Category Archives: Trump

Playing With Fire

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The Trump inauguration featured the usual array of public nuisances and troublemakers that are now a feature of public events. If world leaders meet in a city, that city has a riot by anarchist loonies bused in by guys like George Soros. If a country celebrates one of their traditions, lunatics show up to ruin it for everyone. In this case, paid employees inspired supporters of Democrat pressure groups showed up in the Imperial Capital to harass citizens as they attempted to enjoy the spectacle of crowning our new emperor.

I’ve long argued that public protests are anti-democratic, anti-liberal and an assault on civilized order. They are unnecessary in a social democracy. We have elections where the issues of the day can be debated. There’s simply no need to be out in the streets causing trouble. These people yesterday were not there to raise awareness. They were there to intimidate and frighten people. While we cannot ban such things, the punishments handed out for causing trouble should be draconian. Put the rioters in a city jail for a couple of years and this comes to an end.

Normal people will tolerate a fair bit of this, just as long as they can avoid it when going about their business. There’s also an entertainment factor that gives these rioters some room to maneuver. The press loves covering these idiots and people will watch it on TV. Of course, most of the nation’s press corp wishes they could be rioting and looting so they pretend that the rioters are a serious, organic response to oppression. The struggle myth remains a powerful force in Progressive politics.

Property destruction used to be the preferred action of these rioters as it avoided the moral hazard of physical confrontation. If they rumbled with the cops, they could get a beating or worse. If they assaulted people on the streets, something similar could happen. Plus, judges are tough on perps who attack innocent bystanders and cops, while they are lenient on property crimes. Insurance pays for the damage and the miscreants don’t have any money, so it is easier to just let the rioters go.

That’s changing as we keep seeing with Trump events. These lunatics show up and throw eggs, batteries, urine bombs and worse. There were reports that rioters were crapping in their own hands so they could fling it at people. Milo Yabadabadoopolis keeps having his events cancelled because the authorities worry about potential violence. Given that a guy was shot at his last event, it is not an unreasonable fear. It’s the extreme version of the heckler’s veto. Instead of shouting down the person on stage, the heckler opens fire on the audience.

The question that comes to mind is when do we see the other side of this. So far, it has been all leftist crazies assaulting normies, who quietly take it. To their credit, the normies know the media is looking for a reason to blame all of it on them so they have adopted a passive approach to it. Videos are posted on-line and appeals are made to the authorities to do something about the violence. The assumption is the public will side with the victims over the lunatics, even if the press does the opposite and blames the victims.

So far, it has been remarkable that nothing serious has happened. These protesting lunatics are not terribly clever. All it would take is a bit of forethought to lure them into an ambush. How long before some armed normies turn up at an event and wait for the lunatics to give them a reason? The fact that it has not happened is encouraging, but maybe we have just been lucky. There are a lot of young men at Trump events. The alt-right is mostly young men. Young men tend to push back.

The other side of this is something that came to mind watching Richard Spencer get attacked on the street while doing an interview. At the risk of breaking the code, Spencer is an attention hound, who I suspect set this up hoping something like this would happen. Doing an interview on the street in front of the lunatics is just asking for trouble. The video was posted by his followers and he has been talking about it nonstop ever since. It’s good public relations for him and his cause. It makes him sympathetic, but also gives him street cred.

Of course, young men looking for street cred of their own will see this as a chance to be part of the action. They can stand guard while guys like Spencer conduct interviews and give speeches. This has been the attraction for black militants since the 60’s. Given the choice between wearing cool outfits and carrying a gun or submissively taking a beating from the cops, young black men naturally are drawn to groups like the Panthers, the Nation of Islam and recently, Black Lives Matter.

It is another example of the dangerous game being played by our Progressives rulers. While the public becomes increasingly dissatisfied with the current order, the ruling class becomes increasingly hostile to the people. By encouraging this sort of mayhem we see outside public events, they are encouraging a response to it. I don’t have much interest in Spencer and the preppy Nazi stuff, but if I’m forced to choose between him and the anarchist rioter, it is not a hard choice.

I’ve been making the point for a while now that Trump and his election are a warning shot across the bow of the ruling class. The public is increasingly frustrated by the unresponsiveness of the ruling class. Reform is long overdue. The support for and election of Trump is that message. If the ruling class ignores it or actively subverts it, what comes next will be much worse. The status quo is untenable, but we are not at a crisis. More videos of citizens being assaulted by leftist mobs and people start thinking the time for half measures has passed.

The Company Men

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Since the major news outlets are run by the Cult, all of the focus has been on how the Cult is dealing with the calamity of November 8, 2016. Even two months on, members of the Cult are throwing tantrums in order draw attention to their grief. For example, two degenerates had to be removed from a plane because they objected to Ivanka Trump riding on the same plane. Unfortunately, the plane was still on the tarmac when they were removed. Then there are the daily hoaxes, which are part of their grieving process.

