Preference cascades are tricky things.
A preference cascade occurs when a group of people who have long felt strongly about something they felt they couldn’t express suddenly find out that there are a lot of people who feel the same way. It happened in Eastern Europe in the 1980s, when the rise of Solidarity started a series of shocks to the decaying edifice of communist control that made people realize that just about all their fellow citizens hated living under communism just as much as they did.
Now a similar preference cascade may be taking place among black Americans willing to #WalkAway from the Democratic Party.
For years, Black America’s absolute fidelity to the Democratic Party has been one of the bedrock assumptions of political calculations in the United States, with Democratic Presidential candidates regularly receiving some 90% of the black vote every four years. The pattern was so pronounced that neither Republicans nor Democrats felt the need to aim campaign pitches at black Americans, Republicans because they felt it was useless and Democrats because they felt it was unnecessary.
During the same period, cities across American enjoyed uninterrupted Democratic Party control and uninterrupted decay. Detroit, Baltimore, Philadelphia: None has had a Republican mayor in the last half century. Black Americans voted for Democrats in near-monolithic numbers since 1964 only to see the cities they lived in continue to get worse.
Now, thanks to President Donald Trump, that may all be changing:
The black community is not owned. They’re free Americans with free minds, talents, and ideas and deserve to practice and perfect that level of autonomy just like everyone else does.
However, the Democrats have more or less forbidden anyone from the black community from reaching across the aisle or considering any ideas that break from their approved ideological boundaries. Being a black person and a Republican will cause the Democrats to suddenly turn on you in vicious ways. They’ll lob racist names at you like “Uncle Tom” or worse.
They’ll even arbitrarily decide that you’re not really black.
It’s a brave thing to step out of line and disagree with a large group at the best of times but this is a time when political tensions are at their height. Any political or ideological disagreement could result in your entire life being destroyed by the mob.
For a black person in America, I can only imagine how difficult it is to stand up and say that you’re not going to go along with the approved behavioral codes set for you by the mainstream social guidelines. It will result in a backlash, but the black community knows how to endure, and little by little, they’re enduring the hate and anger thrown at them for reaching across the aisle and shaking hands with the man you’re not supposed to ever even look at without scorn.
It started with Kanye West hugging President Donald Trump and talking about how much he likes him. Maybe they thought that was the end of it. West is a massive talent but they could write him off as loony.
But then recently, Ice Cube thanked Trump for all the things he’s doing for the black community. Cube is a legend, and calling him crazy wasn’t going to fly in this case.
Lil Pump also came out with his own profanity ridden endorsement of Trump.
Now, as my colleague Alex Parker recently wrote, Lil Wayne did the exact same. He sent out a tweet containing a picture of him smiling with Trump and thanking him for the work he’s doing on criminal justice reform.
Democrats are incredibly upset and it’s not hard to understand why. These endorsements will have an effect. If they don’t outright turn people to vote for Trump, then they’ll do something even more horrifying. They’ll make reaching across the aisle a normal thing to do, and the distrust and prejudice against Republicans that the Democrats have built and fostered for so long will begin to dissipate.
Unapproved ideas may begin to creep in and delusions will begin to melt. The Democrat party will lose its hold on the black community and the vote they took for granted for so long will begin to lessen.
Perhaps the Democrats didn’t see this coming, but perhaps the world should have.
The black community isn’t a community known for being friendly with the establishment. They have a lot of reasons to be distrustful or resentful of it as you can imagine. Trump is anything but the establishment. He came in as an outsider whose political experience was a few failed campaigns and some meetings with politicians in the past.
When Trump hit the scene it was clear he wasn’t a part of the Washington machine. He wasn’t a politician and he didn’t care much for their rules. It was clear they hated him for it from the word “go.”
Trump began getting to work for the black community, bringing their unemployment levels to all-time lows. He lowered their taxes and opened up opportunity zones. He began channeling money to black colleges. He’s also been doing a lot for criminal justice reform, which was overdue for change.
