And The Teabagistan Civil War Rages On

Teabagistan’s long-raging civil war gained fresh fuel last week when 22 high-profile right wingers wrote anti-Trump essays for the conservative standard-bearer National Review. Today’s poutrage target on Breitbart is a new National Review column which essentially alleges that Trump’s supporters are uncultured semi-literate hillbillies. Ahem. From the column:

Thomas Aquinas cautioned against “homo unius libri,” a warning that would not get very far with the typical Trump voter stuck sniggering over “homo.” (They’d snigger over “snigger,” too, for similar reasons.) Thomas’s “man of one book” is a familiar type to conservatives; often enough, that book is Atlas Shrugged, or The Fair Tax Book, or, for the more sophisticated sort, Economics in One Lesson. (There are more people who have read about the works of Hayek and Mises than have read the works themselves.)

But a man of one book has something: William Shakespeare made more from his reading of Plutarch than most men could make of the Library of Congress, and a reader who has truly digested the Bible, or Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, or Capitalism and Freedom has something, having consumed with any one of those works not only the work itself but the works that nourished the authors. The man of one book is, in our time, practically a scholar. Our problem is the man of no books at all.

While the above might be amusing, hold your applause as it comes from Kevin Williamson, who has also called for hanging women who have abortions and who has attacked “surgically mutilated” trans people. Back at Breitbart, viciously anti-gay editor John Nolte reacts:



The Unwashed might not have read Shakespeare, but they can read a paycheck. The Unwashed might not have read “Capitalism and Freedom,” but they have read a pink slip as their job went overseas or to an exploited illegal immigrant.

The Unwashed might not have consumed the same library of Greek and Roman classics (in the original or in translation) but they have consumed years of “Dial 1 for English,” Common Core math problems, terror attacks committed by immigrants, and an Establishment so removed Jeb Bush is being sold as a winner because … he speaks Spanish.

The publication that once served up a cup that runneth over with ideas is now reduced to lashing out with ad hominem — not against the Powerful (like Trump), but against the everyday Americans found in William F. Buckley’s fabled Manhattan phone book. Things really have changed at NRO. Impotent rage is a helluva drug.