[guest post by Dana]

If you are feeling all campaigned out, let me offer you a safe-space at Patterico’s. Also known as a Trump-free space. But, whatever you call it, it’s likely you will still end up pulling your hair out…

While the 2016 presidential campaigns power onward, culture continues it rapid decline as society nurture its ongoing self-indulgent identity crisis. It’s horrible, this collective navel-gazing. It’s the ultimate train wreck, you can’t bear to watch but you can’t make yourself look away either. Especially as you realize you are tied down to the very tracks upon which that big old locomotive of crazy is barreling.

It appears there is no end to the Orwellian rabbit hole in which we currently find ourselves tumbling down. Here, courtesy of the Family Institute of Washington, we can see the painful contortions and intellectual dishonesty that are part of the package deal when buying into the the entire mess of new social norms. Of course, none illustrate these societal shifts of insanity more beautifully and tragically than the quintessential dimwitted college student:

In other news confirming our ongoing identity crisis, the very white Rachel Dolezal, who I wrote about here, is penning a book about racial identity:

Race didn’t create racism, but racism created race.

Tell it, sister!

Since there is no rule book on these matters, let me ask you, exactly where does the line between self-identifying and cultural appropriation begin and end? See: Dolezal’s hair and the attack on this young man:

And I haven’t even gotten to the gender-neutral bathroom debacle. Suffice it to say, hats off to North Carolina’s Gov. McCrory for the decision to protect women and children, and shame on any lawmakers dismissing objections to gender-neutral bathroom laws as nothing more than fear-mongering. Let me tell you, that is a real LOAD OF CRAP destined to clog up any toilet, no matter to which gender it has been assigned.

Anyway, I decided that today I’m self-identifying as a size 2 supermodel. Yep. Feeling p-r-e-t-t-y good about myself.

How about you?

–Dana

Jonah Goldberg:

It seems pretty obvious to me that the rage I hear from Trump supporters when I say they’re wrong stems from a kind of insecurity or resentment. Simply put, they want to be validated. It’s an awfully similar response to what we hear constantly on college campuses from the delicate little flowers who say they don’t want debate, they want empowerment. It turns out that many of the mental habits we mock and ridicule on the left have ample purchase on the right as well. This revelation, along with several others, has been painful but useful. The Trump candidacy has been a like a dye marker, highlighting traits and inclinations on the right I didn’t appreciate or acknowledge. I’m grateful for the lesson, though I can’t say I’m glad I had to learn it.

Trumpers on Twitter — which is where I encounter most of them — tend to be remarkably similar. They often have an eagle or an American flag for their background image and/or avatar. They use a lot of exclamation points. They can’t spell to save their lives. They have no reasoning powers. They debate like the most annoying leftists, ignoring every good point and pushing total nonsense. They have no conception of grammar, with “your an asshole” being a fairly common phrase (including from Sean Hannity). They are wildly enthusiastic, in a manner that reminds me of these lines from Yeats’s “The Second Coming”:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Goldberg’s image of a dye marker is about right. I’ve rarely found a trait that so reliably separates the conservatives I like from those I can’t possibly respect. There are exceptions to the rule that Trumpeters are chuckle-headed morons, of course — primarily people willing to overlook all of Trump’s obvious fakery and double-dealing because they unaccountably trust him on some pet issue, like immigration or a dovish foreign policy. But for the most part, Trumpism has done a wonderful job of demonstrating to me who is worth interacting with, and who isn’t.