Welcome to the Friday LinkSwarm! The first week of President Trump’s administration has been incredibly active and consequential! Not everything will be covered here (and I have a few posts on various issues and executive orders at various stages of assembly), but it touches on a lot.
Mr. Trump’s version of stray voltage has a number of effects beyond just causing chaos and distracting his opponents. When everything is an outrage, nothing is an outrage. And when everything is an outrage, you expose yourself as a purely partisan actor, turning off large swaths of the American public.
Trump’s lack of fear of touching politically incorrect third rails that millions of Americans felt, but which had not been articulated so bluntly by a national politician, served him well. Incidentally, it also allowed him to shift the Overton Window on critical issues like immigration and Islamic supremacism.
When attacked for taking these positions, unlike those to come before him, Trump did not avoid the fray. Rather, he jumped into it, counterpunching.
Lulled into a false sense of security by Republicans who fought with their hands tied behind their backs, constrained by suicidal rules of political engagement for decades, the Left did not know how to react when hit.
Leftists could not believe that a political opponent had the gall to actually fight tooth and nail.
Trump does not give an inch to his critics, and neither should any other Republican. He defines the rules of engagement, and so should all on the Right.
Watching the confirmation hearings to date, we see many on the Left jabbing as if we are in a pre-Trump world. Their questions all hew to the same old narrative that if you are not a racist, sexist, or bigot, then you are an out-of-touch plutocrat or a shill for some special interest or other.
Like Trump, Republicans should challenge these charges head on. They should take issue with the Left’s premises from the start, showing that it is the Left who is projecting when it tries to discredit those who believe in capitalism, the power of the individual, and the sanctity of the individual’s rights, the rule of law, national sovereignty, federalism, and the Judeo-Christian morality on which the country is based.
Donald Trump isn’t the bully; he only insults and abuses people in power who have attacked him. They’re the fucking bullies. The left, with their smears, their witch hunts, their slanders, their insults and their weaponizing of the federal bureaucracy.
There aren’t any rules anymore because the left only applies them one way. And in doing so, they’ve left what once was a civil compact between the two parties in smoldering ruins.
I have no personal investment in Donald Trump. He is a tool to punish the left and roll back their ill-gotten gains, no more and no less. If he succeeds even partially in those two things, then I’ll consider his election a win.
Further, I no longer have any investment in any particular political values, save one: The rules created by the left will be applied to the left as equally and punitively as they have applied them to the right. And when they beg for mercy, I’ll begin to reconsider. Or maybe not. Because fuck these people.
This new philosophy has freed me of more emotional angst that I can describe. Literally nothing the left says or does matters to me anymore. I don’t care about their tantrums. I don’t care about their accusations. I don’t care if they say Trump is lying. I don’t care if Trump is lying.
They created this Frankenstein. They own it. I am free of all obligation. I will never play defense again. I will attack, attack, attack, attack using their own tactics against them until they learn their lesson.
What I will not do is let them play my values against me ever again. I don’t need to prove that I’m better than them. I already know it.
President Trump had barely entered the White House, and yet the mainstream media was already falling all over themselves to prove what biased, lying partisan hacks they were. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Scott Adams says that President Trump is flooding the field with so much activity that his critics can’t focus their outrage on any one thing.
A better than usual example of one of those “How could those inbred redneck freaks of JesusLand possibly vote against their enlightened betters” thumbsuckers, this time about Wisconsin. Some quotes:
“I think they thought the liberal elite was looking down on them, and I guess, in some ways, we were.”
“They got this picture that we’re all country bumpkins, the locals are, that we’re not educated. The people who move in talk down to the natives. I don’t know how you want to word that, but that’s the persona given off.”
“I didn’t want to deal with these people. I didn’t want to be a part of what they were a part of. You’re talking about people from the Cities who are very progressive. I call them tree-huggers, a bunch of tree-huggers. They referred to us, meaning the people who’ve lived here and worked here all our lives, as a bunch of hicks. They just think they’re a little bit better than everybody else, and that we’re not as smart.” (And that’s from a former Democratic Party county chairman who switched to the Republicans.)
“The bastards out here in the country are sick of the bullshit.”
Alas, it also includes that sturdy modern liberal journalism cliche, The Single Confederate Flag Mentioned To Suggest All Trump Voters Are Secret Racists.
You know all that talk of how Democrats own America’s emerging majority? Not so fast. “An electoral strategy that starts by assuming you’ve lost a plurality of the country is a rough ticket to victory.”
Speaking of Brock, he’s working on a Twitter-like website for liberals only. And he expects them to pay for it. Get ready for the resounding economic success of Air America 3.0.
Why are the relations between Donald Trump and the press so bad? There are two reasons. One is that Trump is a Republican, and the press consists overwhelmingly of Democrats. But the other reason is that Trump likes it this way, because when the press is constantly attacking him over trivialities, it strengthens his position and weakens the press. Trump’s “outrageous” statements and tweets aren’t the product of impulsiveness, but part of a carefully maintained strategy that the press is too impulsive to resist.
Snip.
The killer counter-move for the press isn’t to double down on anti-Trump messaging. The counter-move is to bolster its own trustworthiness by acting (and being) more neutral and sober, and by being more trustworthy. If the news media actually focused on reporting facts accurately and straightforwardly, on leaving opinion to the pundits, and on giving Trump a clearly fair shake, then Trump’s tactics wouldn’t work, and any actual dirt they found on him would do actual damage. He’s betting on the press being insufficiently mature and self-controlled to manage that. So far, his bet is paying off.
If it comes to the press reforming to ensure their own institutional survival, or clinging to their liberal bias, my guess is that the current press will choose the way of the dodo…
“The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for awhile,” Mr. Bannon said during a telephone call. “I want you to quote this,” Mr. Bannon added. “The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States.”
“The elite media got it dead wrong, 100 percent dead wrong,” Mr. Bannon said of the election, calling it “a humiliating defeat that they will never wash away, that will always be there.”
