Tag: politics

Ben Carson will not play Republican House Negro

As far as I’m concerned, this is the first interesting thing Ben Carson has said since he started his quixotic campaign:

Ben Carson on Friday blasted the Republican National Committee following a Washington Post report that nearly two-dozen establishment party figures were prepping for a potential brokered convention as Donald Trump continues to lead most polls.

RNC Chairman Reince Priebus held a dinner in Washington, D.C., on Monday, and, according to five people who spoke with the Post, the possibility of Trump heading into the Cleveland convention with a substantial number of delegates was a topic of discussion. Some attendees suggested the establishment lay the groundwork for a floor fight that could lead the party’s mainstream wing to unite behind an alternative. Carson rejected this approach.

“If the leaders of the Republican Party want to destroy the party, they should continue to hold meetings like the one described in the Washington Post this morning,” Carson said in a statement released by his campaign.

Carson said he prays the Post’s report is incorrect and threatened to leave the GOP. “If it is correct, every voter who is standing for change must know they are being betrayed. I won’t stand for it,” said Carson, who added that if the plot is accurate, “I assure you Donald Trump won’t be the only one leaving the party.”

The retired neurosurgeon said that next summer’s Cleveland convention could be the last Republican National Convention if leaders try to manipulate it.

“I am prepared to lose fair and square, as I am sure is Donald,” Carson said. “But I will not sit by and watch a theft. I intend on being the nominee. If I am not, the winner will have my support. If the winner isn’t our nominee then we have a massive problem.”

Good for him. He may not be a serious candidate, but it’s good to see the lesser players calling out the corrupt Republican establishment.

Ignoring the elephant

Paul Krugman may call it “ugliness”, but he nevertheless does a better job of explaining the massive shift in American and European politics to frightened American left-liberals than one might have expected. Unfortunately, he omitted the most important element, which is to say, immigration:

My European friends will no doubt say that I’m oversimplifying, but from an American perspective it looks as if Europe’s establishment has tried to freeze the xenophobic right, not just out of political power, but out of any role in acceptable discourse. To be a respectable European politician, whether of the left or of the right, you have had to accept the European project of ever-closer union, of free movement of people, open borders, and harmonized regulations. This leaves no room for right-wing nationalists, even though right-wing nationalism has always had substantial popular support.

What the European establishment may not have realized, however, is that its ability to define the limits of discourse rests on the perception that it knows what it is doing. Even admirers and supporters of the European project (like me) have to admit that it has never had deep popular support or a lot of democratic legitimacy. It is, instead, an elite project sold largely on the claim that there is no alternative, that it is the path of wisdom.

And there’s nothing quite like sustained poor economic performance – the kind of poor performance brought on by Europe’s austerity and hard-money obsessions — to undermine the elite’s reputation for competence. That’s probably why one recent study found a consistent historical relationship between financial crises and the rise of right-wing extremism. And history is repeating itself.

The story is quite different in America, because the Republican Party hasn’t tried to freeze out the kind of people who vote National Front in France. Instead, it has tried to exploit them, mobilizing their resentment via dog whistles to win elections. This was the essence of Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy,” and explains why the G.O.P. gets the overwhelming majority of Southern white votes.

But there is a strong element of bait-and-switch to this strategy. Whatever dog whistles get sent during the campaign, once in power the G.O.P. has made serving the interests of a small, wealthy economic elite, especially through big tax cuts, its main priority — a priority that remains intact, as you can see if you look at the tax plans of the establishment presidential candidates this cycle.

Sooner or later the angry whites who make up a large fraction, maybe even a majority, of the G.O.P. base were bound to rebel — especially because these days much of the party’s leadership seems inbred and out of touch.

What the liberal-left elite tends to forget is that a lot of liberals and left-wingers are still nationalists at heart. They may want a liberal, or a left-wing France, or America, or Britain, but they still want it to be identifiably France, America, or Britain. That’s why Front National, Trump, and UKIP, among others, are actually drawing more heavily from the Socialists, the Democrats, and Labour than they are from the center-right parties.

Immigration is a cross-spectrum issue, and until you realize that, you cannot understand that it is the only issue that matters in Western politics now. Everything else is akin to worrying about the details of French pension payments when the Wehrmacht is blitzkrieging past the Maginot Line.

It’s not conservatism, it’s NATIONALISM

The coming Republican civil war on immigration:

“This is not conservatism.” With those four simple words, House Speaker Paul Ryan dismissed Republican front-runner Donald Trump’s proposal to temporarily ban Muslims from entry into the United States until the federal government gets terrorism committed in the name of Islam figured out.

“This is not what our party stands for,” Ryan added, “and, more importantly, it’s not what our country stands for.”

That may depend on how the party is defined. While elected Republicans have almost unanimously distanced themselves from Trump’s Muslim gambit, one poll found that nearly two-thirds of GOP voters agreed with him. Another determined that more than three-fourths believe the United States is accepting too many immigrants from the Middle East.

There is a civil war in the Republican Party on immigration. Those on Trump’s side tend to see the enemy as including the party’s leadership, consultants, intellectuals and donor class. (The dust-up over Trump and Muslims is likely to bolster that perception.) But they’ve been courted by other GOP presidential candidates too, including Ted Cruz, Scott Walker and Rick Santorum.

Walker is already out of the race and Santorum has stalled in the low single digits. But Cruz is ascendant and Trump has been leading in the New Hampshire polls for a longer period of time than Walker’s presidential campaign lasted.

Trump isn’t the most articulate or consistent spokesman for immigration control in the GOP. That distinction goes to Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala. And Trump’s Republican critics would be the first to point out he isn’t the most conservative. But his rise has fueled a family argument inside the party about how conservatives should view immigration.

Ryan’s position has a long conservative pedigree. He has followed in Jack Kemp’s intellectual footsteps. He can cite Ronald Reagan as well. The Wall Street Journal editorial page that championed Kemp and Reagan’s tax cuts also called for open borders. Republicans like Ryan tend to see America as a proposition or an idea, defined by the political principles laid out in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence.

In this telling, immigration affirms the truths we hold to be self-evident, particularly that all men are created equal and the unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness. The willingness of immigrants to come here is a testament to the success of those principles. “Immigration,” writes veteran conservative columnist George Will, “is the entrepreneurial act of taking the risk of uprooting oneself and plunging into uncertainty.”

Restricting immigration, according to these Republicans, isn’t conservative because it requires government bureaucracies to interfere in labor markets. Immigration is like free trade and restricting it is like protectionism.

Read that last sentence again. Those who have read Cuckservative: How “Conservatives” Betrayed America will now understand, if they didn’t already, why we addressed free trade and immigration in the Immigration and Economics chapter, because the latter, in its open-borders variant, is a subset of the former.

It’s interesting, is it not, that the cuckservatives are willing to fight fellow Republicans to the death, but they’re always eager to negotiate a genteel surrender with the liberals. Of course, as we showed when discussing the six conservative principles laid out by Russell Kirk, cuckservatives reject the last two.

Trump, the proto-Destructor

A great column by Glenn Reynolds in USA Today:

Enter Donald Trump. People who are unhappy with the things Trump is saying need to understand that he’s only getting so much traction because he’s filling a void. If the responsible people would talk about these issues, and take action, Trump wouldn’t take up so much space.

And there’s a lesson for our ruling class there: Calling Trump a fascist is a bit much (fascism, as Tom Wolfe once reported, is forever descending upon the United States, but somehow it always lands on Europe), but movements like fascism and communism get their start because the mechanisms of liberal democracy seem weak and ineffectual and dishonest. If you don’t want Trump — or, perhaps, some post-Trump figure who really is a fascist — to dominate things, you need to stop being weak and ineffectual and dishonest.

Right now, after years of Obama hope-and-change, a majority of Americans (56%) think Islam is incompatible with American values. That’s true even for 43% of Democrats.

In that sort of environment, where people feel unsafe and where the powers-that-be seem to be, well, weak and ineffectual and dishonest, the appeal of someone who doesn’t seem weak and ineffectual grows stronger.

You can see this in France, where the long-marginalized “far right” National Front is now winning elections all over. It’s doing so well because the French people, after not one but two Islamist mass shootings in Paris, feel that their government is not serious about protecting them, and their way of life, from their enemies.

Likewise, it’s a bit hard to take people seriously about Trump’s threat to civil liberties when President Obama was just endorsing an unconstitutional gun ban, when his attorney general was threatening to prosecute people for anti-Muslim speech (a threat later walked back, thankfully) and when universities and political leaders around the country are making clear their belief that free speech is obsolete.

Glenn is making two very important points here.

  1.  If the ruling parties break the laws and manipulate the democratic rules to keep out the law-abiding, democratic nationalists, they will soon find themselves facing the the lawless, anti-democratic, and violent ultranationalists. They are methodically cutting down the very trees of respect and authority that protect them from the people.
  2. The ruling Left has made it clear that they have zero respect for our free speech or our unalienable rights. That means we need not respect theirs.

The mainstream media and the political establishment pretends to be frightened of Donald Trump in order to try to keep American nationalism down, but they should treat him fairly and let the chips fall where they may rather than play their games in order to defeat him. Because despite being somewhat of a bull in a china shop, Trump plays by the rules. And others are watching his example, and learning from it.

Mailvox: change is inevitable

Farmer Tom doesn’t like it and he is seriously thinking about taking his tractor and going home:

This place is really going down hill in a hurry.

The host is now full on Trump supporter.

The vast majority of the guests seem to be so uninformed as to not know who Nate is?

I guess it’s time to find somewhere else to hang out.

I liked the place when “The Yellow Bus” was new.

Some things have changed, and not for the better.

Translation: I’m a Christian conservative and I don’t like it if things aren’t going in the way that I approve at all times. If anyone feels this way, then don’t comment here. Stick to reading and stay out of the discourse. I have never been concerned with the opinion of those who prefer to stomp off in a huff or retreat to snarky sniping than to offer substantive criticism and to articulate their positions, no matter who they might happen to be.

Of course, it may be nothing more than FT not wishing to stick around to defend his self-assured Iowa prediction, as the most recent RCP average has: Trump 25.7, Cruz 22.3, Carson 15.7, and Paul behind !Jeb!.

I’m personal friends with the Iowa campaign managers for Trump and Cruz. I know Carson’s Iowa guy, Huckebee’s guy, hate the a-hole who was Perry’s guy. Met several times Rubio’ s guy, once in his Senate office.

I know these people and the insides of the system.

I can tell you right now that Trump will not win Iowa, he will get second or third.

1. Carson
2. Trump
3. Cruz
4. Probably Rand because the RP people will hang to the end.

Maybe he is right. Maybe he is not. I have no idea; I don’t do political predictions anymore. Regardless, the fact that you’ve been here for years means that I will occasionally cut you some slack, not that I will overlook it when you’re behaving like a run-of-the-mill anklebiter or a prima donna. I find it somewhat frustrating when Ilk demonstrate that, despite years of reading here, they still can’t manage to control their emotions, construct proper syllogisms, or gracefully accept being shown to be wrong.

As I told FT in the comments: This place has not changed, but the world has. In this electoral campaign cycle, Trump is the only candidate who matters, and it is not because of who he is or what he might do if he wins.

This is basic game theory. As I have said repeatedly in the past, there are only three issues that matter today. In their current order of importance, they are:

  • Immigration
  • Gun Control
  • Federal Reserve

We can ignore the latter. None of the candidates even understand the issue and none of them are likely to do anything about it. Trump, being a maverick, is the only one who might even look at the issue, but that’s totally speculative and therefore irrelevant.

On guns, Clinton and Sanders are terrible, Ben Carson is bad, and most of the Republicans, including Trump, are both good and reliable. I’m not at all concerned about Trump saying he would take a serious look at the no-fly list, that was in response to a question about Islamic terrorism and in no way indicates that he has any interest whatsoever in sailing against the populist pro-gun position.

Nate said that we would have come down hard on another candidate who said the same, which is true, because unlike all the other candidates, Trump speaks off the cuff and without having his statement massaged by fifty consultants. If Bush said it, you can bet he’s looking to push anti-gun. In the context that Trump did, he’s wondering why known terrorists are permitted to arm themselves; he’s more likely to jail or deport them than attack gun rights.

More importantly, no one is going to do anything about gun control. Obama has been calling for it non-stop, they’ve been staging multiple false flags to try to drum up popular support – yes, they have, there is no question about it – and yet people are gunning up like never before. Gun control is the most important issue, but it is not one that is any more relevant in this particular election than is the Federal Reserve. I trust every single Republican candidate in this regard, including Ben Carson, who has completely changed his rhetoric on the subject once being confronted with the American public’s cast-iron will on the topic.

