Trouble on the Border - With Quebec

By New Hampshire Bureau Chief and Media Coordinator Pam Smart

New Hampshire, that pointy little state not far from here, is generally thought of in these parts as a placid place, possibly because the locals are thwacked out on fentanyl, and a handy destination for skiing and buying cheap tequila, thanks to its stout embrace of liquor Socialism.

Apparently we were wrong.  New Hampshire is besieged on its borders, North and South.

First, let's head North, where New Hampshire shares a 40 mile or so international border with Canada.  It looks pretty placid to us:

GoogleEarth

But appearances can deceive, according to moderate mainstream Republican hope for the future Gov. Chris “My Struggle” Sununu, the latest member of the fatuous [Surely, fabled? – Ed.] New Hampshire Sununu political dynasty.

Not content to be shoved out of the political frame by 91-count Don, Sununu last week sent a crank letter to his two (Democratic) House members complaining that New Hampshire was under siege from those Mexican rapists and assassins now supposedly rampaging through the street of New Hampshire after successfully sneaking across the border from Quebec:

CONCORD, N.H. — New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu has been calling for more security and funding to go to New Hampshire's border with Canada, for months, and on Friday, he doubled down on his calls, writing in a letter to the state's congressional delegation that there has been a "surge of activity" at the border.

"Illegal border crossings, drug trafficking, and other crimes are increasing in frequency, and a stronger response from the federal government is necessary to keep Granite Staters from becoming victims to these bad actors," Sununu wrote.

Bad actors in New Hampshire? Didn't Adam Sandler move away decades ago?

Huge if true.  

But is it? WMUR-TV, a source of real news and the only network TV station in the state had the temerity to ask:

Despite Sununu's continued efforts, representatives from ACLU have publicly voiced their concern about the fact that some of the data relating to the Northern border have not been made public.

"The public is entitled to know what that data is and whether it supports or doesn't support, those type of resources being spent. But right now, we haven't seen any," Gilles Bissonnette, legal director of the ACLU of New Hampshire, told News 9. 

Imagine the nerve of asking the Governor of a State to provide facts that support his alarming tale. It would be like asking a former President who has been indicted four times on 91 separate felony counts to tell us his weight.

What Sununu is really after, in addition to cheap publicity and the chance to burnish his credentials as an immigrant-bashing Republican in good standing is “an "adequate ICE Delegation Agreement,"” by which he means deputizing the New Hampshire smokies to act as adjunct body snatchers for ICE.  This would mean, for example, that after pulling someone over for the proverbial broken taillight, they could apprehend them on civil federal immigration charges, something that their counterparts in Massachusetts cannot do.

What this has to do with the chaos at the Quebec border is not clear, nor is it clear why the Governors of Vermont and Maine, with far longer and equally porous borders, failed to recognize the clear and present danger of ISIS operatives strolling down the streets of Pittsburg, NH ready to proclaim a caliphate covering all of Coos County.

As for the effect that this border chaos has on crime in border towns, the statistics are sobering.  For 2021, the last year for which the State of New Hampshire has released data, the percentage of violent crimes that remain unsolved in the border town of Pittsburg, NH was 100%.  100 per cent, people.

On a brighter note, though, here's the full violent crime data for that year:

We're not statistics experts, but we think we can round 1.0 violent crimes to, um, one.  So the NH border is not exactly Al Capone's Chicago.

At least not the northern border.

Massachusetts: high-tax drug-selling hellhole

But New Hampshire has other borders as well.

And to hear thirsty Republicans tell it, the real problem is at the Southern border.  That's the one next to that high-tax woke unlivable hellhole that is...Massachusetts.  Retread Republican Kelly Ayotte, running for Governor up there, sounded the alarm:

Former U.S. Sen. Kelly Ayotte is running for governor of New Hampshire, but Massachusetts seems to be the focus of her nascent gubernatorial campaign. Since she announced her candidacy late last month, Ayotte has warned repeatedly that her state is just “one election away” from becoming ours, and cited a number of ways in which she thinks that catastrophic convergence could occur. Is this a winning strategy in a swing state where plenty of residents work and recreate in Massachusetts?

