Another Progressive Fusillade Goes Awry

 

In his tireless battle against Critical Race Theory (CRT), the latest allotrope of vicious anti-white, polymorphously perverse Marxist ideology, Rufo has had signal success.

He has succeeded in bringing the truth about CRT to the public’s attention, and his work has inspired a significant backlash.

He has inspired legislation in more than a dozen states and even a presidential order (though not, of course, by the current president) to check this moral Trojan Horse.

The Empire always Strikes Back, however.

The woke watchmen at the citadels of orthodoxy have begun to sit up, take notice, and sound the alarm about this patient and methodical gadfly buzzing about their efforts to subvert the wholesome, race-blind canons of liberal education as traditionally conceived.

Rufo’s critics face two huge hurdles.

One, CRT and allied ideologies are every bit as toxic as Rufo says.

To describe CRT is to discredit it, and Rufo describes it in patient, if not exactly loving, detail.

Two, those attacking Rufo seem to believe that by saying he represents an assault on “progressive” sentiment they have landed a damaging blow.

They don’t understand that, like Br’er Rabbit, he glories in being tossed into the Briar Patch of anti-progressive reaction

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Read the whole thing

Mark Steyn on why "GOP Inc." is such a loser!

Steyn wrote this when Trump was campaigning for the Republican nomination.  It's amazing how true it is, how much has changed and how much change is still needed.

If the national GOP is a vehicle for ensuring that John Boehner, Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan have a car and driver and a Gulf emir-sized retinue, then it's very effective. If it's a vehicle for advancing conservative principles, then it's a rusted-up lemon on cinder blocks. At an event with Newt Gingrich about a decade ago, one of my neighbors asked why the Republicans were so ineffectual. Newt said it was because they're still getting used to being the majority party. Somebody responded, "So the Iraqis are supposed to get the hang of self-government after six months, but the Republican Party still can't manage it after ten years?"

For many conservative voters, 2014 was the GOP's last chance, and they blew it. For those conservative voters whose priority is immigration, 2016 is America's last chance, and Trump's the only reason anyone's even talking about that.

Conservatives are those with positions supported by the left ten years ago

Mark Steyn notes why "Conservatives" have been losing the culture wars, well, forever.

Indeed. In 2000, when the Vermont Supreme Court mandated same-sex "civil unions", American conservatives were outraged. By 2010, when the left had moved on to gay marriage, conservatives were supportive of civil unions but insisted marriage was an ancient institution between a man and a woman. Now, the left having won that one and moved on to transgenderism, conservatives profess to be a bit queasy about transitioning grade-schoolers.

So you can take it to the bank that by 2030 rock-ribbed Republicans will be on board with penises in the girls' changing rooms, but determined to hold the line against whatever the left's next cause du jour is: human cloning, the state appropriation of parenthood, voting rights for animals.

There really isn't much point to conservatism that's just leftism ten years late, is there? ... If you're considering on which side to bestow your tribal loyalty, the left is right quicker; the right is left behind - but only for a few years until they throw in the towel. If you're all headed to the same destination, why not ride first class ...? Justin Trudeau's vapid modishness was perfectly distilled by his campaign catchphrase of four years ago: "Because it's 2015." But that beats waiting till 2025 to say "Because it's 2015"....

It is surely telling that the only issues on which the right has made any progress at all in moving the ball in its direction - Brexit in the UK; illegal immigration and a belated honesty about the rise of China in the US - had to be injected into public discourse by two outsiders, Nigel Farage and Donald Trump. And indeed in the teeth of opposition by the establishment's catch-up conservatives.

Catch-up conservatism gives the game away: The right has lost the knack of persuasion, and increasingly doesn't even bother to try.

He's right, you know. Today's "conservatives" - the Never-Trump rump of Conservatism in particular, are busy defending gay marriage from the LGBTQ crazies. How supine do you have to be to defend yesterday's heresy from tomorrow's insanity?

Kurt Schlichter: The Conservative Case For Conservatism

A so-called "conservative" arguing about making Puerto Rico a state gets slapped down by Schlichter:

The article’s sub-headline gives away the game: “Besides being the right thing to do, it could reawaken Americans to the necessity of our Constitution’s federalist principles.” Now, the federalist principles stuff is just silly. That federalism is good does not somehow translate into it being a good idea to take a long-term possession with a different culture, relative poverty, and substantial corruption, and make it a state. Economically, it would be a liability, not an asset. Moreover, a good bunch of Puerto Ricans do not want federalism, or any other -ism associated with the US of A. They want independence, and they have shot up the House of Representatives, bombed New York City, and tried to off Harry Truman to make their point. Why again do we want to pay two new Democrat senators to buy ourselves an insurrection?

