I finally put this up so people will stop telling me about it. But it is pretty incredible.
Tag: politics
The coming Trumpslide
Historical model predicts Trump will win the general election in a landslide:
The odds of Donald Trump becoming America’s next president currently range from 97 percent to 99 percent…. Norpoth predicts that Trump has a 97 percent chance of beating Hillary Clinton and a 99 percent chance of beating Bernie Sanders.
Norpoth announced his prognostication on Monday night during Stony Brook Alumni Association event at the SUNY Global Center in Manhattan.
“The bottom line is that the primary model, using also the cyclical movement, makes it almost certain that Donald Trump will be the next president,” Norpoth said, according to The Statesman. “When I started out with this kind of display a few months ago, I thought it was sort of a joke,” the professor told the alumni audience, according to the student newspaper. “Well, I’ll tell you right now, it ain’t a joke anymore.”
“Trump beats Hillary 54.7 percent to 45.3 percent” in terms of popular vote.
Well, it’s obviously now time for all those pragmatic Republicans whose only concern is electability to get on the Trump train, isn’t it. After all, we have been repeatedly assured that principles are not important, winning elections is important.
No, that’s not it
It’s amazing how many so-called pundits and analysts are casting about, looking everywhere except at the real reason, in their attempts to explain why Trump supporters are angry:
Bernie Supporters’ Hatred Of Work Is Why Trump Supporters Are So Mad.
The cultural disconnect about the value of work explains why there’s an open revolt in both parties and the future seems so uncertain…. Indeed, it is precisely this cultural disconnect about the value
of work that explains why there’s an open revolt in both parties and
the future seems so uncertain.If any one issue defines this election, it’s economic stagnation.
Many Trump supporters in the GOP feel left behind by the
twenty-first-century economy. They’re angry about it, because our
“follow your bliss” culture doesn’t begin to appreciate coal miners or
people who work in brake disc factories, even as it obsessively
venerates empty celebrity and people like social media executives and
hedge fund managers who are filthy rich in spite of the fact their
contributions to society aren’t very tangible.Combine that with the
self-loathing these guys feel from, say, being laid off and having to
fake a fibromyagia diagnosis so they can collect disability and feed
their families, and you have tremendous resentment.Trump was not only canny enough to speak to this, but he still
remains arguably the only candidate to forthrightly talk about issues
such as immigration that are feeding this anxiety, even if he speaks
about them with great ignorance. It’s regrettable in many ways, but it’s
also not a mystery why 30 percent of Republicans are lining up to
support a lunatic who has (allegedly) made a lot of money and wields
considerable influence despite now being despised by our cultural
betters.
What a prodigiously stupid headline. And what a transparently futile attempt to redirect that anger to the conventional Bad Democrat Good Republican channel. As usual, conservatives have it completely backwards. Americans are struggling economically, in part due to the economic policies that have caused their real wages to peak in 1973. But that merely exacerbates the anger that they feel at their country being subject to the largest invasion in human history, an invasion of 60 million that is nearly 16 times larger than Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union.
They want their country back. They want to see America be great again, not prostrate before the boots and burqahs of foreign invaders.
That is why they are angry.
Why Trump will win
It’s really quite simple, as this commenter at Althouse explained it:
Hillary says “Vote for me because I’m a woman.”
Bernie says “Vote for me and I’ll give you some of his.”
Ted Cruz says “Vote for me and I’ll kick over all those rice bowls in Washington”.
Donald Trump says “Vote for me and the emergency room at your local hospital won’t look like a bus station in rural Mexico”Might not be fair but I think I know who is going to win that argument.
To this we can add: Marco Rubio says “Vote for me because I am electable as determined by the Republican establishment.”
People want relief from pain. And the pain from losing their country to 60 million invaders is much greater than the constant Washington shenanigans that few understand anyhow.
A world-class tantrum
Matt Walsh is exceedingly butthurt by the fact that Donald Trump just took his third state in a row:
Dear Donald Trump Fan,
I’m going to tell you the truth, friend.
You say you want the truth. You say you want someone who speaks boldly and brashly and bluntly and “tells it like it is” and so on. According to exit polls in South Carolina, voters who want a president who “tells it like it is” are an essential demographic for Trump, just as they’re an essential demographic for Judge Judy and Dr. Phil. You say you want abrupt and matter-of-fact honesty, and you want it so much, you’ll make a man president for it regardless of whether he defies every principle and value you claim to hold.