The black community began to wake up and see what was happening. The Democrat party hadn’t been on their side for a long time. It was using them. Little by little that became apparent, and soon you had black people switching parties.
Maybe the Democrats thought they had the black community on lock, but the black community proved that they’re not owned by anyone.
The rapper endorsements were significant in a way that all those “Actors reunions for Biden” were not. Does anyone think the Seinfeld cast would endorse anyone but liberals?
Rap stars endorsing Republicans, especially a Republican President so hated by white political elites as Donald Trump, is just about unprecedented. Many black people may be low information voters, but they know their cities are broken, they know that Democrats run their cities, and most don’t think that rioting, looting and defunding the police are answers.
Seeing not just black celebrities endorsing Trump, but black celebrities whose entire images revolve around being “ghetto” endorsing Trump does carry novelty value. That’s the sort of thing that gets attention and breaks through to voters that never watch CNN or pick up The New York Times. That’s the way preference cascades start.
In the meantime, what #BlackLivesMatter seems to be accomplishing is getting black-owned businesses looted and burned and getting more black people shot.
New York City’s homicide rate is at a five-year high; the number of shooting victims was up over 42 percent through June 21 compared with the same period in 2019. The number of shootings in the first three weeks of June was over twice that of the same period in 2019, making this June the city’s bloodiest in nearly a quarter century, according to The New York Times. At 4 a.m. last Sunday, a 30-year-old woman was shot in the head in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, at a house party. On Saturday afternoon, a man and a woman were shot to death outside a Brooklyn home. Early Friday morning, a 19-year-old girl was shot to death in the heart of Manhattan, near Madison Square Park, on East 26th Street.
Milwaukee’s homicides have increased 132 percent. “In 25 years, I’ve never seen it like this,” a Milwaukee police inspector told the Police Executive Research Forum, referring to the violence and the low officer morale. Shootings are spiking in Indianapolis. Other cities will show similar increases once their crime data are published.
Snip.
So far this year, more people have been killed in Baltimore than at this point in 2019, which ended with the highest homicide rate on record for that city. June’s killings, which eclipse those of June 2019, include a 23-year-old woman who was eight months pregnant and her three-year-old daughter. They were gunned down in their car by the father of the woman’s unborn child, according to the police.
The victims in these shootings are overwhelmingly black. So far this year, 78 percent of all homicide victims in Chicago are black, though blacks are less than a third of the population. But the defund-the-police advocates and the Democratic establishment have said nothing about the growing loss of black lives.
Indeed, #BlackLivesMatter is not about saving black lives, but imposing a radical Marxist ideology on America that is making things worse:
Their stated goal—to achieve equality for blacks—masks a different agenda. In the “What We Believe” section of the BLM site, they highlight the work they do to “dismantle cisgender privilege” and their desire to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure”—a structure that many, including myself and Kanye West, believe is key to rebuilding black communities. The mission statement mires a message that should be about black lives in a slew of buzzwords and Marxist psychobabble. Not all the sentiments are bad, but none will create positive change in the black community.
That’s one reason why rapper Lord Jamer says that #BlackLivesMatter is “a movement that was given to us by, you know, George Soros and his f***ing boys. Because they saw how things were going and they didn’t want to go back to the 60s to where we started having our own organic movements. That was a big f***ing problem for them.” (The Black Panthers had many problems with radical Marxism of their own, but at least were not funded and controlled by Democratic Party billionaires.)
Democratic Party affiliation among young black people is at an all-time low. “Only 47% of [under-30 black voters] say that the [Democratic] party is welcoming to Black Americans, and only 43% say they trust Democrats in Congress to do what’s best for the Black community.”
81% of black Americans don’t want reduced police funding, because they know that less police funding inevitably results in more violence against innocent black people.
A lot of black people seem to understand that the biggest problem facing black America isn’t “systemic racism,” but Democratic indifference to their suffering and the breakdown of the black family.