But the really bad part of the argument is that first part: It’s “the right thing to do.”

No, no it’s not. Stop that. That’s of a kind with the “BUT OUR PRINCIPLES!” ploy we’ve seen so often lately – a good rule of thumb is that anyone who starts babbling about “principles” is trying to shaft you. You will inevitably observe that these often newly-discovered “principles” always apply to decrease your power, your rights and your wealth, yet never, ever, apply to the hustlers who are demanding that you observe them.

Who is dividing the Conservative Movement?

Let me count the ways.

Could it be that it was the time when so-called “principled conservatives” decided that they would not support the Republican nominee? Even though Trump has backed and enacted more conservative ideas and programs than any president in memory, the cucks not only turned their backs on him, they actively backed the Democrats.

Rich Lowery’s NR gang called for Trump’s defeat before, during and after the last Presidential election.

Not a day passes without Bill Kristol demanding someone, anyone, deny Trump re-nomination.

“Conservative” columnist George Will left the Republican Party and called for Republicans to lose in a landslide because of Trump.

“Conservative” columnist Jennifer Rubin is a Trump obsessed zealot who changes her position moment by moment to oppose Trump’s even if in the previous moment she professed the exact opposite.

“Conservative” columnist Max Boot has gone on CNN to give the nation 18 reasons why Trump is a Manchurian Candidate controlled by Putin and ready to surrender the US to Russia.

I’m just a humble nobody with no national audience. But those who have that audience have been trying their best to destroy the most effectively conservative president since Reagan. I suspect it’s because they were fine with losing if they were leading the losing team. They were the stars of the political Washington Generals, the were comfortably rich where they were and fear that if the political winds actually change their fecklessness and ineffectiveness will be exposed.

Fortunately, most conservatives support conservative programs and actions no matter who implements them. If your paycheck comes from the Washington Post your honesty may be questionable.

Why is the non-ideological Donald Trump able to implement conservative principles when previous Republican presidents failed?

It occurred to me in a flash of insight that one of the reason that Trump has successfully implemented some of the fundamental objectives of Conservatism was because he’s faced an unprecedented amount of hate from a broad spectrum of people.

Everyone agrees that he does not have an ideological bone in his body.  So why is he managing to implement so many Conservative goals when, with the possible exception of Reagan, previous Republican presidents failed to do so?   Why is he willing to back dramatic cuts in taxes for corporations, dramatically cut the regulatory environment, and drastically expand the production and use of fossil fuels?   

Conservative theory holds that corporations don’t pay taxes; they just pass them along to consumers so cutting corporate taxes increase economic activity.  Conservatives have campaigned against the regulatory state for as long as I have been alive, yet the regulatory state has grown under Democrats and Republicans.  Global Warming has been exposed as Fake Science for decades yet Republicans have gone along with the lie that it’s a threat out of fear of being labelled science deniers.   

Trump signed the largest corporate tax cut in history.  Trump is slashing regulations.  Trump pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord and supports increased oil, gas and coal production.    

So what gives the most reviled President the courage to make moves that terrified his Republican predecessors?  I think that Solzhenitsyn provided a clue when he wrote (in the First Circle): “You only have power over people so long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything he’s no longer in your power — he’s free again.”

He was talking about prisoners.  But it applies in politics as well.  Politicians, more so than other people, depend on public opinion as both a weapon and a shield.  They can use favorable public opinion to advance their agenda but are acutely conscious of public opinion being used to reduce their power and to affect their re-election.  

Previous Republican politicians did not have opponents who were seeking to totally destroy them and their families.  They were not going to leave office financial ruined.  Their families were not threatened with jail, or worse.  They media and the culture were not out to assassinate them. 

In an unprecedented way, the insane level of vitriol directed at Trump frees him caving to the press and his political enemies.  He knows that they don’t want him to modify his policies but to overturn the election, to destroy him and remove him from office.  That leaves him free to counter-attack rather than hunker down as previous presidents did.  

He knows that the only people he has to care about satisfying is his political base.  That's what he meant when he spoke about being able to shoot someone on 5th Avenue without losing his base.

The great economic expansion that began with his election is either denied by his opponents or ascribed to Obama.  Whether he approves or denies the use of coal for power plants he knows that the level of vitriol with stay at Max levels.  Whether he increases or decreases the number of immigrants he will still be called a racist.  If he were to implement a policy to either increase or decrease CO₂ emissions his enemies would still denounce him as a science denier.  

My theory is that Trump knows that he has a rock-solid base of support – those who got him elected primarily because they are opposed to the “Ruling Class” (a term that covers the coalition that’s been running – and ruining –the country).  He’s also aware that his opposition is not persuadable.  They will oppose anything he does. 

