A new poll from Quinnipiac shows Trump and Crooked Hillary statistically tied, each in the low 40% range. Their sample included roughly equal numbers of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, unlike many other polls that are stacked more toward Democrats, on the assumption that the turnout for this election to end all elections will look like it did during the boring non-events of the past several elections.
Also encouraging is that Trump wins by a landslide on the issues of the economy and terrorism, and the personal qualities of honesty / trustworthiness and leadership. Those are far and away the most important issues and qualities to the respondents, so much so that others are barely on their radar.
Since people are going to be paying a little too much attention to public polls, as the general election heats up, let's take stock of how good things look already.
At worst, Trump polls around 40% and Hillary around 45%. What can we tell about the state of the race, even if this worst case scenario were true?
Hillary tended to underperform her polls in the primaries, while Trump overperformed them. Add those together, this puts them even in reality despite a 5 point lead in the polls for Hillary.
The 15% of voters who are undecided or not answering at this stage will go more for Trump than Hillary. Probably 10% for Trump, 5% for Hillary. That would make them polling both at 50%, and factoring in their performance relative to polls, gives Trump a comfortable win.
Why will the undecided / no answer people go more for Trump? They can't be confused about where the two stand relative to each other on issues or personal qualities. These candidates are night and day. And the issues and qualities that are most important now have always been since the primaries, and will continue to be through the general -- economy, terrorism, honesty, strong leadership.
If you are closer to Hillary, you are already on board. There's nothing keeping you back. Your peers, family, the media, the entire world is telling you that you're on the right side for voting Hillary.
These undecided voters are really just uneasy about voting for Trump. They are closer to his orbit than Crooked Hillary's, but they're sensitive about bumpy rides. Some times they'll drift closer, sometimes get cold feet, then come back again, etc. Every pressure imaginable is pushing them away 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And despite that, they aren't being converted into higher numbers for Hillary. Her numbers are fairly flat, while Trump's numbers will rise and fall periodically, as his sensitive voters vacillate about joining the bumpy ride.
Ultimately, then, most of these undecideds will vote Trump.
That is just the picture for the national popular vote. The same applies at the state level where it counts. Polls are showing Trump at worst behind Hillary by about 5 points, with double digits undecided. Particularly in blue states, these undecideds have absolutely nothing to worry about in saying they'll vote Hillary -- so why aren't they? They'd conform with their state's recent history, they'd get the respectability of the overly educated elite in their region, as well as the approval of the media.
I'm not saying Trump will blow away Crooked Hillary in all states, let alone in former blue states. But all he needs is one more vote than 50%, and he gets all the Electoral College votes for that state. His national share could be barely over 50%, but if that level holds across the country, he will win in a landslide because of the winner-take-all nature of the Electoral College.
Thus, there will many more "close" states, say where the margin of victory is under 5 points. Trump is turning many blue states into toss-up states -- Michigan, Pennsylvania, Oregon, and others.
This happened before in 1980, when Reagan got 50.7% nationally, but 489 electoral votes because that support was so widespread around the country, rather than concentrated in deeply red states. In 1980, there were 16 close states, 12 of which were won by the winner. Quite a few were former Democrat strongholds in the South, which began to realign in favor of Republicans after the Civil Rights era.
By 2012 there were only 4 close states because the country had become more solidly polarized along liberal vs. conservative lines. Trump is unwinding the lib vs. con culture wars, and is already appealing to a far broader swath of the nation than the Conservative, Inc. candidates from the past quarter-century. This is akin to the earlier realignment of the South, only now there will be a gradual realignment of the Rust Belt, the Pacific Northwest, and parts of the Mid-Atlantic.
Expect for there to be many nail-biter states, as regions realign out of the culture war era, but also expect for more of them to go for Trump than against -- including those with decent-sized electoral prizes, like Michigan and Pennsylvania, and not only Iowa and New Hampshire.
Hillary is not appealing to a very broad range of the country, and seems to be intent on only driving up her numbers in relatively safer states like New York, California, and Illinois, whose large populations make them more influential in national polls. That seems like the only explanation for why the state races are polling so close, while the national race gives her a somewhat wider lead (on the face of it).
I still see no major reason to revise my forecast for a comfortable Trump win in November. Not that he's going to literally knock her block off on the debate stage, win 80% of the popular vote, and then dance on her grave. But given the winner-take-all Electoral College, he can leverage narrow wins in many toss-up states into a wipe-out in electoral votes. Those will include not only the old swing states from the culture war era, but now many blue states that want to realign away from Wall Street and an interventionist foreign policy.
June 29, 2016
June 27, 2016
Brexit has shattered conformity: Americans now feel validated in voting for nationalism and populism
At the beginning of the Trump campaign, I argued that the phenomenon was best thought of as a breaking of the conformity effect, drawing on a long tradition of social psychology research, in particular the Solomon Asch conformity experiments.
In those experiments, a group of people are seated at a table and are shown a pair of lines, one being clearly longer than the other. An authority figure asks each of them in turn, which line is longer? One after the other, they say that the shorter line is longer -- these people are actually in on the game, and their wrong answers are meant to test the conformity of the final respondent, who is the only true test subject. Most but not all people conform and say the shorter line is longer.
However, if there's even one other person who gives the correct answer, it completely wipes out the conformity effect -- now every test subject says that the longer line is longer. They feel relieved, like "Thank God, I thought I was crazy, but I've found independent confirmation."
Before Trump announced his campaign, large swathes of the American population already held the beliefs and felt the feelings that Trump would soon bring into the public forum. What changed was that, by publicly declaring that the Emperor wasn't wearing any clothes, all of those disconnected thinking-they're-crazy voters bolted upright and said, "Thank God, I thought I was the only one who thought and felt that way!"
Trump did not lead them through a logical, rational, or fact-based argument. He and his audience were already largely in agreement on the facts of our current situation. Nor did he manipulate their emotions, as they already felt more or less the way he did about these facts -- how angry they were at the disgrace of our politicians selling out ordinary people to the wealthy and powerful, how violated and corrupted they felt to see their communities overrun with foreigners.
Sure, he gave them a few new facts -- did you know that President Eisenhower deported over a million illegal Mexican immigrants back in the 1950s? -- and intensified the emotions that folks were already feeling -- growling, "Geeeet 'em outta heeeere" to disrupters as his rallies.
By providing a public example of "someone who thought and felt a certain way," he validated the beliefs and feelings of all those who thought and felt that way, which turned out to be a yuge chunk of the American population. He gave them cover to come out of the woodwork and not only express what policies they wanted, based on their thoughts and feelings, e.g. by attending one of his rallies. He also gave them a way to take overt action in furtherance of those goals -- heading out to the polling station and casting a vote for him in the primaries.
So what Trump really changed was people's social behavior -- from sitting apathetic and isolated on the sidelines, to pumped up and unified while attending rallies, trolling idiots on the internet, and voting in elections. He did this not by rational or even emotional argument, but simply by showing them that they were not alone, and if there's so many of us who already think and feel this way, why don't we do something about it?
That made his campaign impervious to attacks on a rational or emotional level -- his followers' beliefs and feelings were already fairly deep-seated, and Trump's campaign was just giving them an outlet to express and act on them. Indeed polls showed that almost none of them would consider voting for anyone else.
To effectively counteract his campaign, therefore, his opponents would have had to either convince his followers that he didn't really share their positions -- impossible after how ubiquitous he made his views through the media -- or to remove the option of voting for him, which was not possible during the primaries, although the cuckservatives did at one point discuss blocking his nomination at the Convention (even then, most of his supporters probably would have voted for Trump as an independent candidate in the general election).
On the other side of the Atlantic, much the same dynamics were playing out leading up to the British referendum on withdrawing from the EU. Being British, the Leave campaign did wage a more rational and emotional battle than the American Trump campaign, but it seems like that was mostly for keeping up the appearance of being a civilized society founded on healthy, vigorous debate.
In reality, the Leave voters had already held those beliefs and felt those emotions long before the prospect of a referendum on the matter had even been suggested, let alone publicly debated. What the Leave campaign offered them was a way to express that, and to make an overt act to achieve their goals -- heading out to the polling stations to vote Leave.
As with the Trump campaign, there was no effective counter-attack possible because the beliefs were so deeply held, and the emotions so deeply felt. And unlike in America, they were voting for a single proposition rather than the full suite of positions held by a candidate, so the opponents could not convince the Leave voters that their choice at the polling station would not be what it was made out to be (leave means leave). The only thing they could have done would have been to cancel the vote and not allow people to act in furtherance of their goals.
But now we have an even higher level of conformity shattering -- Americans have just witnessed Britain acting on behalf of their populist and nationalist goals, in a nationwide election of citizens, in defiance of unrelenting pressures to conform with the policies of their betters. So now we have not only other individuals in America who have validated our goals, we have an entire other nation (perceived as a whole nation rather than individual Britons) that has validated the goals that we want America, as a whole nation, to pursue.
Britain as a nation will also provide an "Emperor is wearing no clothes" example to other entire nations within the EU, such as France and Italy. Much of the population of those countries are already becoming aware that they are not alone in wanting a populist and nationalist set of policies, but until now they only felt that arising among the other individuals within their own nation. Now they see an entire nation acting the way they would like to see their entire nation act.
As in the within-nation case of the Trump campaign or the Leave campaign, the between-nation shattering of conformity is not relying on rational or emotional appeals from one nation to another. The winners of the Brexit vote surely feel similar to the Trump supporters over here, but they aren't appealing to us directly. All they are doing is providing a highly visible example of breaking with the wrong-headed status quo, which -- without intending to do so -- sends the signal to other nations that they can do it, too, if they want.
In the Asch experiments, the only way to prevent the conformity shattering effect would have been to simply not ask the test subject for his response. He hears all of the incorrect answers being given, then he is relieved to hear that sole exception who gives the right answer, but then he is not asked by the authority figure and therefore does not get a chance to make an overt act in defiance of the conformist pressures. He just sits there thinking, "At least I'm not the only one," but still unable express or act on that conviction.
In the political referendum, the analogy would be to simply deny the newly awakened citizens a chance to vote on the matter at hand by canceling the elections -- and plunge their nations into bloody revolution.
Our rulers are not that anti-democratic, so as it stands the populist and nationalist genie has been let out of the bottle, and no amount of rational or emotional argument will put him back in ("fact-checking," calling us xenophobes, etc.). What has changed over the past year is not our understanding of the facts, or our emotional reaction to them, but rather the sense that we were alone, and are now aware of how many others want the same thing as we do.
Our opponents cannot reverse this basic perceptual awareness, without hopelessly trying to convince us that we didn't really see what we have seen. The displays of populist and nationalist sentiment are too public, too widespread, and therefore too unforgettable for the globalist Establishment to shame us back into disaffected isolation.
In those experiments, a group of people are seated at a table and are shown a pair of lines, one being clearly longer than the other. An authority figure asks each of them in turn, which line is longer? One after the other, they say that the shorter line is longer -- these people are actually in on the game, and their wrong answers are meant to test the conformity of the final respondent, who is the only true test subject. Most but not all people conform and say the shorter line is longer.
However, if there's even one other person who gives the correct answer, it completely wipes out the conformity effect -- now every test subject says that the longer line is longer. They feel relieved, like "Thank God, I thought I was crazy, but I've found independent confirmation."
Before Trump announced his campaign, large swathes of the American population already held the beliefs and felt the feelings that Trump would soon bring into the public forum. What changed was that, by publicly declaring that the Emperor wasn't wearing any clothes, all of those disconnected thinking-they're-crazy voters bolted upright and said, "Thank God, I thought I was the only one who thought and felt that way!"
Trump did not lead them through a logical, rational, or fact-based argument. He and his audience were already largely in agreement on the facts of our current situation. Nor did he manipulate their emotions, as they already felt more or less the way he did about these facts -- how angry they were at the disgrace of our politicians selling out ordinary people to the wealthy and powerful, how violated and corrupted they felt to see their communities overrun with foreigners.
Sure, he gave them a few new facts -- did you know that President Eisenhower deported over a million illegal Mexican immigrants back in the 1950s? -- and intensified the emotions that folks were already feeling -- growling, "Geeeet 'em outta heeeere" to disrupters as his rallies.
