In Post-Truth America, Breitbart Attacks Kellogg’s and Rightbloggers Turn Snowflake

Last week, when not occupied with his usual grifts, The Leader worked on his pre-inaugural policy chops. On the domestic side, he associated himself with a $7 million bailout to Carrier to save 800 Indiana jobs from going to Mexico. (At that price, Indiana could have just made up jobs for them, but that would have been socialism.) On the foreign side, The Leader talked to Taiwan, a valued trading partner — well, his valued trading partner, anyway — and pissed off the Red Chinese, for which he was praised as “Machiavellian” by his followers, or at least those of his followers who know what Machiavellian means.

Liberals and even some conservatives found this alarming. But The Leader’s true believers scoffed — not because they could explain what was good about what he did, necessarily, but rather on the grounds that The Leader can’t be judged like an ordinary president — that his success proved that he had transcended your foolish libtard logic, indeed, transcended logic itself.

And anyone who thought otherwise was oppressing them with political correctness — just like those liberal fascists who make Kellogg’s Corn Flakes.

The most well-known examples of this “post-truth” thinking came from The Leader’s own aides and surrogates. Corey Lewandowski, for example, applauded the American people’s ability to appreciate that sometimes “you’re going to say things, and sometimes you don’t have all the facts to back it up.” Confronted with The Leader’s famous bullshit claim about millions of illegal Clinton voters, Vice President-elect Pence shrugged, “I think one of the things that’s refreshing about our president-elect… he tells you what’s on his mind” “There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore as facts,” said Scottie Nell Hughes. Etc.

Advocates less close to The Leader felt obliged to explain the new post-truth reality more strenuously if not more clearly. Some, being typical conservatives, blamed liberals.

At the Daily Caller, Matt K. Lewis smirked that “One good thing about Trump’s victory is that he has liberals making sense again… We now have liberals happily attacking moral relativism and suggesting that there is, in fact, objective truth out there,” which is funny because liberals don’t believe in nothin’. Lewis didn’t explain, as all conservatives understand it has something to do with Sartre or some other existmastentialists.

“Even After Trump, Left Still Using ‘Weasel Words’ to Conceal Truth,” said D.C. McAllister at PJ Media. For example: “‘Pro-choice’ hides the truth of abortion beneath the veneer of freedom.” Also: “‘Consensus’ is equated with science when applied to man-made global warming.”  Eventually, McAllister complained about “replacing the term ‘blacks’ with ‘African-Americans,’ even though most never set foot on African soil, and many have mixed heritage,” and noted that, “if two men raising donor kids want to be called ‘parents,’ ‘mommy and daddy,’ and a ‘family,’ then the rest of us must accept their self-identification as truth.” Not only that, McAllister continued, these whatchamacallits have the nerve to call the alt-right “white nationalists”! Unsurprisingly, it all reminded her of Orwell.

At CNN, Republican operative Brad Todd told the press to “stop taking Trump literally.” While “journalists are conditioned to believe that words are the ultimate product, to be curated, sweated, grinded, and polished,” he said while making jerk-off motions; ordinary Americans “know, and even value, the fact that [Trump’s] words have not passed through a gauntlet of spinners, prose smoothers, and fact-checkers.”

And, Todd went on, so what if The Leader’s promises turn out not to be, strictly-speaking quote-unquote, true? “They may have met other real estate professionals in their own lives,” he said, “and they know better than to take the words of ad hoc marketing seriously.” And if some of them have been cheated out of large sums by The Leader,  that only showed how important it is to appreciate The Leader’s post-truthful genius, and not invest ready money.

Others reduced this message to blar har libtard you and your stupid facts — The Leader’s just trolling ya!

“Trump Punks Media With Claim Of ‘Millions Of Illegal Votes,'” said William Teach of Right Wing News. “Could Trump be correct? Probably not,” admitted Teach. “But, hey, without an examination of the tallies in places like California and New York, how do we know that they didn’t have millions of illegal aliens, felons, people voting two or more times, and legal aliens voting?” In fact, maybe it was millions of outer space type aliens — anything’s possible now!

