Three months after convicted felon Carlos Uresti vacated his state Senate seat, voters will choose his successor Tuesday in a race that could have important consequences for next year’s legislative session.
Republican Pete Flores, a retired game warden, and Democrat Pete Gallego, a former U.S. and state representative, emerged from July’s special election in first and second place, respectively, from a field of 11, resulting in Tuesday’s runoff.
Snip.
Polls will be open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesday. The sprawling district encompasses all or parts of 17 counties, including a portion of San Antonio, large swaths of West Texas and 400 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border.
The winner of the runoff will serve the rest of Uresti’s term, which runs through 2020. The longtime lawmaker was sentenced in June to 12 years in prison for his involvement in a Ponzi scheme.
Today is your last chance to vote in the special election in #SD19. If you live in the district, I urge you to vote for Republican Peter Flores. Pete is a principled, hardworking Texan who will make a great state senator. Find your voting location here: https://t.co/E2M3hO1GV9pic.twitter.com/Sp1Csi2Z2v
Like a toothache that never goes away, the dull, throbbing pain of constant FISA-gate scandularity revelations never quite goes away. There have been some unusual twists and turns as of late, so let’s get this mini-scandularity update out the door.
First up: Powerline’s Scott Johnson has a good summary of two Andrew McCarthy summaries of various released FISA documents:
Andy says he has read the FISA applications so you don’t have to. He has performed a great public service in these columns. Even so, I say you have to review the FISA applications with your own eyes. They are shocking. Drawing from my series on Doss’s Weekly Standard cover story, I want to restate the relevant background in the context of Andy’s linked columns:
Under Title I of FISA — see this useful House Intel Committee summary — it was the burden of the government to establish probable cause that Page was engaging in espionage, terrorism, or sabotage by or on behalf of a foreign power that involved a violation of a criminal statute. (Doss stated: “Although Page had left the campaign, the FBI feared Russia was using him for its own purposes. The application states that the FBI alleged there was probable cause to believe Page was an agent of a foreign power under a specific provision of FISA that involves knowingly aiding, abetting, or knowingly conspiring to assist a foreign power with clandestine intelligence gathering activities, engage in clandestine intelligence gathering at the behest of a foreign power, or participate in sabotage or international terrorism or planning or preparation therefor.”)
Doss to the contrary notwithstanding, the allegations cited by Doss in her article don’t make out probable cause that Page is a Russian agent on any fair reading of the facts once the Steele dossier is seen for what it is.
The FBI relied in substantial part on the allegations of the Steele dossier to obtain the FISA warrant on Page. Although the applications swear otherwise, these allegations were unverified. I observed in my series that Andy was one of the knowledgeable observers who disputes Doss on the propriety of this reliance. Doss simply omitted any acknowledgement of the related issues.
The FBI nevertheless secured the FISA surveillance warrant on Page in October 2016 and renewed it three more times at 90-day intervals. I held out the possibility that the cited facts together with the redacted material fairly establish probable cause, but we have yet to see it. McCarthy now demonstrates that this is highly unlikely.
Whether or not the FBI made out probable cause, it must have monitored Page’s every communication by text, email and cell phone for a year. Yet Page remains a free man. No charge of any kind — not even a process crime such the one used against Michael Flynn and George Papadoploulos — has been brought against Carter Page. The circumstantial evidence strongly suggests that Page is not a Russian agent.
Given the year-long surveillance on him without any resulting charge, Page might not only not be a Russian agent, he might be the cleanest man in Washington.
Carter Page was a victim of government misconduct whose true object was Donald Trump.
Quotable quote: “[L]et’s dispense with the tired claim that the Obama administration did not really spy on Trump and his campaign. Every one of the four FISA warrant applications, after describing Russia’s cyberespionage attack on the 2016 election, makes the following assertion (after two redacted lines): ‘the FBI believes that the Russian Government’s efforts to influence the 2016 election were being coordinated with Page and perhaps other individuals associated with Candidate #1’s [i.e., Trump’s] campaign.’”
One more: “For Mueller, the Russia counterintelligence probe was cover to conduct a criminal investigation of Trump in the absence of grounds to believe a crime had occurred.”
A review of publicly available information causes a reasonable person to wonder whether Bruce Ohr broke the law by promoting his wife’s anti-Trump research to the FBI when he was working at the Justice Department.The law prohibits public officials from involvement in matters in which their spouse has a financial interest. The question is, Did Ohr “personally and substantially” participate in a particular matter in which his spouse had a “financial interest” while he was employed by the Justice Department as the assistant attorney general? Let’s take a closer look.
Recall that the Hillary Clinton campaign (through its law firm Perkins Coie) hired opposition research firm Fusion GPS to generate dirt on Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential campaign. Fusion GPS in turn hired former British spy Christopher Steele, who compiled the Trump dossier containing as yet unproven allegations of Russian dirt on Trump.
We learned in December that Ohr met with Fusion GPS in November 2016 — a critical time frame — while he was the associate deputy attorney general. Former FBI agent Peter Strzok has confirmed Ohr fed the FBI documents pertinent to the investigation into Trump’s Russia ties, and The Hill reported the FBI used Ohr to continue collecting information from Steele, even after it terminated him as a source for leaking word of the investigation to the media.
