MAD AS HELL AND NOT TAKING IT ANYMORE: Matthew Continetti over at the Washington Free Beacon on “Revenge of the Radical Middle: Why Donald Trump Isn’t Going Away.”

Two decades ago, in the spring of 1996,Newsweek magazine described a group of voters it called the “radical middle.” Formerly known as the Silent Majority, then the Reagan Democrats, these voters had supported Ross Perot in 1992, and were hoping the Texas billionaire would run again. Voters in the radical middle, Newsweek wrote, “see the traditional political system itself as the country’s chief problem.”

The radical middle is attracted to populists, outsiders, businessmen such as Perot and Lee Iacocca who have never held office, and to anyone, according to Newsweek, who is the “tribune of anti-insider discontent.” Newt Gingrich rallied the radical middle in 1994—year of the Angry White Male—but his Republican Revolution sputtered to a halt after the government shut down over Medicare in 1995. Once more the radical middle had become estranged from the GOP. “If Perot gets in the race,” a Dole aide told Newsweek, “it will guarantee Clinton’s reelection.”

Well, here we are again, at the beginning of a presidential campaign in which the Republican Party, having lost its hold on the radical middle, is terrified of the electoral consequences. . . .

What Republicans are trying to figure out is not so much how to handle Trump as how to handle his supporters. Ignore or confront? Mock or treat seriously? Insult or persuade? The men and women in the uppermost ranks of the party, who have stood by Trump in the past as he gave them his endorsements and cash, are inclined to condescend to a large portion of the Republican base, to treat base voters’ concerns as unserious, nativist, racist, sexist, anachronistic, or nuts, to apologize for the “crazies” who fail to understand why America can build small cities in Iraq and Afghanistan but not a wall along the southern border, who do not have the education or skills or means to cope when factories move south or abroad, who stare incomprehensibly at the television screen when the media fail to see a “motive” for the Chattanooga shooting, who voted for Perot in ’92 and Buchanan in ’96 and Sarah Palin in ’08 and joined the Tea Party to fight death panels in ’09.

These voters don’t give a whit about corporate tax reform or TPP or the capital gains rate or the fate of Uber, they make a distinction between deserved benefits like Social Security and Medicare and undeserved ones like welfare and food stamps, their patriotism is real and nationalistic and skeptical of foreign entanglement, they wept on 9/11, they want America to be strong, dominant, confident, the America of their youth, their young adulthood, the America of 40 or 30 or even 20 years ago. They do not speak in the cadences or dialect of New York or Washington, their thoughts can be garbled, easily dismissed, or impugned, they are not members of a designated victim group and thus lack moral standing in the eyes of the media, but still they deserve as much attention and sympathy as any of our fellow citizens, still they vote.

Amen. Read the whole thing.

My own preference isn’t to describe this middle as “radical” (because I don’t think they are) but “patriotic.” They abhor the cronyism of Washington elites, and reflect a major “values gap” between DC and Main Street, USA.  The irony, of course, is that Trump does not share their values, really–except perhaps on immigration and a few other patriotism-centric issues upon which he’s wisely capitalizing. But at least Trump is finally giving a voice to the Silent Majority’s deeply felt patriotism. The great middle is craving a leader who is unafraid to be unabashedly patriotic.

The question is: Why aren’t more GOP presidential hopefuls getting a clue and matching Trump’s vigor on these issues? Are they simply too weak, and are waiting for Trump to stop stealing “their” spotlight? Or are they too weak on these issues to really care?

RAND SIMBERG: WE SHOULDN’T BE SURPRISED AT PLANNED PARENTHOOD’S CALLOUS INHUMANITY: A  history of racism and eugenics.

PREDICTION: THESE SENTIMENTS WILL SPREAD WITHIN THE EU. Hungary’s Orban Urges Hard Line Over Migrants in ‘Broken’ Europe. “Europe has become an ideology instead of a practical solution.”

BRITISH RESEARCHER PICKS EXACTLY THE WRONG VIDEO GAME TO PUSH HER WHITE PRIVILEGE THEORIES: “People who are supposedly doing scholarship on video games should at least make an effort to play those video games first,” Moe Lane writes in his latest article at PJM. “You avoid all sorts of embarrassing errors that way.”

