Further losses for Democrats: Atheists, liberaltarians, etc., not just populists

Since the most action during primary season was on the Republican side, we didn't hear much about the cracks that were already beginning to split apart the Democrat coalition, which has now turned into a full-on civil war.

The parallels drawn between the Bernie movement and the Trump movement focused mostly on their being anti-Establishment and oriented toward economic populism rather than the usual topics. That made it clear that the Left populists were breaking away from the mainstream of their party, but there was actually a far broader range of reliable Democrats who were starting to get fed up with the direction of their party toward identity politics uber alles.

Not conservative Democrats, who have already switched over to Republican or not involved.

They're not even moderates on social-cultural issues -- they support gay marriage, they hate religion, and they want increased gun control. They make a point of saying that racism, sexism, etc. exist, and that we should call it out and shame people for it.

Their distinguishing traits are atheism and skepticism, which doesn't mean that's their main cause, only that it separates them from other liberals. Stressing reason, logic, and facts, they bristle at identity politics, which stresses unthinking tribalism, airing of grievances rather than productive debates, and generally a more emotionalist approach to politics. It rejects the obsession with victimhood and oppression, and takes a more constructive engineering approach to fixing problems.

Demographically, they're mostly white, educated, under-40, living in major metro areas, both male and female. In other words, like the populist and environmentalist progs who supported Bernie in such large numbers. Sure enough, most of these non-progs were big on Bernie, too, even if they didn't care what the TPP was all about.

Bernie was not speaking to their major concerns -- boo religion, yay gays, etc. Of the economic topics he focused on, probably the only one that really got their attention was student debt. It was simply the fact that he wasn't making an emotional appeal to tribal identity (race, sex, or whatever), nor trying to win by having the biggest chip on his shoulder.

As an example, consider YouTuber Jaclyn Glenn, who has half a million subscribers, along with 100K each on Twitter and Instagram -- someone who resonates with enough people to make it worth studying just one person's output. And her videos go back to 2010, so there's plenty to study about how she has changed.

She's an early Millennial, college-educated, female, atheist, pro-gay, crazy cat lady, transplant to Los Angeles. Aside from being white, she checks the boxes for being a loyal Democrat. Sure enough, lots of her videos focus on how stupid, evil, etc., Republican voters and politicians are. Going through the titles of videos in her archive, and listening to a random sample, it was the same ol' predictable crap that you'd expect from her demographic background in the political scene of the 2010s.

In 2014, she did express exasperation at how easily offended the third-wave feminists were, but she didn't really stick with this, or turn against feminist identity politics per se. Just, "Wow, settle down -- we're fighting for the same thing ultimately."

On her twitter the term "feminists" shows up a few times in 2014, provoked by GamerGate. She was against the feminazis like Anita Sarkeesian, but also not on board with the anti-feminists. That was the first major time when she felt like there was no middle ground, and you had to pick which side you were on. GamerGate may have opened up young people not only to the future Alt-Right, but also to the future "Shut it, feminazis" strain within the Bernie movement.

That disappeared once the controversy died down by the end of 2014. It's not until primary season began late last year that she really starts sounding off against the identity politics mainstream of her party. The Democrat civil war was just warming up.

Here is her response to the Islamic terrorist attacks in Paris. She all but says, "Hey Trump may have a point with his Muslim ban." It's not being an atheist that primes her to say that, since plenty of atheists apologize for Islamic terrorism. She knows they're the only ones who do this shit (despite a half-hearted reference to the Christian crusades nearly 1000 years ago). There's no room in the Democrat mainstream today for someone who is unapologetic about the danger that Islam uniquely poses to us here and now, and the need to do something about it.

Here is her explicit rejection of feminist identity politics, surrounding the denunciations by older feminazi types that women must vote for other women, or otherwise behave as mere drones in a hive serving the queen bee (that bitch). Wearing a Bernie t-shirt.

Here is an even better rejection of identity politics, reacting to some uppity black girl SJW whining about white privilege, and trying to shame white women for even having to ask what it is, as though they deserved an answer. (The uppity SJW actually demands that white women allies ought to pay her for droppin' dat knowledge on dere melanin-deficient ass.) Her response is pretty angry for a supposed ally. Sounds like she's this close to saying, "Well we don't need you dumb ghetto trash anyway."