By providing a public example of "someone who thought and felt a certain way," he validated the beliefs and feelings of all those who thought and felt that way, which turned out to be a yuge chunk of the American population. He gave them cover to come out of the woodwork and not only express what policies they wanted, based on their thoughts and feelings, e.g. by attending one of his rallies. He also gave them a way to take overt action in furtherance of those goals -- heading out to the polling station and casting a vote for him in the primaries.
So what Trump really changed was people's social behavior -- from sitting apathetic and isolated on the sidelines, to pumped up and unified while attending rallies, trolling idiots on the internet, and voting in elections. He did this not by rational or even emotional argument, but simply by showing them that they were not alone, and if there's so many of us who already think and feel this way, why don't we do something about it?
That made his campaign impervious to attacks on a rational or emotional level -- his followers' beliefs and feelings were already fairly deep-seated, and Trump's campaign was just giving them an outlet to express and act on them. Indeed polls showed that almost none of them would consider voting for anyone else.
To effectively counteract his campaign, therefore, his opponents would have had to either convince his followers that he didn't really share their positions -- impossible after how ubiquitous he made his views through the media -- or to remove the option of voting for him, which was not possible during the primaries, although the cuckservatives did at one point discuss blocking his nomination at the Convention (even then, most of his supporters probably would have voted for Trump as an independent candidate in the general election).
On the other side of the Atlantic, much the same dynamics were playing out leading up to the British referendum on withdrawing from the EU. Being British, the Leave campaign did wage a more rational and emotional battle than the American Trump campaign, but it seems like that was mostly for keeping up the appearance of being a civilized society founded on healthy, vigorous debate.
In reality, the Leave voters had already held those beliefs and felt those emotions long before the prospect of a referendum on the matter had even been suggested, let alone publicly debated. What the Leave campaign offered them was a way to express that, and to make an overt act to achieve their goals -- heading out to the polling stations to vote Leave.
As with the Trump campaign, there was no effective counter-attack possible because the beliefs were so deeply held, and the emotions so deeply felt. And unlike in America, they were voting for a single proposition rather than the full suite of positions held by a candidate, so the opponents could not convince the Leave voters that their choice at the polling station would not be what it was made out to be (leave means leave). The only thing they could have done would have been to cancel the vote and not allow people to act in furtherance of their goals.
But now we have an even higher level of conformity shattering -- Americans have just witnessed Britain acting on behalf of their populist and nationalist goals, in a nationwide election of citizens, in defiance of unrelenting pressures to conform with the policies of their betters. So now we have not only other individuals in America who have validated our goals, we have an entire other nation (perceived as a whole nation rather than individual Britons) that has validated the goals that we want America, as a whole nation, to pursue.
Britain as a nation will also provide an "Emperor is wearing no clothes" example to other entire nations within the EU, such as France and Italy. Much of the population of those countries are already becoming aware that they are not alone in wanting a populist and nationalist set of policies, but until now they only felt that arising among the other individuals within their own nation. Now they see an entire nation acting the way they would like to see their entire nation act.
As in the within-nation case of the Trump campaign or the Leave campaign, the between-nation shattering of conformity is not relying on rational or emotional appeals from one nation to another. The winners of the Brexit vote surely feel similar to the Trump supporters over here, but they aren't appealing to us directly. All they are doing is providing a highly visible example of breaking with the wrong-headed status quo, which -- without intending to do so -- sends the signal to other nations that they can do it, too, if they want.
In the Asch experiments, the only way to prevent the conformity shattering effect would have been to simply not ask the test subject for his response. He hears all of the incorrect answers being given, then he is relieved to hear that sole exception who gives the right answer, but then he is not asked by the authority figure and therefore does not get a chance to make an overt act in defiance of the conformist pressures. He just sits there thinking, "At least I'm not the only one," but still unable express or act on that conviction.
In the political referendum, the analogy would be to simply deny the newly awakened citizens a chance to vote on the matter at hand by canceling the elections -- and plunge their nations into bloody revolution.
Our rulers are not that anti-democratic, so as it stands the populist and nationalist genie has been let out of the bottle, and no amount of rational or emotional argument will put him back in ("fact-checking," calling us xenophobes, etc.). What has changed over the past year is not our understanding of the facts, or our emotional reaction to them, but rather the sense that we were alone, and are now aware of how many others want the same thing as we do.
Our opponents cannot reverse this basic perceptual awareness, without hopelessly trying to convince us that we didn't really see what we have seen. The displays of populist and nationalist sentiment are too public, too widespread, and therefore too unforgettable for the globalist Establishment to shame us back into disaffected isolation.
June 25, 2016
Why "Euro-skeptic" instead of "Euro-phobic"?
In the aftermath of the Brexit vote, we're hearing the usual accusations that such voters were xenophobic, Islamophobic, and everyone knows those voters were probably also homophobic.
Why don't the multiculturalists, then, accuse those voters of being Europhobic? Instead they say Euroskeptic.
Something distinguishes the European Union on the one hand, and foreigners, Muslims, and homos on the other hand. One is simply unwanted, while the other is felt to be disgusting. We only fear what threatens our well-being on a visceral level.
The multicultis would say that they're only using different terms to describe, without endorsing themselves, the differential treatment that those mean old racist voters show towards the EU vs. foreigners, Muslims, and homos.
However, multicultis don't use these terms ironically, and they don't wink when they use the lighter term Euroskeptic, to signal that it's only the awful nationalists who feel such a distinction.
Multicultis themselves use Euroskeptic casually, as though they too believe that the EU is nowhere near the primal threat to the multicultis' survival as are foreigners, Muslims, and homos, and therefore deserve a lighter term with "-skeptic" rather than "-phobe".
Multicultis also love to use hysterical language like xenophobe, Islamophobe, etc. So why, when dealing with nationalists, would they shrink away from hurling another "-phobe" slur at their enemies, and never tire of calling them Europhobes? The "-skeptic" term sounds much weaker, and they don't mince words when attacking their enemies.
What this all shows is that the multicultis realize on a deep level that the groups they're pushing for normalization are threatening to an orderly society, at least in the West. They know that a normal person will have a gut aversion to them, suggesting the term "-phobe".
But, they assure us, we're just going to have to get over our visceral distaste for hostile alien cultures that are colonizing our society. Just as they will have to get over their distaste for us (j/k, they can continue hating, since you need to hold power to qualify for racism).
Normal people don't overcome visceral reactions to such hostile forces without the use of a magic wand. Lacking a magic wand, the multicultis are also aware of the fact that they're setting up the conditions for one of the two antagonistic sides to blow up at the other.
Their goal is to maintain the pressure-cooker atmosphere for as long as possible before the inevitable blow-up -- which will be blamed on the hot-headed blower-uppers, not those cold-blooded social engineers who set up the conditions by forcing hostile groups to compete with each other for subsistence.
The rise of the Farage and Trump movements is to attempt reverse social engineering so that those hostile forces are not locked in a pressure-cooker any longer, each living in their own area of the world undisturbed. It is not, as the multicultis propagandize, to encourage or carry out what would otherwise have been an inevitable pogrom.
Of course the multicultis will never thank us for defusing their pressure-cooker bomb, securing the well-being for all groups concerned, but we don't need their gratitude. We're going to do the right thing, whether the elites appreciate it or not.
Why don't the multiculturalists, then, accuse those voters of being Europhobic? Instead they say Euroskeptic.
Something distinguishes the European Union on the one hand, and foreigners, Muslims, and homos on the other hand. One is simply unwanted, while the other is felt to be disgusting. We only fear what threatens our well-being on a visceral level.
The multicultis would say that they're only using different terms to describe, without endorsing themselves, the differential treatment that those mean old racist voters show towards the EU vs. foreigners, Muslims, and homos.
However, multicultis don't use these terms ironically, and they don't wink when they use the lighter term Euroskeptic, to signal that it's only the awful nationalists who feel such a distinction.
Multicultis themselves use Euroskeptic casually, as though they too believe that the EU is nowhere near the primal threat to the multicultis' survival as are foreigners, Muslims, and homos, and therefore deserve a lighter term with "-skeptic" rather than "-phobe".
Multicultis also love to use hysterical language like xenophobe, Islamophobe, etc. So why, when dealing with nationalists, would they shrink away from hurling another "-phobe" slur at their enemies, and never tire of calling them Europhobes? The "-skeptic" term sounds much weaker, and they don't mince words when attacking their enemies.
What this all shows is that the multicultis realize on a deep level that the groups they're pushing for normalization are threatening to an orderly society, at least in the West. They know that a normal person will have a gut aversion to them, suggesting the term "-phobe".
But, they assure us, we're just going to have to get over our visceral distaste for hostile alien cultures that are colonizing our society. Just as they will have to get over their distaste for us (j/k, they can continue hating, since you need to hold power to qualify for racism).
Normal people don't overcome visceral reactions to such hostile forces without the use of a magic wand. Lacking a magic wand, the multicultis are also aware of the fact that they're setting up the conditions for one of the two antagonistic sides to blow up at the other.
Their goal is to maintain the pressure-cooker atmosphere for as long as possible before the inevitable blow-up -- which will be blamed on the hot-headed blower-uppers, not those cold-blooded social engineers who set up the conditions by forcing hostile groups to compete with each other for subsistence.
The rise of the Farage and Trump movements is to attempt reverse social engineering so that those hostile forces are not locked in a pressure-cooker any longer, each living in their own area of the world undisturbed. It is not, as the multicultis propagandize, to encourage or carry out what would otherwise have been an inevitable pogrom.
Of course the multicultis will never thank us for defusing their pressure-cooker bomb, securing the well-being for all groups concerned, but we don't need their gratitude. We're going to do the right thing, whether the elites appreciate it or not.
June 24, 2016
June 22, 2016
Hillary no longer fag hag in chief, after Orlando
According to the Reuters tracking poll, since June 13 Hillary's poll numbers have tanked among registered voters who are not straight -- falling from 65% to nearly 40%. Slightly more of them actually said they would vote for someone else or wouldn't vote at all (42%), way up from the 20% that they started with before the Islamic terrorist attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando.
Trump has also seen increasing support from the gays, from 7% to 17%, although that is still within the range that he had been getting earlier in the race.
The major change is Hillary's cratering support from the cultural left's sacred minority group du jour -- far lower than the previous low points in the race.
Quite simply, they see how weak she is on dealing with Islamic terrorism, and they may also have become wise to how many tens of millions in bribes Crooked Hillary has taken from Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries that punish homosexuality with death.
The gays have also become far more in favor of a temporary ban on all Muslims from entering the country, a more extreme position than Trump is proposing. In early June, they were over 80% against the ban, and now are only 55-60% against. More are outright in favor, and more are merely uncertain (at least being open to it, instead of closed off to it).
Since the gays only make up 1-2% of the electorate, their changing vote patterns won't directly affect the election. However, if they are making their feelings known to their "straight allies" in real life or on the internet, it could have a rippling effect throughout the left-leaning electorate.
Their allies will not hear a subtle change in opinion, but one that says they've completely changed their minds and simply won't be voting at all. That's bound to start some awkward conversations and reflections among Democrat voters.
As with other culture war topics, this election is putting a stark choice before voters -- do you want an identity politics President who will only "feel your pain," or a results guy who will protect you from those trying to harm you and threaten your way of life?
Trump has also seen increasing support from the gays, from 7% to 17%, although that is still within the range that he had been getting earlier in the race.
The major change is Hillary's cratering support from the cultural left's sacred minority group du jour -- far lower than the previous low points in the race.
Quite simply, they see how weak she is on dealing with Islamic terrorism, and they may also have become wise to how many tens of millions in bribes Crooked Hillary has taken from Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries that punish homosexuality with death.
The gays have also become far more in favor of a temporary ban on all Muslims from entering the country, a more extreme position than Trump is proposing. In early June, they were over 80% against the ban, and now are only 55-60% against. More are outright in favor, and more are merely uncertain (at least being open to it, instead of closed off to it).