What a nightmare!

It can't be the Dunkin' Donuts or the Red Sox.  Those are all over New Hampshire.  So what is it?  Her campaign website gives us a hint:

On day one, Kelly will work to strengthen penalties for heroin and fentanyl dealers. In particular, Kelly will work with law enforcement to prosecute dealers who come over the NH-MA border from the drug hubs of Lowell and Lawrence to the fullest extent of the law. 

Ah yes, it's those Tijuanas on the Merrimack, Lowell and Lawrence, two old mill towns now reinventing themselves as diverse mixed-income communities that welcome all comers.

But to Kelly Ayotte and her fellow white reactionary Republicans, they're cesspools of vice whose sole function is to lure the innocent youths of New Hampshire over the border and inject them with fentanyl, which even Ayotte admits is a problem in her drug-addled state [Surely, State? – Ed.]:

New Hampshire: where you want to be

The fight to end the drug crisis in New Hampshire must include care and support for those struggling with addiction. In the United States Senate, Kelly led the effort to pass the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, which provided grant funding for drug prevention, education, and treatment programs. In New Hampshire, we must continue to improve our model while expanding coverage and outreach to those struggling.

So the white people who buy fentanyl, whether in Lawrence or anywhere else deserve our tender loving care.  The problem is the alleged drug supermarkets luring them to their doom just across the border.

Maybe New Hampshire should build a wall not on its northern border, but on its southern, to keep their honest yeomen safe from the hordes to the south?  The upside for the Bay State: no more New Hampshire hicks flooding across the border bearing Bruins tickets and vomiting on Causeway Street.  The downside: how do we get to Maine?

The two border hysterias are linked.  In Republican mythology, New Hampshire's problems aren't of its own making.  They're the fault of the Other, usually brown, flooding across one border or another.  

The solution is to foment fear and bigotry.  That will solve the problem. 

If the problem is how you elect mediocre Republicans to office, that is.

Why Our Democracy is Broken: Let's Ignore the Elephant in the Room!

By Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling
with Spy Archivist Aula Minerva

If it's a day ending in y, some bloviating hack named Dan or David is pontificating in a deep reporting media outlet about What Ails Our Republic.

On Thursday, it was the turn of venerable conventional wisdom dispenser Dan Balz in The Washington Post.  As usual, he missed pretty much every important point, beginning with his statement of the problem:

The good old days of bipartisan compromise

In a country where the search for common ground is increasingly elusive, many Americans can agree on this: They believe the political system is broken and that it fails to represent them.

They aren’t wrong.

Faced with big and challenging problems — climate, immigration, inequality, guns, debt and deficits — government and politicians seem incapable of achieving consensus. On each of those issues, the public is split, often bitterly. But on each, there are also areas of agreement. What’s broken is the will of those in power to see past the divisions enough to reach compromise.

Is that the problem?  Of course in a time of political gridlock, little gets done and people become frustrated.

But not all frustrations are created equal.

We know that about 40% of the electorate, comprising a large majority of white voters, is frustrated that it can no longer protect white privilege on a national level by majority vote.  (They can still impose cruel white-majority rule in a large swath of southern and midwestern states, including the nation's second and third largest ones)

We also know that progressive voters are frustrated by the failure of government to address unmet human needs, protect the rights of women and minorities, and save the planet from boiling to death.

But the frustrations of racists are not an argument against the current political system.  Rather the opposite.  Government should not represent and advance the interests of white racists and bigots.  That's how American government worked from 1791 to 1964, with a brief intermission from 1863 to 1877. It was very bad, despite what Prager “U's” cartoon version of Frederick Douglass tells you.

And that's not the only howler contained in three short paragraphs.  Balz like his fellow third wayers seems to think that in American democracy, progress arises out of bipartisan compromise.

Let's look at the moderate's worst enemy: the historical record.

The era from 1861 to 1876 saw enormous progress.  Slavery ended.  The rights of all persons were protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.  The South was reconstructed, albeit imperfectly.  And that wasn't all.  We had a progressive income tax, a huge railroad infrastructure plan, a mammoth higher education construction scheme of “land-grant” universities that brought academic and research excellence out of the Northeast and across the nation, and fiat currency that permitted robust economic growth and provided the foundation for the economy we know today.