Less noticed is the ongoing collapse of the Conventional Right into irrelevancy as it copes with the sudden realization that no one cares what they think. National Review, for example, has seen its traffic collapse since they went NeverTrump. The ridiculous person they have running the joint these days is out begging for money to redesign the site again. The implication is that bad technology is the reason no one reads National Review. The fact that they publish nonsense like this gets no mention at staff meetings, I bet.

While it is amusing to watch silly people like Charles Cooke struggle with the reality of his situation, there are some intelligent and thoughtful people in the Conventional Right trying to make sense of things. They correctly see the rise of Trump, and the emergence of a counter culture on the Right, as a dire threat to their thing. After all, why bother consulting the grovelers at National Review when they are always wrong and there are alternatives out there getting it right?

This long piece by Matthew Continetti the other day is a good read for a number of reasons. Continetti is married to a daughter of Bill Kristol and he is a true believer in the neo-conservative faith. Take that however you like. This is the first bit of interest.

I have been thinking about Gavin lately because his life and thought so perfectly capture the conservatism of Donald Trump. When you read Gavin, you begin to understand that the idea of Trump as a conservative is not oxymoronic. Trump is a conservative—of a particular type that is rare in intellectual circles. His conservatism is ignored or dismissed or opposed because, while it often reaches the same conclusions as more prevalent versions of conservatism, its impulses, emphases, and forms are different from those of traditionalism, anti-Communism, classical liberalism, Leo Strauss conservatism in its East and West Coast varieties, the neoconservatism of Irving Kristol as well as the neoconservatism of William Kristol, religious conservatism, paleo-conservatism, compassionate conservatism, constitutional conservatism, and all the other shaggy inhabitants of the conservative zoo.

Like most of the box-tickers in the managerial class, Continetti is largely unaware of what constitutes conservatism in English speaking countries. For men of the Conventional Right, conservatism is a list of policies and poses that define their relationship with Progressives. The idea that conservatism is a temperament, rather than a laundry list of policy proposals is alien to these guys. They are men of the multiple choice exam. Their options are always bounded by the number of choices provided to them.

Moving along, this bit offers a glimpse into the mind of the neo-cons as they face the dustbin of history.

Trump has always been careful to distinguish himself from what he calls “normal conservative.” He has defined a conservative as a person who “doesn’t want to take risks,” who wants to balance budgets, who “feels strongly about the military.” It is for these reasons, he said during the campaign, that he opposed the Iraq war: The 2003 invasion was certainly risky, it was costly, and it put the troops in a dangerous position, defending a suspicious and resentful population amid IEDs and sniper attacks. The Iraq war, in this view, is an example of conservative writers and thinkers and politicians following trains of logic or desire to un-conservative conclusions.

One of the things that never gets discussed is just how spectacularly wrong the Conventional Right was about the response to 9/11, particularly Iraq. Everything the neo-cons said about the Muslim world in the Bush years turned out to be wrong – disastrously wrong. There was a prohibition on pointing this out for a while, but Trump said it, in South Carolina of all places, and paid no price for it. Pretty much the only refuge for the neo-cons is to pretend that everyone was wrong and that Trump was just lucky in his opposition to the “invade the world” portion of neo-conservatism.

This bit is comical because it highlights the foreignness of the neo-cons and the Conventional Right.

The conservatism of Donald Trump is not the conservatism of ideas but of things. His politics do not derive from the works of Burke or Disraeli or Newman, nor is he a follower of Mill or Berlin or Moynihan. There is no theory of natural rights or small government or international relations that claims his loyalty. When he says he wants to “conserve our country,” he does not mean conserve the idea of countries, or a league of countries, or the slogans of democracy or equality or freedom, but this country, right now, as it exists in the real world of space and time. Trump’s relation to the intellectual community of both parties is fraught because his visceral, dispositional conservatism leads him to judgments based on specific details, depending on changing circumstances, relative to who is gaining and who is losing in a given moment.

What he is alluding to here is the deeply held belief, among Conventional Conservatives, that the true leaders of society are the men who manipulate ideas, not the men who manipulate other men or manipulate things. The great revulsion for Trump among our betters is they see him as a man that makes his way managing people things. He is not a man who operates in the realm of ideas. Therefore, he is disqualified from leading society. Continetti sees himself as Trump’s intellectual and moral superior.

This bit is laugh out loud funny.

His is a blunt and instinctive and demotic approach arrived at after decades in the zero-sum world of real estate and entertainment contract negotiations. His are sentiments honed by immediate, knee jerk, and sometimes inelegant reactions to events and personalities observed on Twitter or on “the shows.” And the goal of his particular conservatism is not adherence to an ideological program so much as it is to prevent the loss of specific goods: money, soldiers, guns, jobs, borders, national cohesion.

