Tag: politics

Mexico runs away

The President of Mexico doesn’t dare to face the God-Emperor:

Mexico’s president on Thursday scrapped a planned summit with Donald Trump in the face of insistent tweets from the U.S. president demanding Mexico pay for a border wall, a spat that threatens Mexican efforts to salvage trade ties. Taking a page out of Trump’s playbook, President Enrique Pena Nieto fired the salvo on Twitter, after Trump’s call for Mexico to foot the bill for his planned wall prompted a groundswell of calls in Mexico for next week’s meeting to be called off.

Trump said in a Twitter message earlier on Thursday that his Mexican counterpart should cancel his scheduled visit to Washington if Mexico refuses to pay for the wall that he has ordered constructed along the border. Trump views the wall, a major part of his election campaign, as part of a package of measures to curb illegal immigration.

Trump, who took office last Friday, signed an executive order for construction of the wall on Wednesday, the same day that Mexico’s foreign minister held talks with Trump aides in the White House aimed at healing ties.

I won’t try to guess at the President’s objectives, but what are the odds that this move on Mexico’s part wasn’t anticipated and doesn’t play right into the God-Emperor’s hands? Trump is adroit at setting up the heads-I-win, tails-you-lose play; merely showing up meant Mexico had to commit to funding the wall. If things continue on this track, Trump may well run Mexico out of NAFTA without having to talk Congress into doing anything or even having to issue an executive order.

And the Deep State is being cleaned out as well:

At least three senior U.S. diplomats at the State Department have left their posts, State Department officials told Reuters on Thursday. It was not immediately clear whether their departure was part of the normal transition process when a new administration starts or whether it was a coordinated walkout by diplomats who had served in Democrat Barack Obama’s administration.

Who cares why they left? The important thing is that they won’t be in place to play their usual whispering games.

UPDATE: They were kicked out. The swamp, she is draining!

He’s building THE WALL

Donald Trump tells ABC that construction will start “in months”:

In his first one-on-one television interview since being sworn in as the 45th president of the United States, President Donald Trump told ABC News anchor David Muir that Mexico would be paying for the proposed border wall and that negotiations between the two nations would begin “relatively soon.”

“Ultimately, it will come out of what’s happening with Mexico … and we will be in a form reimbursed by Mexico, which I’ve always said,” Trump said.

During the interview, which took place at the White House this morning, Trump said that Mexico would pay the U.S. back “100 percent.”

He confirmed that U.S. taxpayer dollars would be used to start the construction but said reimbursement would follow.

“All it is, is we’ll be reimbursed at a later date from whatever transaction we make from Mexico,” he said. “I’m just telling you there will be a payment. It will be in a form, perhaps a complicated form. What I’m doing is good for the United States. It’s also going to be good for Mexico. We want to have a very stable, very solid Mexico.”

When asked about the start of construction, Trump said it would happen in “months.”

“As soon as we can, as soon as we can physically do it,” he said. “I would say in months, yeah. I would say in months — certainly planning is starting immediately.”

And Mexico will pay for it.

3rd Generation Politics

There is clearly a ruthless strategist behind the God-Emperor’s executive blitzkrieg of the last three days, and I strongly suspect it is someone who is familiar with the work of both Col. John Boyd and Mike Cernovich. The unprecedented speed with which the executive orders is not merely intentional, it is strategic.

What I believe we’re seeing is the marriage of two tactics: the Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act (OODA) Loop and Cernovich’s media cycle disruption described in MAGA Mindset, being combined into a strategic approach designed to render the media’s mass firepower irrelevant.

Notice how the media was still trying to figure out how to best go about attacking the rather unspecific undermining of Obamacare when Trump dropped the more highly targeted EPA freeze and pipeline orders on them. They had barely begun to even report on those acts when news of the immigration-related orders was then leaked. The God-Emperor is using executive momentum and his ability to make rapid decisions to disrupt and neutralize the mainstream media’s vast, but cumbersome communications apparatus. Much like the Germans created maneuver warfare to avoid the formidable artillery barrages of the Allies and break through the trenches in WWI, Trump is using high-speed maneuver politics to smash the three-day media cycle, thereby preventing his opponents from targeting any individual action.

I’ll discuss this in more detail in tonight’s Darkstream. But it really is a brilliant strategy, and it bodes extremely well for the more radical and populist aspects of the Trump coalition. If my read on this is correct, his executive orders are going to become increasingly radical, and increasingly specific, as the media, the Democrats, and the conservative-corporate opposition increasingly reel back in disarray.

This is, almost certainly, a new generation of political strategy, and one that appears to have the potential to render the Left’s cultural high ground almost completely impotent.

Did I just hear… WALL?

Remember this. From this morning?

Undocumented Civilizationalist January 23, 2017 6:58 PM
And yet, Trump has just caved on immigration. Both Priebus yesterday and Spicer today say ending that ending the DACA amnesty–which Trump can do via executive order– isn’t a priority. Priebus strongly hinted it won’t be done at all. Unfucking-believable. 4 days in and Trump stabs us in the back.

Yeah, so, about that….

U.S. President Donald Trump is expected to sign several executive orders on Wednesday restricting immigration from Syria and six other Middle Eastern or African countries, according to several congressional aides and immigration experts briefed on the matter.

In addition to Syria, Trump’s orders are expected to temporarily restrict access to the United States for most refugees. Another order will block visas from being issued to Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen, said the aides and experts, who asked not to be identified.

Trump’s restrictions on refugees are likely to include a multi-month ban on admissions from all countries until the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security can increase the intensity of the vetting process.

The Republican president was expected to sign the orders at the Washington headquarters of the Department of Homeland Security, whose responsibilities include immigration and border security.

As I mentioned in the Darkstream tonight, the God-Emperor is off to a fast start and he is exceeding expectations. He is ALREADY better than anything I’d even thought to hope for out of any other Republican candidate.

These are not merely the initial indications of a man who will be a good President. These are initial indications of a man who is striving for greatness and may actually achieve it.

UPDATE: It just keeps getting better. We’re now experiencing winning squared; the God-Emperor is giving the order to Build. The. Wall.

President Trump plans to sign executive orders Wednesday enabling construction of his proposed wall on the U.S.-Mexico border and targeting cities where local leaders refuse to hand over illegal immigrants for deportation, according to White House officials familiar with the decisions.

The actions, part of a multi-day focus on immigration, are among an array of sweeping and immediate changes to the nation’s immigration system under consideration by the new president. The moves represent Trump’s first effort to deliver on perhaps the signature issue that drove his presidential campaign: his belief that illegal immigration is out of control and threatening the country’s safety and security.

Trump’s immigration blitz this week is widely seen inside the White House as a victory for the self-described populist wing of his inner circle — which includes chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, attorney general nominee Jeff Sessions and top policy adviser Stephen Miller.

The best part is this: Any immigration measures announced by the president will set up a fierce battle in Trump’s first week between the White House and advocates for immigrants, who were reacting with alarm Tuesday as word spread that immigration was on the table. 


They shouldn’t be reacting with alarm. They should be reacting with fear.

Identity politics are here to stay

And there is no place for white people in the Democratic Party:

Candidates aspiring to take over as chairman of the Democratic National Committee met Monday night to discuss what went wrong in 2016 and how to get the party back on track. Early into the event the candidates gravitated toward a particular scapegoat for the party’s poor showing in November: Political consultancies owned by white people.

“We have to stop, particularly with the consultants,” said the chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party, Jaime Harrison. “You cannot come to the DNC and get a contract and the only minority face you have is the person answering the phone.”

Minority consultants “need to get the same resources that the white consultants have gotten,” said a Fox News analyst and candidate for the chairmanship, Jehmu Greene. “The DNC did a piss poor, pathetic job” attracting minorities, she said.

Democrats must provide “training” that focuses in part on teaching Americans “how to be sensitive and how to shut their mouths if they are white,” urged the executive director of Idaho’s Democratic Party, Sally Boynton Brown, who is white.

The event’s moderator, MSNBC’s Joy Ann Reid, asked the candidates how the party should handle the Black Lives Now movement.

The candidates uniformly emphasized that the party must embrace the activists unreservedly…. Asked whether they would agree to work with President Trump, the candidates agreed they would never do so, which drew some applause from the otherwise quiet crowd at George Washington University.

Translation: it’s time to get those Trumpslide! 2020 shirts made.

One would think this means that there isn’t any place for non-whites in the Republican Party, except that in the political sense, identity means who you want in government. And any rational non-white living in the USA should want white government, because that is what almost all of them – or at least their ancestors – came seeking in the first place.

The single biggest single mistake made by the Founding Fathers was this one: immigrants and their descendants should never have been permitted to vote. After all, no one forced them to immigrate to that particular society and they had nothing to do with creating the society they are seeking to join.

If the God-Emperor truly hopes to make America great again, stripping post-1965 immigrants of all voting rights, state, federal, and local, would be the best thing he could do short of sending them all back to their homelands. Why should people who are not Americans in any sense except paperwork be allowed any say at all in how American society is structured or how Americans live?

