Tag: media

Bracing for impact

The Washington Post appears to suspect that Hillary is going to lose and is attempting to prepare Hillary’s supporters for post-election shock and awe:

If the polls closed right at this moment (which they won’t) and if the results in each state perfectly mirrored the current RealClearPolitics average of polls in each state (which they won’t), Hillary Clinton would be elected president by an electoral college margin of 8 votes.

From her high in the polls a week or two ago, Clinton’s leads in a number of critical battleground states have collapsed or evaporated entirely. The election could come down to one state with four electoral college votes that flips from Clinton to Donald Trump and, boom: A 269-269 electoral college tie, and a vote by the House of Representatives to decide on the next president — who, given the composition of the House, would almost certainly be Donald Trump.

On Thursday, that Clinton state with four electoral college votes raised its hand. Hi, New Hampshire! Two new polls, from Boston Globe-Suffolk University and WBUR-MassInc put the Granite State at a virtual tie, with the continuing trend in the state away from Clinton. That’s Trump’s 269th electoral college vote. Or, really, his 270th: Polling in Maine’s second congressional district (which allocates one electoral college vote separately) has Trump in the lead. He wins the states he holds now and that one in Maine? President Donald Trump.

The trend is stark for Team Clinton.

Now, here is what has provoked this sudden outbreak of pessimism amongst the biased media. If you look at the Post‘s map of Hillary’s theoretical path to Electoral College victory, the pitfalls are readily apparent.

Trump is not only leading in New Hampsire now, but is also threatening to take Pennsylvania, Michigan, Viriginia, Colorado, and even New Mexico. Consider the recent Drudge headlines:

COLORADO: TIED
MICHIGAN: TIED
NEW HAMPSHIRE: TIED
NEVADA: TIED
PENNSYLVANIA: TIED

What do you think “TIED” means in a world where the pollsters give 96 percent of their political donations to Hillary Clinton? Despite weighting their demographics in her favor, massaging their data in her favor, and attempting to create a narrative of Clintonian inevitability, they still can’t present a credible picture of her winning those states.

In fact, they know, as does the Washington Post, that she’s probably going to lose all those states. This “trend to Trump” is merely pre-election CYA meant to retain their credibility for the next national election. And, if you recall, it is exactly what I have been waiting to see in the case of a Trumpslide, they’ve merely left it a little later than expected.

Remember, Colorado, Virginia, Michigan, and even New Mexico were supposed to be in the bag for Hillary. She wasn’t even campaigning or advertising in Colorado because her advisers were foolish enough to buy their own narrative. But look at what RCP, which operates on two weeks delay due to its poll-averaging model, now has as “toss-up” states.

AZ (11)    CO (9)
FL (29)    GA (16)
IA (6)    ME (2)
MI (16)    NV (6)
NH (4)    NM (5)
NC (15)    OH (18)
PA (20)    MECD2 (1)

That’s 158 Electoral College votes. If Trump takes them all – and he now appears likely to take most of them – that’s a 322-216 victory.

Events will take their course. But it certainly appears that the path has been laid for the glorious ascension of the God-Emperor Trump and the crushing of both the Clinton machine and the global establishment.

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton now leads Trump by an average of just 1.7 percentage points nationally, according to the RealClearPolitics average of polls. Less than three weeks ago, Clinton led by 7 points on the same model. FiveThirtyEight’s forecast model gives Trump a 34 percent chance of winning. On Oct. 17, the same model gave Trump a 12 percent chance.

Mike and Milo won the election

Apparently the Washington Post is throwing in the towel early:

The only true winners of this election are trolls

The guiding lights of this crowd — people like the right-wing blogger Mike Cernovich and Breitbart tech columnist Milo Yiannopoulos — have become not only legends on their own hashtags, but leading figures in the offline Trump movement. Cernovich, an erstwhile pickup artist who is largely responsible for the rumors about Clinton’s health, encourages his followers to abide by the maxims “conflict is attention” and “attention is influence.” Yiannopolous, meanwhile, was famously suspended from Twitter for inciting the racist harassment of the actress Leslie Jones, which he defended on the grounds that he’s a “prankster.”

In other words, he harassed Jones as some sort of nihilistic joke — a metaphor for online culture, if I’ve ever heard one.

This is a quasi-concession that Trump is going to win. After all, there has been no bigger nor more successful troll this election season than the ascendant God-Emperor. As the Post writer herself writes:

Phillips is deeply concerned about figures like Cernovich and Yiannopoulos — and, above them, Trump himself. For surely no one else has been so successful at cynically exploiting cultural tensions to get a reaction. 

Mike has an entirely different take.

Based on what we know about the media cover-up of Hillary’s health, it’s clear sick Hillary had another health spell, which isn’t being reported. For no reason at all today, the media is lying about me in an effort to discredit my reporting on Hillary Clinton’s extensive health issues. Based on what we know about the media, it’s certain that Clinton had another health episode. Unlike at the 9/11 Memorial event, there was no one outside of the hoaxing media to report it…. Based on the media’s prior attacks on me, I predict another health event for Hillary soon. It’s likely that she had a recent episode on her airplane, outside of the prying eyes of citizen journalists.

That, or the Post writers know something even more damning is now on the boil behind closed doors. The health issue could, conceivably, be an excuse to permit her to drop out of the race quietly rather than be publicly forced out by a public arrest.

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.

Dems to Hillary: “Step down, immediately”

The Chicago Tribune demands Hillary Clinton step down and relinquish the Democratic nomination:

If ruling Democrats hold themselves to the high moral standards they impose on the people they govern, they would follow a simple process:

They would demand that Mrs. Clinton step down, immediately, and let her vice presidential nominee, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, stand in her place.

Democrats should say, honestly, that with a new criminal investigation going on into events around her home-brew email server from the time she was secretary of state, having Clinton anywhere near the White House is just not a good idea.

Since Oct. 7, WikiLeaks has released 35,000 emails hacked from Clinton campaign boss John Podesta. Now WikiLeaks, no longer a neutral player but an active anti-Clinton agency, plans to release another 15,000 emails.

What if she is elected? Think of a nation suffering a bad economy and continuing chaos in the Middle East, and now also facing a criminal investigation of a president. Add to that congressional investigations and a public vision of Clinton as a Nixonian figure wandering the halls, wringing her hands.

The best thing would be for Democrats to ask her to step down now. It would be the most responsible thing to do, if the nation were more important to them than power. And the American news media — fairly or not firmly identified in the public mind as Mrs. Clinton’s political action committee — should begin demanding it.

They don’t believe she’ll do it. But she should step down. It will be less humiliating. Because whether she steps down or not, a Trumpslide looms. The New York Times’s own poll of Florida, taken before Comey’s unexpected announcement, has Trump +4; a five-point gain in just a month.

If you take a step back from tribal politics, you’ll see that Mrs. Clinton has clearly disqualified herself from ever coming near classified information again. If she were a young person straight out of grad school hoping to land a government job, Hillary Clinton would be laughed out of Washington with her record. She’d never be hired.

As secretary of state she kept classified documents on the home-brew server in her basement, which is against the law. She lied about it to the American people. She couldn’t remember details dozens of times when questioned by the FBI. Her aides destroyed evidence by BleachBit and hammers. Her husband, Bill, met secretly on an airport tarmac with Attorney General Loretta Lynch for about a half-hour, and all they said they talked about was golf and the grandkids.

Hillary is done. She is pining for the fjords. It looks like Google may have just ditched Hillary as well, as they’re finally allowing negative autocompletes concerning her. This is what the beginning of a preference cascade looks like.

How fortunate that she has a credible health issue to blame.

Those independents sure decide fast!

Amazing how these “undecideds” suddenly make up their minds with such rapidity and decisiveness after such a long period of indecision:

Donald Trump has wiped out Hillary Clinton’s comfortable lead, with the Democratic candidate dropping in the polls just 11 days before the election. Clinton now leads by just two points with 47 per cent to Trump’s 45 according to the poll put together by ABC and The Washington Post. At the start of the week, she held a comfortable advantage over her opponent with 50 to his 38.