Guys like Continetti would not last five minutes in the world of real estate or the world of fast food, for that matter. If he were to get a job with Trump’s organization, it would be as a doorman or desk clerk. Maybe in a decade or so he could be in a position to make a decision, like selecting a cleaning contractor or a building maintenance vendor. The reason the Conventional Right is in crisis is that normal, conservative people, have grown weary of the smug condescension from useless know-it-alls like Continetti.

In fairness to Continetti, he does seem to be figuring it out a bit.

It is this specificity of attachment rather than adherence to a program that explains the divide between street corner conservatives and their political brethren. Many of the conservatives in Washington, D.C., myself included, arrived at their politics through study or experience at university, by encountering a great text, the coherence of natural law, the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, or the economics of Smith, Ricardo, Friedman, and Tullock. That is not the case for the street corner conservatives.

Continetti cannot bring himself to contemplate how the people he labels “street corner conservatives” arrived at their positions. That would require a degree of self-awareness that he lacks. He is far too concerned with distancing himself from these people, because Conventional Conservatism is nothing more than a buffer between the dominant ideology of Progressivism and the rest of us. In their heads, they are standing athwart history yelling “stop”, but in reality they are standing in front of you yelling “stop.”

I’ve gone way too long so I’ll circle back to this another day, but the whole vibe from the Conventional Right is of a collection of middle managers after a takeover. They are still wrapping their heads around the fact that the guys coming in are now in charge. The old company men will have to demonstrate their worth or be tossed out like obsolete furniture. In the end, they will come around, because they have no choice, but there will be plenty of moaning and complaining along the way.

The Dissidents and the Media

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Back in the 80’s, one of the more irritating things about following politics was watching stupid Republicans walk onto liberal news programs and get ambushed. It was if they were just made aware of the fact that the Left never plays fair. It was not just Republican politicians. Conservative chatters would also fall into these traps. It was very frustrating until I figured out that it was all a show. The “conservative” was hired to play a role in the drama. George Will, in private, thought you people were gross and disgusting.

This model persisted through the 90’s and it was only when Fox News came on-line did we see some fair treatment of people outside the Progressive orbit. Even there, the obsession with being fair often resulted in being stupid. Exactly no one gives a crap what Juan Williams has to say about anything. Yet, FNC felt they needed to decorate the set with him. Even so, it was just one outlet among many so the prevailing model was a Progressive gang-up on anyone not professing the One True Faith.

What made it most infuriating is that so-called conservatives would go on moonbat networks and do taped shows. The producers would then cut up the recording to make the conservative sound nutty or unresponsive. When confronted, the so-called conservative would admit to knowing it was a setup, but they would say they did it to try and change minds. In reality they were just taking the check. The boys and girls from Official Conservatism™ on the payroll of PBS and CNN were taking a dive on purpose so they could get paid.

It’s why the Tea Party was doomed from the start. When guys like Dick Army got involved, you knew it as a con. More important, the organizers were clawing each other’s eyes out trying to get on TV. These were not people motivated by a cause. They were motivated by the desire to be famous and hang around green rooms with the Lefties they saw on television. Those are people easy to corrupt so it was just a matter of when, not if, they sold out their people, which most promptly did for short money.

What has always been encouraging about Trump is he seems to get this. He has done almost no taped interviews and he avoided private interviews with news sites like the NYTimes and Washington Post. In the former case, he knew they would edit the hell out of his interview because he saw it first hand doing his TV shows. In the latter case, he knew these people were not honest. They lie on spec and giving them a private interview would only enable them make up fake news about Trump.

Trump’s live events were big enough to require coverage, but he put the media in pens so they could not pretend to be talking to Nazis and Klansmen in the crowd. The only thing they could do was show the video and moan about it. You also note that Trump uses lots of hand gestures when speaking. He never used to do this, but I suspect he started doing it because it makes editing impossible. As you can see in this Breitbart story, editing is now the main tool of the media.

National Public Radio ombudsman/public editor Elizabeth Jensen has recommended that the taxpayer-funded radio news service bar future live interviews of conservatives who may have controversial views, following an interview Nov. 16 with Breitbart News’ Joel B. Pollak.

Pollak, who serves as Breitbart’s Senior Editor-at-Large and In-house Counsel, defended its Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon from false and defamatory claims of antisemitism and “white nationalism.” He also turned the tables, pointing out that NPR has “racist programming,” including a story that called the 2016 election results “nostalgia for a whiter America.”

 

NPR listeners were apparently outraged that anyone from Breitbart News had been given an opportunity to defend the website and its chairman.

 

In her response, “Listeners: Two Recent Interviews Are ‘Normalizing Hate Speech’,” Jensen concluded that the live format had allowed Pollak to get the better of host Steve Inskeep.

 

She suggested that future interviews be taped: “In addition, in my opinion, these interviews should not be done live. Inskeep is an excellent live interviewer, but live interviews are difficult, especially when there is limited time. A little contextualizing never hurts.”

In other words, live interview make it hard to fake the interview. In the Reagan years, the press complained that Reagan sat for few taped interviews and he preferred giving speeches to be covered live. Trump seems to have learned this and taken it to another level with the use of social media. What he was able to do is keep the media on the wrong foot, always playing defense, even when they thought they had him, like with the fake bimbo stories. By being unpredictable, he was impossible to script.

It’s a good lesson for the Dissidents doing interviews on Lefty media. Avoid anything that is taped and only do live interviews. Supporting media that supports you has a corollary. Don’t support media that is at war with you. If you are at an event, just ignore the people with cameras and microphones. When you see people claiming to be prominent members of the alt-right, for example, begging to be on CNN or FNC, it is a safe bet that they are just in it for the money and you would be wise to tune them out and drop them from your rotation.

Celebrate Today, Fight Tomorrow

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Like most everyone, the election result left me in a state of mild euphoria for the last dozen or so hours. It’s mostly due to the fact I stayed up half the night watching the results. I’m usually in bed by midnight so being up past two made for a challenging day. Even so, it feels pretty good to see the good guys win once in a while. It feels even better when you are proved right. I put Hillary at 46% for this election and she came in a tiny bit higher, but well below 50%. I said all along that the status quo must break 50% to carry the night.

Now, I look forward to the Triumph. In January, Donald Trump will enter the Imperial Capital in a four horse chariot, wearing a laurel crown and painted toga. Behind him, in chains and rags, will be the members of NeverTrump. The great enemy of the people and the threat to the republic, Hillary Clinton, will be displayed in a wheeled cage so the citizens can throw rotten vegetables at her. After the festivals, the proscription lists will be posted around the city and the NeverTrump loons will be thrown into a pit.

Yes, victory feels good.

That said, this is not the end. It is just the beginning and the road from here to a safe and healthy country is long and full of perils. A political class that is willing to tolerate festering carbuncles like the Clintons, is perfectly willing to close ranks and do everything it can to destroy the Trump presidency. A nation willing to vote for a woman with the ethics of Pol Pot is a nation willing to stand aside and let the political class stymie any attempt to reform the broken system. Cautious pessimism is the right outlook today.

The thing Trump has working for him is that the ruling class is truly stunned at the result of the election. This is a black swan event for them. This is not just a media phenomenon. Kelly Ayotte is staggering around Manchester New Hampshire with her panties on her head, asking people if they know where she lives. She went all in on rejecting Trump and now she is out of a job. The politicians that listened to their party leaders and distanced themselves from Trump were all punished at the polls. The world is upside down.

That’s what makes Trump so frightening to the political class. It’s not that they threw everything at him and he won. That can happen. Political athletes are skilled at beating the odds. What’s frightening about Trump is that he is the nullification of conventional politics. He ran an old school campaign and ran it like a business, instead of a jobs program for the political class. He ticked none of the boxes the experts say you must tick. He rearranged a political map everyone said could not be changed. Trump is scary man right now.

The thing that scares the political class more than anything is that Trump had coattails. It was an article of faith among the political class that Trump would hurt down ballot candidates. He was a badge of shame on the GOP, akin to slavery, and they would not recover for a generation. Instead, Trump boosted candidates who embraced him and his success probably saved the Senate and may have saved the House. Everything the political class believed on Monday was proved false on Tuesday.

One reason Trump exists and is the next president is that the political class is long overdue for reform. The reason the political class is a dumpster fire is the public has lost its civic morality. That cannot be fixed with one election. That cannot be fixed by one man in one job. What ails the country is not a missing comma in the tax code or the regulatory code. The political culture in Washington has to change and that happens when the American culture changes.

Another reason Trump is the next president is a lot of people were willing to say what is not supposed to be said. Good men have sacrificed much in an effort to stem the cultural slide. Pat Buchanan, Steve Sailer, Paul Gottfried, John Derbyshire and others have given up a lot to be right in an age when being right can often be dangerous. There’s also the social media trouble makers like Ricky Vaughn and John Rivers. Telling people, who hate you, things they don’t want to hear, takes commitment and guts.

Today is the start if the long war to try and save the nation and our culture. Join the H. L. Mencken Club. Go to an American Renaissance event.  Kick in a few bucks to a Steve Sailer beg-a-thon. Tune into an Anthony Cumia show. Be a John Derbyshire listener. Tell the screeching harpies in the office that maybe giving women the vote was not such a great idea. Sign up for a Gab account. Speak the truth in a world where speaking truth is a revolutionary act. Be a man with nothing to lose.

Celebrate now. Tomorrow we go back to the war.

Why They Hate Us

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The other day I turned on Fox News and was presented with Britt Hume opining on the state of conservatism and where it goes after the election. I’m going from memory, but he said something like, “The Conservative Movement was about low taxes, small government, muscular foreign policy and opposition to abortion, among other things.” He then went on to point out that Trump is none of those things and that those issues are not featured in his campaign.

