Meditations in an Existential Emergency or "So You've Been Kicked Out Of The Wingnut Biasphere"

This is not an extended critique of our Never Trump "allies".  This is a small thing.  A trivial thing, really. 

 And yet, when I heard it my ear snagged on it like a shirttail on barbed wire.  

This is from a conversation between The Washington Post's Perry Bacon, Jr. and Tim Miller of The Bulwark. You may know Tim as the gay, man-bunned, married, San Francisco dad and former-Republican campaign guy who now enjoys a nearly-continuous presence all over MSNBC every day as part of MSNBC's very successful "Hire As Many Conservative Bulwark Pod People As Humanly Possible" HR initiative.

Anyway, here's Miller. with all the verbal tics and stalls left intact to underscore how deeply uncomfortable Never Trumpers still are when talking about how fucked-in-the-head the corporate media is when it comes to honestly reporting on Republican perfidy.

Miller: You're talking more about -- and, and I completely agree at this point -- y'know this, y'know among the corporate class in particular, right?  Um, not just the media, right? But executive, right? Like, you've... there's this need to kind of y'know create a false balance right? Um, in order to, y'know gain credibility, y'know, in... in a way y'know that allows, y'know, provides cover for a lot of the really pernicious anti-democratic and bigoted, y'know, sort of elements that... that have arisen on the Right. And so and that is really more of your criticism than on, say, Joe Manchin from for going a little bit overboard sometimes on his criticisms to the Left. I think JVL [fellow Bulwarkian Jonathan V. Last] called it "hippie punching" to get a little bit of credit...

It's that last line that caught my ear -- 

I think JVL called it "hippie punching" to get a little bit of credit...

 -- because of  how odd it was to hear a phrase that's been a basic element of the Left's vocabulary since the heady days of Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin when the world trembled at the sound of our adjectives earliest days of the Liberal blogosphere being verbally footnoted by one Bulwark Conservative as something which some other Bulwark Conservative cleverly coined just a few days or weeks ago.

From Language Log:

The term seems to have been introduced into mainstream journalism in September of 2010, when Susan Madrak used it to confront David Axelrod over the Obama administration's treatment of the political left. Greg Sargent, "Liberal blogger directly confronts David Axelrod, accuses White House of 'hippie punching'"

From the original WaPo Article:

Top Obama adviser David Axelrod got an earful of the liberal blogosphere's anger at the White House moments ago, when a blogger on a conference call directly called out Axelrod over White House criticism of the left, accusing the administration of "hippie punching."

"We're the girl you'll take under the bleachers but you won't be seen with in the light of day," the blogger, Susan Madrak of Crooks and Liars, pointedly told Axelrod on the call, which was organzied for liberal bloggers and progressive media.

The call seemed to perfectly capture the tense dynamic that exists between the White House and the online and organized left: Though White House advisers in the past have dumped on the left, anonymously and even on the record, Axelrod repeatedly pleaded with the bloggers on the call for help in pumping up the flagging enthusiasm of rank and file Dems.

Fun Fact:  This same article also mentions where mighty The Professional Left podcast got its name:

But hovering over the call was the obvious disconnect between this plea for help and statements like those of Robert Gibbs, who recently pilloried the "professional left" for being overly critical of the White House.

That tension burst out into the open when Madrak directly asked Axelrod: "Have you ever heard of hippie punching?" That prompted a long silence from Axelrod.

"You want us to help you, the first thing I would suggest is enough of the hippie punching," Madrak added. "We're the girl you'll take under the bleachers but you won't be seen with in the light of day."

Axelrod didn't engage on "hippie punching," but he said he agreed with the blogger. "To the extent that we shouldn't get involved in intramural skirmishing, I couldn't agree more," Axelrod said. "We just can't afford that. There are big things at stake here."

Madrak replied that Axelrod was missing the point -- that the criticism of the left made it tougher for bloggers like herself to motivate the base. "Don't make our jobs harder," she said.

"Right back at'cha. Right back at'cha," Axelrod replied, a bit testily, an apparent reference to blogospheric criticism of the administration.

I seem to remember in some pithy post or podcast or Tweet (they all blur together after awhile) long ago saying something along the lines of, the Republican base believes what it believes about the Left thanks to 25 years of listening to Rush Limbaugh and his dozens of sleazy imitators day after day for decades.   More than any other single factor, the combination of Newt Gingrich-style politics and Rush Limbaugh-style propaganda shaped the GOP base into the mob of reprogrammable meatheads they are today.

But , the wingnuts weren't the only ones listening in.

What we on the Left know about the Right also comes from decades of monitoring what Limbaugh and his imitators were vomiting out of AM radios from coast-to-coast, along with the endless "Liberals are Lying Scum" books rolling off the Regnery Press assembly line and, of course, the 24/7 bullshit dispensary that is Fox News.   In fact, sounding the alarm as loud as we were able, over and over again, about what was going on in plain sight on the Right constitutes the bulk of Liberal analysis and writing since the dawn of the Liberal blogosphere.

During this same period the ratcheting-ever-Rightward dynamic was happening within the GOP's Brain Caste as well.  It wasn't hard.  After all, their belief system never amounted to much more than a genteel, polysyllabic version of the same poison that Limbaugh and company were shitting into the skulls of the base.  Limbaugh may have gotten rich and powerful selling racist rotgut to the rubes, while the National Review and Weekly Standard crowds were distilling special Buckley Van Winkle 23 Year Old Reserve Bourbon for the elite, but the results were the same:  both the high and low born were too angrily zonked on their own 180 proof fairy tales of the Imaginary Evil Dirty Hippie Left to pay the slightest attention to what we on the actual were Left saying or doing or warning about, or care that the price of all those Republican electoral victories and glorious tax cuts was that the base of the Party of Lincoln had devolved into a volatile shitpile of bigot and imbeciles.  