Here she is parodying a hardline feminazi while interviewing pedestrians about inane SJW crap at Venice Beach of all places, underscoring what party-poopers the feminists are. During the past couple months, she's put out quite a few of these anti-feminazi videos.

Here is her "get over it" message to all of the #NotMyPresident complainers (she voted Hillary, too). And she was the one who made that not-really-anti Trump song during the summer, "Hump Trump". She isn't freaking out about his election bringing about the apocalypse, even if she doesn't like where it'll go.

The situation looks dire if the Democrat leadership can't even hold onto someone who was a stereotypical Democrat before primary season. She's not a populist / anti-war activist, showing that the Sanders supporters were drawing more broadly than just the progs. But she's not a rabid SJW or bound by the spell of tribal identity politics, so how can she still be a reliable Democrat?

Of course, she's not going to defect to the other side (unless she marries a Trump supporter). But the intense dissatisfaction with the party leadership means a deeply divided party for the foreseeable future.

Enough 50-D chess analysis: Be thankful for 80% perfect

Now that there are a lot of major decisions by Trump that are compressed into a brief time period, his decision-making ability is a hot topic again, and again too many in the Trump movement have the same response as before -- every big decision he makes is a 50-dimensional chess move whose brilliance may not be apparent to us mere mortals, but will become visible through Trump's instruction by example.

In this worldview, Trump is a guru who reveals esoteric wisdom to the cloudy-minded masses, the better to lift them up into a higher state of enlightenment -- not into the nature of the world, but into the nature of (organizational) leadership. His book The Art of the Deal is a sacred text in this tradition, a reverence that Trump does everything to encourage among his fans. "My second-favorite book, after the Bible."

The basic idea behind the worldview is that what appear to be trade-offs that require Trump to do something good and something bad in order to get things done, hopefully more good than bad, aren't really trade-offs after all. When your consciousness ascends to a higher dimension and looks down on the situation, there really is no trade-off at all, and Trump pulls off the job with (nearly) optimal outcomes on all relevant domains. He is the supreme squarer of circles.

The trouble with these Panglossian analyses is that they are always made after the fact, and have the quality of just-so stories. Why couldn't they have predicted what Trump would do? Because only he possesses the higher awareness to see through the 50-D moves, and we mere mortals are only able to describe its brilliance after he has carried it out. It reeks of excessive flattery.

And these describers will describe it as 50-D chess genius whether Trump does X or whether Trump does Not-X. Pick Romney as Secretary of State? Here's the 50-D chess brilliance behind that decision. Instead, pick Anyone But Romney? Here's the 50-D chess brilliance behind that decision. There's no independent way to evaluate how brilliant of a move it was, if it's always necessarily a masterstroke.

Moreover, if Trump's big decisions are win-win-win-win-win... he could never make a major misstep, and would never need any major course correction. A little wobble here, and little counter-balancing there, but nothing substantially different from what he intended to do.

Trump is undoubtedly better at this stuff than any of us are, but was it a 50-D chess move to skip the GOP debate before the Iowa caucus? He lost that race to Cruz, and saying that he would have lost by even larger margins had he participated in the debate, is just more post hoc rationalization. Was it a 50-D chess move to say that a pro-life stance leads toward punishing the seeker rather than the provider of abortion? Or to camp out in Wisconsin during the primary? He lost that primary by double digits. And was it a 50-D chess move to not only double down on the La Raza judge feud, but to instruct his surrogates to jump into the brawl as well? That was a time of dropping in the polls.

The point here is not to blackpill Trump supporters by desanctifying the image of Trump-as-guru. It is to keep us realistic: not every choice he makes is going to be optimal in all important respects. Sometimes he'll be able to correct the mistake (sidelining culture war questions after the abortion brou-ha-ha), and sometimes he -- and we -- are just going to suffer a blow and try to do as well as we can with that wound (the attempted coup by the GOPe that disrupted party unity just weeks before the election).

