Fox News recently added another “news” program to their lineup, The Specialists. I’ve never watched it. It’s hosted by the cloddish one from Fox & Friends, Eric Bolling, and two young women I’ve never heard of before, Katherine Timpf and Eboni Williams. None of them have any significant expertise; Bolling is an ex-baseball player, Timpf is a comedian, and Williams is the best qualified of the bunch, with a law degree, and that’s it. This is just a group of opinionated people with opinions, and they get their very own news show on Fox — I think you could probably get a better group of people by going down to a local bar and hiring whatever table is having the loudest argument.

But here’s the real problem: these bozos are chattering about what to do about North Korea, and Bolling has ideas.

Bolling suggested that any threat of military action on the Korean peninsula will prompt China to take action for fear that millions of refugees will cripple the Chinese economy.

No one else is going to help them out, Bolling offered, adding the incentive will be even greater if South Korea builds a freaking wall so all North Korean refugees are forced to flee to China.

Build a wall? Why is that a solution Trumpkins always suggest? As you probably know, there is already the Korean Demilitarized Zone in place, a 250km guarded barrier 4km wide stretching across the entire Korean peninsula, backed by military forces on both sides. Travel between the two countries is already tightly controlled.

But think about this plan: he wants to terrorize the civilian population of North Korea into becoming a weapon used against China. Already awful, you might say, but how does he plan to freak out North Korean civilians?

The Fox News host later said the United States should consider an attack on the DPRK.

Thirty minutes is the lead time between firing that missile in North Korea and Los Angeles, Bolling said. Are you willing to risk Los Angeles?

It may be time for a preemptive strike, he added.

I forgot the other thing Trumpkins suggest: bombs. Walls and bombs. That’s how we’ll solve all of our problems.

I would ask Bolling “are you willing to risk Seoul?”, if I didn’t already suspect he’d cheerfully say “yes!” 25 million people live in the Seoul metropolitan area, and stacked up on the other side of the DMZ is the DPRK artillery, all within range and pointed directly at the city. Where are those refugees going to scurry? How can he be so cavalier about triggering destruction and death and misery to innocents?

And what are we going to do about a news organization that willfully sows dangerous misinformation? Point and laugh, I guess, and let everyone know that they’re a deluded idiot if you watch Fox News.

Like our president.

This is the day to call your senators and tell them to kill TrumpCare. If you’re phone-shy, here’s a sample script to use.

I’m in a weird state where my senators are Klobuchar and Franken, and I know exactly how they will vote against this terrible bill, but I’m going to call them anyway.

A shooter opened fire on a group of politicians at a baseball practice, wounding the Republican whip, Steve Scalise. See, this is why we need more gun control, to keep deadly weapons out of the hands of dangerous fanatics. Maybe finally when white Republican congressmen are the targets, they’ll be motivated to do something about it…

Oh, wait. Never mind.

No, we are not. Megyn Kelly left Fox News for good reason — no one of any political stripe deserves sexual harassment — but she was a perfect fit for that network. She became a star at Fox because she embodied the conservative ideals of people like Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly, and everything was copacetic between them all on a political plane. Being a victimized women does not make her an ally or an admirable person. Ann Coulter is subject to some of the most scurrilous, rancid attacks by people on the left; that’s wrong, it makes me sympathize a little bit with her on a personal level, but she still holds hateful and odious views for which she should be spurned.

A lot of us were shocked that MSNBC, the so-called ‘liberal’ news network, offered Kelly a job, but I suppose we should recognize the reality that the news networks are unprincipled profit-making establishments that cannot be trusted to pursue truth over dollars. But now Kelly is following the instincts that served her well on Fox and is interviewing Sandy Hook ‘truther’ (about as contemptible a title as you can bestow on anyone), Alex Jones. And she has so little conscience that she could simultaneously promote Jones and host a benefit for the Sandy Hook families (she’s not now, fortunately).

