Tag: politics

It’s more convincing if you don’t lie

Some of Donald Trump’s critics don’t realize that being “a man of the people” is about supporting those people’s interests, not lying about your background and pretending to have worked your way up from the bottom:

Wall Street Journal deputy editorial page editor Bret Stephens told CNNs’ Fareed Zakaria that Donald Trump’s campaign is “increasingly a vision of the privileges of a white ethnic bloc.” Stephens warned Trump has turned the Republican party into the “white party” and is doubtful the it can reclaim the principle of opportunity and the “right to rise” following a Trump loss.

“It’s basically increasingly a vision of the privileges of a white ethnic bloc who he is speaking to,” Stephens said of the Trump campaign. “If the Republican party essentially becomes the white party, it is going to be the death of it.”

Stephens fought back against the argument that anti-Trump Republicans are elitists living in a bubble.

Stephens said he wished he was born into a rich family entrenched in New York real estate and the privileges that comes along with that. Instead, he said, he “started at the bottom” and any achievements he has made were based on merit.

“This is the standard line of the Trump side of the party, that us who oppose him are just a bunch of elites who live in the Acela corridor in this bubble of unimaginable wealth,” Stephens said to his co-panelist, Trump surrogate Emily Miller. “I wish I had been born into an extremely wealthy New York real estate family and been given multimillion dollar loans to get my start in life. I started at the bottom like so many of us did and to the extent that I achieved anything I think it’s on merit.”

Stephens, however, was born in New York to a chemical company executive and attended boarding school at the Middlesex School in Massachusetts. He later attended the London School of Economics.

Stephens is not only lying about himself, he’s wrong. The only hope the Republicans have of survival is to become the white party, shut down immigration, and start deporting the post-1965 wavers. Due to the combination of demographics and white people opposed to white interests, it’s entirely possible that if Donald Trump does not win, no Republican will ever be president again.

Not all whites favor small government. But look around the world. White Americans are the only people who favor it. That means the Republican Party, with its current ideology, cannot possibly win in any polity that does not consist of predominantly white American voters. It would have to become party more akin to the British Tories or Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, or accept permanent opposition status.

Being a good cuckservative, Stephens probably favors the latter. What could be more satisfying than the certainty of knowing you can remain perfectly principled, secure in the assurance of your noble defeat.

CORRECTION: I stand corrected. Stephens (((Erlich))) is not a cuckservative, he’s just another media Jew who is opposed to a white Republican party because a white Republican party would reliably prioritize American interests over Jewish interests. As I’ve repeatedly predicted, ideology is dead. It’s all identity politics now.

On a tangential note, we’ll know America is no longer the premier global power when the Erlich-Stephens of the world start changing their names to Wang, Li, and Zhang.

The White House on the Left

At this rate, if Hillary manages to beat Donald Trump, it appears the White House may look like a 1980s horror flick:

Call it conspiracy theory, coincidence or just bad luck, but any time someone is in a position to bring down Hillary Clinton they wind up dead. In fact, as we noted previously, there’s a long history of Clinton-related body counts, with scores of people dying under mysterious circumstances. While Vince Foster remains the most infamous, the body count is starting to build ominously this election cycle – from the mysterious “crushing his own throat” death of a UN official to the latest death of an attorney who served the DNC with a fraud suit.

As GatewayPundit’s Jim Hoft reports, on July 3, 2016, Shawn Lucas and filmmaker Ricardo Villaba served the DNC Services Corp. and Chairperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz at DNC’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., in the fraud class action suit against the Democrat Party on behalf of Bernie Sanders supporters (this was before Wikileaks released documents proving the DNC was working against the Sanders campaign during the 2016 primary).

Shawn Lucas was thrilled about serving the papers to the DNC before Independence Day… Shawn Lucas was found dead this week.

According to Zerohedge, that’s five mysterious deaths already. Since JUNE! I do think it’s a bit of a stretch to suggest that a 27-year-old DNC staffer was in any position to bring down anyone, let alone Hillary Clinton. But still, WTF?

On the plus side, a Hillary presidency will create considerable interest in conspiracy theories. On the downside, the thought of Hillary with drones at her disposal is a sobering one.

Mailvox: it’s just the media narrative

MJ is suspicious about the so-called “Trump Implosion” and rightfully so:

With all of the talk I’ve been seeing over the past week in regards to the mainstream news of Trump “imploding”, is it just me, or are the various factions of the diminishing hordes of establishment supporters getting more and more outlandish in their barbs against the campaign? How much longer will these types continue to deny the inevitable truth before they have to pivot to attempt to save their ignorant asses?