How Trump happened

Brendan Neill explains at The Spectator:

It happened because you banned super-size sodas. And smoking in parks. And offensive ideas on campus. Because you branded people who oppose gay marriage ‘homophobic’, and people unsure about immigration ‘racist’.

Because you treated owning a gun and never having eaten quinoa as signifiers of fascism. Because you thought correcting people’s attitudes was more important than finding them jobs. Because you turned ‘white man’ from a description into an insult. Because you used slurs like ‘denier’ and ‘dangerous’ against anyone who doesn’t share your eco-pieties.

That’s part of it, anyhow. But it also happened because conservatives refused to fight for the nation or to conserve anything. It also happened because neocons invaded the world while inviting the world. It also happened because corporations set up factories in China and hired H1B foreigners instead of employing Americans. It also happened because Churchians decided it was more important to spare the feelings of non-Christians than obey the teachings of Jesus Christ and the Bible.

“Now comes the Hour of Action!”

Donald Trump’s Inaugural Address. What a phenomenal speech. A wee bit on the civic nationalist side for me, but vastly more aggressive and combative and anti-globalist than I was expecting.

Chief Justice Roberts, President Carter, President Clinton, President Bush, President Obama, fellow Americans and people of the world, thank you.

(APPLAUSE)

We, the citizens of America, are now joined in a great national effort to rebuild our country and restore its promise for all of our people. Together we will determine the course of America and the world for many, many years to come.

We will face challenges. We will confront hardships. But we will get the job done. Every four years, we gather on these steps to carry out the orderly and peaceful transfer of power.

And we are grateful to President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama for their gracious aid throughout this transition. They have been magnificent. Thank you.

(APPLAUSE)

Today’s ceremony, however, has very special meaning. Because today, we are not merely transferring power from one administration to another or from one party to another.

But we are transferring power from Washington D.C. and giving it back to you, the people.

For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished, but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered, but the jobs left. And the factories closed.

The establishment protected itself but not the citizens of our country. Their victories have not been your victories. Their triumphs have not been your triumphs. And while they celebrated in our nation’s capital,  there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land. That all changes starting right here and right now. Because this moment is your moment. It belongs to you.

(APPLAUSE)

It belongs to everyone gathered here today and everyone watching all across America. This is your day. This is your celebration. And this, the United States of America, is your country.

What truly matters is not which party controls our government but whether our government is controlled by the people. January 20th, 2017 will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again.

The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer.

Everyone is listening to you now. You came by the tens of millions to become part of a historic movement, the likes of which the world has never seen before.

At the center of this movement is a crucial conviction — that a nation exist to serve its citizens. Americans want great schools for their children, safe neighborhoods for their families and good jobs for themselves.

These are just and reasonable demands of righteous people and a righteous public. But for too many of our citizens, a different reality exist. Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities, rusted out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation, an education system flushed with cash but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge. And the crime, and the gangs, and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.

We are one nation, and their pain is our pain. Their dreams are our dreams, and their success will be our success. We share one heart, one home and one glorious destiny.

The oath of office I take today is an oath of allegiance to all Americans. For many decades, we’ve enriched foreign industry at the expense of American industry, subsidized the armies of other countries while allowing for the very sad depletion of our military.

We defended other nation’s borders while refusing to defend our own.

And spent trillions and trillions of dollars overseas while America’s infrastructure has fallen into disrepair and decay.

We’ve made other countries rich while the wealth, strength, and confidence of our country has dissipated over the horizon. One by one, the factories shuttered and left our shores with not even a thought about the millions and millions of American workers that were left behind.

The wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homes and then redistributed all across the world.

(APPLAUSE)

But that is the past and now we are looking only to the future.

We assembled here today are issuing a new decree to be heard in every city, in every foreign capital and in every hall of power. From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land. From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first — America first.

(APPLAUSE)

Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs will be made to benefit American workers and American families. We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies and destroying our jobs.

(APPLAUSE)

Protection will lead to great prosperity and strength. I will fight for you with every breath in my body. And I will never, ever let you down.

(APPLAUSE)

America will start winning again, winning like never before.

(APPLAUSE)

We will bring back our jobs. We will bring back our borders. We will bring back our wealth, and we will bring back our dreams. We will build new roads and highways and bridges and airports and tunnels and railways all across our wonderful nation. We will get our people off of welfare and back to work rebuilding our country with American hands and American labor. We will follow two simple rules — buy American and hire American.

We will seek friendship and goodwill with the nations of the world.

