FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Charme pour les jours.
•   We have a new entry for the Children of Zhdanov files, those depressing attempts by conservative pencil-pushers to colonize the arts by just slapping a PROPERTY OF THE RIGHT label on any book, movie, or video game that titillates them. It's at National Review, which has published many prime examples of the form -- from John J. Miller's notorious "50 greatest conservative rock songs" to Jonah Goldberg's "there’s a profound conservatism to all great fiction." Suprisingly, this new one's not from Kyle Smith, their full-timer on this beat, but from Kevin D. Williamson, who has so many other ways to annoy you'd think he'd leave this to the pros.

The great works of art that appeal to the conservative sensibility rarely if ever are constructed as self-consciously conservative stories — propagandistic literature lends itself more readily to progressive causes, in any case.

I'm torn here between "please explain" and "no, wait, please don't."

What Coriolanus tells us about populism and mass politics is not true because it is conservative but conservative because it is true.

Coriolanus thinks he's more Roman than Rome and turns traitor, which may make you think of Donald Trump until you consider that his mommy eventually makes him be loyal instead, which he does knowing his new Volscians buddies will kill him for it. The play does exhibit a lot of contempt for democracy, which may be what Williamson is getting at, or maybe it's just a brain chemistry issue.

The relationship between the beautiful and the true helps to explain how it is that so many actual Communists in Hollywood’s golden age produced works that were moving, true, often patriotic, often speaking to religious faith, and in many cases profoundly conservative. They weren’t out to make something right-wing, but something great.

Ha ha, last laugh on you Dalton Trumbo, by being good at your job you were actually conservative all along, PSYCH.

I doubt very much that either Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead...

The few punters still reading relax. Oboy fun stuff, I bet that's rightwing too!

...is the product of an overwhelmingly conservative group of storytellers. (From what I can learn of the politics of the writers, that does not seem to be the case.) But both shows are obliged by the nature of their dramatic structures to consider the fundamental questions of politics, and both invite deeply conservative interpretations.

Deeply indeedly! Williamson tells us the zombie comic book show is explained by Murray Rothbard and "Mancur Olson’s idea of the state as a 'stationary bandit,'" and in the end democracy doesn't work. (A theme emerges!) The tits-and-lizards show, meanwhile, shows the "liberal" leader to be "incompetent" and the "power-mad megalomaniac" to be a great one, thus making "an implicit case for things like federalism and the separation of powers." Also tits, also lizards. Thus the fans are reassured: Everything they like -- tits, lizards, zombies, choc-o-muts ice c'eams -- is conservative.

•   BTW I released the bats, so to speak, on Thursday's edition of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, my mildly popular newsletter, so even non-subscribers can read it. I already told you this but I'm taking a cue from Ted Bates and hitting the USP (Subscribe! Cheap!™) hard and often. My fortune's assured!


•  Let's have a dash of Dreher, eh?

I know some conservatives who are closed-minded, bigoted, you name it — but I don’t know any conservatives who would refuse to be friends with someone because they are liberal. They must exist, but in general, the disposition to cast out the impure from one’s circle of friendship is something I have seen much more commonly among progressives. Let me be clear: I’m not talking about holding extreme views; that is common on both sides. I’m talking about the way one interacts with those on the other side. It has seemed to me that in general, people on the Left get a lot more wound up about politicizing social interaction, and treating people who hold opposing views as morally tainted, than people on the Right do...

This is a personal view, admittedly. It’s something I’ve noticed over the years.

Oh, I bet he has. It just might be everyone knows Dreher is a twerp, but conservatives tolerate him because he might be good for a few votes or to help usher in a theocracy, while liberals have no such motivation to put up with his nonsense.

A guess: because left-wing politics has become obsessed with questions of power and status, and that breeds a natural sense of personal insecurity. Leftists have forgotten that one can be wrong without being evil incarnate. And, when you perseverate over whether or not you feel “safe” in the presence of something or someone challenging, you cannot help but generate a neurotic politics.

