ABC/WP has Trump +1

Donald Trump has leapfrogged over Hillary Clinton in the newest national ABC News/Washington Post tracking poll. Trump is now 1 point ahead of his Democratic rival, earning 46 percent of likely voters’ support, compared to Clinton’s 45 percent. This is a shocking reversal from just nine days ago, when Clinton was 12 points ahead. – Daily Mail

Amazing how all those independents and undecideds are suddenly making up their minds. Trump is already up in FL and OH. And as I said, once the polls show Trump up in PA and NC, the Trumpslide is on.

UPDATE: Speaking of North Carolina:

With a week to go until Election Day, Republican Donald Trump has seized control of a tight presidential race in North Carolina, according to an exclusive WRAL News poll released Tuesday. SurveyUSA polled 659 people statewide Friday through Monday who have already cast their ballots or are likely to vote in the election and found Trump with a 51 to 44 percent lead over Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. The poll has a margin of error of +/- 3.9 percentage points. In a WRAL News poll released three weeks ago, Clinton led Trump 46 to 44 percent.

UPDATE: A second NC poll has it tied, 44 Trump, 44 Clinton, 4 Johnson. This is also a significant change from polls which had Clinton +6 less than a week ago.

The last days of #NeverTrump

No matter how the election turns out, the #NeverTrump crowd have permanently discredited themselves:

Now that we seem to be having a non-stop stream of evidence (as if we needed it) that the Obama and forthcoming Clinton administrations are basically a crime syndicate, stretching from the Department of Justice, through the FBI, and into the IRS — and an international one at that, with tentacles, via the Clinton Foundation, all the way to Moscow and Riyadh — it’s time for the NeverTrumpers to take a final look at their position.

Do they want to enable such a crime syndicate to be running the U.S. government? And if so, how do they expect it ever to end, if not now? Through litigation? Under whose auspices? Do they not think, if Hillary is elected, that the paramount goal of her administration will be to further entrench the syndicate, making it impermeable to change, turning the USA into the ghost of itself? These things happen in history.

Not simple, is it?

If I were writing my book on moral narcissism today, I would have to add a chapter on the NeverTrumpers, because — like it or not — their stance, while once idealistic, at this point seems rather too substantially based on self-regard. They want to have “clean hands” to avoid any tarnishing by the unseemly Mr. Trump.

Well, fine. But where does that leave the rest of us? Where does that leave the country?

I don’t know how it is going to be possible for anyone on the right to take the cucks and neocons seriously again. I certainly hope conservatives will show better sense than to listen to them or give them credence in the future.

“Meritocracy” in America

Thomas Frank at The Guardian observes the way the Podesta emails reveal how America’s ruling class really operates:

This genre of Podesta email, in which people try to arrange jobs for themselves or their kids, points us toward the most fundamental thing we know about the people at the top of this class: their loyalty to one another and the way it overrides everything else. Of course Hillary Clinton staffed her state department with investment bankers and then did speaking engagements for investment banks as soon as she was done at the state department. Of course she appears to think that any kind of bank reform should “come from the industry itself”. And of course no elite bankers were ever prosecuted by the Obama administration. Read these emails and you understand, with a start, that the people at the top tier of American life all know each other. They are all engaged in promoting one another’s careers, constantly.

Everything blurs into everything else in this world. The state department, the banks, Silicon Valley, the nonprofits, the “Global CEO Advisory Firm” that appears to have solicited donations for the Clinton Foundation. Executives here go from foundation to government to thinktank to startup. There are honors. Venture capital. Foundation grants. Endowed chairs. Advanced degrees. For them the door revolves. The friends all succeed. They break every boundary.

But the One Big Boundary remains. Yes, it’s all supposed to be a meritocracy. But if you aren’t part of this happy, prosperous in-group – if you don’t have John Podesta’s email address – you’re out.

I don’t so much mind the corruption and nepotism. It has always been thus, in every human culture. Francis Fukuyama has even coined a term, repatrimonialization, to describe the process, and in his excellent The Origins of Political Order, argues that one of the chief challenges of a society, and one of the causes of the rise and fall of civilizations, is the never-ending battle between the aristocratic class to increase its wealth and privileges at the expense of the common people, and pass them on to its children, and the state, which attempts to interfere with that process.