Personally, I think you’re lying, and I’m going to test my theory. In fact, I believe I’ve already proven my theory because you’re now offended that I called you a liar. But Trump has called half of the Earth’s population a liar at some point over the past seven months, and you loved every second of it. You said you loved it not out of cruelty or spite, but out of admiration for a man who’s willing to call people liars — even if he’s lying when he does it.
Yet here I am employing the same tactic — accurately, I might add — and you recoil indignantly. Over the course of this campaign season I’ve said many harsh words about you and your leader, all of which I stand by, but you’ve never respected my harsh words, or the harsh words of any Trump critic. Indeed, you insist that our tough criticism of you only vindicates your support of Trump, while Trump’s vulgar and dishonest criticism of everyone else also vindicates your support of Trump. You’re tired of people being critical, but you love Trump because he’s critical. You say you like Trump for his style, but you hate his style when it’s directed at him or you.
It’s epic. You really have to read the whole thing to believe it, let alone appreciate it. But wait, there’s more! I happened to tweet about it.
Supreme Dark Lord @voxday
The butthurt. The salt. The tears. The meltdown of @MattWalshBlog is simply delicious. Deal with it, cucky.Matt Walsh @MattWalshBlog
Thanks for sharing my stuffSupreme Dark Lord @voxday
Are you kidding? I made certain to archive it before you come to your senses and delete it. That was a self-evisceration!
Now, I don’t know much about Matt Walsh, but I do know where he stands socio-sexually now, because like every other Gamma bitterly licking his wounds, he didn’t hesitate to leap in and take a shot when he thought he saw the opportunity.
Supreme Dark Lord @voxday
Even as the political elite sneer at them, Trump tells the poorly-educated that he loves them. And they will love him back. #Trump2016Matt Walsh @MattWalshBlog
So you need politicians to tell you they love you? Are you an actual toddler or are you just pretending?Supreme Dark Lord @voxday
No, Matt, the difference is that they know you hate them and think you are better than them. That’s why you’re irrelevant.Supreme Dark Lord @voxday
Also, you’re projecting, Matt. That was a world-class tantrum you threw. That’s why so many people are laughing at you.Klejdys @klejdys
What @voxday is doing to @mattwalshblog now is illegal in 38 states.
That little exchange explains something I didn’t understand when I first read the article/tantrum, which is why Matt Walsh doesn’t merely oppose Donald Trump politically, but harbors genuine hatred for him. As a Gamma, he’s a Secret King, which is why he is simultaneously contemptuous of Trump and envious of Trump’s success.
Anyhow, enjoy the salt. I certainly did.
The ceiling just broke
How much farther can Trump rise? Is 25% his ceiling, or his base?
– Red State
Nevada is a notoriously difficult state to poll and the caucus format could hurt Trump’s turnout.
– Slate
Yes, Trump leads all the national polls, and he keeps busting through what look like ceilings. But (unlike Dean) he doesn’t lead in Iowa, and his ceiling there looks very stable: He’s been hovering around 25 percent since September, and he’s never broken 30 percent…. There is no credible scenario in which a consistent 30 percent of the vote will deliver the delegates required to be the Republican nominee. So for Trump to lose, he doesn’t actually have to collapse; he just has to fail to expand his support.
– Ross Douthat, New York Times
Yeah, well, that ceiling may have looked very stable, Ross. But looks can be deceiving.
Nevada Results:
45.9 Trump
23.7 Rubio
21.5 Cruz
6.1 Carson
3.6 Kasich
Stopping Trump now looks like a steeper proposition after he trampled Rubio and Cruz on Tuesday, scoring huge wins across nearly every cross-section of the Republican Party. Entrance polls show Trump won moderate voters and very conservative voters by huge margins. He won in rural and urban areas, and among voters with only high school diplomas and those with post-graduate degrees.
Trump even handily bested Cruz among his supposed based of evangelical Christians, and, though the sample was small, topped his two Cuban-American opponents among Hispanic caucus-goers.
Trump reveled in the details. “I love the evangelicals!” he yelled. ““Number one with Hispanics,” he bragged.
