Everyone seems to be speculating about who the “Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration” is. I don’t care, because whoever it is isn’t part of the resistance at all — they are an enabler and supporter of the goals of the administration. They even say it outright.

To be clear, ours is not the popular “resistance” of the left. We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous. But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic. That is why many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.

Don’t get me wrong. There are bright spots that the near-ceaseless negative coverage of the administration fails to capture: effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more.

See it for what it is: Republicans seeking to distance themselves from a bad president while still trying to support the same destructive policies. They are trying to represent the failings of this administration as the fault of personal incompetence of Donald Trump, hiding the fact that he is the apotheosis of Republican politics of the past 60 years.

Also, I don’t want to know who the author is. I hope they preserve their anonymity for years, so that the mad emperor starts violently tearing apart every asshole skulking in government in his efforts to root out the traitor. I hope it ends with every Republican shattered and fleeing in disgrace.

Well, now I’m confused. It turns out that the historicity of the Bush years can be reasonably called into question.

Of course as every high-school student knows, almost all of the original digital and analog records of the Guild of Pundits during that period were destroyed during the Great Discontinuity — the early 21st century’s Elite media’s last ditch effort to evade accountability for their crimes. And what few fragments we do have from that time come down to us filtered through the fun-house mirrors of surviving backups of the “fuckingblogs”.

In particular, one figure stands out as implausible: David Brooks.

And as the original events have been sifted and re-sifted by popular culture, fan fiction and hermeneutics, the academic world has more-or-less evenly divided itself into two, irreconcilable orthodoxies — the Historical Brooks versus the Fictional Brooks — each of which finds strong support for its own theory in the literature itself.

Based on the radically divergent accounts of writings attributed to him during a single decade, roughly half of all professional media historians — The Historicals — subscribe to theory that “David Brooks” in an amalgamation of several real but wildly different people. The other half — The Fictionals — maintain that since so much of what he was alleged to have written was so obviously false and absurd, “David Brooks” had to be a literary contrivance: something analogous to Poe’s nameless recounter of “The Telltale Heart” or Greta Van Sustern — a fictional narrator whose own pathological unreliability is integral to the story.

Both sides have good arguments.

Obviously, (the Historicals conclude) like “Alan Smithee” or “Tom Freed Man”, “David Brooks” must have been some sort of collective pen-name behind which dregs of the Punditry Guild could shout all kinds of shameful craziness while avoiding the professional consequences of saying remarkably stupid thing in public.

But (the Fictionals rejoin very effectively) it is the very ludicrousness of “David Brooks”‘s “opinions” which argue most strongly against it being the name — or pseudonym — of any real person or persons. Consider that, in order to make the argument that the United States government is incapable of competently operating a national health-care system with mandates, “David Brooks” simply ignores the fact that the United States government of that era was already operating a very efficient and beloved national health-care system (with mandates!) which was known as Medicare and, at the time, had over 49 million beneficiaries.

I don’t know how to decide. This might help: a fellow atheist and trained historian, Eddie Marcus, contacted me and offered to explain how historians make decisions about the historicity of a different weird, unbelievable person, Jesus. I’m willing to listen — it might help me make up my mind about this bizarre “David Brooks” character — so we’re doing a hangout on Wednesday at 7am Central time, or 8pm Perth time (the hour is a compromise to find a reasonable time when both of us are awake). I’d say “Join us”, but I think that’s only going to reasonably apply to Australians and Asians. So, “Join us, Australians! Half of us will be speaking English properly!” The rest of you can tune in after it’s all over.

You might find this series, Sheilas, entertaining — it’s about the badass women of Australian history.

The first episode is about Nancy Wake, which had me wondering what exactly they teach in Australian girls’ finishing schools.

Brazil has suffered a terrible loss.

Brazil’s oldest and most important historical and scientific museum has been consumed by fire, and much of its archive of 20m items is believed to have been destroyed.