In the USA, the state, and the people, have clearly lost that battle, because the financial aristocrats captured the throne, which has historically allied with the common people against the aristocracies.

3.1 million

For nearly 10 years, I didn’t think much about the traffic statistics, until in 2012, a few Scalzi fans began trying to taunt me with McRapey’s supposedly massive traffic at Whatever. (Key word: supposedly). So, it now gives me a sense of satisfaction every time a new high-water mark is reached. October 2016 marks the first time I’ve hit three times the all-time peak for the former most popular blog in science fiction, which was recorded in May 2012.

Of course, it’s around 6x Whatever‘s current traffic, but no one cares about that anymore.

Anyhow, October set a new traffic records for both VP – 2,615,169 Google pageviews – and VP+AG – 3,112,416. It will be close, but it now looks like the combined blog total will exceed 30 million in 2016, up considerably from last year’s 20,776,969 pageviews.

A lot of that is the election, of course, but there was no dropoff at all after November 2012, so perhaps the newly come Ilk will become the foundation for the next ramp up to 50 million annually. Who knows?

There is a deeper point to this post, however, beyond the petty ball-spiking. Past performance can be indicative of future performance, but that is not always the case. For example, I have a pretty good statistical model that predicts traffic growth with a reasonable degree of accuracy. It can be so good that it predicted 1,990,883 pageviews in January 2016. The actual number was 1,982,034. That’s precision to within half of one percent! It also predicted 27,682,865 pageviews for 2016; we’re presently at 24,247,801 with two months to go. Not bad, right?

That, you see, is why I take dh very seriously when he discusses the election in terms of the historical poll analyses. His perspective is not irrelevant. Far from it. On the other hand, one also has to be aware that these statistical trends, however reliable they tend to be, are not determinative. One also has to pay attention to potential outliers, and recognize the scenarios when they are likely to be in play.

For example, my impressively precise traffic model predicted 2,019,930 pageviews in October 2016. The actual result, previously mentioned, turned out to be 54 percent higher.

TL;DR: Thank you for visiting. Feel free to join the discourse. And please to enjoy the incipient Trumpslide.

Mailvox: an alternative Comey script

As opposed to Scott Adams Two Bullets for the Republic story or my own Another Chance at Redemption movie, we are given The Puppet’s Whitewash:

Here’s how the current bogus Comey/Huma/Weiner email scandal scam works:

Re those Wiener emails that everyone’s foolishly talking about while the sold-out media deliberately ignores the ongoing Julian releases (which are actually much more important), some important facts first, any of which is a dead giveaway of what’s ACTUALLY going on:

Specifically, director Comey has been attending daily meetings at the white house all along (which would be rather unusual if he’s actually about to dump something damaging which could implicate the white house as well as destroy Hillary and the entire Democratic party) and, of course, Hillary has been demanding that they release those new Weiner emails immediately (which is ridiculous for several incredibly obvious reasons).

The fact that Comey is continuing to visit the white house daily in the midst of this new supposed “scandal” is the first obvious giveaway, but Hillary demanding that they release those emails is the second less obvious giveaway until you realize several very, VERY important and obvious things:

Unlike any Julian material, those emails are in the possession of bought-and-sold-Hillary-flunky director Comey.

Also, legally, if there is a valid investigation under way, he CAN NOT release evidence in an ongoing case.  Hillary realizes this too (which makes her calls to release the emails kind of silly, but it plays really well to an ignorant audience who doesn’t know the law).

However, Hillary CAN LEGALLY release those emails whenever she wants – they’re her property, after all, and she is under no legal obligation to keep them under wraps.  Indeed, if they’re full of crap, by releasing them NOW, it instantly ends the scandal.

Of course, that is the last thing they want.  So here’s how it works:

The reason Hillary is demanding the immediate release of those emails is because she already knows that her slave Comey has gone through them with a fine-toothed comb and very carefully edited out ANYTHING which might actually be illegal while leaving in just enough to make Hillary look merely “careless” again.

