," normally a tell. Maybe he's had conversion therapy? Or perhaps he just knows what his audience craves.)

Then he gets to the meat: He used to like this English comedian Jimmy Carr because "he seemed utterly indifferent to audience sensitivities and wasn’t remotely political." Sounds good to me too! So Bawer went to see him in Oslo, and at the show Carr got into the local Muslim situation. But to Bawer's dismay:

Carr’s line was that Norwegians are being inhospitable [to Muslims]. Sitting there listening to this, I couldn’t help reflecting that in his own country, the kind of policies he was promoting have made things even worse than they are in Norway — they’ve quashed speech freedoms, turned more and more urban areas into no-go zones...

Yeah whatever buddy. But here's the worst part:

I was appalled by Carr’s glib, PC drivel. But I was pretty much alone. Almost the entire audience, which consisted not of the kind of ordinary, hard-working Norwegians who oppose mass immigration but of affluent-looking, snappily dressed, patently urban 20-somethings (I didn’t see a single non-white face)...

An all-white audience in Oslo! There's a switch.

...laughed and applauded lustily.

They were laughing at something Bruce Bawer didn't agree with! That's double PC!

Plainly, these kids were the spawn of the privileged, pro-immigration left-wing elite and will soon join that elite themselves.

I don't know why Bawer didn't climb on stage like Kenneth Mars in The Producers and yell "You are the victims of a hoax!"

(Carr, I surmised, has advisers at his tour stops who know his demographic and know exactly what kind of material will get them going.)

Wow, he does material he thinks the audience will enjoy. And him a comedian! Is there no end to the PCness?

Eventually Bawer pretends he has an aesthetic case against Carr too ("instead of the tight, snappy sets I’d seen on TV, what I saw was terribly padded-out, including a lot of uninteresting back-and-forth with audience members...") but really he's pissed because they weren't making the jokes he likes -- you know, like that Achmed the Dead Terrorist Guy. But Jeff Dunham is still touring with Achmed -- why not go see him, or Larry the Cable Guy? Why so pissed that other people like different jokes?

The answer is that the people who yell the loudest about political correctness think "other people being open-minded" means "other people agreeing with me." And nothing makes these pecksniffs madder than to hear people laughing and find out that the joke's on them.

DEMENTIA '16.

That Egyptian river ran through Columbia Heights today:

Don't Blame the Republican Party for the Rise of Trump

Because he's the Democratic nominee presumptive? No. Because he's the nominee presumptive in some other party that isn't the Republican Party? No. Because [throws a handful of dirt in your face, runs]. This may be the worst thing McArdle has ever written. Seriously, look at this:

Or maybe those liberals shouldn't be forgiven so easily. I’ve been pondering these theories -- advanced by everyone from Barack Obama and Harry Reid to Bill Maher -- and the thing is, they don’t make a heck of a lot of sense. They seem to posit a Republican electorate that is, on the one hand, so malleable that the GOP leadership could create the emotional conditions for a Trump candidacy -- and on the other hand, a Republican electorate so surly and unmanageable that it has ignored the horrified pleading of conservative leaders and intellectuals, in order to rally behind Trump.

That there is some bullshit, and not just because what she presents as either-or choices are not mutually exclusive, but also because both the "either" and the "or" are gibberish. GOP voters don't have to be "malleable" to turn from covertly pyscho to overtly psycho: They only needed to suffer through two Black President terms, bookended by the humiliation of George W. Bush (hey, wonder if the Republicans will finally invite him to a convention this year?) and the recent Gay/Trans Apotheosis, for their psycho-sap to rise and run over all by itself.

Neither is there anything weird about the Trumpenproletariat "ignoring the horrified pleading of conservative leaders and intellectuals." Who, aside from some National Review cruise-goers and Inner Circle party donors, has ever cared what Jonah Goldberg and Billy Kristol said or thought? The Republican rabble has always been ready for a true shitheel to step up -- hell, they were hot for President Sarah Palin until she decided to run a safer grift. And before Ronald Reagan's elevation to sainthood, he was just a talking doll with a nice smile and strong appeal to the Strom Thurmond wing of the Party -- which wing never went away, but only got older, grimmer, and mad that they can't say the n-word anymore because of political correctness.