Bipartisan consensus at work!

None of this happened because all sides came together and compromised.  It came about because the Slave Power tried to destroy the nation and, after four years of war and 600,000 deaths, failed.  If the bloody ground of Antietam and Gettysburg was compromise, we'd hate to see Balz's idea of open warfare. 

How about 1933, when the Republic almost ground to a halt after four years of disastrous Republican inaction to combat the Depression?  Did Roosevelt and Hoover sit down and hash out a bipartisan compromise?  Of course not.  FDR and the Democrats won smashing victories in1932 and 1936, leading to huge Democratic majorities willing to enact the greatest program of social welfare legislation in American history.

(By the way, whatever bipartisan compromises were required were terrible, like exempting domestic and agricultural workers from Social Security to protect the purses of Southern white supremacists.)

In 1964, after Lyndon Johnson and the Democrats achieved another smashing victory, LBJ pushed through the Civil and Voting Rights Acts, food stamps, Medicare, and Medicaid.  And we don't want to hear about all the Republicans who voted for civil rights – on that issue, the partisan split was between white racists, then mostly Democratic, and everyone else.  The good guys won not because of consensus but because the power of Southern Democrats was broken. Don't worry; they got it back.

In 2008, after eight disastrous years of needless war followed by economic disaster, Barack Obama and the Democrats won big, and delivered at least some version of national health insurance, over implacable Republican opposition.  As was the case with previous bipartisan deals, the concessions made were uniformly terrible.  Imagine how much money we could have saved with a public option, but thanks to lovable bipartisan “Holy Joe” Lieberman, we can't have it.

So the two premises that underpin the piece are utter bollocks.  How about the execution?  It's a little better, but not by much.

Our bloviator goes on to examine what he believes are structural or Constitutional impediments to a functional government.  Let's see if we can find any common thread that connects them!

 1.  The Electoral College frustrates majority rule.  That's hard to argue with:

The Constitution created an unusual mechanism for electing the president — an electoral college. It was built on assumptions that over the years have proved to be faulty.

If only anyone had noticed this.

Oh, wait, they have: “More than 700 proposals to reform or abolish it have been introduced in Congress since 1800.”

So why can't we fix this flaw, either by Constitutional amendment or widespread adoption by states of commitments to award electors based on the winner of the national popular vote?  Here's a clue, courtesy of NBC News:

 

Republicans want to keep the Electoral College because they don't like the results obtained with direct democracy. They dress it up a little with some community-college word salad about the purple mountain majesties and fruited plains, like this classic from George Will:

Furthermore, choosing presidents by electoral votes is an incentive for candidates to wage truly national campaigns, building majorities that are geographically as well as ideologically broad. Consider: Were it not for electoral votes allocated winner-take-all, would candidates campaign in, say, West Virginia? In 1996 Bill Clinton decisively defeated Bob Dole there 52 percent to 37 percent. But that involved a margin of just 93,866 votes (327,812 to 233,946), a trivial amount compared to what can be harvested in large cities. However, for a 5-0 electoral vote sweep, West Virginia is worth a trip or two.

Like everything else spewed out by this long-time Republican hack, this is ass-backwards.  Thanks to the Electoral College, the 2024 Presidential election will be decided by voters in five states: Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, and maybe North Carolina.  Voters in the rest of the country can just stay home.  Without an Electoral College, candidates would have to appeal to voters everywhere, not just in a few swing states.

In short, the problem is not the Electoral College; it is the refusal of Republicans to unrig a system that has worked in their favor twice in this century.  Elect more Democrats either to Congress or state legislatures and the problem goes away.  No consensus needed or wanted.

 2.  Gerrymandering has produced fewer competitive Congressional districts.  Also irrefutable.  And also caused by relentless Republican assaults on fair districts in Republican-run states, like Ohio, where the Republican-dominated legislature has defied not only the will of the voters expressed in a referendum but also multiple decisions of the Ohio Supreme Court enforcing the results of that vote.

