Tag: politics

South Carolina results

This is the open thread to discuss the results in South Carolina and Nevada. On the Democratic side, I understand Fox has called Nevada for Hillary Clinton, but it’s close.

UPDATE: Fox News is running a non-stop commercial for Ted Cruz in the last 30 minutes of the SC polls being open. Doubt it will do them any good at this point. But it’s good to know who the cuckservatives are pulling for now.

UPDATE 2: “Preliminary exit poll results indicate that three-quarters of the
state’s primary voters support temporarily banning Muslims who are not
U.S. citizens from entering the United States. That’s even more than the
support for this proposal among GOP voters in New Hampshire, 65 percent
– a core support group for Trump in that state.”

UPDATE 3: Decision Desk has Trump winning at 32.8 percent with 44.4 percent reporting. Fox News has called South Carolina for Trump. Now the only question is how big he will win it.

So much for Trump being finished in Iowa….

I enjoyed this exchange with GOP media guy Rick Wilson:

Rick Wilson ‏@TheRickWilson
Anything less than 50% is a huge loss for @realDonaldTrump  #SCPrimary

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
You’d say anything short of collective mass suicide by the other candidates was a huge loss for Trump.

Rick Wilson ‏@TheRickWilson
LOL grow a sense of humor, Vox.

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
So you didn’t think the idea that the SC mall shooter was a deranged Jeb Bush triggered by Trump’s victory was funny?

Rick Wilson
‏I have no idea what you’re on about.

For some reason, my sense of humor frequently goes unrecognized.

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
Active shooter reported at South Carolina mall. Wow, @realDonaldTrump’s success is really getting to @JebBush!

Put a cassock in it, Your Holiness

Not being Catholic, I don’t pay much attention to Pope Francis, but I’m beginning to see why so many Catholics are not at all happy with him.

‘A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian,’ Francis said in answer to a specific question about Trump’s views. ‘This is not in the gospel.’

Asked if American Catholics should vote for someone with Trump’s views, Francis said: ‘I am not going to get involved in that. I say only that this man is not Christian if he has said things like that.

‘We must see if he said things in that way and in this I give the benefit of the doubt.’

As you can imagine, Donald Trump’s response was appropriately withering:

‘If and when the Vatican is attacked by ISIS, which as everyone knows is ISIS’s ultimate trophy, I can promise you that the Pope would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been President because this would not have happened.

ISIS would have been eradicated unlike what is happening now with our all talk, no action politicians.

The Mexican government and its leadership has made many disparaging remarks about me to the Pope, because they want to continue to rip off the United States, both on trade and at the border, and they understand I am totally wise to them.

The Pope only heard one side of the story – he didn’t see the crime, the drug trafficking and the negative economic impact the current policies have on the United States. He doesn’t see how Mexican leadership is outsmarting President Obama and our leadership in every aspect of negotiation.

For a religious leader to question a person’s faith is disgraceful. I am proud to be a Christian and as President I will not allow Christianity to be consistently attacked and weakened, unlike what is happening now, with our current President.

At this rate, Trump is going to end up being the first man being elected both President and Pope.

Big swing, bigger miss

I like Ace. But I think he has gone very aft agley on this most recent pronouncement concerning the latest imminent demise of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign:

I think Trump hurt himself badly tonight, enough to knock him out of his first-place standing in most states. Oh he won’t completely disappear — but 2nd Place Trump is not the same thing as Frontrunner Trump.

Trump damaged himself with his claim that Bush lied us into war in Iraq. Not botched the intelligence, not read too much into thin intelligence.

Most Republicans, I think, would agree that that.

No, Trump claimed that Bush deliberately lied us into war.

First, this is alarming because it once again demonstrates that Trump has a conspiratorial mind. It’s not enough for the conspiracist to say someone was wrong — no, they have unrealistically black/white minds, and if you made a bad call, you must have lied.

That conspiracism was always present in his claims about Obama’s birth certificate. But that bit of fantasy was about Obama, someone the average Republican voter isn’t exactly eager to man the battlements for.

This corker — this Al Gore roar of quote — is about George W. Bush, someone still looked upon with affection by most of the party.

Which brings us to the second problem.

If Donald Trump is right, and George W. Bush deliberately schemed with his neo-con advisers to “lie” us into a phony war with Iraq, what does that say about the average Republican voter who supported Bush from 1999, voted for him, defended him through the recount, cried with him on 9/11, agreed with him on Iraq, defended him from ceaseless liberal attacks on him during the war, defended him from Obama’s never-expiring “Blame Bush” blame-shifting, etc.?

If Trump is right, then we’re not just wrong to have supported him. If Trump’s right, we’re goddamned rubes and fools to have defended this Actual Hitler-Level Monster for going on 17 years now.

My first response is yes, you were all goddamned rubes and fools to have supported George W. Bush and the invasion/occupation of Iraq. I said so 12 years ago. I was right then, and Donald Trump is right now.

And my second response is to observe that there is already a candidate who is a proxy for the affection George W. Bush enjoys in the party, namely, his brother Jeb Bush. And Jeb has the support of about one percent of the party.

So, I very much doubt that the Republican voters are anywhere nearly as ego-invested in George W. Bush as Ace’s argument requires.

Shadowbanned by SJWs

Twitter knows the SJWs can’t win on a level playing field, which is why they are attempting to silence the influential voices of the social media Right:

Rumours that Twitter has begun ‘shadowbanning’ politically inconvenient users have been confirmed by a source inside the company, who spoke exclusively to Breitbart Tech. His claim was corroborated by a senior editor at a major publisher.

According to the source, Twitter maintains a ‘whitelist’ of favoured Twitter accounts and a ‘blacklist’ of unfavoured accounts. Accounts on the whitelist are prioritised in search results, even if they’re not the most popular among users. Meanwhile, accounts on the blacklist have their posts hidden from both search results and other users’ timelines.

Our source was backed up by a senior editor at a major digital publisher, who told Breitbart that Twitter told him it deliberately whitelists and blacklists users. He added that he was afraid of the site’s power, noting that his tweets could disappear from users’ timelines if he got on the wrong side of the company.

Shadowbanning, sometimes known as “Stealth Banning” or “Hell Banning,” is commonly used by online community managers to block content posted by spammers. Instead of banning a user directly (which would alert the spammer to their status, prompting them to create a new account), their content is merely hidden from public view.

For site owners, the ideal shadowban is when a user never realizes he’s been shadowbanned.

However, Twitter isn’t merely targeting spammers. For weeks, users have been reporting that tweets from populist conservatives, members of the alternative right, cultural libertarians, and other anti-PC dissidents have disappeared from their timelines.

Among the users complaining of shadowbans are sci-fi author and alt-right figurehead Vox Day, geek culture blogger “Daddy Warpig,” and the popular pro-Trump account Ricky Vaughn. League of Gamers founder and former World of Warcraft team lead Mark Kern, as well as adult actress and anti-censorship activist Mercedes Carrera, have also reported that their tweets are not appearing on the timelines of their followers.

It’s pretty easy to tell when you’re being shadowbanned because your notifications decline dramatically. It’s also easy to see it in the 28-day profile.

Notice how despite the number of tweets being flat and the number of followers increasing, the number of impressions and profile visits dropped significantly at precisely the same time. As it happens, that’s right when I noticed my notifications declining and people began letting me know that they weren’t seeing my tweets.

The reason mentions don’t drop as heavily is because for an account with less than 10,000 followers, many of my mentions are not made in response to my tweets and are therefore not affectived by the shadowban.

But never fear. Alternatives are on the way.

Portrait of a leader

The reason Trump is dominating the other Republican candidates is that he is the only one who is actually a leader of men. The others are politicians, which is a very different skill set. Look at how Trump not only shows that loyalty runs in both directions, but insists on letting them speak for themselves.

Now THAT is a man of the people in action.

Hillary hides in the closet

It’s hardly a secret that Hillary Clinton is a lesbian. I remember an interview that Hannity and Colmes did with Gennifer Flowers during the Lewinsky scandal when she quite flatly stated that Hillary was of a Sapphic orientation – hardly a surprise when you consider Hillary’s alma mater – and I have never seen a show go faster to a commercial before or since.

But it is apparent that people in Arkansas who are aware of her orientation are considerably less afraid of the the Clinton machine than they were, as more and more people are speaking openly to the press about what everyone in Little Rock circles has known for decades. Such as, for example, another Arkansas woman who had an affair with Bill Clinton:

The twice-divorced 77-year-old took to social media in recent weeks to post an extraordinary warning that if she dies by ‘suicide’ no-one should believe it.

When Daily Mail Online visited Miller at her Arkansas home she insisted she had been stalked, spied upon and plagued by anonymous phone calls since word of her memoir leaked out.

‘She doesn’t care what I say about Bill, that’s old news,’ Miller told Daily Mail Online. ‘But I think she wonders what Bill told me. I think she wonders how much I know about her that came from Bill.

‘With the election coming up she can’t afford any sort of loose end. She’s the closest thing you can imagine to Al Capone. I don’t think she is going to rest until she puts me to rest.’

And what of those accusations so insulting or damaging that a potential Presidential candidate would unleash her operatives to intimidate or even bump off an elderly lady?

‘Hillary is a lesbian,’ Miller claims, reigniting a lingering but unsubstantiated rumor that has dogged the former First Lady for years.

Frankly, I’m surprised that anyone might still believe that Hillary is straight. One look at those pantsuits she favors would be sufficient evidence to convict in any court of law.

