David French has been assaulted by the Trump People.

I’ll get to the French thing in a minute. First, I’m going to say my goodbyes to Facebook. Goodbyes. I’ll still be here doing my thing, going back to where I belong. Here’s what I said a couple years back on the subject of going home.. Should have paid attention to what I was trying to tell myself.

Poking Around

Johnny Last Chance Garage

Yeah. Come back to an old place, especially from your youth, and everything seems smaller.

When you were a kid, the Coca Cola cooler seemed big. It’s not. It’s also rusted and broken. But that’s okay. If you have an Amex card, you can still get a cold king size glass bottle of coke. If you’re a billionaire.

I’m tired of pretending. Even the ones who think they know don’t. Intellectually maybe, they have some appreciation of the dire circumstance. They see Godzilla emerging from the sea at the city’s edge. What they don’t see, and never will, is that everyone alive now beckoned Godzilla, asked him to come in one way or another. By the fights they refused to fight, the narrow ambitions they pursued while the giant stomped closer, the semantics they used to deflect responsibility from themselves because all they cared about was their families. As if families will exist when freedom has been extinguished by a reptilian moron.

Got a scuffed old cowboy boot with a bone boot chain. Propping it on the porch rail. Want to fight? I welcome it. Come. Fight. All you millennial slackers. I’m the elder now. And I don’t care about your feelings anymore. Such freedom. You have absolutely no idea how much more I know about everything than you do.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh. I can breathe again.

It’s not incremental. It’s factorial. I’m breathing this tremendous sigh of relief. The cars go by. I’ve shown you my work and you don’t comprehend it. You drive by. I breathe. Do you understand that? It makes me free. Now, when I dream, my dreams are not so bad.

I’ve got an old Triumph in Johnny’s Garage. I’m kick-starting it now. But I’ll be back in an hour or so for a king size Coke unless there’s a 16 oz RC Cola in that magnificent artillery bottle.

As I said, you have no idea what all is in my head.

Robert Laird via Johnny Dodge at 6:51 PM, Febuary 15, 2014.

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So David French is mad as hell and he’s not going to take it anymore.

“Trump’s alt-right trolls have subjected me and my family to an unending torrent of abuse that I wouldn’t wish on anyone. I distinctly remember the first time I saw a picture of my then-seven-year-old daughter’s face in a gas chamber. It was the evening of September 17, 2015. I had just posted a short item to the Corner calling out notorious Trump ally Ann Coulter for aping the white-nationalist language and rhetoric of the so-called alt-right. Within minutes, the tweets came flooding in. My youngest daughter is African American, adopted from Ethiopia, and in alt-right circles that’s an unforgivable sin. It’s called “race-cucking” or “raising the enemy.” I saw images of my daughter’s face in gas chambers, with a smiling Trump in a Nazi uniform preparing to press a button and kill her. I saw her face photo-shopped into images of slaves. She was called a “niglet” and a “dindu.” The alt-right unleashed on my wife, Nancy, claiming that she had slept with black men while I was deployed to Iraq, and that I loved to watch while she had sex with “black bucks.” People sent her pornographic images of black men having sex with white women, with someone photoshopped to look like me, watching.”

Okay. Bad stuff. I’ve been through some of it myself, thanks to genial Internet maestro Glenn Reynolds who threw me under the bus for one post. I got called every name in the book all over the Internet, “eat shit and die, motherfucking racist” being the consensus theme. So I sympathize with Mr. French and family. I do.

On the other hand, David French actively participated in a massive, organized verbal gang rape of Donald Trump because he has bad hair and didn’t go to Yale like politicians are supposed to. David French actually ran for president FOR ONE DAY and then stopped. Weak. You make yourself look weak and, guess what, the morlocks will attack.

It’s called consequences. You act like a shit and people will act like shit back. And there are a lot of them and they know more about being a shit than you or Glenn Reynolds do.

So I’m of two minds about the whole thing. Yes, I’m sorry that the wife and kids were insulted, threatened, and subjected to abuse they didn’t deserve. But I’m also wondering if National Review will learn anything from the barging in of reality to their prissy, snotty enclave on the snob-right.

Probably academic anyway. National Review will be closing its doors soon, leaving a lot of families out in the cold. That will probably hurt more than nasty pics and videos you don’t actually have to watch. Because you do need a paycheck to fund your hubris in a moldy opinion journal.