I Totally Agree With Michelle Malkin For the First Time Ever

Let me disclaim this: I generally believe Michelle Malkin’s windbaggy screeds to be a scourge upon the world, retrograde bile unleashed for the sole purpose of creating chaos. But today, on tax day 2015 anno domini, Malkin has written a piece that I find to be quite reasonable and also making an ultimately important point. Also on this day, I have discovered the grey space in which conservatives and progressives are able to reach across the aisle and vehemently agree without conflict, and in that grey space is none other than Gwyneth Paltrow.

Malkin, of course, is a super-conservative writer and Fox News contributor who spews right-wing vitriol in arguments that often barely make sense. She is anti-feminist, anti-choice, and seems to think racism does not exist. Most notably she is straight up loca on immigration (pro-ICE, anti-amnesty, which is ironic considering she is a first-generation American. Her parents emigrated to the US from the Philippines.) This is a person who actually wrote a book about how the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII was a great idea, and advocates trying it again in current times, but with Arab and Muslim Americans. Yeah, dudes. What the bejeezus.

But in a blog entry entitled “Gwyneth Paltrow’s poverty voyeurism,” Malkin lambastes Paltrow’s recent devotion to the SNAP challenge, which encourages Americans to “experience what life is like for millions of low-income Americans living on the average daily allowance of only $4.15!” To announce her little foray into a low-income food allowance, Paltrow tweeted a photo of the food she’s eating on $29 a week—why do you need eight limes, girl—and wrote, “We’re walking in their shoes to see how far we get.” The impulse to eye-roll deeply was shared by all—literally all of us! Malkin writes:

Paltrow was invited to join the poverty voyeurism racket by her good friend Chef Mario Batali – last seen eating his way through Spain with G-Pally for a 13-part PBS TV series. What, you don’t have a chef bestie to motor around in a Mercedes with across Galicia and Cordoba as you savor almejas, salmorejo and flamenquines?

When these self-indulgent stars are not binging on European delicacies, they’re purging themselves of liberal guilt with phony gimmicks like the SNAP sanctimony. [More from Ari Armstrong deconstructing Paltrow’s math here.] The idea, Batali explains, is to “walk in the shoes of” millions who rely on government assistance to supplement their household budgets.

Fortunately for Paltrow, this doesn’t mean she has to give up her $1,200 pair of Tom Ford black platform heels or anything else in her well-appointed shoe closet. All she had to do was snap a Vogue-ready photo of her $29 haul of austerity grocery items (likely purchased by one of her many private kitchen assistants at an organic food market in West L.A.).

Granted, Malkin peppers her piece with the requisite scapegoating of liberals and sarcastic references to President Obama—the insubstantial, nuance-lacking crap that mars the worst and, apparently, even the best (!?) of her writing. But ultimately, her point is clear and concise and something that I totally agree with, even if I do still believe she is totes the devs. We have reached a point of mutual understanding. Gwyneth Paltrow is the great unifier. Our shared disdain for her bullshit will heal the world.