Since the gays only make up 1-2% of the electorate, their changing vote patterns won't directly affect the election. However, if they are making their feelings known to their "straight allies" in real life or on the internet, it could have a rippling effect throughout the left-leaning electorate.
Their allies will not hear a subtle change in opinion, but one that says they've completely changed their minds and simply won't be voting at all. That's bound to start some awkward conversations and reflections among Democrat voters.
As with other culture war topics, this election is putting a stark choice before voters -- do you want an identity politics President who will only "feel your pain," or a results guy who will protect you from those trying to harm you and threaten your way of life?
June 18, 2016
Trump slump reversing after Orlando
Every campaign goes through rising and falling phases. For the Trump movement, there was a low point leading up to and just after the Iowa caucus, which reversed itself and reached a peak on Super Tuesday. Then another slump in late March and early April, around the Wisconsin primary -- which reversed itself and reached another peak during the ACELA and Indiana primaries, and clinching the nomination.
In late May and early June, there was another slump during the controversy around the La Raza judge presiding over a civil case involving Trump. It turned into an identity politics issue -- with Trump correctly accusing the judge of reverse racism -- similar to the common-sense abortion controversy before the Wisconsin primary.
No matter how justified his comments were, they are identity politics topics from the old Republican party, and probably gave Independents and fence-sitters the idea that he was going back to Gingrich-era politics, when his appeal is about leaving behind identity politics and pushing populism and America first over corporate elitism and globalism.
But that slump appears to be reversing itself, perhaps in response to the Islamic terrorist attack in Orlando, and will reach another peak sometime in July. According to the Reuters tracking poll, Trump's numbers have been improving all week. You can see earlier rising and falling and rising-again phases.
At the rate things are going, it seems like there's a month-up and month-down rhythm to the campaign. Peaks occur in the early part of an odd-numbered month, and slumps early in even-numbered months. Fortunately, the election will be held in the early part of an odd-numbered month, favoring the apparent rhythm, although it also predicts a slump during the Republican National Convention in late July. We'll see.
And so far, the polls in battleground states and bellwether counties look favorable. Remember that we will win through the electoral college, or broad geographic appeal, rather than getting over 70% of the popular vote.
The Establishment politicians, the media, and shills on social media have been trying to hawk a narrative about Trump hitting a wall -- but we've heard that a million times already, and every time his numbers go back up. Now that he's back on-message with Islamic terrorism, immigration, and putting America first, it's only a matter of time before he's back where he was when he clinched the nomination.
And from now on, he'll be unloading on Crooked Hillary's record of corruption, which will only steadily drive her numbers down during this anti-Establishment zeitgeist. She didn't have to suffer through too many slumps of her own during the Democrats' primary because Bernie wussed out and didn't touch her record, preferring instead to debate abstract principles hypothetically.
No more kid gloves once you're in the ring with Trumpzilla. We're gonna say, "Bye-byeeee".
In late May and early June, there was another slump during the controversy around the La Raza judge presiding over a civil case involving Trump. It turned into an identity politics issue -- with Trump correctly accusing the judge of reverse racism -- similar to the common-sense abortion controversy before the Wisconsin primary.
No matter how justified his comments were, they are identity politics topics from the old Republican party, and probably gave Independents and fence-sitters the idea that he was going back to Gingrich-era politics, when his appeal is about leaving behind identity politics and pushing populism and America first over corporate elitism and globalism.
But that slump appears to be reversing itself, perhaps in response to the Islamic terrorist attack in Orlando, and will reach another peak sometime in July. According to the Reuters tracking poll, Trump's numbers have been improving all week. You can see earlier rising and falling and rising-again phases.
At the rate things are going, it seems like there's a month-up and month-down rhythm to the campaign. Peaks occur in the early part of an odd-numbered month, and slumps early in even-numbered months. Fortunately, the election will be held in the early part of an odd-numbered month, favoring the apparent rhythm, although it also predicts a slump during the Republican National Convention in late July. We'll see.
And so far, the polls in battleground states and bellwether counties look favorable. Remember that we will win through the electoral college, or broad geographic appeal, rather than getting over 70% of the popular vote.
The Establishment politicians, the media, and shills on social media have been trying to hawk a narrative about Trump hitting a wall -- but we've heard that a million times already, and every time his numbers go back up. Now that he's back on-message with Islamic terrorism, immigration, and putting America first, it's only a matter of time before he's back where he was when he clinched the nomination.
And from now on, he'll be unloading on Crooked Hillary's record of corruption, which will only steadily drive her numbers down during this anti-Establishment zeitgeist. She didn't have to suffer through too many slumps of her own during the Democrats' primary because Bernie wussed out and didn't touch her record, preferring instead to debate abstract principles hypothetically.
No more kid gloves once you're in the ring with Trumpzilla. We're gonna say, "Bye-byeeee".
June 16, 2016
Growing support for Muslim ban, even among Democrats and liberals
One overlooked reason why there is such silence on Islamic terrorism when the Orlando attacks are discussed by the Establishment of both parties, their media mouthpieces, and their shills on social media, is that there is growing grassroots support for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the country -- and this growth is due mostly to Democrats and liberals beginning to change their minds.
In our age of cocooning, it can be hard to remember that real-life Democrats and Republicans are not caricatures like you see on the talking head panel for MSNBC or Fox News. In fact, if both of those channels are skeptical of a proposal, you can bet that there is actually a good deal of support for it among the flesh-and-blood Democrats and Republicans who live around you. The divide in that case is between globalist elites and America-first populists.
The Reuters tracking polls include one about a temporary ban on all Muslims entering the country, which is more extreme than what Trump is proposing -- not on all Muslims, but those from countries with a proven record of producing Islamic terrorists.
As you can see by clicking that link, being against the ban had been comfortably more popular than being for it, from May 17 when they started asking it, until June 5, when it abruptly reverses. For some reason, Reuters stopped asking the question at that point, but put it back in after the Orlando shooting, showing little change from June 6. Presumably by the end of the week, there will be even greater support.
I have no idea what took place around June 5 that reversed the popularity of "for" vs. "against," but it's worth noting that the ban had more for than against already by the time of the Orlando attack.
The other big recent change is an increase of people who say they're merely "not sure".
Putting it all together, first some of those against switched abruptly to being for it (around June 6), and one week later some of those newly "for" it decided to walk it back a bit and said they were just "not sure". The end result is unchanged, though: it's more popular than not, and those who are sitting on the fence are probably for it but just don't want to admit it, or want a slightly watered-down version of it, like Trump has actually proposed.
If you filter the data to look just at Republicans, conservatives, or those who voted for Romney, there hasn't been much change over time -- support is consistently high. The change is entirely due to Democrats, liberals, and those who voted for Obama re-evaluating how wise it is to have unchecked immigration from Muslim countries in an age when they're likely to blow up our leisure spaces because they hate the "decadent West".
Women also show a major change in favor of the ban, while men have remained about equally for and against. White Democrats show a yuge increase in being "for" the ban, while black Democrats remain unchanged. Islamic terrorism is a potential wedge to drive between white and non-white Democrats.
The common denominator of the change in sentiment is those who feel most vulnerable to violence, or who prioritize protection from violence over other matters (such as multiculturalism). That is what liberal morality usually boils down to -- avoiding harm.
But perhaps in this case they're prioritizing culture and lifestyles, and wanting to maintain those against Muslim immigrants who want to impose sharia law on Americans. Whether or not they've read the data from a Pew survey of the world's Muslims, they can tell that most of the Muslims coming here don't want to assimilate to our norms, and want the backward severe laws of their homelands. When over 70, 80, and 90% of a country wants sharia law, "moderate Muslims" are like a needle in a haystack.
Sooner or later, liberals and Democrats will realize that unchecked Muslim immigration will become their worst nightmare, as a puritanical theocracy replaces a secular society.
Disturbingly, though, there is one conservative group that is fiercely against the Muslim ban -- try to take a guess, based on which state Trump lost by the biggest margin, and who is the only lingering high-profile "Never Trump" politician. That's right -- it's the damn Mormons again. The sooner that the Trump-influenced GOP can trade the Mormons for Michigan, the better.
During the entire period of the question, Mormons were 61% against the ban, 27% in favor, and 12% not sure. Other religious groups are either evenly for and against (like the Methodists), or slightly in favor (like the Catholics). It's only the Mormons who are so bitterly opposed to the idea. It stems from their still burning sense of persecution as a religious minority by the Federal Gubmint, which refused to allow Utah to enter the Union until they ended the most backward and whackjob practices of their new-age out-West cult, like polygamy.
That's my guess as to why Romney is still so triggered and tantrum-throwing about the rise of Trump, and crying about the Muslim ban. He's not like the other Establishment Republicans, who are either falling in line or trying to appear neutral. He's a high-ranking official of the Mormon Church, with divided loyalties between it and the nation:
Jews are the other "religious" group that is far more against the ban than for it, being globalist managerial types. But even they are not as naive as the Mormons, and have a healthy minority who want to keep Muslims out of Jewish neighborhoods.
The Trump movement's goal should be to put out feelers for common-sense liberals and Democrats (not progressive activists concerned with signaling their values), and encourage their skepticism of unchecked immigration from around the world, particularly from countries whose immigrants want to impose sharia law on us at a minimum, and occasionally blow up our leisure spaces.
It's also important to distance ourselves from the old Mormon and Mormon-ish base of the GOP, which will soon defect to the Democrats or form a breakaway party, in either case siding with globalist multiculturalism rather than putting America first.
In our age of cocooning, it can be hard to remember that real-life Democrats and Republicans are not caricatures like you see on the talking head panel for MSNBC or Fox News. In fact, if both of those channels are skeptical of a proposal, you can bet that there is actually a good deal of support for it among the flesh-and-blood Democrats and Republicans who live around you. The divide in that case is between globalist elites and America-first populists.
The Reuters tracking polls include one about a temporary ban on all Muslims entering the country, which is more extreme than what Trump is proposing -- not on all Muslims, but those from countries with a proven record of producing Islamic terrorists.
As you can see by clicking that link, being against the ban had been comfortably more popular than being for it, from May 17 when they started asking it, until June 5, when it abruptly reverses. For some reason, Reuters stopped asking the question at that point, but put it back in after the Orlando shooting, showing little change from June 6. Presumably by the end of the week, there will be even greater support.
I have no idea what took place around June 5 that reversed the popularity of "for" vs. "against," but it's worth noting that the ban had more for than against already by the time of the Orlando attack.
The other big recent change is an increase of people who say they're merely "not sure".
Putting it all together, first some of those against switched abruptly to being for it (around June 6), and one week later some of those newly "for" it decided to walk it back a bit and said they were just "not sure". The end result is unchanged, though: it's more popular than not, and those who are sitting on the fence are probably for it but just don't want to admit it, or want a slightly watered-down version of it, like Trump has actually proposed.
If you filter the data to look just at Republicans, conservatives, or those who voted for Romney, there hasn't been much change over time -- support is consistently high. The change is entirely due to Democrats, liberals, and those who voted for Obama re-evaluating how wise it is to have unchecked immigration from Muslim countries in an age when they're likely to blow up our leisure spaces because they hate the "decadent West".
Women also show a major change in favor of the ban, while men have remained about equally for and against. White Democrats show a yuge increase in being "for" the ban, while black Democrats remain unchanged. Islamic terrorism is a potential wedge to drive between white and non-white Democrats.
The common denominator of the change in sentiment is those who feel most vulnerable to violence, or who prioritize protection from violence over other matters (such as multiculturalism). That is what liberal morality usually boils down to -- avoiding harm.
But perhaps in this case they're prioritizing culture and lifestyles, and wanting to maintain those against Muslim immigrants who want to impose sharia law on Americans. Whether or not they've read the data from a Pew survey of the world's Muslims, they can tell that most of the Muslims coming here don't want to assimilate to our norms, and want the backward severe laws of their homelands. When over 70, 80, and 90% of a country wants sharia law, "moderate Muslims" are like a needle in a haystack.
Sooner or later, liberals and Democrats will realize that unchecked Muslim immigration will become their worst nightmare, as a puritanical theocracy replaces a secular society.