And he pointedly called out the home states of his remaining rivals — Texas for Cruz, Florida for Rubio and Ohio for John Kasich — as places he now leads in the polls and will win the coming weeks.
It looks like Cruz is effectively done. He’s a Christian who can’t win evangelicals and a Cuban Spanish-speaker who can’t win Hispanics. And there is no way, none, that all of his support is going to go to Rubio. I wouldn’t be surprised if more than half of it either went to Trump or goes home.
I have no idea why Kasich is still in. And Carson badly misplayed his hand; he should have thrown his support to Trump in return for a Cabinet position before South Carolina. Now Trump doesn’t actually need him, although it would still be wise to reach out to Carson and secure his support just for the optics.
Hillary’s stalking horse?
If so, Donald Trump is doing a very, very poor job of it:
The Fox News-sponsored controversy over Hillary Clinton’s use of a
private email server will become another anti-Clinton national tragedy
if Donald Trump wins, the Republican front-runner told Fox News’ Sean
Hannity at a town hall Monday night.Hannity
asked if Trump would order his attorney general to investigate Clinton
if he wins the White House in November, and Trump said he would “have no
choice,” because “in fairness, you have to look into that — she seems
guilty.”He momentarily tried to walk his comment back, saying,
“but you know what, I wouldn’t even say that,” before saying what he
just said he wouldn’t say again. “But certainly, it has to be looked
at,” he said. Trump later added that “she’s being protected, but if I
win, certainly it’s something we’re going to look at.”
Wheels within wheels, my friends. Wheels within wheels.This post also serves as an open thread to discuss the Nevada Republican caucus and its results.
In a state where only 33,000 of the state’s 400,000 GOP voters turned out to caucus in 2012—a mere 7%—the campaigns of Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and one-time candidate Jeb Bush got organized early, snapping up talented operatives and key endorsements, while beginning caucus trainings last fall in the hopes that a strong organization could overcome Trump’s momentum.
But Trump appears to have steamrolled through all of that, dominating not just Nevada’s unreliable polls, but capturing the excitement and buzz in the race with his visits here. In interviews with dozens of Republican voters across the state over the last week, many said without hesitation that they were standing firmly with Trump and had given little thought to the other Republican candidates.
It’s going to be interesting to hear the convoluted explanations of how winning three states in a row is the certain death knell of the Trump campaign.
Donald Trump: democratic socialist
As I said before, Sarah’s take on these things is always amusing:
The
blogger has never understood the difference between European right and
American right. Not stupid but strangely culturally blind — and
COMPLETELY misunderstood it. I mean, amazingly, bizarrely misunderstood.
What I find funny about this is that Sarah goes on and on and on about how no one can
possibly understand Europe, or European politics, except her (because
poor village in Portugal), when the easily confirmed fact of the matter
is that she doesn’t even understand what America is. And her logic is amusingly specious: she understands the danger that Donald Trump poses to America better than everyone else because Portugal.
Do you see what I mean about immigrants? They don’t even understand how their basic perspective is intrinsically foreign. They are fish wondering what this water of which you speak might be.
Now, she is right about one thing. I will not be Portuguese or Italian or German no matter how long I live in Europe. Here, you can move from a neighboring village that is a 10-minute walk away and you will always be stranieri to the locals. But what Sarah fails to understand is that she is no more American than I am Portuguese. She is a US resident, perhaps even a US citizen, but she is not an American. America is not an idea. America is not a concept. America is not a proposition nation. One cannot, contra her past assertions, become a genuine American just because one happens to believe one thinks a certain way.
Now, an immigrant may have a recognizably American spirit, just as it is possible for an American expat to have an Italian spirit, a Swiss spirit, a French spirit, or a Portuguese spirit, and even to have it recognized by the natives as such. But that does not make one any more an American than it makes one Italian, Swiss, French, or Portuguese.
The notion that America is nothing more than an idea is a modern one, a 20th century invention, and a fiction which immigration advocates hell-bent on replacing Americans with immigrants like Sarah herself, advocates such as George W. Bush and Barack Obama, have repeatedly attempted to sell to the public. Had she read Cuckservative, she would know this. Even the famous “melting pot” to which many so often appeal is a romantic 19th century invention of a Russian Jew who lived in Britain. It has nothing to do with America, Americans, or American history.