John Solomon filled in the contours of Ohr’s role in the investigation, writing in The Hill of recently disclosed emails: They also confirm that Ohr later became a critical conduit of continuing information from Steele after the FBI ended the Brit’s role as an informant.
The FBI specifically instructed Steele that he could no longer ‘operate to obtain any intelligence whatsoever on behalf of the FBI,’ those memos show.
Yet, Steele asked Ohr in the Jan. 31 text exchange if he could continue to help feed information to the FBI: ‘Just want to check you are OK, still in the situ and able to help locally as discussed, along with your Bureau colleagues.’
‘I’m still here and able to help as discussed,’ Ohr texted back. ‘I’ll let you know if that changes.’
Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy recently expressed alarm that Ohr would insert himself into the ongoing Russia investigation. Understandably so. The FBI acts as the Justice Department’s investigator, and normally must convince the DOJ that the quality and quantity of gathered evidence will support a case before a federal court. When a senior DOJ prosecutor gives the FBI information, it comes with the DOJ’s implied endorsement of the evidence. This kind of implied endorsement may have played a role in the FBI’s decision to pay Steele to continue research on the Trump dossier.
Ohr sponsored Steele’s research in spite of the fact that, as Steele later admitted, critical allegations in the dossier remain unverified. In particular, Steele now refuses to stand by his allegations of Russian hacking. Steele reportedly said his dossier allegations were never supposed to be made public, which is incongruous with his dissemination of the allegations to Ohr and his decision to leak word of the investigation to the press.
Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson disclosed in a sworn declaration that Fusion GPS paid Ohr’s wife, Nellie Ohr, a Russia expert, to help research and analyze potential opposition research on Trump.
Curiously, it appears Ohr’s relationship with both Simpson and Steele predated his wife’s work for Fusion GPS, which raises the question whether Simpson may have hired her to gain favor with him. We don’t know how long Nellie Ohr worked for Fusion GPS, but Simpson’s December 2017 declaration indicates bank records from August 2015 through that time reflected she contracted with the firm to help research Trump. Ohr’s promotion of his wife’s research to the FBI potentially helped stoke continued demand for her services.
As pointed out by The Daily Caller, Ohr failed to disclose that his wife was being paid by Fusion GPS in his mandatory public financial disclosure form. The purpose of the form is to “identify potential or actual conflicts of interest.” Thus, The Daily Caller posits that when Ohr became involved in brokering his wife’s Trump-Russia research to the FBI, he deprived DOJ of the opportunity to identify this potential conflict of interest by failing to disclose the source of her “consulting” income. The DOJ had a legal right to know that Ohr’s wife was personally profiting from the research he promoted to the FBI.
One question that remains unanswered is whether Ohr also had a role in approving or overseeing the Trump-Russia investigation from within the DOJ. As noted by The Daily Mail, he “worked closely” with both Sally Yates, former assistant attorney general, and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
Also of note is that both Yates and Rosenstein signed off on one or more of the spy warrants for Trump associate Carter Page. If either Yates or Rosenstein consulted Ohr on the propriety of those applications, Ohr would have been in a position to endorse the validity of research for which his spouse was paid.
Violation of the law prohibiting public officials from involving themselves in matters in which their spouse has a financial interest (18 U.S.C. §208) is a crime punishable for up to five years in prison, if the conduct is deemed willful. The DOJ has the power to enforce this law civilly and criminally, and as Ohr’s employer, has a responsibility to do so if he violated it.
With due respect, this is not a situation in which, out of the blue, “a congressional majority [has made] substantial charges of Department of Justice wrongdoing.” Against the backdrop of its blatant tanking of the criminal investigation against the Democratic presidential nominee, the Democratic administration’s Department of Justice went to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in the last three weeks of the presidential campaign to seek monitoring of a former adviser of the Republican presidential campaign — monitoring that would inevitably have revealed campaign communications in stored email and texts, and quite possibly in real-time conversations — based on a stated suspicion that there was a traitorous confederation between the Republican campaign (quite possibly including the Republican nominee) and the Putin regime.
That was a very “substantial charge” for the Justice Department to make. It is completely reasonable, then, to demand of it what David demands of the House Intelligence Committee’s allegations: a carefully researched presentation (in this instance, in a FISA warrant application) “that provide[d] supporting evidence for each and every inflammatory charge.” Certainly, it is fair to expect that of the Justice Department since (a) that is the standard to which the DOJ proudly holds itself, and (b) the DOJ and FBI typically work as a harmonious unit, unlike a congressional committee composed of sharply divided partisans in the throes of a highly charged political rift.
Snip.
It got worse when the Obama administration started spying on its domestic opponents during the Iran deal, when the Obama administration learned how far it could go in manipulating the foreign-intelligence surveillance apparatus for domestic political advantage. As Adam Entous, then of The Wall Street Journal, wrote in a December 2015 article, “the National Security Agency’s targeting of Israeli leaders and officials also swept up the contents of some of their private conversations with U.S. lawmakers and American-Jewish groups.”
Obama administration officials had leaked the story to Entous in order to shape its reception. After all, the real news was pretty bad—Obama had spied on Americans and the Americans he spied on, Congress and Jewish community leaders, knew it. But in Entous’ account, it was only by accident that the National Security Agency had listened in on Americans opposed to the Iran deal, opponents whose communications had simply been “swept up.” While Entous’ evident lack of skepticism about that account was hardly good reporting, it was perfectly in keeping with the maxim of not biting the hand that feeds you.
