Last year, Adam Serwer published a phenomenal article about Trump and his supporters titled "The Cruelty Is The Point". His no-nonsense tour of Trumpdom outraged conservatives, who were uncomfortable being seen as fellow travelers to smirking alt-right trolls. Even liberal media, which patronizingly casts Trump as the sigh of the oppressed Cletus, objected to Serwer's straightforward explanation of why people support his lies, atrocities and outrages.
Anyway, here's Ben Shapiro praising Trump as "so cruel" in that fawning nasal whimper of his.
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Conservative thinkeur Ben Shapiro was interviewed by BBC host and UK conservative luminary Andrew Neil. It didn't go well for Ben at all. Facing straightforward questions about his beliefs, he had a tantrum, accusing Neil—chairman of The Spectator!—of being a leftist and finally storming off.
From The Spectator itself:
Ben Shapiro is the famous, fast-talking pundit who regularly ‘owns’ aggressive campus students with his quick wit and rapid repartee. Alas, Shapiro isn’t so ‘crazy smart’ when he comes up against difficult questions from a real interviewer. Yesterday he just couldn’t cope with an interrogation from the BBC’s Andrew Neil. He decided that Neil must be a typical BBC leftist and had an epic tantrum.
As soon as you take right-wingers out of the U.S. cable news environment or their creationist-style YouTube "debates", they fall completely to pieces under even the most impartial and disinterested questioning. With due respect to Andrew Neil, it's amazing how deferential mainstream U.S. media are to conservatives—and as a result inconceivable to an American conservative that a foreign counterpart might issue them challenging questions. So it's no surprise that Neil would humiliate Shapiro, or that Shapiro would do all the work himself given the barest length of rope.
Here's the full 16 minutes:
Neil is absolutely no friend of the left: an HIV/AIDS denialist, climate-change critic and 9/11 conspiracy theorist. Read the rest
Sean Hannity, the conservative firebrand and one of Fox News' last remaining ratings-grabbers, does not gargle piss, reports Clayton Purdom. The cable news pundit had publicly responded to a tweet saying "Sean you should drink more!!!" with "I need one" only for his interlocutor to change his name to "hannity gargles piss", thereby creating the unfortunate impression Hannity had cheerfully agreed he hankered for a nice pint of warm urine. Hannity, made aware of the clever switcheroo, decided to delete his tweet, thereby making clear that he does not suffer from a thirst that can be slaked only with a long draft of his own bitter pilsner.
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At the PsySociety blog, Melanie Tannenbaum looks at the meta-analysis cited by Erik Erikson of Redstate.com as proof that low-income families fare worse when mom works outside the home — and finds that it says exactly the opposite. This post is notable not only for deconstructing a "common sense" belief, but also for doing a great job of explaining what a meta-analysis is and why it matters. Also provides a full daily serving of Fox News schadenfreude. Read the rest