To wit:

– Yes, Trump has a concern about taking things personally. I see that more as a positive than a negative. The current occupant of the Office has too much of an “I don’t give a damn” attitude, and I think that’s part of the issue we’re running into in terms of leadership.

– The whole Khan issue. The reason it hasn’t gone away isn’t because Trump is keeping on it, it’s that the establishment handlers keep thrusting Khan back out into the spotlight to force Trump to respond. I heard a piece of an interview between Khan and Anderson Cooper from the other day, and it was clear to me that the man had no clue what he was talking about in terms of his constitutional claims. I literally felt dumber after hearing the man speak, it was that bad. The only reason Khan is even remotely relevant is that his son died in action during OIF, and that was an action supported by the D nominee, not Trump. I personally find it repulsive that they would use that status for such actions (it’s not surprising to me, however).

– The enthusiasm gap. Last weekend, there was supposedly a big bus trip through Pennsylvania and Ohio for the D ticket. It was so huge that they had to pay people to show up in western PA, and they ended up canceling the appearance in Cleveland, both cases due to lack of interest. Meanwhile, Trump and his campaign were upset that fire marshals were capping entry to venues far below the posted capacity limits. And where he’s not being capped, they’re turning people away. It’s night and day in terms of what is being reported by the establishment versus what the ground truth is.

I’m registered as unaffiliated where I live. I chose to be unaffiliated because the two-party system here is horribly, irrevocably broken. I understand that a lot of this traffic is meant for me to influence me into supporting the D nominee. I hate to say it, but I’m rather insulted by this attitude and approach. It’s not working. There’s nothing there for the D nominee to offer, and the choice of running mate is also a personal affront to me as an active, practicing Roman Catholic.

I will be honest, I’m not 100% behind Trump, but it’s not for any reason from the establishment. There is a legitimate unknown with him, and that’s probably due more to my healthy skepticism of someone who is naturally outside the overall process. This is another of those once in a generation occurrences where the truth is so obvious that one would have to be a complete idiot to ignore it.

The conclusion I’m running into is this: Trump is the catalyst for a completely new paradigm in both American and international politics, something that we sort of started to see with the Brexit vote, even though that was focused on the UK. The opportunity his election presents is huge in terms of how things can at least attempt to rectify themselves, and that’s what gives me hope.

I agree with the consensus that the Trumpslide is coming, especially since there’s still 95 days of campaigning to go, including 3 debates.

My take: everyone needs to relax about the “Trump implosion” and the purported Republican revolt. The media is full of SJWs. And what do SJWs do? Exactly!

This is what a full-fledged feeding frenzy looks like.

With Donald Trump facing the roughest stretch of his candidacy, the media have moved from questioning his sanity to depicting a campaign in disarray and top Republicans still wondering whether they can dump the nominee.

That won’t happen, of course, but it’s an indication of the toxic nature of the coverage and the flood of anti-Trump leaks now washing across the media landscape.

There’s a natural piling-on effect when campaigns go off the rails: The polls dip, the critics step up their rhetoric, staffers start pointing fingers, and the press keeps the vicious cycle going.

But I’ve never seen anything like this.

Things reached the point yesterday morning that CNBC’s John Harwood tweeted: “Longtime ally of Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager: ‘Manafort not challenging Trump anymore. Mailing it in. Staff suicidal.'”

And there was this from CNN: “A source tells @DanaBashCNN that some Trump campaign staff are frustrated w/ candidate lately, ‘feel like they are wasting their time.’”

I am told by knowledgeable campaign sources that Manafort is not going anywhere and believes that Trump will be getting back on message.

I am further told that reports of a planned “intervention” with the candidate, led by Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani, are false.

And the sources also say that, contrary to media reports, party chairman Reince Priebus is not furious with Trump, though he is disappointed with the nominee’s refusal to endorse Paul Ryan.

The Khan/Implosion narrative nothing more than the Democratic hasbara that we’ve been seeing on this blog and others, writ large. As for the polls, I remind you of my previous assessment: they don’t mean ANYTHING until 30 days after the end of the second convention.

If there is no discernible Trump trend by then, it MIGHT be time to start considering the possibility of a Hillary win. In the meantime, pay no attention to the media’s attempt to establish a false narrative. Remember, they are trying to shape reality, they are not honestly reporting it.

Let’s look at this rationally. If the media was genuinely convinced that Hillary Clinton was going to win, do you really think they would engage in this sort of mass narrative-shaping instead of triumphantly slinging insults at Republicans while victory-dancing?

As to how long it will be before they pivot, I would say one week after the polls start showing Trump within striking distance of Hillary again. Which should be in about one month.

