AFTER THEY'VE TRIED EVERYTHING ELSE?

Perhaps our thought leaders will see the logic of bourgeois manners.

Over the weekend, the angry voices who see in the Media Narrative a steady diet of Fake News, or who might be willing to believe that the Angry Left and their lackeys in the Establishment want Normals dead had little reason to rethink their priors.

That's got David Brooks thinking about something more substantive than the crease in Barack Obama's trousers.

The Covington case was such a blatant rush to judgment — it was powered by such crude prejudice and social stereotyping — I’m hoping it will be an important pivot point. I’m hoping that at least a few people start thinking about norms of how decent people should behave on these platforms.

It’s hard to believe that people are going to continue forever on platforms where they are so cruel to one another. It’s hard to believe that people are going to be content, year after year, to distort their own personalities in service to a platform, making themselves humorless, semi-blind, joyless and grim.

It probably came to this years ago, when the Ruling Class's enablers first in the academy, later in journalism, and finally in entertainment, figured out that they could dress up their hectoring, condescending, and deplorable-shaming as Respectable Opinion.  No sooner did the humorless, joyless, and grim Hillary Clinton concede the presidential election than did all of her fans on social media decide it wasn't enough to be upset, no, they started scolding or otherwise being nasty to anybody who wasn't fully in on the wake.  As the social media platforms are property of Hillary fans, the owners were less careful about enforcing any sort of decorum than, oh, any owner of a sports bar is whenever the tournament of the current season is under way.

Their behavior has mugged Rod Dreher by reality.

I’ve been so busy here that I’ve not been able to follow the continuing fallout over the Covington Catholic boys and the terrifying thing that has happened to them. We now know that Nathan Phillips, the elderly Native American guy, flat-out lied about what happened — and the media fell for it. The Covington boys became international hate figures instantly (I say “international” because people here in Dublin were talking about it).

They were not guilty. At all. And yet, the moral insanity of this story continues to astonish.

I suspect Kurt Schlichter is going to be in fine form Thursday, and not because of the Formerly and Yet Again Los Angeles Rams playing in the Super Bowl.  Mr Dreher isn't quite yet in Schlichter territory.  But wait.

I was telling my Irish friends last night that it’s impossible to overstate how powerful this event is going to be for right-of-center Americans. It’s even more powerful than the Kavanaugh debacle, in terms of showing how so many progressive elites are driven by vicious contempt for those not like themselves — especially white male Christians. It’s not a crime to dislike preppy white Catholic boys in MAGA hats. But to attempt to destroy them, on the basis of faked “evidence”?

I would like to remind our left-wing friends that when Trump is re-elected in 2020 on the strength of votes by people who have been frightened by the prospects of liberals and progressives in power, think of the Covington boys, and what was done to them. As in the Kavanagh mob action, the left tried to destroy because the hate figures symbolized people they loathe: white, male, Christian conservatives. At least in the Kavanaugh case, there was a chance that he was actually guilty. It took almost no time to prove that these boys were not guilty. And yet, even after evidence vindicated them, many on the left continue the hatred. Because it feels so good.

That's the same left that would like to attenuate or repeal the Second Amendment, but I digress.

In the cab from the hotel to the airport, I got in touch with my inner Thomas Friedman, and talked to the cab driver, an older white Irishman. He told me that he thinks Donald Trump is “a dangerous man,” but “I’ll tell you, political correctness has gone too far. He’s right about that.” Get this: an Irish cab driver doesn’t like Trump at all, but thinks he’s necessary, because the forces lined up against him are too powerful and malign. This morning, at least, I have come around to his way of thinking. Yesterday, someone made the point in my hearing that Trump has no regard at all for the truth, but the Buzzfeed report the other day, and now the national left-wing freakout over the Fake News of the Covington Catholic boys shows that despite its pretensions, many liberal elites don’t care for the truth either.

The cab driver talked about the Yellow Vests protests in France. He said they’re starting in Ireland, but he doesn’t know how far they’ll go. “We’ve got to do something in this country,” he said. “The people who run it are ruining the place. The inequality is something. They’re only out for themselves.” He denounced the ruling class bitterly.

It could be worse. Much worse. Dov Fischer notes it might not be the Angry Left that's on the side of the angels, either.

Because conservatives — social conservatives, theological conservatives, political conservatives — slept for the past half-century, we ceded too much of value to the Left. That which makes America great continues to be the values associated with conservatism. People from all over the world who try to enter our country, whether legally or otherwise, are not marching in caravans because they seek the life of Ferguson, Missouri or Detroit, Michigan. They want the America of wealth, of safety and low crime, of economic prosperity and limited governmental interference.

That's encouraging, as it might be the case that the Democrat strategy -- if that is in fact the Democrat strategy -- of importing pliable voters to keep voting for soak-the-rich taxes and expanded public assistance -- might backfire.

The balance of his essay, however, is anything but encouraging.