Such blatantly unfair gerrymanders were made possible by a Republican-bent Supreme Court which concluded such anti-democratic vote rigging was A-OK, because...what were they supposed to do about it?

Which brings Balz and us to...

3.  The Republican-bent Supreme Court.  The Post finally reaches a third major cause of democratic dysfunction: a Republican-rigged anti-democratic Supreme Court that has arrogated for itself the right to decide what it will let the President do in implementing laws passed by Congress, which it calls the Major Questions Doctrine. (Capitalized to show that six Republicans didn't pull it out of their a**es.)

Even the Post had to note that

Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the last nine presidential elections. But during that time, Republican presidents have nominated six of the nine current members of the Supreme Court. Four of the nine justices, including the three nominated by Trump, were confirmed by senators representing a minority of the population. 

The Supreme Court...is a problem

No s***, Sherlock.  It also didn't help that Senate Republicans wouldn't even grant a hearing to President Biden's nominee a year before the election while filling Ruth Bader Ginsburg's seat less than a month before the next one.

There are fixes to the problem of Supreme Court tyranny, aggravated by their habit of deciding things in the absence of Constitutional power to do so under Article III, as noted last month in these pages.

Congress and the President could expand the Court by adding new Justices or they could limit the Court's jurisdiction to prevent them from for example stopping the actions of the democratic branches until after a full trial or only by unanimous vote.

There are such proposals before Congress. Guess who's blocking them?  Hint: it's the same law and order party that has lined up behind a tangerine-faced Russian agent with 91 criminal charges pending against him.

To sum up, there are solutions to these supposedly intractable structural problems that cripple our democracy.  The Post can't quite bring itself to admit that these solutions require only 56 things: a Democratic President, a Democratic House, and 54 Democratic Senators willing to abolish the idiotic filibuster.

It turns out that the crisis of democratic government in these United States isn't caused by “partisan gridlock,” as both-sides hacks like Balz have been telling us for years.  It's caused by Republicans.  And the solution is Democrats. 

Plucky Job Creators vs. The Crushing Fist of the Deep State - An Old, Old Story

By Business Editor Samuel Insull
with Legal Correspondent Saori Shiroseki

The jackboots of liberal elite deep state job killers struck again, this time in Virginia, coming down like the proverbial ton of bricks on a hard-working small business owner.  Or, as The Washington Post described it,

The manager of a laundry business in Virginia was accused of pulling a 13-year-old girl’s hair while ordering her back to work. Other teenagers told investigators they were forced to toil through grueling 11-hour overnight shifts before school. And a new mother was grabbed by the arm and shaken when she asked for help taking care of her infant son, who was strapped in his stroller “with his bottle tied to the chair” while she worked, court records allege.

She's not being groomed to be a Lesbian!

Prosecutors say those were some of the conditions workers endured at Magnolia Cleaning Services, a Williamsburg-based business that cleaned linens for hotels and timeshares. Its owners and managers were charged with operating “a family-based labor trafficking enterprise” that smuggled over 100 migrants from El Salvador, including minors, and forced them to work under threats of violence and deportation, officials said Wednesday during a news conference.

Who will save us from overreaching Biden Administration shock troops like this, you may ask.

There's a clear answer: Republicans.  Just ask them. 

One of the many dark-money institutions established by plutocrats to provide, um, intellectual heft to Republican attacks on regulation, the Heritage Foundation, calmly explained the problems caused by government regulation:

The Biden Administration’s regulatory agenda for 2022 reveals complete indifference toward the social and economic chaos perpetrated to date by the President’s progressive policies. Few, if any, of the thousands of looming regulations are necessary or beneficial notwithstanding the enormous costs, and many will erode free enterprise and individual liberty....

[T]he White House boasts that federal agencies will “build on significant progress the Administration has already made advancing our priorities and proving that our Government can deliver results—from confronting the pandemic, to creating a stronger and fairer economy, to addressing climate change and advancing equity.”

