Category Archives: Politics

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.

Getting Right

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Vox Day posted something the other day that was particularly wrong in some important ways. This bit is what caught my attention.

As John Red Eagle and I chronicled in detail in Cuckservative: How “Conservatives” Betrayed America, conservatism has not only failed, it was always doomed to eventual failure by virtue of its very nature. It was an attitude and a defensive posture, not a coherent ideology or an identity, and it lacked positive objectives, so it never had any hope of resisting the relentless ideological onslaught of the Left.

The first thing I think he has very wrong is to call Official Conservatism an attitude. That’s pretty much the opposite of reality. Official Conservatism is a collection of policy items held together by a pose, which is just a sales strategy. Things like low taxes and limited business regulation are policy goals. The stuffy smugness you see from big foot conservatives is a pose, a sale pitch they think helps sell their proposal. It is intended to inoculate them from being called simple minded by the Progressives.

This is in sharp contrast to the traditional American conservatism which is, in fact, an attitude or a temperament. It is a set of preferences that Michael Oakeshott spelled out a million years ago in his essay On Being Conservative. “To be conservative is to be disposed to think and behave in certain manners; it is to prefer certain kinds of conduct and certain conditions of human circumstances to others; it is to be disposed
to make certain kinds of choices.” In other words, conservatism is a disposition.

This is why Buckley-style conservatism could never outlive its age. It was tied to a specific set of public polices that only made sense in the context of the age in which they were conjured. In the Cold War, business friendly taxes and regulation, along with a muscular defense policy make perfect sense as a rebuttal to the dominant Progressive ideology. Once the Cold War ended, the justifications for Buckley-style conservatism ended. It became a body with no soul to animate it.

That touches on the another error in the Vox post. Buckley Conservatism did not fail because it lacked an ideological underpinning. It failed because it had one, or at least tried hard to fashion one, out of the collection of policy goals we associate with Official Conservatism. As Russell Kirk observed, “conservatism is the negation of ideology: it is a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order.” Put another way, Buckley built a movement that he dressed up in the garb of of conservatism.

The attempt to create an ideology that could coexist with a despairing acceptance of the human condition, meant that the movement would always be riddled with cracks. Just as important, because it was a political movement, it was always willing to toss aside that which it found politically inconvenient. It’s why the Buckleyites purged so many people over the decades. Guys like Steve Sailer were shipped out because they were politically inconvenient, not because they were wrong about what was happening in the culture.

Inevitably, an ideology demands that the adherent accept things that are in direct contradiction with observable reality. That’s both the attraction and the defect of ideology. Those with a conservative temperament were always going to be skeptical of the projects championed by the Official Right. Public policy is about accepting less than perfect trade-offs. In the Cold War, the threat of the Soviets enforced a degree of accommodation. When that ended, the divorce was inevitable.

The interesting thing about what is happening is that the guys calling themselves “conservative” are fighting against what is, in fact, the reemergence of the old traditional conservatism. The mild isolationism, practical nationalism and biological realism are just the old ideas that were once common in America, before the ideologues gained the upper hand in the 20th century. All those fringe types the Buckleyites purged, turned out to be a majority and now the Buckleyites are looking like a collection of fringe weirdos.

That’s the other thing Vox has wrong. The alt-right is not an ideology and it is never going to be one. As soon as guys like Vox are able to create one, it will cease being of any interest to anyone outside it. The reason this thing they call the alt-right works is that it is not an ideology. It is just a long series of inconvenient observations repeated daily on social media and elsewhere. Posting FBI crime stats on Facebook is not the makings of a mass movement. It is the undoing of one. That’s what makes it so dangerous.

National Populism

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If you were of an intellectual after the Great War, you would have formed your thoughts and opinions in the shadow of what was the most horrific cataclysm to strike the civilized world since the collapse of the Roman Empire. J.R.R. Tolkien, for example, fought at the Somme in the Great War. The images of which were in his mind as he wrote his legendary work, The Lord of the Rings. Not only would the images of the war be always on your mind, the causes of the war would also be at the center of your thinking.

If you were an intellectual in France after the Second World War, you would have developed your moral philosophy in the shadow of two massive industrial wars that very nearly extinguished civilization. It is nearly impossible for modern people to imagine what life was like for Europeans, and to a lesser degree Americans, following two civilization wrecking wars. It was not the physical devastation that haunted the minds of Europeans. It was what caused it that haunted the people of the West.