“The mainstream media has not fired or terminated anyone associated with following our campaign,” Mr. Bannon said. “Look at the Twitter feeds of those people: they were outright activists of the Clinton campaign.” (He did not name specific reporters or editors.) “That’s why you have no power,” Mr. Bannon added. “You were humiliated.”
“You’re the opposition party,” Mr. Bannon said. “Not the Democratic Party. You’re the opposition party. The media’s the opposition party.”
CNN has gone from in-the-street news reporting to pundits on panels.
Is President Trump the good cop on Russia with congress playing the bad cop? Problem: The Henry Ford anecdote is a Just So Story masquerading as a serious analogy.
Is the British Army’s actual army fighting force down to a single brigade? “The last time the fighting division was sent to war was in 2003 during the Iraq War but according to experts if they were to be deployed now, at best they would only be able to deploy a brigade of 10,000 troops.” I thought this might be some Daily Mail exaggeration, but Wikipedia states the British Army now consists of just 87,610 regulars. Keep in mind the British Army contributed 46,000 troops to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
President Trump announces plans to announce his Supreme Court pick February 2nd:
I will be making my Supreme Court pick on Thursday of next week.Thank you!
The usual liberal idiot protesters block buses in Portland. Police take their asses down. Onlookers cheer.
🆘‼️👮😂 USA: Police in Portland (Oregon) responded very quickly to a traffic blockade of protestors. The wind has turned: Go Mr. President! 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/lwTL0EYGML
I’ll give the final word to Steve Hayward over at Powerline: “I’m starting to think Trump really is a one-person wrecking crew for the left delivered by divine Providence.”
President Trump is wasting no time in cleaning up Obama Administration messes where it’s possible to do so by executive order. One over the weekend started reigning in the EPA. “The Trump administration instituted a media blackout at the Environmental Protection Agency and barred staff from awarding any new contracts or grants. Emails sent to EPA staff since President Donald Trump’s inauguration on Friday and reviewed by The Associated Press, detailed the specific prohibitions banning press releases, blog updates or posts to the agency’s social media accounts.”
Under Obama the EPA was a rogue agency perusing a radical environmental agenda at the expense of congressional intent. Texas alone has sued the EPA numerous times. A few of the lawsuits currently in progress over EPA overreach:
The Cross-State Air Pollution Rule.
The “Endangerment Finding” over greenhouse gas emissions congress never authorized the EPA to regulate.
Pollution Control Permitting, where the EPA illegally disapproved of Texas’ permitting program.
The 2016 Regional Haze Plan Suit. “Once again, the Obama Administration is misinterpreting and misusing federal agencies to force through a radical agenda based more on the beliefs of his environmentalist base than on common sense.” There was also a lawuit over the 2012 Haze Plan.
Two separate Sulfur Dioxide Rule lawsuits. one still pending.
Multiple Greenhouse Gas rule lawsuits.
A lawsuit over Freedom of Information Act requests over the EPA colluding with various environmental groups to issue laws.
There are probably a few I’ve forgotten.
U.S. District Judge John Preston Bailey has said that the agency “evidences the continued hostility on the part of the EPA to acceptance of the mission established by Congress.”
Says Powerline’s John Hindraker:
The EPA was created by Congress and owes its powers exclusively to Congressional enactment, but over time it has become contemptuous of its democratically-elected master, and has come to view itself as a superior and independent power, entitled to enforce those legal provisions that it likes, and ignore those that are inconvenient. Agencies like the EPA are the single greatest threat to the freedom of American citizens.
The EPA is a rogue agency long overdue for reining in.
President Donald Trump has withdrawn the United States from the Trans Pacific Trade Partnership agreement, as both he and Hillary Clinton promised to do on the campaign trail. (We can speculate that Clinton was just lying, and that she would happily flip-flop and sign TPP once safely ensconced in office, but the glorious thing is that now we’ll never know.)
Free trade is a good idea, and multinational free trade agreements do generally help grow the economy. My suspicion is that TPP probably would have provided a net benefit, albeit it one that might be hard to measure if you weren’t employed in an industry (like apparel) called out by TPP. Vietnam and Malaysia were included, so maybe my sneakers would have gotten slightly cheaper.
But the question of whether this particular free trade treaty was actually a good or bad thing requires actually analyzing and reading the thing, and I have to give that a pass. For the historical record, here’s the cached text of the Trans Pacific Trade Partnership agreement. I didn’t have time to read that gargantuan tome of trade minutia back when it was a going concern, and I’m certainly not going to now. It’s less a platonic ideal of free trade ripped from the quill of Adam Smith and more a vast dog’s breakfast of competing special interest requests that, on the whole, probably nudges trade in a slightly freer direction while scratching numerous well-heeled backs.
Trump is not necessarily opposed to trade agreements in principle, but seeks more bilateral trade agreements than multinational ones. There were real concerns about TPP (especially in the areas of copyright agreements, labor laws, environmental regulations, and enshrinement of certain dodgy foreign part content requirements into law) that could be addressed in smaller bilateral agreements. The Washington Examiner suggests that a bilateral trade agreement with the UK should be at the top of Trump’s list.
Trump invited a lot of union leaders to the White House to help dance on TPP’s grave, and he garnered lavish praise from the likes of the UAW and the Teamsters (the still-breathing Jimmy Hoffa the Younger) for the move.
Setting aside the fact that the UAW probably did far more than Japanese competition to cripple the U.S. auto industry, imagine if Trump were able to get private sector unions to not even flip their support to Republicans, but just significantly cut back their campaign donations to Democrats. That would cripple their fundraising at a time when they’re already hurting for being completely out of power and for alienating Jewish Americans (traditionally a key Democratic Party funding constituency) over Israel. That could be a big domestic political positive even if ditching TPP is theoretically a small net economic negative.
Welcome to Inauguration Day, when Donald J. Trump is sworn in as the Forty-Fifth President of the United States of America! Celebrate the momentous day with a Friday LinkSwarm.