As with so much of the Leftist manifesto, this conceit about government’s efficacy and beneficence is misguided. In actuality, the Biden Administration has failed to check the spread of the coronavirus.  [But unlike his Republican predecessor, he did manage to limit the death toll by requiring vaccines and masking, – Ed.]

Its unconstrained spending has contributed to the worst inflation in 40 years, while 18 months of welfare and unemployment profligacy has intensified an unprecedented labor shortage and supply chain crisis. [Seems like only yesterday! – Ed.]

There are also billions of dollars being funneled into destructive climate initiatives that actually undermine rather than enhance environmental quality. The Administration’s preoccupation with racial and gender equity is also exacerbating what Heritage Foundation scholar Mike Gonzalez has dubbed America’s “grievance caste system,” thereby sowing discord and resentment.

For the Biden Administration to assert that more regulation and even bigger government will “improve the lives of the American people” mocks the challenges facing the nation and betrays the fundamental principles of its Founding [including or excluding slavery? – Ed.] . Now more than ever, citizens must demand that Congress reclaim its oversight responsibilities and lawmaking authority and codify rigorous rulemaking standards. Otherwise, the Biden Administration’s radical regulatory agenda will reduce America to “nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”

So regulation is bad because it treats us like cows. That's a view.

While the Biden Administration seems content to turn us into sheep, this farrago of nonsense has had a more profound effect in the many Republican-ruled states, where child labor is now regarded as a good thing:

When Iowa lawmakers voted in mid-April to roll back certain child labor protections, they blended into a growing movement driven largely by a conservative advocacy group.

"Free market rules! Two cents please!"

At 4:52 a.m. on April 18, the state’s Senate approved a bill to allow children as young as 14 to work night shifts and 15-year-olds on assembly lines. The measure, which still must pass the Iowa House, is among several the Foundation for Government Accountability is maneuvering through state legislatures.

The Florida-based think tank and its lobbying arm, the Opportunity Solutions Project, have found remarkable success among Republicans to relax regulations that prevent children from working long hours in dangerous conditions. And they are gaining traction at a time the Biden administration is scrambling to enforce existing labor protections for children.

The FGA achieved its biggest victory in March, playing a central role in designing a new Arkansas law to eliminate work permits and age verification for workers younger than 16. Its sponsor, state Rep. Rebecca Burkes (R), said in a hearing that the legislation “came to me from the Foundation [for] Government Accountability.” 

And you thought it came to her in a dream!

What could go wrong with letting 14-year-olds labor all night on assembly lines or, as in slaughterhouses, disassembly lines?  According to CBS News, plenty:

Children are working dangerous jobs at JBS meat processing plants in Minnesota and Nebraska, hired illegally for overnight shifts and tasks that left a 13-year-old with caustic chemical burns, federal officials say.

The U.S. Department of Labor this week asked a federal court to issue a nationwide restraining order against the world's largest meat processing company's plant clean-up provider, Packers Sanitation Services, or PSSI, to stop it from employing dozens of workers under the age of 18. A U.S. district judge in Lincoln, Nebraska, granted the temporary request on Thursday, a department spokesperson told CBS MoneyWatch in an email.

An investigation launched in August found that PSSI hired at least 31 children — ranging in age from 13 to 17 — to fulfill the company's sanitation contracts at JBS plants....

Which is the point. Despite endless bleating from Republicans and their owners about the supposed threat to “free enterprise and individual liberty,” regulation has a purpose. 

In the case of child labor laws, it's to protect children (and also to let them get an education). 

In the case of climate changes initiatives, it's to keep us from broiling or drowning, or both. 

In the case of vaccine and mask mandates, it's to keep millions of us alive. 

Those facts are not in dispute, despite the best efforts of disingenuous propagandists like our friends from the Heritage Foundation. Behind any regulation there's a reason. If there wasn't, it could be voided by a court under the Administrative Procedure Act [Stop snoring back there – Ed.] 

Using the skills his pappy learned in slavery

You'll be amazed to learn that the Republican indifference to the lives and fortunes of poor children and other intended beneficiaries of government regulation did not, despite the shrieks from our newly-minted Republican allies about the dangers of “Trumpism,” begin in 2017. The attack on government regulation sung to the tune of ‘Yankee Doodle’ goes back many decades, to the days when then TV pitchman Ronald Reagan inveighed against the assault on liberty that was – Medicare.