“Hell, even his title is a troll,” swooned Kurt Schlichter at TownHall. Come again? “President-elect Donald Trump — just having to say it makes pointy progressive heads explode. But look on the bright side, suckers. This time come January, you won’t have to call him ‘President-elect’ anymore. Because then it will be President Donald Trump. Cue the giant sad trombone.”

It wasn’t all Shavian wit — Schlichter also engaged objections to The Leader: for example, to those who doubted the sincerity of his promise to build a Mexican wall, Schlichter explained, “Dude, he’s totally building a wall. And you’ll see him down by the border, flipping off Tijuana then digging the first shovelful of dirt.” In your imaginary face, libtard!

But as longtime readers know, conservatives can mood-swing from grandeur to persecution mania in the blink of an eye. Last week, cereal brand Kellogg’s chose to remove their ads from Breitbart.com, the website until recently run by The Leader’s minister of propaganda, Stephen Bannon, because, they said, such placements did not align with their “values” as the breakfast choice of millions of non-neo-Nazi households.

Kellogg’s is not the only advertiser to pull out, but Breitbart.com, perhaps stung to the heart by the loss of Tony the Tiger and Toucan Sam, cried that this was “one more example of an out-of-touch corporation embracing false left-wing narratives used to cynically smear the hard working Americans that populate this nation’s heartland,” declared war (or, in Breitbart talk, #war), and demanded its readers pledge to “NEVER BUY KELLOGG’S AGAIN!”

Breitbart has since run several stories about Kellogg’s, including this 5,500-word doozy tying the company to Mao Tse-Tung’s Long March, Saul Alinsky, Antonio Gramsci, the “New Class,” U2, George Soros, and other wingnut boogeymen. They also showed a video of a fan who, I’m not kidding, blew up a box of Pop-Tarts.

Many Breitbart readers tweeted pictures of cereal boxes in the garbage as proof of their loyalty to The Leader.

This may seem nuts to you, but several prominent conservatives of the sort who habitually sneer at liberals as “special snowflakes” agreed that Kellogg’s was the victim of a War of Cornflake Aggression, and fought for their Constitutional right to force corporations to advertise on their favorite websites.

“Executives at companies like Kellogg need to understand that ours is not a one-party state,” sputtered John Hinderaker at Power Line.

“Destroy Kelloggs,” roared Ace of Spades. “Don’t eat another damn thing made by these fascists… If they want Peace, then they shall have Peace. But if they want #War, let them have more #War than they can bear.”

“The left wants a world in which a discount furniture warehouse is free to advertise with Rachel Maddow but not Rush Limbaugh,” babbled Mark Steyn. “The CEO of something as universal and unobjectionable as Kellogg’s Corn Flakes finds it easier to side with the losing side in a free election, and against half of his fellow citizens… America is a split nation politically. If the likes of Kellogg’s and Anheuser-Busch want to extend that split to beer and corn flakes, there won’t be a lot left.” (Anheuser-Busch? Linkage suggests Steyn meant they didn’t drag Colin Kaepernick to his feet when he took a knee, which is also an act of #war.)

The New York Post gave Breitbart’s boycott favorable coverage, including the claim that a recent Kellogg’s stock dip was “in part because of the Breitbart brouhaha.” Conservatives professed glee at what they portrayed as the death-blow. “After Kellogg’s Tosses Conservatives to the Curb, They Get What’s Coming to Them,” crowed Young Conservatives. “The message is simple: stay out of the culture wars or pay for it,” warned the Family Research Council.

Understand, Kellogg’s isn’t the real target here, and ad dollars aren’t the real prize. Conservatives have drawn a lesson from The Leader’s success: Rage sells — and when it comes to rage, supply drives demand. So if someone doesn’t want to buy your advertising, don’t shrug it off, as people did in pre-post-truth times — take it as an insult, in fact as an assault on your honor, and demand satisfaction. Thousands of your followers who are sick of yelling at Muslims and Mexicans and having nothing to show for it will be happy for the change of pace offered by an assault on some cereal company run by rich people who have never had their own reality TV show and are therefore not their buddies.

Doesn’t make sense, you say? Haven’t you been paying attention? In the immortal words of John Prine, that common sense don’t make no sense no more.