The American economy was doing gangbusters before the overreaction to the Wuhan coronavirus hit, with black unemployment hitting historic lows. Some of that was due to the Trump Administration actually enforcing border controls against illegal aliens. Probably no demographic has suffered from wages suppressed by illegal alien labor than working class black Americans. But the Democratic Party, seeing “demographic transformation” as a key to permanent majority status, has not just turned a blind eye the illegal alien problem but has actually encouraged it, constantly pushing for more welfare for illegal aliens and blanket amnesties for illegals.
Now that we’re on the other side of the V-shaped recovery, the economy grew at a record pace in the third quarter. Biden tax increases would kill that recovery dead.
Here’s a very short video which points out why transactional politics should trump the personal for black voters:
I think this video sums up what Ice Cube did and the thought process that has to change amongst black people. pic.twitter.com/12aBjyLdI6
— Nick (@ThisAintNick15) October 14, 2020
This Trump billboard offers a succinct summary of the choice facing all Americans:
George Soros and the radical left have offered up #BlackLivesMatters as an AstroTurf movement providing sham leadership of black Americans to empower the hard left by cowing white liberals and to keeping black Americans voting for Democrats. Meanwhile, the Republican Party is offering real reform, a booming economy, and a very strong slate of black Republican candidates like Kimberly Klacik, John James and Wesley Hunt. And in Donald Trump, Republicans have a leader capable of closing deals others thought impossible. Is getting hosts of Arab countries to normalize relations with Israel any less impossible than getting black Americans to vote Republican?
President Trump seems within striking distance of closing that impossible seeming deal. All that has to happen is for black Americans to #WalkAway from the Democratic Party that’s ignored them for the last half century.
The third and final presidential debate is in the books, Trump breaks 50% approval, and the hard left plans another riot and arson spree if they lose. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
That appeared to be one lesson from a Zoom focus group conducted after the debate by messaging expert Frank Luntz. Speaking to 15 undecided voters — and yes, they appeared to be really undecided — Luntz asked for a one- or two-word description of the candidates’ debate demeanor. For Biden, the words were mostly bad: among them were “vague,” “very vague,” “non-specific,” “cognitively impaired,” “old,” “uncomfortable,” “elusive,” “grandfatherly,” and “defensive.”
For Trump, they were mostly much better: among them were “controlled,” “composed,” “constrained,” “reserved,” “poised,” “con artist,” “surprisingly presidential,” “calmer,” and “restrained.”
There will be more coverage of the debate, of Biden’s promise to end the oil industry and, indeed, more about Mr. Luntz, in Monday’s BidenWatch.
An activist group is planning large-scale and widespread ‘disruptive activity’ starting on the night of the election, in an attempt to stop what it predicts will be an “attempted coup” by President Trump in the form of a refusal to accept the election results.
“Shut Down D.C.” is setting the stage for mass gatherings in D.C., noting that the “resistance” must begin during the “muddied” legal and political debate over the election outcome.
“We need to show that we’re ungovernable under a continued Trump administration…That can mean blocking traffic at major intersections and bridges, shutting down government office buildings (why should ICE or the FBI be able to keep doing Trump’s bidding when he’s leading with a coup?!?), or blockading the White House.”
The document bases its action plan upon the scenarios projected by the establishment leftist “Transition Integrity Project” for election night and sketches these activists’ response to each, explicitly rejecting the possibility that Trump could legitimately win. It continues:
We’ll keep it going until Trump concedes. We could be in the streets throughout the fall and into the winter– maybe as lots of rolling waves of action or possibly as a few major tsunamis! In other parts of the country, as vote counts conclude, our focus will turn from protecting the vote counts to themselves being ungovernable.
