Despite the fact that Republican politicians are in charge of Congress and the White House while a conservative-leaning majority reigns in the Supreme Court, conservatives are nevertheless convinced that “the Left” is using political correctness to quash their ideas.

This pattern of thought is nowhere more evident than in the writings of National Review writer David French, who Friday published a story defending a recent article — written by the New York Times’ Bari Weiss — about the “Intellectual Dark Web.”

The web is a “network” of iconoclastic thinkers who include people like Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, and Ayan Hirsi Ali.

Despite these individuals’ relative success, the idea of the Intellectual Dark Web is that they are somehow kept down by oppressive political correctness and excluded from legacy media outlets. French argues, however, that “the path to prominence for many of these now-popular people has sometimes been painful.”

The torture program set up by the George W. Bush administration in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks was a brutal, illegal, and slipshod travesty for which there has been no reckoning. All of the people who designed, implemented, and justified the brutal and useless interrogations of terrorism detainees have successfully ducked accountability for a variety of reasons: Republicans actively support torture, Democrats voluntarily abandoned their opportunity to impose accountability for the program, and both parties are apt to excuse flagrant abuses committed in the name of “national security.”

This is why we have the grim spectacle of President Donald Trump (whose stated position on torture is that it should be used as sadistic punishment) nominating as CIA director Gina Haspel, who oversaw the torture of detainees and later led the effort to destroy videotaped evidence of interrogations. It’s also why former Vice President Dick Cheney can go on cable news and give lie-filled defenses of the horrific interrogation program he shepherded into existence.

Cheney sat down with Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo this week and oozed out a series of falsehoods about his torture program -- lies that elicited precisely zero challenges from Bartiromo. Let’s run through the many misleading claims and outright bullshit Cheney spewed in defense of his shameful legacy.

When the White House goes low, Sarah Huckabee Sanders goes lower, as she has refused to condemn a White House staffer’s mocking of dying Sen. John McCain.

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Transcript:

Q: We have heard a lot about white house aide Kelly Sadler and her comments about Senator McCain reportedly saying in a meeting the president shouldn’t worry about the senator’s opposition to the nomination of Haspel because he is dying away. Megan McCain wondered allowed today why the aide still has a job at the white house. Does she still have a job?

Sanders: I’m not going to comment on an internal staffer meeting.

…
Q: Does the White House not think you need to condemn these remarks or —

Sanders: I’m not going to validate a leak one way or the other out of an internal staff meeting.

Q: Are you saying she didn’t say this?

Sanders: Again I’m not going to validate a leak out of an internal staff meeting one way or the other.

Q: Does the president regret what he said during the campaign about John McCain when he said he wasn’t a war hero, he prefers people that weren’t captured?

Sanders: I believe the president has spoken about that. I haven’t talked with him specifically about that. Jeff.

“Their program policies have resulted in dead children, dead mothers and dead fathers,” Davis continues. “I’m Pat Davis and I approve this message because if Congress won’t change our gun laws, we’re changing Congress.”

Davis’ ad ran around 12:30 p.m. local time Friday on KRQE, the local CBS affiliate in Albuquerque, but station manager Bill Anderson bemoaned the fact that he couldn’t censor it.

“We received a request for airtime from a legitimate federal candidate for office, and according to federal election rules, we are required to give him the same access as his opponents,” he said. “This station, by law, is not permitted to censor or in any way edit this commercial.”

Republican Governor Mary Fallin has just signed an anti-gay bill that will enshrine into Oklahoma law discrimination against same-sex couples and LGBT people. The legislation, known as SB 1140, will allow taxpayer funded adoption agencies to cite their "religious or moral convictions" to refuse to allow LGBT people to adopt.
"SB 1140 allows faith-based agencies that contract with Oklahoma to continue to operate in accordance with their beliefs," Governor Fallin said in a statement. "In a day and time when diversity is becoming a core value to society because it will lead to more options, we should recognize its value for serving Oklahoma also because it leads to more options for loving homes to serve Oklahoma children."

Fast forward to the distant future of less than one year later and Kelly has not only failed to lessen the chaos of the Trump administration, he's also come out of the closet as a white supremacist, smearing his own "honorable" reputation by spitting on the foundational concept of America as a nation of immigrants.

Here's his latest foray into ignorance:

Let me step back and tell you that the vast majority of the people that move illegally into United States are not bad people. They’re not criminals. They’re not MS-13. … But they’re also not people that would easily assimilate into the United States, into our modern society. They’re overwhelmingly rural people. In the countries they come from, fourth, fifth, sixth-grade educations are kind of the norm. They don’t speak English; obviously that’s a big thing. … They don’t integrate well; they don’t have skills.


"Modern society"? Does Kelly think immigrants will be confused by indoor plumbing and color television? Donald Trump is still amazed by the White House's phone system, his staff couldn't initially figure out how to turn on the fucking lights, and none of them apparently know how to use a spellchecker so perhaps Kelly should not cast aspersions on the "rubes" from other countries while being surrounded by a team of them himself.

But the incompetence of the Trump administration aside, Kelly seems to have forgotten that it wasn't all that long ago that his own people, the Irish immigrants of the 1800s, were once considered "overwhelmingly rural" and unwanted because they were "also not people that would easily assimilate into the United States, into our modern society." In fact, the Irish were considered slightly better than animals: