The Drudge Report has, for the most part, become a tabloid outlet for the political cranks and Hollywood degenerates. His page is full of the crazy rantings of media attention whores or stories about entertainment figures. The former is due to Drudge being a parasite on the mass media and the latter is due to his affliction. As a result, it no longer works as a useful portal to get the news of the day. Still, if you want to take the temperature of the Progressive loons in the mass media, Drudge is useful.

Currently, he has a picture of the bug-eyed bug-man Adam Schiff staring out from the page, in his best Charlie Manson face. In bold letters is the headline, “SCHIFF STARES DOWN TRUMP FACES JAIL MEDIA PUSH IMPEACHMENT”  Obviously, the point is to grab your attention. A little below, in the center column, are links to stories from various left-wing crazies describing the looming arrest, impeachment and jailing of President Trump. “There’s a gathering storm…you can feel it” reads one link.

Left-wing sites like the Huffington Post, of course, have been on the pending Trump indictment since 2015, so every day they run at least one post swearing it will happen any minute. Alternatively, they will run a post fantasizing about Trump’s last days. They always imagine him as Hitler in the bunker, because of the usual suspects. Like kids in the week before Christmas, the Left is sure that any day they will wake up and learn that Trump has been hauled out of the White House in chains to face trial for his crimes.

These postings in the media are mostly part of a well orchestrated propaganda campaign orchestrated by the NeverTrump loons. Like a disease, these people have spread from their warrens in so-called conservative media to all of the mass media. In one of life’s ironies, these people are determined to prove everyone right about the nature of subversives.The NeverTrump leaders have apparently decided that Kevin McDonald’s books were how-to manuals. Thus we get this organized subversion of the media.

Putting that aside, the reason these sites are desperate for trashy stories about Trump being hurled into a dungeon is there is an audience for it. Just as steam whistles like Sean Hannity dominate conservative cable, these sites are catering to an audience that wants to hear confirmation. Because all of the media is run by the usual suspects, this segment has always been over-served, but that does not change the fact the audience exists. In America, there are millions who think Trump is the Hitler described in the prophesies.

The question that arises is what happens if nothing happens? What is palpable on the MAGA side of the world is that the people who voted for Trump are becoming dispirited because he has done pretty much nothing in two years. Nothing that matters to a large swath of his voters. Despite efforts to spin it otherwise, Trump won on immigration and what it represents. His failings on the issue have started to convince many of his supporters that it was all just a big con and nothing was ever going to happen.

Of course, as Trump morphs into Jeb Bush, the Washington political elite has no reason to get rid of him. Trump as useful idiot is certainly better than Trump as martyr. The base of the Democratic party may want impeachment, but the people in charge want the status quo, so they are probably trying to figure out how to look busy, while doing nothing, hoping that is enough for their crazies. The trouble is the NeverTrump loons will never quit, so they will be stoking those fires until the oil runs out.

One result of the Obama years was a rise in black violence, peaking with series of BLM murder sprees set off by the White House. From the 2010 election forward, Team Obama had been working to get their voters angry, hoping that would result in good election results in 2012 and 2014. The trouble was those angry blacks thought it was authentic and they expected something to happen. When it did not happen they decided to take matters into their own hands. The result was a summer of BLM murder and mayhem.

Will something like that be in the cards for the summer of 2019? It’s hard to know, but the Democrats take the House in January and they are showing few signs of restraint. They toned it down a bit in the election in order to not scare the remaining whites in their coalition, but they seem to be determined to go full crazy once in power. Maybe it is just a pose. Perhaps they are hoping a well choreographed bit of theater is enough to satiate the howling mobs of their coalition. Maybe they have unleashed forces they cannot control.

On the other hand, Trump has been a cunning political animal, even if he has been all thumbs when it comes to governance. He clearly thinks having Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi as foils is good for his re-election campaign. That means he will be doing everything he can to poke that hornet’s nest. The stage is set for a year of NeverTrump loons stoking the impeachment fires, while the steam whistles in conservative talk radio and cable TV blow full blast making sure the red hats are fully engaged in the fight.