After the Great War, people on both sides of the conflict blamed their leaders for the bloodbath. Germans soldiers thought their leaders had stabbed them in the back and brought shame on Germany. The French soldiers largely agreed with them, even though France came out as the victor. If you had fought in the war, it was hard to find a reason for it and benefit to it, regardless of which side you were on in the fight. Winning looked a lot like losing. Intellectuals blamed the people in charge for the disaster.

After the Second World War, it was no longer possible to just blame the leaders. The people in charge in the Second World War had lived through the Great War. Many had fought in the trenches. Many had dedicated their lives to preventing such a thing from happening again. Neville Chamberlain is vilified today, but he was not alone in thinking that any peace was better than war. Yet, within a generation, Europe was in rubble after another industrial war that killed millions. There had to be a reason.

The thinking classes settled upon nationalism. For the last half century the belief among the ruling classes is that national identity always ends in conflict. In a world with nuclear weapons, national conflict is annihilation. Therefore, blunting national identity and nationalism has been the the raison d’être of Western ruling classes for half a century. It is what has driven the integration of Europe into a single political entity. It is what is behind things like the World Bank, global trade deals and the IMF.

It has become an article of faith that open borders and unlimited migration are the ultimate solution to the problem of nationalism. If people are free to move around as they please and homogeneous communities are diluted by foreigners with no allegiance to local customs, there can be no national identity and therefore no threat of nationalism. It is why European leaders cling to mass migration in the face of local opposition. They see the opposition as the problem they are trying to solve.

It is why Western intellectuals are scrambling to figure out how to blunt the rising tide of discontent all over the West. Brexit was the first big jolt to the system. The election of Donald Trump is is the second. The next year is promising more body blows to the status quo. The Italians got to the polls next to vote on a referendum that is largely seen as a proxy vote on the European project. In France, Marie Le Pen is suddenly looking like a possibility. Then there are populist uprisings all over like the recent one in Catalan.

The thing is, there are two brands of nationalism The Germans and the French were not driven to slaughter one another because French truffle hunters hated German watch makers. The people of France did not care about the people of Germany until their leaders insisted they care. Millions of men were called to battle by leaders appealing to their sense of national duty and their patriotism. Europe was not dragged into two wars by populist movements. It was dragged into two wars by the greed of its rulers.

The nationalism that is sprouting up between the paving stones of globalism is nothing like the ruling classes imagine because it is organic. Human beings are tribal, clustering together with those who share a common biology, ancestry and heritage. The flood of migrants sponsored by the ruling classes looks like an invasion at the street level so people at the street level are responding. The fact that their leaders not only refuse to help, but actively aid the invading foreigners, is not going unnoticed but the public.

A century ago, the nationalism of the West was a top down phenomenon. National socialism was embraced by large swaths of the political and intellectual classes. Mussolini was celebrated in America as a model for Progressive rule. The virulent nationalism that is blamed for the great wars was always a ruling class phenomenon. It simply exploited the public’s sense of civic duty and national identity. Blaming low-church nationalism for the Nazis is blaming the the gun for the murderer.

National Populism is a bottom up phenomenon. The people organizing resistance to the globalists are doing so out of self-defense. AfD is not planning to invade Poland. The alt-right is not looking to invade Mexico and claim it for the United States. UKIP is not interested in rebuilding the Empire. The populist movements of the West are simply a response in self defense to global elites that no longer respect the people over whom they rule. They are the backlash to the relentless front lash of multiculturalism.

The logical end of these populist movements is that everyone goes back to where they belong to live in peace. Unlike the nationalism of a century ago, National Populism is not ambitious. It is mildly isolationist and inward looking. A century ago Western rulers were swollen by excessive pride. Today, populist dissenters are simply interested in crawling out from under a half century of shame, heaped upon them by people who claim to be their betters. National Populism is nothing more than the a return to normalcy.

Data Driven Nonsense

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When I was a young man starting out in the world, I was once given an assignment for the marketing people. The job was to gather up and detail the costs of various marketing programs. For some reason they did not track these things in the accounting system. That meant I had to rummage through filing cabinets pulling out invoices and then tabulating the results in a spreadsheet. My guess is I was given the task mostly because I was the only guy who could use Lotus 1-2-3.