The rest is also crap and who has time, but I will say that anyone who writes "triple-distilled balderdash … high-test twaddle … self-congratulatory swill … nonsense on stilts" ought to be sent to a young-fogey rest home and given plenty of sedatives.

Believe it or don't, McArdle was still out-crazied -- but, less surprisingly, by David French:

The American people need the chance to make a better choice. Given the stakes of the election, to simply leave the race to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is to guarantee a terrible presidency marked by incompetence and cronyism. There is just one hope — however slim — of avoiding this national disaster: America needs a third option.

And at this point, Mitt Romney is the only man who combines the integrity, financial resources, name recognition, and broad public support to make a realistic independent run at the presidency.

Does French actually think Romney has a chance in hell? He has at least enough brain cells left to be sneaky with his answer:

A third-party Romney bid would introduce the chance of a different outcome, giving millions of Americans the important option to choose a man of integrity as their president.

Similarly, millions of Americans had the important option to choose windshield washer fluid over Coca-Cola as their beverage at lunch. It could happen!

But the goo-goo ga-ga winner is David Marcus at (where else?) The Federalist:

How Anti-White Rhetoric Is Fueling White Nationalism

Long story short, liberals are talking about bad things white people do, and how else can a rational honky react except by going neo-Nazi?

White people are being asked -- or pushed -- to take stock of their whiteness and identify with it more.

I see a crying cowboy in Oklahoma, who can't watch TV no more without seeing them Key and Peele fellers talking down His People -- and since you libtards injected race into things, this is forcing the cowboy to "identify with it more." Marcus laments:

This is a remarkably bad idea. The last thing our society needs is for white people to feel more tribal. The result of this tribalism will not be a catharsis of white identity, improving equality for non-whites. It will be resentment towards being the only tribe not given the special treatment bestowed by victimhood.

When we start lynching people, remember who started it! Why must you always provoke us.

A HAND-JOB, NOT A HAND-OUT.

So, why are conservatives all het up over Facebook and its alleged prejudice against them? I don't normally give much credence to the totally mental Glenn Beck, but something in his whining coverage of the meeting Zuckerberg arranged over the affair with prominent wingnuts struck a nerve:

I sat there looking around and heard things like:  

1) Facebook has a very liberal workforce. Has Facebook considered diversity in their hiring practice? The country is 2% Mormon. Maybe Facebook’s company should better reflect that reality.  

2) Maybe Facebook should consider a six-month training program to help their biased and liberal workforce understand and respect conservative opinions and values.  

3) We need to see strong and specific steps to right this wrong.  

It was like affirmative action for conservatives. When did conservatives start demanding quotas AND diversity training AND less people from Ivy League Colleges... 

What happened to us? When did we become them? When did we become the people who demand the Oscars add black actors based on race?

"What happened to us?" Oh Glennda, where have you been? Conservatives are constantly demanding affirmative action, and have been for years. They want affirmative action on Ivy League faculties. They want affirmative action in the mainstream media. They want affirmative action in Hollywood. And so on. Whenever they don't dominate a field, they shriek and wail that it's because they're being oppressed by all-powerful liberals.

And the funny part is, what's really going on is they just can't compete in those marketplaces. If conservatism were what everyone wanted, then they wouldn't need to force Harvard to hire more wingnut professors -- they could just put a little more money in the marketing budgets of Bob Jones, Liberty University, and various other Bible colleges, and watch them become the new Ivy League. This solution to the "Academic Discrimination against Conservatives" that guys like David French of National Review complain about is obvious, indeed self-evident, and completely consonant with supposed free-market values -- surely the Invisible Hand will reward wingnut schools over socialist ones? -- yet they never even bring it up for some reason.

Same's true with Facebook. Why are conservatives blubbering over their underrepresentation on this corrupt liberal social media site they hate so much, anyway? Hasn't the current crisis alerted The People to Facebook's communist provenance? And since The People are with the Right, surely they'll abandon these commie sites toot suite for rightwing ones. Look, here's Freedombook -- which started as Reaganbook and came back in 2014 with its new, freedom-loving name. Since America loves conservatism, surely citizens must be abandoning Facebook in droves -- especially now that they know it's prejudiced against the comedy stylings of Steve Crowder! -- and flocking to Freedombook. Yet I haven't been reading about this new social media phenomenon,  even in National Review and Commentary. Why not?