The trouble with the future is it is unpredictable, so how all this unfolds cannot be known in advance. Most likely, the Democrats have not yet worked out how to proceed and Team Trump is a circus of confusion. Still, the ingredients are in place for a very ugly year and when the Left gets ugly, it always means bloodshed. Now that those Antifa mobs no longer have Richard Spencer to chase around, they will need to do something. Odds are, it means attacking red hat wearing Trump supporters in the coming summer of hate.

After two years in office, Donald Trump finds his presidency at a crossroads. His mode of operation as president has been a continuation of his style as candidate. He says a lot of flippant things about the establishment, many of which are true, but the response is mockery or possibly some pearl clutching. Otherwise, from a policy perspective, the Trump era looks like the Jeb Bush era. The donor class got tax cuts and regulatory reform, while the voters have thus far gotten nothing, other than more of the same.

He can continue down the same path he has been on, reacting to the machinations of his enemies, like a hyper-active version of Richard Nixon, but that promises he will be a one-term president. While the political class ignores him on policy, the Mueller investigation operates like an anaconda wrapped around his administration. It is squeezing the life out of his agenda, by filling the media with salacious nonsense stories and reactions to them, while scaring off serious people interested in joining the administration.

A strange result thus far is that Trump is bad at the thing he was elected to do. That is confront the political class. From the beginning, he has allowed them to push him around and bluff him into bad policy. For example, the Mueller fiasco could have easily been avoided by refusing to appoint the guy. Was the GOP House really going to start impeachment hearings? Would the media be worse on him for not signing off of this ridiculous idea? At every turn, Trump has taken the advice of his enemies.

The conspiratorially minded think the “deep state” has something on him so he is being forced to go along with their agenda. That’s an entertaining theory, but the so-called deep-state has shown itself to be all thumbs when trying to pull off the simplest of capers. The real reason behind his failure thus far is Trump, at heart, still believes in old America, a system of laws and rules where eventually the truth rises to the surface. Trump’s “assault” on the swamp is actually a defense of that old dead American ideal.

After two years of learning that the rule-based system of politics is a myth and what happens in Washington makes New York City real state look innocent, Trump needs to accept the reality of his situation. He can let the Mueller investigation go on forever, as his opponents so desperately desire, or he can end it. If he chooses the former, he is a one-term president whose name will be forgotten. The victors may even have Trump and his family imprisoned, as a warning to others, who dare challenge the establishment.

The other option is to learn a lesson from Lincoln. When you scrape away the slobbering praise from the eventual victors, Lincoln faced a simple dilemma. He could try to preserve the old order, fail and be remembered as a blood thirsty tyrant, who tried to upend the Constitutional order as created by the Founders. Alternatively, he could be the tyrant and overthrow the system, win the war and create a new order. The reason Lincoln is not remembered as the American Sulla is his side won and wrote all of the history books.

That’s the dilemma Trump now faces. He can keep trying to win within the rules being imposed upon him by the establishment, or he can reject those rules entirely. After all, he is in the White House because he did exactly that in the campaign. His primary run was an example of outsider genius to outflank his opponents. His use of novel metrics to create new votes in the general was mostly due to necessity. It is a great reminder that necessity is the mother of invention – and revolutions.

Trump needs to accept that things have a reached the breaking point. It is no longer possible for him to strike a compromise with the establishment. They must be brought to heel and reform must be imposed upon them. They know this, which is why they are endlessly bluffing on what they are doing. Trump needs to call their bluff and fire Mueller, end his investigation and begin the process of investigating the rampant corruption in the intelligence services. More important, he has to be done with flourish.

Imagine news breaks one Friday that the Secret Service has raided the offices and homes of the Mueller team. Their computers, phones and materials were seized and their access to those materials revoked. All of them fired on the spot. Imagine the media hysteria over that move. Now imagine Trump addressing the nation that night, telling the country he has fired Team Mueller and is instructing his new AG to appoint a new special counsel to get to the bottom of the Mueller cover up of the FBI corruption.

That would turn Washington on its ear. When it is further learned that all of the material in the Mueller probe is under 24-hour armed guard and off-limits to everyone until the second investigation is commenced, the game is on. That means the new prosecutor can and will prosecute leaking information in those files. Bob Mueller goes from being the grand inquisitor to a person of interest. His flunkies suddenly become a liability to him and the rest of the conspirators. The rules of the game are suddenly very different.

Would the House Democrats commence impeachment proceedings? Probably. Even if they went forward, would the GOP senate convict? Maybe. There are plenty duplicitous cowards in the Republican Party. A craven loser like Mitt Romney comes to mind. Regardless of how it goes, Trump suddenly becomes an inflection point in the nation’s history. If they remove him from office, exactly no one will believe American democracy is anything but a sham to protect a corrupt ruling elite. The system will be discredited.

That’s where Trump is right now. In a very different context, he is in the same place Lincoln was at when he assumed office. Lincoln could only fail by maintaining the old order, so he had to end the republic. Trump can only fail if he tries to restore the old civic order he fondly remembers from the 1980’s. His choice is to fail or overthrow the current order. The former is a slow death of his administration. They latter does not guarantee success, but it means the end of the old order, for which he will be remembered.

Over the last two plus years, the prevailing assumption has been that the Trump phenomenon is part of a greater populist backlash against the corrosive effects of cosmopolitan globalism. Trump’s alleged populism is linked to nationalist movements in Europe, where natives are rebelling against the migrant invasions. Despite the superficial similarities, what’s happening in America may not be analogous to what’s happening in Europe. Instead, the Trump phenomena may be the last echo of old stock America.

If you look at what Trump has actually done in office, versus what he has said, his presidency has been rather conventional. He has cut a lot of regulations, which is pretty standard Republican stuff. He got a tax overhaul passed, which is also standard issue Republicanism. His judges are all right out of the Federalist society. Otherwise, the Trump administration has been what we would have got from Jeb bush, except the marketing of it has been much more entertaining than what you get from standard issue conservatives.

What Trump’s presidency looks like is an echo of the Reagan presidency. Reagan ran on a platform to roll back the cultural revolution of the 60’s and 70’s. He did not explicitly say it, but that’s what everyone assumed. He talked about shrinking government, reforming taxes, rolling back the cultural excesses like abortion and affirmative action. He also talked about economics and foreign policy, but the people who voted for him were looking at the domestic items. People really believed the Reagan revolution was a rollback.

That last bit has been understandably forgotten by the current ruling class. They don’t even talk about the Reagan Democrat phenomenon. That was the great re-alignment in the 1980’s that carried into the 1990’s. Working class whites, who had always voted Democrat, changed parties over the culture issues. Things like taxes and regulation were nice, but what got them to change parties was the culture war. They voted for Reagan because they believed he would fix everything broken in the 60’s and 70’s.

Instead, Reagan delivered a huge military buildup, massive deficits, bigger government and a debt fueled economic boom. All the talk of entitlement reform ended, for example, when it threatened the military buildup. Despite the enormous support from social conservatives, Reagan delivered nothing on that front. Of course, the currency reforms in the Reagan years made today’s debt boom possible. Then there was immigration reform, which is turning out to be the Gipper’s most important policy achievement.

Reagan was the Baby Boomer’s ideal president, in that he delivered to middle-class boomers exactly what they wanted. They were in their prime work years, so they got low taxes, a roaring economy and booming investment climate. Their parents were getting old, so they got assurance the government would pay for all the entitlements. Of course, the boomer kids were in school, so we got a boom in education spending. Boomers have always been socially liberal, so nothing was ever done to address the cultural stuff.

The way to look at the 1980’s is as an echo of Eisenhower’s America. Watch movies from the period, like Star Wars or Indiana Jones, and what you see are remakes of the wholesome action films middle-class boomers grew up on as kids. Even the foreign policy stuff had a whiff of Eisenhower’s era. Instead of kids hiding under their desks at school, kids watched movies like Red Dawn or The Day After to get good and scared about the the Soviets. The 1980’s were a Spielberg remake of the 1950’s.

Trump won election as a remake of the Reagan election. It’s not a perfect analogy, but people forget that the Gipper talked pretty tough on the campaign trail. The tone police followed him around too. As much as Trump gets cast as the white nationalist’s president, he’s pretty much just standard middle American white guy, in terms of his politics and delivery. Like Reagan, the white working class voted for him thinking he would roll back the last three decades of excess. Just as with Reagan, none of that is going to happen.