What struck me about what he said is there was no trace of self-awareness. No mention of the fact that the Conservative Movement lost on all but the foreign policy stuff, and that has been a disaster. The tax bite has not changed very much since the 50’s, despite endless rounds of tax cuts and tax reform. Government has grown like a weed and social issues have all moved in one direction, with amazing speed at times.

A theme here over the years has been the fact that the Conservative Movement has managed to conserve nothing. The reason they are in a crisis is the same reason a losing ball coach finds himself in jeopardy. People will tolerate only so much losing. A salesman, who cannot close deals, gets fired, even if he is the nicest guy in the world. What’s happening today is Official Conservatism™ is being fired.

There’s something else, I think. A useful tool for understanding the world is this. You can learn a great deal about someone by looking at who he hates. The same is true of groups of people. Yankee fans, for example, are indifferent to Mets fans, but they detest Red Sox fans. The reason for that is the Mets are always terrible and pose no threat to the wellbeing of Yankee fans. The Red Sox, on the other hand, are almost always a problem.

Official Conservatism™ hates Donald Trump and they hate the people voting for him. That’s been a bit of an eye-opener for people. When Hume detailed Trump’s deviationism, he was dismissive and condescending. He then had that gold plated phony George Will come in and dismiss Trump and the people supporting him as knaves and fools. The segment was ostensibly about Official Conservatism™, but it was really just an excuse for the two of them to bash Trump.

Take a look at this column from Mona Charen the other day.

If she wins (a bigger “if” today than a week ago), it will be due only to the Republican Party’s suicidal decision to nominate and support a pathological narcissist/con man — a figure utterly outside the parameters of acceptability for public office. Any public office. So as culpable as Democrats are for nominating a person who ought to have been disqualified, Republicans are even more irresponsible for risking the terrible powers of commander in chief to someone most elementary school kids would regard as emotionally unstable.

Just look at the language used here. If she were describing Hitler, would she use a different tone? More important, is it anything like the tone and language used to describe Clinton? Clearly not and that’s the tell. These are people driven purely by hatred of Trump and by extension those who support him. Hillary Clinton could probably promise to revive the Holocaust and Charen would support her, simply because she hates Trump.

The question is why do they hate Trump and his voters so intensely?

I don’t think there is a single answer, but a big part of it is purely personal. No one likes to see their mistakes and failures made public. The people at the core of NeverTrump are the same people who sold us neo-conservatism in the Bush years. What is happening now is a delayed reaction to the massive failures under George W. Bush. Trump made his mark in the primary by humiliating Jeb Bush and that was not an accident. Trump is the repudiation of Bush and the neo-cons.

There’s another bit here too. The Official Right™ has defined itself to the Left by who it hates. Purging people from their ranks has been an integral part of how modern conservatives define their thing. Naturally, when challenged, they fall back on the old ways. The trouble is all their name calling and threats have been met with jeers and laughter. They lost all of their moral authority so they can no longer simply scold the dissenters into silence.

Finally, there’s the creeping realization that their brand of conservatism is all hat and no cattle. Their moral preening and appeals to as yet undefined principles are just postures. In the end, their thing was just a jobs program for people unable to do productive work. As one of the moonbats at the post points out, it is a movement with no base. No matter what happens Tuesday, the pro-Trump people will never forget these traitors or welcome them back.

After liberation, French women guilty of “collaboration horizontale” were dragged into the street to have their heads shaved. It was punishment for betrayal of their people. The Dutch did the same, but they also sent their collaborators to work camps in New Guinea. Many were simply shot, of course. Immediately after the liberation, almost 200.000 Dutch citizens were interned in camps and prisons and put on trial. Sadly, this is not what awaits the traitors of NeverTrump, but at some level they know they will never be “us” again.

 

Too Stupid To Rule

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Talk to anyone in law enforcement and they will tell you that the stupidity of criminals is a key part of solving crimes. The crooks leave clues and make huge blunders that allow the cops to catch them. Ray-Ray decides he has had enough of Peanut disrespecting him so he walks up to him at a party and starts shooting. Not only are there a million witnesses, Ray-Ray leaves the gun with his fingerprints and brags to his buddies latter that he just dusted Peanut at a party. It’s not a hard case to solve because Ray-Ray is a moron.

That comes to mind when reading the stories about the Clinton secret e-mail caper. We have enough of the details at this stage to have a rough idea how we got to this point. They wanted to have a secret communication method that would be not be subject to government security and Freedom of Information Act requests. They also figured that this secret system would be free from Congressional oversight. After all, if no one knew it existed, then no one could ask any questions about what was on it.

It’s not hard to imagine the conversations leading up to the decision to go with this plan versus using Google or Yahoo accounts. They figured that the reason guys like General Patraeus got caught using Gmail was that the government IT people were able to tell when people were accessing these systems via their work computers. Alternatively, they just assumed the government had access to these system like they do in the movies. Either way, they determined that using these options for personal stuff was a bad idea.

