NUTSY NAZI TIME.

It's turning into old home week at alicublog, and mainstays like Rod Dreher and The Federalist are always good for holiday cheer. But let us not sleep on Roger L. Simon, kingpin of the PJ Media empire, who in his occasional waddles to the mike always says something sensational, and this week is no exception:

Are Europe's 'Extreme Right' Parties Really So Extreme?

If you're curious to hear what Simon thinks of Jobbik's call for a ban on all immigration in Hungary, or of the overtly fascist Golden Dawn in Greece and People's Party in Slovakia, apologies, his handlers have steered him toward three more telegenic/less ostentatiously jackbooted entities: UKIP, which he thinks is all about "local democratic rule"; Geert Wilders, a notorious bigot but only against Muslims, hence MSM-friendly; and Germany's AfD, which has recently started slowly to de-Nazify itself, which may explain Simon's sangfroid ("my knowledge [of its extremism] is not first hand, but I am skeptical") -- or maybe he's heard that many of the new neo-Nazis are trending pro-Israel and figures, hey, let bygones be bygones.

So he doesn't see what's so Nazi about these guys -- but...

The irony of ironies may be that the true heirs to the Nazis are the Merkels of the world, not the AfD, etc. While not Hitler-like in mass murder and megalomania, not to mention all the master-race insanity...

(Because that's not the important part of Nazism.)

...they do share a background with the genocidal dictator -- socialism. The Nazis were the National Socialist Party.

Like Jonah Goldberg, Simon thinks libtards are the Real Fascists; unlike Goldberg, he doesn't even dimly perceive what a hash of that theory the election of Trump makes.

That Merkel is East German is not accidental.

Similarly, Trump can't be a fascist because like FDR he's a white American. Then, a kill-Mozzies close and it's off to his weekly fedora-reblocking. So much for linking arms against fascism, guys; guess we'll have to do it ourselves.

TODAY'S ASYLUM TOUR.

The kids at The Federalist are on fire lately, but I know you guys are busy with Christmas shopping and fighting the patriarchy and whatnot, so I boiled down a couple of their recent offerings for you:

2016: The Year The ‘Alt-Right’ Breached The Moral Quarantine On Racism. Robert Tracinski quotes himself on how the alt-right is the left’s fault because they accused less-racist-than-the-alt-right people of racism, sort of like how people who bring charges against burglars are responsible for Bernie Madoff because with their nitpicking they discredit the whole concept of theft. Tracinski is thus able to admit that his own party nominated and elected “a candidate whose entire campaign is penetrated by the Aryan Nation” because it’s neither his fault nor any skin off his ass.

It’s Going To Take Men With Guns To Stop The Suburban Deer Uprising. I’ll just quote John Daniel Davidson’s closing -- you can pretty much reverse-engineer it from there:

In any case, we’d all better get used to hunting and eating more deer. If not, we’d better get used to them crashing through our windows and breaking down our doors. The deer uprising has begun.

Now That Trump Is President, Can The Left Finally See How Much He Has To Offer Us? Sean Lester is a “member of the political left” who chooses to address “my own supposed half of the spectrum” at The Federalist because as the old saying goes, if you’re hunting for ducks you ought to go somewhere where all they ever do is bitch about ducks. Lester reminds liberals that Trump has gay friends, is anti-TPP etc., and not to worry about all his other stated intentions that horrify liberals because he’s “dishonest” (about the horrifying stuff, not gays and TPP — that you can trust him on). And to those worried about Trump’s nightmarish transition and cabinet picks, Lester says, “don’t ignore, however, that he brought on Elon Musk,” so if Trump destroys the planet you might be able to book a SpaceX ticket for Mars.

Dear MTV: Telling White Guys What To Do Just Provokes Racism. The Tranciski article run through the Urban Dictionary filter.

Maybe It’s Time To Redefine What It Means For Women To ‘Have It All.’ Grace Olmsted works, yes, but she’s a good mommy, as you can tell because she talks about how good a mommy she is, not like you bitches and skanks.

DREHER'S HAPPY FUN STORY TIME.

Oh brother:

Rod Dreher's Reader Mailbag feature is a fun object of contemplation. Sometimes I have no doubt the items are authentic, even when they're most fantastical -- as when he gave the floor to some guy in rural Pennsylvania who told readers his town was a BenOp paradise, with lots of churches and plenty of good manly work that you don't need a sissy degree to do -- "the biggest problem those factories face is not competition from Mexico or China, it’s a shortage of workers" -- and encouraged Christians of a certain persuasion ("we are CATHOLIC. The community demands it") to move there and, one is forced to conclude, join him in nightly mass self-flagellation frenzies to prepare for the day when The Leader calls on them to go to Philly and kill the unbelievers.