Trump started planning his presidential run right after Romney lost. In fact, Trump registered his “Make America Great Again” slogan six days after Romney’s defeat. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Clinton Family Friend: “Yes, I will be at the review stand at the inauguration and I am going to kill President-elect Trump… what are you gonna do about it Secret Service?” Secret Service: “Enjoy these complimentary handcuffs.”
I don’t think reasonable differences of opinion on the one hand, and the ordinary hypocrisy of partisan politics on the other, explain the extraordinarily stridency, the venom, and the hatred being flung at the incoming administration by its enemies. There may be many factors involved, to be sure, but I’d like to suggest that one factor in particular plays a massive role here.
To be precise, I think a lot of what we’re seeing is the product of class bigotry.
Snip.
Until last year, if you wanted to experience the class bigotry that’s so common among the affluent classes in today’s America, you pretty much had to be a member of those affluent classes, or at least good enough at passing to be present at the social events where their bigotry saw free play. Since Donald Trump broke out of the Republican pack early last year, though, that hindrance has gone by the boards. Those who want to observe American class bigotry at its choicest need only listen to what a great many of the public voices of the well-to-do are saying about the people who votes and enthusiasm have sent Trump to the White House.
You see, that’s a massive part of the reason a Trump presidency is so unacceptable to so many affluent Americans: his candidacy, unlike those of all his rivals, was primarily backed by “those people.”
Snip.
This isn’t just because so large a fraction of working class voters generally backed Trump; it’s also because Trump saw this from the beginning, and aimed his campaign squarely at the working class vote. His signature red ball cap was part of that—can you imagine Hillary Clinton wearing so proletarian a garment without absurdity?—but, as I pointed out a year ago, so was his deliberate strategy of saying (and tweeting) things that would get the liberal punditocracy to denounce him. The tones of sneering contempt and condescension they directed at him were all too familiar to his working class audiences, who have been treated to the same tones unceasingly by their soi-disant betters for decades now.
Much of the pushback against Trump’s impending presidency, in turn, is heavily larded with that same sneering contempt and condescension—the unending claims, for example, that the only reason people could possibly have chosen to vote for Trump was because they were racist misogynistic morons, and the like. (These days, terms such as “racist” and “misogynistic,” in the mouths of the affluent, are as often as not class-based insults rather than objective descriptions of attitudes.) The question I’d like to raise at this point, though, is why the affluent don’t seem to be able to bring themselves to come right out and denounce Trump as the candidate of the filthy rabble. Why must they borrow the rhetoric of identity politics and twist it (and themselves) into pretzel shapes instead?
Physicians across the country have been firing Medicare patients; and according to a late 2015 study from the Kaiser Family Foundation, 21% of physicians are not taking new Medicare patients.
Much of this trend is based on stiff penalties and financial disincentives from the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), and 2015’s Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization (MACRA) Act.
MACRA in particular is completely mystifying.
The law created a whopping 2,400 pages of regulations that Medicare physicians are expected to know and follow.
Many of the rules are debilitating.
For instance, MACRA changed how physicians can be reimbursed for their Medicare patients by establishing a bizarre set of standards to determine if a physician is providing “value”.
As an example, if a patient ends up in the emergency room, his or her physician can incur a steep penalty.
This explains why my step-dad was dropped by his doctor.
The healthcare system has been broken to the point that physicians now have a greater incentive to fire their Medicare patients than to treat them.
Soros’s global reach and influence far outstrip those of the Koch brothers or other liberal bogeymen—and that underlying it all is a vision both dystopian and opportunistic. “The main obstacle to a stable and just world order,” Soros has declared, “is the United States.” Ergo, that constitutional republic must be weakened and its allies degraded. The Sorosian world order—one of open borders and global governance, antithetical to the ideals and experience of the West—could then assume command.
Snip.
n the United States, Soros bankrolls a broad range of political and cultural causes. One is to destabilize the Roman Catholic Church in the United States. In 2015, he dedicated $650,000 for the purpose of shaping Pope Francis’s U.S. visit, using left-leaning Catholic groups to promote gay marriage, abortion, and physician-assisted suicide. Leading the effort was Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta, a self-professed Catholic. Bill Donohue, outspoken president of the Catholic League, vainly called for Podesta’s dismissal. “He is fomenting revolution in the Catholic Church, creating mutiny and is totally unethical,” Donohue said. “He is the front man for George Soros to create a host of phony anti-Catholic groups. These are not just bad comments, as some have suggested. These words are orchestrated, calculated and designed to create fissures in the Catholic Church.”
Another Soros favorite is Black Lives Matter, the radical protest group dedicated to the proposition that police are inherently racist. Working the streets with incendiary rhetoric, at odds with the truth about black-on-black crime, BLM has helped foster “depolicing,” as Heather Mac Donald describes it, in high-crime urban areas. In 2015, after days of rioting in Baltimore in response to the death of Freddie Gray in police custody, an Open Society Foundations memo excitedly commented that “recent events offer a unique opportunity to accelerate the dismantling of structural inequality generated and maintained by local law enforcement and to engage residents who have historically been disenfranchised in Baltimore City in shaping and monitoring reform.” Three straight acquittals of police officers involved in the matter left the prosecution’s case in shreds but made no difference to the Open Society Foundations. It has donated at least $650,000 to Black Lives Matter and pledged more assistance to antipolice factions across the country. These activities prompted the father of one of the Dallas police officers killed during a Black Lives Matter protest to sue Soros (along with other individuals and groups) for inspiring a “war on police.”
I always thought George Soros was running Black Lives Matter, and now here’s some proof: “BLM leader lives in home owned by Soros’ Open Society board member.”
Don’t look now, but the Clinton/Sanders rift is still roiling the Democratic Party. Sadly, neither side seems to be willing to give up on Social Justice Warrior victimhood identity politics. (Hat tip: Hot Air, which notes “Democrats have to come to grips with the fact that they stopped speaking for most Americans over the past eight years, and started lecturing at Americans instead. The party got wrapped up in the progressive-academic social-justice agenda to the point that the party made diversity into an obsession at the expense of the real economic issues facing voters outside of the coastal enclaves and college campuses.”)
