Tag: politics

We are the spectre

Allum Bokhari thoughtfully provides establishment conservatives with a Guide to the Alt Right:

A specter is haunting the dinner parties, fundraisers and think-tanks of the Establishment: the specter of the “alternative right.” Young, creative and eager to commit secular heresies, they have become public enemy number one to beltway conservatives — more hated, even, than Democrats or loopy progressives.

The alternative right, more commonly known as the alt-right, is an amorphous movement. Some — mostly Establishment types — insist it’s little more than a vehicle for the worst dregs of human society: anti-Semites, white supremacists, and other members of the Stormfront set. They’re wrong.

Previously an obscure subculture, the alt-right burst onto the national political scene in 2015. Although initially small in number, the alt-right has a youthful energy and jarring, taboo-defying rhetoric that have boosted its membership and made it impossible to ignore.

It has already triggered a string of fearful op-eds and hit pieces from both Left and Right: Lefties dismiss it as racist, while the conservative press, always desperate to avoid charges of bigotry from the Left, has thrown these young readers and voters to the wolves as well.

National Review attacked them as bitter members of the white working-class who worship “father-Führer” Donald Trump. Betsy Woodruff of The Daily Beast attacked Rush Limbaugh for sympathising with the “white supremacist alt-right.” BuzzFeed begrudgingly acknowledged that the movement has a “great feel for how the internet works,” while simultaneously accusing them of targeting “blacks, Jews, women, Latinos and Muslims.”

The amount of column inches generated by the alt-right is a testament to their cultural punch. But so far, no one has really been able to explain the movement’s appeal and reach without desperate caveats and virtue-signalling to readers.

Part of this is down to the alt-right’s addiction to provocation. The alt-right is a movement born out of the youthful, subversive, underground edges of the internet. 4chan and 8chan are hubs of alt-right activity. For years, members of these forums – political and non-political – have delighted in attention-grabbing, juvenile pranks. Long before the alt-right, 4channers turned trolling the national media into an in-house sport.

I leave it to you to decide whether we belong with:

  • The intellectuals
  • The natural conservatives
  • The meme team
  • The 1488ers 

Regardless of their merits and demerits, all of these alt-righters are to be preferred to the cuckservatives and the GOPe sellouts.  I’ve been called “an alt-right figurehead” and I am perfectly fine with that.

And if you’re going to call me a nationalist, that’s fine. Just make sure that you get it right and call me a “red nationalist”.

Michelle Fields quadruples down

Keep this in mind when you’re dealing with a woman. They NEVER stop doubling down, because they simply can’t believe that they’ll have to deal with the consequences. Michelle Fields is actually pressing charges against Donald Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski.

“Mr. Lewandowski was issued a Notice to Appear and given a court date. He was not arrested. Mr. Lewandowski is absolutely innocent of this charge,” Hicks said. “He will enter a plea of not guilty and looks forward to his day in court. He is completely confident that he will be exonerated. Mr. Lewandowski is represented by Scott Richardson of The Law Office of Scott N. Richardson, P.A. in West Palm Beach, and Kendall Coffey of Coffey Burlington in Miami.Inquiries are to be directed to Mr. Richardson’s office.”

Setting aside the fact that she claimed to have been grabbed on the UPPER arm and the bruises she showed were on the lower arm, there are still some significant doubts concerning who touched her in the first place.

As some have suggested, Trump’s response should be to require all members of the media to sit in a pen, for their own protection.

Relativity and the ideological spectrum

I’ve designed a nine-point ideological scale for reasons that will be readily apparent soon, and I’m in need of some clarifying examples. Here is what I have so far, but I feel as if there could be better examples. Ideally, the more famous the individual, the better; accuracy is far less important than familiarity.

One is extreme left, nine is extreme right. The goal is to clarify, not obscure or start arguments, so leave Hitler and anyone else likely to spark debate out of it.