And
the fact is that I know the difference between the European right and
the American right much, much better than she does. I even happen to be acquainted with some of the various players on both sides of the
Atlantic.
As for Donald Trump being a Democrat and a
socialist, well, I can testify that he was not only at the Republican National Convention in New Orleans in 1988, but he sat right behind me in George H.W. Bush’s personal suite the night Bush
accepted the Republican nomination. He even apologized to me for nearly putting his shoe on my shoulder when he crossed his legs.
I doubt Sarah realizes how few of the
major players on either side of the aisle actually care in the slightest about their party’s platforms or official ideologies; they are in the political game for power and money. Trump
is no more a socialist than the self-styled “Houston Mafia” that surrounded Bush the Elder were; he doesn’t have any more ideological bones in his body than did
Bush ’41 or Bush ’43. Sarah talks about Trump’s connections to the Clintons, but what she doesn’t grasp is that the entire corporate-political elite is connected. Bill Clinton is closer to the Bush family than he is to Trump; in fact, it’s entirely possible that Trump’s connection to both Clintons is through the Bush family.
Is Trump going to govern like Obama? Or like the Bushes? Perhaps in many ways, but unlike the other Republican candidates, that is unlikely in regards to the only issue that matters at the moment: immigration. Trump is the only one talking about a wall, talking about stopping Muslim immigration, and even talking about deportations. And that, I strongly suspect, is the real fear of Trump opponents like Sarah. It’s not that they think he will govern like Obama on immigration and the American national interest, but they fear that he won’t.
That is why Trump is the only candidate who is worth supporting in 2016, despite being a member of the corporate-political elite, because he is an unpredictable rogue member of it and the only one that might – MIGHT – make a positive difference in the near future in the American national interest. Of course, he also may well not, but we already know beyond any shadow of a doubt that none of the other candidates are worth a damn.
He isn’t an ideal candidate, he probably isn’t even a good candidate, and he certainly isn’t a trustworthy candidate, but nevertheless, at this point, he is the only possible candidate.
A pernicious influence
Or so they say. This exchange over at Sarah Hoyt’s is both illuminating and amusing. It even features a rare appearance by Dr. Jerry Pournelle. Anyhow, they’re worrying about Donald Trump and America turning too far to the “right”, by which it appears they mean an America that is genuinely nationalist, cognizant of its own interests, and concerned about its own survival:
accordingtohoyt
I speak enough with millenials in private to see even the left ones “turn” – ya’ll are going to end up like my generation in Portugal. They pushed leftism on us every chance. And we ran right as fast as we could.Foxfier
That’s what worries me. Rand was right about what was wrong, but wrong about what was right. (Mangled Chesterton, there.) There are a lot of other directions besides “right.” Mostly just tired of getting kicked by the people who didn’t manage to stop this from happening because we haven’t magically fixed it before 35.accordingtohoyt
Yeah, a lot of them are becoming like VD. “Everything the leftists say is a lie, so racism, sexism, etc. must have a point.” Head>desk.Joe in PNG
So, in order to avoid the ditch on the “Left” side of the road, they are aiming right straight at the ditch on the “Right” side of the road. Either way, you wind up with a totaled car.overgrownhobbit
VD doesn’t go far enough. Everything the vileprogs advocate needs to be re-examined down to the ground-level assumptions. Stopping part way just leaves one with bits of prog stupid rattling round the mental furnishings and gumming up the philosophy. Like mistaking an is for an ought.Still have hope for the guy. He’s got some sound foundations, and he’s right more often than wrong.
Now, I like Sarah and I think that her heart is in the right place, but I can only conclude that she has either failed to accurately observe the current situation or to think the matter through sufficiently.
What she, and many conservatives, have yet to grasp is that classical liberalism, conservatism, libertarianism, free trade, constitutionalism, and a whole host of other 18th century concepts that were largely theoretical as well as being near and dear to our hearts have fundamentally failed.
Technology and events have fundamentally changed the way we must now think about these things; the logical cases that were laid out by the various 18th century Enlightenment thinkers are now subject to the analysis of more than 200 years of readily available data. Let the cult of reason be silent when experience and history gainsay its conclusions.