What the White House really wanted to know, on Entous’ telling, was what the Israeli prime minister and his ambassador to Washington were doing to contest the Iran deal. Except, neither Benjamin Netanyahu nor Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer makes U.S. policy: Congress does. As I explained in an April Tablet article, the purpose of the spying campaign was to help the White House fight U.S. legislators and other Americans critical of the deal—i.e., to win a domestic political battle. A pro-Israel political operative who was deeply involved in the Iran deal fight told me last year, “The NSA’s collections of foreigners became a means of gathering real-time intelligence on Americans.” With the Iran deal, as would later happen with Russiagate, the ostensible targets of intelligence collection—Israel, then Russia—were simply instruments that the Obama administration used to go after the real bad guys, namely its enemies at home.
The same process of weaponizing foreign-intelligence collection for domestic political purposes that the Obama administration road-tested during the Iran-deal fight was used to manufacture Russiagate and get it to market. Except instead of keeping a close hold of the identities of those swept up during “incidental collection” of U.S. persons, departing Obama White House officials leaked the names to friendly reporters.
House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence investigators appear to have uncovered a second husband-wife team providing a conduit for opposition research by Fusion GPS into the highest levels of former President Barack Obama’s White House.
Shailagh Murray, a former Obama policy adviser who previously served as deputy chief of staff and communications director for Vice President Joe Biden, is married to Neil King, Jr., who, according to Fox News, works for the shadowy Washington, D.C.-based opposition research firm that hired former British spy Christopher Steele.
Snip.
Murray and King both worked for The Wall Street Journal, while Murray also was at the Washington Post during her career. Fusion GPS was founded by Glenn Simpson, another former Wall Street Journal reporter.
Snip.
She and a second former Biden aide, Colin Kahl, are being questioned via a questionaire, according to Fox News. Should either of them decline to respond, the intelligence committee will seek to compel their answers.
Committee investigators see parallels between the Murray-King duo and that of Fusion GPS employee Nellie Ohr, whose husband Bruce, was deputy associate attorney general during the 2016 campaign. Bruce Ohr was demoted after it was learned he failed to disclose on federal conflict of interest reports required details of his wife’s employment.
The specter of an intelligence bureaucracy working in tandem with the press to preserve the prerogatives of a ruling clique is the kind of thing that someone who knows Russia from the inside and actually fears the specter of authoritarian government would naturally find worrying. And not surprisingly, concerns over the role of the intelligence community and its increasingly intrusive methods motivate other Russiagate critics on the left, like Glenn Greenwald at the Intercept, historian Jackson Lears writing at the London Review of Books, and Stephen Cohen at The Nation.
“One of the most bizarre aspects of Russiagate,” writes Lears, “is the magical transformation of intelligence agency heads into paragons of truth-telling—a trick performed not by reactionary apologists for domestic spying, as one would expect, but by people who consider themselves liberals.”
Cohen, a distinguished if often overly sympathetic historian of the Soviet Union, was even more alarmed. “Was Russiagate produced by the primary leaders of the US intelligence community?” asks Cohen, referring to former CIA director John Brennan as well as ex-FBI chief James Comey. “If so, it is the most perilous political scandal in modern American history and the most detrimental to American democracy.”
Yes, the left hates Trump. I didn’t vote for him, either. But what Gessen, Greenwald, Lears, and Cohen all understand is that Russiagate isn’t about Trump. He’s just a convenient proxy for the real target. Their understanding is shared by writers on the right, like Andrew McCarthy, a former lawyer at the Department of Justice, who has unfolded the Russiagate affair over the last year in the pages of National Review, where he has carefully explained how the DOJ and FBI misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in order to spy on Carter Page and violate the privacy of an American citizen.
What unites Gessen, Greenwald, Lears, and McCarthy obviously isn’t politics—rather, it’s the recognition that the Russiagate campaign represents an attack on American political and social institutions, an attack on our liberties, an attack on us. Russiagate is a conspiracy theory, weaponized by political operatives, much of the press, as well as high-level intelligence and law enforcement bureaucrats to delegitimize an American election and protect their own interests, which coincide with those of the country’s larger professional and bureaucratic elite.
Here is the absolute truth — all of the applications rely on the Steele Dossier and the Isikoff story from September 2016 — a story that Steele himself was the source for. Those are the only two pieces of “evidence” the FBI supplied to the FISA court that could reasonably be inferred to assign probable cause that Page was a knowing Russian agent. The only other things mentioned in regards to Page are that he lived in Russia for a time, travels there sometimes as an energy consultant, and was approached by Russian agents in the past, one of whom Page himself helped to trap and convict by serving as a willing FBI informant. That last part is incongruous with designating him as a Russian agent, but is included any way as an attempt, not to exonerate him, but to tar him.
Also, if you do a page by page comparison of all four applications, there is little material added from one to the other —if you compared the applications side by side, practically every redacted section is identical in shape and length and page designations. In other words, in each of the renewals, it is apparent that the FBI got jackshit from the surveillance — there was nothing they could add to each application, and so just mostly copied the first application serially.