A National Councilman for the College Democrats of America is jumping ship and considering joining the Republican Party just before President-elect Trump takes the oath of office.
Michael J. Hout, a junior at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, told Campus Reform that he believes the contemporary Democratic Party is no longer the best place for an ideological moderate like himself, saying the Party is pivoting towards more extremist rhetoric and appealing more to those who often do not even consider themselves Democrats, such as socialists and independents.
Snip.
“This strategy of catering to the whims of those for whom identity politics matters more than anything else, and of allowing for even anti-white, anti-male rhetoric to find a home within the party, is a large part of its untenable strategy moving forward,” Hout explained, predicting that “it will continue to cause Democrats to lose, time and time again.”
Former California Democratic Party chair argues that Democrats should move their headquarters to Detroit to reconnect with middle class voters. I agree, but for a different reason: So they can be forced to see the results of their handiwork firsthand every day.
A glimmering of a clue: “U.S. Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy III, breaking ranks with other Democrats who are trashing President-elect Donald Trump and boycotting his inaugural, is imploring his party’s rank and file to figure out why middle American voters went Republican in November….’Folks, we lost their trust and being mortified and mystified about their vote doesn’t bring it back.'” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
While [Steve] Harvey tries to use his celebrity for something selfless and useful and while the Talladega College marching band gets the world stage to show off the results of its hard work and school spirit, think of their detractors as the latter sit behind their cell phones and sling names like “coon” and “Uncle Tom”[i] in between posting their twerking and ghetto fight videos.
Numero Three-o: Why is anger as a voting incentive limited to white males? Don’t black men get angry? When Louis Farrakhan holds a rally, why doesn’t Yahoo News say “Angry Black Men Gather in Chicago”? Why aren’t there any Angry Latino Men or Angry Chinese Men?
Numero Four-o: More specifically, how do you explain the fact that the Angry White Men who voted for Trump in 2016 are the same white men who voted for Obama in 2008? When they vote for Obama they’re not angry, but when they vote for Trump it can only be because they’re enraged hicks? Gogebic County in Michigan is 92 percent white and hadn’t voted for a Republican since 1972—until this election. The counties in southwestern Wisconsin, all heavily Democratic, went for Trump after a strong Obama vote in 2008 and 2012. Eastern Iowa, Democratic since 1988, went for Trump. Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, which is frequently used as the very definition of “working-class,” went for Republicans for the first time since 1988. Why are all these people classified as “angry” now, but in 2008, when they were angry at George Bush, they were just “voting for change”? Could it be, just perhaps, maybe, they feel betrayed by the Democratic Party? If we’re gonna call them angry, let’s define what they’re angry about.
For all that CNN flack global warming, they certainly don’t act like they believe it. In addition from moving CNN headquarters from Atlanta to New York City, “Time Warner, the company that owns CNN, just invested in SEVEN new buildings located in Hudson Yards, a part of Manhattan just a block or two away from the water. An area that, according to its own CNN, will soon be underwater, and therefore utterly and completely worthless.”
Speaking of CNN, they just hired Valerie Jarrett’s daughter to report on Trump’s Justice Department. “Valerie Jarrett’s daughter quietly joined CNN in September as a reporter in the network’s Washington bureau. She came to CNN with no experience in journalism.” Evidence suggests CNN has naked contempt for both objectivity and those not in the anointed liberal overclass. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
“The primary aim of official propaganda is to generate an “official narrative” that can be mindlessly repeated by the ruling classes and those who support and identify with them. This official narrative does not have to make sense, or to stand up to any sort of serious scrutiny. Its factualness is not the point. The point is to draw a Maginot line, a defensive ideological boundary, between “the truth” as defined by the ruling classes and any other “truth” that contradicts their narrative.”
UK PM Theresa May aims at a “hard Brexit.” Andrew Stuttaford (and I) wonder why she isn’t going for the ‘Norway option’ of leaving the EU but staying in the European Economic Area.
Marine Le Pen cues up Frexit. “The euro has not been used as a currency, but as a weapon—a knife stuck in the ribs of a country to force it to go where the people don’t want to go.” I disagree with Walter Russel Mead: The EU, as currently constituted, is incapable of being reformed. Reform is impossible without scraping the European Commission, which is impossible without scraping Maastricht, which would scrap the EU. Better to start again from scratch or go back to just the common market.
Jihadwatch’s Robert Spencer had a minor piece at The Hill on why Lindsay Lohan’s (rumored) conversion to Islam was a bad idea. I wasn’t even going to link it. The The Hill took it down due to political pressure. Now I have to.
Four family members who ran one of the largest cartel smuggling operations in south Texas had their life in prison sentences commuted and will likely be returning to this border city from where they ran their criminal empire. One of the main destinations that the criminal organizations delivered drugs to was Chicago, Illinois.
This week, outgoing President Barack Obama commuted the sentences of 209 convicted criminals and pardoned 64 others. The majority of the convictions were from drug trafficking or production offenses.
Four of those convicted criminals who had been sentenced to life in prison will be released by May 17. They ran a criminal organization made up of close to 80 men and women who worked with Mexico’s Gulf Cartel to move between 100,000 to almost 750,000 pounds of marijuana into the U.S. during a 10-year period. The drugs were moved into Houston and then distributed to Atlanta, Chicago, and other major metropolitan areas.
According to court records obtained by Breitbart Texas, brothers Cesar Moreno Sr., Eduardo Moreno, Lazaro Moreno, and Luis Moreno along with other relatives and friends had been at the helm of a large-scale drug distribution operation based out of the border city of Roma, Texas.
3D TV is dead again. Good. 3D always struck me as an annoying gimmick, even in IMAX.
“Woman stabbed man 9 times after he wouldn’t commit to relationship.” I’m pretty sure the guy made the right call there… (Hat tip: Bill Crider.)
Man gets head start on the epic douchebag Olympics. “28-year-old James Allen is facing a charge of driving while intoxicated. [He] drove a $385,000 Ferrari off a bridge in Westlake, went airborne for 40 feet and crashed into the woods while speeding on Friday night.” (Hat tip: Iowahawk’s Twitter feed.)
