Ownin’ those libs for fun and profit. As usual.

It’s lucky that most of you aren’t near me when I watch Fox News. It’s an ugly experience since I inevitably become enraged and the language gets more than a little bit salty. If I didn’t have to watch it I wouldn’t but it’s important to my work to keep up with what they’re saying. (As citizens you can follow Media Matters and Right Wing Watch to get the highlights without subjecting yourself to the horror of Fox News.)

One of the people who inevitably turns my rage level up to 11 is Mollie Hemingway. So I enjoyed this piece in the New York Times about the certain breed of right wing personality who cleverly evades some of the Dear Leader bootlicking in favor of another tried and true wingnut crowd pleasing strategy:

When President Trump ran for office four years ago, a conservative writer with a growing following vented the kind of doubt and cynicism that was common among people like her who worried about the damage he could do to their cause. She called him “a demagogue with no real solutions for anything at all.” She accused him of betraying the anti-abortion movement. And she wrote that his constant complaining about being treated unfairly was “ineffectual and impotent.”

Today, that writer, Mollie Hemingway, is one of Mr. Trump’s favorites. Her pieces for The Federalist, where she is a senior editor, have earned presidential retweets and affirmation for their scathing criticism of Democrats and the news media, whom she accuses of lying about just about everything when it comes to the president. Recently she claimed that journalists had fabricated reports about tear gas and the excessive use of force against protesters outside the White House (law enforcement, in fact, has acknowledged shooting a pepper-based irritant into the crowd), and said “a large group of Democrats” was defending the destruction of federal property (there is no such group).

Ms. Hemingway is part of a group of conservative commentators — who have large social media followings, successful podcasts and daily Fox News appearances — that has helped insulate the president and preserve his popularity with his base, even as many Americans say they are likely to vote against him in November.

What these writers and pundits don’t tend to do is make the doggedly pro-Trump defenses that appear on Breitbart and erupt from the mouth of Sean Hannity. Often, they don’t bother at all with the awkward business of trying to explain away Mr. Trump’s latest folly.

Instead, they offer an outlet for outrage against those the president has declared his enemies, often by reducing them to a culture war caricature of liberalism.

The capacity that many Trump supporters have developed to focus so intensely on the perceived wrongdoing of his opponents is a powerful asset for the president as he runs for re-election amid growing economic and social turmoil and a public health crisis that a majority of voters say they don’t trust him to handle. This almost entirely white cohort of conservative commentators can spend ample time mocking the mainstream and liberal media for focusing on Mr. Trump’s racist and divisive messaging without giving nearly as much consideration to the harm caused, for instance, when he promotes a video of someone shouting “white power.”

Through this lens, Mr. Trump’s transgressions seem irrelevant compared with the manifold misdeeds of everyone from the Clintons to CNN. Their portrayal of what the country would look like if the Democrats win big in November is indeed a frightening one to Trump supporters: a White House with Senator Bernie Sanders as the shadow socialist president; a Democratic House of Representatives where Representative Ilhan Omar calls the shots; a society in which mask mandates are the first step in a government experiment with social control; a political arena where conservatives are badgered into silence.

To many conservatives these scenarios seem perfectly plausible, especially as some prominent figures on the right contend that their voices are unwelcome in mainstream media — and even some liberals face a backlash for arguing that shaming and ostracism of opposing points of view has grown too common.

“There are a lot of conservatives reading ‘1984’ right now,” said Allie Beth Stuckey, who hosts a podcast, “Relatable” and is the author of a forthcoming book on self-esteem, “You’re Not Enough (And That’s OK).” Ms. Stuckey has a growing fan base and a large platform through her affiliations with right-leaning outfits like Turning Point USA and PragerU that are aimed at reaching millennials. While she does not go out of her way to defend the president, she said she got the sense from her audience that there are a lot of young women like her: socially conservative and religious, who sometimes cringe at Mr. Trump’s behavior but don’t let it bother them over all.