So he’s freed of the shackles that restrained conventional Republican politicians who believed that they needed to do business as usual even after getting elected on promises to make major changes. 

Trump is free to use executive power, build over generations as Congress gave the Executive more power.  He has been freed of the illusion that he can persuade the opposition.  Like the prisoner who has had everything taken away from him, he’s much more free that those who still had that hope left.  He understands that it’s him, his base, and that part of Normal Americans who can be shown that his ideas work.

Thanks to an insane opposition, Trump is the Conservative they never wanted and they are in danger of creating the autocrat they feared.

Candace Owens Comes Out

(Candace Owens on Her Journey From Left to Right)

Reason's Katherine Mangu-Ward: The Leftwing Media's Idea of a Tolerable Conservative is Me, and I'm Not a Conservative

The only conservatives allowed are the neutered ones.

Kurt Schlichter: Some Real Talk For Conservatives About 2018

Kurt Schlichter tells it like it is.

We conservatives need to get our heads right about the mid-terms or liberals will end up guzzling patriot tears and their gloating will be flat-out intolerable. We’re not doomed in 2018 – I mean, it’s not like tax reform or pulling out of the Paris Climate Scam, which have already killed millions of people, including me and you. But, if we fail to get on course for victory then we’re going to see Nancy Pelosi and the Gropeocrats back in charge and trying to make America into California.

Trust me. You do not want to live in the United States of California.

So, the first step toward victory is some real talk about us normals – you know, conservatives who are more concerned with our country than with muttering about principles and trying to sell cruise cabins. We need to talk about how we’ve screwed up and how we need to change what we’re doing wrong. We got lazy after we vanquished Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit and installed what has turned out to be the most conservative president since St. Ronald. We had the House, and we had the Senate, so we relaxed. Sure, we’ve gotten some great things done, but every step has been a battle thanks to the enraged Dems, their lying media pals, and that cheesy bunch of Never Trump weasels who are motivated by rage at how we dissed them and their Conservative, Inc., cronies. The enemy is creating a sense of permanent chaos, and they intend to present themselves as a return to normality. “Vote for us liberals and everything goes back to normal,” they’ll lie. They’ll actually amp up the insanity with impeachment shenanigans and obstruction, and they’ll probably bumble their way into provoking a short and hilarious civil war.

We have to stop them, but stopping them starts with us fixing what we’re doing wrong. We can only change ourselves, so we need to do that. [snip]

In Virginia, we had a huge, bloody primary fight that left the winner weak going into the general. Ed Gillespie is an Establishment meat puppet, but he would have been okay, and “okay” is better than any commie Dem. We need to pick our fights. Here’s a news flash – the most conservative candidate won’t win every time. We need to figure out who is the most conservative candidate who can win, and back him/her – that’s the old Buckley rule. The purge of the squishes must come later. We need raw numbers, and if that means accepting the occasional Susan Collins, fine. She’s the closest thing to a win in Maine, so accept that and move on.

In Virginia, the Democrats nearly took the legislature by identifying vulnerable seats, sneaking in with money, tech, and logistics, and pushing turn-out of motivated pinkos. They caught us napping. That’s their plan in 2018 too – but now we know the score. We need to identify our vulnerabilities and start building our defenses – and we can also to identify their vulnerabilities so we can snatch some Democrat seats in Trump country. That means we need to give money and time and not do the grumbly “I’ve got the madz and the sadz at how the GOP isn’t perfectly conservative so I’m staying home, darn it, and ensuring the Democrats win” thing.

We’ll never get 100% of what we want. Ever. Deal with it. So, John McCain torpedoed the Obamacare repeal? I guess the rational response is to let the libs run rampant, right? Sheesh. Stop being a pouty teen, man up, and get back in the fight.

I get mad too. I’m furious with the Elderly Mutant Establishment Turtle. But I’m an adult, not a child, and sometimes I have to delay my unholy vengeance. We worry too much about purging our ranks and not enough about making sure we still have ranks to purge. Oh, the accounting shall come – we will have our revenge. But today we need to keep control of Capitol Hill so Donald Trump can keep packing the courts, gutting the bureaucracy, and winning the war against jihadi dirtbags.

We can wait to get even.

No, Trump’s not a populist – he’s a breed all by himself

I have called Trump a Populist in other essays, like this one, becaue I didn't associate poplism with evil.  I may have been wrong.  Here's an intersting - and valid - take by F. H. Buckley (no relation to William F. Buckley - or Natioanl Review, thank God).

You should never let your opponents define you, because they’re not looking to do you any favors. That’s why Republicans, especially those who voted for President Trump, should object to being called populists.

Populism was one of the nastiest of American political movements. It was inevitable, therefore, that Trump would be called a populist. But that doesn’t describe Trump, or the Republican Party he re-invented.

It’s true that, like most populists, Trump thinks that tariff walls that keep foreign goods out of the country might help American workers. But then Abraham Lincoln and William McKinley thought so, too, and they weren’t populists.

It’s also true that, like most populists, Trump championed an underclass unjustly held back by an aristocracy of wealth. But then Karl Marx and socialist Eugene V. Debs thought the same thing, and they weren’t populists. And like most populists, Trump decried the influence of money in politics. But then so did Hillary Clinton and Liz Warren, and nobody called them populists.

Here’s what the accusation of populism really means. It’s a smear meant to link one to people like “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, one of the vilest characters in American political history. Tillman was the governor of South Carolina from 1890 to 1894 and served as the state’s representative in the US Senate for the next 23 years. He invented Jim Crow laws in his state, defended lynch mobs and boasted of the African-Americans he had killed.

Trump is something new in American politics. He’s not Andrew Jackson, or a plain-speaking Harry Truman. He’s not Ronald Reagan. He’s unlike anything we’ve seen before, for the simple reason that he’s up against something we’ve never seen before: a left that’s given up on the American dream of a mobile and classless society, that defends economic immobility and aristocracy.

Trump isn’t a populist. He’s a conservative nationalist. As a conservative he favors socially conservative institutions and free-market solutions to political questions. As a nationalist he is middle of the road or liberal when it comes to taking care of Americans who have fallen behind, through a generous safety net.

That might sound like an unnatural union of opposites, but similar parties have had a long history in our sister parliamentary governments. Benjamin Disraeli was another conservative nationalist. As a parliamentarian, he opposed Sir Robert Peel’s free-trade policies and in the process created a new Tory party.

And a year before Friedrich Engels shocked readers with his description of the wretchedness of East End London in “The Condition of the Working Class in England” (1845), Disraeli had written no less passionately about economic inequality.

Then, as the Conservative prime minister, Disraeli extended the franchise to all adult male heads of households in the 1867 Reform Bill.

In a speech on the bill, Disraeli described what he thought the Tory Party should be, in terms that also define Trump’s Republican Worker’s Party:

“I have always considered that the Tory party was the national party of England . . . It is formed of all classes, from the highest to the most homely, and it upholds a series of institutions that are in theory, and ought to be in practice, an embodiment of the national requirements and the security of the national rights.”

As a nationalist, Disraeli and his party wanted all Britons to prosper. He could never have called one group of his countrymen deplorable, or ignored half the voters because they were in the wrong identity group.

By reaching out to all Britons, he took the Whig’s issues away from them, just as Trump did in dishing the Democrats.

Not much has changed, and the American who wishes to understand the shape of things to come might do well to read up on the “Tory Democracy” of Lord Randolph Churchill (Winston’s father) or observe the similarities between Trump’s agenda and the National Policy of Sir John A. Macdonald’s Tory Party in Canada.

They were conservative, but because they supported generous social-welfare policies they were sometimes called Red Tories. And they’re the ancestors of Trump’s Republican Party.

That's a definition of Donald Trump I can agree with.

Violating Our Conscience: 12 Ways The MSM And Left Keep Us Divided

John Nolte itemizes the way that the media is keeping the nation divided by forcing conservatives to violate their conscience. read the whole thing.)

Everything listed above is not only an unreasonable demand made by the left and their media, it is an immoral one and one intentionally designed to take away our right to be left alone, to be indifferent, to live and let live.

Because the left and their media now target our children, our personal space, our religious conscience, and how we express ourselves through speech -- we are forced to care, forced to take a side, forced into a toxic debate we would prefer to avoid.

You see, now that America is for the most part colorblind and indifferent to cultural and lifestyle differences, these phony controversies, these criminal martyrs, and absurd demands are all manufactured and ginned up as a means to keep the Jenga Tower scared, feeling victimized, outraged, bitter and voting against their own interests -- a bigger welfare state, worse public schools, more illegal aliens taking their jobs, and more poorly vetted refugees.

Good grief, these toxic freaks are now demanding married men invite their female subordinates out for a private dinner.

It is not that we are being told we cannot do something, which is easier on the conscience. Rather, we are being forced, coerced, and bullied into actions and attitudes that wound our conscience.

This is the stuff of police states.

REACTIONARY PHILOSOPHY IN AN ENORMOUS, PLANET-SIZED NUTSHELL

Worth a read.

Trump is a Conservative

Matthew Continetti on "Street Corner conservatism"

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.

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.