Hilariously, it appears they came to the conclusion that having their own e-mail server meant that all the e-mail was magically hidden in the box in Hillary’s bathroom. Their subsequent attempts to erase the hard drives suggests they did not know that e-mail travels across networks and is also stored on the receiver’s servers. Those servers are usually on a network not controlled by the recipient. They started to realize this at some point, which is why they smashed their phones and laptops.

The most amusing part of this caper is they started sending e-mails from this domain to people outside the domain. If they had kept this as a tight internal communication system, they could have got away with it. Highly secure e-mail systems actually work this way. You cannot send or receive mail from outside the domain. That way people cannot forward mail off the system and the system is not exposed to outsiders looking for an open window. In some government facilities, access is only through terminals in the facility.

Once e-mail was sent from the domain to outsiders, it was only a matter of time before the secret was out. They were lucky that most media people are remarkably stupid so they lack the wherewithal to wonder why Hillary Clinton did not have a State Department e-mail account. Watch the cable channels and you come away thinking that the people on TV just learned about e-mail last week. Eventually the Romanian cab driver unearthed the whole thing and the enterprise came crashing down.

The other bit of interest in the area of technical competence is how they responded to FBI requests for their e-mail. They printed them off and turned them over as paper documents. These are lawyers and they just assumed they could bury the government with paper. After all, how can they possibly organize 50,000 pages of e-mail? This is an old trick. In discovery one side asks for everything so you give them everything plus a mountain of junk they have to sort through to find what they want.

What they failed to understand is that the FBI digitized this stuff in a day or two. Modern high speed scanners can process 50 pages a minute. OCR technology can turn the paper into a machine readable document. Content management systems let you store millions of documents so they can be searched and sorted based on content. I have this on my laptop so I can stash all of my documents in a database, rather than file folders. The Clinton people were as ignorant of this as they were of how e-mail worked.

There are a lot of angles to these Clinton scandals, but the thing that transcends all of it is the rank stupidity of the people involved. There were safer and more secure ways to establish clandestine communications. Even with their setup, a modest amount of discipline would have prevented most of this from happening. All they had to do was limit mail going out of the system. When the time came to burn it down, they only had to destroy the server entirely and no one would be able to prove anything.

The argument from Team Trump in the closing days of the election is that Hillary Clinton is too corrupt to rule. He’s painting her as the face of the larger problem, which is the metastasizing corruption of the ruling class. It’s a good closing argument and it resonates, but the reason Hillary should not rule is she is dangerously incompetent and she surrounds herself with outlandishly stupid people. A society can survive crooked rulers, but it cannot survive stupid ones. Hillary Clinton is too stupid to rule.

A Meandering Post About Nothing

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Imagine you are in a room with six sides and each wall has a door. If you leave the room through one of the doors, you end up in another six-sided room with doors. Assuming no obstacle, you can move in a straight line in any of six directions. If there obstacles, then things gets more complex. Anyone old enough to remember the Avalon Hill war games from the 70’s will be familiar with this concept.  The idea was to simulate the 360-degree movement of the real world, but with segmented game space.

Now, imagine yourself in that first room and let’s assume it is filled with sights, sounds, smells and all sorts of other things that you can experience with your senses. So much so, in fact that you can’t quite experience and remember all of them. You spend as much time as you want, studying as much of the room as possible, before moving to the next room. Let’s say you master 80% of what there is to master. Then you move onto the next room to experience whatever lies within.

Here’s the thing though. You can only remember so much before the memory begins to fade and you forget some things. When you get into the new space, you have new stuff to process and organize in your head. Making room for the new stuff means forgetting some of the old stuff. Let’s say you forget a third of what you tried to remember of the first room by the time you get to the 80% point in the new room. Your head now contains 66% of 80% of the first room and 80% of the second room.  You can do the math. I’ll wait.

If you move into the third room, you forget even more of the first room. You can see where this is headed. Keep moving from room to room and before long you only have vague recollections of what happened in the first rooms where you started. Even if you write stuff down you’re recollections are bound to get out of whack. When it comes to why you picked one door over another or what you were thinking at the time, well, your memory will be clouded by the present. It’s called recency bias.

Now, instead of you moving from room to room, imagine it is generations of men. The first generation operates in the first room. The next generation moves onto the second room, taking with them as much as they can recall being taught to them by the first generation. Then the third generation moves onto its phase of existence, having only second hand memories of their grandparent’s age. It does not take but a few generations before the people in the present are thoroughly detached from their ancestors. All they have are recollections of recollections.

That’s where the modern conservative finds himself in this age of turmoil. I was listening to someone on the radio the other day, lamenting the fact that no matter what happens in the election, the “conservative movement” is mortally wounded. The Trump insurgency has forever marginalized those rock-ribbed conservatives and their dreams of managerial technocracy. They did not put it that way, but that was the flavor of it. The person saying this clearly had no recollection of where the Right started or the road it had taken to end up at what some think is its terminus.