Because they know it's bullshit, that's why not. Yet everyone, including Zuckerberg, indulges them, because it's easier to make believe they have legitimate grievances than to tell them, "If you don't like it, fuck off to Freedombook and see how far you get," and bear their tantrums afterward. Sigh! This political correctness will be the death of us all.

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.

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?

HE MAY BE A FOOL, BUT HE'S YOUR FOOL.

Now that the Republican Presidential front-runner has anted up his bigotry, conservatives are trying harder to disown him. But it really cuts against their grain. When Trump proposed keeping Muslims out of the U.S., David French had just put up a post at National Review all about how dangerous Muslims are -- the title, in fact, is "Dispelling the ‘Few Extremists’ Myth – the Muslim World Is Overcome with Hate." Among the choice bits:

...jihadists represent the natural and inevitable outgrowth of a faith that is given over to hate on a massive scale, with hundreds of millions of believers holding views that Americans would rightly find revolting... 

To understand the Muslim edifice of hate, imagine it as a pyramid — with broadly-shared bigotry at the bottom, followed by stair steps of escalating radicalism... 

The base of the pyramid, the most broadly held hatred in the Islamic world, is anti-Semitism, with staggering numbers of Muslims expressing anti-Jewish views... 

The next level of the pyramid is Muslim commitment to deadly Islamic supremacy. In multiple Muslim nations, overwhelming majorities of Muslims support the death penalty for apostasy or blasphemy...

Etc. To be fair, he stops short of calling them vermin. If you said something like this about Christians, French would file a hate-crime complaint. You can imagine some goon reading this and thinking Shee-it, them Muslims sound awful, I better vote for Trump an' keep 'em all out!

But today French is trying to distance himself from Trump. Not on the grounds of their mutual beliefs, mind you -- French reiterates that "it’s foolish to admit a class of refugees when we know the world’s leading terror army is attempting to infiltrate the displaced masses or recruit from their ranks." But the ones that are here already, they can stay, French says -- and we can let in a small, select group of "good" Muslims, such as "interpreters who’ve laid down their lives to serve our warriors downrange... members of allied militaries who are training to be the Muslim 'boots on the ground,'" et alia. Everyone else can go die in the sea.

Oh, then he talks about what a menace political correctness is. Which is weird, because he and they are really just waiting to put in a nominee who can be as racist as Trump but keep his mouth shut about it.

UPDATE. As has become his habit of late ("We Didn't Start The Fire: Who Created Trump?"), Matt Lewis of The Daily Caller emerges again to tell us that Trump's strong support among Republicans is bad for Republicans, especially when they were getting so pumped up denouncing Obama after his pro-reason terrorism speech:

Yesterday, the media cycle was focused on radical Islamism and President Obama’s inability to counter it. Today, Donald Trump has changed the subject. But it’s not just that. Yesterday, the view that radical Islamism was a serious threat that President Obama has not taken seriously (polling backs this up) was a persuasive mainstream position that evoked sympathy and agreement. Today, it’s marginally harder to make that argument.

Now when Ralph Peters calls Obama a pussy, people will think we're intemperate! At the end Lewis admits Trump will probably get a boost from his statements -- another case of Republicans being unfairly made to look bad by other Republicans!

UPDATE 2. At The Federalist, Ben Domenech:

It is no accident that President Obama’s America has given rise to Donald Trump.

It defies explanation, but I'll try: Everyone thinks Obama's a failure and hates him (never mind showing Domenech polls that suggest otherwise, those are all run by liberals), and "our modern elites respond to that rational distrust by smearing it as vile hatred, which further divides and toxifies our politics." In other words, if you point out that their argument is wrong, that just makes Republicans more insane and racist -- so it's all your fault! "And Trump is a perfect personality to exploit these divides," Domenech goes on, "offering the promise of an authoritarian who represents the people in place of an authoritarian who represented the elites." I hope you're proud of yourself, liberals!