I’m not reacting to the Left. I’m not a reactionary and I’m not reacting to anything except considerably more information than the likes of Smith, Ricardo, Jefferson, Voltaire, or even Mises, Friedman, and Rothbard ever had.
My thinking has changed dramatically because of what I have witnessed over the last four decades. We are still much the same humanity that we always were, but we live in a radically different world today. It was one thing to posture grandly about free trade and the free movement of peoples back in the 1800s, or even the 1970s, it is another to do so when a nation’s entire industrial base can be dismantled or the population of an entire nations can literally pick up and move across a continent without anyone, anywhere, so much as lifting a finger to stop them.
Contra Sarah, Trump is neither the potential problem nor is he the solution. What he offers is one last chance to get it right. That’s all. He will buy America a little more time to find itself again, to find itself and embrace the strong, self-confidence of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant American nationalism that made the USA a world power and turned it into a place to which people around the world wanted to come.
But they are on the verge of killing the golden goose because they are not, and they never will be, the kind of Americans who built America. Read Cuckservative: How “Conservatives” Betrayed America. Their ideas about America’s history and America’s founding are little more than romanticized fairy tales. They think they are extending and expanding on the founding concepts when in truth they have perverted them.
Race does matter. Sex does matter. Nationality does matter. Not because the Left lies about these things, but because they are materially and objectively significant. The romantic Right is outdated, ill-informed, and intellectually irrelevant. Here is a hint: if you’re even mentioning the word “mercantilism”, you are arguing against nationalist Frenchmen dead 300 years, not the nationalist Mil-Right of today.
Mailvox: why turn your back on conservatives
Doc Rampage doesn’t understand why I’m not courting conservatives in building a new social media alternative:
The words in parenthesis are not inherent characteristics of the group, but are prominent in the current environment.
Left: envy, greed, (hatred)
Conservatives: justice, propriety, (resentment)
libertarians: pride, rationality
Alt-right: clannishness, loyalty, (spite)The Left is always talking egalitarian, but a Leftist never passes up a chance to get ahead of his fellows and they are always trying to create hierarchies with themselves on top. This is because they only want egalitarianism due to envy–they don’t want anyone to have an advantage they don’t have.
Everyone hates conservatives for being unreliable political partners. The reason is that their primary loyalty is not to a group but to abstract principles like justice, and they will follow their idea of justice even at the group’s expense, or even at their own expense.
Libertarians are drawn to their beliefs in large part because they think that starting on a completely level playing field, they would come out near the top. Many of them are right–they tend to be intelligent and well-educated. But their pride in their own ability makes them unable to sympathize with the fact that most people need social support of various kinds.
As to the alt-right, it is clannishness and spite that drives someone on the alt-right to capriciously insult conservatives in a message where they might instead be finding common ground and help in a common cause, driving them away instead of inviting them to help.
It’s interesting to see how Doc Rampage’s observations are so perspicacious while his conclusions about the alt-right are so wrong. It’s not spite that causes me to turn my back on conservatives, but rather, the very conservative unreliability he points out that is why I have no interest in finding common ground with them. They are worse than useless; it would be a tremendous mistake to rely upon them because they are unreliable.
Moreover, as Red Eagle and I showed in Cuckservative, conservatives don’t actually have any principles. They think they do, but what they really have is an attitude; one can hardly call it a philosophy. That’s why conservatives are forever going on about who is “electable” or which candidate is “serious”; those are not the words of abstract thinkers who reject pragmatism in the name of principle.
Even their oft-proclaimed self-definitions are unreliable.
If there are conservatives who want to help because what I’m doing will better serve their abstract principles than the alternatives, that’s great, but I’m not going to depend upon their support because I don’t trust them one little bit. I will place my trust in those who have repeatedly shown they have my back, in those who will not bug out the first time they get called names by SJWs or decide they don’t completely approve of my every word or action.
What are the VFM? What are the Dread Ilk? Are they conservative? Are they libertarian? Are they alt-right? I neither know nor care. What I know is that they will be there when called. They will show up when needed. They are implacably opposed to my ideological enemies. And that’s all I need to know.
Conservapedia is a good demonstration of what a social media project that relies upon conservatives looks like.