But there are some Dreher correspondents who I can't be sure are real -- like the "old friend" who called and said she and her son had been terrorized by potty-mouthed "obviously transgendered" men at a showing of Captain America: Civil War in Texas, of all places:

“Rod, I have gay and lesbian friends. I have a bi friend,” she said. “None of them behave like that. I’ve never seen anything like it. They were egging each other on. And the sense of rage coming off those people — it was evil. And here’s the thing: this was not in Austin, this was not in Deep Ellum [hipster Dallas neighborhood], this was in the far north suburbs. 

“This was not at the fringes. It’s in a town that’s home to three of the biggest churches in Texas!”

Was this person kidding? Was her story actually made up by Dreher, channeled by him while he was dressed like and talking in the voice of Norman Bates' mother? It's a tantalizing mystery.

But this Liberal Who's Had Enough, and whose alleged correspondence fills this current Dreher post, is something else. She says she's a "secular/agnostic Californian" whose "ex-Catholic mom loathes organized religion to this day," and describes herself as surrounded by "secular liberals"--

Almost everyone at my corporate law firm was a secular liberal. My California neighbors and friends are secular liberals, as are my fellow government lawyers. My mother, siblings, and their spouses are all secular liberals.

If this incantation suggests the groundwork for a conversion narrative to you, congratulations! As once we had the liberals who since 9/11 were outraged at Chappaquiddick, so now we have one who is saved by the grace of MAGA, her emotional pussy grabbed by The Leader:

But November 8 and its aftermath revealed to me that I am just so tired of these people. I can’t be like them, and I don’t want my kids turning into them.

Since that fateful day she has become sick of her liberal friends, family, and colleagues, of their "name-calling and virtue-signaling," of their "trendiness," of their "acceptance of vulgarity and sarcastic irreverence," -- indeed, of everything Rod Dreher excoriates from his pulpit every week. And now the metamorphosis:

That leads me to . . . drum roll . . . the Christian Right. It is no small feat, switching tribes. It feels stressful and weird to abandon your tribe for the Detested Other Side.

Since November 8, my husband and I have been taking the kids to church. (He is politically conservative with a religious bent, so no argument there.) I have come this close to buying a giant poster of the American flag for the living room. I may do it still.

We've all had that friend who was really into something -- maybe punk rock, maybe Sufism, maybe Morris dancing -- and then, one day, suddenly hated all those things and went the opposite way; like if they used to be into Bukowski, now they were obsessively reading Chesterton and C.S. Lewis, and had grown a shitty little beard and started smoking a Meerschaum.

That's my offhand psychological explanation. It's also possible that Dreher just made her up. Or it's a Dummy Trap: Someone else made it up and sent it in, knowing Dreher would read it and, his hands shaking, his eyes brimming with grateful tears, fall to his knees and cry to whatever God he's up to now Thank you [Your Name Here] for leading the lamb out of the liberal darkness! I shall repost it on my blog to glorify thy [Your Name Here]!  What do you think?

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...a miscellany of sorts, with no overarching theme other than stupidity.

I did get a little into the fake news stuff again. One of the things I left out was a rabbit hole I followed from a tweet by some dummy with a Breitbart icon on Twitter:  “BREAKING,” he cried, “Director Of WikiLeaks Just Found Dead, Cause ‘Undetermined…’” The linked story was datelined December 16 but the BREAKING news at Conservative Daily Post was from October: “Julian Assange’s lawyer,” they declared, “was mysteriously ‘killed’ late one evening when he stepped in front of a train ‘on accident’ at 3am in London.” They explained this with an internal link asserting that “ASSANGE NARROWLY MISSES DRONE ASSASINATION, THEY KILL HIS LAWYER INSTEAD.” (Look up “assange lawyer” on Google and you’ll find a lot of sites with names like Forbidden Knowledge' peddling the same innuendo.)

Conservative Daily Post added, “Now it is being reported that WikiLeaks director and founder of the Center for Investigative Journalism, Gavin MacFadyen, has died at age 76. As one can imagine, the cause of death has yet to be revealed, but this feels awfully suspicious…” — notwithstanding that the guy was 76 years old and, a quick visit to non-conspiracy news sites reveals, had lung cancer. Or is that just what they WANT you to believe? In any case, the Macedonian clickwheel rolls on.