Like the rest of our subjects, Domenech basically agrees with Trump; he, too, thinks Muslims are toxic and "elites" are losing the War on Whatchamacallit with their "tolerance" bullshit ("Republicans have spent much of the past three years wringing their hands over how to win the white working class – Donald Trump is showing them how: by confronting and rejecting the values and authority of the elites..."). But he got the Trump-bad memo, so he portrays Trump as a menace while embracing his message. Look, it's at The Federalist -- it's not like it has to make sense.

UPDATE 3: You see this shit:

"The author advises Marco Rubio’s campaign for president." Presumably he advises on non-sequential thought, because his column is just the usual rightwing froth crowned with an "if it weren't for Joel Grey singing 'Wilkommen' there'd have never been a Hitler" assertion. And actually that's not new either: Conservative factota have been trying to blame Trump on Obama, or draw parallels between the two men, since Trump became the front-runner, and because they've saturated their little world with this false equivalence, there's no longer any reason to even pretend to back it up with evidence.

UPDATE 3. What have I been telling you people.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP....

...at least until advertisers get it pulled. This one's sort of a recap, since the column was down for a year, and assesses the behavior of the conservative movement and the GOP's Unholy Three in light of the Umpqua shooting.

UPDATE. Thanks, all, for your generous comments.

As to the mainstreaming of Trump to which I allude in the column, National Review has just provided an excellent example. NR is in the main anti-Trump and the feature article by Ramesh Ponnuru and Rich Lowry is, too, sort of  -- but what large concessions they make to him:

But while Trump is not a conservative and does not deserve conservatives’ support, Republicans can nonetheless learn from him. Most politicians cannot hope to match Trump’s flair for the dramatic and should not try to compete with him in displays of narcissism or contempt. But politicians have been known to cultivate excitement and glamour — think of Reagan, or Bill Clinton, or Obama. These qualities have been missing from Republican politics for a long time. Republicans could, without going the full Trump, stand to be a little less apologetic and defensive under media criticism.

But didn't the Republicans already have someone "less apologetic and defensive under media criticism" -- i.e. a practiced asshole -- in Chris Christie? There's a reason Trump displaced Christie, and the authors' confusion about this is evident in the paragraphs just before and just after this one. First:

Trump responds to this kind of criticism by casting himself as a brave dissenter from political correctness. Here, too, he discredits a worthy cause. Conservatives and some honorable liberals have stood up against the oversensitivity and censorship of legitimate political viewpoints that has spread from college campuses over the last three decades. Trump appears to confuse simple decency with PC. Republicans should not embrace this confusion by cheering him on.

But they are cheering him on, possibly because they too "confuse simple decency with PC" and don't appreciate either, but certainly because they appreciate Trump's panache -- which is where he blows Christie away: Christie at least makes a feint at being interested in the non-vendetta aspects of governance -- Trump clearly doesn't give a shit, and that's much of his charm, as it were, for the Republican voters who endorse him. This is a point that Lowry and Ponnuru sail right past in a later paragraph:

For weeks, Trump simultaneously stayed on top of the polls and promised to raise taxes on rich people. His eventual proposal on taxes bore no resemblance to that promise, which is a good thing: The federal government needs to slim down, not be given more sustenance. But the fact that Trump’s polling did not suffer even a modest drop after his soak-the-rich comments should tell other Republicans that the priorities of the donors they meet at fundraisers are not the same as those of the voters whose support they need. Cutting taxes is generally desirable, but Republicans need not base all their economic and budget policies on slashing tax rates on the highest earners.

They're pretty much admitting that it's all about bullshitting the electorate and making them like it. But Lowry and Ponnuru are so bought into the conservative program that there's no trace of the nod and wink that would have humanized their own bullshit. Clearly Trump still has much to teach him!

ROOTING FOR INJURIES, PART 329.

One of the creepier developments in the right-blogosphere has been the emergence of a group of white supremacist online losers who think the conservative establishment isn't racist enough; they throw around the word "cuckservative" and get excited when it is repeated even in disgust or derision, because it means attention; naturally they're big fans of Donald Trump. By and large the group has been disowned by the better-known conservative bloggers, who try to steer their readers away from the group, much as Dorian Gray tried to keep people from seeing the picture in his attic.