Obama makes a list

He’s getting ready for the Supreme Court appointment battle in the Senate:

Moving quickly to begin the process of filling the unexpected vacancy on the Supreme Court bench, President Obama spent much of the weekend compiling a shortlist of gay, transsexual abortion doctors to replace the late Antonin Scalia, White House sources confirmed Monday. “These are all exemplary candidates with strong homosexual values and proven records of performing partial-birth abortions, but am I missing anyone?” Obama reportedly asked himself while reviewing his list of queer, gender-nonconforming, feminist Planned Parenthood employees, all of whom were also said to be black immigrants. “I definitely have enough post-op transsexuals on the list, but it is a little light on pre-op candidates. And I should probably add a cop killer or two on here just to round out my options.”

Sources later confirmed that Obama was attempting to rapidly narrow the list down to the single best nominee to submit to the Senate in hopes of wrapping up confirmation hearings before his choice had to leave to attend the Hajj pilgrimage.

In related news, Majority Leader “Vichy” Mitch McConnell refused to reveal his plans for the upcoming Republican surrender in the Senate. “We haven’t decided exactly how, or how fast, we’re going to collapse,” the U.S. Senator from Kentucky said. “Perhaps just a few of us will bravely cross the aisle and join the Democrats in supporting whatever illiterate, homeless person of color is put up for the Court by the President, or maybe we’ll go all in and stab the grass roots in the back en masse. We’re still working out the strategy.”

When asked if he, personally, had held the pillowcase over the late Justice Scalia’s face, Sen. McConnell shook his head before replying, “No comment.”

Trump destroys Hillary

VDH explains how Donald Trump, in a single day, managed to do what the entire Republican political establishment couldn’t do in eight years:

Mrs. Clinton’s campaign rhetoric is coming up empty—largely because it is at odds with the way she has lived her life and conducted her various careers over the last two decades. Voters, even younger ones, are now sorely aware of those flagrant contradictions.

The so-called Republican war on women was successful Democratic demagoguery in 2008 and 2012. That paranoid mythmaking worked with urban, unmarried young women. They were terrified of old white-guy Republican bogeymen, who would make them pay for their birth control and take away abortion on demand, were indifferent to new expansive definitions of sexual harassment, and seemed hung up on what were seen as roadblocks—religion, marriage, and family—to a young, college-educated woman’s self-expression. Yet Hillary has now lost that long-enshrined wedge issue after only 24 hours of Donald Trump’s withering counter-fire—in stark contrast to past years of failed Republican counter-strategies.

It’s interesting how the Republican pragmatists are beginning to see the advantage of backing Trump rather than yet another GOPe loser.

The technocultural war

Milo explains how Facebook-Instagram-Whatsapp has joined with the governments around the world in an unholy alliance to create a global Big Brother:

It’s not just Facebook we’re talking about. They own WhatsApp and they own Instagram. And WhatsApp and Instagram are two of the companies that are winning the short messaging war–that are winning the war for Millennial attention and for Millennial users. Twitter lost that war. Twitter only really appeals to media people: people like you and people like me. We want to kind of keep in touch with our peers. And then some of our fans who are, like, really really keen might sign up for a Twitter account just to see our witty sayings or whatever clever lines we toss off on the way to the train station in the morning. But primarily, Twitter has lost that war. Snapchat, Instagram, WhatsApp–these are the networks that have billions of users. These are the networks that are getting young users, and Facebook owns two of those three.

The other thing to bear in mind is that Facebook so far has a really really bad track record when it comes to free speech. And not just a bad track record censoring different political opinions like Twitter does. Facebook’s moves are even more sinister, in a way. Facebook has teamed up with governments to censor certain political opinions that the incumbent party doesn’t like. In Germany, for instance, Facebook has teamed up with Angela Merkel to censor reasonable, respectable, mainstream concern about mass Muslim immigration–or just about mass immigration in general–and has started removing this stuff and classifying it as “hate speech.” It is effectively slandering its own users saying that their perfectly reasonable points of view constitute “hate speech” and that they’re not going to be allowed on Facebook, and Facebook has promised the German government that this stuff will be removed within 24 hours. That is outright Orwellian. That is outright terrifying.

Facebook is pure ideological evil. Don’t use it. Don’t support it. We will have alternatives, they are in the works and they are on the way, but they are going to take time to develop and they are going to need your support.

But we don’t need to be worried. We need to be resolute. We can beat them. We will beat them at their game, even though they have the money power on their side. Because the money power is not merely creaking, it is cracking, and we are the side in harmony with truth and reality.

The pendulum always swings back. Never forget that. And the harder they work to restrain it and hold it fixed to one side, the more vicious and unstoppable the return of the pendulum will be.

The last defender of the Constitution

RIP Antonin Scalia:

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has died at the age of 79, Texas Governor Greg Abbott said in a statement on Saturday. The statement did not indicate the cause of death, but several news
outlets reported that he died of natural causes while in Texas this
weekend.

Scalia was nominated by President Ronald Reagan to the Supreme Court in 1986.

It’s sobering to think that he may be the last genuine Constitutionalist to sit on the Supreme Court. One can only expect that he’ll be replaced by a black female Marxist.

Ross Douthat summed up the man well: “We should all die full of years, with 28 grandchildren, in our sleep after quail hunting.”

That is the sign of a life well-lived.