Nonsense — as we’ve seen before, being an socialist justice warrior means never having to research the battlefield before attacking.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 806.

DEAR ALBERTA HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION…

CHANGE: Elite Women Choosing Family Over Work.

Millennials are hard to pin down. They’ve been characterized as politically liberal, but turn out to be quite skeptical of government. They’re thought to have Tweet-length attention spans, but turn out to read more books than older adults. They’re sometimes described as careerist and individualistic, but a certain group of them, at least—high-achieving women—actually prioritizes family over work to a greater extent than their mothers did. . . .

Feminists will likely see the shift as evidence that the women’s liberation is still incomplete, while social conservatives are likely to welcome the (modest) move toward more traditional gender norms. But the social picture communicated by the data is probably more complicated than the orthodoxies of either the left or right would allow.

The Times article cites three surveys—one of “college educated professionals,” one of business students at Wharton, and one of business students at Harvard. The trend away from full-time working motherhood, in other words, is limited to a narrow and privileged group of American women. Poor and working class women (a disproportionate share of whom are divorced) are less likely to have the luxury of taking time off to spend with their children. While the Times report pitches the data as a story about changing gender norms, they also tell a story about class stratification.

So while the surveys might seem to vindicate the conservative view that many women would opt for part time work or full-time motherhood if given the choice, they also highlight the fact that this choice is not actually available to the majority of the population.

Well, “economic inequality” is as much a symptom as an explanation of many societal problems.

P.J. O’ROURKE: HOW I KILLED NATIONAL LAMPOON:

What was so much fun about the original National Lampoon’s Vacation was its maniacal expression of the love-and-hate relationship between weird hip sensibilities (Hughes) and even weirder normal middle-class values (Clark Griswold).

That kind of fun can’t be had in the 21st century, where there are no normal middle-class values, all the Clark Griswolds are alienated, sarcastic and cynical, and every suburban schlub is a font of nihilism’s dark, ironic genius.

Early National Lampoon writer and onetime Michael O’Donoghue paramour Anne Beatts (who created the legendary mock VW ad with a Beetle floating in water and the text, “If Ted Kennedy drove a Volkswagen, he’d be President today,”) was quoted as saying, “You can only be avant-garde for so long before you become garde.” The reverse is true as well — when did the intersection occur when, as O’Rourke wrote above “every suburban schlub” began to fancy himself “a font of nihilism’s dark, ironic genius,” and National Lampoon lost its edge? And what caused it?

FROM COMMUNISM ON, EVERY SHITTY VIOLENT MOVEMENT HAS ATTRACTED BORED, OVERPRIVILEGED WESTERNERS: What Westerners migrating to ISIS have in common with Westerners who sympathized with communism. They’re both political philosophies that weaponize losers.

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GANGSTER GOVERNMENT: IRS Used Donor Lists to Target Conservatives for Audits. “These documents that we had to force out of the IRS prove that the agency used donor lists to audit supporters of organizations engaged in First Amendment-protected lawful political speech. And the snarky comments about the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the obsession with Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPD show that the IRS was targeting critics of the Obama administration.”

HMM: Rebellious kids grow up to out-earn rule-followers.

Here’s a silver lining for parents of rule-breaking, defiant, disagreeable children: Such surly offspring could end up being a very good investment.

A recent study published in the journal Developmental Psychology looked at data on a cohort of 745 children in Luxembourg from the time they were about 12 years old in 1968 until 2008, when their average age was about 52. Researchers sought to connect the information collected on the children—including their socioeconomic background and questionnaires answered by both the children and their teachers—with their career outcomes four decades later.

The short version? Researchers from the University of Luxembourg, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and The Free University of Berlin found—perhaps unsurprisingly—that occupational success was closely associated with IQ, the socioeconomic status of parents, and a metric of “studiousness” based on teacher assessments. (To define occupational success, researchers used an index that ranked occupations on prestige and socioeconomic status.)