I gathered up all the data for the periods in question and put together a report. Out of curiosity, and to be a suck up, I created s chart that showed the impact of various marketing efforts on sales. I even factored in things like the number of peak sales days in a month and adjusted the results to reflect these variances. What jumped out to me was that marketing did nothing for sales. I then expanded the data range to include previous years and it was more obvious. Our marketing was a waste of money.

I was young, but I was not an idiot so I gave the VP of marketing the numbers without my analysis. He then used them in his presentation, in which he claimed to be the key to the company’s success. I sat watching it waiting for someone to point out that he was full of baloney, but no one did. What I realized was everyone believed in these types of marketing schemes. They had to work because everyone did them. The VP of marketing liked his job so he told everyone what they wanted to hear.

The point of this walk down memory lane is that people have been using data to lie to one another long before we had cheap database software and Chinese quants cranking out reports. My bet is the first modern humans to migrate out of Africa had a meeting where Grog held up a skin, with marks on it, that he claimed was proof that slow food and fast women were just over the horizon. Data analysis is often just another form of magic that we use to grease the wheels of life.

This always comes to mind when I hear political types talk about their data operations. Reince Priebus is running around saying it was the GOP data operations that got the Trump vote out on Tuesday. He was on the radio claiming that his team “knew what people ate for lunch, when they went to work and how they voted in the past” so they could target these voters and get them to the polls. He made it sound like they had studied all of us since birth so they could maximize their vote.

This is nonsense. Trump had none of this stuff in the primary and he poleaxed everyone in his way. His “ground game” was to go on TV and radio and be interesting. Then he went on Twitter to give reporters something to ask him. In the general, he preferred the old fashioned whistle stop tour. Instead of a train, he flew around on his plane and did stadium shows near airports. His campaign was lean and mean, avoiding the trap of hiring an army of experts. Trump was outspent something close to 5-to-1 when including outside groups.

The fact is people buy stuff because they think they need it. They buy your stuff because they think it is cheaper or they think it has high status. I have a $200 Windows phone because it does everything I would want to do on an iPhone. My friends all have iPhones because they think it makes them look smart and hip. No amount of analytics are going to get me to buy an $800 iPhone nor will it make the cheap mobile phones hip and trendy.

Similarly, people vote for a few reasons, one of which is tribal loyalty. I know people who will never vote for a Republican, even if the Democrat is an ax murder. No amount of data analysis is going to alter that reality. The persuadable, on the other hand, can be persuaded if the candidate is appealing and offers them something they want. Similarly, the loyalists will turn out if they like their candidate and he has something to offer. Again, big data has nothing to do with it.

I suspect Trump’s reluctance to sign off on the big data operations, in his campaign, was due to the fact he has spent his life sitting through presentations in which clever guys tried to baffle him with data. Early in his career, he was the guy doing the baffling, as he convinced bankers and investors that his projects were going to make money.  Over a long career he has figured out that the basics of sales are immutable and the rest if just window dressing.

That’s not to say that all data analysis is nonsense. Steve Sailer has used publicly available voting data to analyze the lunacy of Official Conservatism™. It’s just that big data is not terribly useful in selling a candidate or a political party. Hillary Clinton allegedly had the greatest data team in the history of data teams. She had Google, Faceberg and Twitter working with the DNC to aid her data team. She lost because she is an awful person with nothing to offer.

But, that’s not what the data says, or at least it is not what the quants analyzing the data will say it says. Instead, they will work for the next year building after action reports loaded with jargon from statistics and demography, that will prove she just needed a bigger data operation and more “granular analysis in real time.” In 2020, the one-legged Latina lesbian the Democrats offer up against Trump will have the best data team and ground game in the history of mankind.

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.

Ivy Day In The Blogosphere

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The first election in which I had an emotional investment was the 1976 presidential election. I was only ten years old, but we were Democrats so I got to vote anyway. In fact, I voted several times that day, along with all of my dead relatives and their dead friends. I’m kidding, of course, but it was the first time I cared about an election. I grew up in a Democrat family, but some family members were breaking ranks with the party and that made for some ugly conversations at Sunday dinner.

Despite my Southern sensibilities, I was not a Carter fan. Even at that age, I was a bit of a contrarian. There was just something about Carter that bothered me. There was that and the fact that the hard core Nixon haters in my family were nuts. There was an aunt that always went on and on about her trip to San Francisco in the 60’s. She was well on her way to becoming a cat lady. The big Nixon hater was an uncle, who was big into Kennedy conspiracy stuff. It just seemed to me that Carter people were not all there.