  1. Vladimir Lenin
  2. Karl Marx
  3. Angela Merkel
  4. Bill Clinton
  5. John F. Kennedy
  6. George W. Bush
  7. Ronald Reagan
  8. Thomas Jefferson
  9. Ayn Rand

Another idea would be to provide multiple examples from different fields, from economics, from politics, and from philosophy. I’m entirely open to suggestion here, with one caveat: I am not at all open to suggestions of multiple axes or anything more complicated than a single 9-point scale.

And if you know what this is concerning, please resist the urge to demonstrate as much. When I want to make an announcement, I will make an announcement. In the meantime, keep an eye on your emails tomorrow.

Sanders sweeps Saturday caucuses

Hillary’s meltdown continues:

Bernie Sanders swept all three Democratic caucuses Saturday — scoring
victories in Hawaii, Alaska and delegate-rich Washington state.

While the underdog’s West Coast wins are not nearly enough to trip up
former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s path to the nomination, his
wide margin of victory provides his campaign with a burst of momentum
heading into a 10-day break before the next primary contest. The Vermont
senator’s big victories are also typically followed by a considerable
fundraising bump.

Sanders was victorious in Washington state’s caucuses 72.7 percent
to Clinton’s 27.1 percent and won Alaska’s caucuses by a landslide,
defeating Clinton 81.6 percent to 18.4 percent. At 4 a.m. Sunday, with
87.8 percent of precincts reporting, Sanders was declared the winner in
Hawaii, leading Clinton 70.6 percent to 29.2 percent.

I will be surprised if Hillary Clinton doesn’t withdraw from the race for health reasons before the DNC. She quite clearly is not well and she won’t want to endure the humiliation of losing to such an obvious no-hoper as Sanders.

Disney, Marvel, oppose religious liberty

Two prominent purveyors of cultural dysgenics join the NFL in threatening democracy in the State of Georgia:

The Walt Disney Co. and Marvel Studios indicated opposition to a Georgia religious liberty bill pending before Gov. Nathan Deal, saying that they will take their business elsewhere “should any legislation allowing discriminatory practices be signed into state law.”

With generous tax incentives, Georgia has become a production hub, with Marvel currently shooting “Guardians of the Galaxy 2” at Pinewood Studios outside Atlanta. “Captain America: Civil War” shot there last summer.

“Disney and Marvel are inclusive companies, and although we have had great experiences filming in Georgia, we will plan to take our business elsewhere should any legislation allowing discriminatory practices be signed into state law,” a Disney spokesman said on Wednesday.

It doesn’t speak well for Christians that they are so less willing to back up their beliefs with action than those whose objective is the dismantling and destruction of Christianity and Western civilization. I already refuse to use Disney products; it appears I will have to extend that policy to Marvel Studios as well. (I’m not going to bother changing the RP 2016 recommendations at this point, as Marvel’s actions thus far remain hypothetical.)

One hopes the governor does not give in to this corporate attempt to influence the political process. And if he does, I expect he will experience the consequences of putting corporate politics ahead of the clearly expressed will of the people.

The Ted Cruz affair crisis

The National Enquirer has run a story about “The 5 Romps that will destroy Ted Cruz”, complete with pictures of the five women with whom he has supposedly had affairs.

Oh dear, the National Enquirer has come out with a story claiming evidence of multiple sexual trysts by presidential candidate Senator Ted Cruz.

Worse yet for the Cruz camp, the framework within the article is structurally very concerning:The National Enquirer is indeed a tabloid – and as such there are various grains of salt that should be applied when reviewing anything they present.

However, that said, they have been unfortunately accurate for more
than a few presidential hopefuls:  Gary Hart, Jesse Jackson and John
Edwards to name a few of the more infamous examples. Beyond the story itself there’s a few presenting elements which point
to a high degree of confidence, and as a consequence ‘legal
avoidance’, on the publishers’ part.

Firstly, they post pictures of the collective mistresses.  NE would never legally “go there” if they did not hold a very reasonable certainty the outlined players were factually part of the story.

