FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

I am not familiar with early James Brown, so this came as a shock.

•   Christmas in July! I'm gonna be real nice to you guys who haven't taken paid subscriptions yet and unleash two (2) Roy Edroso Breaks It Down newsletter stories from this week: THIS bagatelle in which our president is visited by one old and one new friend, and THIS little essay about the modern tendency to call things "scary," including our current state of malgovernance, and why we shouldn't be scared.

•  One thing that really puts some perspective on the whole conservative "elitism" shtick, lately associated with Republican up-and-dumber Josh Hawley (anti-elitist credentials: Stanford, Yale), is Kevin D. Williamson's latest attack on poor white people at National Review. He goes to Appalachia (mostly Owsley County, Kentucky), interviews some people, and reaches the same conclusion he came to a few years ago with his first big get-a-U-Haul-stupid-hillbillies article: White folks in poor rural counties are shiftless, stupid, and addicted to pills and lotto.

This isn’t the Kentucky of Elmore Leonard’s imagination, and there is nothing romantic about it. These are no sons and daughters of Andrew Jackson, no fiercely independent remnants of the old America clinging to their homes and their traditional ways. Having once been downwind of a plate of biscuits and squirrel gravy does not make you Daniel Boone. This is not the land of moonshine and hill lore, but that of families of four clutching $40 worth of lotto scratchers and crushing the springs on their beaten-down Camry while getting dinner from a Phillips 66 station.

But it's not entirely their fault; globalization took their jobs -- ha ha, kidding! The real culprit is welfare! “The monthly welfare checks" are "poison," says Willamson, that "has made Appalachia into a big and sparsely populated housing project," as even ultra-liberal Nicholas Kristof admits -- case closed! And as one of his better-off and hence more sympathetic subjects tells Williamson, "when you have that many people on the draw, that’s a big majority of voters," which is why they vote for those welfare-loving Democrats -- ha ha, kidding again! Owsley Country went 84% Trump in 2016. These offenses to common sense, however, are not as maddening as the fact that Williamson, whose attitude toward these impoverished Republicans is one long sneer, will never get half the shit about "elitism" as some Democrat who wants to give them health insurance.