Didn't care...until the mob they created turned on them.  And then, suddenly...

And whether they were frog-marched out of the Wingnut Biasphere or left under their own power shortly before they would've been frog-marched out they all found themselves in the same position at roughly the same time: dumped onto a completely alien environment and on the lam from the very same Giant Republican Death Machine that they had spent their entire adult lives building.  

So, as surely as form follows function, it should come as no surprise that, to as they scrambled to figure out why their attempts to simply order the Giant Republican Death Machine to stop failed so miserably, it should come as no surprise that they would end up reinventing or just plain stealing the critiques of those of us who have been warning them about about the terrible danger in building a Giant Republican Death Machine for decades.

This includes suddenly noticing that the voting base the Republican party has been carefully shaping for decades is, in fact, a shitpile of reprogrammable meatbags.  

Suddenly noticing that it's useless to try to convince them, or reason with them or extend a hand of friendship to a mob of bigots and imbeciles who see any such gesture as exploitable weakness.

I hope all these censures of solid Republican stalwarts by state-level kooks puts to rest all that "forgotten man" populist bullshit. These voters didn't care about policy; they liked the show and they think their favorite star shouldn't have been voted off the island. https://t.co/YIa7b3W9vx

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) February 16, 2021

Suddenly noticing that it's pointless to wail about fiscal discipline or point out the Right's towering hypocrisy on every issue or it's leadership's incessant lying and corruption because the GOP never gave a shit about any of that.  

Suddenly noticing that their dear friends and fellow travelers in the high-brow Conservative media are nothing but rankest fascist-enablers who have built their businesses by remaining in a constant frenzy over the trivial or wholly imaginary sins of the Left while completely ignoring existential and immediate threats from the Right.  From this episode of The Bulwark podcast: 

Bill Kristol:  ...they are laying the groundwork for acquiescing to if not flat out supporting Trump as the Republican nominee in 2024 and certainly supporting him in the general election against, y'know, Biden or whoever the Democratic nominee is.  So this is a signal, the end of 2021, after everything that they're not going to fight very hard to save the Republican party from Trump, even to save it for someone who I think most of us wouldn't y'know think much of, y'know DeSantis-type. But still not at least... at least not Trump himself, they are white... this is implicitly totally whitewashing January 6, whitewashing his unbelievably grotesque handling of the... of COVID and everything else he did.  Incidentally, yeah, demagoguery because they are willing to go along that's forme that's what's significant about it.

...

Mona Charen: ...I completely agree that you do have this sense of taking crazy pills when you read, uh, editorials like Rich Lowry's -- which I haven't read either about the... the headline -- uh, but also y'know the... the... the Wall Street Journal editorial page where they are constantly expecting the Republican Party to revert to what it was and... and they are blithely indifferent to the... the threats to, uh, our system.  And it'... it's kind of, y'know, it's just... it's gobsmacking.  What do you... what do you think?

Tim Miller:  I... I would... I... I point a lot of this to self-interest. But... but some of it's a threat assessment and I, y'know, a trend I've been noticing is I look all these guys -- the Wall Street Journal editorial board, the National Review, all these guys that we talk about -- like, they all live in Blue America right?  And so I... I think that they are hyper-attuned to their annoyances about Blue America.  To the things, y'know, to the... to the, y'know, most extreme comment made by a person at their kid's school, y'know? To, y'know the the stupidest city council person in their cities comments right? And... and... and I think that they're hyper-attuned to this than the threats to the Left and the AOC so we can go on and on and... and completely shield themselves from what is happening in the real republican party, right?

And suddenly noticing that help will never be arriving from the mainstream media because the mainstream media is a broken, Both Siderist parody of a free and fair press:

we are hampered by a media not up to the serious task of defending democracy, one that insists on passive voice and false equivalence to disguise the moral insanity raging in the GOP

— Jennifer 'pro-voting' Rubin (@JRubinBlogger) December 31, 2021

Since the dawn of the Liberal blogosphere, Liberal writers have spilt tens of millions of pixels on the subject of the zombie depravity of the GOP base, the cowardice and power-mad ruthlessness of GOP leadership, the relentless, venomous propagandizing of the Conservative media and the capitulation of the mainstream media.  And based on the shocked and growing panic with which Never Trumpers speak every time they "discover" the truth of what we on the Left have been saying all along, it's clear that they never listened to a word of it.  

We were all dismissed wholesale as crackpot alarmists.  

And based on everything I have read or heard from the Never Trump camps, we are still being dismissed as unserious and stupid.  Which should also come as no surprise to anyone.  After all, if word should ever get around that the Left had been right about the Right all along, what would be the point of continuing to solicit the opinions of goofs who were wrong all along until the day they were chased out of the party by the monster they helped to build?

Which is why, based on everything I have read or heard from the Never Trump camps, there is almost always a moment in every column and every podcast when the Never Trumpers stop to virtue signal to one another with some form of ... Don't get me wrong.  I still think Liberals are degenerate cranks and spoiled toddlers who have no business meddling in the affairs of us adults, it's just that, for the moment, the GOP is slightly worse.  

After which they reveal that they have discovered that the Beltway media is full of hacks and equivocating morons with with all the ceremony and gravity of a physicist announcing that they have finally answered the question of whether a non-trivial quantum Yang–Mills theory with a finite mass gap exists!

Well damn.  

I guess this was not as small and trivial as I originally thought.

Burn the Lifeboats