It is more accurate to say that Trump is good at surviving, or "winning," despite the blows that have been landed against him. And I don't just mean the antifragile strength that comes from, say, the media attacking him for not having served as a politician before -- that's a good thing in today's climate! I mean even the true blows like that "grab the pussy" tape. He is robust.

No matter what the context is, we'll always know that he's the least likely President to even consider selling out. He took money from no one and is a billionaire himself already. He's not from the political system, so they can't try shame / blackmail / etc. to police a member of their own network. And he's stated his goals boldly, publicly, and repeatedly, so that there won't be any double-talking wiggle room when it comes to trying to implement them. And he's fortunate to belong to the party that also controls both houses of Congress, along with most state and local government functions. And with his Supreme Court picks, he'll have that body's backing as well.

But that doesn't mean he won't ever have to compromise.

Some of it to heal the deeply divided nation, which he has always spoken out against. His most heartfelt indictment of Obama was that he thought at least Obama would be a bringer-together and a cheerleader for the nation, and then Obama turned out to stoke the divisions to polarize the population even further.

And some of it we may have no clue about because only the inner circles know about it. How do we know he hasn't been threatened by the Deep State already -- wanting certain boundaries to be respected, no matter if he was elected through a populist revolt. Trump is not an ideologue: in some such cases, he may decide it's worth the fight against the system (e.g., exposing and shutting down the elite pedophile rings), while in others he may decide it's more trouble than it's worth (cases we may never know about).

We would be foolish to believe that he, or we, have a mandate to do whatever the hell we see fit about cleaning up our government, economy, population, and culture. His theme song has been "You Can't Always Get What You Want" by the Rolling Stones -- not "Invincible" by Pat Benatar. He is a courageous warrior, not a teenager who has unlocked god mode on a video game.

The danger in spinning all these just-so stories is that we'll turn into a cult of the guru Trump, unable to recognize when the movement is heading in the wrong direction on some issue at some time. His is shaping up to be the greatest presidency that any of us has ever experienced, and there's nothing wrong with that representing an 80-90% compromise from what we truly have our hearts set on.

Let's be thankful for that.

Splitting Dem women away from SJWs: Class-based praise of family formation

Now that the Democrat civil war has already split the race warriors apart from the class warriors, it's time to focus on splitting apart the feminist SJWs from liberal women who don't resonate with gender identity politics.

How did the schism open up over the race vs. class divide?

It was the class side siding more with Trump than Hillary on economics, whether they wanted to admit it or not. Since Trump won, the class-oriented Dems can say "I toldja so" about the impotence of identity politics, and the importance of class. When the race baiters snap back about the class Dems being crypto-Trump supporters, both sides have exchanged fire.

Because they're a crumbling empire rather than an inchoate insurgency, there's a positive feedback loop between the two warring factions, which will split them farther and farther apart.

How could this be re-created over gender identity politics vs. class?

See this earlier post about the common ground that the populist nationalist movement shares with the Jill Stein and Bernie crowd regarding family formation. The old GOP framed family formation in natalist terms, where having children is a moral good per se and ought to be pursued to make the world a more moral and good place.

The populist take, from the Jill and Bernie people, is materialist -- forming a family is one of those normal things that normal people do, so if a majority are not, then either a majority are abnormal or there are other obstacles in their path. These are shaky income prospects and shifting residence patterns for fertile-aged women and their husbands, as they hunt for good-paying stable jobs in what feels like a wild goose chase.

In this video (at 7:15), Emma Vigeland from The Young Turks: Politics discusses this topic with her interview subject, a working-class black woman from suburban Cleveland. Vigeland takes it for granted that getting married and starting a family is a desirable thing, but feels financially uncertain and therefore hesitant to get started right away in her early 20s. She's clearly from an affluent family herself, so it hits on the theme of downward class mobility. Gen X-ers and Millennials may not want to admit it, but delaying marriage and having small or no families is yet another sign of their downward mobility.

The old GOP stance was the extremist conclusion -- that more and more young people are abnormal, as shown by their lack of interest in forming a family. This personalized and moralized their childlessness, as though it were a deliberate statement or a decision, rather than a situation they'd rather not find themselves in.