As it becomes clear that Trump’s coup is failing, institutions and the elites will start to abandon him – or we will approach them as part of the problem. Either Amazon will shut down AWS for the Trump loyalists in the government or we’ll shut down their fulfillment centers. Either governors will tell their national guards to stand down or we’ll shut down their state capitals as well. Over time, Trump will grow increasingly isolated and his empire will crumble down around him.
The new-old leftist aim is not to operate within either the existing parameters of the Constitution as written or the customs and traditions of America—a 150-year-long nine-justice Supreme Court, the Electoral College, a 50-state nation, a Senate filibuster, two senators per state, and a secure border. All are obstructions to the drive for power.
Given its redistributionist creed, socialism cannot afford to be patent and honest. If socialism were transparent, it never would gain majority support. Joe Biden cannot talk about the Electoral College or court packing, unequivocally condemn the violence in our urban centers, discuss the Green New Deal, name his likely Supreme Court appointments, be honest about his plans for fracking, or explain his views on the borders, because he is now owned lock, stock and barrel by the hard Left whose agendas were rejected even in his own Democratic primaries.
The Left seeks to transform America into something never envisioned by the founders, a huge all-encompassing, panopticon state, one run by anointed Platonic guardians. Our elite watchmen will use their unlimited power to force upon us an equality of result society—with themselves properly exempted.
The hard Left’s defense is that its mission is so critical, so morally superior, that all means can be justified to achieve its noble ends. And so almost every institution that the Left has in its line of vision is now petrifying.
Large swaths of the downtowns of America’s large cities—New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland—are becoming unhygienic, unsafe, and uninhabitable. Substantial corridors swarm with the homeless. Crime is increasing but commensurately redefined as a sort of cry of the heart, no-bail social activism. The cities are broke and yet demand more bailouts to spend more money that will ensure things get worse.
Read the whole thing. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Back in 2018, I wrote about the phenomenon of Great Southern Democratic Hopes — candidates with not-so-great chances of success running in a Republican-learning state who receive wildly optimistic coverage from national media organizations and reporters desperate to discover a Democrat who can win statewide races in the South and someday end up on a presidential ticket.
Prime past specimens of the Great Southern Democratic Hopes include Harold Ford Jr. in Tennessee, Alison Lundergan Grimes in Kentucky, and Michelle Nunn and Jon Ossoff in Georgia. But 2018 brought the modern king of the Great Southern Democratic Hopes, Texas Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke.
You notice none of those candidates actually won, although O’Rourke deserves some credit for performing better than any other Democrat in decades. Still, next spring, Ted Cruz will be in the third year of his second term, and O’Rourke, having completed a presidential bid that also didn’t live up to the initial hype, will be teaching at Texas State University.
This cycle: Amy McGrath.
after McGrath won the primary, the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin declared, “Democrats serious about winning chose Amy McGrath.” The Frankfort State Journal concluded, “McGrath has the name recognition and financial backing to give McConnell, well, a run for his money.” Fueled by Democrats across the country who are itching to see McConnell defeated, McGrath’s fundraising has been off the charts — $37 million in the last quarter, more than $82 million overall.
And yet it is mid October, and McConnell does not appear to be running for his money. The newest Mason-Dixon poll puts the Republican ahead, 51 percent to 42 percent. Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight gives McConnell a 96 percent chance of winning. In a year when Democrats are finding themselves in surprisingly strong shape from Maine to Colorado and from Montana to Arizona, McGrath is an afterthought and on pace to turn out like the last Democrat who took on McConnell. In 2013, Politico wrote of Grimes, “The fresh Democratic face could give the Senate minority leader the fight of his political life.” Mitch McConnell won reelection in 2014, 56 percent to 40 percent, in what was not the fight of his political life.
China is one of the most censorious societies on Earth. So what better place for Facebook to recruit social media censors?
There are at least half a dozen “Chinese nationals who are working on censorship,” a former Facebook insider told me last week. “So at some point, they [Facebook bosses] thought, ‘Hey, we’re going to get them H-1B visas so they can do this work.’”