Disturbingly, though, there is one conservative group that is fiercely against the Muslim ban -- try to take a guess, based on which state Trump lost by the biggest margin, and who is the only lingering high-profile "Never Trump" politician. That's right -- it's the damn Mormons again. The sooner that the Trump-influenced GOP can trade the Mormons for Michigan, the better.
During the entire period of the question, Mormons were 61% against the ban, 27% in favor, and 12% not sure. Other religious groups are either evenly for and against (like the Methodists), or slightly in favor (like the Catholics). It's only the Mormons who are so bitterly opposed to the idea. It stems from their still burning sense of persecution as a religious minority by the Federal Gubmint, which refused to allow Utah to enter the Union until they ended the most backward and whackjob practices of their new-age out-West cult, like polygamy.
That's my guess as to why Romney is still so triggered and tantrum-throwing about the rise of Trump, and crying about the Muslim ban. He's not like the other Establishment Republicans, who are either falling in line or trying to appear neutral. He's a high-ranking official of the Mormon Church, with divided loyalties between it and the nation:
Romney is no run-of-the-mill churchgoer but has held responsible posts in this clergy-less denomination that’s led locally by laymen serving part-time. He has been the “bishop” (equivalent of a pastor) in his own “ward” (congregation) and president of the Boston area “stake” (akin to a Catholic or Episcopal bishop). He is an ordained “high priest,” the LDS ecclesiastical rank below patriarch, seventy, and apostle.
Jews are the other "religious" group that is far more against the ban than for it, being globalist managerial types. But even they are not as naive as the Mormons, and have a healthy minority who want to keep Muslims out of Jewish neighborhoods.
The Trump movement's goal should be to put out feelers for common-sense liberals and Democrats (not progressive activists concerned with signaling their values), and encourage their skepticism of unchecked immigration from around the world, particularly from countries whose immigrants want to impose sharia law on us at a minimum, and occasionally blow up our leisure spaces.
It's also important to distance ourselves from the old Mormon and Mormon-ish base of the GOP, which will soon defect to the Democrats or form a breakaway party, in either case siding with globalist multiculturalism rather than putting America first.
June 15, 2016
As mass murderers change from "angry white men" to bitter immigrants, discussion shifts from alienation to choice of weapons
Now that liberals are going into overdrive about gun control in the wake of another massacre, you have probably seen disingenuous charts showing statistics about "mass shootings" -- when what really matters is mass murder. We don't ignore 9/11 and the Boston marathon bombing, just because they used planes flown into buildings and pressure-cooker bombs rather than guns.
These three attacks are only a handful of examples of radical Islamic terrorism, which makes the gun control people feel anxiety not only because they tend to involve weapons far worse than guns, but because it raises problems for their agenda of ethnic and cultural pluralism.*
So, rather than address the safety problems of importing millions of Muslims into our country, they try to make it seem like Muslims are no worse than the folks in flyover country who have produced mass murderers of their own. (For the sake of argument, let's put aside the obvious objections that the per capita rate of terrorism is orders of magnitude higher for Muslims, and that we don't need to add to an existing problem by importing more trouble-makers.)
Who are these mass murderers from flyover country? It's shocking how little the phrase "Oklahoma City bombing" comes up among the gun control / "whites are just as evil as Muslims" crowd. It would seem to be tailor-made for their narrative -- two white guys from the Great Lakes region, paranoid about the Federal Gubmint, deadliest domestic terrorist attack in America and killing the most other than 9/11.
What gives? First, they made a bomb, which doesn't fit the narrative of controlling guns.
But more importantly, it would lead us to ask what the motivation was, what the psychology was, what were the sociological forces at play, and so on. Liberals don't want to go down that road because it would lead us to ask the exact same questions about radical Islamic terrorists, and come to similar conclusions -- centering around bitter alienation from society, leading them to violently lash out at an entire group that they view as their tormentors.
However, in the case of jihadists, it would lead ordinary Americans to the common sense solution to keep Muslims out of our country -- where most of them are bound to feel alienated -- which is a non-starter for white Americans of founding stock who feel alienated.
Uh-oh, different solutions for seemingly similar problems -- a big no-no, no matter how impossible it would be to attain parity (by deporting white people from America).
In order to prevent ordinary Americans from coming to the conclusion to keep most Muslims out of a country where they appear to be incompatible, liberals must first prevent them from focusing on the bitter alienation that a typical Muslim feels in America (or any other Western country).
It doesn't matter what aspects of our culture make them feel so out-of-place, the end result is that they do inevitably feel this way, to varying degrees. But it's not hard to think of several -- a more libertine code of conduct than in their more puritanical culture, adhering more to a culture of law than a culture of honor, and one that is more secular and even blasphemous than religious and pious.
This is a similar line of investigation as there used to be into the phenomenon of "angry white men" -- coming up with a basic psychological profile, demographic description, and looking at how sociological changes may be at play (declining working-class incomes, women as breadwinners, multicultural values in mainstream culture, bullying at school, and so on).
But whereas the study of angry white men led to tough questions about how they can become better integrated into society -- like the Trump program of bringing back high-paying manufacturing jobs and ending political correctness -- the study of bitter alienated Muslims leads instead to the other Trump program of "they all gotta go back". They're not rooted here, and don't need to be here. They may still be bitter back home, but that's their homeland's problem, not ours. We can help out from afar, but we won't be taking them in, which will only exacerbate their sense of bitter alienation.
It's shocking how quickly the interest in understanding mass murder has evaporated, even as it has become more common. As recently as 2002, uber-liberal director Michael Moore released Bowling for Columbine, which looked into the psychology and sociology behind mass murder by angry white men. It did touch on gun control, but that was not the main focus since he spent the other half focusing on the Oklahoma City bombers. Toward the climax, Marilyn Manson is interviewed to provide a window into the minds of alienated white youth, and he emphasizes better social integration of kids like the Columbine shooters, rather than a pat answer about gun control.
When you consider the implications for immigration, though, the blindness to social forces in mass murder makes perfect sense. We don't better culturally integrate Muslims, since they themselves feel that to be more or less impossible without America accepting governance under sharia law. We just stay here in our country, and they stay over in theirs.
And now that we aren't allowed to inquire into the human factors, we can only discuss the inanimate weapons that the mass murderers choose. Not being total morons, the liberal side doesn't try to argue against airplanes that could be hijacked, or plant fertilizer that could be used in another Oklahoma City bombing. Guns are familiar enough, and provide enough of a gray area for debate to proceed (the upside and downside of each class of firearm is not as crystal clear as it is for planes and fertilizer).
Ignoring the social and cultural alienation behind mass murder has proceeded for so long only because there hasn't been a Donald Trump to cut straight to the chase -- restoring the dignity of blue-collar white men, while keeping culturally incompatible foreigners out. Once we begin an era of America-first populism, mass murder will recede back to the levels of the Midcentury. Changing the political climate won't happen overnight, but it's the only real choice to solve these problems, not bickering back and forth about gun control.
* I'm using "liberal" rather than the more accurate encompassing term of "globalist" because we're talking about the gun control debate. Conservative globalists like Bush, Romney, Ryan, McCain, etc. have a similar agenda of forced ethnic pluralism, but they don't turn to gun control as the solution to the inevitable violence that stems from deep cultural incompatibility. Conservative globalists are more into mass surveillance of threats than literally disarming them.
Therefore, this post could be copied for the debate over mass surveillance. As with gun control, keeping out Muslims also solves the problem of having to cast such a wide surveillance net on Americans.
These three attacks are only a handful of examples of radical Islamic terrorism, which makes the gun control people feel anxiety not only because they tend to involve weapons far worse than guns, but because it raises problems for their agenda of ethnic and cultural pluralism.*
So, rather than address the safety problems of importing millions of Muslims into our country, they try to make it seem like Muslims are no worse than the folks in flyover country who have produced mass murderers of their own. (For the sake of argument, let's put aside the obvious objections that the per capita rate of terrorism is orders of magnitude higher for Muslims, and that we don't need to add to an existing problem by importing more trouble-makers.)
Who are these mass murderers from flyover country? It's shocking how little the phrase "Oklahoma City bombing" comes up among the gun control / "whites are just as evil as Muslims" crowd. It would seem to be tailor-made for their narrative -- two white guys from the Great Lakes region, paranoid about the Federal Gubmint, deadliest domestic terrorist attack in America and killing the most other than 9/11.
What gives? First, they made a bomb, which doesn't fit the narrative of controlling guns.
But more importantly, it would lead us to ask what the motivation was, what the psychology was, what were the sociological forces at play, and so on. Liberals don't want to go down that road because it would lead us to ask the exact same questions about radical Islamic terrorists, and come to similar conclusions -- centering around bitter alienation from society, leading them to violently lash out at an entire group that they view as their tormentors.
However, in the case of jihadists, it would lead ordinary Americans to the common sense solution to keep Muslims out of our country -- where most of them are bound to feel alienated -- which is a non-starter for white Americans of founding stock who feel alienated.
Uh-oh, different solutions for seemingly similar problems -- a big no-no, no matter how impossible it would be to attain parity (by deporting white people from America).
In order to prevent ordinary Americans from coming to the conclusion to keep most Muslims out of a country where they appear to be incompatible, liberals must first prevent them from focusing on the bitter alienation that a typical Muslim feels in America (or any other Western country).
It doesn't matter what aspects of our culture make them feel so out-of-place, the end result is that they do inevitably feel this way, to varying degrees. But it's not hard to think of several -- a more libertine code of conduct than in their more puritanical culture, adhering more to a culture of law than a culture of honor, and one that is more secular and even blasphemous than religious and pious.
This is a similar line of investigation as there used to be into the phenomenon of "angry white men" -- coming up with a basic psychological profile, demographic description, and looking at how sociological changes may be at play (declining working-class incomes, women as breadwinners, multicultural values in mainstream culture, bullying at school, and so on).
But whereas the study of angry white men led to tough questions about how they can become better integrated into society -- like the Trump program of bringing back high-paying manufacturing jobs and ending political correctness -- the study of bitter alienated Muslims leads instead to the other Trump program of "they all gotta go back". They're not rooted here, and don't need to be here. They may still be bitter back home, but that's their homeland's problem, not ours. We can help out from afar, but we won't be taking them in, which will only exacerbate their sense of bitter alienation.
It's shocking how quickly the interest in understanding mass murder has evaporated, even as it has become more common. As recently as 2002, uber-liberal director Michael Moore released Bowling for Columbine, which looked into the psychology and sociology behind mass murder by angry white men. It did touch on gun control, but that was not the main focus since he spent the other half focusing on the Oklahoma City bombers. Toward the climax, Marilyn Manson is interviewed to provide a window into the minds of alienated white youth, and he emphasizes better social integration of kids like the Columbine shooters, rather than a pat answer about gun control.
When you consider the implications for immigration, though, the blindness to social forces in mass murder makes perfect sense. We don't better culturally integrate Muslims, since they themselves feel that to be more or less impossible without America accepting governance under sharia law. We just stay here in our country, and they stay over in theirs.
And now that we aren't allowed to inquire into the human factors, we can only discuss the inanimate weapons that the mass murderers choose. Not being total morons, the liberal side doesn't try to argue against airplanes that could be hijacked, or plant fertilizer that could be used in another Oklahoma City bombing. Guns are familiar enough, and provide enough of a gray area for debate to proceed (the upside and downside of each class of firearm is not as crystal clear as it is for planes and fertilizer).
Ignoring the social and cultural alienation behind mass murder has proceeded for so long only because there hasn't been a Donald Trump to cut straight to the chase -- restoring the dignity of blue-collar white men, while keeping culturally incompatible foreigners out. Once we begin an era of America-first populism, mass murder will recede back to the levels of the Midcentury. Changing the political climate won't happen overnight, but it's the only real choice to solve these problems, not bickering back and forth about gun control.
* I'm using "liberal" rather than the more accurate encompassing term of "globalist" because we're talking about the gun control debate. Conservative globalists like Bush, Romney, Ryan, McCain, etc. have a similar agenda of forced ethnic pluralism, but they don't turn to gun control as the solution to the inevitable violence that stems from deep cultural incompatibility. Conservative globalists are more into mass surveillance of threats than literally disarming them.