Nor is it the only example. Fealty to econometric models, Trump says, has led many conservatives as well as liberals to embrace a “dumb market” that gives mercantilist powers in Asia advantages over U.S. industry and labor. The rush to pass comprehensive immigration reform as a result of the elite consensus that immigration is an unmitigated good set the Republican Party leadership against its own voters. The desire to restrain entitlement spending through cuts rather than prolonging the lifespan of these programs through economic growth demoralizes Republican voters who count on their checks to arrive each month.

Indeed, Trump was so at variance with the mainstream of the intellectual conservative movement on these issues that he modified his political identity. “I really am a conservative,” he said last February. “But I’m also a commonsense person. I’m a commonsense conservative. We have to be commonsense conservatives. We have to be smart.” Common sense in this understanding is opposed to the theoretical and academic analysis that has led conservatives to nonsensical and unpopular positions because they are beholden to speculative conclusions or to creedal dogma.

Trump’s politics are grounded not in metaphysics but in what he understands to be the linguistic root of the term conservative. “I view the word conservative as a derivative of the word conserve,” he has said. “We want to conserve our money. We want to conserve our wealth. We want to conserve. We want to be smart. We want to be smart where we go, where we spend, how we spend. We want to conserve our country. We want to save our country.”

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.

Read the whole thing.

Theory and Practice

Megan says about rules based principles: “one that we classical liberal, market-loving folks are going to have to contend with in the years ahead.” Perhaps she’s younger than her picture because it sounds as if she was born last night.

We have not lived with neutral principles for well over a century and neutral rules have been nothing but an afterthought during the Obama administration. Being concerned about “the years ahead” makes it sound as if the Carrier deal is a sharp departure from government non-interference in the lives of people and companies. When the EPA controls what you can do with a puddle in your back year because they define it as a navigable waterway you are way beyond classical liberal market based principles.

A second point about principles: they should benefit people rather than the other way around. Once abstract theory causes enough harm to enough people it’s worth evaluating whether the theory is working for the people. If not, theory needs to be re-examined. 

An example is the theory of man-made global warming. It looks great on paper and in computer models but the Manhattan is not under water and snow is falling in Hawaii. Global warming alarmists have been predicting the end of the habitable world since the 1980s, with “the end” always being 10 years off. So far none of the cities that were supposed to be under water have drowned, the glaciers have not melted and the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps are intact. Yet we continue to be told that the end is nigh. With each passing decade Global Warmists have ratcheted up the decibel level and today if question their projections you are accused of crimes against humanity.

One principle that seems to be animating the classical liberal market-loving folks is that tariffs and trade wars are inextricably linked. Recall that tariffs funded the federal budget for most of American history until the 20th Century and the 16th Amendment was passed.

Would you be surprised to learn that China imposes a tariff of at least 25% on imported cars. Then there’s a 25% consumption tax on cars with bigger engines than 3 liters and a 9% vehicle purchase tax. But for some reason there has been no threat of American or European retaliation.

Finally, people who are the strongest advocates of the “invisible hand” being allowed to do its job are never the ones who suffer the consequences. They don’t work in factories that are being closed and their jobs are not being outsourced to India, Mexico or China. Perhaps the market-clearing wage for factory assembly jobs worldwide is $1 per hour and the free market may lead to that wage for unskilled labor in every country. But would people who write for a living hew as closely to their principles if we determine that the average free-market wage for writers, worldwide, is really $2 per hour. The American educational system is so far behind the rest of the world that India, China and Cambodia can certainly produce a glut of replacement writers who can use the internet at least as well as Americans, replacing the “principled free market” enthusiasts that currently pull down salaries that make foreign writers green with envy.

And the transportation costs of the written word are zero.

The ultimate conservative

The ultimate conservative is the cloistered academic or bureaucrat, who sees danger in the freedom of others to act out of their control, and whose income is secure no matter how slowly the economy grows.

MATERIALISM VS PURPOSEFUL LIFE: TRUMP, BANNON, AND TEILHARD DE CHARDIN

There are still poisoned, prejudiced hearts that retain the hatred of people solely for their race or religion, but far fewer of them, and they are not in power — even under President-Elect Donald Trump. Bannon is no simple hater, but Breitbart’s tolerance for ugly commenters and attacks on political correctness can easily be seen by the paranoid as tarring both Bannon and Trump by association. Feeding this contamination theory of morality where failing to condemn the bad actors often enough makes you guilty by association suits the propagandists of the crony capitalist machine, which has gained nearly complete control of public education and the media in the West. The populist movements that have sprung up are indeed reactionary — reacting to the suppression of dissenting thought and speech. While some of the people supporting them are “deplorable,” the majority is not — and half the US voted for Mr. Trump despite all his flaws, wanting a change from the business-as-usual machine which systematically loots the middle class to support its credentialed nomenklatura and increases the fortunes of the financial industry and the 1% while pretending to care about income inequality.