Trump, with Ivanka's help, is making this issue a materialist one again, seeking to make childcare more affordable so that young people can do what they want to do, which is get married and start having children. It's just one of those normal things everyone wants to get around to doing, not some higher good.

There is a waiting schism among Democrat women between those who are anti-natalists -- morally indignant at the idea of family formation being a good thing -- and normal women who want to start a family when they're able to afford it. We can help to ignite the war between them like we have with the race vs. class war.

The more the Trump movement discusses -- in a neutral, non-moralistic tone -- family formation as something that most normal people want to get around to, and are only putting it off because they're in an uncertain economic situation, the more we will force Democrat women to reveal which side they're on, and then go to war against each other.

The class-oriented ones will say, "Y'know, I hate to admit that Trump is right about anything, but he has a point." That will provoke the feminists into denouncing the normal ones for "judging" women who don't want a husband and/or children. The response by normals: "No, we don't mean those women are, like, morally bad or anything -- but shrinking family formation is a bad sign of economic stagnation." Oh, so you're one of those "economics is everything" women who doesn't care if she gets turned into a baby factory by her husband? "Excuse me? 'Gets turned into?' What if I want the children myself?" You see! -- she admits to internalizing patriarchal norms!

The end result is the SJWs waging a crusade to shame their fellow Democrats for having normal priorities, whether it's wanting to bring back good-paying jobs or make family formation affordable for all people and not just the rich. Normal people will resent being shamed for having normal priorities, which causes the SJWs to splinter off from the coalition, into their own purity cult, all hermetic and misanthropic.

It wasn't too long ago that Republican activists tried to shame Democrats and Independents as abnormal for not wanting to live under a Christian Zionist theocracy. Now the shoe is on the other foot, with Democrats becoming the party of alienating cultural extremists.

Hopefully Trump and Ivanka will start bringing up the topic again, but why wait? We can start sowing the seeds of discord with memes directed at normal women, from feminazi women. It's hardly a false flag when this is truly what they already believe, in substance and in tone. Put something like this over a picture of Elena Kagan looking maximally smug.

Dear faux-feminist women:

Starting a family is one of your life goals?
Seriously, baby factory much?
Your internalized misogyny is disgusting.
And, btw, makes you look weak and pathetic.

Sincerely,
The real independent women

Where Trump won youth: The future of the re-alignment

In all the talk about the reversals of Democrat dominance in supposedly safe groups, I haven't noticed people talking too much about young voters. According to the exit polls in several states, Trump didn't just improve over the typical Republican, he won them outright.

These just so happen to be key states that flipped from blue to red, and although the flip of the youth vote is not the main factor, it's still part of a broader shift in these former blue states.

This ought to put in serious doubt the comforting mantra that the Bernie people tell themselves: "We're the future". Not in these states, you're not. Where young people are rabid Trump fans, do not count on "winning back the college kids," even with Bernie, and certainly not with pandering crap like Katy Perry and Jay Z concerts.

In de-industrialized, forgotten areas, young people face a rough and bleak-looking future, made even worse if their formerly homogeneous communities are becoming disrupted by immigration. They are willing to ignore the old nostrums that seem to have gotten them into this mess, and are willing to take a risk on the populist and nationalist direction that the Trump movement wants to take the country in.

Nationally, the exit polls show Trump losing the 18-24 year-old vote by about 20 points, the 25-29 year-old vote by about 15 points, and the 30-39 year-olds by about 10 points. Only starting with 40-somethings do the numbers switch to favor Trump.

The expected exceptions are in deep red states, where all age groups vote red. Even in some red states, though, it is the middle-aged and older groups that carry the state red, while young people vote blue (like Georgia).

In two usually blue states, Pennsylvania (now red) and New Hampshire (narrowly blue), Trump performed according to the national numbers among the 25-29 and 30-39 group. Although he didn't win the 18-24 group, he lost them by a much narrower margin than nationally -- 5 points in PA and just 2 points in NH. It's unusual for him to do better among the youngest age group, which suggests the beginning of a generational shift in the populist / nationalist direction.