Therefore, this post could be copied for the debate over mass surveillance. As with gun control, keeping out Muslims also solves the problem of having to cast such a wide surveillance net on Americans.
June 13, 2016
Less globalist propaganda defending Muslim immigration; Liberal debate shifts to domestic gun control
In the response to the gay nightclub massacre, there has been a strange decline (if not absence) of multicultural propaganda telling us not to criticize anything about Islam, that Muslims per se had nothing to do with it, and that we don't need to change our immigration policies to protect Americans from Islamic radicals.
Only the really globalist kool-aid drinkers are saying we have to admit more Muslims and just pray that they don't shoot up another gay nightclub, bomb another marathon, or fly planes into another skyscraper.
Instead, the debate seems to be focusing mostly on gun control, a debate that is always going to be with us, even if the Democrats became a populist and America-first party, a la the Bernie movement. It's an entirely domestic policy debate.
The Bernie people especially seem to have largely conceded the point about immigration from Muslim countries, by ignoring Trump's "incendiary" comments about it, when they're not the type to ignore incendiary comments. The major exceptions are Jewish and Muslim Sanders supporters -- the one being the most pro-globalist group out there, and the other being a major beneficiary of their propaganda.
I've noticed a similar response from MSNBC coverage. They are elitists rather than populists, but like the Bernie crowd, they are mostly interested in improving American society first, rather than optimally managing an interlocking global system. Of course they both have a liberal Romantic view of what the improved America looks like, but liberal vs. conservative is separate and independent from globalist vs. America-first.
"Liberal America-firsters" is a category that doesn't easily fit into the current climate, but give it a little while, and emboldened by the Bernie and Trump movements, we may see them argue more openly (if tepidly) for protecting Americans' interests against hostile foreign groups who cannot be mixed into our society without threatening American values and lifestyles.
Their response is a welcome change from the CNN / Clinton / Bush / Obama / Romney / Ryan crowd, who instead lecture us about the moral necessity of cosmopolitanism over "Islamophobia" after we've been invaded and attacked by jihadist foreigners.
There's been another change just since the San Bernardino attack last November -- do you remember liberals rushing to assure us that ISIS was not "really" Islamic? That was a transparently globalist talking point, to get us to shut up about curbing immigration from hostile cultures.
And of course that canard was nothing new, and not unique to Democrats and liberals -- in 2002, traitor-in-chief George W. Bush, who was truly a prog-tard ahead of his time, delivered this rationalization of multiculturalism, after the 9/11 attacks:
Translation: jihadists are the REAL infidels! Nothing to see here, folks.
This time around, we aren't hearing so much of these slight-of-hand arguments defending unchecked immigration from Muslim countries. Nobody is running with the narrative that the Orlando shooter wasn't a true Muslim, that he was hijacking a peaceful religion, #NotAllMuslims, etc. By now, the Trump campaign has worn away all of that PC bullshit, and given ordinary Americans permission to respond with common sense to yet another Islamic terrorist attack in our country.
In fact, that is the only angle to this attack that ignores the domestic gun control debate, and focuses on international questions -- it is the Trump movement's skepticism of globalism that is picking up steam, not the defense of open borders as a moral necessity.
Only the really globalist kool-aid drinkers are saying we have to admit more Muslims and just pray that they don't shoot up another gay nightclub, bomb another marathon, or fly planes into another skyscraper.
Instead, the debate seems to be focusing mostly on gun control, a debate that is always going to be with us, even if the Democrats became a populist and America-first party, a la the Bernie movement. It's an entirely domestic policy debate.
The Bernie people especially seem to have largely conceded the point about immigration from Muslim countries, by ignoring Trump's "incendiary" comments about it, when they're not the type to ignore incendiary comments. The major exceptions are Jewish and Muslim Sanders supporters -- the one being the most pro-globalist group out there, and the other being a major beneficiary of their propaganda.
I've noticed a similar response from MSNBC coverage. They are elitists rather than populists, but like the Bernie crowd, they are mostly interested in improving American society first, rather than optimally managing an interlocking global system. Of course they both have a liberal Romantic view of what the improved America looks like, but liberal vs. conservative is separate and independent from globalist vs. America-first.
"Liberal America-firsters" is a category that doesn't easily fit into the current climate, but give it a little while, and emboldened by the Bernie and Trump movements, we may see them argue more openly (if tepidly) for protecting Americans' interests against hostile foreign groups who cannot be mixed into our society without threatening American values and lifestyles.
Their response is a welcome change from the CNN / Clinton / Bush / Obama / Romney / Ryan crowd, who instead lecture us about the moral necessity of cosmopolitanism over "Islamophobia" after we've been invaded and attacked by jihadist foreigners.
There's been another change just since the San Bernardino attack last November -- do you remember liberals rushing to assure us that ISIS was not "really" Islamic? That was a transparently globalist talking point, to get us to shut up about curbing immigration from hostile cultures.
And of course that canard was nothing new, and not unique to Democrats and liberals -- in 2002, traitor-in-chief George W. Bush, who was truly a prog-tard ahead of his time, delivered this rationalization of multiculturalism, after the 9/11 attacks:
Islam is a vibrant faith. Millions of our fellow citizens are Muslim. We respect the faith. We honor its traditions. Our enemy does not. Our enemy doesn’t follow the great traditions of Islam. They’ve hijacked a great religion. But it’s important, as we lift that veil, to remember that they are nothing but a bunch of radical terrorists who distort history and the values of Islam.
Translation: jihadists are the REAL infidels! Nothing to see here, folks.
This time around, we aren't hearing so much of these slight-of-hand arguments defending unchecked immigration from Muslim countries. Nobody is running with the narrative that the Orlando shooter wasn't a true Muslim, that he was hijacking a peaceful religion, #NotAllMuslims, etc. By now, the Trump campaign has worn away all of that PC bullshit, and given ordinary Americans permission to respond with common sense to yet another Islamic terrorist attack in our country.
In fact, that is the only angle to this attack that ignores the domestic gun control debate, and focuses on international questions -- it is the Trump movement's skepticism of globalism that is picking up steam, not the defense of open borders as a moral necessity.
June 12, 2016
Hillary isn't even playing the woman card well
The main theme of Crooked Hillary's campaign is that she's not just any corrupt Establishment next-in-line candidate -- she's the first one to also be a woman. In their lazy insulated minds, that would make her male opponent an enemy of women.
Even during the Democrats' own primary, voters showed little interest in this approach, either the "first woman" part or the part about "my enemy is a woman-hater for getting in this woman's way". During the general election, non-Democrats including independents will show even less patience for it.
Trotting out Pocahontas Warren was an even worse mistake, since doubling down on a tiresome and soon to be annoying tone will further alienate general voters. Also, it immediately deflates the tepid enthusiasm for Hillary being the "first woman" -- now that she's paired with Pocahontas, are they a first pair of women, or maybe part of a first larger movement of women? The "first woman" candidate would only stand out in stark contrast if those surrounding her were men.
The emphasis is no longer on Hillary being "first," which suggests reaching a historical milestone of fairness (for what that's worth), but rather on a broader "women vs. men" confrontation that has nothing to do with fairness but inter-group warfare. And the battle of the sexes is as old as mankind, therefore not a historical milestone, as originally billed just a few days earlier.
"Oh great, yet another brigade of nagging scolds is teaming up in the political arena -- get ready for Prohibition part 2."
The Trump movement can only rejoice at Team Hillary stepping on its own dick twice in the first week of its general campaign -- her status as "first" was immediately overshadowed by Pocahontas becoming a de facto "second," and then the "fairness milestone" thing quickly devolved into a "hostile battle of the sexes" thing.
Once Trump starts to really unload on her during his Monday speech, they're going to find out that this Republican candidate isn't the wuss that low-energy Jeb Bush would have been, sitting there and taking their "war on women" bullshit the entire time.
Even during the Democrats' own primary, voters showed little interest in this approach, either the "first woman" part or the part about "my enemy is a woman-hater for getting in this woman's way". During the general election, non-Democrats including independents will show even less patience for it.
Trotting out Pocahontas Warren was an even worse mistake, since doubling down on a tiresome and soon to be annoying tone will further alienate general voters. Also, it immediately deflates the tepid enthusiasm for Hillary being the "first woman" -- now that she's paired with Pocahontas, are they a first pair of women, or maybe part of a first larger movement of women? The "first woman" candidate would only stand out in stark contrast if those surrounding her were men.
The emphasis is no longer on Hillary being "first," which suggests reaching a historical milestone of fairness (for what that's worth), but rather on a broader "women vs. men" confrontation that has nothing to do with fairness but inter-group warfare. And the battle of the sexes is as old as mankind, therefore not a historical milestone, as originally billed just a few days earlier.
"Oh great, yet another brigade of nagging scolds is teaming up in the political arena -- get ready for Prohibition part 2."
The Trump movement can only rejoice at Team Hillary stepping on its own dick twice in the first week of its general campaign -- her status as "first" was immediately overshadowed by Pocahontas becoming a de facto "second," and then the "fairness milestone" thing quickly devolved into a "hostile battle of the sexes" thing.
Once Trump starts to really unload on her during his Monday speech, they're going to find out that this Republican candidate isn't the wuss that low-energy Jeb Bush would have been, sitting there and taking their "war on women" bullshit the entire time.
June 10, 2016
Blacks vs. progressives: The Bernie movement as Eugene McCarthy plus George Wallace
Since comparisons keep coming up to the 1968 election, especially the civil war among the Democrats, it's worth looking at who the major players were back then and who their modern counterparts are.
President Johnson was pulled aside by the Establishment and told that he would not be running for re-election, because his escalation of the Vietnam War and cracking down on students was threatening to blow the society apart. The elites wanted the social tensions to calm down, and Johnson couldn't stop himself from antagonizing them further. So he was out.
His VP, Hubert Humphrey, was the Establishment next-in-line. His counterpart today is the next-in-line of the Establishment bigwigs, Crooked Hillary Clinton.
Robert Kennedy was making a play for the white ethnics, immigrants, and minorities, before he was assassinated during the primaries. That faction of the old New Deal coalition has by now been thoroughly integrated into the Establishment wing. Martin O'Malley was attempting to present himself as a latter-day Bobby Kennedy, but since Kennedy's base is no longer a distinct faction of the party, O'Malley had no distinct audience to appeal to, and quickly vanished.
Eugene McCarthy represented the progressive peacenik wing, mostly popular with young people, and his counterpart is clearly Bernie Sanders.
George Wallace actually broke away from the Democrats and ran on a third-party ticket, though representing a key faction of the old New Deal coalition -- white Southerners. That demographic has left the Democrats, and so his present-day incarnation -- Jim Webb -- had no one to appeal to, and left as quickly as O'Malley.
And yet when we step back and take a look at how the contest between Hillary and Bernie has played out, perhaps the spirit of George Wallace lives on in the Bernie phenomenon after all. Not by advocating segregation, of course, but by nevertheless wanting to make national parties focus on something more important than minority identity politics.
Everyone knows how white the Bernie movement is, and how reliant Crooked Hillary has been on minorities -- particularly blacks, who have deep roots in the party, back to the '60s, unlike Hispanics or Asians, who have shallow roots, are not loyalists, and not gung-ho at the ballot box. That percolated up to the state level, where white states went to Bernie and black or minority-heavy states went to Hillary. And that has percolated further up to the national level -- the Democrats' electorate is more minority-based than the country as a whole, so the winner overall was Hillary.
The disconnect between white progressives and black Democrat loyalists is nothing new, and rears its head every time a progressive movement shows up, the last time being Nader in 2000. This time around, though, it was big news because the white progressives attempted a hostile takeover of a major party rather than run third-party and be invisible.
This recent article from Politico by a black Southern Democrat loyalist discusses the racial rift in the party. At the root of the problem is white progressives wanting to reduce racial injustice to class / economic injustice, or at most talking about criminal justice reform. They don't get identity politics ("what it's like to live as a black man in America"), and aren't interested in trying to get it.