The insider shared an internal directory of the team that does much of this work. It’s called Hate-Speech Engineering (George Orwell, call your office), and most of its members are based at Facebook’s offices in Seattle. Many have Ph.D.s, and their work is extremely complex, involving machine learning — teaching “computers how to learn and act without being explicitly programmed,” as the techy website DeepAI.org puts it.
When it comes to censorship on social media, that means “teaching” the Facebook code so certain content ends up at the top of your newsfeed, a feat that earns the firm’s software wizards discretionary bonuses, per the ex-insider. It also means making sure other content “shows up dead-last.”
Like, say, a New York Post report on the Biden dynasty’s dealings with Chinese companies.
To illustrate the mechanics, the insider took me as his typical Facebook user: “They take what Sohrab sees, and then they throw the newsfeed list into a machine-learning algorithm and neural networks that determine the ranking of the items.”
Facebook engineers test hundreds of different iterations of the rankings to shape an optimal outcome — and root out what bosses call “borderline content.”
It all makes for perhaps the most chillingly sophisticated censorship mechanism in human history. “What they don’t do is ban a specific pro-Trump hashtag,” says the ex-insider. Instead, “content that is a little too conservative, they will down-rank. You can’t tell it’s censored.”
(Hat tip: ZeroHedge.)
In a joint press release issued early this morning, SK Hynix and Intel have announced that Intel will be selling the entirety of its NAND memory business to SK Hynix. The deal, which values Intel’s NAND holdings at $9 billion, will see the company transfer over the NAND business in two parts, with SK Hynix eventually acquiring all IP, facilities, and personnel related to Intel’s NAND efforts. Notably, however, Intel is not selling their overarching Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group; instead the company will be holding on to their Optane memory technology as they continue to develop and sell that technology.
Per the terms of the unusual agreement, SK Hynix will be acquiring Intel’s NAND memory business in two parts, with the deal not expected to completely close until March of 2025. Under the first phase, which will take place in 2021 once all relevant regulatory bodies have approved the seal, SK Hynix will pay Intel the first $7 billion for their SSD business and Intel’s sole NAND fab in Dalian, China. This will see Intel’s consumer and enterprise SSD businesses transferred to SK Hynix, along with the relevant IP and employees for the SSD business, but not any NAND IP or employees. Similarly, while SK Hynix will get the Dalian fab, the first phase does not come with the employees that operate it.
Following the first phase, Intel will continue to develop and manufacture NAND out of the Dalian fab for roughly the next four years. This period is set to last until the rest of the deal fully closes in March of 2025. At that point, SK Hynix will pay Intel $2 billion for the rest of their NAND business. This will finally transfer all of Intel’s NAND IP and related employees over to SK Hynix, along with the Dalian fab employees.
NAND = Flash memory, and it’s a very profitable business to be in most times, but not part of Intel’s core microprocessor business. In Intel’s case, NAND is what you run once your fab is too old to crank out Microprocessors, and Fab 68 in Dalian was built in 2010 as a 65 nanometer fab. With Intel’s cutting edge currently at 7nm, you can see how it would be easy for them to part with, especially since the flash division was losing money despite record revenue in 2019. What Hynix gets out of the deal is harder to fathom. They’re buying a revenue stream in a sector that should be profitable, add another fab to their stable, and maintain parity with DRAM rivals Samsung and Micron. But that’s an awful lot to pay for a small revenue stream bump, a ten year old fab and no NAND IP until 2024.
The Nate Paul scandal has, at its heart, allegations that federal and state law enforcement officials abused the rights of an American citizen. The facts from all sides seem to indicate an unwillingness by the OAG staff to investigate Paul’s complaint; their unwillingness to do so must be explored.
If the 2019 raid was properly conducted, why has that not been confirmed? Why delay an investigation into the raid? If the raids were legitimate, why, after more than 13 months, has Nate Paul not been charged with a crime?