“There’s fear. It’s real fear. And I understand if you’re not a conservative it’s hard to be empathetic and it seems like an exaggeration,” Ms. Stuckey said. “But like the same kind of fear on the left that Trump is a unique threat to the country, there’s a real fear on the right, especially I would say from Christians, of what the country would look like under a Democratic president.”

The thread of commentary that isn’t explicitly pro-Trump as much as it is witheringly anti-left has blossomed into a big business, led by personalities like Ben Shapiro, the host of one of the most successful podcasts in the country and the author of best-selling books. His most recent is “How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps,” in which he offers a stark take on how the “rising tide of radicalism from the left” threatens to tear the country apart.

Mr. Shapiro isn’t shy about calling out the president for his divisive and unfocused leadership. But far more often he takes shots at Mr. Trump’s critics. In this line of attack, Mr. Shapiro echoes other conservatives who deflect: Mr. Trump wasn’t helping anyone, for instance, by asking top public health officials to study whether disinfectant could be injected into the human body as a coronavirus treatment. But, Mr. Shapiro explained he didn’t actually tell people to put bleach in their bodies. “That doesn’t mean he was recommending actually injecting Clorox, people.”

Some media scholars see the desire to pick apart Mr. Trump’s critics as a form of entertainment disinformation. “They try to get you not to believe other kinds of information that you might hear in the larger media sphere, and it’s just fun,” said Khadijah White, a professor at Rutgers University who studies race, gender and the media. “It’s really fun to see the other side lose. And that just buttresses the idea that maybe Trump is corrupt, but they’re corrupt too.”

This is the future of the Trump Cult. They will seamlessly move from their love of Trump to their hatred of “the libs” because it’s never really been about him — it’s about them. He said what they were thinking and what they were thinking is how much they hate all their enemies. They don’t really care about trade or America being laughed at or taxes or Jesus. They just hate liberals, Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Muslims, all foreigners of all races, ethnicity and religion, and all uppity feminists. In other words, they hate everyone but themselves. And Trump made their hatred mainstream and took it all the way to the White House.

Wingnut welfare recipients like Hemingway will continue to make a tidy living feeding their hatred with lies, propaganda and cant. There is absolutely nothing new about any of that. It’s just that their political leaders (with the exception of clowns like Steve King and Louis Gohmert) left it to the wingnut welfare queens and hate radio hates to feed that grotesque impulse directly. Politicians would indirectly validate these people with attention, dogwhistle their endorsement of the hate, but usually left the crude insults and blatant lies to them so they could appear to be above it all.

Trump was too stupid to understand how that worked. That’s why he could never get out of the low 40s. It’s also why his core base loved him so much. He was one of them.

It’s not about class or region. It’s about who you hate.

The article goes on to look at The Federalist, Hemingway’s home, which is sort of interesting but I can’t say that it’s doing anything that we didn’t see in plenty of conservative rags in the past. It’s just going with the Breitbart model — and the Newsmax model and the American Spectator model and Drudge and blah,blah, blah. It has shadowy funding which means it’s got a rich right wing sugar daddy and that’s also nothing new. This is how the right wing gravy train works.

Republicans who are no fans of Mr. Trump or the turn that their party has taken under him say that its fuming commentariat is a symptom of a deeper problem: its inability to govern. Though the G.O.P. controls half of Washington, its leading voices still often sound like the aggrieved opposition party.

“Ask them what they are building, and they can’t answer,” said Evan McMullin, who ran against Mr. Trump in 2016 as a third-party candidate. “They aren’t trying to build anything. They’re just tearing things down.”

Yeah, ok. Again, nothing new about any of this. McMullin only thinks it is because Trump is such a brutish ignoramus.

Maybe Trump has lowered America’s tolerance for right wing bullshit but I’ll believe it when I see it. This is a financial model that benefits rich Republicans and professional GOP propagandists. If it ain’t broke …