During the New Deal era, these would have simply been two factions that didn't address the same problems but still co-existed within the larger party's coalition. Once the working class was kicked out during the status-striving and profiteering era (no later than the Go-Go Eighties), the progressives were no longer a full-fledged member of the party's coalition. Today, therefore, they have no standing to push for their agenda at the national level. The black faction has nothing to do one way or the other with Wall Street, corporate monopolization, etc., so they were allowed to stay in the coalition. Today, they do have standing to push for their racial identity politics agenda.
Normally progressives are left out in the cold by both Democrats and Republicans, and remain depressed and apathetic. That's changing, though, now that they've tasted national recognition, participation, and come so close to actually securing the nomination (in their minds, anyway -- the superdelegates would have over-ridden a Bernie victory in pledged delegates).
What was the biggest obstacle in their path? Not the Wall Street donors to Crooked Hillary, or her sprawling political machine, although those certainly paved the way. The Trump movement's hostile takeover of the GOP faced the same obstacles -- fueling even more competitors, in fact -- and yet he won big-league.
At the end of the Dem race, however, Bernie still lost in the popular vote, pledged delegate count, and state contests. And those losses all boil down to the racial composition of the Dem electorate. Trump appealed to an almost entirely white electorate, so his populist campaign took off and won victories so overwhelming that the Establishment could not over-rule his voters without setting off a bloody revolution.
Every time Bernie lost a diverse state, his supporters flipped out and came this close to blurting out, "Fucking niggers again". But that would make them evil racists, so they just bit their tongue and waited eagerly for the next whitopia state to cast its vote.
What has this done to their long-term vision of politics? Twenty-four hours a day for the past six months, they've been dreading when black people vote, and praying and celebrating when a lily-white electorate votes. Black voters sink progressivism, while white voters keep it afloat. Whether they want to admit it publicly or not, no level of "intersectional outreach" is going to bring more than a small share of the entire black voting pool over to their side.
Worse than failing to bridge the gap, they are getting mercilessly clobbered by the Establishment politicians and their media propaganda outlets -- from the lowliest troll repping Black Twitter, all the way up to the President himself. Right up until Election Day, they're going to be subjected to non-stop attacks about, "Sit cho white azz down an check yo' pribbalege, honkey-azz progressive cracka."
I can't imagine that the Sanders supporters will remain as committed to "intersectional" politics after this experience, especially those who are new to elections and are getting blind-sided by the reality of who the base of the Democratic Party is, and what they're all about (not class).
So in its own way, the Bernie phenomenon is a mix of both the Eugene McCarthy and the George Wallace wings of the 1960s-era Democrats. Anti-war, yay -- black grievance, nay.
Let's end with a fun little speculation about what it would look like if Bernie grew a pair and ran as an independent in the fall, representing a progressive movement distinct from both Clinton and Trump.
Like George Wallace, Bernie's support would be highly localized around the country, unlike Ross Perot whose message resonated everywhere -- though not at a high enough level to win any state. Wallace's message resonated in the Deep South, where he won 5 states and 46 electoral votes. Bernie's "who cares about black grievances?" message would resonate in several key areas, which also showed the highest support for Nader in 2000.
The map below is my projection for a general election between Trump, Hillary, and Bernie, where Trump keeps the Romney states and adds a few swing states for a narrow victory. In reality, he'll enjoy a much larger victory, but let's keep the tension high by only allowing a narrow victory. The projections are based on primary results in 2016, as well as historic electoral outcomes for progressive parties.
Bernie would win several states in peripheral New England -- the non-elite states of Vermont, Maine, and Rhode Island. He would pick up the Lutheran Belt states of Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa. He would do well with Mountain State hippies, although there are only a large enough concentration of them in one state for him to win -- Colorado. Finally he would scoop up the Pacific Northwest states of Washington and Oregon.
I've given California to Hillary to be conservative, but in a three-way contest between her, Trump, and Bernie, I'd give even odds to each one of them.
Without California, Bernie would win 9 states and 65 electoral votes. With it, 10 states and 120 votes. Either way, an even stronger performance than Wallace in '68, the last time a third-party candidate won anything.
A cynic looking for an excuse would complain about "What's the point if he can't win the entire election?" Well, if he wants progressive causes represented in the next administration, a solid showing in the general election would be hard to ignore. In fact, if he did eke out a win in the three-way battle for California, his electoral vote count would be almost as much as Clinton's -- 120 to her 145. Suddenly the progressive movement would not look and feel so marginal.
The wimpy cynic would continue with the excuse about how "A third-party run would hand the election to Trump." First of all -- Trump is going to win this thing no matter who else does or does not run against him, just as Nixon would have won in '68 whether or not Wallace's electoral votes went back to the Democrats who normally won the Deep South. Wallace did not eat into traditional Republican states of the time, and Bernie would not eat into the red states of today.
I'm being generous in only giving Trump the Romney states plus Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida, to squeak by with 273 electoral votes. Whether Crooked Hillary wins all of the remaining minority of the electoral votes in the absence of Bernie, or splits them nearly evenly with Bernie, makes no difference for who's got the majority and is heading to the White House.
The progressives had better get used to President Trump. Turnout is off the charts for Republicans, and deflated for Democrats. If they sadly line up behind the Wall Street warhawk, merely because "she's not Donald Trump," that will be the wasted vote. Instead, their choice is between voting for a losing candidate they loathe, or a losing candidate they love.
I voted Nader in 2000, so the choice seems like a no-brainer to me. Luckily this time I've got a superior populist and non-interventionist candidate to vote for -- President Trump -- but if he had not entered the race, and it were Clinton vs. Bush: The Resurrection, there's little doubt I would have voted for Bernie in the primary as well as the general (write-in, independent, or whatever).
President Johnson was pulled aside by the Establishment and told that he would not be running for re-election, because his escalation of the Vietnam War and cracking down on students was threatening to blow the society apart. The elites wanted the social tensions to calm down, and Johnson couldn't stop himself from antagonizing them further. So he was out.
His VP, Hubert Humphrey, was the Establishment next-in-line. His counterpart today is the next-in-line of the Establishment bigwigs, Crooked Hillary Clinton.
Robert Kennedy was making a play for the white ethnics, immigrants, and minorities, before he was assassinated during the primaries. That faction of the old New Deal coalition has by now been thoroughly integrated into the Establishment wing. Martin O'Malley was attempting to present himself as a latter-day Bobby Kennedy, but since Kennedy's base is no longer a distinct faction of the party, O'Malley had no distinct audience to appeal to, and quickly vanished.
Eugene McCarthy represented the progressive peacenik wing, mostly popular with young people, and his counterpart is clearly Bernie Sanders.
George Wallace actually broke away from the Democrats and ran on a third-party ticket, though representing a key faction of the old New Deal coalition -- white Southerners. That demographic has left the Democrats, and so his present-day incarnation -- Jim Webb -- had no one to appeal to, and left as quickly as O'Malley.
And yet when we step back and take a look at how the contest between Hillary and Bernie has played out, perhaps the spirit of George Wallace lives on in the Bernie phenomenon after all. Not by advocating segregation, of course, but by nevertheless wanting to make national parties focus on something more important than minority identity politics.
Everyone knows how white the Bernie movement is, and how reliant Crooked Hillary has been on minorities -- particularly blacks, who have deep roots in the party, back to the '60s, unlike Hispanics or Asians, who have shallow roots, are not loyalists, and not gung-ho at the ballot box. That percolated up to the state level, where white states went to Bernie and black or minority-heavy states went to Hillary. And that has percolated further up to the national level -- the Democrats' electorate is more minority-based than the country as a whole, so the winner overall was Hillary.
The disconnect between white progressives and black Democrat loyalists is nothing new, and rears its head every time a progressive movement shows up, the last time being Nader in 2000. This time around, though, it was big news because the white progressives attempted a hostile takeover of a major party rather than run third-party and be invisible.
This recent article from Politico by a black Southern Democrat loyalist discusses the racial rift in the party. At the root of the problem is white progressives wanting to reduce racial injustice to class / economic injustice, or at most talking about criminal justice reform. They don't get identity politics ("what it's like to live as a black man in America"), and aren't interested in trying to get it.
During the New Deal era, these would have simply been two factions that didn't address the same problems but still co-existed within the larger party's coalition. Once the working class was kicked out during the status-striving and profiteering era (no later than the Go-Go Eighties), the progressives were no longer a full-fledged member of the party's coalition. Today, therefore, they have no standing to push for their agenda at the national level. The black faction has nothing to do one way or the other with Wall Street, corporate monopolization, etc., so they were allowed to stay in the coalition. Today, they do have standing to push for their racial identity politics agenda.
Normally progressives are left out in the cold by both Democrats and Republicans, and remain depressed and apathetic. That's changing, though, now that they've tasted national recognition, participation, and come so close to actually securing the nomination (in their minds, anyway -- the superdelegates would have over-ridden a Bernie victory in pledged delegates).
What was the biggest obstacle in their path? Not the Wall Street donors to Crooked Hillary, or her sprawling political machine, although those certainly paved the way. The Trump movement's hostile takeover of the GOP faced the same obstacles -- fueling even more competitors, in fact -- and yet he won big-league.
At the end of the Dem race, however, Bernie still lost in the popular vote, pledged delegate count, and state contests. And those losses all boil down to the racial composition of the Dem electorate. Trump appealed to an almost entirely white electorate, so his populist campaign took off and won victories so overwhelming that the Establishment could not over-rule his voters without setting off a bloody revolution.
Every time Bernie lost a diverse state, his supporters flipped out and came this close to blurting out, "Fucking niggers again". But that would make them evil racists, so they just bit their tongue and waited eagerly for the next whitopia state to cast its vote.
What has this done to their long-term vision of politics? Twenty-four hours a day for the past six months, they've been dreading when black people vote, and praying and celebrating when a lily-white electorate votes. Black voters sink progressivism, while white voters keep it afloat. Whether they want to admit it publicly or not, no level of "intersectional outreach" is going to bring more than a small share of the entire black voting pool over to their side.
Worse than failing to bridge the gap, they are getting mercilessly clobbered by the Establishment politicians and their media propaganda outlets -- from the lowliest troll repping Black Twitter, all the way up to the President himself. Right up until Election Day, they're going to be subjected to non-stop attacks about, "Sit cho white azz down an check yo' pribbalege, honkey-azz progressive cracka."
I can't imagine that the Sanders supporters will remain as committed to "intersectional" politics after this experience, especially those who are new to elections and are getting blind-sided by the reality of who the base of the Democratic Party is, and what they're all about (not class).
So in its own way, the Bernie phenomenon is a mix of both the Eugene McCarthy and the George Wallace wings of the 1960s-era Democrats. Anti-war, yay -- black grievance, nay.
Let's end with a fun little speculation about what it would look like if Bernie grew a pair and ran as an independent in the fall, representing a progressive movement distinct from both Clinton and Trump.
Like George Wallace, Bernie's support would be highly localized around the country, unlike Ross Perot whose message resonated everywhere -- though not at a high enough level to win any state. Wallace's message resonated in the Deep South, where he won 5 states and 46 electoral votes. Bernie's "who cares about black grievances?" message would resonate in several key areas, which also showed the highest support for Nader in 2000.
The map below is my projection for a general election between Trump, Hillary, and Bernie, where Trump keeps the Romney states and adds a few swing states for a narrow victory. In reality, he'll enjoy a much larger victory, but let's keep the tension high by only allowing a narrow victory. The projections are based on primary results in 2016, as well as historic electoral outcomes for progressive parties.
Bernie would win several states in peripheral New England -- the non-elite states of Vermont, Maine, and Rhode Island. He would pick up the Lutheran Belt states of Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa. He would do well with Mountain State hippies, although there are only a large enough concentration of them in one state for him to win -- Colorado. Finally he would scoop up the Pacific Northwest states of Washington and Oregon.
I've given California to Hillary to be conservative, but in a three-way contest between her, Trump, and Bernie, I'd give even odds to each one of them.
Without California, Bernie would win 9 states and 65 electoral votes. With it, 10 states and 120 votes. Either way, an even stronger performance than Wallace in '68, the last time a third-party candidate won anything.