Why?

Because he (representing the FBI) will release those emails just before election day, and then the Hillary camp will point at them and say, “Look, there’s actually NOTHING criminal here at all and I am now vindicated by no less than the FBI!”

She’ll then follow up with a knockout punch by proclaiming that it was an unfair Trump witchhunt all along and that Trump knew it all along and yet he still persecuted her unfairly, bringing up the emails continuously in a sleazy and unethical attempt to unfairly bring her down.  Suddenly outraged and now motivated (which they’re currently not), even reluctant Hillary voters suddenly rush the polls, voting her into office while the Trump supporters slink away in embarrassed (and non-voting) silence.

So, bottom line, it’s a trap and Comey is complicit in it and so are the media (as usual), and not only does it set up a trap but it also distracts the public from the ongoing tsunami of the continuing Julian data dumps (which are FAR more important as they’re not under the control of a loyal Hillary slave like Comey, and therefore the Julian emails are real while the Comey emails are being manipulated and edited in Hillary’s favor as I type this).

That said, however, it’s actually a pretty good strategy:  all you have to do is have Comey complicit in every step and it becomes a pretty good game of chess complete with inevitable checkmate.  And in the meantime, Hillary and her supporters keep screaming intense outrage and cursing Comey while the inner circle, of course, already knows what’s going on (like I said, Comey going to the white house every day, even now).  But I would like to take this moment to nominate Hillary for an Emmy and Oscar – good acting deserves an award.

And the final proof:  if Comey has betrayed her and the dems with “his” deliberate and intentional bringing up the emails just before the election, and if they were, in fact, as terrible as Hillary and the dems claim they are, then Obama would despise Comey for destroying the election.  So what did the Prez do today?

Remember, this is from the President himself while the rest of the dems run about in mock horror and outrage, with Hillary herself continues to act like she’s really, REALLY furious at Comey while simultaneously demanding that the emails be made public because she knows Comey has already edited them in her favor.  And keeping that in mind, so if the emails are so damaging, WHY would President Obama put in a good word for Comey who just restarted the investigation into those oh-so-damaging emails?  Why would President Obama show support for Comey when he has so clearly destroyed Hillary and the Democratic party?

But hang on – one more piece:  guess who will be deciding whether or not to take any legal action at all regarding those emails?  Answer:  the most corrupt Justice Department in the history of the United States who also just happen to be totally rock solid Hillary supporters:

LOL!  Could they be any more OBVIOUS?!   If the voters fall for this HUGE scam, they’re really are as stupid as Hillary says they are in all of her emails and text messages.  And the Republicans have obviously taken the bait, hook line and sinker which, by definition, makes them complete retards for falling for this obvious trap.

This is how the Comey/Huma/Weiner scam works.  It’s a trick.  It’s a trap.  Case proven, Q.E.D.

Color me dubious. First, some of the basic facts are wrong. Most of the emails are not Hillary’s. She can’t release Huma’s emails, Weiner’s emails, or any other files from the computer, and she probably has no idea what most of them are. Even Huma apparently doesn’t know what is on the laptop, which belongs to her husband, not her.

Second, this version of the story assumes that Obama wants to protect Hillary Clinton. I very much doubt that. He doesn’t care about her and he doesn’t care about the Democratic Party. Third, this version of the story ignores the most important aspect of the situation, which is the internal pressure at the FBI and the fact that the New York FBI office was in possession of the laptop for some time and presumably has copies of all the emails as well.

If there was nothing in the original emails, why was there so much anger directed at Comey when he refused to recommend prosecution? And if the new emails were selectively edited and released in support of a whitewash, that would risk blowing the whole defend-Hillary conspiracy wide open and taking down everyone associated with it. Would you want to bet everything on the assumption that no one at either the NYPD or the New York FBI has a complete set of the emails from that laptop? Remember, we’re talking about criminals here, and criminals tend to project their own criminality on others.

Copying the emails is the very first thing that any corrupt official would do, whether the law permitted it or not, and I would assume that there are multiple copies of the complete set now floating around. I wouldn’t be surprised if both the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks already have their own sets.