In addition, none of the applications told the court that the Clinton Campaign is the one who paid Steele and FusionGPS — not a single time. Indeed, the only mention in all the applications of “Candidate 2” is in the very last renewal, and that section wasn’t discussing who hired the law firm, but was instead discussing some letters Page wrote criticizing the Clinton Campaign. The FBI knew who hired the law firm — they knew Steele (Source 1) was hired by Glenn Simpson (aka US citizen), and they knew Simpson was hired by a law firm- i.e. the FBI knew which law firm and thus it was the Clinton Campaign. The applications studiously avoid mentioning “Candidate 2” at every point they describe the chain of cutouts- always ending with “law firm”.
Finally, it clear the FBI confirmed nothing of the Steele Dossier. At no point does it appear that Steele revealed his sources to the FBI- they are always described as “subsources”- this is FBI legalese for “we don’t even know the name so that we can designate them by number”.
The House Intelligence Republican memo was correct on all counts. The Democrat memo was extremely misleading — there is nothing else other than the Steele Dossier and the story Steele sourced to Isikoff.
And if all that weren’t enough, hold on to your hats: As many as 50,000 new text messages and emails from Strzok may be released next week. It used to be people wondered how he could do any work with all his adultery and test messaging. Now I’m beginning to wonder how he even had time for adultery…
EU: “Bad Hungary! We are going to sanction you for thought crimes against the European elite!” Poland: “Hey EU! Get stuffed!” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Bureaucrats try to strip the title of heroes from the defenders of the Alamo, and the elected state board of education stops them cold. (By the way, I recently watched John Wayne’s version of The Alamo, and it’s a much better film than its reputation.)
And it’s not just missed sleep: Trump Derangement Syndrome made a Democrat attempt to get all stabby on a Republican congressional candidate in California.
R.S. McCain on modern dating: “Guys, when women say they want you to ‘share your feelings’? Don’t believe it. All that stuff you read about how women want men who are ‘sensitive’ and ‘vulnerable’? This is a gigantic load of crap. Don’t fall for it.”
“Author of ‘How to Murder Your Husband’ Charged With Murdering Her Husband.” What are the odds?
“Facebook has banned Brandon Straka, the former Democrat who founded the ‘Walk Away’ campaign and its viral hashtag #WalkAway, after he linked to Infowars.com – which has been banned from the platform.” Evidently even linking or mentioning an official “unperson” can get you banned…
Via Ann Althouse comes this dramatic depiction of just what a 6′ and 9′ storm surge looks like:
“Google Rep Issues Heartfelt Apology For Anti-Conservative Bias While Wearing ‘Kill All Republicans‘ T-Shirt.” “We want Google to be completely free from bias, even against Republicans who need to die violent deaths for disagreeing with us. That’s what inclusivity is all about.”
I saw this over at Say Uncle and I may have to pick some up:
Leftist befuddled by how black men can join “white nationalist” groups like Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer. Here’s a hint, dumbasses: They’re not white nationalist groups.
Social Justice Warriors attempt to slip their usual political bullshit into open source licensing terms and get smacked down hard. “Less than 24 hours after I posted this, the license change was revoked and its committer expelled from the project.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
#Gamergate Social Justice Warrior lunatic “Brianna Wu” lost her a bid for Massachusetts’ 8th U.S. congressional district by 49 points.
Theranos, the biotech company fraud built, is shutting down. Now all that remains is for Elizabeth Holmes to go to federal prison on pending wire fraud charges.
Principles of the Resistance: 1) When we get back in power there will be a purge and a blacklist and we will destroy the lives of anyone who in any way supported Trump! 2) We need to stop our nation's alarming drift into tribalism. https://t.co/3ktfRKP80S
Another week, another poll that shows Beto O’Rourke within striking distance of Ted Cruz. The entire sample size on the Emerson poll was only 550 registered voters. It seems that O’Rourke’s numbers go up as the size of the sample goes down.
First, this is among registered voters, not likely voters, as other polls have screened. That matters, because off-year elections have lower turnout than Presidential elections.
Second, did they oversample Democrats? Why yes they did, albeit not as grossly as as some previous polls. Republicans checked in at 41%, Democrats at 35%, a six point difference as opposed to the nine point difference in party identification in 2016, much less the 16 points win Cruz enjoyed over Paul Sadler in 2012, or the 20 points Greg Abbott beat Wendy Davis by in 2014.
Third, they’ve oversampled women 52.3% to 47.7% men. The last non-Presidential election poll show closer to a 51% women/49% men split.
I’m guessing that the “closeness” of the race is heavily dependent on those factors.
It’s that time of year, when various polls show Texas statewide races closer than they actually are.
This time around: The Ted Cruz/Beto O’Rourke Senate Race.
Like Wendy Davis was in 2014, O’Rourke is the Texas poster-child for national Democrats. O’Rourke gets fawning profiles in places like Town and Country, which declares “Kennedyesque” (presumably with less adultery and vehicular homicide), and GQ, where former Texas Observer and Austin Chronicle writer Christopher Hooks calls the man born Robert Francis O’Rourke “authentic” and “without guile.”
A few weeks ago, a new Lyceum Poll showed O’Rourke within two points of Cruz. The first thing to check with a Lyceum Poll is how badly they skewed the sample. That didn’t take long: They sampled equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats, because evidently their samples are from 1994, the last time a top-of-the-ticket Democrat was within 10% of the vote total of the Republican.