But we do so with the understanding that it is the right of all nations to put their own interests first. We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone but rather to let it shine as an example. We will shine for everyone to follow.

(APPLAUSE)

We will reinforce old alliances and form new ones. And unite the civilized world against radical Islamic terrorism, which we will eradicate completely from the face of the earth.

(APPLAUSE)

At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America and through our loyalty to our country, we will rediscover our loyalty to each other. When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice.

(APPLAUSE)

The Bible tells us how good and pleasant it is when God’s people live together in unity. We must speak our minds openly, debate our disagreement honestly but always pursue solidarity. When America is united, America is totally unstoppable.

(APPLAUSE)

There should be no fear. We are protected, and we will always be protected. We will be protected by the great men and women of our military and law enforcement. And most importantly, we will be protected by God.

(APPLAUSE)

Finally, we must think big and dream even bigger. In America, we understand that a nation is only living as long as it is striving. We will no longer accept politicians who are all talk and no action, constantly complaining but never doing anything about it.

(APPLAUSE)

The time for empty talk is over. Now arrives the hour of action.

(APPLAUSE)

Do not allow anyone to tell you that it cannot be done. No challenge can match the heart and fight and spirit of America. We will not fail. Our country will thrive and prosper again. We stand at the birth of a new millennium, ready to unlock the mysteries of space to free the earth from the miseries of disease and to harness the energies, a new national proud pride will stir ourselves, something and heal our divisions. Is time to remember that all wisdom — are total never forget that whether we are black or brown or white, we all believe the same red blood of patriots.

We all enjoyed the same glorious freedoms, and we all salute the same great American flag.

And whether a child is born in the urban sprawl of Detroit or the windswept plains of Nebraska, They look up at the same night sky, they build a heart with the same dreams and they are infused with the breath of life by the same Almighty Creator.

Ball and large — So to all Americans in every city near and far, amount of the mountain, from ocean to ocean, hear these words — you will never be ignored again.

Your voice, your hopes and your dreams will define our American destiny. Together, And your courage and goodness and love will forever guide us along the way. We will make America strong again. We will make America wealthy again. We will make America proud again. We will make America safe again. And yes, together, thank you. we will make America great again. God bless you. And God bless America. Thank You.

The doomed presidency

(((Richard Cohen))) warns that the Trump presidency is doomed:

Whether he knows it or not, the specter of Lyndon Baines Johnson haunts Donald John Trump. There are some jarring similarities — two big, fleshy men given to vulgarities and gauche behavior, boastful, thin-skinned, politically amoral, vengeful, unforgiving and, most important, considered illegitimate presidents. For Johnson, that took some time to sink in; Trump is already there….

The president-elect will take the oath with a minority of the popular vote — a substantial deficit of almost 3 million votes. He enters the Oval Office with historically dismal poll numbers, lower now than right after he won the election. He has done nothing to woo the majority of Americans who rejected his candidacy and has, instead, adhered to his schoolyard habit of tweeting his every grievance, denigrating his every critic, making cameos with vaccine and global-warming doubters and, as if to show some versatility, rascals such as Don King and Kanye West. It is a “Gong Show” with no gong in sight.

Lyndon Johnson would no doubt warn Trump that he is already on thin ice and he will plunge through it the moment Congress takes the measure of his unpopularity. Johnson was a man of huge political abilities and experience, and his achievements in civil rights entitled him to greatness. Yet, when Vietnam went sour, so did the public, and it seemed, after a while, that his personal characteristics, scathingly caricatured by artists such as David Levine and Jules Feiffer, oozed out of him so that they obscured both him and his accomplishments. He was deemed capable of anything — of lying and perversion of all kinds. This is where Trump stands now.

By the end of the week, Trump will be the president. I wish him the best; I wish him the worst. The dilemma is how to separate loathing for him from love of country. I am leaving it to time to work that out. Meanwhile, Trump will have his moment, that’s for sure, but when things go wrong he will be chased from office — just like Johnson once was. The ancient Greeks knew why: A man’s character is his fate. In that case, Trump’s presidency is doomed.

My two-word rebuttal: Bill Clinton.

Now, LBJ was, in my opinion, the very worst president the USA has ever had, with the arguable exception of Lincoln. Say what you will of Wilson and FDR, (much less trivialities such as Carter, the Bushes, and Obama) but in both cases, the nation-state not only survived their administrations, but came out of them at least temporarily stronger than before, even though various seeds for long term problems had been planted. And LBJ managed to do his mortal damage to the nation in less than two full terms.

