Here Comes Your 1900th Both Sides Takedown: A David French Adventure

If you've read this blog for more than a minute, you know that since we opened for business 20 years ago, Fake Centrism and Both Siderism have been a consistent beat. And believe me, no one is sicker of writing about this than I am, because it's not 1,900 posts. It's closer to 8,000 or 9,000, and, like you, I am footsore and arm-tired pushing that fucking boulder up that fucking hill over and over and over again.  So I make this solemn pledge to my fellow Sisyphi: I will stop doing it forever once the legacy media and the Right and assorted other cowards, simpletons, political laggards and mopes forswear hiding behind false equivalence forever, and quit writing paeans to a vast, silent, utopian political Center that Does. Not. Exist.

Sadly, this week was not that week.  In fact, this week was the opposite of that week.

The murder of Charlie Kirk caused the legacy media to flee for the safety of the mighty fortress of "Both Sides Do It" like Edoras evacuating to the fastness of Helm’s Deep: a place of thick walls and high gates where they believed they could safely ride out anything and emerge unscathed and still gainfully employed after the Right's bloodthirsty freakout had abated a bit.  

In case you are unfamiliar with the mighty fortress of "Both Sides Do", let me give you the nickel tour.

The mighty fortress of "Both Sides Do It" is an ideological safe space/dissociative disorder/lazy pundit's crutch, but mostly it is a Very Big Lie.  Or, to steal a phrase from William Gibson, it's a kind of consensual hallucination, and it remains the biggest and most culturally potent Big Lie precisely because so many people desperately want it to be true...or are deeply invested in getting others to believe it's true.  

It's home to many different kinds of people.  Some -- like MAGA filth when they get caught out as liars and hypocrites -- are transients.  They will scuttle through the gateway and lay in the cut, swatting away critiques with volleys of "But the Democrats..." until the coast is clear, and then sneak out the back way and return to the quotidian business of sucking the mushroom stub of President Shits-His-Pants von Cheats-At-Golf, and shrieking that you and I are existential threats to civilization. 

For example, as you will recall, the walls of the mighty fortress of "Both Sides Do It" were the first line of defense once President Shits-His-Pants von Cheats-At-Golf decided to launch his ham-fisted Epstein Files coverup.  Confident cries of "Whatabout if Democrats are in the files, huh? Whatabout Clinton?" poured forth from the fortress's machicolations as if the MAGA filth thought it was burning pitch and we were made of balsa wood.  Freaked 'em completely out when we shrugged it off, shouted, "Great!  Lock 'em all up!" back at them, and kept coming.  

There are also permanent residents, about whom I am planning to write more in the next post, because this one already threatens to break the TL;DR threshold.  For now, I'm going to discuss one of the fortress's  semipermanent residents -- the type who keeps a toothbrush there, and a change of clothes, and they have a lease, but grinding out Both Sides Do It columns every fucking week is not primarily what they're known for.  They're known for entirely other toxic claptrap

Today's subject is Mr. David French of The New York Times.  French was hired by the Times apparently because having only three, middle-aged conservative white men on the payroll -- Bret Stephens, Ross Douthat and David Brooks -- was not representative enough of the rich text that is modern conservatism, so they felt compelled to add one more middle-aged white conservative guy.  A middle-aged conservative white guy who had to have his vicious, Bible-thumping, anti-gay bio tidied up hurry-up-quick to get him into the Times' lineup.  

Since coming to the Times, French has mainly specialized in writing about how, as a deeply conservative Christian man, it came as a complete shock to him that [checks notes] his Republican Party was full of Republicans.  He was indignant.  He was saddened.  Over and over again he lamented, (to quote Pink Floyd)  "Who let all of this riff-raff into the room?"

We can discuss some other day how the fuck it came to pass that the first-tier of elite, legacy media conservative political pundits all have one thing in common: regarding all those decades when they were trading on their supposedly uniquely deep and savvy insights into American politics ... they all now swear they never had the slightest idea what was actually going on inside their own political party and ideological movement.  Suffice it to say that David French's version of this is being very disappointed that his party turned out to be just as barbaric, bigoted, hypocritical, hollow and profoundly un-Christian as we dirty hippies always said it was.  

Very, very disappointed. 

But not this time.

This time he climbed to the ippy-tippy-top of the keep at the center of the fortress to make a direct address to the base of his recently-former party.