The fact is, Official Conservatism is so far from where it started, it is a crime against the language to call it “conservative.” The traditional American Right was always an individual liberty cause, which starts and ends with freedom of association. Everything that can be “conservative” rests on the basic idea that you have a basic right to associate with whom you like, when you like, on the terms you like. No one on the modern Right has talked about that in so long it is now forbidden knowledge.

The people writing at the big foot conservative publications never think about such things. Most of them came into the world of political ideology thinking that conservatism was about cutting taxes and losing wars of choice. The geezers came along when conservatism was focused on fighting the Russians and trying to figure out how to get around Roe in order to curtail abortion. The neocons are pretty much just hyper-violent globalists with a bizarre grudge against the Russians.

It’s why Trump’s talk about law and order, for example, sounds so alien and weird to the modern right-winger. To their ears, it almost sounds like Trump is hostile to government, which is crazy talk on the Right these days. That’s because the modern conservative is so far removed from the time when conservatism stood for ordered liberty that it is no longer even a recollection of a recollection. It is no longer part of their mental landscape so it falls outside their definition of conservative.

One can go on forever about the wrong turns the Right has made over the decades. Lord knows I’ve written enough on the topic. None of which really matters all that much, as the modern Right is where it is, in this time, a time when it no longer has anything to offer those outside the statist ideology of modern globalism. The alternative to post-national managerialism cannot be a different version of post-national managerialism. That’s why people, particularly young people, are turning their back on it, heading off to other rooms.

Pink State

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Imagine the space-time continuum gets scrambled and you find yourself in a world where the coming election is between a crazy old cat lady, an old hippie, Hitler and Mussolini. Hitler is leading one major party and Mussolini is leading another major party. The hippie and the cat lady have no party and very little support. As a practical matter, your choice is between Hitler and Mussolini. More important, you know the ramifications of both choices. The former is murder and mayhem and the latter is authoritarianism and long speeches.

To anyone with a soul, the choice is clear. You vote for Mussolini. It’s a terrible option, but so is chemotherapy. No one enthusiastically opts for chemotherapy, but it beats dying from cancer. If you told your doctor that your morals prevented you from choosing chemo, so you were going to visit some guy with magic crystals, your doctor would try to have you committed. Similarly, no one would wants Mussolini as the ruler, but he is a vastly better option than Hitler. You do what you must, even when it is unpleasant, to stop Hitler.

To continue this a bit further, imagine if someone came up to you are said “I’m Susan Wright and my principles prevent me from voting Mussolini, even though I know Hitler will murder millions, so I’m voting for the goofy hippie guy.” You would have dark thoughts about that person. They are willing to stand aside and allow something truly horrible just so they can avoid doing something unpleasant. To make it worse, they demand that you pretend that their cowardice and treachery is high minded.

Further, you would look at those people investing all of their energy ridiculing Mussolini as pro-Hitler partisans. After all, the successful end of the efforts can only mean one thing –  Hitler wins. They could protest all they like that they hate both Hitler and Mussolini, but you would know them by their deeds. They are working to pave the way for Hitler, regardless of their reasoning. If successful, they would be, in part, responsible for what comes next. Blood would be on their hands and you would feel justified in holding them responsible.

Alternatively, if someone came up to you and made the case for Hitler, along with pointing out the faults of Mussolini, you would not feel the urge to punch them in the face. They may be horribly mistaken, but at least they are being honest. They are pro-Hitler and they take responsibility for it. They own it. Who knows, they could be right and Mussolini is worse in the long run. In theory, at least, you can debate this with the Hitler fans and maybe in the process sway some undecided voters to your side.

Obviously, you see what I’m doing here. Replace Hitler with Clinton and Mussolini with Trump and we have the debate between the Cult of Never Trump and the rest of us. No one thinks Trump is the ideal candidate. Many of us think he is a awful candidate, but he is orders of magnitude better than Clinton. Her election means the nation lurches into authoritarianism. What comes next will be unfathomably horrible. If you have a soul, you do what you must to prevent evil from triumphing. Susan Wright has no soul.

This twitter exchange I had with her is the genesis of this post:

Red State, of course, has gone full-on moonbat. Their only reason to exist these days is to bash Trump and Trump voters. A moral nullity like Susan Wright also takes time out to bash other Dirt People like Sarah Palin. Even loopy liberals have moved on from Palin-bashing, but as a dog returns to its vomit, the degenerate social justice warriors of the Never Trump Cult go back to Palin-bashing when they need material. Reading her posts, you could be forgiven for thinking she was a writer for Salon.

To return to my analogy, Susan Wright is the sort that would spend all her time harping about the defects of Mussolini, then claim she is standing on principle, as Hitler rounds up the Jews and packs them off to the gas chambers. She would rather something horrible happen, than get her hands dirty doing the hard work of opposing evil. Of course, that assumes she thinks Clinton is a bad choice. Again, reading her posts, it’s hard not to think she is related to the old bag, not just a supporter.