It was also my first lesson in the reality of politics. People don’t vote their interests. They vote for their tribe, their religion, their race, whatever. Carter won in 1976 by carrying the South. He was an Evangelical and a Georgian, so he won on a combination of rust belt states, the South and Appalachia. Even 40 years ago, it was crazy for Southerners to vote for a Democrat, but people convinced themselves he was not a crazy liberal. After all, he was a devout Christian and a Southerner. He could’t be that liberal.

The first election that shocked me was me was the 1988 Democrat primary. I was living in Massachusetts and I knew Dukakis was a joke. How that guy managed to win the nomination still baffles me. There was no chance for the party that year, as Reagan was so popular, even Bush was a shoe in. Still, nominating a guy, who makes the clerks at the DMV sound bright and interesting never made any sense. It just goes to show that determination and luck are what counts in politics.

The thing about that election that will always stick with me is when Bush did his “Read my lips. No new taxes” line. At that moment, I knew he was going to be a fink. The reason he said it was because he knew everyone knew he was going to raise taxes, so he lied. Of course, it did not take Bush long to prove he was liar all along. Little did I know that his presidency was the beginning of the end for the country. The downward trajectory of the GOP and the country started in the ’88 election.

While I’m on the subject of Bush, the first time I thought seriously about not voting was the 2000 election. I was pretty sure Bush would win handily so my boycotting the election would not be irresponsible. For whatever reason I could not go through with it so I stopped at my polling place on the way to work. I was shocked to see so many people voting and the type of people voting. I got the very clear impression that lots of liberals were motivated to vote against Bush. I came away thinking it was going to be a long night.

The funny thing about that election is normals assumed we dodged a bullet, but in retrospect we would have been better off if Gore had won. It would have discredited the neocons and put an end to the Bush dynasty. Gore was having a nervous breakdown, but that could have been handled. We still have no come up with a way to fix the disaster that was the Bush presidency. I don’t know if it will ever be fixed. My bet is a lot of people think back and wish that they had voted the other way back in 2000.

My first non-vote was 2012. I hated Romney, but I wanted to punish Obama so I went off to do my duty. I watched a bus full of little brown guys ushered in by an SEIU worker. They were given provisional ballots and someone who spoke their languages guided them through the process. I stood in line watching it as a fat girl with blue hair tapped at her cell phone. She had a face full of fishing tackle and probably the IQ of a goldfish. Disgusted, I went home without voting. That was a good day.

I’ll head off to vote for the last time in my life tomorrow and I will vote for Trump, even though he has no chance to win my state. It will be the last time we have a chance to vote for someone that is not a nut or a grifter. If Clinton wins, she will amnesty 50 million foreign peasants, creating something close to a one party nation as a result. America will rocket along toward becoming Brazil, if we’re lucky. The crazy bitch could very well start a war with Russia or the Chinese and that could finish us all off.

It was fun while it lasted.

Testing The Theories

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The thing about elections is they test various theories about the direction of the country, the strategies of the party elites and the pet theories of the talking heads representing the ideological sides of the ruling class. In predictable elections like 2012, everyone can hedge enough to look like they have a bead on things, but 2016 is not one of those elections. No one really knows how things will turnout on Tuesday. That’s leaving all the so-called experts out on one limb or another, ready to have it sawed off by the voters.

The first camp that will probably plunge to the ground are those who have been saying Trump is outlandishly unacceptable. These are the the NeverTrump loons mostly, but there are some Progressive nutters in this group. These are the people that have been predicting a blowout for Clinton, even suggesting she will usher in a permanent realignment. After all, Trump’s pro-evil message and buffoonish style will be resoundingly rejected by the voters and that’s going to damage the Republican brand for a generation.

There’s not way to interpret the polling that says this will happen. The most likely scenario, as of this writing, is the slimmest of slim victories for Clinton. Even Nate Silver says she is one close state flipping away from defeat. If she is going to win, it is going to be the narrowest win possible and closer that what Obama did four years ago. At the minimum, it says the message was fine, but the campaign strategy was poorly executed and a slightly less eccentric messenger would have won.

The next group plunging to earth tomorrow will be those claiming that Trump’s message appeals only to white nationalists. This group should already be on the turf as it is clear that Trump is doing just as well as any Republican with blacks and Hispanics. There’s a lot of polling that suggests he is doing better than previous Republicans with both groups. The only thing that will keep this group of experts around after the election is they are shameless and facts simply don’t matter.