That leaves immigration. And here, Trump is the only candidate who is even beginning to address the scope of the existential problem. All the Democrats, and more than half of the Republicans, actually want to make it worse. Even if you don’t support him, or trust him, the mere fact that he is in the race has changed the debate on the subject more than the combined efforts of every anti-immigrationist, every open-borders skeptic, and every anti-free trade economist. He has been a literal Godsend in this regard, no matter what happens in the end.

In short, Donald Trump has radically changed the culture, and culture always trumps politics. And that is why petty sniping about the usual politics is not only pointless, it demonstrates that you are too stuck in an intellectual rut to even understand what the rest of us are discussing.

France’s new Joan of Arc

The Front National has a rising star, Marion Marechal-Le Pen:

Last week, she raised a storm when, in Toulon, a Mediterranean city with a large number of citizens of Arab descent, she said Muslims could only be French ‘if they follow customs and a lifestyle that has been shaped by Greek and Roman influence and 16 centuries of Christianity.’

‘We are not a land of Islam,’ she said. ‘In our country, we don’t wear djellaba clothing, we don’t wear a veil and we don’t impose cathedral-sized mosques.’

She’s Christian, she’s blonde, she’s attractive, she’s fearless, and she’s on the verge of becoming a significant political figure in France. However, as we’re seeing in the USA, the French equivalent of the bifactional ruling party, who are supposedly such tremendous rivals, have united to try to stop the nationalists.

The vote confirms what previous ballots suggested, but which official commentators did not want to admit – the National movement is without any doubt the first party in France, but meanwhile it is hardly represented in parliament,’ Marine Le Pen said.

In a speech to supporters in the early hours today, Ms Le Pen added: ‘It is the only party to defend the authentic French republic the development of our traditions, and the defence of all the French, especially the most vulnerable.’

Marechal-Le Pen, meanwhile, scored above 40 percent in final estimates for the vast Provence-Alpes-Cote-d’Azur region in the south, placing her on course for a landmark win next week.

Both women, however, face an uphill battle to clinch the run-off vote after the Socialist Party withdrew candidates in the key regions and called on its supporters to back conservative rivals.

Now, why would the Socialist Party be withdrawing its candidates and backing its “conservative rivals”? For exactly the same reason American “conservatives” are backing Hillary Clinton rather than Donald Trump. As detailed in Cuckservative, both socialists and self-styled “conservatives” are globalists who are virulently opposed to nationalism and the national interest of every European peoples, including the American people.

Cucks show their true colors

What is the color for “anti-American” anyhow?

One of Florida’s biggest conservative Republican moneymen — and a billionaire backer of Jeb Bush — is so disgusted by Donald Trump’s candidacy that if he has to, he’ll do the unthinkable:

“If I have a choice — and you can put it in bold — if I have a choice between Trump and Hillary Clinton, I’m choosing Hillary,” Miami healthcare magnate Mike Fernandez told the Miami Herald on Friday. “She’s the lesser of two evils.”

Outraged by Trump’s unimpeded ascent, Fernandez is taking on the GOP frontrunner himself. He purchased a full-page ad in the upcoming Sunday edition of the Herald calling Trump a “narcissistic BULLYionaire with a hunger to be adored.” He also likened him to some of history’s bloodiest demagogues.

“You have no idea how furious I am with my friends in the Republican Party who have embraced this guy,” Fernandez said.

Fernandez, who also plans to run the ads in Des Moines and Las Vegas newspapers on Dec. 14, said he didn’t notify the Bush campaign of his plans. Fernandez was the single highest donor to the political committee backing Bush, Right to Rise USA, as of the last financial disclosure report at the end of June. His contribution: more than $3 million.

“My frustration is really with that sector of Republican voters that are so blinded by the demagoguery” of Trump, Fernandez said. “I know the campaign — or any other campaign — is not going to say it…. This is not about Jeb. This is about us. This is about the voter.”

Yeah, tell us again how “conservative” you are. He’s so conservative that he’s become a billionaire by leeching off the federal government; that’s the only way to make money as a “health care magnate”.

