Smug liberals force James Bennet to hire a pro-Trump columnist

A New Yorker essay from January of last year went hunting for that rarest of species, pro-Trump intellectuals.  If found them huddled at a blogspot site:

[I]t was something of a surprise when, this past February, an academically inclined online publication appeared, full of erudite arguments in favor of Trump. It was called the Journal of American Greatness, in tribute to Trump’s pledge to “Make America Great Again,” although its sensibility was more tweed jacket than red baseball cap. A charmingly bare-bones site, hosted at a lowly blogspot.com Web address, it evoked an earlier, nerdier version of the Internet, and its wry tone seemed calculated to contrast with the bombastic style of its chosen candidate. This was where Publius Decius Mus began his career, alongside a handful of other writers, most of whom adopted Latin pseudonyms. The hidden identities of Decius [author of the infamous “Flight 93 election” essay]  and the other Journal contributors may have made the essays more seductive, by making their authors seem like fugitives, desperate to stay one step ahead of the ideological authorities. Their facelessness also conveyed a faint sense of menace, as if these were the distant, Plato-quoting cousins of the balaclava-wearing hooligans who are a regular presence at nationalist marches throughout Europe.

Then Trump got elected, and things became a little more upscale and lot less pseudonymous:

The Journal of American Greatness was replaced, this past summer, by a more conventional spinoff, American Greatness, published by a little-known polemicist named Chris Buskirk, who wants it to become “the leading voice of the next generation of American conservatism.”

How’s that working out for you Chris?

Real well, it turns out.  Meet the New York Times’ op-ed page’s newest contributing opinion writer. 

I leave it to the LGM commentariat to linger over the various pearls Buskirk is casting in this piece.

As to the decision to react to complaints about the lack of intellectual diversity on an opinion page where Paul Krugman might as well be a Maoist by hiring a pro-Trump conservative, I’m all out of both gin and snark, so I’ll outsource that to y’all as well.

Now I’m getting back into the boat.