Now, why would Obama put in a good word for Comey? My interpretation of his statement is that it was a signal to the media and the entire Democratic Party that he is hanging Hillary, and by extension the whole Clinton machine, out to dry. I think he’s entirely willing to let the chips fall where they may. He’s not involved, he knows he’s not involved, and I suspect it would give him a good deal of satisfaction to see his former Secretary of State, whose inept foreign policy has ruined his legacy, finally receive her comeuppance. Remember, these people do not like each other.

We’ll see who is closer to correct soon enough. If the emailer is right, we’ll see a public whitewashing from Comey later this week. If I’m right, this week will see more and more prominent media figures pulling long faces and declaring that Hillary is unsuitable for the presidency as her poll numbers collapse.

The rise of Trump and the fall of America

Peter Thiel has been on a serious roll of late. His speech yesterday about the upcoming election was less about Donald Trump and more about why the USA is in desperate need of a man like Donald Trump due to the complete failure of its government and its elites.

Only an outbreak of insanity would seem to account for the unprecedented fact that this year, a political outsider managed to win a major party nomination.

To the people who are used to influencing our choices, the wealthy people who give money and the commentators who give reasons why, it all seems like a bad dream.

Donors don’t want to find out why we got here, they just want to move on. Come November 9, they hope everyone else will go back to business as usual. But it is this heedlessness: the temptation to ignore in difficult realities indulged in by our citizens that got us where we are today….

What explains this eagerness to escalate a dangerous situation? How could Hillary Clinton be so wildly overoptimistic about the outcome of work?

I would suggest it comes from a lot of practice. For a long time, our elites have been in the power a long time, our elites have been in the habit of denying difficult realities. That is how bubbles form. Wherever there’s a hard problem but people want to believe in an easy solution, they will be tempted to deny reality and inflated bubble. Something about the experience of the baby boomers, whose lives have been so much easier than their parents or their children has led them to buy into bubbles again and again. The trade bubble says everyone is a winner. The war bubble says victory is just around the corner, but these overoptimistic stories simply have not been true and voters are tired of being lied to.

It was both insane and somehow inevitable that D.C. insiders expected this election to be a rerun between the two political dynasties who let us through the two most gigantic financial bubbles of our time. President George W. Bush presided over the inflation of the housing bubble so big that it’s collapse is still causing economic stagnation today. But what is strangely forgotten is that the last decade housing bubble was just an attempt to make up for the gains that have been lost the decade before that. In the 1990’s, President Bill Clinton presided over an enormous stock market bubble and devastating crash in 2000 just as his second term was coming to an end. That is how long the same people have been pursuing the same disastrous policies.

Now that someone different is in the running, someone who rejects the stories that tell us everything is fine, his larger-than-life persona attracts a lot of attention. Nobody would suggest Donald Trump is a humble man. But the big things, he is right about an amount to a much-needed dose of humility. He has questioned the core concept of American exceptionalism.

He doesn’t think the force of optimism alone can change reality without hard work. Just as much as is is about making America great, Trump’s agenda is about making America a normal country, a normal country does not have a half trillion dollar trade deficit. A normal country does not fight five simultaneous undeclared wars.

America is not exceptional. America is not blessed by God. America is not immune from the patterns of history. Indeed, the United States of America has followed, almost precisely, the pattern of behavior exhibited by every previous fallen power.

America was great, not because it had superior propositions or concepts, but because it was founded by the most adventurous of the Anglo-Saxons, the great race that also established the Empire on which the sun never set. This was not an accident. The USA supplanted its founding power, Great Britain, because it was large, rich, populous, and geographically isolated, thereby insulating it from the debilitating effects of World War I and World War II. Its political culture was initially advantageous, but contained a fundamental flaw in its equalitarian pretensions.

The rot set in with the first wave of European immigration, who partially integrated, but adulterated the nation and the culture. America was further weakened by the second wave of European immigration, when even less suitable immigrants arrived, who only appeared to integrate, and readily took advantage of the opportunity, wealth, and power to which they had access to serve their various tribal interests instead of the original nation. The fatal wounding occurred with the third wave of immigration, the massive global wave, the largest invasion to ever take place in human history to date.