By signing the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 and instituting the Great Society, LBJ murdered the American nation-state, which no longer exists any more than the Chickesaw nation in northern Mississippi or the Cherokee nation in Georgia do. The USA is now a multinational, multicultural, multireligious state, with less stability and worse long-term prospects than the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1900.

We should hope and pray the Trump presidency is as significant as LBJ’s doomed one, although, of course, in the opposite direction. MAGA! MAWA! MAAA!

Pity the poor Never Trumpers

Given their inability to grasp the relationship between action and consequence, to say nothing of their inability to predict events, one could argue there is a case for the God-Emperor Ascendant to leave the Never Trumpers Never Employed even if he was inclined to let bygones be bygones.

They are some of the biggest names in the Republican national security firmament, veterans of past GOP administrations who say, if called upon by President-elect Donald Trump, they stand ready to serve their country again.

But their phones aren’t ringing. Their entreaties to Trump Tower in New York have mostly gone unanswered. In Trump world, these establishment all-stars say they are “PNG” — personae non gratae.

Their transgression was signing one or both of two public “Never Trump” letters during the campaign, declaring they would not vote for Trump and calling his candidacy a danger to the nation. One letter, with 122 names, was published by War on the Rocks, a website devoted to national security commentary, during the primary season in March. The other, with 50 names, including some repeat signatories, was published by the New York Times during the general-election campaign in August.

Now, just days before Trump is sworn in as the nation’s 45th president, the letter signers fear they have been added to another document, this one private — a purported blacklist compiled by Trump’s political advisers….

The conflict was exacerbated shortly after the election when Eliot Cohen, a State Department counselor during the Bush administration who had helped organize the War on the Rocks letter, aired new criticism of the Trump transition. In an opinion column for The Washington Post in November, Cohen said that a friend on the transition team had asked him to provide names of potential job candidates — with the stipulation that he include no one who signed either of the letters.

Cohen wrote that he became convinced there were “pent-up resentments” among members of the Trump team, and he warned young policy experts against working for the administration. Cohen has had no further communications with the transition team.

“Believe me — my phone is not ringing,” he said in a recent interview.

Forget not being hired. These jokers should be worried about being renditioned and droned. After all, they have called the President-Elect of the United States of America “a danger to the nation”.

And what nation would that be, exactly?

The fact that they are so utterly clueless as to be surprised that they are not being offered employment by the very man they attacked so viciously and so publicly should alone be enough to prevent anyone from hiring them, not just the Trump administration.

In any event, once more the God-Emperor Ascendant is demonstrating his wisdom by refusing to place his trust in the bureaucratic elite that hates him and will fight him at every opportunity. I don’t think Trump is going to disappoint his supporters, I think he is going to delight them by exceeding their expectations.

No one cares what you want

Jonah Goldberg expresses concerns, concernedly, that Donald Trump will fail to be the kind of president Jonah Goldberg prefers.

I very much want Trump to be a successful conservative president — which is to say, I don’t want him to be a successful statist president. I understand all-too-well that many of Trump’s fans do want him to be a successful statist president. They don’t use the word “statist,” preferring the rough synonym “nationalist.” They either sincerely think, or convincingly pretend to think, that there’s a meaningful difference between a statist and a nationalist. There isn’t. That’s a worthwhile argument to have, and there will be many opportunities to have it down the road. But if Trump is going to be a successful conservative president, I think his biggest fans will have to recognize their own tribalism.

The intrinsic dishonesty of some civic nationalists runs so deep that they do not even appear to recognize it when they make massive blunders like confusing statism with nationalism.

Jonah is smarter than this. He understands the difference between a nation – a group of homogeneous people – and a state – a sovereign political entity. He’s written about the Kurds before, so he knows there is a Kurdish nation but not a Kurdish state. He’s written about the Soviet Union before, so he knows there was a Soviet state despite there being no such thing as a Soviet nation.

Moreover, conservatives have been overt statists since the first Bush ’43 administration. Has Jonah already forgotten “big government conservatism” or the bank bailouts of 2008? The fact is that conservatism is a dying non-ideology, and that’s why all the anti-Trumpers and Never Trumpers are beginning to cozy up to the God-Emperor Ascendant, whispering their wicked advice in the hopes that they can influence him.

But it won’t do them any good. Their electoral impotence, their intellectual irrelevance, and their lack of character was revealed in last year’s primary and general election campaigns. And very, very few of them are indicating that they learned anything from the experience.

And as for tribalism, we readily admit ours. We would just like to see Mr. Goldberg and company be honest about theirs. Given the absence of a strong demographic majority, tribalism and identity politics are the inevitable order of the day. See Thomas Sowell for details.