It's hilarious that Dreher keeps going to that snowflakes-in-their-safespace well when his whole Benedict Option racket is that the homos and he-shes are persecuting him with their deviant sex and the godly must join him in WiFi monasteries to escape them.

A NOVEL THEORY.

Trump's interesting idea of appealing his not-yet-commenced impeachment to the Supreme Court inspired a little play at my newsletter, which I am unlocking for the general public, in which the President seeks the advice of a prominent TV attorney.

SHE'S STILL GOT IT!

Haven't looked in on White Working Class Whisperer Salena Zito for a while, let's scan her recent titles: "Beto O'Rourke: Late-term abortions are 'about women making their own decisions about their own body,'" "Can any 2020 Democrats speak Yinzer?" -- welp, sounds like the grift hasn't changed much. Let's look at her latest, entitled:

After Mueller, nobody has changed their views on Trump

Well, his poll numbers have dropped some, but not so much, so this is an arguable proposition at least. Let's see what she has to say:

If you voted for him, you are still thrilled and optimistic about the future. I outlined in the book I co-authored with Brad Todd, The Great Revolt, that election was never quite about Trump. Many of his voters saw with eyes wide open the man’s flaws and were voting heavily on concern for their communities and not necessary for themselves. 

Many who did not vote for Trump loathe him with the intensity of a white-hot rod poker prodding at their souls. Their hair is still on fire, and nothing in the world can extinguish it until he is out of the White House, preferably in handcuffs.

So if you voted for Trump you're not only still happy but also still have your "eyes wide open" and are the kind of Yinzer who'd vote for a flawed (i.e. scumbag) candidate because you put the needs of your community above your own (sounds like she's talking about all the JustTheTipTrump people); whereas if you didn't vote for Trump your hair is on fire and a white hot poker is prodding at your soul, which is appropriate because you're damned. Then she goes on about journalists, who are even more depraved:

Reporters marvel at [Trump] voters’ unwillingness to give up on a struggling town to move to a larger city or region, never understanding that these voters often happily trade a higher paying salary or a career with bonuses in another city to stay in a community where they have deep roots.

You city slickers may have soap and toothpaste, but my meth dealer and me went to kindergarten together! In case you were wondering what this tirade against the effete ways of people who live in big tall buildin's has to do with Mueller, Zito explains:

Which brings us back to this: Nothing has changed since Election Day 2016, because everything had changed for the C-suite influencers that control our culture, politics, entertainment, big tech, and news consumption. They chose to ignore the signs — or, in their arrogance, just missed what was in plain sight for decades. 

The fusion of conservatives and populists who make up the Trump coalition that placed Trump in the White House will continue long after whatever date the president leaves office. And despite the efforts of the press, and despite Trump’s own actions, the Trump coalition is unlikely to change their minds, because the only alternative is an elite that paints them as a villainous segment of our society.

In other words, us happy Trumpkins would vote for him if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue, or sold America out to the Russians, because you sissies think yer sumpin' better'n us! I marvel there are enough people who would identify with this stuff who can also read it, but I suppose between her colleagues in the propaganda industry and hate-readers such as myself, she manages to make her quota. Once again Trump is putting Americans back to work!

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."

IMPEACH OR GET OFF THE POT.

As far as I can tell, the argument in favor of impeachment is that Trump told some of his goons to commit crimes for him, and the argument against is that most of the goons were either too smart or too dumb to commit those crimes for him.

Speaking of the latter argument (and "too dumb" in general), Andrew Sullivan:

As for Putin’s deep enmeshment with Trump, I found the following anecdote from the report rather apposite: “As soon as news broke that Trump had been elected President, Russian government officials and prominent Russian businessmen began trying to make inroads into the new Administration. They appeared not to have preexisting contacts and struggled to connect with senior officials around the President-Elect.” More: “Putin spoke of the difficulty faced by the Russian government in getting in touch with the incoming Trump Administration. According to Aven, Putin indicated that he did not know with whom formally to speak and generally did not know the people around the President-Elect.” I’m afraid this makes speculation that Trump has been a Soviet and Russian asset for decades or those who still insist on a conspiracy … well, not exactly in touch with reality.