These were polls carried out BEFORE the FBI announced it was reopening emails investigation. The truth is that Hillary never had a 12-point lead over Trump or anyone else. It was nothing more than the usual attempt to manage public opinion by the mainstream media.

Of course, they have to dial back their attempts right before the election in order to retain their credibility for the next time. Hence the “late-breaking independents” and “undecideds making up their minds”. As Scott Adams said over a month ago, no one is undecided about Hillary Clinton; she’s been a public figure for nearly 30 years.

Zerohedge notes a key admission in the way the latest poll was conducted. “Changes in the poll’s latest four nights compared with the previous four are not mainly about people shifting in their candidate preference, but about changes in who’s intending to vote.”


Translation: the oft-heard narrative about late-deciding independents tightening the polls is a false one.

Zerohedge also observes two more relevant facts: “Ironically, these new results do not reflect the latest FBI bombshell as polling was concluded on October 27th and it still includes an 8-point sampling advantage for democrats.”


It is still true that the state polls in the battleground states are the important ones. But the known unknown there is the extent to which they have been manipulated in the same way.

A WikiLeaks summary

Break usefully summarizes the massive WikiLeaks email dump in a manner the average reader can follow:

As of tonight, WikiLeaks has now released roughly 32,000 out of the 50,000 emails that it claims to have obtained from John Podesta’s hacked email account. If that weren’t enough, James O’Keefe and his whistle-blowing organization, Project Veritas, is in the process of releasing a video series that is packed with damning evidence against the Hillary Clinton campaign machine.

Both the Podesta emails and the O’Keefe videos paint a clear picture of a rigged election; predictably, both have been met with virtual radio silence on behalf of the mainstream media. With so many facts flying around and so much diversion from the Clinton camp and beyond, it can be difficult to figure out what is truly going on. This article aims to help sort everything out.

WIKILEAKS – What is it?

WikiLeaks is a non-profit organization founded by Julian Assange in 2006. Its stated purpose is to hold world governments accountable by bringing the truth to light, usually by obtaining sensitive “leaked” documents and publishing them on the internet. Since its inception, WikiLeaks and Assange have been involved in a dizzying number of diplomatic controversies due to the organization’s penchant for embarrassing powerful leaders around the globe.

Since 2012, Assange has been operating out of the Ecuador embassy in London, who granted him asylum after he had been charged by Swedish authorities for rape. Assange has soundly denied the charges, insisting that they are part of the American government’s ploy to extradite him and stem the flow of its secret internal documents.

What do the Podesta leaks contain?

It is important to emphasize that the leaks represent an enormous cross-section of Podesta’s emails. That means that many of the emails are simply mundane work emails of no importance to the American public.

The rest of the emails, however, unearth a complex and cozy web of connections: one between the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee back in the primary; various ties between the Clinton Foundation and several foreign powers with dubious motives; and an insidious marriage of the Clinton machine and the mainstream media.

If you’re not entirely certain what the emails contain, or why they are significant, this is a useful guide to what has been released to date.

Mailvox: why doesn’t Mike Cernovich promote me?

Mike C asks a leading question:

  • How come Mike Cernovich always promotes himself?
  • You promote him.
  • But he never promotes you?
  • His ideal list of speakers include Milo, and others.
  • He says that he and Milo are the only ones on the right doing social properly.
  • He doesn’t let you share his platform, but you are always promoting him, and sharing your platform.