Despite being partially-obscured, three of the five women alleged to have been involved with Cruz have already been identified: Katrina Pierson, Sarah Isgur Flores and Amanda Carpenter. This story was already in the works at Breitbart, as Allum Bokhari had it back in February but was not permitted to run with it. The current timing strikes me as intriguing given the fact that Donald Trump already warned the Cruz campaign that there would be reprisals for their advertised attack on his wife Melania.

It also looks as if the Rubio campaign had the dirt on Cruz, but sat on it in order to keep him viable against Donald Trump.

They had their chance

Glenn Reynolds explains how David Brooks and company created The Trumpening:

Brooks is, of course, horrified at Trump and his supporters, whom he finds childish,
thuggish and contemptuous of the things that David Brooks likes about
today’s America. It’s clear that he’d like a social/political revolution
that was more refined, better-mannered, more focused on the
Constitution and, well, more bourgeois as opposed to in-your-face and
working class.

The thing is, we had that movement. It was the Tea Party movement….
Yet the tea party movement was smeared as racist, denounced as fascist, harassed with impunity by the IRS and generally treated with contempt by the political establishment — and by pundits like Brooks, who declared “I’m not a fan of this movement.” After handing the GOP big legislative victories in 2010 and 2014, it
was largely betrayed by the Republicans in Congress, who broke their
promises to shrink government and block Obama’s initiatives.

And now they call Trump supporters fascists and Nazis. So, guess what comes next if David Brooks and company are successful in keeping Donald Trump out of power?

If we can’t have it, nobody can

Jonah Goldberg pronounces time of death for the GOP:

Nominating Donald Trump will wreck the Republican party as we know it. Not nominating Trump will wreck the Republican party as we know it. The sooner everyone recognizes this fact, the better.

Denial has been Trump’s greatest ally. Republicans and commentators didn’t believe he would run. They didn’t believe he could be an attractive candidate to rational people, no matter how angry with “the establishment” voters said they were. They — which includes me — were wrong.

The denial lasted longer for some than others. Long after many observers had come to the realization that Trump was the front-runner, Jeb Bush’s super PAC, Right to Rise, believed Bush’s real rival was Marco Rubio. It spent $35 million trying to destroy Rubio before it dropped its first $25,000 attacking Trump.

Over the weekend, Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus showed the first public signs of acceptance about what’s in store for the party. He finally acknowledged that the Republican nominee was probably going to be determined on the convention floor in Cleveland.

La, the drama! This is just the butthurt talking. Jonah is still in modest denial. I’ll make three predictions:

  1. Donald Trump is going to acquire the necessary 1,237 delegates before the Republican National Convention
  2. Donald Trump is going to be the Republican candidate for president
  3. There will be no GOPe third-party candidate. The GOPe will, however reluctantly, fall in line behind Donald Trump.

I’m not saying every neocon will; Bill Kristol may well lose it and announce that he is supporting Benjamin Netanyahu for president, but once the big money guys realize that Trump is not only going to be the nominee, but beat Hillary Clinton handily, the small fry will obediently fall in line, however much they might grumble.

There are going to be more Islamic State attacks. Some of them may be in the USA. And every single one is going to drive more support to Trump. Remember, these guys have no principles. Once the Trump Train looks sufficiently inevitable, they’ll all be scrambling to avoid being the last on board.

Primaries: Arizona and Utah

This is to discuss the results of the Republican primaries in Arizona, Utah, and American Samoa. Decision Desk HQ has the live results as they are reported.

Trump is going to win Arizona, the only question is by how much. If he wins big, that’s one more nail in the coffin of the GOPe this year. And as I’ve said, I think he’s very nearly assured the 1,237 delegates required already.

Donald Trump speech to AIPAC

Good evening. I speak to you today as a lifelong supporter and true
friend of Israel. I am a newcomer to politics but not to backing the
Jewish state.

In late 2001, weeks after the attacks on New York City and Washington
– attacks perpetrated by Islamic fundamentalists, Mayor Giuliani
visited Israel to show solidarity with terror victims. I sent him in my
plane because I backed the mission 100%.

In Spring 2004, at the height of violence in the Gaza Strip, I was
the Grand Marshal of the 40th Salute to Israel Parade, the largest
single gathering in support of the Jewish state.