Now this week we have a Marist poll that shows O’Rourke within four points of Cruz. I’d like to tell you what level of skewing went into the Marist poll crosstabs, only I can’t find any. If that’s the complete list of questions, they don’t appear to have asked party affiliation, so there’s no way to know just how skewed the smallish (759) sample of registered voters is.
In 2012, Ted Cruz beat Paul Sadler by 16 points. In 2014, Greg Abbott beat Wendy Davis by 20 points. Will O’Rourke put in better showings than either of those doomed Democrats? Actually yes, I think he will. He’s a much better campaigner than either, and he’s raised much more money than Sadler’s doomed “let’s lose with an old warhorse rather than an unknown” campaign.
But keep in mind that Cruz racked up that 16 point win against Sadler in a Presidential election year against serious Obama headwinds, and Sadler wasn’t out on the stumps flacking for gun control. This year, the economy is booming and the electorate is probably going to look closer to 2014. But pretending O’Rourke has a serious chance to win Texas is sucking national donations from a dozen endangered-but-less-sexy Democratic senate incumbents in red states.
Edit to add: As commenter richb58 notes down below, the crosstabs for that Marist poll are now out and, yeah, they’re garbage. Their sample is 33% Republican and 31% Democrats, a two point difference in party ID compared to the 9 point difference exit polls found in 2016, mirrored in the 9 point vicory Donald Trump enjoyed over Hillary Clinton that year.
Sometimes you put up something you don’t actually agree with, and which most of your readership may find more confounding than enlightening. This is one of those times.
Some may find the author’s theories absurd, or opaque, or illogical, and I’m not entirely in disagreement. But if you view them through Scott Adams’ “persuasion technique looks an awful lot like magic from the outside” filter, these essays make a certain amount of sense.
I’m also posting this for two non-conservative science fiction writer friends to take a look at: Don Webb (an expert on Egyptian magic) and Will Shetterly (a socialist with an interest in the American class structure).
So, without further adieu, here are excerpts from the four parts of John Michael Greer’s The Kek Wars:
Every aristocracy begins as a set of tough, capable individuals who come to terms with some reality the previous ruling elite has ignored too long, and use that reality as a battering ram to break down the doors of the status quo and take power from the overly delicate hands that previously held it. As long as the new aristocracy stays in touch with the world outside its own circles, and provides the people it rules with effective ways to seek redress of grievances and communicate their wants and needs, it retains power—but when it retreats from that necessary interaction and closes its ears to the needs of those under it, it writes its own death warrant.
The managerial aristocracy of contemporary America followed exactly that trajectory. It took power from an older aristocracy in the crisis years of the Great Depression, when Franklin Roosevelt spearheaded a not-quite-violent seizure of power and broke the grip of a failed social and economic orthodoxy. There Was No Alternative until FDR created one, and in his wake a new cadre of bureaucrats and intellectuals seized the levers of power and turned the established certainties of American life on their heads. The bare-knuckle international slugging matches of the Second World War and the early Cold War were grist for the new aristocracy’s mill, and when it was in its prime, it had the common sense to pay attention where necessary to the grievances and wants of those outside its circle.
Fast forward to 2000 or so, and the members of this same caste had fallen into the same trap as the elites of the pre-New Deal era, and embraced a social and economic orthodoxy just as toxic as the one their predecessors overthrew. What’s worse, they made the same mistake as their predecessors, and convinced themselves that the policies that furthered their own interests at everyone else’s expense were not only the only alternative, but the only moral alternative.
The policies in question? There were a galaxy of them, but the threefold core was metastatic centralism, economic globalism, and unrestricted illegal immigration. The fantastic proliferation of federal regulations since 1932 choked out small businesses and transferred wealth and power to big corporations and government bureaucracies; the elimination of trade barriers encouraged the offshoring of millions of working class jobs that, despite endless claims in the mainstream media, were never replaced, and were never intended to be replaced; the tacit encouragement of unlimited illegal immigration created a vast underclass of noncitizens who had no rights worth mentioning, and were employed at starvation wages under inhuman conditions, thus driving down wages and working conditions across the whole range of working class jobs.
In last week’s thrilling episode of The Kek Wars, we talked about the way that America’s managerial aristocracy and its broad penumbra of lackeys and hangers-on retreated into a self-referential bubble to avoid noticing the consequences of their preferred policies. As they did so, those policies—the metastatic growth of government regulation that strangled small businesses and transferred power and wealth to huge corporations and federal bureaucracies, the trade policies that forced working class wages and benefits down below subsistence levels, and the tacit policy of encouraging unlimited illegal immigration that created a vast labor pool of noncitizens who had no rights and thus could be exploited with impunity—drove tens of millions of Americans into destitution and misery. Now it’s time to start exploring how the blowback to those policies took shape.
Snip.
Thus we don’t yet have a consensus ideology among the losers we’ve been discussing. The label “Alt-Right” is a grab bag of contending notions, not a specific set of proposals. The mainstream media’s loud insistence that the Alt-Right is all about racism, by the way, is straightforward disinformation; what the American aristocracy fears more than anything else is a rapprochement between working class white people and working class people of color, and the constant shrieks of “racism!” from the privileged classes are part of a strategy intended to stave off that ultimate elite nightmare.