"Better-known conservative bloggers" and "white supremacist online losers" are not exactly huge constituencies, so any publicity bump for the controversy, however modest, was bound to stir the shit, and under cover of Labor Day Weekend Jonah Goldberg spoke against Trump and by implication his fringier fans -- Stormfront versus stormfart, as it were. Whether Goldberg speaks from conviction or because David Koch held a gun to his head, his nerves are evident. Goldberg doesn't get into the racist stuff, probably because he realizes that, given his own history, he would be laughed off the face of the earth if he tried to claim that particular high ground, so he reminds people that Trump used to be pro-choice, and that he's ill-mannered. Apparently intuiting how little this would mean to anyone,  he embraces martyrdom for the Cause:

...I am tempted to believe that Donald Trump’s biggest fans are not to be relied upon in the conservative cause. I have hope they will come to their senses. But it’s possible they won’t. And if the conservative movement and the Republican party allow themselves to be corrupted by this flim-flammery, then so be it. My job will be harder, my career will suffer, and I’ll be ideologically homeless (though hardly alone). That’s not so scary. Conservatism began in the wilderness and maybe, like the Hebrews, it would return from it stronger and ready to rule...

Oh, sphincter up, Mary, one wants to tell Goldberg -- you're a legacy pledge and your Mom will never let you miss any of your dozen daily meals.

Anyway the white supremacists let up a collective shriek and in their Laboratories of Butch developed a nice new hashtag: #NRORevolt, meant to signal their displeasure with Goldberg and the entire rotten establishment. The tweets, like the one reproduced below, have the belligerent yet wounded tone of a 10-year-old boy telling his G.I. Joe doll to go gut-stab his mother in vengeance for his time-out.

Feel the momentum! The mainstream conservatives are mad, but what can they do? After years of throwing boob bait, they find the boobs fording the moat and don't know how to send them back. Some, like The Weekly Standard's Jim Swift, try to portray these white supremacists as just like liberals:

Like a right-wing bastard child of Occupy Wall Street and Anonymous, #NRORevolt was popular among the nom-de-plume crowd on Twitter (i.e. cowards). Like OWS, it didn’t have much in the way of stated goals, other than outrage/revolt. But hey, when you have former Enron Adviser Paul Krugman agreeing, what else do you need?

That last bit refers to a column in which Krugman calls Trump "exactly the ignorant blowhard he seems to be" and his platform in general "viciously absurd," but allows that the idea of taxing the rich, which Trump happens to share, isn't bad. For the equally tendentious Occupy Wall Street and Anonymous references, Swift doesn't even have that much of a fig leaf. I know partisanship requires a certain willing suspension of disbelief, but does Swift really think anyone attracted to this Aryan Little-Brotherhood is going to be scared off by the taunt that it will make him look like a liberal?

The fleurs du mal are getting more pungent by the day. Here's something from Taki's Magazine -- a guy complaining about the "faux 'anti-PC' bravery of many conservatives" including... Mark Steyn. Wow, you may be thinking, he's calling out Mark Steyn -- this guy must be really hardcore anti-PC! Buddy, you don't know the half of it:

So here’s the bigger point I’m trying to make. My example proves the emptiness of the braggadocio you hear from many conservative pundits about how fearless they are in the face of political correctness: “Mexican immigrants are rapists. Palestinians are a death cult. Black Americans owe whites a ‘debt’ for being enslaved and then freed” (a gem from David Horowitz, an original FOA member). “Women in higher education will lead to the ‘abolition of man.’ White women need to breed more to overcome an invasion of uncivilized darkies. ‘Sodomites’ are waging ‘gayhad’ against straight people. Offended? Get over it, Mr. Sensitive. We’re being brave and audacious and in-your-face! Oh, but just don’t say anything that might be offensive to Jews. That’s crossing the line. Hey, look how quickly we found our sensitivity!”

I should tell you that the author is David Cole, best known for his unorthodox ideas about the Holocaust ("'The best guess is yes, there were gas chambers' he says. 'But there is still a lot of murkiness about the camps...'"). Now he's complaining that Mark Steyn and David Horowitz are too PC. The old curse may have been mistranslated: Maybe our enemies really wish for us to live in hilarious times.