After the war, many Germans tried to say they did not know what was happening so they should not be held accountable for supporting the Nazis. The question in those cases was whether or not the person should have known or could have known. The Clinton Crime Family has been a known quantity for 25 years. Susan Wright and her ilk know exactly what comes from a Clinton victory. Blood will be on their hands. “I did not know” is not going to be an acceptable excuse when the time comes.

The Virtual Candidate

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In the 1992 election, the one thing that jumped out to me was the enthusiasm for Clinton at public events. He had big raucous crowds, while Bush had smaller, older crowds. The press had all the same horse race stories we see today, but it felt like Clinton had all the enthusiasm on his side, despite the tight polls. One of the things I recall is not seeing any Bush bumper stickers, but lots of Clinton stickers. That always stuck in my head as a useful metric when trying to gauge the intentions of the voters.

This ad hoc measure held up in the following election, as Dole was just a sacrificial candidate the GOP put up just so they could have someone on the ticket. In 2000, this metric really did not hold up as I saw many more Bush signs and his crowds were much bigger than Gore’s crowd, but it was a razor thin result. That said, it held up very well in 2004 as Bush clearly had the more enthusiastic voters. I recall seeing a clip of him at an event that looked like a rock concert. I knew he was going to win handily.

Like any seat of the pants observation, it is prone to your own bias. I think in 2000 I was probably fooled a little by where I lived at the time. I was in Virginia, which was strong Bush country. Even so, we all have our biases and that means we tend to see that which confirms our magical thinking. I think about that when I see the video from Trump events. The guy is playing to massive crowds that we last saw when Obama ran in 2008. Even the reporters covering these things admit they are yuge.

On the other hand, Clinton is playing high school gymnasiums where a few hundred people, at most, are herded into to hear her cackle at them. These are rare, as she spends most of her time at private fundraisers or sleeping. That’s the other thing that is so odd about this election. She takes weeks off, not having any public events. Right now, she has been under wraps for five days. Criminal Genius David Axelrod is now suggesting she skip the next debate entirely. Frankly, would that be shocking if she did skip it?

The disconnect in this election between what we are being told and what we are seeing is dizzying. The polls all show a tie or a slight Clinton lead. If that is true, it means Trump voters are willing to drop what they are doing, stand in line for hours, just to see their guy give a speech. Clinton voters are not all the interested in seeing her or even hearing her take questions. This is entirely possible. Unhappy people are more likely to go out and protest, while those satisfied with the status quo stay home. But, in an election?

The trouble is I can think of no example where this has been the case. Even poor old Bob Dole was out giving speeches in front of decent sized crowds. If I recall, he did a barnstorming thing at one point where he would show up at a few places every day and give a speech. People showed up and cheered. Clinton has become invisible to her own voters. I see her commercials, but she has not held a single public even within a three hour drive of me. Trump has done a few events and my state is a long shot for him.

To make this election even more bizarre is the way the press has ignored the biggest story in political history since Watergate. The Wikileaks stuff is explosive. It is what political reporters used to pray for, back when we had political reporters. The stuff in those e-mails is the sort of stuff that used to end careers and bring down governments. Despite the caterwauling from  the stray moonbat, the media has ignored the story, preferring to spend all their time talking about the Trump bimbo hoax.

One of the things that was clear about the ’92 campaign is the Left studied Reagan. They were convinced Reagan won because of his ability to use modern media to reach voters. As a result, they had ready for 1992, Hollywood film makers to assist the Democratic nominee. The Clinton campaign was the first to use Hollywood to stage their events and produce their campaign videos. They even brought in costume people to help them select clothes for their events. Leni Riefenstahl would have been proud.

The result has been increasingly synthetic candidates on the Democratic side. Al Gore was so scripted people wondered if he was a robot. He was not allowed to pick out his own ties, he was so tightly controlled. Kerry’s campaign was actually packaged for him by the same people that created the Mark Warner campaign in Virginia. For instance, they recycled the hunting skits that Warner used to appease gun owners. Kerry’s job was to learn his lines and convincingly wear the costumes.

By the time Obama came along, the Democrats were fully prepared to run an actor hired to play the role designed by the party. Obama may as well be an actor, for as much as anyone knows about the guy. Even after all these years, his back story remains a mystery to most Americans. He’s simply the young version of  Morgan Freeman playing President in Deep Impact. Staff write his speeches, prepare him for the fake interviews they stage for the public and otherwise direct every aspect of his public performance.

Now here we are with Hillary Clinton running as the virtual candidate. For all anyone knows, she could be a head in a jar and those old fat women we see waddling around from time to time are just body doubles. While Trump is running a real campaign in front of actual humans, Hillary is hidden away somewhere, a virtual presence on campaign videos, but otherwise detached from the physical world. The media plays along, focusing all of its attention on the weird flesh and blood guy talking to humans. This ad from 2008 is turning out to be disturbingly prescient.