But this sort of announcement should help Trump far more than it hurts him. After all, if the big money men in the Republican Party hate him so much, that’s got to appeal to the working class vote in both parties.

Of shopping and survival

It’s rather remarkable that David Brooks is still regarded, by some, to be a serious and thoughtful public intellectual, when in reality he is about as deep and reflective as Britney Spears hopped up on anti-depressants. Here he explains, in the aftermath of the most recent Islamic immigrant massacre, why the appeal of Donald Trump is bound to fade:

A little while ago I went rug shopping. Four rugs were laid out on the floor and among them was one with a pink motif that was dazzlingly beautiful. It was complex and sophisticated. If you had asked me at that moment which rug I wanted, I would have said the pink one.

This conviction lasted about five minutes. But then my mentality flipped and I started asking some questions. Would the furniture go with this rug? Would this rug clash with the wall hangings? Would I get tired of its electric vibrancy?

Suddenly a subtler and more prosaic blue rug grabbed center stage. The rugs had not changed, but suddenly I wanted the blue rug. The pink rug had done an excellent job of being eye-popping on its own. The blue rug was doing an excellent job of being a rug I could enjoy living with.

That’s right. The analogy from which Brooks draws his political model is his own interior-decorating habits. If I was a similarly shallow thinker, I would argue that Marco Rubio is bound to win because I had a glass of Spanish Tempranillo with lunch today and he is the most obviously Spanish candidate in the mix.

I am not certain yet that Trump is capable of overcoming the all-out war that will be waged on him by both factions of the bi-factional ruling party. The Republican establishment already has its knives out for him, but the Democratic establishment has not yet begun to fight. But I would not count him out either, especially in an environment where Americans quite rightly feel threatened by the hostile invaders that the ruling party has established in their midst.

But speaking of politics, and political philosophy, I am pleased to be able to say that SJWs Always Lie is now #1 in Political Philosophy on Amazon UK and is in the top 1,000 overall on  #1 in Political Philosophy on Amazon Australia as well.

And there goes Ben

I told you it was just a matter of time before this cycle’s Get-Out-of-Racism-Free card expired.

Pro-Life leaders are furious with presidential hopeful Dr. Ben Carson for his comments yesterday that pro-life rhetoric is partially responsible for the shootings that took place in Colorado last week.

On CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday morning, Carson said, “Hateful rhetoric exacerbates the situation…You don’t ever solve them [problems] with hateful rhetoric. Both sides should tone down the rhetoric and engage in civil discussion.”

On ABC’s This Week Carson said, “There’s a lot of extremism coming from all areas. We get into our separate corners and we hate each other, we want to destroy those with whom we disagree.”

In exclusive interviews with Breitbart News, a number of national pro-life leaders condemned Carson’s statements.

Anti-gun and squishy on abortion. I stand by my original assessment: he’s a complete non-starter. Don’t worry, he’s got a nice soft landing at Fox News waiting for him.

Ideology uber alles

This is why the Left is so enthusiastically pushing the demographic destruction of the American nation:

“The core of the NRA’s support comes from white, rural and relatively less educated voters,” Winkler writes. “This demographic is currently influential in politics but clearly on the wane. While the decline of white, rural, less educated Americans is generally well known, less often recognized is what this means for gun legislation.”

Polls show whites favor gun rights more than other races by 57 percent to 40 percent.

Whites comprise 63 percent of the population. But not for long. Hispanics are only 17 percent of the population but will likely boom to 30 percent over the course of a few decades. Unlike whites, Hispanics overwhelmingly — at 75 percent — favor gun control.

A total of 80 percent of Asian-American registered voters support gun control. While they constitute only 5 percent of the population, that number is expected to triple in three decades.

Keep in mind that if they were capable of thinking ahead or of understanding the consequences of their actions, they wouldn’t be leftists in the first place.

The idea that Hispanics, Asians, and Africans won’t simply follow their lead because they are the right kind of White people who have their best interests at heart is completely beyond them. For the leftist, “not White Right-Wing Republican” is about as far as their comprehension goes, so they can’t imagine the various ways in which their clever plan to achieve their ideological goals will go awry.

In fairness, we can’t either, but that’s only because the variety and the magnitude are so vast that it’s impossible to predict with any degree of accuracy.