There's more of a youth surge in Maine. Although Trump lost the 18-24 and 25-29 groups by 8 and 2 points, that's well above the national numbers. And he actually won the 30-39 group by 10 points, even better than his support among older voters. As these 30-somethings enter the numerically heavy middle-aged group, they could push Maine entirely into the red column, and not just in the one Congressional district.

The most interesting exceptions, however, are in the Upper Midwest. Wisconsin voted Republican for the first time since 1984, when the whole country voted Republican. Among the 18-24 group, Trump actually won by 2 points, and only lost by 9 points among the 25-29 group -- both far above the national numbers.

In Minnesota, too, Trump actually won by 5 points among the 18-24 group, and lost by 11 with the 25-29 group. He didn't do as well with older voters as he did in Wisconsin, so he didn't take the state, but it's staggering to see the youngest age group in the most reliably blue state vote for Trump (it famously did not fall during either of the Reagan landslides).

Rounding out the Lutheran Triangle, Iowa showed the greatest youth support for Trump. Although he lost the 18-24 group by 9 points, that's still well above the national numbers, and he won the 25-29 group by a whopping 24 points, as well as the 30-39 group by 10 points. That's even greater support than the 50-and-over voters showed him.

Most people forget the regional cultural breakdown of support for the Nazis in Germany -- it was greatest in the Lutheran dominant regions in the north and east, lying in the low farmland plains. Those people take it and take it and take it -- until they don't, and then they snap. In addition to the rural Lutherans turning their conformism in a nationalist direction, the Upper Midwestern plain is now also seeing the emergence of the Trumpenjugend.

"The cosmopolitans always used to take advantage of our Minnesota niceness. They used to think it was a joke. They are not taking advantage anymore."

Democrats abandon policy focus, reduced to calling people evil

If you thought the end of the election would see the Democrat Establishment shifting their critiques away from superficial things that might sway emotional voters, and toward the policy wonk issues that are more fitting now that Trump is about to start implementing the Trump agenda -- you'd be surprised to see how much their obstructions still boil down 100% to "the people on the other side are evil".

That could be racist, sexist, Islamophobic, or whatever else. The focus is on individuals rather than policies, and these individuals are evil. Most of the accusations are being thrown at the Cabinet picks, but it'll be someone else once they're all set. The hysteria is also directed broadly at Trump voters or sympathizers. The policies are not bad and in need of correction by good policies -- people are evil, and they are in need of moral redemption.

This substance-free sanctimony will guarantee us even greater wins during Trump's re-election, but the liberal crusaders don't care. Their job, as they see it, is to convert the wicked -- and if that's a longer-term project that may have to overcome several electoral setbacks in the meantime, then so be it. They have to be on the side of the angels, fighting the good fight -- not trying to win certain outcomes in certain political domains.

They did not react this way toward the Gingrich Revolution in Congress during the mid-1990s, or to the W. Bush presidency, or even to the Tea Party movement. In all those cases, of course they hurled their obligatory charges of Republicans being racist / sexist / bla bla bla. But that was more of a finishing flourish to policy-oriented charges that the Republicans wanted to gut the social safety net, pursue the Iraq War, give tax cuts only to the rich, overlook police brutality, and so on and so forth.

Now, they're abandoning any mention of Trump's policies and why they don't like them -- why we ought to have open borders, a de-industrialized economy, regime change in the Middle East, Supreme Court Justices who are fine with partial-birth abortions, and everything else he's promised action on. Some are disingenuously trying to criticize the Paul Ryan agenda, but everyone knows he's a non-entity and that President Trump will kick his ass so hard if he tries to privatize Social Security, it'll make ya head spin.

Now, charges of this or that individual being evil are not just a finishing rhetorical touch, they are the main argument -- the Chief Strategist, the Attorney General, whoever, is evil, therefore anything he does will be bad for the country, and we don't even have to know what that would be.

Moralizing the character of individuals rather than arguing for or against certain policies or general approaches sounds a lot like the Republicans from the '90s and the 21st century (before Trump). In both cases, they had won on the issues for so long: for the GOP, free marketeer-ism during the winding down of Soviet Communism, and for the Democrats, values liberalism during the culture wars. They took their superiority for granted, rested on their laurels, and then got a rude awakening when the primary issues shifted to something else (GOP caught unaware of liberal culture war, Democrats caught unaware of populism and nationalism).

