This hot take on Bernie took me a week to complete. What the fuck was I smoking?
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Posts Tagged David Brooks
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Jordan Peterson’s, the far right’s savior du jour, loses his shit, but why does he have shit to lose in the first place? Find out in my latest hot take!
And hey, look who’s the topic of the conversation again? It’s me!! This time its The Brotherhood of Evil Geeks who realized how important I am!
Conservatives Lament Not Liquidating the White Race
Last week was  blistering  for the Republicans. The withdrawal of Marco Rubio from the race for President means that the contest is now between a man whose face could curdle milk, a bowl of soggy Cheerios…and Him. The true horror of Trump is finally sinking in.
Actually, “sinking in†is too generous a term. Trump is now like Wilfred Brimley in The Thing, shoving his fingers through the soft tissue of the Republican Party’s face, making their flesh one with his.
This passing of the era of dignified politics has led to numerous finger-pointing dispatches from the Establishment, a sub-genus of the Republican party that didn’t even know it had a name until the Trump campaign turned its habitat into a brownfield.
For David Brooks, the Week the Music Died arrived with this revelation: there are economic classes apart from the one he inhabits! And guess what? They vote! David has promised to investigate this phenomenon further in the years to come, and will report on his findings in his upcoming book Bobos of the Apocalypse, which will be completed just before he is strapped to the hood of an armored Crown Victoria and driven across the desert at 80 miles per hour.
Politically ever-so incorrect conservative Ben Shapiro is now a #NeverTrump after parting ways with the hack news site Breitbart.com, for whom he has served as a writer and editor. Ben laments that the website—the creation of the late, fumigating Andrew Breitbart—has abandoned its mission of declaring anyone with a camera phone and a hatred for feminist theory majors a â€journalistâ€, and has instead become Donald Trump’s official fluffer. Breitbart’s response to Ben’s resignation? A Trump-worthy defamation.
Meanwhile, Right wing goblin Ben Stein is prepared to blame any future Trump triumphs on blacks (as he is prepared to do for almost any catastrophe short of an outright sharknado). Ben declares himself “terrified†of Trump, all the more so because, as he puts it, every Black Lives Matter protester who shows up at a Trump event puts a thousand more white bigots into Trump’s column. Still, Ben vows to continue to support his party against Hillary, who he still finds more frightening than Trump, a man who has boasted that he can simply order China to assassinate Kim Jong Un (perhaps by threatening to waterboard Bei Bei the panda).
Meanwhile, Trump gleefully grinds his boot into the face of any Beltway Menshevik who still defies him, George Will and Charles Krauthammer being favorite targets. And in the wake of the most recent primary results, Krauthammer, who blew the call repeatedly during the rise of Trump, has conceded the man’s dangerous unpredictability. Poor Chuck. A lifelong Reaganite, he can’t even sit by the old man’s grave to speak to him anymore, as Ronald Reagan’s spinning corpse has reportedly bored its way down to the kingdom of the Mole Men.
But the “Golden Load in the Pants” trophy for last week’s biggest shit fit clearly belongs to Kevin D. Williamson of National Review, who blasted the traitorous scum of conservatism as though he were imbued with Cyclops’ eye lasers. It’s truly must-read stuff.
In sticking it to the ersatz conservatives of the fruiting Trump movement, Williamson shows just how interchangeable the right’s enemies can be. For example, conservatives often accuse liberals of needing the tender grip of some Stalinist state to complete them, but Kevin finds that The Donald fits the bill for Republicans just as nicely as Uncle Joe does for Democrats.
It is easy to imagine a generation of young men being raised without fathers and looking out the window like a kid in an after-school special, waiting for Daddy to come home.
Many of them slip into harmless Clark Griswold–ism, trying to provide for their own children the ideal families they themselves never had. But some of them end up grown men still staring out that window, waiting for the father-führer figure they have spent their lives imagining, the protector and vindicator who will protect them, provide for them, and set things in order.
This vainglorious delusion about what makes a blue collar American tick is exactly the tone-deafness that David Brooks only just caught on to. Matt Taibbi diagnosed the same malady in a recent Rolling Stone piece.