Once elected, St. Ronald of Bitburg assured us in his first inaugural address that "Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem." 

His solution to the problem of 13-year-olds working on the kill floor of chicken plants was to overthrow the Government of Nicaragua.  You had to be there.

The Republican Party's fervid and unshakable opposition to regulation as a method to solve problems up to and included mass extinction events is at the core of the party's appeal to voters and more crucially the rich and powerful who write the checks that keep them going. 

To be fair, there are a few regulatory initiatives that Republicans approve of, including those regulating the reproductive rights of women, the medical rights of children with identified conditions such as gender dysphoria, the right of the State of Texas to chop up desperate refugees seeking asylum, and the right of any yahoo, no matter how ignorant or bigoted, to control what everyone else's children can learn in school.

But that's different because those regulations don't “mock[]s the challenges facing the nation [or] betray[] the fundamental principles of its Founding.”

And if you still don't understand, we have a cartoon from Prager “U” in which Frederick Douglass explains it all to you.

Broken Opinion: It's All the Fault of Coastal Elites, Like You and Me!

By Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling
with Washington Correspondent Tess Harding

Having bored everyone last week with an endless interview with Spy Political Editor David Bloviator, we were really hoping to avoid bloviators named David this week.

But then we came across this Tweet [You mean X – Copy Ed][F*** that – Ed.]:

There are two types of Times columnists, the spectacularly ignorant and the actively malicious.

I'm not sure what the second type is. https://t.co/4rNDKHCBx1

— Edward (@Fornbirkibeinn) August 5, 2023

It turns out that Mr. Edward was referring not to the distinguished editorial page of The New York Times, but to the pages of another Rupert Murdoch disinformation volcano, doing business as The Times of London.

But the combination of spectacular ignorance and active malice so perfectly describes a half dozen of New York Times op-ed columnists that we couldn't let it pass.  The toxic stew is the favorite recipe of Pamela Pill, Bretbug, Monsignor Douthat, National Review David, and Kevin Dowd's sister Maureen, among others.

Today we turn to the other: that great public intellectual and connoisseur of fine Italian meats, Moral Mountain David Brooks. 

His topic for yesterday: who's to blame for the deep and wide loyal support of a thrice-indicted and twice-impeached corrupt subversive bigoted Russian stooge?

The question actually contains the correct answer, but that didn't stop our deep-thinking no-reporting columnist from arriving at the wrong answer.

His answer was, wait for it, 

Keep waiting.

Lie down.  Take an edible.

You are!

That's right: if you're the kind of person who shells out $1800 a year to read this codswallop every day, you're a coastal cultural elitist who has driven average Americans into the tiny orange hands of ex-President U Bum. 

Trump? it's all your fault!

Just to give you a flavor of what passes for his argument, we'll quote this much (and come back to it later when we deconstruct the sources of this drivel):

I ask you to try on a vantage point in which we anti-Trumpers are not the eternal good guys. In fact, we’re the bad guys.

This story begins in the 1960s, when high school grads had to go off to fight in Vietnam but the children of the educated class got college deferments. It continues in the 1970s, when the authorities imposed busing on working-class areas in Boston but not on the upscale communities like Wellesley where they themselves lived.

The ideal that we’re all in this together was replaced with the reality that the educated class lives in a world up here and everybody else is forced into a world down there. Members of our class are always publicly speaking out for the marginalized, but somehow we always end up building systems that serve ourselves.

We remember the history a little differently, which is to say correctly.  More on that later.  But let's just follow his causal chain to the last bite of the ciabatta sub:

It’s easy to understand why people in less-educated classes would conclude that they are under economic, political, cultural and moral assault — and why they’ve rallied around Trump as their best warrior against the educated class. He understood that it’s not the entrepreneurs who seem most threatening to workers; it’s the professional class. Trump understood that there was great demand for a leader who would stick his thumb in our eyes on a daily basis and reject the whole epistemic regime that we rode in on.