America is not exceptional. America is not blessed by God. America is now a conquered, occupied, overwhelmed nation that doesn’t even know who or what it is. And until both conservatives and liberals come to understand that there never was an exceptional country called the United States, merely a naturally advantaged land mass that happened to be predominantly occupied for two hundred years by one particular high-performance nation, there is absolutely no hope of making America great again. In fact, America will likely only survive in a severely adulterated and geographically limited form.

History never ends, but empires always do.

Men of the West

It’s good to see some of the Dread Ilk branching out and transforming the Alt-West from an abstract philosophical identity into material action. They’ve got a whole site full of material already, so I’ll let their introductory post, Welcome to the Hard Right, speak for itself:

“Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”
– H.L. Mencken

What is civilization?  It is expectation.  It is shared protocol.  It isn’t so much about what thing is done but how one does that thing.  The savage shows up at the local Wal-Mart in pajamas.  The civilized man shows up dressed within the socially acceptable norms.

Aha!  But what if pajamas are within the social norms?  Then you’re in a civilization of savages.   See, we have this notion that civilization is related to what we think of as civilized, but that is a lie.  The cannibals of the darkest jungle are a civilization.  But they are not civilized.

These are different concepts.  Most all of us come from some civilization, but to be considered civilized, you must abide by the protocols of the civilization you are currently inhabiting.

And make no mistake.  All civilizations are not equal.  Equality does not exist on this earth.  For example, you may admire the pygmies of New Guinea, but they haven’t launched a space program, have they?  They have produced no great works of art, have they?  Can you name their great composers?

Now that’s some good rhetoric right there. The Hard Right. It’s good, in that it is less abstract than Alt-West, less frightening than the Mil-Right, and less branded than the Alt-Right. As to what it is, well, you’ll have to read Men of the West and find out.

The dam is breaking

And the Trumpslide I’d predicted before the conventions now looms:

According to former Jimmy Carter pollster Pat Caddell, Hillary Clinton is hemorrhaging support as a result of the FBI announcement and we could see a repeat of the 1980 election when anti-establishment candidate Ronald Reagan won in a landslide.

Caddell drew comparisons to the 1980 presidential race, which was close right up until the final days before the electorate abandoned Carter and rallied around the anti-establishment candidate, leading to Reagan taking victory in a landslide.

Caddell noted that Carter’s entire campaign had been built around portraying Reagan as unqualified and “dangerous,” in a similar vein to how Clinton has demonized Trump. Caddell explained that the polling between Reagan and Carter was close up until the final weekend when “the dam broke” and Reagan shot ahead by ten points.

Stating that he had been looking at the data regarding unfavorability ratings for both Clinton and Trump, Caddell noted that since Friday, large numbers of voters had been structurally “moving against the status quo – the incumbent who is essentially Hillary Clinton.”

Interestingly enough, Drudge is now reporting that Hillary Clinton’s unfavorability rating has hit record highs and now exceeds Donald Trump’s. She has been such a historically horrible candidate that the net result of all her campaign spending was to lose 9 points of favorability since May 2015.


Sixty percent of voters view Hillary Clinton unfavorably, according to a ABC News/Washington Post poll released Monday morning, the highest level of unpopularity yet for the Democratic presidential nominee.


The difference, of course, is that plenty of people are going to vote for Trump despite their dislike of his bombastic personality. No white people who aren’t drinking the Clinton Kool-Aid are going to vote for Hillary.

Meanwhile the early voting numbers look positive for the Trump campaign:

Trump communications advisor Jason Miller said on Breitbart News Sunday that Donald Trump has thousands of more early votes racked up than Mitt Romney did during this point in the 2012 election, giving them more momentum heading into the final week of the 2016 presidential election. “I want to give you a couple of early voting, absentee voting successes we’ve seen,” Miller told SiriusXM host Matthew Boyle. “We can talk about polls… But let me tell you about real votes coming in now in Florida. Republican numbers at this point are a combination of absentee voting and early voting. Republican numbers are up seven percent, and Democrat numbers are down ten percent. So, what does that mean?”