-Will surely be labeled a concern troll

Concern troll? I don’t suspect you of being a concern troll. I suspect you of being Mike Cernovich. But let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that the questioner is neither a self-promoting Mike Cernovich nor a concern troll. In answer to the questions:

  1. Mike Cernovich always promotes himself because he started from zero, with nothing but mindset, vision, and audacity. He has gone from nothing to one of the most influential political figures on social media through relentlessly effective self-promotion. And since Mike has not yet met his objective – which he reveals in his new bestseller, MAGA Mindset – he has to continue self-promoting. You don’t supplant the hoax media by putting on a bow tie, crossing your legs, and doing your most genteel imitation of George Will. You do it by making damn sure that no one is able to ignore you or pretend you don’t exist.
  2. It’s absolutely false to say Mike doesn’t promote me. I had to talk him out of putting my name on the cover of MAGA Mindset. Mike regularly mentions me, praises my editing of his book, wrote the introduction to Cuckservative, and links to this blog from both Twitter and Danger & Play. Of course, he can’t link to it from Twitter now without risking having his account locked, so he’s wise to avoid doing so.
  3. Milo is a better speaker than I am. So are a lot of people. I’m not offended that I’m not on his short list of ideal speakers, especially because I never give public speeches anywhere.
  4. He and Milo are doing social media properly. They have an order of magnitude more social media followers than I do. As Mike himself has told me, I don’t tweet enough. I’m sure he’s right, but a one-way, 140-character-limited medium is simply not my preferred one. I prefer the environment of a blog with comments, probably to my short-term detriment.
  5. Why would I want to share his platform? I haven’t even used my own Twitter account in weeks. Also, as the Lead Editor of Castalia House, I am his publisher. I have a responsibility to promote our authors, Mike included. As an author, he has no responsibility whatsoever to return the favor by promoting Castalia House… even though he has done us the very great favor of choosing to publish with us when he could have simply self-published again instead.

To put it plainly, Mike has done more for me than I have done for him. He is an utterly reliable ally, a trustworthy friend, and he has an important message that many people need to hear. I know they do, because I needed to hear it myself. I can tell you right now that without Mike Cernovich, Infogalactic would not exist.

So, I am entirely content to continue to promote him, and his excellent works, whether he happens to see fit to mention me again in the future or not. After all, what has Haruki Murakami ever done for me?

Trump takes lead in Florida

Mirabile dictu, the poll gap is closing! Who could have ever seen that coming?

Donald Trump has a slim advantage in Florida as critical independent voters narrowly break his way in the must-win battleground state, a Bloomberg Politics poll shows. The Republican presidential nominee has 45 percent to Democrat Hillary Clinton’s 43 percent among likely voters when third-party candidates are included, the poll found. In a hypothetical two-way race, Trump has 46 percent to Clinton’s 45 percent. Florida, one of two states Trump calls home, is rated by major election forecasters as a toss-up or leaning toward Clinton.

And now Pennsylvania is, miraculously, unexpectedly, in play:

The candidates in the General Election for President of the United States are the Republican Donald Trump, the Democrat Hillary Clinton and the Libertarian Gary Johnson or someone else. If the election were held today, for whom would you vote? 


Donald Trump:42%
Hillary Clinton:45%
Gary Johnson:5%
Someone else:1%
Undecided:7%


Isn’t it remarkable how the independents are, only now, beginning to make up their minds? Why, whatever happened to the media narrative that the election was already over and Hillary was going to win by 14 percentage points?

Do you think, perhaps, just maybe, that it wasn’t true?

The cost of corporate convergence

Money-losing Twitter is cutting jobs. What will be interesting is if all of the Trust and Safety Council member and other SJWs still have jobs after the job cuts.

Twitter Inc. is planning widespread job cuts, to be announced as soon as this week, according to people familiar with the matter. The company may cut about 8 percent of the workforce, or about 300 people, the same percentage it did last year when co-founder Jack Dorsey took over as chief executive officer, the people said. Planning for the cuts is still fluid and the number could change, they added. 

It’s always easy to see the extent to which a corporation is converged when it engages in layoffs. If engineers and salespeople are let go while diversity hires and HR personnel remain employed, the convergence is complete.

The success of Gab, accomplished on a shoe string, can’t be helping the Twitter cause any. Where is the value in a money-losing company with such demonstrably low barriers to entry? Particularly when that company is converged and prone to attacking its customers.