Speaking of “epistemic,” we'll let our friend Greg Sargent point out that the ol' Perfessor's theory is, um, falsified by those pesky facts:  (His whole thread is well worth your time, unlike Brooks's crapcan column.)

In 2020, 53% of Biden voters didn’t have a college degree, vs. 46% who did, per Pew. Yes, that's more lopsided for Trump (31-70). But the Dem anti-Trump coalition has a lot of the “less educated class” in it.

So the facts don't support the ol' Perfessor's claim that Biden v. Trump is a battle between those nasty cultural elites (like us!) and the long-suffering working class.

In fact, the real facts suggest a contrary reading of who supports ex-Pres. Tiny Toadstool and why:

So it's not that highly-educated people like Biden and everyone else likes Trump. You see that split only among white voters.  Among Black voters, amazingly enough there isn't a fear of cultural elitism of the sort that desegregated the Boston Public Schools.  And by the way almost half of those white elitists voted for...a corrupt Russian-owned sex offender.

Nowhere in his column does Soprassata Dave touch on these amazing facts, probably because they fatally undercut his bullsh*t thesis.

In fact, once you start pulling on this thread, everything unravels.  As noted, his examples of cultural elitism are also rooted in white racism.  It wasn't “authorities” that ordered the Boston Public Schools desegregated because they had been illegally and intentionally segregated by race; it was federal judge Arthur Garrity, carrying out his duty to apply Brown v. Board of Education.  And Wellesley wasn't included in the plan because no one argued that the lack of Black students in ritzy suburbs (other than the ones that districts like Wellesley took in under the voluntary METCO program) had been caused by illegal de jure segregation.

And as for the old whine about how rich college educated liberals managed to dodge the draft (while trying to end the war for everyone), it doesn't explain why uneducated whites continue to support a coward who openly boasts of dodging the draft thanks to his rich daddy.

Brooks's stories do have an origin: they are the same toxic fictions peddled by white supremacists and other divisive hatemongers like Dick Nixon and George Wallace.  We're old enough to remember Nixon's war on elite “nattering nabobs of negativism” who dared to attempt extricating those poorer Americans from the pointless charnel house of Vietnam and got Medicare for everyone over 65 (which proved to have zero electoral upside in 1966).  And we're old enough to remember how bigots blamed their centuries-old bigotry on Blacks and liberals, except back then it was called “white backlash.”

And speaking of those arrogant elites, generations of Southern segregationists cloaked their racism in supposed populism. Then as now The New York Times fell for it.  Here's a 1972 sample describing the enduring appeal of all-time champion white racist George Wallace:

 

They're not racists – they're just letting off steam, they're just responding with understandable frustration to those nasty bra-burning coastal elites, they're just livin' in a small town, they're f***-all.  For over 60 years, white racists and their defenders have tried to get us to blame someone else for their unrelenting and virulent violent racism.  We suspect that Brooks knows this, but like a half century of apologists for the Republican pro-racist “Southern Strategy,” he knows that the truth will sink his not yet lost cause.

Before we go, we can't resist deflating one last Brooksean stupidity balloon:

Like all elites, we use language and mores as tools to recognize one another and exclude others. Using words like “problematic,” “cisgender,” “Latinx” and “intersectional” is a sure sign that you’ve got cultural capital coming out of your ears. Meanwhile, members of the less-educated classes have to walk on eggshells because they never know when we’ve changed the usage rules so that something that was sayable five years ago now gets you fired.

It's remarkable that he can pack so much wrong in one short paragraph.  Who is excluded by using non-pejorative terms to describe sexual identity, other than bigots?  “Latinx” gets a big response from reactionaries like Brooks, but if the reason that white people support Trump is because they prefer “Latino” to “Latinx,” then they're a lot more fragile than anyone thought.

And who is being fired for not using newly minted words? If people are being fired for how they describe others, it's because the words they are using have a long and terrible history in this country. Of course, our expert on Italian cured meats and everything else cites no examples of such injustices, because, as we once said about former Chicago Tribune publisher Col. R.R. McCormick, “he cites no authority, being it.”