But when it came to income levels, researchers found a slightly different pattern. After accounting for the impact of IQ-level and class background, researchers found that “rule-breaking and defiance of parental authority” was the best predictor of which students ended up making higher incomes. The writers called this a “surprising finding” and admitted there were reasons to be cautious about it. But they did float a few theories on why this might be the case. “We might assume that students who scored high on this scale might earn a higher income because they are more willing to be more demanding during critical junctures such as when negotiating salaries or raises,” they wrote.

Another explanation, they said, might be that childhood troublemakers “also have higher levels of willingness to stand up for their own interests and aims, a characteristic that leads to more favorable individual outcomes—in our case, income.”

Is this really so surprising?

12 DONALD TRUMP BUSINESSES THAT NO LONGER EXIST: It really feels like entering an alternate universe when exploring the Wonderful World of Trump, doesn’t it? I have no problem with the concept of brand extension — Brooks Brothers and Ralph Lauren are putting their name on everything these days from cologne to furniture to eyeglasses. But the products they associate with, even when obviously produced by outside manufacturers, usually seem fairly classy and upscale. Trump’s entire image revolves around his yuuuuge net worth, so why do his products always seem incredibly tacky? How much does the tackiness reflect Trump thinking that’s what the public wants, and how much does it reflect it his own oddly nouveau riche tastes?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyONt_ZH_aw

AMID ALL THE HACKING AND EMAIL-DESTRUCTION STORIES, this piece on paper ballots is worth reading again.

RON FOURNIER: Clinton’s Conspiracy of Secrecy Worthy of Criminal Probe. “Here’s all you need to know: The Clinton campaign doesn’t—and can’t—deny the nut of this story. Two Obama administration inspectors general want an investigation into whether her personal email system contributed to the release of classified information.”

RACISM IN OBAMA’S AMERICA: Wyatt Cenac: Jon Stewart Screamed “Fuck Off” When I Objected to Joke.

“I remember he was like, ‘What are you trying to say? There’s a tone in your voice.’ I was like, ‘There’s no tone. It bothered me.’ And then he got upset. He stood up and he was just like, ‘Fuck off. I’m done with you.’ And he just started screaming that to me, and he screamed it a few times. ‘Fuck off! I’m done with you.’ And he stormed out. I didn’t know if I had been fired.”

Liberal hero abuses minority employees. Actually, a pretty common story. . . .

PRESIDENT TRUMP—GET USED TO IT: Roger Simon explains “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Donald.”

I had fun Photoshopping Trump between the POTUS podium and a giant Patton-style flag for Roger’s article:

BRUCE CARROLL: What Happens When Science Allows Us to Abort A Baby If It Has the ‘Gay Gene’?

This is quite a dilemma for pro-abortion gay activists like Rachel Maddow, the Human Rights Campaign, and Planned Parenthood itself. Donors to gay rights groups and pro-abortion groups are frequently the same individuals, and millions are exchanged between these two causes. Finally, for reasons I have never understood, gay activists frequently cite “abortion rights” as a keystone to achieving overall LGBT equality.

Read the whole thing.

RUSH LIMBAUGH: Pay Attention To Carly Fiorina.

GLENN LOURY AND JOHN MCWHORTER talk about Ta-Nehisi Coates and the religion of “authentic blackness.”

MY ADVICE TO THE CANADIANS: MAKE YOUR MOVE NOW, OBAMA WILL FOLD LIKE HE ALWAYS DOES: The tiny islands where Canada and America are at war.

ACE: The Donor Class, Which Is Stupid, Has Mistaken Itself for Clever, and Other Things You Already Knew.

SOLVING THE BLOOD SHORTAGE BY draining the dead? “Roughly 15 million pints of blood are donated each year by approximately 9.2 million individuals. Over the course of the same year, about 2.6 million Americans will — sadly — pass away. If hospitals were to harvest the blood from a third of those people, roughly 4.5 million liters would be added to the reservoir. . . . Draining the blood from a body is hardly out of the ordinary; it’s actually a regular part of the embalming process. To prepare a dead body for funeral services and eventual burial or cremation, morticians pump out all of the blood and interstitial fluids and replace them with an embalming solution, typically containing formaldehyde and methanol. Would it not make more sense to remove the blood at the hospital soon after death, rather than let it all go to waste?”