This clip is four months old but it’s making the rounds now because CNN played it during an interview with Moore spokesman Janet Porter a few nights ago and the rest of the media has suddenly picked it up. A fun story about Porter, by the way, from author Nancy French, who remembers running into her at the Values Voter Summit in 2008 when French and her husband David were backing Mitt Romney instead of Mike Huckabee.

She cut me off by berating me, ending it with ‘Well, I can tell you just don’t love America.’ My husband @DavidAFrench was just days away from being deployed to Iraq, and I was very very emotional about him leaving me and our two children. /9

— Nancy French (@NancyAFrench) December 8, 2017

You’ve probably guessed the unhinged-lady-on-the-elevator-who-yelled-at-a-soldier’s-wife-for-not-loving-America was Janet Porter. /11

— Nancy French (@NancyAFrench) December 8, 2017

Imagine telling a veteran’s wife when he’s days away from deploying to a war zone that she and he aren’t patriots because they’re supporting a Mormon. She’s a perfect spokesman for Moore, as apparently neither of them have any use for their country when their own tribe isn’t in charge of setting its rules. It makes me laugh that CNN or anyone else thinks the clip below might hurt him, though, as all he’s doing is being a good nationalist. “My country used to be great but it sucks now because villains have stolen control of it”: That’s nationalism. And Moore’s voters agree with him by and large on who the villains are, so what’s to object to?

His self-declared kinship with Putin is also unsurprising, not just because Putin finds the Christian-warrior role politically expedient but because American nationalists tend to make no secret of their admiration for their rougher-edged European counterparts. The nationalist president of the United States offered a quasi-endorsement of the National Front candidate before this year’s French presidential election, for cripes sake. Playing footsie with fascists is part of the program.

Still, Moore’s obsession with gay marriage is another reason why he’s an uneasy fit for the Trump/Bannon populist moment. Trump isn’t a “values” scold, to put it mildly; his VP is way more serious about drawing a red line around traditional marriage than POTUS is. And the rest of the party is moving more towards Trumpian complacency on the subject than ardent Moore-ish opposition. This summer Pew found the GOP evenly split, with 48 percent opposed to legalizing marriage between gays and 47 percent in favor. A month earlier Gallup also pegged Republican support at 47 percent. Moore’s about to be elected to populist acclaim on an issue that both the country and the party care less about every day. But then, we have a Republican speaker whose pet issue is entitlement reform and neither the country nor the party cares about that. Why should Moore face a different standard?

Anyway, no, the clip below won’t cost him votes. But it would if right-wingers were as offended by anti-Americanism as they pretended to be during the Obama years.

REPUBLICANS, 2008: Obama shouldn't be president because his pastor Jeremiah Wright said "God damn America"
REPUBLICANS, 2017: We should elect Captain God Damn America to the Senate https://t.co/xL9zgzhNax

— Yair Rosenberg (@Yair_Rosenberg) December 8, 2017

Imagine the reaction if a black Democrat had uttered these words, and cited police brutality rather than same-sex marriage as his reason for why America is focus of modern evil in the world. https://t.co/2Ipj52B8KU

— Philip Klein (@philipaklein) December 8, 2017

All Moore’s doing here is rhetorically kneeling during the anthem because his narrow cause takes precedence over honoring America. Why doesn’t President MAGA, super-patriot, tweet something scolding him?