If you assume that you'll win forever on the issues, then a yuge upset loss could not have happened due to your failure on the issues, but only because the other side had individuals with powerful dark evil magic that they used to cheat their way to victory. Typical witchcraft hysteria.

If those losses continue time after time, you'll become even more convinced that issues don't matter -- otherwise you would've won all those times! -- and that their powerful evil magic keeps growing stronger and more hopeless to counteract. So you double down on the strategy of waging a moralistic crusade against evil individuals, rather than study what the new set of important issues is, what positions on them are desired by voters, and finding and fielding candidates who best offer that to the electorate.

It's not as though the Democrats are completely blind to issues, only in the context of explaining their losses to Trump and Congressional Republicans. When it comes to the Democrat civil war, they are hyper-sensitive of what the various camps of issues are -- the main ones being identity politics (race, sex, gayness), and class / anti-war / environmentalism.

To explain why their side lost, the two factions are going to accuse each other of having an inferior set of issues that voters don't care that much about. Issues that don't motivate enough of Us to turn out, and that alienate too many of Them to cross over at the ballot box.

They are not accusing specific individuals on the opposing camp of being evil, and of bad politics stemming from being evil. Sure, the ID politics people hurl accusations of racism, gender privilege, etc., but it's more of a flourish than the main critique, which is instead based on the issues. Such as, "Who cares about breaking up Wall Street banks, when that wouldn't end racism, sexism, and homophobia?"

For the next generation, most of their focus on issues will be channeled into the Democrat civil war, and their only attacks against the Republicans will be that they're fundamentally evil. While this will help to re-shape the issues, platform, and coalition that makes up the party, it will take them out of the running in most Presidential elections, where their only arguments will be that if you vote for that other guy, you're evil and need to be redeemed by liberal crusaders before being allowed to vote.

If this reversal of fortunes seems abrupt, welcome back to 1992. The Republicans had occupied the White House from 1968 to 1992, with only Jimmy Carter interrupting. George W. Bush was our Jimmy Carter -- barely squeaked through a close race, unpopular / embarrassing, and galvanized voters to choose Anybody But That-Guy. I think he was also meant to be a single-term interruption (winning in 2004), with the Florida recount from 2000 still making it unclear that he truly won.

Earlier posts in the series documenting the Democrats becoming the party of moral panic crusaders during this election season: one, two, three, four.

They didn't "get it wrong" -- the goal was propaganda and emotionalism

Trump's decisive win on election night did not "burst the bubble" of so many people who thought they had "gotten it right". That assumes their goal was accuracy, insight, forecasting, and so on.

If their audience came to them for this reason, then their catastrophic failure would have rendered them invisible in the media. Instead, there they still are, rolling on with whatever BS they've been peddling the whole time.

Having tuned out the media for the past 10-15 years, I didn't know quite what the 21st-century media were about until tuning in here and there during the first election that has actually mattered in my lifetime. The old knock against them is that it's just propaganda -- outlining a narrative favorable to those with wealth and power, filling in details from one day to the next, etc. It's informational warfare by The Powers That Be against the people.

That's somewhat true, but only for CNN, whose anchors affect a sober and "just the facts" demeanor, and whose presentation is mostly pumping out key factoids and talking points from the Establishment (liberal wing). Of course CNN has been in decline over the years, and certainly during this election season and likely into the near future.

The other approach is emotional button-pushing and ego validation for the audience. The anchors speak and act with zero emotional restraint (not always spazzing out, but allowing bursts and long rants). They're trying to work up the emotional energy of the viewer, and build them up to a climactic release of ego validation -- this one quick proof of why your side is superior, or the other side is inferior. It's not the Establishment vs. the people, but one side vs. another in a culture war.

That's the approach of the older Fox News (which has mellowed out somewhat), MSNBC, and The Daily Show and its imitators. This is the genre that has gradually taken over news on cable TV since the medium began in the 1990s, when CNN was the only game in town and Fox and MSNBC effectively did not exist just yet. The CNN propaganda genre belonged more to the three-network era of TV news. I guess viewers figure they can get "the facts" from ordinary sources, and cable TV ought to provide more of an emotional high for what you're paying.