What these tweedy Buckleyites at places like the Review don’t get is that most people don’t give a damn about “conservative principles.” Yes, millions of people responded to that rhetoric for years. But that wasn’t because of the principle itself, but because it was always coupled with the more effective politics of resentment: Big-government liberals are to blame for your problems…But the fact that lots of voters hated the Clintons, Sean Penn, the Dixie Chicks and whomever else, did not, ever, mean that they believed in the principle of Detroit carmakers being able to costlessly move American jobs overseas by the thousands.
This insight will continue to lay beyond the grasp of many conservatives. It certainly eludes Kevin, who goes on to rip the lungs out of working class whites in a spittle-flecked rant worthy of the one Hitler delivered in Downfall:
The problem isn’t that Americans cannot sustain families, but that they do not wish to…The white middle class may like the idea of Trump as a giant pulsing humanoid middle finger held up in the face of the Cathedral, they may sing hymns to Trump the destroyer and whisper darkly about “globalists†and — odious, stupid term — “the Establishment,†but nobody did this to them. They failed themselves…the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America….The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die.
By the end of Williamson’s ejaculation there are only two things left for him to do: marry Eva Braun and blow his brains out. Given his snobbery, I dearly hope he avails himself of the latter.
The collected greying temples at National Review, The American Spectator, The Weekly Standard, et al., are being rubbed raw these days as the smartest minds of the Op-Ed page try to figure out which part of their governing equation didn’t account for Trump. Perhaps, no…did we fail to correctly balance the stagnation of wages and lead in the drinking water with enough cheap flat screen TVs?
Little did they realize that one day a billionaire jack-o’-lantern would break ranks and reveal the Establishment’s dirty little secret to the Republican base: their party also, not just the “Demoncratsâ€, were the ones who sent the choicest grunt work over to China (or, as the pumpkin king himself says it, to “CHY-NAH!â€).
For eight years the Republican party put all their chips on doing nothing but holding the nation hostage after America’s first black president arrived two centuries ahead of schedule. They are just now discovering that even white Republicans expect to escape their thirties with a job that doesn’t involve piloting a cash register.
Ben Shapiro’s Tasteless Post-Mortem on Trayvon Martin
I recently listened to an episode of The Ben Shapiro Show, a podcast hosted by the eponymous Shapiro, a right-wing columnist and B-lister in the Republican chattering class. Here’s Ben dropping his conservative balls on the table for all to admire:
I’m about as politically incorrect a fellow as is in American politics. I’m the guy who Tweets out on Trayvon Martin’s birthday, when the left is deifying him, that Trayvon Martin wouldn’t be dead if he hadn’t beaten a man’s head into the ground then gotten himself shot.
While you pause to fill Ben’s name in on your “Hero of the Year” ballot, please note that this boast was meant to illustrate the difference between ‘principled’ political incorrectness and mere vulgarity. Someone this benighted probably thinks Human Centipede is the sequel to A Bug’s Life.
At 32, Ben’s trademark is his reputation as one of the youngest pundits on the hard right, a reputation he seems to be trying to shake as he tours America’s college campuses delivering anti-PC screeds that inveigh against America’s “spoiled childrenâ€.
The effect is almost comical given Ben’s appearance. His face is like Leonardo DiCaprio’s, unable to shake its adolescence even with the help of thick, Mephistophelean eyebrows. When he speaks from the podium with his rapid, nasal voice he strikes you as an aggressive student council president; half Tracy Flick, half Damien Thorn.
As with most conservatives, Ben’s implied moral hygiene is an ill fit with the common tongue. In that same episode of his podcast Ben laced into NYT columnist David Brooks for being a chardonnay-sipping moderate, stating that if the Republican base could speak as one to Brooks it would sound like this:
’F’ you, dude. ‘F’ you and ‘F’ the horse you rode in on. ‘F’ you, you’re a ‘P’-word, you’re full of ‘S’… ‘F’ you.
(Are ya payin’ attention, Quentin? This kid knows how to put a little jalapeño in his script!)
It’s worth noting that The Ben Shapiro Show is not broadcast over the air—he’s free to drop as many F-bombs as he likes. But that litany of near-filth amounts to ‘skating the edge’ for a conservative talker. While Ben does not operate anywhere near David Brooks’ level of legitimacy, he at least wants to set himself one notch above the corrections officers and slot jockeys that his right wing appeals are pitched towards.