If the rest of the election follows that pattern, a 17-point turnaround means a Trumpslide.

Cheetos McCuck on the Alt-Right

Poor old Glenn Beck has absolutely no idea what is coming for him or how thoroughly his feeble cuckservatism has rendered itself irrelevant:

There are words that you may not have ever heard before or heard sparingly. But now all of a sudden, they are everywhere. And other terms and ideas that were not a conservative driving force — for instance, trade barriers. That’s not conservative. How come trade barriers are now suddenly so huge? There are ideas that were never conservative, but most of us just go, “Huh. I must have missed something. All of a sudden, this is everywhere. I don’t know what that is.” The way they’re describing things with new spins, the ideas might sound really good. We just dismiss and support them or accept them. If you repost (phonetic), one of the easiest wonders to know, you are now entering the world of the alt-right is the cuckservative. That word was nowhere. What the hell is a cuckservative? Right? How many times have you thought of that?

STU: This is a weird segment, man. We started out with masturbation shows, and now we’re on to cuckservatives.

GLENN: Right. This is an easy sign to see that the writer has either been deeply influenced without his knowledge or is a member of the alt-right.

PAT: What is a cuckservative? I don’t know what that is.

STU: Yeah. Cuckold.

GLENN: Yeah.

STU: It’s — eh. I mean, it’s not really stuff we can really talk about. But it’s basically — it started out as a racist slur, essentially.

GLENN: Yes.

STU: Saying that you don’t — you care so little, you’re giving up your wife to black people, is essentially the accusation. And when you are —

PAT: Oh, we’ve been cuckolded?

GLENN: Yes, yes.

PAT: Okay.

GLENN: But notice it has its roots in racism.

STU: Of course.

PAT: Uh-huh.

GLENN: So cuckservative is a cuckold and conservative put together.

PAT: Oh.

GLENN: This is a word specifically designed by the alt-right. So when you see that word, warning. That should be a warning sign. But most people are just like, “Yeah, I like that word, or what is that that word?” They either dismiss, it or they adopt it. Do not adopt it.

Cheetos McCuck doesn’t understand the Alt-Right, he doesn’t understand that the conservative movement is moribund, if not completely dead, and he doesn’t understand that he can see what a cuckservative is by looking in the bloody mirror.

Look at these morons still trying to make hay out of being less racist than thou at a time when, as per Alt-Right expectations, white identity in America and nationalism in Europe is aggressively on the rise. And yet, they are STILL more determined to fight the Alt-Right than the globalist enemy that has repeatedly and thoroughly vanquished them.

At least he got this part right: It is causing the alt-right to — to have a fan base because they’re the only ones saying, “We have to stop this.”

That’s why conservatives and cuckservatives alike are useless. Conservatives are too in love with their hypothetical propositions to be able to take a stand and cuckservatives are, above all, determined to avoid being called racist. Neither is in any shape to oppose the Alt-Right. They’ll roll over for us even faster than they do for the globalists. As David French has demonstrated, all it takes is a few Pepe and oven memes to send them running away crying for help from the Left.

Glenn, if you want your listeners to know what a cuckservative is, you should probably have them read the definitive book on the subject, CUCKSERVATIVE: How “Conservatives” Betrayed America. As a bonus, they’ll also understand why they find it increasingly hard to take anything you say seriously these days.

We as conservatives are for global trade. We are for — we’re not isolationists. We are not our country is better and your country sucks, so we should be able to destroy you. We should be proud of what we have, just like I’m proud of my country — my family. But that doesn’t make my family better than your family.

Globalist is now a term to describe anyone. Notice anyone who is for free trade, is now a globalist. People who were deep — deeply respected intellectual conservatives. Krauthammer, George Will, they’re now cuckservatives and globalists? Jonah Goldberg is now a globalist. I am now a globalist. That word is being thrown around everywhere. But it’s thrown around by people who are in the alt-right.

That’s because free trade IS globalism, you gurning, Cheetos-dusted equalitarian cuck. Free trade REQUIRES the free movement of people who aren’t any better or any different than anyone else and the total destruction of nations and national sovereignty to function.