UPDATE: from the comments: “Ricky Vaughn 99 has suggested for months that it all starts with one push from Labor Day. He has said Trump does pushes and retreats in waves.”

I have noticed this too. Remember there were similar lulls around the time Michelle Fields was raped, murdered, and dismembered at a Trump rally and again after the Ohio loss cost Trump the Republican nomination.

As an experienced developer, Trump understands that you can’t mindlessly push all the time. You need to take the time to reload, gather your strength, and recover before launching another offensive. I assumed that’s what he’s been doing since the end of the Republican nomination.

Democracy is incompatible with immigration

The Netherlands is rapidly learning why:

Europe has more than its share of angry anti-immigrant political parties these days. But one party has turned the politics of immigration on its head, positioning itself as perhaps the first in Europe with a pro-immigrant stance, run by people from immigrant backgrounds.

That party, called Denk, or Think, is led by a multicultural group of candidates seeking to combat xenophobia and racism in the Netherlands.

Denk has promoted itself as a kind of answer to the nativist and isolationist positions of the flamboyant far-right populist candidate Geert Wilders and his Freedom Party, which has been surging in the polls.

“What is unique about Denk is that it’s a party of people with a migration background who completely control the party,” said Cas Mudde, a specialist in European political and radical parties who was born in the Netherlands.

“Nonwhites have been in Parliament for a long time, but all the parties are still dominated by white Dutch people,” added Mr. Mudde, who is an associate professor at the School for Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia. “We haven’t had a party dominated by nonwhite Dutch that has a potential chance of getting elected into Parliament.”

The Denk party has proved contentious. It has been greeted with skepticism by its political opponents and criticism in the Dutch media.

Denk was accused in the local Amsterdam centrist newspaper, Het Parool, of “fanning flames of immigrant discontent.” On social media, the party has been called “Netherlands haters.”

Among the Denk party’s stated policy goals are banning from legislative forums a pejorative term often used for Dutch nonwhites, “allochtoon,” and to replace the term “integration” with “acceptance.”

It wants to establish a “racism register” to track the use of hate speech by elected officials and to bar those who promote racism from holding public office.

Most Americans don’t understand that the same process now at work in the Netherlands has ALREADY significantly altered US law and American society. The only difference is that the various distinctions between “nonwhite Dutch” and the native Dutch are more glaringly apparent than the superficial differences between Americans and “Irish-Americans” or “German-Americans” or “Jewish-Americans”. That is how the US immigrants managed to so successfully transform American society and eliminate so many American traditions without meeting much resistance.

It’s a little ironic that so many Americans are prone to proclaim “the end of Europe” on the basis of an non-European immigrant population below 10 percent when they don’t understand that they have already lost their own nation to immigrants who not only outnumber them, but now rule over them as well.

The top priority of immigrants has always been more immigrants. Because most post-18th-century immigrants are economic migrants who fully intend to reshape the land they have invaded to be more to their liking. See: Californication.

The only solution is to not permit immigrants to vote for at least three generations, until they are at least potentially assimilated. The same policy should have been adopted by the U.S. States in the 1950s.

An intellectual empire sans clothes

Steve Sailer explains why Donald Trump is simultaneously accused of stupidity due to his verbal simplicity even as he punctures the absurd pieties of the media Narrative:

Seven hundred years ago an English friar named William of Ockham gave his name to the traditional Western prejudice that the simplest feasible explanation is most likely to be true.

Six and a half centuries later we went to the moon.

Lately, however, we haven’t really felt all that inclined to figure out how the world works. It’s more important to demonstrate our mastery of socially preferred locutions.

For example, one pressing public-policy question of the day is: What are the main causes of Muslim terrorism? Now, an Ockhamite might surmise that one useful answer is:

Muslims.

But the respectable answer in 2016 isn’t supposed to be anything that blunt. In particular, any acceptable explanation must include the six-syllable word “Islamophobia.”

Logically, Islamophobia sounds like it would be an effect of Islamic terrorism rather than a cause.

But logic hasn’t been the goal in 21st-century America. Status is. Repeating the word “Islamophobia” demonstrates that you have been to college, or at least that you watch talking heads on TV who have been to college.

And that’s what really counts.

In summary, Trump has been able to galvanize American politics by telling so many unfashionable truths because the reigning dogmas of our day are smart in form yet stupid in content.

It’s more than a bit ironic that someone so famous for exaggerating should prove to be more fundamentally truthful than all the fact-checkers and media pedants who scrupulously report that which is technically accurate in order to mislead and deceive.