The con man got into the White House, and in the chaos Putin couldn't find someone willing to take his "Congratulations on our successful theft of the election!" call -- to Sullivan, this means Trump's in the clear.

That Sullivan proceeds to an incoherent "He's innocent but let's impeach him because he's bad" argument  is typical of him -- his cunning has ever been to grasp that no one would call him on his bullshit; just as that cunning served him well in his career as Pete Buttigieg avant la lettre, it will serve him now because no one will force him to retreat from his facially bold decision by actually impeaching Trump.

Everyone's making speeches about it but to my mind it's just this: Trump is a scumbag whose band of Republican grifters are destroying the country. I understand and to some extent endorse the point that Trump's policy is just Republican policy on steroids, but those steroids are really making it worse, especially since, Trump being who he is, he isn't using them as a professional athlete using non-metaphorical steroids would to improve his performance, but merely to swell himself up and exacerbate his own 'roid rage.  

So we just have to get him out of there and at this point I'm no longer worried about political repercussions -- because what would those be? That if we acted like Republicans, Republicans will get mad? We might lose some votes in Fritters, Alabama? Fuck that. You want votes in the South, give us more Stacey Abrams and less George Wallace.

If the majority of elected Democrats who are acting like dogs confronted with an intriguing but frightening smell -- trying to get their noses as far forward and their tails as far back as possible --  can't understand that, then maybe they'll understand this: Soon enough, even their traditional grift -- roiling and shaking down the base with spooky Trump stories and doing fuck-all about it, then repeating the process -- doesn't work if nobody believes it, and at the moment, trust me, nobody believes it. AOC boycotting Pelosi's incumbency-protection racket is the thin end of the wedge.

Just pretending to fight back isn't going to work. And if you can't get the Senate to go along, so what?  It didn't do George W. Bush any harm. C'mon, earn your fucking paychecks.

I SHOUTED OUT, WHO BURNED DOWN NOTRE DAME/WHEN AFTER ALL IT WAS YOU HEATHENS' LACK OF SHAME!

The fire at Notre Dame in Paris is terrible and it's touching to read the tributes and outpourings of sorrow it has occasioned.  Of course there have been some absurd reactions too -- and some that go way beyond that:

Like James Poulos above, I cannot see this as anything other than a sign. The only church in all of Western civilization more important than Notre Dame de Paris is St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. The consuming fire is likely to have been started from a construction accident. I hope that is the case; if this was terrorism, then France is in for unimaginable spasms of violence. Nevertheless, if this was an accident, it still symbolizes what we in the West have allowed to happen to our religious and cultural patrimony. What happened in Paris today has been happening across our civilization. 

It happens whenever we fail to live out our baptism, and fail to baptize our children. It happens by omission, by indifference, and it happens by commission, from spite. It happens in classrooms, in newsrooms, in shopping malls, in poisoned seminaries and defiled sacristies, and everywhere the truths that Notre Dame de Paris embodied are ridiculed, flayed, and destroyed in the hearts and minds of modern men. The fire that destroyed Paris’s iconic cathedral made manifest what we in the West have been doing to ourselves for over 200 years.

This may be the nuttiest thing Rod Dreher has ever written, and that, my friends, is saying something. At one point he compares the fire, as yet not proven to be anything but an accident, to 9/11. (He also keeps saying he hopes it's not terrorism, which, ha, we've all caught your act, guy.) Also:

For you in the West who are not religious, I hope you will reflect on what this cathedral meant in artistic, architectural, and cultural terms, and that you will think hard about what we are losing as we collectively repudiate our patrimony.