It was a very dangerous time for Israel and frankly for anyone
supporting Israel – many people turned down this honor –I did not, I
took the risk.

I didn’t come here tonight to pander to you about Israel. That’s what
politicians do: all talk, no action. I came here to speak to you about
where I stand on the future of American relations with our strategic
ally, our unbreakable friendship, and our cultural brother, the only
democracy in the Middle East, the State of Israel.

My number one priority is to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran.
I have been in business a long time. I know deal-making and let me tell
you, this deal is catastrophic – for America, for Israel, and for the
whole Middle East.

The problem here is fundamental. We have rewarded the world’s leading
state sponsor of terror with $150 billion and we received absolutely
nothing in return.


I’ve studied this issue in greater detail than almost anybody. The
biggest concern with the deal is not necessarily that Iran is going to
violate it, although it already has, the bigger problem is that they can
keep the terms and still get to the bomb by simply running out the
clock, and, of course, they keep the billions.

The deal doesn’t even require Iran to dismantle its military nuclear
capability! Yes, it places limits on its military nuclear program for
only a certain number of years. But when those restrictions expire, Iran
will have an industrial-size military nuclear capability ready to go,
and with zero provision for delay no matter how bad Iran’s behavior is.
When I am president, I will adopt a strategy that focuses on three
things when it comes to Iran.

First, we will stand up to Iran’s aggressive push to destabilize and
dominate the region. Iran is a very big problem and will continue to be,
but if I’m elected President, I know how to deal with trouble. Iran is a
problem in Iraq, a problem in Syria, a problem in Lebanon, a problem in
Yemen, and will be a very major problem for Saudi Arabia. Literally
every day, Iran provides more and better weapons to their puppet states.
Hezbollah in Lebanon has received sophisticated anti-ship weapons,
anti-aircraft weapons, and GPS systems on rockets. Now they’re in Syria
trying to establish another front against Israel from the Syrian side of
the Golan Heights.

In Gaza, Iran is supporting Hamas and Islamic Jihad – and in the West
Bank they are openly offering Palestinians $7,000 per terror attack and
$30,000 for every Palestinian terrorist’s home that’s been destroyed.

Iran is financing military forces throughout the Middle East and it
is absolutely indefensible that we handed them over $150 billion to
facilitate even more acts of terror.

Secondly, we will totally dismantle Iran’s global terror network.
Iran has seeded terror groups all over the world. During the last five
years, Iran has perpetrated terror attacks in 25 different countries on
five continents. They’ve got terror cells everywhere, including in the
western hemisphere very close to home. Iran is the biggest sponsor of
terrorism around the world and we will work to dismantle that reach.

Third, at the very least, we must hold Iran accountable by
restructuring the terms of the previous deal. Iran has already – since
the deal is in place – test-fired ballistic missiles three times. Those
ballistic missiles, with a range of 1,250 miles, were designed to
intimidate not only Israel, which is only 600 miles away but also
intended to frighten Europe, and, someday, the United States.

Do you want to hear something really shocking? As many of the great
people in this room know, painted on those missiles – in both Hebrew and
Farsi – were the words “Israel must be wiped off the face of the
earth.”

What kind of demented minds write that in Hebrew? And here’s another
twisted part – testing these missiles does not even violate the horrible
deal that we made!

The deal is silent on test missiles but those tests DO violate UN
Security Council Resolutions. The problem is, no one has done anything
about it. Which brings me to my next point – the utter weakness and
incompetence of the United Nations.

The United Nations is not a friend of democracy. It’s not a friend to
freedom. It’s not a friend even to the United States of America, where
as all know, it has its home. And it surely isn’t a friend to Israel.

With President Obama in his final year, discussions have been
swirling about an attempt to bring a security council resolution on the
terms of an eventual agreement between Israel and Palestine. Let me be
clear: An agreement imposed by the UN would be a total and complete
disaster. The United States must oppose this resolution and use the
power of our veto. Why? Because that’s not how you make a deal.