It is entitled, "There Are Monsters in Your Midst, Too" and if that "Too" alone is enough to give you a giant ass-ache, congratulations, your bullshit detector is in good working order.

Let's jump to the middle:

Online algorithms magnify the problem. They recognize that you are hungry for content that amplifies every bad act by your political enemies and that you hate to read or see any form of attack on your friends, so you live in a carefully curated false reality.

As a result, no matter the direction of the tragedy, the end result is the same — the right grows angrier at the left, and the left grows angrier at the right.

You see this exact phenomenon unfolding in the aftermath of the assassination of Charlie Kirk...

Can you smell it coming?

French then goes through the statements of several prominent conservative influencers who all blame "the left" for Charlie Kirk's death, and all believe that, one way or another, we should all be wiped out.  This one especially stood out because it attempted to short-circuit the inevitable "Both Sides Do It" platitude before any pundit could advance it.

Blake Masters, a former Republican candidate for Senate and an ally of JD Vance and Peter Thiel, posted on X, “There is no ‘both sides’ here. The political aggression and taste for violence against innocent people are all coming from the left.”

And then...

But wait. Can’t someone on the left mount a similar indictment of the right? 

Then French runs down a damning list of the Right's organized, Conservative-media driven episodes of political violence, from shooting up a pizza joint because Conservative media told weak-minded bigots that the world pedophile HQ was housed in their non-existent basement, to the President of the United States fomenting violent insurrection against the government.  

In fact, a person on the left might argue, the data is clear — over the last decade, right-wing extremists have killed far more people than left-wing extremists.

And then comes the razor in the apple, in which French torches whatever he thought he was doing in the previous paragraphs:

If we’re convinced that political violence comes from only one side of the divide, then the temptation toward punitive authoritarianism is overwhelming. “They” are evil and violent, and “they” must be crushed.

If, however, we accurately understand that America has an immense problem with violent extremism on both sides of the ideological aisle — even if, at any given moment, one side is worse than the other... 

To get past this dreadful moment, more and more Americans are going to have to face a painful fact. Evil isn’t confined to one side of the American divide. There are monsters in your midst, too.

As I have written on this blog ad nauseum, Republicans expended enormous effort and billions of dollars creating a base of reliably reprogrammable meatbags by demonizing Democrats in ever more lurid and eliminationist terms.   

And French was only too happy to do his part in creating this hate-fueled electoral Doomsday Machine with no "off" switch. 

Democrats twice nominated and elected a man who, for all intents and purposes, might as well have been built in a Centrist laboratory.  Decent.  Humane.  A scandal-free family man who never stopped trying to reach across the aisle to forge bipartisan solutions to our nation's very-real problems.  

And how did French's Republican Party react?  Fanatical obstruction.  Relentless sabotage.  And, from the pinnacles of  "respectable" conservative columnists to the sewers of Breitbart comment sections, an eight-year-long, hysterical, racist primal scream. None of which David French objected to.  But every time some scumbag on Conservative Hate Radio and on Fox News was given a raise and an "Atta boy!" for slagging Democrats as dirty, commie, America-hating, terrorist-loving, baby-killing monsters, or Obama as a Kenyan commie sleeper cell out to murder their sainted white grandmothers with his fiendish Death Panels they were paving another mile of road that led to Donald Trump.  

Or, to put it in language French would understand, he and his fellow Conservative Bible-waving bile merchants were "making straight the way" to where we are now.  

Then Trump showed up and easily took over the party that had been so carefully prepared for his coming.  And for Never Trumpers like David French, the arrival of Trump was like shining a  million  watt black light into their political orgy pit.  One minute they're happily down in the grind with the swinish base, the next minute they're shocked!schocked! to discover that there's bigotry and rage and fascism going on in this establishment! 

So the Never Trumpers storm out, hilariously assuming that some substantial number of the Pig People will follow them because they, too, must be deeply offended by, well, getting what they wanted all along? 

Nope.

And now that his former party has eagerly nominated the apex predator of fascist political violence three times, and twice elected him as President, the very best French can muster is, "Sure, Democrats are dirty, commie, America-hating, terrorist-loving, baby-killing monsters but consider, my brothers in Republican Jebus, there are bad guys in your midst too!  Join me in the mighty fortress of Both Sides Do It, and together..."

No Half Measures