Here’s an interesting piece on the threat Trump poses not only to the media’s political pieties, but to the entire edifice of politically correct moral authority they had spent decades constructing:
If all his other cultural blasphemies did not finish off Donald Trump, his grab-them-by-the-pussy line, in the overwhelming opinion of the liberal media, would. That it did not might suggest that many cultural certainties are a lot less firm than most of the media and culture industry thought. Twenty years (or so) of rule tightening about how we talk about sex, gender, race and our multicultural society—what is disparagingly called political correctness, or, more inclusively, the liberal point of view—was put up for review by Trump’s election.
The ongoing expressions of shock on the part of the cultural establishment—expressed on a daily basis by The New Yorker, New York magazine and The New York Times, anything, apparently, with New York in its title—reflect their fears that the development of a more careful, regulated and corrected world is about to be undone. That the unapologetic white male has returned. You could hardly find a more threatening and throwback version of that than Trump—a rich, voluble, egomaniacal, middle-aged pussy hound. To write him you would need some combination of authors like Norman Mailer, Terry Southern, Harry Crews and Gore Vidal, all notably out of step with current cultural norms.
The culture norm is as starkly confronted as the political norm with proof that it’s not speaking to the lives of a sizeable part of the nation: that same pussy talk that shocked cosmopolitans turns out not to be of much concern, and even to express a casual day-to-day reality, for many Americans. Media fragmentation has created all sorts of thriving niches that accommodate the views of eager consumers, lessening the need to speak to a broader, more difficult-to-reach audience—the once-great mass market.
Snip.
Instinctively or by canny plan, Trump converted the conservatives’ parochial and rate-limiting culture war on abortion and gay marriage into a much more visceral campaign against the political pieties of sophisticated America, with Trump as the ultimate revenge on upper-middlebrow cultural life. It’s the mannered and effete against the profane and immediate.
For Trump, Hillary Clinton, in her guardedness and suspicion, in her inability to express herself with any openness and spontaneity, summed up out-of-touchness, struggling to attract crowds of a few hundred, while he was pulling tens of thousands.
Trump’s attacks on the media served to say that his language, his expressiveness, his ability to connect with the audience was more potent than the media’s. (In an interview with Trump shortly after his nomination was secure, he told me he was sure of victory when for the first primary debate, the usual audience increased almost tenfold because of his presence: “I’m more entertaining than the media.”) The media, in thrall to the culture establishment—and signed on to its cultural rules and concerns (hence its Pussygate shock)—was inauthentic and he was the real thing. For “CNN sucks”-screaming Trump supporters, CNN sucks for, in fact, the same reason that it sucks to everybody else—it’s phony and slavish—but Trumpsters were suddenly saying it, screaming it. (Liberals took this as an attack on free speech; on Trump’s side, the view was that the media stifles real speech.)
This attack on careful, orderly, prescribed culture is what happens when the culture stops talking about real things—at least what a significant part of the country regards as real and important. Or, it is—and certainly is inevitably thought to be by those cultural standard bearers under attack—a sinister onslaught against enlightenment itself.
In the view of the latter camp, Steve Bannon, one of the masterminds of the Trump campaign, and the new administration’s “chief strategist,” becomes a preeminent retrograde white male bugaboo. The non-Trump culture can only see him as a threat, and sore thumb, and, without the means to describe or recognize anybody too far outside its circle, a racist, misogynist, anti-Semite. And yet, not that long ago, Bannon would have been a perfectly recognizable figure, even an admirable one, an ex-military and up-from-working-class guy, striving, through three marriages and various careers, to make it, but never finding much comfort in the establishment world, wanting to be part of it, and wanting to explode it at the same time—a character for a writer like Kevin Morris. An American man’s story. Republican politics is filled with such strivers—Lee Atwater, Roger Ailes, Karl Rove—great characters reduced to violations of liberal sensibilities.
Indeed, the election reengages a gender battle that many people on the New York side of the Trump gap had thought was mightily going in only one direction. The vestigial and primitive American man, unreconstructed, baying at the moon (probably high on opiates)—the alt-right in the liberal view—voiceless for many years (or, anyway, wise to shut up), now had Donald “Let me be your voice” Trump. The obvious message of his sudden resurgence of course is that he didn’t go away or reform: He was just shut out. Without any place in upper-middlebrow culture, except as an occasional enemy of reason or subject of scandal, there was no bridge to who he was—no humanity left for him.
Hence, while the liberal media was helping to eject that ultimate white man devil figure Roger Ailes from Fox News for real and perceived sins against women (it seemed not to much matter which), the country was making a pussy-grabber president. The gap between HR departments and the real world is a story obviously not being told very well. A story whose ambiguities and nuances could not now be written—nor its real language uttered—because the cultural establishment sees no ambiguities and nuances and, for sure, doesn’t allow those words. But meanwhile, a good part of the country—unable to communicate with the cultural establishment—sees only hypocrisy.
Glenn Greenwald says Democrats will go to any lengths to avoid blaming themselves for their debacle:
I really haven’t experienced anything even remotely like the smear campaign that has been launched by Democrats in this really coordinated way ever since I began just expressing skepticism about the prevailing narrative over Russia and its role that it allegedly played in the election and, in particular, in helping to defeat Hillary Clinton. I mean, not even the reporting I did based on the Edward Snowden archive, which was extremely controversial in multiple countries around the world, not even that compared to the attacks now.
And the reason is very, very obvious, which is that it has become exceptionally important to Democratic partisans to believe that the reason they lost this election is not because they chose a candidate who was corrupt and who was extremely disliked and who symbolized all of the worst failings of the Democratic Party. It’s extremely important to them not to face what is really a systemic collapse on the part of the Democratic Party as a political force in the United States, in the House, in the Senate, in state houses and governorships all over the country. And so, in order not to face any of that and have to confront their own failings, they instead want to focus everything on Vladimir Putin and Russia and insist that the reason they lost was because this big, bad dictator interfered in the election. And anyone who challenges or anyone who questions that instantly becomes not just their enemy, but now, according to their framework, someone who’s actually unpatriotic, that if you question the evidence, the sufficiency of the evidence to support this theory, that somehow your loyalties are suspect, that you’re not just a critic of the Democratic Party, you’re actually a stooge of or an agent of the Kremlin.
For months, the CIA, with unprecedented clarity, overtly threw its weight behind Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and sought to defeat Donald Trump. In August, former acting CIA Director Michael Morell announced his endorsement of Clinton in the New York Times and claimed that “Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.” The CIA and NSA director under George W. Bush, Gen. Michael Hayden, also endorsed Clinton and went to the Washington Post to warn, in the week before the election, that “Donald Trump really does sound a lot like Vladimir Putin,” adding that Trump is “the useful fool, some naif, manipulated by Moscow, secretly held in contempt, but whose blind support is happily accepted and exploited.”
It is not hard to understand why the CIA preferred Clinton over Trump. Clinton was critical of Obama for restraining the CIA’s proxy war in Syria and was eager to expand that war, while Trump denounced it. Clinton clearly wanted a harder line than Obama took against the CIA’s long-standing foes in Moscow, while Trump wanted improved relations and greater cooperation. In general, Clinton defended and intended to extend the decadeslong international military order on which the CIA and Pentagon’s preeminence depends, while Trump — through a still-uncertain mix of instability and extremist conviction — posed a threat to it.
Whatever one’s views are on those debates, it is the democratic framework — the presidential election, the confirmation process, congressional leaders, judicial proceedings, citizen activism and protest, civil disobedience — that should determine how they are resolved. All of those policy disputes were debated out in the open; the public heard them; and Trump won. Nobody should crave the rule of Deep State overlords.
Yet craving Deep State rule is exactly what prominent Democratic operatives and media figures are doing.
One need not buy all of Greenwald’s analysis of geopolitics or Trump to conclude that his analysis of the current alliance between Democrats, the media and the intelligence community is essentially correct. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
My take is that several state actors certainly hacked Hillary’s email server for years and years, and silently read all her communications. Probably more than one state actor penetrated the DNC email system for several years.
It’s plausible than an insider leaked the DNC emails – some BertieBro IT Admin type who saw how the sausage was being made and who was smart enough to cover his tracks while pointing clues towards Russia.
Bottom line, this is a tale told by an idiot; full of sound and fury and signifying nothing. We know that something happened, but we don’t know who did it, and what they say in the report doesn’t change that.
Borepatch, in turn, points to this detailed analysis of the security on both Hillary’s email server and the DNC:
At this point, we can largely dispose of Hillary’s Hack. It was an open book to all comers and at least one was Romanian (and sharing with friends) and not Russia. However, I’d say it was almost certain that at some time a Russian intrusion happened. The name of the server was obvious. The location insecure. The operating system and protective layers a joke. Frankly, I’d expect them to be “in” the same day they first looked at it. Which means something like 8 years ago. So why didn’t things leak then?
Because the Russians Are Not Stupid. A fundamental of spycraft is you don’t expose sources and methods, you use them to collect intel for your use, not publication. I suspect they enjoyed a near real time email feed from the Secretary Of State for years, in silence. This argues for email dump to be someone other than them. My personal muse would be an NSA guy, aghast at what was in evidence. Like a Snowden, but not willing to give up the $1/4 Million salary… He (or she…) would have all the requisite skilz to pull it off and leave no finger prints, access to PRISM, and lots of neat toys to work with. Though more likely would be the underpaid I.T. guy Hillary had set it up who was making a backup one day and dropped a load… But I digress.
The bottom line on Hillary is we know she kept a full copy (found on Huma’s Laptop with the Wiener…) and that it was around until she had her lawyers erase it. We know it surfaced in full at the time the laptop went to the FBI, and in parts before that. We know at least one of her hackers was found (though he had likely not leaked it) and that he said he had a doomsday copy for safety. He wasn’t a very good hacker, so that shows lots of good ones walked right in and snagged copies. Assigning source of any Hillary leaks is going to be an exercise is “ME ME MEE!!! PICK MEEE!” with a dozen hands up in the room.
More from Guccifer 2.0 himself: “I have totally no relation to the Russian government. I’d like to tell you once again I was acting in accordance with my personal political views and beliefs. The technical evidence contained in the reports doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. This is a crude fake.” (Hat tip: Zero Hedge.)
Our new Secretary of Defense sounds serious about defeating the Islamic State. “We should try to shut down its recruiting, shut down its finances, and then work to fight battles of annihilation — not attrition, but annihilation — against them; so that the first time they meet the forces that we put against them, there should basically be no survivors.”
The problem that we are faced with, and what the American people seem to be rebelling against, are the “experts” who seek to influence government policy in ways voters are either opposed to or at the very least find ineffective and expensive.
To put it bluntly: those experts have screwed a lot of shit up. Obamacare, American foreign policy, the war on drugs, domestic environmental policy, the economy…the list of issues is seemingly endless. The American people were told for at least the last eight years that the smart set was in charge, and things would be just dandy if only we allowed the “experts” free rein. The problem is that there are a lot of things that may seem smart on paper but which just won’t work when forcibly applied to the citizens of 50 separate states, with 50 separate economies, and 50 distinct voting bases, and this assessment assumes that those implementing policy actually have America’s best interests as a free republic at heart.
This leads us to the real heart of the matter: liberty. The Washington political and bureaucratic classes have no Constitutional right to force the “solutions” to any of these problems on their fellow citizens. The health insurance “problem” is not a national problem insofar as there is no Constitutional right to health insurance (or even healthcare), and the answer to what problems there are in healthcare in Texas are very probably not the same as the answer for New Hampshire or Oregon. The federal government institutes regulations constantly affecting the economy that have no Constitutional basis. There is no Constitutional basis whatsoever for banning or regulating any drug at the Federal level, and yet we’re told we have a national “opioid epidemic” that demands a federal solution. Foreign policy experts are undoubtedly necessary, but our foreign policy, when any logic or reason can be discerned in it at all, certainly doesn’t seem to be guided by any experts in the field. There is even a very good possibility that actually fixing any “problem” at the federal level is viewed as bad for business, because without the problem to solve there would be a lot of unemployable experts.