As for Trump's "unpresidented" spelling, I see the Christian Science Monitor has enlisted some schooly types to tell us no no dear boy, you must understand the rabble love when he spells poorly:

"His base is not stupid. His base is just sick and tired of being told [what to think] by what they call 'the elite' and I’ll call 'the political system,'" she adds, grouping academics and mainstream-media players with members of the political establishment. "So he’s meeting their expectations and violating ours"...

"We always interpret our friends in the best possible light, and we interpret our enemies in the worst possible light," [a schooly type] tells the Monitor in a phone interview Sunday. Those who are inclined to mock Trump do so, and those who are inclined to support him see evidence that his Twitter presence is really him, with immediacy and charisma, and without experts filtering through what he's saying.

What do you want, good government or good taste? This is maybe good instruction for operatives trying to Jedi-mind-trick the voters into voting non-fascist, and perhaps Democratic nominee Honey Boo-Boo will sweep in 2020 with the slogan "I don't know nothin' 'bout nothin'." But we who have free souls, it touches us not; my only obligation to this disintegrating Republic is to remind the citizens within my signal that rich con men have been playing dumb for years and it usually doesn't work out for their marks.

WHATEVERTRUMP.

Jonathan Chait has noticed (as I have) that a lot of the old NeverTrump guys have rolled on their backs and peed in submission to The Leader. National Review writers in particular were, back in the day, writing columns like "Is Trump a Double Agent for the Left?" and filling entire issues with demands that he be stopped, but even before the election began extending feelers ("He is a demagogue, but he might be our demagogue") and are now wholly bought in.

Some of the NR guys are crabbing about it. Kevin D. Williamson complains that Chait tied their movement to Ayn Rand, which is absurd because Rand's for babies -- mature wingnuts go for Charles Murray. Also, God: "Actual conservatives are more likely to be found in church, where, among other things, they exercise the philanthropic impulse in community." (Trump goes to church too, and even tried to drop money in the collection plate at least once, so I guess he's as philanthropic as Wilbur Ross and Kevin D. Williamson. Also, doesn't he have some sort of foundation?) Williamson does not otherwise describe the intellectual pedigree of modern conservatism, but judging from the insults with which he peppers his essay he might have named Don Rickles.

Better still is Charles Two Middle Initials Cooke, who has apparently been working on his House Englishman routine:

Here’s a fun theory, courtesy of New York magazine’s resident apparatchik, Jonathan Chait: Because they are devotees of the work of Ayn Rand, Donald Trump’s critics have begun to shut up.

I shan’t attempt to explain how ineluctability silly is this contention...

Oh, you shan't, shan't you? He goes on toffee-nosing like this ("I have seen it expressed elsewhere and think it needs nipping in the bud") for some time, but eventually has to get down to the real bullshit:

In order to answer these questions, one has to reiterate what exactly the Never Trump position entailed, as well as remember that it was never a pledge to reject conservatism or to join the Left on the barricades. Rather, it was a description that was applied to those rightward-leaning figures who believed that Donald Trump was a poor choice as the GOP’s nominee, and that he was an unfit candidate for president. Although I rarely used the term myself, it did apply to me as a practical matter: Throughout the primaries and the general election, I argued that Donald Trump was (a) an immoral man, ill-suited to the office of the presidency; (b) a political opportunist, likely to pursue policies that would seriously damage conservatism in the long run; and (c) a wannabe authoritarian who shouldn’t be trusted with power. As a result, I both opposed his nomination during the primaries and concluded during the general that I could not back somebody so manifestly unsuited to his coveted role.

Quite obviously, Trump’s victory rendered much of this moot — not, of course, because his victory has altered his character or because his success has impelled reconciliation, but because the role of Trump’s critics has by necessity been changed...

Go read the rest if you like, but it comes down to this: NeverTrump didn't mean NeverTrump, it meant UnlessHeWinsTrump, in which case he's like any other Republican, which is to say mostly dandy.

You may compare this posture to the conduct of Evan McMullin -- who was sufficiently NeverTrump to mount an insurgent campaign against him and, unlike many of his fans from that time, continues to kick both Trump and the Trumpified Republican Party in the ass. McMullin seems to have a different idea of NeverTrump than Cooke, based on principle and the plain meaning of words.

CE N'EST PAS UNE MAJORITÉ POPULAIRE.