Instead, he is delivering what the middle-class boomers want. They are heading into retirement, so keeping the stock market humming and making sure inflation is in check is their top priority. Of course, entitlements cannot be touched. As for immigration, nothing is going to change, because this is not important to them. They live in nice safe suburbs and rely on the little brown guys to mow the lawn. Maybe the visiting nurse is from Trinidad or perhaps the grand kids nanny is a nice Guatemalan woman who is teaching them Mam.

The trouble, of course, is that middle-class boomers are a shrinking block. The invasion plus the actuarial tables are making them less of a factor. The remnants of the old Reagan coalition came out of mothballs to shock the pollsters and the political elite in 2016, but they are not making that mistake again. As we saw in the midterms, they can manufacture all the foreign votes they need to win the 2020 election. This echo of old heritage America, is going to be weaker and shorter than the Reagan echo. It will be the last.

In debates about monetary policy, there is an old saying about the fundamental flaw in hard money arguments. “If your government is so corrupt you need a gold standard to keep it under control, your government is corrupt enough to find a way around the gold standard.“ It is an observation that is fundamentally true about the reality of ruling classes, regardless of the political system. It also speaks to the way liberal democracy warps the way the intellectual classes think about the relationship between ruler and ruled.

In all forms of government prior to the Enlightenment, the defects of the state were assigned to the people in charge of the state. In a tyranny, problems in one of the provinces meant the tyrant replaced the local governor. In a monarchy, bad policy coming from the crown meant the king was the problem. If he was enough of a problem, he would have a hunting accident and there would be a new king. In all forms of personal rule, the assumption is the problems arise from the person doing the ruling, not the system.

Since the Enlightenment, in contrast, whenever problems in governance are discussed, it is assumed that the system is the issue and not the people. This is true within various forms of socialism or liberal democracy. The one obvious exception is Chinese communism, where changing the people is still the rule. Thar’s mostly due to the fact that China was always Chinese first, communist second. Otherwise, the debate about government is about systems rather than the sorts of people who should rule.

All forms of communism start from the assumption that property arrangements, and relationships between property holders, is the basis of human society. This was certainly true of feudalism, but communists picked up where Rousseau left off and assumed property is the fork in the road of human societies. The communist solution is to get rid of property. This allows the scientific socialist to create new social arrangements that are beneficial to all of society. It’s a property solution to the human condition.

Similarly, libertarians start from the assumption that property is the basis of human relations and human society. Contrary to the communist, libertarians see the violation of property rights as the source of human misery. Their solution is to sanctify private property, by re-establishing it as the basis of human relations. That’s the thing about libertarianism. When you strip away the window dressing, it is simply a system property relations. Like communism, it is a property solution to the human condition.

Democratic systems are an effort to address the natural inequality of society by harnessing the will of the majority in the political system. The notion of “one man, one vote” acknowledges that all men may not be equal in wealth and status, but they have an equal stake in society, so they get an equal vote. The flaw is that what is good for the individual is often bad for society. If everyone votes their interests, or what they think of as their interests, you may end up invading Sicily and losing the Peloponnesian War.

Even if democracy does not result in a catastrophic failure, as with the Greeks, the system we call liberal democracy produces unfavorable results. A long observed problem with democracy is something called the Condorcet paradox, where the results swing between two fixed extremes. We see this in American democracy. We get one party in charge for a few elections, then for some reason, the results of the next election go the other way. The last two elections are pretty good example of cyclical results.

That’s the motivation behind schemes like quadratic voting, which seek to tie economic interest to the weight of the vote. The very short version is that everyone gets so much vote capital to spend on the issues they think are important. The greater the interest in an issue, the more voting stock you invest in it. Presumably this means people with no interest in some topic, will not vote on that topic. It is an interesting theory that is not based in reality and could never work in the real world. It’s a fun exercise for the bored.

Again, what you see here, and quadratic voting is a good example, is an effort to arrive at a system solution to the human condition. We know some people are not very smart and are not going to make rational choices when voting. We know there are evil people who will exploit dumb people. Democracy allows for no way to address this, as the starting assumption is all votes are equal, because everyone has the same stake in the outcome of elections. Quadratic voting is a clever attempt at vote-stripping that will fool no one.