What those voters want is an end to the condescension and being told what to do by people who think their education entitles them to direct the lives and even the simplest behavior (plastic shopping bag and lightbulb use, for example) of other less enlightened people. We now know from Wikileaks that Obama’s first cabinet was almost literally dictated by a Citibank employee, that Clinton campaign operatives hired people to disrupt Trump rallies then blamed Trump for inspiring violence, and that nearly all media broke journalistic ethics to try to elect Hillary Clinton after they had given Trump so much exposure that he won the Republican nomination. This story quoting a long-time New York Times editor gets at their behavior: the Times wrote to promote a narrative, selectively choosing facts to support it. Stories which did not support their desired narrative weren’t reported at all or were consigned to back pages.

The administrative state has malfunctioned and produced a bureaucracy that cannot build anything at a reasonable cost, or provide the best standard of healthcare for veterans or anyone else. There is little accountability, with even criminal and negligent employees shielded by government employee unions and Civil Service rules. The union of administrative state apparatchiks and the media elite has controlled what the people are allowed to see, but social media now reveal the lies and inconsistencies.

Which is the source of the anger that fed Breitbart’s growth. Citizens who strive to make a living for themselves and their families find themselves denigrated and blocked by bureaucrats. They want to see a return to rewards for the intelligent application of labor and an end to bailouts for losing bankers, subsidies for connected businessmen, and government-enforced monopolists charging too much and limiting their choices.

Donald Trump may end up being a terrible president. But what’s clear from the hysterical reaction to his victory is that the media-academic-bureaucratic forces will sacrifice their credibility to demonize him and try to erode his legitimacy even before he takes office. The new administration would be doing the citizens of the country a great favor if they help Congress take back much of the rule-making and enforcement authority delegated over the years to the executive branch agencies, staffed largely by partisans and entitled hacks. Reforms to Civil Service and government employee unions are necessary to reduce their corrupt and deadening influence on government productivity. Citizens are not getting their money’s worth and are getting tired of the agencies ruling against growth and business, which has created the stagnation that has half of our youth underemployed and the lowest rate of new business formation in post-Depression history. The return of accountability and popular control of government means some incompetent bureaucrats, teachers, and law enforcement personnel will have to find other things to do.

As for me, I retired from running a family office for a wealthy high-tech friend around 2003, when I realized none of the extra money I was making for his family by clever investment was going to do the world any good. Quite the opposite — his wife began donating large sums to causes like the National Resources Defense Counsel (NRDC), the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), and Democratic politicians. More than likely they gave a large sum to Hillary Clinton’s campaign and Emily’s List. These organizations actively harm the people and the future of humanity through promotion of anti-free-market and anti-limited-government propaganda, and are staffed by lawyers living well by doing good, if good is defined as blocking other people’s projects and regulating some businesses to death while awarding others that support their agenda monopolies and subsidies. Because the core support for the Progressive bulldozer is elite, educated people who work in academia and government jobs, where business to be curbed and hindered. The ultimate conservative is the cloistered academic or bureaucrat, who sees danger in the freedom of others to act out of their control, and whose income is secure no matter how slowly the economy grows.

Important Question for the GOP "Intellectual" Class: What Percentage of the GOP Do You Estimate Actually Are Irredeemably Racist Deplorables?

There are several possible answers to this.

One answer -- which "Consistent Conservatives" used to offer as a matter of course -- is that of course there are some racists and anti-Semites in the GOP, or at least who try to mix in GOP circles, but 1, this is a small fraction of the GOP, a fringe which has no power nor influence, and 2, the Democrat Party has a roughly equal fraction of racists and anti-Semites. Probably more, actually.

Witness Obama's condemnation of those ill-educated racists of Pennsylvania who "cling bitterly to their guns and religion" and harbor a hatred of those who look different or hail from different countries.

Another possible answer is that there are so many racists -- or near-racists ready to become full racists are soon as the Go Sign, the Racist Bat Signal, is flashed up to the sky -- that it requires the extreme measure of throwing a presidential election to make sure that this faction is checked and the party is kept from being "hijacked" by this largish force.

No conservatives have previously claimed this -- though a lot of ex-conservatives have claimed it on their way out the door, in their The Party Left Me salutation.

So for the NeverTrumpers making the argument that Trump must be stopped to keep this faction from being "empowered:"

Just how large of a force do you think these Racist, Anti-Semitic GOPers constitute?

Apparently the latter -- apparently it's such a large fraction that if they are given any succor, anything that Team Racist can call a "win" on Twitter, the party will naturally and inexorably join the Dark Side and hate on minorities.

So it seems that question is answered, by implication.