So why are confirmed liars and phonies like Alex Jones and Megyn Kelly and other ghastly serial liars like Jeffrey Lord given a loudspeaker at every opportunity? Yet at the same time others, like Reza Aslan (whose show I despised for its insipid religious apologetics) get fired? How can people be upset at a performance of a Shakespeare play that has someone who looks like Donald Trump cast as Julius Caesar? That’s a serious promotion given to the president, and yes, Julius Caesar gets assassinated, but the whole point of the play is that the assassins get their due, and that murder is a violation of Republican principles.

I’ve come to the conclusion that free speech is an illusion in a world where power puts on the mask of liberty. It’s not free speech when it’s selectively denied and used solely as an excuse to justify hate and the expression of one set of values. It’s not free speech when Nazis think it means they get to slash people’s throats. It’s not free speech when it’s a club used to rationalize trampling on the rights of the oppressed by the privileged.

So I’m not at all surprised when a regressive toady like Megyn Kelly keeps bubbling up to the top. She’s part of the demographic that knows very well how to manipulate the concept of free speech to make lies a virtue.

As Charles Pierce notes, this looks like something out of an autocracy. All praise to the Great Leader!

Something is stirring deep within me…oh, excuse me, it’s just nausea.

This is more like what I’ve been expecting: an alt-right dorkwad tried to join a protest by a far right Christian militia, offering to share his posters with Pepe the Frog and Nazi symbols, and the Oathkeepers turned angry and vicious and chased him off. This is not comiccon, one said.

The alt-right trolls are a noisy presence on the internet, but everyone knows they’re superficial twits looking for lulz, rather than committed ideologues. Many of their precious memes — such as Nazi regalia, or flaunting gayness as a generic taunt to the mainstream, or advocating open fascism or sacrilegious behavior — are anathema to the conservative far right. I don’t support either side, and they can go ahead and put each other in chokeholds all they want, but I was expecting these kinds of conflicts to come up far more frequently.

I’m trying to imagine Milo Yiannopoulos addressing a group of Oathkeepers and the event not ending in bloodshed. It’s hard.

When a conservative party has trouble meeting the demands of a progressive future, they never consider compromising with the liberals: they always reach back and compromise with the most backward idiots they can find. The Tories in the UK fail to form a majority in the recent election, so what do they do? Revise their policies to be more in line with the electorate? Don’t make me laugh. They decide to form a coalition with the crazies. The DUP. Ian Paisley’s rotting corpse. This party:

It reminds me of how the Republicans in the US are making hay with an unholy union of Libertarians and the Religious Right. It just leads to greater decay.

The Driftglass report on Brooks’ latest: We can’t investigate Trump because look at all the misery caused by investigating the Clintons!

Instead, Mr. Brooks turns the entire Republican attempted-coup-by-impeachment scheme — from Whitewater through Blue Dress — into a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger cautionary tale about the consequences of investigating presidents generally:

If past is prologue, this investigation will drag on for a while. The Clinton people thought the Whitewater investigation might last six months, but the inquiries lasted over seven years. The Trump investigation will lead in directions nobody can now anticipate. When the Whitewater investigation started, Monica Lewinsky was an unknown college student and nobody had any clue that an investigation into an Arkansas land deal would turn into an investigation about sex.

This investigation will ruin careers far and wide. Investigators go after anybody they think can yield information on the president. Before the Whitewater investigators got to Clinton they took down Arkansas Gov. Jim Guy Tucker, Webb Hubbell, Susan and Jim McDougal, and many others.

But of course, The Past can only be prologue for those who remember it fully and clearly. So how perfectly ironic it is that doing this very thing — remembering The Past fully and clearly — is also the greatest single existential and financial threat to Conservatism generally, and to Mr. David Brooks’ ability to afford his new multi-million dollar Capitol Hill retreat specifically.

The media are trying desperately to exonerate Republicans and blame the Democrats for our current situation — and I agree in part with the latter, because the Democratic party has lost its soul in a mad scramble for corporate dollars — but we cannot allow this kind of selective amnesia. The Republican party is a treacherous swamp of greed and treachery, and the people who voted for Trump are…

I would say much worse things about David Brooks.