On the other hand, Nate Paul might—indeed—be a notorious villain. But in the current environment, shouldn’t state investigators be willing to double-check that the actions of law enforcement officials are conducted properly? Even accused criminals have constitutional rights.
Just as important, what if Mr. Paul is not a villain and merely a businessman targeted for less than honorable reasons? Is it merely a coincidence that U.S. Attorney Bash resigned from office three days after Mateer tendered his own resignation?
Likewise, it is possible—as the seven OAG employees allege—that Paxton was acting “under duress” in pushing for this investigation into the complaint made by his friend Mr. Paul. Whether or not Nate Paul’s allegations have merit, Texans need to be certain their elected officials are not acting improperly or unethically in the course of their jobs. Was Mr. Paxton simply pursuing justice for a Texan, or was he acting under undue influence?
I have been evicted from Facebook. No explanation. No appeal. I have downloaded "my information" and see nothing that explains it.
We are governed now in private, by entities that make their own rules and are answerable to no process. Disaster is inevitable. We are living it. pic.twitter.com/JBTFH2devl
— Bret Weinstein (@BretWeinstein) October 22, 2020
Wokeville is a terrible place https://t.co/45OaxOvEqB
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) October 21, 2020
Since Starlord is an integral lead in two blockbuster franchises, I would say the chances of this costing him work are pretty much nil…
I don't care who you are, but seeing your dog dressed as Chuckie, running towards you with his wig and little knife arm, is just funny….. pic.twitter.com/vwaX0as0qW
— Sister Vol Reborno (@vol_jr) October 18, 2020
Since early voting has already started in Texas, here’s my “No one else is doing this so it might as well be me” local races roundup. Consider this “one-eyed man in the land of the blind” advice.
More resources:
The choices to vote for here are Donald Ayers and Kim Roche-Green You may remember that I also endorsed Ayers back in 2018, and the Wilco GOP rates him a Hard R. Also, both of their opponents have been endorsed by Democratic groups. Finally, they make a compelling case in this flyer:
Welcome to the October country, one of my favorite months! It being 2020, things lean rather more heavily on tricks than treats…
(1) If he wins, Biden will almost certainly sign off on ending the filibuster to pack the courts and add two new states for a permanent Democrat majority that will leave the Constitution behind.
(2) Trump may have announced that he’s about to reveal that the Democrats, from Obama on down, engaged in a coup against an American president.
(Hat tip: ZeroHedge.)
And here’s the Livemap.
Quick conclusion: Relative to the number of infections fewer people have died in the US than in Australia. So for all the talk about not letting us have a US style health system, it has performed relatively better than ours did. True, Australian base levels of health are higher than US levels. Relatively fewer people got infected here than in the US. (We can argue about why that happened in the comments – probably policy errors in themselves at the State level in the US). Once infected, however, it looks like the chances of survival was higher in the US.
I think the explanation for plummeting viewership is fairly obvious, even if Strauss would rather not talk about it. Conservative America is disgusted with the NBA, and therefore is tuning it out. We’re disgusted with the way the league kowtows to China and even more disgusted with the embrace of the radical BLM movement by the league and its players.
I didn’t watch a minute of the playoffs this year and rarely even checked the scores. Not because of what many of the players think about the police and about America, in general, as slanderous as those views are. And not even because players made pro-BLM gestures before the games began.
My problem was what was allowed, indeed encouraged, during the games. I will not watch any sports event during which the preaching of politics or ideology occurs.
I guess I’m not alone.
Conservative America’s divorce from the NBA is a sign, I think, of things to come. Unless corporate America steps back from its embrace of woke leftism, we are going to have to divorce ourselves from large swathes of it. To the extent feasible, we may have to divorce ourselves from many of America’s public schools. And so forth.
Dog says 'mama' not child 🥰🥰🥰💞💗💖 #dogsoftwitter #animals pic.twitter.com/bOky7oVkEE
— Funny Pets (@FunnyThUSA) September 25, 2020