Shapiro is the author of several of those books that supermarkets sell in the same aisle as the SOS pads, the kind that bleat about conservatism’s eternal rearguard action against the indomitable left. His books are invariably subtitled with the formula of “How (insert left wing shibboleth) Has (insert synonym for ‘raped’) Our (insert ‘mom’, ‘baseball or “apple pie’)â€. Naturally, several have been bestsellers.
But back to Ben’s latest tour de force, his gravestone-toppling Tweet about Trayvon Martin. On February 5th, the date that would have been Trayvon Martin’s 21st birthday, Ben had this to say:
With the hoots and grunts of a million Trump supporters ringing in his ears,  Shapiro doubled down and followed his Tweet with a wound-salting exegesis of the “real story†of “Saint Trayvon of the Blessed Hoodieâ€, in order to take down the left wing’s “lying narative†of this incident four years after the fact. That Ben had to shit all over Trayvon Martin’s memory to do so was simply collateral damage, like a drone strike. Ben has nothing against Trayvon personally, just everything about him.
Deploying one cheap, race-baiting detail after another, Ben proceeds to spank the black off America’s ass. We are alarmed to learn that Trayvon may have liked to get high on “leanâ€, some sort of inner city voodoo potion; that Trayvon used the word “nigga†(and you can’t!!), and that Trayvon’s autopsy “showed that he had THC in his system”. Really? Is that supposed to send shockwaves through a country where half the population can’t pass a follicle test? In fact, all that this last detail reveals is that Trayvon felt free to kindle a fire on Sundays, unlike Ben of the Pious Skullcap.
Ben is not unique in having unresolved issues over the death of Trayvon Martin. That incident shone a spotlight on our collective fears regarding race and privilege, and from the moment the story broke nationally a million strangers heaped their prejudices onto the fallen young man. Upon reviewing the facts of the event even I was surprised to discover how many of the things I had taken for granted turned out not to be true. Such is the power of belief.
But what is true is that no one deserved to die that night, and that George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin both suspected each other of things that turned out to be false. It is tragic to think how well we know the names of both of these persons today when neither of them knew each other’s name.
The truth is that there were no villains in the Trayvon Martin shooting, but that fact didn’t make for good TV. You would think that, with four years to reflect, America’s armchair attorneys would be a bit more sage. Not so Ben Shapiro.
At no time does Ben even hint at the idea that Trayvon, being pursued as he was by a creeper, may have actually felt threatened by Zimmerman. How could he have been? Trayvon was no “pacifistic angel†according to Ben. Why, this beastly mancub even had the temerity to get into fights at school! The boy was clearly a… well, let’s let Ben’s chorus do the talking. In hundreds of comments posted to Shapiro’s article, here is how those “Benny Bros” described Trayvon Martin:
“Thugâ€, “black thugâ€, “hoodâ€, “hood ratâ€, “hoodie thugâ€, “Thugvonâ€, “Treyboon†“porch monkeyâ€, “crime-monkeyâ€, “drug dealerâ€, “street criminalâ€, “POSâ€, “piece of crapâ€, “scumâ€, “turd†and “n#gger”.
I’d say that last guy learned a thing or two about abbreviations from Ben, wouldn’t you? Enough to fool a word filter, anyway. It is also safe to say that anyone with a molecule of class would happily embrace a false, liberal narrative if it meant putting 1000 yards distance between themselves and the swarm of blowflies Ben effortlessly attracts.
Maybe Trayvon died for being a hotheaded punk. Then again, maybe he died for not dealing with his aggressors the way Ben Shapiro did during a recent appearance on the Dr. Drew Show. When a man in a dress knocked the chip off the shoulder of the outspokenly transphobic Shapiro, Ben took the high road and simply wet his pants, squeaked something about proper talk show etiquette, and then filed battery charges.
See, Trayvon? You might be alive today if you’d only been a f#ggot.
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Here’s a worthwhile blog entry from the nuclear powered Matt Taibbi, taking on snob apologist David Brooks over the merits of populism. A good read, and it will angry up your blood!