A cynic looking for an excuse would complain about "What's the point if he can't win the entire election?" Well, if he wants progressive causes represented in the next administration, a solid showing in the general election would be hard to ignore. In fact, if he did eke out a win in the three-way battle for California, his electoral vote count would be almost as much as Clinton's -- 120 to her 145. Suddenly the progressive movement would not look and feel so marginal.
The wimpy cynic would continue with the excuse about how "A third-party run would hand the election to Trump." First of all -- Trump is going to win this thing no matter who else does or does not run against him, just as Nixon would have won in '68 whether or not Wallace's electoral votes went back to the Democrats who normally won the Deep South. Wallace did not eat into traditional Republican states of the time, and Bernie would not eat into the red states of today.
I'm being generous in only giving Trump the Romney states plus Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida, to squeak by with 273 electoral votes. Whether Crooked Hillary wins all of the remaining minority of the electoral votes in the absence of Bernie, or splits them nearly evenly with Bernie, makes no difference for who's got the majority and is heading to the White House.
The progressives had better get used to President Trump. Turnout is off the charts for Republicans, and deflated for Democrats. If they sadly line up behind the Wall Street warhawk, merely because "she's not Donald Trump," that will be the wasted vote. Instead, their choice is between voting for a losing candidate they loathe, or a losing candidate they love.
I voted Nader in 2000, so the choice seems like a no-brainer to me. Luckily this time I've got a superior populist and non-interventionist candidate to vote for -- President Trump -- but if he had not entered the race, and it were Clinton vs. Bush: The Resurrection, there's little doubt I would have voted for Bernie in the primary as well as the general (write-in, independent, or whatever).
June 9, 2016
Noam Chomsky: Trump voters are the Sanders people, only older
The discussion about the recent Ralph Nader interview got me thinking about another staple of the anti-globalization movement of the early 2000s, Noam Chomsky (who like Nader has been involved in movements for a lot longer). Heading over to a website that grew big during that same anti-globalization period, ZNet, there's an interview of him from Counterpunch in which the elections come up.
After expressing their exasperation with Bernie for not taking Hillary to the mat over her warhawk foreign policy, they give credit to Trump for his fundamentally defensive rather than offensive foreign policy stance:
Both the Sanders and Trump supporters overlap a good deal, only with one group being older and whatever else that entails, like being more conservative. I can't be the only former Nader 2000 voter who's been all-in for Trump, now that I'm not a college sophomore anymore. (I've never voted other than 2000 and 2016, so my conscience is clean.)
What a bizarre political climate, where a dissident on the Left blows off the mainstream attacks about Trump voters being bigoted etc. -- "Yeah, they may be casually racist, BUT..." Chomsky is from the old school, where the focus is primarily on class and power, rather than culture and identity politics.
Contrast that to the cuckservative response that Trump voters are fools for wanting to keep entitlements, and also are evil racists who must be brutally ostracized from the political sphere.
Read through the rest and be surprised at how much you find yourself agreeing with a couple of urban Jewish leftist intellectuals -- the education system is geared toward credentialism for strivers, postmodern nonsense may help academics score fashion points but it's destructive, political participation means more than touching a screen every four years, and so on.
Not that we'd agree with everything -- "state" terrorism as a concept, climate change as the ultimate danger facing us, all that the problem kids in school need is a candy bar in the morning to get normal glucose levels, etc.
But we're closer to them than either of us is to the Clinton network (globalist Establishment) and their voter base (identity politics voters). In a better world, they would be the Left, and we would be the Right, instead of the neoliberals and neoconservatives.
We're doing the best we can on our side -- and we ought to give the non-interventionist populists whatever boost we can on the other side. Otherwise, suppose worst case scenario that our Trump-like candidate loses -- do we want the winner to be like Crooked Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders? We can put the same question to them, to desensitize them to the prospect of a Trump presidency vs. Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, etc.
Related post from 3 years ago: "The Left in the 1980s: What did they focus on, if not stuff white people like?"
After expressing their exasperation with Bernie for not taking Hillary to the mat over her warhawk foreign policy, they give credit to Trump for his fundamentally defensive rather than offensive foreign policy stance:
Noam Chomsky: I mean I suspect [Sanders is] not going to be president. But if he were, he’d probably be a little less adventurous but I think the same is really true of Trump. Crazy as he is, he seems to wants a kind of America first, a huge military but only to protect us from all of them.
Saul Isaacson: He seems so unpredictable, Trump.
Noam Chomsky: He seems very unpredictable.
Saul Isaacson: Oddly to the left of Clinton on some issues.
Noam Chomsky: On some issues like the Social Security, Medicare. He kind of vacillates.
Both the Sanders and Trump supporters overlap a good deal, only with one group being older and whatever else that entails, like being more conservative. I can't be the only former Nader 2000 voter who's been all-in for Trump, now that I'm not a college sophomore anymore. (I've never voted other than 2000 and 2016, so my conscience is clean.)
Dan Falcone: The support that Sanders is generating in the domestic issues is coming from the young people, younger citizens, I would say that indicates a good sign. Would you agree?
Noam Chomsky: I agree.
Dan Falcone: It is often where it comes from anyway, the students.
Noam Chomsky: Well, in fact if you look at the Trump voters, you take a look at their attitudes it’s not all that different. In some respects they’re similar. They’re an older version of the Sanders people. So a lot of it is racist and you have that sort of thing, but if you look at their views on say health, education, and so on, it’s kind of the same as Sanders.
What a bizarre political climate, where a dissident on the Left blows off the mainstream attacks about Trump voters being bigoted etc. -- "Yeah, they may be casually racist, BUT..." Chomsky is from the old school, where the focus is primarily on class and power, rather than culture and identity politics.
Contrast that to the cuckservative response that Trump voters are fools for wanting to keep entitlements, and also are evil racists who must be brutally ostracized from the political sphere.
Read through the rest and be surprised at how much you find yourself agreeing with a couple of urban Jewish leftist intellectuals -- the education system is geared toward credentialism for strivers, postmodern nonsense may help academics score fashion points but it's destructive, political participation means more than touching a screen every four years, and so on.
Not that we'd agree with everything -- "state" terrorism as a concept, climate change as the ultimate danger facing us, all that the problem kids in school need is a candy bar in the morning to get normal glucose levels, etc.
But we're closer to them than either of us is to the Clinton network (globalist Establishment) and their voter base (identity politics voters). In a better world, they would be the Left, and we would be the Right, instead of the neoliberals and neoconservatives.
We're doing the best we can on our side -- and we ought to give the non-interventionist populists whatever boost we can on the other side. Otherwise, suppose worst case scenario that our Trump-like candidate loses -- do we want the winner to be like Crooked Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders? We can put the same question to them, to desensitize them to the prospect of a Trump presidency vs. Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, etc.
Related post from 3 years ago: "The Left in the 1980s: What did they focus on, if not stuff white people like?"
June 7, 2016
Crooked Hillary's publicity stunt will alienate Californians in general election
In order to minimize the damage from a probable win for Bernie in the California primary, the Clinton campaign had made it seem like they'd shift focus to New Jersey instead, and declare her the presumptive nominee once that state's large black population put her over the top in the delegate count. Their polls close three hours earlier, so she could declare ultimate victory in the primary, and should Bernie win California three hours later, nobody would care.
It turns out that this was only a head-fake. Their true plan was revealed last night when first the AP announced that an updated survey of superdelegates showed that enough had declared their support for Hillary that she now has enough to clinch the nomination. Then NBC News announced their calling it for Hillary, which was then spread to MSNBC, and several hours later to the Clinton News Network ("sometimes referred to as CNN"). This morning it's being announced by the NYT, WaPo, and others.
The Clinton campaign's last-minute bribing / blackmailing / etc. of these superdelegates was designed to demoralize the Sanders supporters in California right before the primary, and get them to stay home in resignation.
Even if they turn out enough to win, they will still feel slighted by the publicity stunt, as though their vote didn't matter, when they've expected for months now that it would.
From what I can tell from comments on Facebook posts (ones that draw thousands of comments) and Twitter responses, the Hillary and Bernie factions have moved beyond attacking each other's platforms or candidates. They are now playing the blame game about who's responsible for the inevitable triumph of the Trump movement, as the "Bernie or bust" voters will either vote third party or not vote at all, substantially reducing the turnout for Crooked Hillary when it really matters, in the general.
Since California is the most important state that Bernie will either win or tie, the Clinton campaign ought to be concerned about retaining that state's Dem primary voters more than those of any other state. Instead they are doing the best they can to cut off California's visibility by this publicity stunt right before their primary.
This stunt could wind up costing Hillary the largest electoral prize in the fall, as California's 55 votes go either to Trump or perhaps even an independent Bernie run. But in either case, not to her royal highness.
The civil war will only get aggravated throughout the day and week, as the Clinton machine and the media begin trying to pummel the Sanders supporters into pledging their support for Crooked Hillary in the fall -- after rigging the process from the outset and pulling one stunt after another against them, right up through the present.
Because most of the Sanders supporters are not Dem party loyalists, trying to cow them into becoming Hillary voters will have little effect. If the Establishment tries to scare them about Trump, they will do what disaffected voters always do, and stay home rather than vote for someone they despise maybe somewhat less than someone else.
It was always clear that factional fighting would grow even more bitter leading up to, during, and after the national Convention in July. But at first it looked like most of the antagonism would come from the losing side lashing out at the winners. So far they've only threatened to not vote for her in the general -- no big overt acts of antagonism. Now that Crooked Hillary has decided to unload so mercilessly, rather than only use threatening words, the Bernie movement will feel like it was the other side who fired the first shots in the civil war.
We keep hearing about the unified Democratic party and the divided Republican party -- but that is only among the party hacks. Among actual voters, it is the Trump supporters who are unified, while the Hillary vs. Bernie voters could not be more at war (well, just wait a month).
With the Clinton campaign burning bridges so early, a Trump victory is looking all the more likely!
It turns out that this was only a head-fake. Their true plan was revealed last night when first the AP announced that an updated survey of superdelegates showed that enough had declared their support for Hillary that she now has enough to clinch the nomination. Then NBC News announced their calling it for Hillary, which was then spread to MSNBC, and several hours later to the Clinton News Network ("sometimes referred to as CNN"). This morning it's being announced by the NYT, WaPo, and others.
The Clinton campaign's last-minute bribing / blackmailing / etc. of these superdelegates was designed to demoralize the Sanders supporters in California right before the primary, and get them to stay home in resignation.
Even if they turn out enough to win, they will still feel slighted by the publicity stunt, as though their vote didn't matter, when they've expected for months now that it would.
From what I can tell from comments on Facebook posts (ones that draw thousands of comments) and Twitter responses, the Hillary and Bernie factions have moved beyond attacking each other's platforms or candidates. They are now playing the blame game about who's responsible for the inevitable triumph of the Trump movement, as the "Bernie or bust" voters will either vote third party or not vote at all, substantially reducing the turnout for Crooked Hillary when it really matters, in the general.
Since California is the most important state that Bernie will either win or tie, the Clinton campaign ought to be concerned about retaining that state's Dem primary voters more than those of any other state. Instead they are doing the best they can to cut off California's visibility by this publicity stunt right before their primary.
This stunt could wind up costing Hillary the largest electoral prize in the fall, as California's 55 votes go either to Trump or perhaps even an independent Bernie run. But in either case, not to her royal highness.
The civil war will only get aggravated throughout the day and week, as the Clinton machine and the media begin trying to pummel the Sanders supporters into pledging their support for Crooked Hillary in the fall -- after rigging the process from the outset and pulling one stunt after another against them, right up through the present.
Because most of the Sanders supporters are not Dem party loyalists, trying to cow them into becoming Hillary voters will have little effect. If the Establishment tries to scare them about Trump, they will do what disaffected voters always do, and stay home rather than vote for someone they despise maybe somewhat less than someone else.
It was always clear that factional fighting would grow even more bitter leading up to, during, and after the national Convention in July. But at first it looked like most of the antagonism would come from the losing side lashing out at the winners. So far they've only threatened to not vote for her in the general -- no big overt acts of antagonism. Now that Crooked Hillary has decided to unload so mercilessly, rather than only use threatening words, the Bernie movement will feel like it was the other side who fired the first shots in the civil war.