One of the lessons of the history of morals is that the more stridently you repress something, the more desperately people want to do it. In Victorian England, when sex was utterly unmentionable in polite company, the streets of London swarmed with prostitutes and brothels thrived, so that people could do in private what they wouldn’t dream of talking about in public. The drug abuse epidemic in the US today, similarly, is almost entirely a product of the much-ballyhooed War On Drugs—countries that treat drug addiction as an ordinary medical issue, not a subject for moral grandstanding, have much lower rates of drug use.
Recent crusades against “hate speech” have had exactly the same effect in today’s America. Those who attend university classes or work in white-collar jobs know that their every word is scrutinized by jealous rivals ready to use accusations of sexism, racism, or the like as a weapon in the competition for status. Most people, forced into so stifling an environment, will end up desperately longing for a place where they can take a deep breath and say absolutely anything, no matter how offensive. The chans were among the internet venues that offered them that freedom. Posts on the chans are anonymous, so there was no risk of reprisal, and the culture of the chans (and especially of /pol/) tended to applaud extreme statements, so they became a magnet for the people we discussed in last week’s post: those who for one reason or another lost out in the struggle to become flunkeys of the established order of society, who were locked out of what had been the normal trajectory of adult independence by plunging wages and soaring rents, and who were incensed by the smug superiority of a system that assumed that it had all the answers.
Snip.
It was somewhere around this same time, too, that someone on the chans noticed that “kek” wasn’t just a funny way of saying LOL. It was also the name of an ancient Egyptian god, a god of the primeval darkness that gave birth to the light, who was worshiped in the city of Hermopolis—and who was very often portrayed as an anthropomorphic frog. Like Pepe, in other words. Following up this clue, another anonymous user found on the internet the photo of an ancient Egyptian statue of a frog, mislabeled as a statue of Kek. It was actually a statue of the frog goddess Heqet, but no one realized that at first—and the hieroglyphics of the name Heqet look rather unnervingly like a person sitting in front of a computer screen, with a swirling shape like magical energies on the far side of the screen.
By the time this finished percolating through the chans, a great many people there were convinced, or ironically pretended to be convinced, and at all events acted as though they were convinced, that Donald Trump was the anointed candidate of the god Kek, bringer of daylight, who had manifested as Pepe the Frog and was communicating his approval to them with “gets.” In response, the chaos magicians of /pol/ flung themselves into action. Those of my readers who followed the 2016 US election will remember that rumors were swirling around the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton by this point, claiming that she had a debilitating health condition that she was hiding from the media and the voters. The operative mages on /pol/ focused their efforts on a single goal: making Hillary Clinton collapse in public.
Snip.
The thing that doomed Clinton’s campaign, more than anything else, was the inability of the candidate and her inner circle of advisers and managers to notice that anything was going wrong. Every time polls showed that a very large percentage of American voters disliked and distrusted their candidate, Clinton’s handlers simply looked blank and set out to reintroduce her to the voters, and when that didn’t work—and it never did—they simply looked blank and tried again. From my perspective, and not from mine alone, it really did look as though they were under a spell.
As the campaign wore on, the Clinton machine’s weird detachment from reality became even more pronounced. People who were involved in local Clinton campaign organizations have written about the way their increasingly desperate attempts to warn the national headquarters that Trump was gaining ground in crucial swing states were brushed aside as irrelevant, while millions of dollars were wasted on venues such as Chicago, which the Democrats would have won easily if they’d nominated Zippy the Pinhead. As Trump held rally after rally in the critically important states of the upper Midwest, and the numbers swung further Trump’s way with every poll, the Clinton campaign ignored those battleground states and lumbered ahead as though going through the right motions would conjure up the victory that they seemed to think the universe owed them.
Two features of the Changer myth seem particularly relevant at the moment. The first is pointed up skillfully in the stories. The beings who try to stop the Changer and keep the world the same just keep doing whatever they were doing when the Changer arrives: the man with the board keeps carving tree trunks, the man with the many-pointed weapons keeps looking around—and there they are today, the beaver beside his dam, the deer on the hill. Having refused change, they become unable to change, and keep on going through the motions of their failed plans forever. That’s exactly what Trump’s opponents have been doing since his candidacy hit its stride, and more particularly since his inauguration. “From now on your name is Protester,” says the Changer, and sticks a pussy hat on the person’s head and a placard in her hands…
Food for thought, even if you’re deeply skeptical (as I am) about vast swathes of his theory…
In June 1996 — after the staffer had begun working for Feinstein — the FBI detected that the Chinese government was attempting to seek favor with the senator, who at the time sat on the East Asian and Pacific affairs subcommittee of the Foreign Relations Committee, which oversees US-China relations. Investigators warned her in a classified briefing that Beijing might try to influence her through illegal campaign contributions laundered through front corporations and other cutouts.
The warning proved prescient.
One Chinese bagman, Nanping-born John Huang, showed up at Feinstein’s San Francisco home for a fundraising dinner with a Beijing official tied to the People’s Bank of China and the Communist Party Committee. As a foreign national, the official wasn’t legally qualified to make the $50,000-a-plate donation to dine at the banquet.
After a Justice Department task force investigated widespread illegal fundraising during the 1996 Clinton re-election campaign, Feinstein returned more than $12,000 in contributions from donors associated with Huang, who was later convicted of campaign-finance fraud along with other Beijing bagmen. The DNC and the Clinton campaign had to return millions in ill-gotten cash.