So let me ask you some more interesting questions:

1. At what point did you realize the party was jam-packed full of racists and anti-semites, so many, in fact, that it becomes a moral necessity to tank an election to prevent them from taking over the country?

Read the whole thing.

I won't want to be part of a party that thinks that badly of me.

Restatement on Flight 93

Author rebuts his critics. Read the whole thing.

A point from the earlier essay is worth repeating. Conservatives have shouted since the beginning of Trump’s improbable rise: He’s not one of us! He is not conservative! And, indeed, in many ways, Trump is downright liberal. You might think that would make him more acceptable to the Left. But no. As “compassionate conservatism” did nothing to blunt leftist hatred of George W. Bush, neither do Trump’s quasi-liberal economic positions. In fact, they hate Trump much more. Trump is not conservative enough for the conservatives but way too conservative for the Left, yet somehow they find common cause. Earlier I posited that the reason is Trump’s position on immigration. Let me add two others.

The first is simply that Trump might win. He is not playing his assigned role of gentlemanly loser the way McCain and Romney did, and may well have tapped into some previously untapped sentiment that he can ride to victory. This is a problem for both the Right and the Left. The professional Right (correctly) fears that a Trump victory will finally make their irrelevance undeniable. The Left knows that so long as Republicans kept playing by the same rules and appealing to the same dwindling base of voters, there was no danger. Even if one of the old breed had won, nothing much would have changed, since their positions on the most decisive issues were effectively the same as the Democrats and because they posed no serious challenge to the administrative state.

Which points to the far more important reason. I urge readers to go back through John Marini’s argument, to which I cannot do anything close to full justice. Suffice to say here, the current governing arrangement of the United States is rule by a transnational managerial class in conjunction with the administrative state. To the extent that the parties are adversarial at the national level, it is merely to determine who gets to run the administrative state for four years. Challenging the administrative state is out of the question. The Democrats are united on this point. The Republicans are at least nominally divided. But those nominally opposed (to the extent that they even understand the problem, which is: not much) are unwilling or unable to actually do anything about it. Are challenges to the administrative state allowed only if they are guaranteed to be ineffectual? If so, the current conservative movement is tailor-made for the task. Meanwhile, the much stronger Ryan wing of the Party actively abets the administrative state and works to further the managerial class agenda.

Trump is the first candidate since Reagan to threaten this arrangement. To again oversimplify Marini (and Aristotle), the question here is: who rules? The many or the few? The people or the oligarchs? Our Constitution says: the people are sovereign, and their rule is mediated through representative institutions, limited by written Constitutional norms. The administrative state says: experts must rule because various advances (the march of history) have made governing too complicated for public deliberation, and besides, the unwise people often lack knowledge of their own best interests even on rudimentary matters. When the people want something that they shouldn’t want or mustn’t have, the administrative state prevents it, no matter what the people vote for. When the people don’t want something that the administrative state sees as salutary or necessary, it is simply imposed by fiat.

Don’t want more immigration? Too bad, we know what’s best. Think bathrooms should be reserved for the two biological sexes? Too bad, we rule. And so on and on.

To all the “conservatives” yammering about my supposed opposition to Constitutional principle (more on that below) and who hate Trump, I say: Trump is mounting the first serious national-political defense of the Constitution in a generation. He may not see himself in those terms. I believe he sees himself as a straightforward patriot who just wants to do what is best for his country and its people. Whatever the case, he is asserting the right of the sovereign people to make their government do what they want it to do, and not do things they don’t want it to do, in the teeth of determined opposition from a managerial class and administrative state that want not merely different policies but above all to perpetuate their own rule.

Reply to Bud and his death wish.

Bud Norman writes a blog called Central Standard Times.  I shared some thoughts with him.

Why do some fringe brands of Conservative have a death wish?  I mean that in a figurative sense of course, since this death wish manifests itself only during an election.  But Bud here is a great example.  When I began reading him I found a conventional Republican with a talent for droll humor.  But as the election cycle heated up the inner maniac showed up.  We’re now past he point where Bud’s Hail May passes miss the receiver and he realizes that third party candidates are not going to be the next President.  But we still hear the lonely laments that the Republican does not act like the standard issue M1A1 Republican loser. 

Here’s an outstanding example of the #NeverTrump mindset as it demands that the Republican nominee cut his throat in the town square at high noon. 

“Neither candidate seems at all concerned about the nation’s unaffordable debt, much less expressed a willingness to address the entitlement programs that is driving it…”

Of course that sentence is nonsense on two levels.  No one this side of an insane asylum expects the Democrat to do anything but ignore the national debt – or blame it on Bush as Obama did.  And the Democrat is guaranteed to fatten current entitlement spending and invent new entitlements.  In fact, “free” college education is part of the Democrat platform.  So Bud’s not really being honest with his readers when he talks about “neither candidate.”  He’s talking about Trump.