The central defect of all political and economic systems since the Enlightenment is they assume there is a rational system that can address the human condition. Whether it was socialists trying to solve the problems that arise from material inequality or the humanists, who seek to address the biological reality of man, the assumption is there is a system that once in place, people will voluntarily support, thus making authority unnecessary. At the heart of all western political philosophy is the dream of voluntarism.

The funny thing is there is never much speculation into why it is or how it is that men voluntarily cooperate. The fascists, to their credit, looked at the brotherhood of trench socialism, as a model for voluntarism. In times of crisis and great danger, men of all classes and interests will join together in the struggle. Marxists came to rely upon perpetual revolution as a way to maintain discipline, but that hardly qualifies as a voluntarist solution to human cooperation. It’s an excuse for state terror.

French conservatives, writing in the later years of the Revolution, probably came the closest to understanding this problem. Joseph de Maistre looked at society as an organic thing, where the parts were defined by their relationship with one another. Individually, they could not exists, because their form and purpose was defined entirely within the state and in relation to the other parts of society. The members of society voluntarily participated in their role, because it is what defined them as human beings.

The fact that the old aristocratic order, that conservatives came to represent, collapsed in the face of Enlightenment radicalism, suggests it either had different defects or never addressed the problem of human cooperation. The long experiment that followed the French Revolution, all the murder and mayhem that defined it, has arrived at the same point as the old aristocratic order. The question is what will come along to push over the liberal democratic order, promising to solve the problem of human cooperation.

Perhaps it is just voluntary, cooperative suicide.

20:00: The internet tells me the polls are closing and both sides are sure their dreamed of result is coming true. I’m listening to the extremely racist and clearly “not who we are” guys at The Right Stuff cover the results. I may flip over and watch Jean-Francois Gariépy and extremely racist and clearly “not who we are” guests. There’s also a strong possibility that I watch a movie or read a book on Puritans I have in the queue. I’m getting the same vibe I had in 2012 when normal people hoped the polls were wrong.

15:00: Someone asked me what I was doing tonight. By that they meant where I would be watching the election results. The answer is, I probably won’t bother watching much of it and may not watch any of it. Getting a pirate feed from one of the cable channels is a hassle,e specially on a big news night. That and the talking heads they have in the studio are offensively stupid now. It has probably always been this way and it is just more obvious now that I never watch the stuff. I’m just not used to it anymore.

Still, it does feel like the quality of public affairs television has dropped significantly since when I started paying attention in the 1980’s. I recall there being a line about public discourse aiming at a ninth grade level audience. I forget the details, but it was soemthing like that about the intelligence of TV news. Admittedly, I’m not around many ninth graders, but I suspect the target IQ of TV these days is in the 80’s. It’s aimed at the sort of people our rulers think will be running America in the not so distant future.

Anyway, I’m not sure how I will track the results. I have to workout, eat dinner and then work on the podcast for this week. Jean-Francois Gariépy will be hosting a live show with some alt-right people, so maybe I’ll watch some of that tonight. The FTN guys are doing a live show, but I have no idea how they are hosting it or where they are hosting it. If I figure that out I’ll post a link here. I should probably figure out how to do live shows, just for events like this. I do have the NPR guy radio voice. May as well use it.

12:45: A great post by Audacious Epigone on the midterms with some good links and a prediction for the outcome. Since I have not offered a prediction, I’ll go ahead and say the GOP ends up with 55 Senate seats, to 45 for the Democrats. I ignore the fake independents, as that’s just a Prog lie. In the House, I said way back that the result will be much closer than Team Brown has been predicting. I’ll go with the Democrats getting 220 seats to capture a razor thin majority. This will set off a circus like we have never seen.

Something that does not get mentioned is there are a dozen or so Democrats running who promised to vote against Pelosi for Speaker. That means anything other than a brown wave results in an ugly leadership fight. The bet made by the leadership was that they could wish themselves into a big majority and vindicate their decision to stagger on long after the expiry date. Anything less than a 20-seat majority is going to call that bluff and lead some of the young non-whites to demand a bigger slice of the leadership pie.

12:30: Someone suggested I re-post this.

