SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER:

Trump is way ahead -- for many reasons, but the most important is obvious and virtually ignored.

Political correctness. Trump hasn't made it a campaign theme exactly, but he mentions it often with angry disgust. Reporters, pundits, and the other candidates treat it as a sideshow, a handy way for Trump (King Kong Jr.) to smack down the pitiful airplanes that attack him as he bestrides his mighty tower, roaring. But the analysts have it exactly backward. Political correctness is the biggest issue facing America today. Even Trump has just barely faced up to it. The ironic name disguises the real nature of this force, which ought to be called invasive leftism or thought-police liberalism or metastasized progressivism. The old-time American mainstream, working- and middle-class white males and their families, is mad as hell about political correctness and the havoc it has wreaked for 40 years -- havoc made worse by the flat refusal of most serious Republicans to confront it. Republicans rarely even acknowledge its existence as the open wound it really is; a wound that will fester forever until someone has the nerve to heal it -- or the patient succumbs. To watch young minorities protest their maltreatment on fancy campuses when your own working life has seen, from the very start, relentless discrimination in favor of minorities--such events can make people a little testy.

We are fighting Islamic terrorism, but the president won't even say "Islamic terrorism." It sounds like a joke -- but it isn't funny. It connects straight to other problems that terrify America's nonelites, people who do not belong (or whose spouses or children don't belong) to the races or groups that are revered and protected under p.c. law and theology.

Political correctness means that when the Marines discover that combat units are less effective if they include women, a hack overrules them. What's more important, guys, combat effectiveness or leftist dogma? No contest! Nor is it hard to notice that putting women in combat is not exactly the kind of issue that most American women are losing sleep over. It matters only to a small, powerful clique of delusional ideologues. (The insinuation that our p.c. military is upholding the rights of women everywhere, that your average American woman values feminist dogma over the strongest-possible fighting force--as if women were just too ditzy to care about boring things like winning battles--is rage-making.)

CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY IS known for his satires of American politics, including Little Green Men, Boomsday, and Supreme Courtship. His 1994 novel Thank You For Smoking, about an amoral PR man who works to downplay the dangers of cigarettes, was adapted into a 2005 film starring Aaron Eckhart. But in Buckley's new book The Relic Master, he turns his attention from current events to history.

"The reason I went back 500 years and crossed the Atlantic and settled in the Holy Roman Empire was I kind of needed a break from political satire," Buckley says in Episode 190 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "I don't know how you do political satire today."

He says that in the age of Donald Trump, it's impossible to dream up anything more exaggerated than reality, whereas Renaissance Europe offered a fresh new playground to explore.

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