Still, Beijing got its favored trade status extended — thanks in part to Feinstein. In speeches on the Senate floor and newspaper op-eds, she shamelessly spun China’s human-rights violations, as when in 1997 she compared Beijing’s 1989 massacre of hundreds of young demonstrators to the 1970 Kent State shootings, calling for the presidents of China and America to appoint a human-rights commission “charting the evolution of human rights in both countries over the last 20 to 30 years,” that “would point out the successes and failures — both Tiananmen Square and Kent State — and make recommendations for goals for the future.”
Feinstein also led efforts to bring China into the World Trade Organization in 1999, which gave Beijing permanent normal trade relations status and removed the annual congressional review of its human-rights and weapons-proliferation records.
Feinstein, still among the Senate’s most influential China doves, travels to China each year. Joining her on those trips is her mega-millionaire investor husband, Richard C. Blum, who has seemingly benefited greatly from the relationship.
Starting in 1996, as China was aggressively currying favor with his wife, Blum was able to take large stakes in Chinese state-run steel and food companies, and has brokered over $100 million in deals in China since then — with the help of partners who sit on the boards of Chinese military front companies like COSCO and CITIC.
China investments have helped make Feinstein, who lives in a $17 million mansion in San Francisco and keeps a $5 million vacation home in Hawaii, one of the richest members in Congress.
Academic dogma postulates that white people cannot be the victims of racism, and such banal white demonization has now seeped into the larger liberal commentariat. With that bias comes the notion that one can smear the white working classes with impunity. Caputo, however, was not brave or stupid enough to visit a Trump rally and to suggest to the crowd around him to get to a Clear Smile clinic.
If you are a non-white purveyor of such prejudice, venom like Jeong’s is contextualized through the lens of compensatory historical grievances. Someone’s grandfather mistreated your grandmother, so you can invert and then replay the roles with impunity. Or less charitably, life’s disappointments are always due to past cosmic injustice, not one’s own perceived tragic shortcomings or bad luck or just cruel fate.
If you are an elite white liberal, you are a twofer: virtue signaling your identity politics bona fides, while psychologically squaring the circle of your own privilege. Those who ridicule less fortunate white others for their supposed racial privilege—themselves often the products of old boy networks, elite upbringings, inherited perks, prep schools and parental leveraging—end up as the privileged smearing the non-privileged for their privilege.
Jeong is a Harvard Law graduate. Strzok has a master’s degree from Georgetown. The ridicule of the white working class by NeverTrump conservative pundits is read on the pages of the nation’s premier newspapers or voiced in hallowed symposia.
Is such ignorance of an entire class because of, or in spite of such, elite training?
Snip.
“In answer to the now hackneyed question, who or what created Trump? All these purveyors of class and racial prejudice need only look in the mirror.”
That “Democratic Socialist wave” crested and broke-up before it ever hit the shore: Just about all Bernie bros go down in Democratic primary defeats. “Rather than demonstrate that his movement has a broad reach across the electorate, Sanders has instead demonstrated that’s a fringe movement even within the Democratic Party.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
It is because the left, while it currently seems ascendant in our houses of culture and art, has in fact entered its decadent late phase, and it is deeply vulnerable. The left is afraid not of Peterson, but of the ideas he promotes, which are completely inconsistent with identity politics of any kind. When the poetry editors of The Nation virtuously publish an amateurish but super-woke poem, only to discover that the poem stumbled across several trip wires of political correctness; when these editors (one of them a full professor in the Harvard English department) then jointly write a letter oozing bathos and career anxiety and begging forgiveness from their critics; when the poet himself publishes a statement of his own—a missive falling somewhere between an apology, a Hail Mary pass, and a suicide note; and when all of this is accepted in the houses of the holy as one of the regrettable but minor incidents that take place along the path toward greater justice, something is dying.
When the top man at The New York Times publishes a sober statement about a meeting he had with the president in which he describes instructing Trump about the problem of his “deeply troubling anti-press rhetoric,” and then three days later the paper announces that it has hired a writer who has tweeted about her hatred of white people, of Republicans, of cops, of the president, of the need to stop certain female writers and journalists from “existing,” and when this new hire will not be a beat reporter, but will sit on the paper’s editorial board—having a hand in shaping the opinions the paper presents to the world—then it is no mystery that a parallel culture of ideas has emerged to replace a corrupted system. When even Barack Obama, the poet laureate of identity politics, is moved to issue a message to the faithful, hinting that that they could be tipping their hand on all of this—saying during a speech he delivered in South Africa that a culture is at a dead end when it decides someone has no “standing to speak” if he is a white man—and when even this mayday is ignored, the doomsday clock ticks ever closer to the end.
In the midst of this death rattle has come a group of thinkers, Peterson foremost among them, offering an alternative means of understanding the world to a very large group of people who have been starved for one. His audience is huge and ever more diverse, but a significant number of his fans are white men. The automatic assumption of the left is that this is therefore a red-pilled army, but the opposite is true. The alt-right venerates identity politics just as fervently as the left, as the title of a recent essay reproduced on the alt-right website Counter-Currents reveals: “Jordan Peterson’s Rejection of Identity Politics Allows White Ethnocide.”