With that framework in mind, it's easy to see what role the punditry and the polls played in the election season. For the propaganda genre, they were meant to push the Establishment narrative that Trump and his platform were doomed, since what the American people truly wanted was Clinton. For the emotionalist genre, they were meant to pump you up about why your candidate was a great savior, and the other candidate was a vicious monster. During the primaries, Fox provided emotional highs to the anti-Trump viewers, while MSNBC hyped up its anti-Bernie liberal audience.

Now that those ends no longer apply, the pollsters and pundits can go right on making appearances in these media because the propaganda and emotionalist goals have changed to the post-election environment. Now the goal is to obstruct the Trump administration and amp up support for his political opponents.

So now we might get phony polls about how 90% of Americans want Syrian refugees to settle right next door to them, or pundits weighing in on how impossible it will be for Trump to get his way on re-industrializing the American economy by threatening tariffs on manufacturers.

True, these pollsters and pundits were liars and failures during the election, but we're not judging them anymore by the standard of forecasting election results. We're judging them by how well they manage to obstruct Trump from accomplishing his campaign promises -- and their performance there remains to be seen, so let's cut them some slack for awhile.

This applies to the usual and intended audience for the media, the ones who look to CNN for "the facts" or who crave ego validation and hook up Fox or MSNBC to their veins during primetime.

However, given the wide-ranging interest among the public for this most momentous of all elections, a large chunk of the non-news-watching public just got a rude awakening about how biased and abjectly clueless the media is. At a gut level, they already did not trust the media, but now they have something they can consciously articulate as the reason why they are not to be trusted -- look at how badly they fucked up everything about the election! Whadda buncha geniuses these guys are!

Having conscious reasons to defend your gut-level intuitions makes it all the more easy to stick with your convictions. Before, the general public (not the niche audience of cable news) might have felt awkward admitting to not trusting the media, as though they would be thought anti-factual, post-truth, etc. Now they can behave that way all they want, because they're convinced by real-world proof -- the pathetic failure of the polls and pundits about the most important election they'll ever experience.

Before, taunts against the media were unspecific ("CNN sucks"), whereas now I wouldn't be surprised if real-life trolls started walking by reporters shouting, "Who won the election, dumbass? Hahahaha."

Once Trump begins breaking up the media monopoly, ordinary people will be not just glad because they hate the media, but also vindicated to see total failure punished by going out of business. Sadly for them, the media still think they have high status ("Fourth Estate"), and are doubling down on how important, serious, and totally on-the-right-track they are, after having their credibility vaporized overnight in front of literally the entire world.

That haughty attitude will only make normal people cry louder for Trump to go "off with their heads!" rather than show any mercy. And it will help to solidify Trump's position in the recently blue Rust Belt region of flyover country. Will Minnesota go red in four years? It can if the media keep whining about Trump ditching his press detail while going out for dinner, rather than apologizing and showing humility in the wake of the biggest blow-up the media has ever lived through.

Please, keep it up, media!

Final proof Kasich rigged Ohio primary

This will be the third and final proof that Kasich rigged the Ohio primary by coercing hundreds of thousands of Democrats to vote for him in the open primary.

The first proof compared turnout size in the Dem and GOP primaries this year. The usually blue northeastern region went heavily red, which would only make sense if Trump won those counties -- he, not Kasich, had massive crossover appeal among de-industrialized Rust Belt places. Instead, Kasich won them. Conclusion: those were not crossovers but partisan Democrats who were coerced by the Governor into saving his ass in the primary, likely state workers.

The second proof compared turnout in the GOP primary this year to the general turnout last time. Some of those counties in the northeast actually had more Republican voters in the primary this time than Romney got in the general election last time. Primary turnout must be smaller than general turnout -- unless they weren't really Republican primary voters this time, but partisan Democrats who had voted for Obama last time and should have been participating in the Dem primary this time. Except they were threatened with their jobs, or something, by Kasich.