In short, the American people don’t have a problem with experts or intellectuals. What they have a problem with is incompetence, and it is just a fact of life that the larger and more remote the government and bureaucracy become, the more incompetent and unaccountable they will be.
Thanks Obama. “93 percent of police officers are concerned about their safety on the job; 72 percent are less willing to stop suspicious characters; and 75 percent report increased tension between cops and the black community.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Social Justice Warriors already deterring people from the “Women’s March on Washington.” See, they were all set to flaunt the peacock feathers of their leftwing virtue, only to be told “they had a lot of learning to do.” Because there’s nothing more fun than being lectured about how you’re a racist when you’re not. Welcome to Red State America, liberal white women! (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Social Justice Warrior drama at the Free Software Foundation. “‘Developer’ Leah Rowe has been making unhinged, outrageous claims of harassment and bullying on behalf of her anonymous friend who was let go by the FSF. She then stole the Libreroot project from the community, locked it down away from the other devs, and made a unhinged claims of wrongdoing by the FSF and two employees. She has provided no evidence of any of these claims and as she is a post-modernist, we’re supposed to substitute her feelings for any facts as being equivalent.” The amazing thing is that, for once, FSF head honcho Richard Stallman (who is somewhere on the continuum between “true software visionary” and “fanatic lunatic no one wants to deal with”) isn’t the person at fault for the drama…
“An Arizona Department of Public Safety officer has survived an attempt on his life after a passing motorist shot dead a highway sniper who took aim at the trooper after stopping to assist an individual in a rolled vehicle.”
On the Democratic side, Clinton and Sanders are also in a tight and testy battle, although Clinton slowly gains the upper hand thanks to the Democratic Party’s controversial formula for allocating “superdelegates,” which is as follows:
▪ 57 percent go to Clintion.
▪ The remaining 43 percent also go to Clinton.
Responding to charges from the Sanders camp that the Democratic National Committee is tipping the scales in Clinton’s favor, chairperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz states that “the DNC is scrupulously neutral in the contest between Secretary Clinton and the senile Commie fart.”
JUNE: It becomes evident that, barring some highly unlikely political development, the next president of the United States will be either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. Meanwhile, the nation is in the grip of a worsening heroin epidemic. Coincidence? You be the judge.
Speaking of coincidences: Bill Clinton happens to find himself in the same airport as U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and – as any two people would do if one of them was the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer and the other was married to the subject of a federal investigation – they meet privately aboard Lynch’s Justice Department jet. When word of the meeting leaks out, Lynch assures the press that she and Bill did not discuss the FBI investigation into Hillary’s email, adding, “nor did we inhale.” For her part, Hillary continues to insist that she never emailed anything classified, and even if she did she actually didn’t, besides which so did a lot of other people such as Colin Powell and Harry Truman, and this so-called “scandal” is ancient history from literally years ago that just makes a person sigh and roll her eyes because it is preventing her from fighting for working families while at the same time being a historic woman.
Internationally, the top story is “Brexit,” the decision by voters in the United Kingdom to leave the European Union. This comes as a big surprise to professional pollsters, who had confidently predicted the opposite result; they enjoy a hearty laugh, then head across the Atlantic to apply their talents to the forthcoming American presidential election.
On the Democratic side, the month gets off to a rocky start when FBI Director James Comey, announcing the results of the bureau’s investigation, reveals that when Hillary Clinton was secretary of state, her official emails, some including classified material, were basically as secure from prying eyes as a neon beer sign. Nevertheless, Comey says he is recommending that no criminal charges be brought against Clinton, because, quote, “I don’t want to die.”
With that legal hurdle cleared, relieved Democrats gather in Philadelphia for their convention, which opens, in a bid to placate Sanders delegates, with the ceremonial caning of Debbie Wasserman Schultz. This is followed by several hundred speeches praising Hillary Clinton for the many accomplishments she has achieved, as well as the achievements she has accomplished, while at the same time being, historically, a woman. In her acceptance speech, Clinton calls on Americans “to join with me in building a better world for us and for our children,” adding, “or I will crush you like an insect.”
Meanwhile, newly released State Department emails cause some people to suggest that the reason a variety of dodgy foreign businesspeople and nations gave millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state was that they expected – get a load of this wacky right-wing conspiracy theory! – to receive special access to or favors from the U.S. government. Hillary has no choice but to roll her eyes and laugh in a violently unnatural manner at this latest attempt to use these discredited smear tactics to prevent her, a historic and lifelong woman, from fighting for working families as well as working for fighting families.
Meanwhile the Clinton campaign is dealing with a steady stream of WikiLeaks emails suggesting that the Clinton Foundation is dedicated to humanitarian relief in the same sense that the Soprano family was dedicated to waste management. But this kind of scandal is ho-hum stuff for the Clinton campaign, whose campaign slogan has slowly morphed from “Stronger Together” into “At Least She’s Predictably Corrupt.” As the month wears on and Trump continues to flail away unconvincingly at his alleged groping victims, it appears more and more likely that Clinton has established herself, with just enough voters, as the least-loathsome choice in this hideous, issues-free nightmare of an election.
And then, just when we thought it could not get any weirder or any worse, we are hit with the mother of all October surprises in the form of the incurable genital wart on the body politic known as Anthony Weiner. While probing Weiner’s laptop (Har!) for evidence of alleged sexting with an underage girl, the FBI reportedly discovers thousands of emails that were sent from or to Hillary Clinton’s private email server, which apparently had a higher internet profile than Taylor Swift. James Comey sends a letter informing Congress that the FBI is taking another look at the email issue. In a display of the intellectual integrity that has made our political class so respected by ordinary citizens, all the Democrats and allied pundits who praised Comey in July as a courageous public servant instantly swap positions with all the Republicans and allied pundits who said he was a cowardly hack. This new development sends the political world into Full Freakout Mode, with cable TV political analysts forced to change their underwear on an hourly basis. Meanwhile millions of critical swing voters switch from “undecided” to “suicidal.”
