Tag: politics

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.

The personal is always political

 

David Gerrold’s announcement that he will unfriend the majority of Americans who support Donald Trump for president is a clear example of why it makes no sense to attempt to be friends with SJWs or even be civil with them. Time and time and time again, I see someone explain that so-and-so SJW “is really a good guy” or that this-and-that SJW “is fine as long as we don’t discuss politics”.

But politics is all-consuming for the SJW, and when push comes to shove, the SJW will ALWAYS choose his politics over you because his politics are an intrinsic aspect of his personal identity. You might as reasonably expect him to cut off a body part in order to preserve the relationship once the inevitable conflict arrives. The SJW is not your friend. The SJW is incapable of being your friend.

So don’t associate with SJWs. Don’t cut them any slack at all. Once a friend, a family member, or an acquaintance reveals symptoms of SJW, you should quarantine them as ruthlessly as you would quarantine them if they had ebola or some other lethal and infectious disease.

Be the problem.

Why Trump is winning

Mike Cernovich explains one important aspect of Donald Trump’s success, as well as his own:

The Trump Mindset: Momentum + Focus + Energy

It’s clear none of Trump’s haters have read his books (Think Big and Kick Ass and Art of the Deal). If you had you’d know how Trump thinks and moves.

To understand how someone thinks, look at the language he uses. Kindle makes this simple. You can search for specific keywords in the Kindle version of a book.

Trump’s books are loaded winning, focus, push, enthusiasm, energy, and momentum.

Trump is a momentum player. He doesn’t wait for the perfect time to strike. He comes out swinging and he keeps swinging.

There’s even a chapter in Think Big and Kick Ass called Big Mo!

What do momentum types never do? We don’t apologize!

An apology destroys your momentum, as it causes you to stop.

Scott Adams is also a momentum type. How do I know this?

Adams talks about “energy” in his great book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. Energy is mentioned 67 times and there is even an entire section on how to increase your personal energy.

Momentum types are obsessed with energy, as it’s crucial for us to keep moving forward.

Momentum types believe if we keep putting fire on targets, we will win.

As long as our energy holds up, this is true.

It’s funny, I don’t really think of myself as either a momentum or a high-energy guy because I am almost extraordinarily lazy. My ability to mentally check out and pay no attention to anything short of an assault team utilizing heavy weaponry is well-known throughout my entire social circle. One of the primary reasons I feed on the hatred for me is that it is about the only thing I find reliably motivating.

On the other hand, I do possess an unusual amount of what I think of as “focused stamina” which is how I was able to write ATOB in 18 months and turn in a complete 60-page game design document in under a week. I suppose if you consider that I’m on the verge of publishing my second book in four months while having designed two games and edited three books at the same time, it is possible that I am merely using different terminology than Mike is.

But I dont think so. Two things that I have learned from Mike recently is the importance of a) enthusiasm and b) thinking big. For example, I don’t think I’ve been thinking big enough for Brainstorm; it’s already nearly as well-attended as I imagined it could possibly be. And there is no real reason why my political books should sell any fewer copies than those published by Ann Coulter or Mark Levin, after all, as Mike notes, we’re both already outselling most books published by well-known mainstream conservative writers with substantial media profiles.

So, I’m working on learning to think bigger. Here is the first baby step: my goal is for Cuckservative to debut in the Amazon top 100 overall. In keeping with this objective, we’re going to modify a few of our usual launch routines in order to help make that happen. We’ve put together a solid New Release offer (don’t forget to get on the mailing list if you want to receive them), we’re only going to make the book available on Amazon for the first three days, and for the first time, those who buy through Amazon will be able to take advantage of the offer.

And yes, if you need the epub and don’t have Calibre installed, you can send us a copy of your Amazon order and we’ll get it to you.

There are a few other things we’re doing as well, including one moderately exciting one that I cannot talk about quite yet, but I am entirely confident that with your help, we can drive the book, and more importantly, the message, into higher orbit than any of us at Castalia House originally envisioned.

In terms of Mike’s advice, all I can really add to it is the importance of understanding your own motivations. Once you figure out what it is, use it relentlessly no matter what anyone else might think of it. It doesn’t matter what your own private Carthago is or why you believe it must be destroyed. Stay focused, stay motivated, and keep your momentum going, until one day, its walls are razed and its fields are sown with salt.

Counter-Currents interview

A transcript of my interview with Greg Johnson of Counter-Currents:

GJ: How would you describe your political philosophy and who are some of the intellectual influences on its formation?

VD: I would describe myself as a Christian Western Civilizationist. I’ve been a libertarian for a long time. I was briefly even a card-carrying libertarian. But I was always more of a small L libertarian rather than a capital L one. Mostly because there were certain amounts of libertarian dogma that didn’t quite work out in the real world. Then as time went on it became readily apparent to me as I traveled around the world, as I lived in different countries, as I learned different languages, it became apparent to me that the abstract ideals that we often tend to follow in America in particular are not really relevant to most of the world.

I was being interviewed by a reporter from Le Monde in Paris about two months ago and he had absolutely no idea how to even describe the concept of libertarian to his readers. That’s in France, which is at least Western civilization and so forth. Trying to have a conversation about that sort of concept in Japan or China is just totally meaningless. So, that’s when I really became more cognizant of the importance of the nationalist element.

I think that just as Stalin found it necessary to modify international socialism for the Russians and just as Mao found it necessary to modify international socialism for the Chinese, it’s necessary for every other ideology to also understand that there are nationalistic, tribalistic limits to the abstract application of those ideologies.

GJ: That’s interesting. I’m an ex-libertarian myself. I was not a card-carrying libertarian, but I subscribed to Reason magazine and read lots of Ayn Rand and Hayek and Mises mostly when I was an undergraduate. There were things that led me away from that.

Two books in particular. First, I read Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions and the other was Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, which basically destroyed my liberal optimism about humanity.

What are some of the things that you think don’t work about libertarianism? You said that some of the abstract libertarian dogmas just don’t work, so specifically what are those?

VD: Well, the most important one, as we are now seeing, is the free movement of peoples. What really changed my thinking and it was a process, you know, it wasn’t an immediate thing, although it was a fairly quick process now that I think about it . . . I grew up on Milton Friedman. My father had me reading Free to Choose when I was fairly young, and so I was a big free trade dogmatist and around the time of NAFTA and all that sort of thing I could recognize some of the problems but I bought into the line that the problem is that it’s not real free trade. It’s a free trade agreement, but it’s not real free trade.

Then I read a really good book by Ian Fletcher, and he directly addressed the concept of Ricardo’s comparative advantage, and he really destroyed it. I think he had something like seven major problems with it, and that got me interested, so I started looking into it. I’m very fortunate in that I have a pretty active and intelligent blog readership and they really like to engage and they have absolutely no respect for me so they’re quite happy to argue with me.

Most of them were free-traders as well so we ended up having an on-going two or three week debate about free trade, and it got pretty detailed to the extent that I went through Henry Hazlitt’s entire chapter on free trade just to look at it critically rather than just reading through it and accepting it. Just looking at the arguments. I found that the free trade arguments were just full of holes. Not just Ricardo’s, but also Hazlitt’s. That’s what got me realizing that Ricardo’s argument was totally dependent on the idea that capital could move but labor couldn’t and so what that got me thinking about was the fact that a libertarian society – even if we could convince everyone in the United States that libertarianism was the correct way to approach things – would rapidly be eliminated by the free movement of peoples as people from non-libertarian societies, people from cultures where they have absolutely no ideals that are in common with the Founding Fathers or with libertarian ideals, would rapidly be able to come in and end that libertarian society in much the same way that the Californians have gone into Colorado and completely changed the political climate there.

So, Ian Fletcher’s book is what really triggered that whole shift in thought process. Now I look at the concept of the free movement of peoples, free trade, and those sorts of concepts with a considerable amount of skepticism. Of course, in Europe we’re seeing some of those problems related to the idea of the free movement of peoples just as you see it in the States with the Central Americans coming across the border.

Read the rest of it there. One factual update: the landmark Martin van Creveld essay mentioned will not be appearing in Riding the Red Horse Vol. 2 since I made the mistake of showing it to Jerry Pournelle, who promptly stole it for There Will Be War Vol. X.

Mailvox: the key to failure

Is often past success. It sounds as if Team Clinton is attempting to pull another Perot out of their bag of tricks. A loyal member of the Ilk writes:

I just received a robo-poll from “Victory Processing, LLC”, asking whether I might vote for “a successful businessman” in a three-way race between Hillary Clinton, a Republican, and “Fred Strauss”.  I thought you would want to know about this call, because it suggests that the Clintons are considering putting up another Ross Perot, so that they can split the Republican vote and win the election.  It also suggests that the Clintons are going to try to run a completely issue-free campaign.

The robo-pollster sounded like a pleasant, decently educated, middle-aged white woman.  She started with the usual questions — Do I always vote in presidential elections?  Do I consider myself to a Democrat, Republican, Independent, or Other?  Do I consider myself to be a Liberal, Moderate, Conservative, or Other?  If the presidential election were held today, would I be inclined to vote for a Democrat, Republican, Independent, or Other?  Do I think that the people running the country are working for the rich and powerful instead of ordinary people?  Do I want an insider “who can get things done,” or an outsider who would bring “new ideas”?  There were **no** questions about the economy, or “Is the country on the right track or on the wrong track”, or foreigh policy, or immigration.  In fact, **there were no questions about any issues at all.**

Then the poll asked if I had a Favorable, Unfavorable, or Undecided view on each of Ted Cruz, Hillary Clinton, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, and Donald Trump.  It also asked about head-to-head matchups.  If the presidential election were held today, would I vote for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, or be undecided?  Ditto for Clinton vs. Carson, Cruz vs. Clinton, and Clinton vs. Rubio.

Then the poll asked if I would consider voting for an unnamed “successful businessman” in a three-way race.  The unnamed candidate “grew a small family business from 2 stores to 600 stores in 30 states, with 40,000 employees.”  The poll asked if, regardless of my candidate preferences, whether I thought a third-party candidate could win.  Yes, No, Maybe, or Undecided?

Then the poll named the mystery candidate:  “Fred Strauss”.  The poll repeated the four matchups, this time with Strauss as a third-party option.  This time there were 7 options: “Definitely vote for” candidate X, “Probably vote for” candidate X, ditto for Y, ditto for Z, Undecided.

At the end, the poll asked some demographic questions.  Age range: 18-35, 36-50, 51-65, over 65?  Male or Female?  Race:  White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, Other, Refuse to State?  There were **no** questions about educational attainment, income, profession, or employment status.

The poll ended by thanking me for my time, and saying that it was paid for by “Victory Processing, LLC”.

I hope this gives you and The Ilk some ideas about how the presidential campaign might unfold.

The other possibility is that Team Clinton is worried that Donald Trump will run as a third-party candidate if the GOP Establishment successfully denies him the nomination despite his popularity.

Which, by the way, he absolutely should do, given the way in which the GOP Establishment is now attacking him. Loyalty is only ever a one-way street for them.