But no nation is ever likely to suicide itself, as the American nation has done, without being told, and accepting, many lies.

We live in a society that is every bit as dishonest with itself as the Soviet Union ever was. The USA is now the Evil Empire, and like its predecessor, it will collapse in disarray due to the increasing weight of those lies.

The Communist perspective on fascism

Keep illuminating article entitled “Divided They Fell” from International Socialism in mind when you observe the modern anti-fascists in action:

The Communist Party organisation began to change fundamentally in the mid-1920s. Concomitant with the degeneration of the Russian Revolution, Stalinisation of the KPD began under the leadership of Ernst Thälmann. Freedom of discussion and internal democracy were replaced piece by piece by a mood of unquestioning discipline and authoritarian leadership. Oppositional currents were discouraged from speaking openly and eventually forced out of the party. No longer held politically accountable to the membership, in 1929 Thälmann and Stalin agreed upon an ultra-left course against the SPD, concluding that the Social Democrats represented a form of “social fascism”. This disastrous line would eventually prove fatal for both the Social Democrats and the Communists.

The theory of social fascism dictated that Nazis and Social Democrats were essentially two sides of the same coin. The primary enemy of the Communists was supposedly the Social Democrats, who protected capitalism from a workers’ revolution by deceiving the class with pseudo-socialist rhetoric. The worst of them all were the left wing Social Democrats, whose rhetoric was particularly deceptive. According to the theory, it was impossible to fight side by side with the SPD against the Nazis under such conditions. Indeed, the KPD declared that defeating the social fascists was the “prerequisite to smashing fascism”. By 1932 the KPD began engaging in isolated attempts to initiate broader anti-fascist fronts, most importantly the Antifascischistsche Aktion, but these were formulated as “united fronts from below”—ie without the leadership of the SPD. Turning the logic of the united front on its head, SPD supporters were expected to give up their party allegiance before joining, as opposed to the united front being a first practical step towards the Communist Party. Throughout this period the leaderships of both the SPD and the KPD never came to a formal agreement regarding the fight against Nazism.

Another fatal consequence of the KPD’s ultra-leftism was that the term “fascism” was used irresponsibly to describe any and all opponents to the right of the party. The SPD-led government that ruled Germany until 1930 was considered “social fascist”. When Brüning formed a new right-wing government by decree without a parliamentary majority in 1930, the KPD declared that fascism had taken power. This went hand in hand with a deadly underestimation of the Nazi danger. Thus Thälmann could declare in 1932: “Nothing could be more fatal for us than to opportunistically overestimate the danger posed by Hitler-fascism”.The KPD’s seeming inability to distinguish between democratic, authoritarian and fascist expressions of capitalist rule proved to be its undoing. An organisation that continually vilified bourgeois democratic governments as fascist was unable to understand the true meaning of Hitler’s ascension to power on 30 January 1933, the day the KPD infamously (and ominously) declared: “After Hitler, we will take over!”

To this day, “fascism” still means nothing but “any and all opponents to the right of the speaker”. Note that SPD refers to the Socialist Party which established the Weimar Republic and is currently the junior partner in Germany’s governing coalition, and the KPD is the Communist Party.

Why Trump?

Tom Kratman answers the question and explains why anyone, with any sense at all, will be supporting Trump over the status quo candidate:

Trump is pissed – dare I say “royally pissed”? – at the DC establishment that wants his money but shuns him. There’s a better than fair chance, and a better chance than we’ve had since Reagan who, at the time, had bigger sturgeon to slice, for us to have someone in the White House who may actually purge the bureaucracy that’s taken over the country. Oh, no, he won’t do everything we need and stand the upper echelons of the Agency and State, EPA, Justice, etc., against a wall with the Old Guard providing the firing squads. But he’s fairly likely to trim them badly enough to put the fear of God – which is to say the fear of you and me; “Vox Populi, vox Dei!” – into the remaining swine.

And then there’s what I think is the most important thing, the answer to the question of why Trump is even running. To me, it’s obvious: He doesn’t need graft or girls; he wants a better place in the history books than the one he’s earned so far as “slumlord to the elite.” He wants to earn that better place. This will tend to make him controllable, to make him at least try to keep his campaign promises in a way we haven’t seen since Reagan and defeating the Soviet Union. I expect that wall on our Southern border to go up. I expect him to repudiate the globalist “Free trade” agreements that have allowed the world’s piratical and parasitic “elite” to loot us, Russia, Europe, everyone not of their little class. I expect some bureaucracy trimming. Why? Because he’s such a great guy? No, because he wants that place in the history books.