WHAT, THOSE PEOPLE USE THE INTERNET TOO?

Michael C. Moynihan, formerly of Reason (the magazine, not the capacity for consciously making sense of things, obviously), goes blar har over the latest political correctness:

His buddies concur: "Good grief. How about 'might not contain the same views as yours. Go ahead and listen; stretch your personal envelope,'" "What, did someone in the program use a gender-specific pronoun or something?" etc.

You may recall that Buckley was a full-throated segregationist and white supremacist:

He didn’t stop there. In 1957, Buckley wrote National Review’s most infamous editorial, entitled “Why the South Must Prevail.” Is the white community in the South, he asked, “entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically?” His answer was crystal clear: “The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because for the time being, it is the advanced race.” Buckley cited unfounded statistics demonstrating the superiority of white over black, and concluded that, “it is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority.” He added definitively: “the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage.”

And this is from the WNYC broadcast descriptor:

During the question period [Buckley] endorses the concept of a "white backlash" if it means repudiating the views of such black leaders as Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Bayard Rustin.

Maybe these are the kind of sentiments that WNYC wanted to warn visitors about. Do these guys really think it's a bad thing if the website thinks some black kid might like a simple heads-up before opening a file from an advocate of "white backlash"? Probably -- I expect they think the Pure Food and Drug Act was a big statist nuisance too, depriving consumers of the freedom to discover poison in their food by eating it.

I'm not crazy about trigger warnings and other sissy evasions of rough and tumble public discourse, but if someone wants to warn Jews that Hitler's about to make his big pitch, or warn blacks that William F. Buckley is about to speak, I count that as elementary good manners.

UPDATE. In comments, Maclean's cultural critic Jaime Weinman reminds us of the trigger-warnings-avant-la-lettre that have appeared before old cartoons that feature pickaninnies and whatnot for many years now:

I'm pretty reflexively anti-PC (or anti-anti-anti-PC?) but I also think the most important thing above all is to keep stuff available and uncut, whether it's a cartoon or a radio interview. And I don't think people realize that the choice is between sending this stuff out in public with a warning and not sending it out at all.

"No longer politically or socially appropriate" is awkward phrasing, I admit, but then Warner Brothers' first try at a content warning for cartoons had Whoopi Goldberg walking out to warn us. They replaced this with a disclaimer card. It's a work in progress.

I can understand how the degradation of black people might be something some viewers (including black people) would want to avoid; I can also understand why some viewers would want to see the cartoons as they were meant to be presented, not shot full of censor-holes. (I should mention that syndicates also cut non-racial things out of cartoons, like Porky and Daffy's iron lung gag.) The warning seems a reasonable accommodation, but I can also understand how that lets libertarians out.

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.

IT'S ALWAYS PROJECTION.

Both at The Federalist -- first:

Farewell To Jon Stewart, The Left’s Donald Trump

and:

But Stewart is no more an honest newsman than, say, Donald Trump is a serious presidential candidate.

Meanwhile:

Jeb: Trump's rhetoric 'reminds me of Barack Obama'

Of course Bush is not smart enough to make this up himself -- earlier:

Marco Rubio Says Obama Is Like Trump

 No round-up of dumbasses would be complete without David Brooks:

...bumper-car politicians thrive. Bernie Sanders is swimming with the tide. He’s a conviction politician comfortable with class conflict...
The times are perfect for Donald Trump...

Over t'England they have a forthright Labour candidate and guess what:

Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn are two of a kind

The one thing wingnuts can't admit is that Trump is their own id monster, so they have to tell themselves and anyone else who'll listen that he's actually the same thing as other people they also don't like, for reasons that don't make any sense.

If this travesty goes on much longer the name "Donald Trump" will take its place with "9/11" and "political correctness" as terms that used to mean something but, thanks to overuse by conservatives as fake synonyms for "liberal," no longer mean anything at all.

UPDATE. Speaking of bullshit, Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds:

Trump’s rise is, like that of his Democratic counterpart Bernie Sanders...