Deals are made when parties come to the table and negotiate. Each
side must give up something it values in exchange for something it
requires. A deal that imposes conditions on Israel and the Palestinian
Authority will do nothing to bring peace. It will only further
delegitimize Israel and it would reward Palestinian terrorism, because
every day they are stabbing Israelis – and even Americans.

Just last week, American Taylor Allen Force, a West Point grad who
served in Iraq and Afghanistan, was murdered in the street by a
knife-wielding Palestinian. You don’t reward that behavior, you confront
it!

It’s not up the United Nations to impose a solution. The parties must
negotiate a resolution themselves. The United States can be useful as a
facilitator of negotiations, but no one should be telling Israel it
must abide by some agreement made by others thousands of miles away that
don’t even really know what’s happening.

When I’m president, believe me, I will veto any attempt by the UN to
impose its will on the Jewish state. You see, I know about deal-making –
that’s what I do. I wrote The Art of the Deal, one of the all-time
best-selling books about deals and deal making. To make a great deal,
you need two willing participants.

We know Israel is willing to deal. Israel has been trying to sit down
at the negotiating table, without pre-conditions, for years. You had
Camp David in 2000, where Prime Minister Barak made an incredible offer –
maybe even too generous. Arafat rejected it.

In 2008, Prime Minister Olmert made an equally generous offer. The
Palestinian Authority rejected it. Then John Kerry tried to come up with
a framework and Abbas didn’t even respond, not even to the Secretary of
State of the United States of America!

When I become President, the days of treating Israel like a
second-class citizen will end on Day One. I will meet with Prime
Minister Netanyahu immediately. I have known him for many years and we
will be able to work closely together to help bring stability and peace
to Israel and to the entire region.

Meanwhile, every single day, you have rampant incitement and children
being taught to hate Israel and hate the Jews. When you live in a
society where the firefighters are the hero’s little kids want to be
firefighters.

When you live in a society where athletes and movie stars are heroes,
little kids want to be athletes and movie stars. In Palestinian
society, the heroes are those who murder Jews – we can’t let this
continue. You cannot achieve peace if terrorists are treated as martyrs.
Glorifying terrorists is a tremendous barrier to peace.

In Palestinian textbooks and mosques, you’ve got a culture of hatred
that has been fermenting there for years, and if we want to achieve
peace, they’ve got to end this indoctrination of hatred. There is no
moral equivalency. Israel does not name public squares after terrorists.
Israel does not pay its children to stab random Palestinians.

You see, what President Obama gets wrong about deal making is that he
constantly applies pressure to our friends and rewards our enemies.
That pattern, practiced by the President and his administration,
including former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, has repeated
itself over and over and has done nothing but embolden those who hate
America. We saw that with releasing $150 billion to Iran in the hope
that they would magically join the world community – It’s the same with
Israel and Palestine.

President Obama thinks that applying pressure to Israel will force
the issue, but it’s precisely the opposite. Already, half the population
of Palestine has been taken over by the Palestinian ISIS in Hamas, and
the other half refuses to confront the first half, so it’s a very
difficult situation but when the United States stands with Israel, the
chances of peace actually rise. That’s what will happen when I’m
president.

We will move the American embassy to the eternal capital of the
Jewish people, Jerusalem – and we will send a clear signal that there is
no daylight between America and our most reliable ally, the state of
Israel.

The Palestinians must come to the table knowing that the bond between
the United States and Israel is unbreakable. They must come to the
table willing and able to stop the terror being committed on a daily
basis against Israel and they must come to the table willing to accept
that Israel is a Jewish State and it will forever exist as a Jewish
State.

Thank you very much, its been a great honor to be with you.

——————–

My comment: This is better than I would have expected, not as good as I would have hoped. It is not a ritual genuflection, but a practical acknowledgement of the current realities. The deal with Iran is ridiculous. Attacking the UN is the right thing to do and may be a harbinger of more positive developments on that front. Moving the embassy is irrelevant, but a nice gesture.

At no point is there any indication that he is inclined to wage Israel’s wars for them as the previous two presidents have done, and that is the main thing.