Me, I'm thinking about what we're losing when we collectively repudiate basic fire safety. It's like the inside of Dreher's head is a bad editorial cartoon where the spark that set the blaze is labeled "secular humanism." And I'm waiting for Peggy Noonan to tell us she saw "the face of the Evil One" rising in the smoke. Who knows, maybe even Trump will get with it and say something like, "Many people are saying that the devil actually set this fire, like it was Halloween. I don't know if they're right or not. Personally I think it was whatshisname, the guy in Venezuela we're supposed to go to war with."

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Of course John's my favorite Beatle,
but George is close behind.
•  I'm unlocking another edition of my newsletter Roy Edroso Breaks It Down (Subscribe! Cheap!), this one a transcipt of Stephen Miller's unheralded appearance before the House Judiciary Committee's White Nationalism hearing. Part of the inspiration was Candace Owens' appearance, which as Stephen A. Crockett Jr. reports was sort of a parody of the conservative attitude toward white nationalism (which is by far the biggest terror threat in the U.S. now) -- let's just get a black lady up there to say that it doesn't exist and you're the Real Racist™! If they can get away with this, I see no reason why Miller can't get away with his own Jew-channeling-Goebbels innovation.

•  One good thing we may be able to salvage from this administration, if we survive it, is permanent damage to the whole stupid idea that evangelicals have anything serious or beneficial to add to the national debate. Remember when Michael Gerson, George W. Bush's evangel whisperer, was the model for such people -- temporizing, pencil-necked, only gently pushing the authority of Our Lord & Savior for conservatism (and then only for the goody-goody parts)? Well, now it's the age of the Savage Messiah, baby, with goons like Franklin Graham excusing Trump's sins and getting Republicans to promote their popcorn propaganda for them in hearings. (I'm not going to see Unplanned, but look forward to the sequel Unplanned 3-D, in which the actors thrust bloody, dismembered fetus parts at the audience. Move over Paul Morrissey!)

I'm sure some Jesus freak has defended Trump's cage-and-boot immigration policy before, but Matthew Schmitz's offering at the godly First Things, "IMMIGRATION IDEALISM: A CASE FOR CHRISTIAN REALISM," strains itself to make it look like the Lord's will. Schmitz starts out lamenting how naive he was as a young man, and how he thought the manly men he worked with who "complained about 'illegals' taking American jobs" were bigots when really they were just expressing common-sense Christianity in earthier terms. Later Schmitz learned that, by applauding hard-working immigrants, "elites" like Barack Obama and Lin-Manuel Miranda "portray working-class Americans as violent, hateful, and incompetent. They revel in their suffering." Gotta choose who to feel sorry for: The whites or the browns. Guess which side Jesus is on? Thus people who want the kids caged and booted are The Real Christians.

Also the liberal elites are like the guys who didn't want to fight Hitler: "Sooner or later, even the most idealistic calls to welcome migrants must contend with hard reality," warns Schmitz. "In the run-up to World War II, men inside and outside the Church invoked the gospel to justify appeasement and pacifism..." We had to fight Hitler's SS, and now we must fight the army of cleaning ladies and day laborers who similarly threaten our country!

The whole thing's nuts, but this may be the keeper:

While advocating realistic and Christian migration policies, the Church must not forget that the most important migration is that of souls into heaven. In Exsul Familia Nazarethana, Pope Pius XII speaks of the need to “provide all possible spiritual care for pilgrims, aliens, exiles and migrants of every kind.” He praises the Church’s long history of care for migrants, including the Catholic colonizers of the New World. (Pius’s view is not easily reconciled with liberal pieties.) According to the Pew Forum, 19 percent of the foreign-born, Hispanic adults living in the United States have given up their Catholic faith—half before they arrived, half after. These are souls lost at sea, spiritual migrants stopped at the border between earth and heaven.

Apparently by letting immigrants into our fallen nation, soft-hearted liberals are causing them to lose their faith, thus condemning them to an eternity in Hell. Who's mean to immigrants now? So when Trump's immigration control people kick over water bottles so immigrants may die of thirst in the desert, they're really just sending them quicker to heaven!

We must never forget what monsters these people are.