Hillary Clinton's popular vote margin is now tallied at 2.8 million and rising -- which only counts in horseshoes, of course, but with the prospect of a possible Manchurian Candidate and definite buffoon as President the fact does rather cast an ironic pall. So many conservatives nervously downplay her higher total, with Michael Barone alone first saying it doesn't count because of California, then because it's all just coastal states.  (This was also the heart of Breitbart's "DONALD TRUMP WON 7.5 MILLION POPULAR VOTE LANDSLIDE IN HEARTLAND" analysis. Apparently proximity to a Kroger or a meth lab makes your vote count extra.)

At PJ Media, Brian Boyer has a novel approach:

Let me make a bold statement: There is a reasonable chance that Hillary Clinton would not have won under a "popular vote" system, even though it seems clear that she currently has about two million more votes than President-elect Donald Trump. That's because the “popular vote” the media keeps talking about is not representative of what the popular vote would actually look like without the Electoral College. In fact, I believe that the Electoral College is actually skewing the “popular vote” in favor of Democrats.

I'll spare you: Republican turnout was low in California because they had no hope of winning ("Under the Electoral College system, if you are a Republican in California, why bother to vote? California’s 55 electoral votes are going blue whether or not you cast a ballot"); if those GOP voters were in a situation where their vote counted, they'd have come out of the woodwork in droves. Boyer doesn't explain why this same syndrome doesn't apply to Democrats in Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, etc. Maybe it's because Republicans are sensitive flowers who would rather hide in the cellar than face the prospect of defeat. Another reason why they should get extra credit for voting!

But out of all of them Kevin D. Williamson of National Review has my favorite bit:

Who lost (“lost”) the popular vote (“popular vote”) is irrelevant for all sorts of reasons. For one thing, it doesn’t have anything to do with the outcome of the election. For another, it doesn’t, strictly speaking, exist. We don’t have a popular presidential vote, or a campaign for that vote.

If only he'd had the balls to say that arithmetic itself is merely a concept by which we measure our pain! I have to say Trump's solution is more elegant -- he just says he won in a landslide. But then he has no need to convince people he's an intellectual.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Russian hack revelations and the rightblogger response, which is basically that MSM is "fake news" because Dan Rather so you can only trust PatriotButtMunch.com which sez TRUMP RULES. I'm not sure how much to trust an unsupported CIA claim myself, but I will say the folks calling this McCarthyism are way off -- back in the day, people got called Russian dupes for advocating civil rights and a nuclear freeze, not for arranging for the Soviets to make mad bank -- ask Armand Hammer! -- and publicly begging Stalin to spy on their opponents

I sort of wanted to work in an example of those bogus sites and was looking at PRNTLY: AMERICA’S TOP NEWS SITE -- specifically a post headlined “93% say Global Warming is #FakeNews, Liberals freak out as Trump picks oil CEO as Sec of State." Author (or as Philip Bump would say "apparent author") Shelby Carella writes, "a new poll out conducted online show that only 7% of voters actually believe in the fake news story of Global Warming.” I couldn't find a reference to or evidence of any such poll, but I suspect he means one of PRNTLY's own (catch those collateral clicks!): “It appears that by meeting with Leonardo DiCaprio, and Al Gore, Trump was opening up to environmentalist wacko logic, and was open to falling for the Global Warming shell game,” continues Carella. “To quote our New President? WRONG… Trump just humiliated every wacko environmentalist in US by meeting with Gore, then picking Pruitt.” (That would be Scott Pruitt, The Leader’s EPA pick. Wasn't the headline about Tillerson? Forget it, he’s rolling.) Carella finally suggests readers buy “The Perfect Christmas Gift: Trump 45 Hat,” and “share this story the media does not want you reading." Your rage- and dementia-addled grandma will be glad you did!

Also, I tried at one point to access a Joe Hoft story (yeah, he's still got his brother/alias on the payroll) at another site that was carrying it, teaparty.org; when I did so, I got a popover announcing “Donald Trump with Dr. OZ ‘This tiny pill gave me the mental and physical stamina that won me this election.’” In this ad Trump was alleged to have told Dr. OZ that “the brain is like a muscle, you got to work it out and use supplements just like body builders use, but for your brain…” It's fun to imagine Trump saying this, but even more fun to imagine it said by the guy it's elsewhere attributed to: Stephen Hawking.

Speaking of which, I see John Bolton is suggesting the alleged Russia hack was a "false flag" operation by Obama. False flag! Next he'll tell us about the chemtrails. Can't wait to see Bolton guest-host for Alex Jones, especially if he tries to make the same ridiculous faces.