Donald Trump is elected president of the United States, unless this turns out to be one of those really vivid dreams, like the one where you’re at the dentist but you’re naked and your dentist is Bette Midler and spiders keep coming out of your mouth.
Trump’s victory stuns the nation. Not since the darkest days of the Civil War have so many Americans unfriended each other on Facebook. Some even take the extreme step of writing “open letters.” Angry, traumatized protesters cry, march, shout, smash windows, set fires – and that’s just The New York Times editorial board. Leading celebrities who vowed to leave the country if Trump won immediately start making plans to … OK, to not actually leave the country per se, but next time they definitely will and YOU’LL BE SORRY.
In Washington, Democrats who believed in a strong president wielding power via executive orders instantly exchange these deeply held convictions with Republicans who until Election Day at roughly 10 p.m. Eastern time believed fervently in filibusters and limited government.
On TV, the professional Explainers, having failed spectacularly to predict what just happened, pause for a period of somber and contrite self-reflection lasting close to 15 minutes before they begin the crucial work of explaining to the rest of us what will happen next.
Joe Biden lies awake at night, staring at the ceiling.
In the month’s biggest non-election news, the death of former Cuban leader Fidel Castro is greeted with expressions of sorrow from several dozen world leaders who never had to live under his rule, and tears of happiness from many thousands of Cubans who did.
Welcome to the last LinkSwarm of 2016! I have a lot of bigger posts gestating for next week (including a huge one on Texas’ own municipal pension crisis), so in the meantime, enjoy these:
The New York Times is having a hard time understanding President-elect Donald Trump.
Trumpism is a process and a philosophy of action and leadership so different from the normal Washington systems that the Times just seems incapable of understanding it.
Furthermore, there is an Orwellian quality of deliberation misinformation and disinformation to the Times’ coverage.
President-elect Trump IS different. In fact, he is unique. No other American has won the presidency without serving in elected office or being a general in the military. No other billionaire has been elected to the presidency. No one has ever used social media as effectively. No one has had the scale and frequency of rallies. No one has understood that a 20,000-person rally with every person using his or her smartphone to send out photos and videos creates an audience the size of MSNBC. No one else has been dramatically outspent in both the primaries and the general election and won.
You would think that a person with these achievements would be worthy of a certain respect and of a curiosity about how he thinks and what he is trying to do.
Furthermore, Trumpism IS different. It isn’t traditional conservatism. It is an entrepreneurial, pragmatic, energetic, constantly evolving and constantly learning and improving model.
If The New York Times were a serious newspaper it would start by recognizing that Trump is a remarkable leader and that this is a new phenomenon. Then it would try to explore and understand the differences between the old order and the world Trump is trying to create. Then it could describe the context of the President-elect and educate its readers accurately in an informed, coherent manner.
Unfortunately, The New York Times is trapped within the obsolete establishment mindset which was wrong about Trump throughout the primaries, then was wrong about Trump throughout the general election, then was wrong about who would win. This elite mindset has learned nothing. It is now enthusiastically being wrong about the transition. All of this is great practice for the paper to be wrong about the new administration.
Lunatic anti-#GamerGate tranny Brianna Wu (AKA John Walker Flynt) is running for congress from Massachusetts. Good. Every Democratic Party donor dollar that goes to that Wu is a dollar not backing a candidate that can actually win. (Background on Wu for people coming in to the story late.)
Interesting analysis of the media pushing the Russians did it meme. “Here’s a trick when reading New York Times articles: when they switch to passive voice, they are covering up a lie.” (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
Syrian migrants in Germany kick a baby. “Was that wrong? Should I not have done that?” Disclaimer: Not these guys:
Lessons from 5,000 gun fights. Including “Reloads are almost vanishingly insignificant factors in gunfights” and “He who puts the first shot into meaty bits on the other guy, wins.”
Gun control loses at the ballot box, as well as the box office. “For every dollar spent on advertising, Miss Sloane brought in just 21 cents in ticket sales.”
Let’s take a look at a small sideshow act to this year’s Electoral College circus: Lawrence Lessig’s Amazing Disappearing Faithless Electors.
The Harvard professor, Creative Commons founder, and all around political gadfly boldly declared a few days before the election that “at least 20 Republican members of the Electoral College may not cast their votes for President-elect Donald Trump.”
That’s just 18 more than the 2 that actually flipped. One wonders how Lessig arrived at his grossly inflated count, assuming it wasn’t plucked out of thin air or his nether regions.
Indeed, Lessig spent much of the 2016 election cycle making mystifying moves and puzzling pronouncements. In August 2015, he announced he was running for the Democratic nomination for President, raised $1 million to do so, pledged that if elected, he would pass a campaign finance “reform” (including a basket of liberal activist proposals, including limiting free speech by overturning Citizens United, eliminating Gerrymandering, introducing ranked voting, etc.) and then resign. Two months later he walked back the resignation promise, and shortly after that, after being excluded from the debates and unable to obtain any traction in the race, dropped out entirely.
“Donald Trump is the biggest gift to the movement for reform since the Supreme Court gave us Citizens United,” Lessig told Politico.com, referring to Trump’s boasts that he’s given big sums to candidates in both parties and then called in favors as needed. “What he’s saying is absolutely correct, the absolute truth. He has pulled back the curtain.”
“I’ll make a promise,” Lessig said in Politico’s report, after stating he would not “rule out a third-party run with Trump” should that offer be made. “If Trump said he was going to do one thing and fix this corrupted system, then go back to life as an entertainment figure, I absolutely would link up with Donald Trump.”
In light of all that, it’s strange that Lessig would not only throw his full weight behind Hillary Clinton, the embodiment of special interest money in politics, but lie about faithless electors in a last-ditch attempt to deny Donald Trump the presidency.
Then again, if I were to pick a locale for the most intense cases of Trump Derangement Syndrome, the Harvard University faculty lounge would probably rank near the top of the list…