He’s demanding that Trump run on the Scrooge platform.  He’s demanding that Trump spend the campaign telling people how if he’s elected he’s going to cut Social Security and Medicare and take food out of the mouths of starving orphans and widows.  And lest anyone accuse me of hyperbole, keep in mind that during the 2012 elections the Republican ticket was shown throwing a wheelchair-bound grandmother off a cliff.

There are ways of solving our deficit spending problem; ways of making this country and its people less dependent of government and more independent in every way.  The last time the budget was near balance was because the economy was growing fast enough that tax receipts actually kept up with spending. 

But first you have to get elected.  And you do that by appealing to people’s emotions. 

Republicans have been doing that for decades by promising their constituents fiscal frugality and loosening the bonds of government.  And when they get into office they deliver goodies to the people who bankrolled them while lying to the rubes that they didn’t have to votes to cut spending.

Democrats have an easier path to bribing their voters and supporters: they just tell them right out that they’re going to pass out free stuff from the cornucopia that’s the federal treasury.   How’s this for an appeal to the youth of the nation – and their cash strapped parents?  “Wanna spend four years partying at State College?  Elect us and we’ll pay the bill.”

So this election is not going to be about who’s Scrooge and who’s Santa Claus.  It’s a battle between a sick, corrupt woman who’s expecting to ride into office on the coattails of her husband, and a political novice who’s vanquished the corrupt, lying Republican establishment with the promise of Making America Great Again. 

I think the novice will win.  

The political pendulum has never, in the history of humanity, stayed on one side of a swing.

Cold Anger.

There’s a level of anger far deeper and more consequential than expressed rage or visible behavior, it’s called Cold Anger.

Cold Anger does not need to go to violence. For those who carry it, no conversation is needed when we meet. You cannot poll or measure it; specifically most who carry it avoid discussion. And that decision has nothing whatsoever to do with any form of correctness.

We watched the passage of Obamacare at 1:38am on the day before Christmas Eve in 2009. We watched the Senate, then the House attempt passing Amnesty in 2014. We’ve watched the $900 billion Stimulus Bill being spent each year, every year, for seven consecutive years. Omnibus, Porkulous, QE1, QE2, Bailouts, Crony-Capitalism.

Cold Anger absorbs betrayal silently, often prudently.

We’ve waited each year, every year, for eight years, to see a federal budget, only to be given another $2 trillion Omnibus spending bill by Speaker Ryan. We’ve watched the ridiculing of cops, the riots, and the lack of support for laws, or their enforcement. We’ve been absorbing.

Cold Anger is not hatred, it is far more purposeful.

Cold Anger takes notice of the liars, even from a great distance – seemingly invisible to the mob. Cold Anger will still hold open the door for the riot goer. Mannerly. We’ve watched our borders being intentionally unsecured. We’ve watched Islamic Terrorists slaughter Americans as our politicians proclaim their uncertainty of motive.

Cold Anger when evidenced is more severe because it is more strategic. Eric Cantor, the Brexit and Donald Trump might aide your understanding.

Cold Anger does not gloat; it absorbs consistent vilification and ridicule as fuel. This sensibility does not want to exist, it is forced to exist in otherwise unwilling hosts – who also refuse to be destabilized by it.

Transgender bathrooms appear seemingly more important than border security. Employment and standard of living in Vietnam and Southeast Asia appears more important to Washington DC, than the financial security of Youngstown Ohio. We didn’t create that impression, we are simply responding to the reality afore us.

Deliberate intent and prudence will insure avoiding failure. The course, is thoughtful vigilance; a strategy devoid of emotion.

Foolishness and betrayal of our nation have served to reveal dangers within our present condition. Misplaced corrective action, regardless of intent, is neither safe nor wise.

Cold Anger is not driven to act in spite of itself; it drives a reckoning.

When the well attired lady leaves the checkout line carrying steaks and shrimp using an EBT card, the door is still held open for her; yet notations necessarily embed.

When the U.S. flags lay gleefully undefended, they do not lay unnoticed. When the stars and stripes are controversial, yet the Mexican flag is honored – we are paying attention.

When a school community cannot openly pray, it does not mean the prayerful were absent. When a liar seems to win, it is not without observation. Many – more than the minority would like to admit – know the difference between science and clocks and political agendas.

Cold Anger perceives deception the way a long-term battered spouse absorbs the blow in the hours prior to the pre-planned exit; with purpose.

A shield, or cry of micro-aggression will provide no benefit, nor quarter. Delicate sensibilities are dispatched like a feather in a hurricane. Pushed far enough, decisions are reached.