They have so much in common. For one thing, Sanders "once wrote that women dream of gang rape," or at least his writings can be thus willfully misinterpreted. Plus Sanders is "an avowed socialist." Why, it's like they're twins -- no wonder you always see Sanders hanging around at Trump's casinos,  goosing the cocktail waitresses! Further, Reynolds says,

Trump and Sanders are just symptoms. The real disease is in the ruling class that takes such important subjects out of political play, in its own interest. As Angelo Codevilla wrote in an influential [?-ed] essay in 2010, today’s ruling class is a monoculture that has little in common with the rest of the nation...

Those of you familiar with Codevilla's and Reynolds' schtick will know their standard solution for this is the election of  rightwing Republicans -- a groovy anti-ruling-class revolution that surprising coincides with the goals of the RNC. (The "country party" of true sons of liberty, Codevilla writes, "in the short term at least... has no alternative but to channel its political efforts through the Republican Party." Trust us, comrades, once we cut taxes on the rich it's on to Jerusalem!) The Tea Party act with its knee-breeches and triconers has gotten a bit long in the tooth, though -- maybe this time they should cosplay 60s radicals instead, and march around dressed as members of S.W.I.N.E. What the hell, they're led by a tenured radical.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

I had the great pleasure and privilege to see Harold Prince's

stripped-down version of Candide on Broadway in 1974 and still 

appreciate its crispness, but I just love the original version of this song.  

•   I think I made the right choice to skip the debate and go see Loudon Wainwright III last night. He opened with "Double Lifetime" and "Heaven," which set the tone -- death and jokes! Wainwright seems to have repurposed some of his material from his Surviving Twin thing about fathers and sons -- in fact he not only prefaced some of his songs with bits from his father's Life magazine columns, he even performed one of those columns as a  comic monologue. I wanted more songs but it made an interesting point of comparision: LWII's stuff is pretty good for magazine work; it's well-crafted and has the old-fashioned, better sort of middle-class attitude toward the big issues -- that is, a becoming gratitude for one's privilege, and respect for the mysteries of love and death and the inadequacy of privilege before them. It strikes me that his son picked up some of that, and though he likes to be more irreverent and playful that's still his grounding. Which may really be the reason he never got to be a big star -- not because of the "novelty-store garlic gum" bitter surprise lyrics I blamed when I wrote about him years ago, but because his truths are literally old home truths, a hard sell to a pop music audience (unless of course you lie about the truths).  Concert highlights: A song for his upcoming Alaskan family boondoggle called "Meet the Wainwrights" ("Rufus used to be a tit man/Now he checks out pecs at the gym"), and a really good "Be Careful, There's a Baby in the House," a song that sounds pretty mature considering it debuted in 1971.

•   Tell you why else I think I made the right call: I saw the video clip where Donald Trump excuses calling women "fat pigs" on the grounds that "this country" doesn't have time for "political correctness," and I have to say he exceeds even my satirical gifts. I also see that the mainstream National Review conservatives, who were pissed when Trump began hogging attention, are starting to love him for it.  A month ago Jonah Goldberg was calling Trump a fraud -- now he says, "[Trump] makes the debates entertaining and his competitors look more serious and responsible -- what’s so bad about that?" which suggests that they could have gotten the same effect with the Iron Sheik, who I understand has a higher Q rating. Jim Geraghty crows that Trump "killed with that 'Only Rosie O’Donnell' line" (in re women as fat pigs); he's slightly more protective of Megyn Kelly, which is perhaps just his way of showing that there's no principle of chivalry at stake, he just like fat jokes about lib chicks. I wonder what election this is meant to win? These guys already had date rapists and gamergaters locked up. On the plus side, Ben Carson mentioned Alinsky, thereby alerting whatever normal people may have been watching to this weird conservative secret handshake, which ought to help them decide how seriously to take the Republican Party as presently constituted.

UPDATE. Gack:

"[Megyn Kelly] gets out and she starts asking me all sorts of ridiculous questions," Trump said in a CNN interview. "You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever"...

How will the Trumpenproletariat react? Let's see what Breitbart.com commenters have to say about it:

The more toffee-nosed cons protest: National Review's Charles C.W. Cooke sputters, "Trump has no attractive qualities at all. He's not a conservative, he's not a good politician, he's not eloquent, he has no experience." Which seems a harsh thing to say about his party's front-runner.