That’s my impression too. Trump doesn’t need the money or the power. He doesn’t need the fame or the babes. What he wants is a meaningful place in history, and there is only one way he can achieve that.

You can’t trust Donald Trump’s principles, his words, or his commitment to Jesus Christ. But if you can’t trust in his vanity, if you can’t place any faith in the vanity of a egocentric man who has stamped his name in gold letters on everything he can, in what can you possibly trust?

Another Magic Dirt fail

Well, that, or Germans are taking an extraordinary interest in Turkish politics:

Around 50,000 supporters of Turkey’s Islamist president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan have rallied in Cologne, Germany to demand his authoritarian reign continues. The Islamist crowd chanted “Allah hu Akbar!” and held signs reading, “Erdoğan is a human rights activist”, whilst opponents waved banners insisting “Stop the Erdomania!”

Members of the Turkish-nationalist, fascist-leaning “Grey Wolves” group were among the crowd that gathered on banks of the Rhine River with the city’s huge gothic cathedral in the background.

I wonder why these bona-fide, no-question, Genuine and Real True Germans are so interested in Turkish politics all of a sudden?

And to think people ask how mass deportations could possibly be conducted. I should think there is a pretty good hint right there.

“Viva Mexico rally today. Free burritos and tequila shots!”

Mailvox: Churchianity and Cruz

JM is mystified by the continued enthusiasm of Churchian cuckservatives for Ted Cruz:

I used to respect the authors of this blog and some of those they quote with approval, but I’ve lost respect for them in the last few months, and have dropped them from my blogroll.  I find it both interesting and annoying to see how they rationalize Ted Cruz’s refusal to keep his word into an act of Christian principle.  To be charitable, they may be unaware of all the dirty tricks pulled by the Cruz campaign, but they’d probably find some way to justify them, anyway.

I suspect that Cruz, Jeb, and Kasich never had any intention of supporting Trump regardless of the pleedge they made, and they’re just making up excuses to rationalize their dishonesty.

Most of the women mentioned in this post who are so upset at Trump and Christians who favour Trump are extremely judgmental Calvinists, who seem to be making this a test of Christian orthodoxy.

If these people are so enthusiastic about Cruz’s alleged adherence to the Constitution, why don’t they notice that he isn’t even constitutionally eligible to hold the office he was running for?

It’s just a form of Christian identity politics, that’s all. After all, once you’ve determined that Ted Cruz is the Holy and Anointed One, it’s a little hard to back down and admit that not only are you wrong, but you’ve been listening to false prophets you should never again give any credence.

Like any other cult that’s faced with dealing with false prophecies, the response of the hard core is to double down even as everyone else falls away.

The only reason they’re so upset with Trump is because he has shown their prophets to be false, their principles to be fake, and their pretensions to be ridiculous. I suspect that most of these die-hards are either women or gammas, as neither can ever forgive someone who humiliates them by publicly proving them to be wrong.

I wasn’t even a little bit surprised to see the poster boy for Churchian cuckservatives, Matt Walsh, being prominently featured in the approved quotes club. That is the sort of people JM is dealing with here.

State polls vs national

Nate Silver of 538 addresses the discrepancies while explaining why his systems are, by his own account, “bullish on Trump”:

Another tricky question is how to reconcile state polls with national polls. For example, there have been no polls of Pennsylvania over the past two weeks, during which time Clinton’s lead has evaporated in national polls (and often also in polls of other states, where we’ve gotten them). The FiveThirtyEight model uses what we call a trend-line adjustment to adjust those those old polls to catch up to the current trend. That’s why our polls-only forecast shows Pennsylvania as a tossup even though Trump has only led one poll there all year. Those older polls came from a time when Clinton led by 5 or 6 or 7 percentage points nationally, and they generally showed her up by about the same margin in Pennsylvania. Now that the national race is almost tied, it’s probably safe to assume that Pennsylvania is very close also. Some of the competing models don’t do this, and we think that’s probably a mistake, since it means their state-by-state forecasts will lag a few weeks behind, even when it’s obvious there’s been a big shift in the race.

Bottom line: Although there are other factors that matter around the margin, our models show better numbers for Trump mostly because they’re more aggressive about detecting trends in polling data. For the past couple of weeks — and this started before the conventions, so it’s not just a convention bounce — there’s been a strong trend away from Clinton and toward Trump.

In other words, as I’ve been saying from the start, it’s too soon to tell anything from the state polls. The fact that the trend is towards Trump is apparent, but it’s not certain that it is the start of a cascade preference that will lead to the predicted Trumpslide.

However, it is the first required step in the process, so that’s a good sign for now.