11:40: I was a little late getting out of the office to vote. It’s raining heavy today, so that probably tamps down the enthusiasm. This morning I saw a lot of hens that are typically associated with the pink hat nonsense, but when I went back it was mostly blacks and old white people. If you want to see why I oppose democracy in all of its forms, come stand in line to vote in a Lagos election. It’s not just the people voting. It is the circus atmosphere of the people running the polling stations. They will not survive without us.

The one normal person working the station told me the turnout was very light thus far, so I’m a bit more encouraged about what will happen. There’s no logic to it. I just feel better when I know fewer people are voting. The conventional wisdom has always been that the bad guys need high turnout to rig an election. I’m not sure that applies in a place like Lagos, but I don’t know. There’s nothing happening locally to get the native angried up, so maybe this is just a normal turnout on a raining midterm election day

I voted for the Democrat for governor. I know nothing about him, other than he is black and he sounds remarkably stupid. The sitting governor is a white guy and a Republican, but Lagos deserves a king of their own. That and the current governor is a gun grabber, who signed off on a red-flag law that has already led to one murder by the cops. There’s no chance the Nog King will overturn that law, but sometimes the only thing you can hope to do in the voting booth is send a message. I’ll vote for a black moron over a gun-grabber.

08:40: Maybe it will not be a brown wave, so much as a twat wave. I stopped to vote and the place was jammed with middle-aged hens. It is raining here, so I was not about to stand in the rain to throw my vote away. I don’t recall it being that busy when I voted in 2016, but I would not trust my memory. Come to think of it, I went in the mid-morning last time and stood in line for an hour or more. I’ll go over around ten to see what it is like and that will be a better comparison. Still, seeing all of those hens was ominous.

07:00: Every once in a while, I get a request for an open thread on a topic, inviting commentary from the readers. Famous blogs like Star Slate Codex and Steve Sailer do this with some frequency, so it has been suggested I give it a try. According to the people who rule over us, the prophesies have foretold that today is when we are cleansed of our sins by the great brown wave. If this is indeed the end of the honky hegemony, we may as well enjoy it with a bit of running commentary. Perhaps today is the end of the world.

For those looking for some nitty-gritty analysis of the House and Senate races, here is a deep-dive on the former and one on the latter by Ethnark and McFeels at FTN. I have to say, I don’t watch or listen to any mainstream political chat shows these days. I’ll catch clips from Tucker once in a while, but otherwise I skip all of it. I make an exception for the FTN shows, because they do a very good job analyzing the news of the day in a format that is not openly hostile to my existence. I recommend their shows to the curious.

I’ve been puzzled about this midterm for a while. For starters, the Senate is going to swing to the Right this year. No pollster questions this. It is mostly due to so many Democrats up for re-election. In other words, when a Democrat cannot hide in the pack, like in a House race, they are in trouble. That’s why the predictions for a brown wave in the House strikes me as unlikely. A reader pointed out that the one election in modern times to be a split decision was 1970. Usually, both chambers move the same way in a midterm.

The thing about 1970 that makes it salient is the Left back then was going through a spasm of self-destructive lunacy similar to what we see today. They were also sure Nixon was Hitler. The big difference though is the Democrat leadership back then was not insane and the Democrats were in firm control of politics. They were the majority party with control of the House and control of most state houses. They also had 57 seats in the Senate prior to the election. In other words, beyond the superficial, there is no comparison.

Back when this brown wave stuff started in the media, I did a post on the House races, just looking for the number of seats that were legitimately in play this year. The most generous estimate is about 35, with a handful that are new due to redistricting. Incumbents just don’t lose very often and gerrymandering has made 80% of the House seats safe for one party or the other. Can the Dems win the House? Sure, but it is going to be very close and their majority will be very thin. Narrow majorities in the House are unworkable.

The funny thing is Trump will be guaranteed re-election in 2020 if the Democrats take the House, especially if Pelosi is the Speaker again. That ridiculous old bag is a great reminder of why no sane white person should ever vote Democrat. Trump does his best work when he has a foil and the Democrats in the House are a great freak show for him to use as props for the next two years. Given how quickly whites are figuring out the changing demographics, having anti-whites running the House is manna from heaven.