If you think that a backlash to the kind of philosophy that resulted in The Nation’s poetry implosion; the Times’ hire; and Obama’s distress call isn’t at least partly responsible for the election of Donald Trump, you’re dreaming. And if you think the only kind of people who would reject such madness are Republicans, you are similarly deluded. All across the country, there are people as repelled by the current White House as they are by the countless and increasingly baroque expressions of identity politics that dominate so much of the culture. These are people who aren’t looking for an ideology; they are looking for ideas. And many of them are getting much better at discerning the good from the bad. The Democratic Party reviles them at its peril; the Republican Party takes them for granted in folly.
The global influence of Europe continues to wane, at least as defined by demographic robustness, technological innovation, the quality of higher education, and the ability to defend its interests. Its aristocratic elite classes are currently under constant challenge from populist reformers. And 73 years of peace have been hard on Europe, in the sense that the postmodern European cultural ideal is to avoid childbearing, most religion, and national defense.
Snip.
Europe continues to believe that the “Palestinian issue” is key to “peace” in the Middle East — a euphemism for distancing itself from Israel. In truth, the Middle East is undergoing the greatest revolution since the end of colonialism. The worries about Arab security are not the tardiness of Palestinian statehood but the existential threats emanating from theocratic Shiite Iran and the neo-Ottomanism of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey. In that sense, a conventionally strong and nuclear Israel is for now allied with an Arab world at odds with both Tehran and Ankara, and is likely in any major war to be on the side of an Egypt or Saudi Arabia. Yet for Europe, the Palestinians are the rusty key to peace, even as the latter are increasingly under suspicion by Arab nations as pro-Hezbollah and pro-Iranian.
Europe for now is on the wrong side of the energy revolution, perhaps best epitomized by the near-suicidal green policies of Germany. As it dismantles coal and nuclear plants, Angela Merkel’s government finds its subsidized wind and solar projects utterly incapable of meeting Germany’s competitive industrial needs. The result will likely be a continual and massive importation of natural gas, increasingly from NATO’s supposed archenemy, Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The dream of hydraulic fracturing of shale gas throughout Europe is now largely dead and buried by opposition from radical environmental groups. The result is not a self-sufficient Europe enjoying renewable energy but a continent increasingly dependent for its mounting conventional energy needs on costly imports, with resulting energy costs that are making it uncompetitive with North American industries. Again, the contrast with the United States is telling: The latter went from foreordained, “peak oil” fossil-fuel dependence to becoming the largest oil, gas, and coal producer in the world.
One symptom of European demographic decline, multiculturalism, and military impotence is massive illegal immigration from the Middle East and North Africa. The ensuing crisis of large unassimilated populations is said to be analogous to the influxes of illegal immigrants into the United States from Central America and Mexico. But there are key differences. As an immigrant nation without a hereditary aristocracy, the melting pot of the United States even in postmodern times has far better integrated, assimilated, and intermarried newcomers. Illegal immigrants to the United States are largely Catholic; challenges to assimilation are national, ethnic, and linguistic but not additionally religious as in Europe. Congressional and presidential policy reflects a majority opinion in the United States that now supports secure borders and measured, legal, meritocratic immigration. In Europe, official immigration policy is still at odds with voters.
Woman who was the daughter and granddaughter of women who used men simply as sperm donors wonders why men are suspicious of her. Also, from the comments: “What the writer only lets on, deep into the article, is that she was raised in a lesbian commune.”
This sign was on the door of a restaurant in Kansas. Me and my clients went in and enjoyed a very nice steak dinner. No one was harassed, asked to leave, or in fear for their lives. And I expect 80% of us were carrying. It’s become a regular stop because it is a safe space pic.twitter.com/3bRtPGQvxn
It’s a runoff to replace convicted felon Democrat Carlos Uresti in Senate District 19:
Republican Pete Flores and Democrat Pete Gallego are headed to a runoff in the special election to replace convicted former state Sen. Carlos Uresti, D-San Antonio.
With 97 percent of precincts reporting Tuesday night, Flores was leading Gallego by 3 percentage points, 33 percent to 30 percent, according to unofficial returns. At 25 percent, state Rep. Roland Gutierrez of San Antonio was coming in third in the eight-way race. The five other candidates were in single digits, including Uresti’s brother, outgoing state Rep. Tomas Uresti of San Antonio.
The first-place finish by Flores, who unsuccessfully challenged Carlos Uresti in 2016, is a boon to Republicans in the Democratic-leaning district. In the home stretch of the race, he benefited from a raft of endorsements from Texas’ top elected officials including Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and U.S. Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz.
The special election was triggered in June after Carlos Uresti was found guilty of 11 felonies, including securities fraud and money laundering, tied to his work with a now-defunct oilfield services company. He was sentenced to 12 years in prison days after he stepped down.
If you live in Texas Senate District 19 (covering parts of San Antonio and much of west Texas), don’t forget to vote in today’s special election to replace resigned Democrat and convicted felon Carlos Uresti.
Two tweets on the subject:
There’s an election THIS Tuesday for a Texas Senate seat in the San Antonio area. Be sure to vote for Pete Flores. He will work to keep Texas the best state in America. @PeteFlores_TX#txlege#TXSen#SD19https://t.co/2bbObwIOA0