The fire at Rio de Janeiro’s 200-year-old National Museum began after it closed to the public on Sunday and raged into the night. There were no reports of injuries, but the loss to Brazilian science, history and culture was incalculable, two of its vice-directors said.

Imagine if the Smithsonian burned down. It’s not replaceable.

The media are reporting that the cause of this fire was neglect — the museum had “fallen into disrepair”, and that it had only recently managed to land support for a fire prevention project. I might be more favorable to conservatives if they were actually interested in preserving what the nation has, and less interested in looting what we’ve got to benefit the wealthy (I know nothing about the leanings of the Brazilian government; this is a general statement about the neglect I see when conservatives are in power in my country.)

Jeffery Ford is a genius. How do we know? He tells us so.

Jeffery Ford is an author, TED speaker and frequent guest on numerous talk radio shows. He was honored in Michigan’s House of Representatives for winning a global election to become the World Genius Directory’s 2016 Genius of the Year for America (which includes both the North and South American continents).

Whoa. I’ve always wanted to be a genius. I looked up this World Genius Directory to find out how. It’s maintained by a guy named Jason Betts, an Australian who seems to do nothing but churn out “intelligence tests”, some of which are free to lure you in, others that cost a dollar, and some that cost tens of dollars. To get on the World Genius directory, you have to get a high score on one of his tests, and mail him $11 (I think that’s the important criterion).

I’m already dubious about his qualifications. But then he went and wrote this article, “Here’s Why Leftists Truly Hate Conservatives”, and confirmed the value of weird online IQ tests.

There’s only one thing that leftists hate as much as America, and that’s the millions of fact-based, faith-based conservatives who are the human embodiment of everything that makes America and the entire Western world far superior to every other country and culture that has ever existed.

It’s the first paragraph, and I’m already whooping it up! You can’t be both fact-based and faith-based — those are contradictory. I also have to question the assertion that America is a superior nation in all things. If we were, how come we don’t have universal health care, and how did Trump get elected?

Leftists hate conservatives because they are damned by any comparison with them. Conservatives believe in personal accountability and in the power of the individual to make a profound difference in our world. The left doesn’t believe in the power of the individual anywhere near as much as it believes in the absolute power of the collectivist state — where everyone suffers equally and are rewarded for their efforts minimally.

Unlike capitalism, where the individual can go to work for Walmart or Amazon and be treated with respect and a living wage.

Just as the 9/11 hijackers hated America for its freedoms, so too does the American leftist hate us for subjecting them to the high risks that are inherent in a free capitalist society and that is precisely why they have been working night and day for decades now to destroy our country.

They hated us for our freedom? What is this, 2001? No, they hated us because we did not follow their religion, and because we’d exploited and bombed the Middle East and wrecked their homes, to simplify it in another way.

The left has successfully laid waste to our nation’s educational system. Over time, they have covertly transformed our educational system from being one of the best in the world into an indoctrination system that would have made Joseph Goebbels proud.

Spoken as if conservatives had ever supported the public school system, and weren’t wallowing in denial of science.

One of the left’s greatest victories over America has been its infiltration and domination of almost every important aspect of our news media. But all is not lost. As a matter of fact, conservatives are closer to winning the hearts and minds of the vast majority of American people than ever before.

Say what? What liberal news media?

You guys go have fun with this loon. I’m just going to mourn the fact that apparently I can’t become a genius by mailing $11 to some wacko in Australia.

Michael Cohen pleaded guilty on 8 counts, Paul Manafort was found guilty on 8 tax and bank fraud charges.

“Today he stood up and testified under oath that Donald Trump directed him to commit a crime by making payments to two women for the principal purpose of influencing an election,” Davis added. “If those payments were a crime for Michael Cohen, then why wouldn’t they be a crime for Donald Trump?”

Good question.

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Guess how Fox is handling the convictions?

That War on Christmas is always a great distraction.