One branch over in the canopy are the TrueCons and Movement Conservatives that have been arguing that Trump is not conservative and only a real conservative can win against a Liberal Democrat. These are the folks debating the proper use of semicolons in the tax code. They need a Clinton landslide to avoid having their limb sawed off tomorrow. The weight of their own perfidy has caused many to plunge to the earth in the primary, but there are still some hanging on, going on about principled conservatism.

Then we have the amnesty crowd. This is going to be interesting to watch as they are almost as fanatical as the NeverTrump loons. A Trump loss will temp them to say amnesty is the only way to prevent this from happening again, but that’s going to be a tough sell. A Trump win takes the issue off the table. The only way these people can claim victory on Tuesday is if Trump losses and it is the result of losing states with heavy Hispanic populations. This is looking unlikely, but that’s their one hope.

Similarly, there have been those who have argued that immigration and amnesty are simply toxic issues. They are third rail issues. The solution is to ignore them or suck it up and pass amnesty so the issue is off the table for another generation. This is a popular cop-out with Republicans as it makes them look like they are reluctant to cave to Democratic pressure, but it keeps the Progressives from calling them racist. The results thus far make clear that this is ridiculous, but a Trump win should kill this one off for a generation.

My favorite election theory this cycle has been the howling from the political class about the need for a ground game. That means the need to hire thousands of their friends into do-nothing jobs for the campaigns. Trump has run a lean and mean campaign in the primary and the general. The political professionals hate him for it. If he wins, then we probably see a new style of electioneering modeled on what he did in 2016. A loss and we get a barrage of opinion from these people claiming they were right all along.

Then there is the Depressive Right’s argument that the country is lost due to demographics. These are the people who drink vinegar for breakfast. Because of immigration, there’s simply no way to win on anything other than a statist agenda. The electoral map has been rigged and the only way a Republican can compete is to out globalist the Democrats. The result will be a slow march toward the abyss as the country cracks up under the inevitable strains of multiculturalism, tribalism and globalist economics.

This is the one group with the best chance to be proved right tomorrow. Trump has his flaws, but his message is fundamentally pro-American, while Clinton is running an anti-American campaign. If that is not enough, Clinton is clearly the least moral and least honest politician any of us has seen in our lifetime. If the voters still reject Trump, then there is no reason to think there is a way to win an election on a pro-American, patriotic message. The people have quit on themselves and the country.

Then there is the Sailer theory of recent elections, which is that the GOP has been shedding white voters and therefore their prospects have dimmed. Those white voters are not voting for the other party in great numbers. Instead, they stay home, dropping out of the system. If the data from the primary is correct and Trump is pulling those forgotten voters back in, then this validates Sailer’s thesis. This may not be obvious for a while after the election, but this election will be a good test case.

This brings up another theory, one that is quietly being discussed in Progressive circles. You can make an argument that someone lacking Clinton’s ugly corruption and even uglier personality would be headed for a landslide right now. After all, the least appealing candidate in human history is one state from winning the election. Imagine if she did not have the sex appeal of a pit viper. The point being, even a narrow loss will seem to prove that post-Americanism is a winner or at least a potential winner, with the right candidate.

Time will tell.

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.

 

Call Me Swamp Thing

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Way back in the Clinton Administration, I had the opportunity to socialize with Chris Mathews at a small dinner function. It was one of those charity deals where they have some important person give a little speech and chit-chat with the attendees. This was before Mathews had his mental breakdown so he was good fun, despite being a Lefty. People forget that he was not great fan of the Clintons, even though he was always a loyal party man.

This was the mid-90’s and the Drudge Report had just gone up as a website. Americans were flocking to computer stores to buy modems so they could use that AOL disk they got in the mail. I forget what we were discussing, but at some point I got the impression that Mathews simply had no idea the internet existed. I made mention of something about on-line news and Mathews had this puzzled look, then said, “Oh, you mean that internet thing.” He was unaware of the biggest technological event since the steam engine.

It is a story I like to tell as way to illustrate that people in the national media don’t live in America like the rest of us. The old joke in DC was that the big media outfits sent their foreign correspondents to cover stories in Ohio. That’s an exaggeration, but our national media does live in bubble. They can, when they feel like it, do a good job telling the rest of us about the doings in politics, but otherwise they are baffled about what happens out among the Dirt People. You see that in this Megan McArdle column.