The third proof comes now that the general is over, and the results for Ohio were a blowout for Trump. From all sorts of polling (e.g., Emerson), we know that the Kasich primary voters were the least likely to vote Trump in the general, including in Ohio -- at best 50% would go Trump, and a large chunk were going to vote for Crooked Hillary. This was unlike the other GOP primary voters, like those who chose Rubio or Cruz, who were much more than 50% likely to vote Trump in the general.

Now, if the Republican primary voters in Ohio were so overwhelmingly in favor of Kasich (he "won" by 11 points), then Trump should have collapsed among GOP partisans in the general, drawing no more than half of them. A big chunk would've gone to Clinton, and a small chunk to Johnson. And although he would have gotten some crossovers from the Democrats, the vast majority would have voted for their party's candidate.

Because Trump crushed Clinton rather than the other way around, we were mistaken in assuming that those "GOP primary voters" who delivered the "win" for Kasich were actually Republicans. Some were, but a double digit percentage were partisan Democrats coerced by the Governor into voting on the GOP side during the primary.

Similarly, we can compare Ohio to other states. Kasich only won Ohio, and his voters were the least friendly toward Trump, so Ohio should have done much more poorly than other states, compared to their baseline of 2012. In fact, Ohio swung from blue to red by over 10 points -- one of the largest changes of all.

Although this is the final major piece of evidence (barring future smoking-gun evidence), I won't let this matter go, and will keep reminding people of what a scheming traitor Kasich has been all along, going so far as to rig an election. We can never let that kind of scum anywhere near office again -- and be doubly suspicious if he comes to us wearing a "gee golly gosh" disguise.

Kasich is term-limited and will be gone in 2018. Here's to hoping that President Trump deports the Syrian etc. refugees during his first two years, so he can make a display of dominance in Kasich's backyard of Columbus, where they're being dumped, and remind Ohioans what a petty backstabbing rat their Governor is, as a warning against picking someone connected to him as a successor.

In fact, before the GOP primary for Ohio Governor really gets going, Trump should weigh in to some degree and play king-maker. Hold rallies, tweet, send surrogates like Eric (who traveled a lot in the Rust Belt), whatever it takes. No more rats!

Ricky Vaughn now DatRickyVaughn on Twitter

Faggots at Twitter banned his account again, but he must have dozens in reserve.

New one: DatRickyVaughn.

Girls still pouting because all hot guys are Trump supporters

An earlier post drew attention to the phenomenon of hot guys and girls uniformly being Trump supporters (or Bernie supporters way back in the primaries). Don't take my word for it: everyone on Twitter agrees. People with good genes are repulsed by half-dead Hillary and the former Chair of the DNC who looks like an inbred Medusa (Debbie Wasserman-Schultz).

With more and more time for this pattern to sink into people's minds, some of them are now moving beyond a single anecdotal observation, and drawing the broad conclusion that "every" hot guy they come across inevitably turns out to be a Trump supporter.

Make no mistake: they are absolutely fantasizing about that guy, and probably going to wind up fooling around with him -- they just hate the fact that he has "bad (boy) politics". He's their problematic fave in bed.

Here's a sample (the best is the girl at the end, an SJW with crayon hair and problem glasses):

Every hot guy in my school is a straight trump supporter I'm kms

— king kesha 🏳️‍🌈 (@Frecklesha) September 30, 2016

Now every hot guy I see I'm wondering if they voted for trump bc then I change my mind #ElectionDay

— Allie Ehrhart (@alliehearts) November 10, 2016

Every time I see a hot guy on tinder he just HAS to be a trump supporter. 😭 #Imwithher

— emma❄️ (@emma_linthicum) November 7, 2016

how is it that every time a cute boy or one that seems at least remotely sane tries to talk to me, THEY END UP BEING A TRUMP SUPPORTER....

— tay (@taygavs) June 24, 2016

Why is it that every time I meet a cute boy he's a trump supporter 😕😕

— Myah (@MyahFreeman) August 20, 2016

why does every cute boy I talk to support trump???? what did I do to deserve this @god

— Jaclyn Humphrey (@JackieSue0224) September 2, 2016

Every time I drive by a cute boy and make flirty eye contact he has a freakin trump sticker on the back of his car. Every damn time.

— Lizz (@_slickjimmy_) November 7, 2016