The Weekly Sift

As Calvin once said to Hobbes, “The days are just packed.”

It’s been another week where, by Monday morning, everything I thought was so important on Tuesday and Wednesday (like the debate over the Google anti-diversity memo, whose author was being fired as I was posting last week’s Sift) seems like it happened a long time ago. Even North Korea, which on Friday looked like a plausible site for Armageddon to begin, is barely denting the headlines this morning. I imagine a reader thinking: “Why are you still going on about all that?”

Today — or rather this morning; Trump has advertised a big news conference for later today, so who knows what we’ll be buzzing about by this afternoon — it’s the alt-Right violence in Charlottesville, and Trump’s lack of reaction to it.

In short, reasonable commentary is tough these days. By the time you research something well enough to know what you’re talking about, it’s ancient history.

Enough complaining. What caught my attention this week was the Higgins memo, the one that got its author fired from the National Security Council, and seems to be part of the McMaster vs. Bannon power struggle happening inside the White House. Rich Higgins is part of the Bannon faction, and the memo is — I might as well be blunt about it — insane. All the resistance to the Trump administration, it turns out, arises from a multi-decade conspiracy to destroy America by “cultural Marxists”, who have infected not just the media, but both major parties, big corporations, and the Islamists as well. I’ll bet you didn’t realize you were “inter-operating seamlessly on a narrative level” with the Muslim Brotherhood and several international organizations whose names I had to look up. Now you know.

This doesn’t seem to be the work of One Crazy Guy. It’s a point of view that has a following both on right-wing web sites and inside the White House. In particular, the Donald Trumps Sr. and Jr. both seem to be open to it. (The President reportedly was upset to discover that Higgins had been fired.) So this week’s featured post, “The Battles Within the White House Are Even Crazier Than You Think”, fleshes out the cultural Marxist conspiracy theory and how much it explains about the more rabid sort of Trump supporter. It should be out around 9 EDT.

In the weekly summary I’ll discuss (but mostly link to other people’s discussions of) Charlottesville, Google, North Korea, and some other ancient history happened days and days ago, before closing with a Queen parody that spoils the first six seasons of Game of Thrones. Lots of work still to do there, but I’ll try to have it out by noon.