How can the Republican Party keep another Trump candidacy from derailing its future electoral chances? Forget messing around with the primary system. If Republicans want a party that can win, says Catherine Rampell of the Washington Post, the first thing they need to do is to “drain the right-wing media swamp.”

“It is, after all, the right-wing radio, TV and Internet fever swamps that have gotten them into this mess,” she writes, “that have led to massive misinformation, disinformation and cynicism among Republican voters. And draining those fever swamps is the only way to get them out of it.”

I could point out that Rampell is remarkably ungenerous in ignoring the many serious conservative journalists who spoke out early and often against Donald Trump, including an entire “Against Trump” issue of the National Review, the elder statesman of right-wing journalism. (The National Review also printed an editorial unequivocally stating that then-President-Elect Barack Obama was a natural-born U.S. citizen.) None of this had much effect on folks like Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity, nor does it seem to have appreciably damaged Trump. It’s unclear how the Republican establishment critiquing Fox News and talk radio would be any more effective.

Note the pleading in there about how “serious conservative journalists” are anti-Trump. McArdle plays a libertarian on approved media sites. Libertarian in this context is the house broken type that Progressives will tolerate. These are the low-tax liberals, who are the first to answer the call when it comes time to make war on the crime-thinkers. In the current crisis, this manifests as obsequious rumpswabbery where the “libertarian” comes close to begging the loopy liberal woman for mercy.

Let me suggest a better strategy. Liberal journalists who want to drain the “fever swamps” should not be pointing the finger at Republican politicians. If they want to get people out of the swamp, they’ll have to make room in the castle.

The media is overwhelmingly liberal. It tends to mirror the left-to-center-left spectrum of the social class from which most journalists are drawn. That affects coverage, which right-wing readers pick up on.

Yes, liberal journalists, I’m saying that the media is biased, and I know you don’t see any evidence of that, because that’s how bias works: You don’t notice it when you share the bias. No, my loonier Republican readers, I am not confirming your belief that journalists deliberately slant their coverage to achieve political ends or even just to provoke you.

The not-so-subtle condescension here is what always gets me about these people. Instead of “right-wing readers” I suspect she wanted to write “slack-jawed yokels.” In case that’s not clear, she makes sure her Progressive friends all know that she thinks people like you are loony. Most of what passes for conservative or libertarian opinion in the media is really just moral signalling. In this case, McArdle wants her Progressive friends to remember she is not one of those disgusting Trump people.

Conservative media, in other words, became an ideological ghetto. And ghettos often develop pathologies. What’s remarkable is not that so much of the right-wing media is so vitriolic and prone to conspiracy-mongering; what’s remarkable is that so many of those outlets remain committed to careful reporting and debunking things like the Obama birth certificate nonsense, rather than simply pandering to their readers.

The defining feature of Official Conservatism™ and its retarded little brother, Reason Libertarianism, is a fear of being “ghettoized” which is the scare word for being left out of the Progressive party circuit. They fear that more than death. If the price of admission means mocking and ridiculing the people whose interests they claim to champion, that’s a price they are more than happy to pay.

I’m not blaming liberals for the rise of the conservative-media ghetto. “Blame” implies that someone made a decision to make this happen. The thing is, no one made any such decision. There was no secret plan.

There was certainly no liberal media conspiracy, just an iterative process controlled by no one: Being human, liberals naturally prefer the work of folks who agree with them, so those are the folks they tend to hire and promote.  As they became increasingly dominant in the media, the trend became self-reinforcing. Fewer conservatives wanted to enter the castle in the first place, and few were allowed to. Now the castle residents are peering into the swamp and wondering what the heck is going on out there.

I suspect she had to fight back tears writing those two graphs.

But whoever is to blame for the problem, yelling at the residents of the swamp to behave themselves is probably not going to fix it. What would fix the problem is if the folks in the castle made a concerted effort to open the doors and persuade some of the swamp-dwellers to move inside. Not just to move inside, but to help run the place, pushing back on liberal pieties and dubious claims with the same fervor that liberals push back on conservative ones.

Call me Swamp Thing.

One of the amusing aspects of these columns is that people like McArdle are just as clueless about life outside the bubble as her moonbat friends. She positions herself as soul sister number one, down with those loony Dirty People in the swamp, but she would break out in hives reading the sorts of things that are coming from the Dissident Right. The fundamentals of what is driving the rebellion against the elites is well outside the field of vision for people like McArdle. She does not know what she does not know.