We keep hearing about the unified Democratic party and the divided Republican party -- but that is only among the party hacks. Among actual voters, it is the Trump supporters who are unified, while the Hillary vs. Bernie voters could not be more at war (well, just wait a month).
With the Clinton campaign burning bridges so early, a Trump victory is looking all the more likely!
June 4, 2016
Angelina for Trump
This item from Blind Gossip says that Angelina Jolie "is actually a Donald Trump supporter, and is working behind the scenes to get him elected!"
Why?
"In her opinion, electing Trump will lead to less racial divisions and better economic opportunities in the United States… as well as a safer environment for disadvantaged women and children around the world."
Supposing she takes a more public role, this could help the campaign in several ways:
- Boost support among women (especially unattached women), young people, and Californians / West Coasters. YouGov polls suggest that she's the most admired woman around the world, and probably more so among these three groups that Trump does not already have a lock on.
- Provide a surrogate to deflate Hillary's support among women, particularly over her intimidation of the victims of Bill's sexual assaults and rapes, so they wouldn't go public and ruin the Clintons' ambitions. One of her main causes is preventing sexual violence around the world. How could Hillary of all people contribute to that, especially when she takes large bribes from the worst offenders like Saudi Arabia?
- Re-focus the concern about refugees toward allowing them to stay in their homelands, rather than struggling to absorb them here. She seems to view the refugee crisis more as a wound that must be healed -- ideally, the populations would return to their roots -- rather than a ripe opportunity to diversify first-world countries in order to lower labor costs for the corporate bottom line.
Trump has said the goal is to keep their homelands safe, and Angelina knows that the main cause of destabilization has been the Establishment's wars, which warhawk Hillary would continue unabated. He's also said the goal is to set up safety zones so that they can return to their homes as soon as possible, both to keep their families together but because nobody wants to live in a strange foreign land. They want to stay connected to their roots just like we do.
Angelina Jolie is no doubt connected to the largest globalist organizations -- the UN, Council on Foreign Relations, speaker at Davos, and most disturbingly the Clinton Global Initiative. So she will not be getting a Cabinet position in the Trump administration.
But she does seem to be more of a do-gooder who wants to improve the lives of foreigners in their own lands, where they will ideally continue to live, rather than an amoral diversity manager who wants a Balkanized America filled by refugees of all the countries we bomb for no reason.
Having her as a messenger could go a long way toward introducing common sense into what is allowable to say about the refugee crisis and mass immigration before a general election audience, as long as she and Trump coordinated their message.
Why?
"In her opinion, electing Trump will lead to less racial divisions and better economic opportunities in the United States… as well as a safer environment for disadvantaged women and children around the world."
Supposing she takes a more public role, this could help the campaign in several ways:
- Boost support among women (especially unattached women), young people, and Californians / West Coasters. YouGov polls suggest that she's the most admired woman around the world, and probably more so among these three groups that Trump does not already have a lock on.
- Provide a surrogate to deflate Hillary's support among women, particularly over her intimidation of the victims of Bill's sexual assaults and rapes, so they wouldn't go public and ruin the Clintons' ambitions. One of her main causes is preventing sexual violence around the world. How could Hillary of all people contribute to that, especially when she takes large bribes from the worst offenders like Saudi Arabia?
- Re-focus the concern about refugees toward allowing them to stay in their homelands, rather than struggling to absorb them here. She seems to view the refugee crisis more as a wound that must be healed -- ideally, the populations would return to their roots -- rather than a ripe opportunity to diversify first-world countries in order to lower labor costs for the corporate bottom line.
Trump has said the goal is to keep their homelands safe, and Angelina knows that the main cause of destabilization has been the Establishment's wars, which warhawk Hillary would continue unabated. He's also said the goal is to set up safety zones so that they can return to their homes as soon as possible, both to keep their families together but because nobody wants to live in a strange foreign land. They want to stay connected to their roots just like we do.
Angelina Jolie is no doubt connected to the largest globalist organizations -- the UN, Council on Foreign Relations, speaker at Davos, and most disturbingly the Clinton Global Initiative. So she will not be getting a Cabinet position in the Trump administration.
But she does seem to be more of a do-gooder who wants to improve the lives of foreigners in their own lands, where they will ideally continue to live, rather than an amoral diversity manager who wants a Balkanized America filled by refugees of all the countries we bomb for no reason.
Having her as a messenger could go a long way toward introducing common sense into what is allowable to say about the refugee crisis and mass immigration before a general election audience, as long as she and Trump coordinated their message.
June 3, 2016
San Jose Trump rally: Violent mob of foreigners intimidate and assault American voters in their own election
See the two posts here and here for an overview, with many videos and tweets, of the anarchy that unfolded after last night's Trump rally in San Jose. A violent mob of several hundred were milling around outside the venue, swarming individual Trump supporters, attacking them, stealing their hats, and sucker-punching them to the ground. The police stood by and did nothing.
My comments...
- - - - -
The dishonest media cut their live feeds once it became clear how violent it was getting. Wouldn’t want the truth to get out about how barbaric much of our cities are becoming, and how anti-white and anti-American the immigrants are.
They covered the Alburquerque etc. protests for hours and hours, since it “only” reached the level of Mexican gangbangers screeching their tires.
Now that a mob of several hundred dark-skinned thugs is surrounding nice law-abiding white people, shoving them, and attacking them — well, er, uh, we’ll just cut the feed and show the re-run of the earlier primetime shows.
Pay no attention to the violent brown mob we were broadcasting just moments ago.
Good thing we’ll have all the video evidence we need from Twitter, YouTube, etc. The media is so damn dishonest.
- - - - -
Make sure you show these videos to any conservative or libertarian who has wet dreams about getting the government out of our lives.
We see what happens when the government is weak — anarchy.
And something tells me that the thugs are not going to spare the limpwristed conservatives and libertarians just because they, too, are against “authoritarianism”.
- - - - -
Police Chief named Garcia… folks, this is what you can expect when the so-called police ethnically identify more with the rioters than the victims.
The SJPD weren’t “holding back” — they were protecting their own.
- - - - -
Military occupation of California cannot come soon enough. Then knock out Chicago on the way back East.
Trump has said repeatedly that his only flaw is that he never forgets and never forgives. All of this chaos will be remembered and punished.
Once Trump is in office, they should re-brand the show C.O.P.S. to focus on the imposing of order, deportation, etc., in lawless cesspools like San Jose. Now that’s entertainment!
- - - - -
It’s only a matter of time before one of these female reporters becomes the next Lara Logan. No need for it to take place in the third world, if the third world is already here in America.
That’s why Katy Tur had an honest moment there and admitted how awful the rioters are — she knows they wouldn’t leave her alone just because she said that she hates Trump, too. “Hey dere, preedy leedle white gurl….”
I was actually surprised that Hallie Jackson didn’t get raped on live TV during the Albuquerque riot, once it was dark and there were only the gangbangers left. She and Sara Murray are so naive about their surroundings.
Let’s face it: the media won’t truly turn on the rioters until it’s one of their own who gets victimized by the mob.
- - - - -
Wow, major credit to MSNBC for honest coverage and zero spin. Sounds like how we would have written it.
Unlike the obfuscation of CNN, this article said mobs, violence, swarm, surrounded, punched, cornered, spit at, threw eggs food and water bottles, attacked… readers get a good idea of the true nature of what happened.
And the key to the anarchic atmosphere: “police in riot gear largely stood by”.
- - - - -
In contrast to the zero-spin article from MSNBC, look at this victim-blaming garbage from CNN that makes it sound like the two sides were evenly matched and that both sides started fights, or that they materialized out of nowhere with no responsibility. They even let the thugs get in their message that voting for Trump is voting for fascism.
Absolutely disgusting.
- - - - -
At the next riot, the Trump supporters should point at Jeremy and Sara, and tell the mob that those two white people just said “Get the Mexicans out of America!” And don’t believe them when they deny it — that’s what all racists do when confronted about it!
I’m boycotting CNN until I get to see their scumbag reporters surrounded, harassed, and/or beaten up by an angry brown mob.
MSNBC may be elitist like CNN, but they’re not nearly as pro-globalist. I’m sure they support roughly the same policies, but when a violent mob of illegals surrounds peaceful rally attendees, they aren’t so globalist that they’ll spin it as the white Americans deserving it.
CNN is so globalist (also having an international channel) that even a violent mob of foreigners trying to intimidate American voters in their own election, must be desperately re-framed as “a vote for Trump is a vote for fascism”.
My comments...
- - - - -
The dishonest media cut their live feeds once it became clear how violent it was getting. Wouldn’t want the truth to get out about how barbaric much of our cities are becoming, and how anti-white and anti-American the immigrants are.
They covered the Alburquerque etc. protests for hours and hours, since it “only” reached the level of Mexican gangbangers screeching their tires.
Now that a mob of several hundred dark-skinned thugs is surrounding nice law-abiding white people, shoving them, and attacking them — well, er, uh, we’ll just cut the feed and show the re-run of the earlier primetime shows.
Pay no attention to the violent brown mob we were broadcasting just moments ago.
Good thing we’ll have all the video evidence we need from Twitter, YouTube, etc. The media is so damn dishonest.
- - - - -
Make sure you show these videos to any conservative or libertarian who has wet dreams about getting the government out of our lives.
We see what happens when the government is weak — anarchy.
And something tells me that the thugs are not going to spare the limpwristed conservatives and libertarians just because they, too, are against “authoritarianism”.
- - - - -
Police Chief named Garcia… folks, this is what you can expect when the so-called police ethnically identify more with the rioters than the victims.
The SJPD weren’t “holding back” — they were protecting their own.
- - - - -
Military occupation of California cannot come soon enough. Then knock out Chicago on the way back East.
Trump has said repeatedly that his only flaw is that he never forgets and never forgives. All of this chaos will be remembered and punished.
Once Trump is in office, they should re-brand the show C.O.P.S. to focus on the imposing of order, deportation, etc., in lawless cesspools like San Jose. Now that’s entertainment!
- - - - -
It’s only a matter of time before one of these female reporters becomes the next Lara Logan. No need for it to take place in the third world, if the third world is already here in America.
That’s why Katy Tur had an honest moment there and admitted how awful the rioters are — she knows they wouldn’t leave her alone just because she said that she hates Trump, too. “Hey dere, preedy leedle white gurl….”
I was actually surprised that Hallie Jackson didn’t get raped on live TV during the Albuquerque riot, once it was dark and there were only the gangbangers left. She and Sara Murray are so naive about their surroundings.
Let’s face it: the media won’t truly turn on the rioters until it’s one of their own who gets victimized by the mob.
- - - - -
Wow, major credit to MSNBC for honest coverage and zero spin. Sounds like how we would have written it.
Unlike the obfuscation of CNN, this article said mobs, violence, swarm, surrounded, punched, cornered, spit at, threw eggs food and water bottles, attacked… readers get a good idea of the true nature of what happened.
And the key to the anarchic atmosphere: “police in riot gear largely stood by”.
- - - - -
In contrast to the zero-spin article from MSNBC, look at this victim-blaming garbage from CNN that makes it sound like the two sides were evenly matched and that both sides started fights, or that they materialized out of nowhere with no responsibility. They even let the thugs get in their message that voting for Trump is voting for fascism.
Absolutely disgusting.
- - - - -
At the next riot, the Trump supporters should point at Jeremy and Sara, and tell the mob that those two white people just said “Get the Mexicans out of America!” And don’t believe them when they deny it — that’s what all racists do when confronted about it!
I’m boycotting CNN until I get to see their scumbag reporters surrounded, harassed, and/or beaten up by an angry brown mob.
MSNBC may be elitist like CNN, but they’re not nearly as pro-globalist. I’m sure they support roughly the same policies, but when a violent mob of illegals surrounds peaceful rally attendees, they aren’t so globalist that they’ll spin it as the white Americans deserving it.
CNN is so globalist (also having an international channel) that even a violent mob of foreigners trying to intimidate American voters in their own election, must be desperately re-framed as “a vote for Trump is a vote for fascism”.
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