"...you might need to examine the mental prisons you've constructed for yourself."

In the American Thinker, J.B. Shurk writes in part,

After decades of incremental movement toward a one-government Europe, the people of the U.K. pushed back. After decades of uni-party leadership in D.C., Americans said, "No more." Regardless of one's personal politics, these events should have at least seemed interesting to people who see themselves as reflective connoisseurs of the history of ideas. Instead, they chose to see nothing at all. It could all be explained away quite easily, they have assured, by detestable appeals to "populism" and "racism," with a little Russian propaganda sprinkled in for good measure.

Read the whole thing here.

"...for decades, business as usual for our garbage elite has not merely been running our institutions badly but pillaging and looting our country for power, prestige and cash."

In Town Hall, Kurt Schlichter writes,

...Look at the Biden Family Crime Syndicate and the antics of the junior capo of the Cosa Nose Candy. In what universe is it A-OK that the crack-fueled Johnny Appleseed of paternity suits that is Joe’s snortunate son was cashing in on $50K a month in sweet, sweet Ukrainian gas gold just weeks after Ensign Biden got booted because he tooted? And then there’s riding on Air Force Two to the NBA’s favorite dictatorship for some commie ducats. Now there are even some Romanian shenanigans too – is there a single country on earth that Totally-Not-Senile Joe didn’t shake down for the benefit of his daughter-in-law’s second hubby?

Read more here.

Have the elites lost control?

Here is American Spring, written in January, 2016. It starts with some U.S. history.

...Political parties formed to monopolize the vote. The losing parties kept ganging up until only two parties remained. Resembling vast and immortal corporations, they consolidated all political power.

The parties need mass media to win elections. Media literally intermediates reality and programs voters by framing the acceptable parameters of any debate. Mass media costs mass money.

The elites, a plutocracy of the top few percent, bought the parties. So cheaply in fact, that they bought both.

The elites are merely people that went to the right schools, grew up in the right neighborhoods, and came from the right money and the right families. It’s not a formal conspiracy – rather an intricate and distributed system, organized by the invisible hand of the market, voting with dollars and newspaper ink, and controlling the country all the same.

...Mostly the elites agree to keep power with elite institutions, controlling the masses who cannot be trusted. Yes to wars, yes to mass surveillance, yes to bailouts, yes to war on drugs, yes to war on terror, yes to endless copyrights, yes to monopolies and oligopolies, no to term limits, no to wealth taxes… On these and others, pick R or D, there are no choices.

The Elite Party runs the system and it basically works. The elite stay elite. Income may be taxed, but wealth compounds. The most belligerent and implacable of the masses are sent to fight in mercifully distant wars. Crime happens in other people’s neighborhoods. The prisons are full and everyone is being watched. The pie expands, slowly and un-evenly, and all is well.

Social and alternative media dominates and disintermediates mass media. Every column brings a hundred rebuttals. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are stood like commoners next to bloggers, begging for tweets, likes, and votes. We are all journalists and editors now.

Bernie can play this game. The MoveOn crowd organizes effortlessly using the new media.

Trump can play this game. The reality show vet generates outrage and impressions, tweeting as he goes.

The mass media barrier is down. The money barrier is down.

A mob is pushing Bernie. Trump is pulling one behind him.

The elites are livid. They sneer at the masses – Uneducated. Socialist. Racist. Luddite.

...YouTube killed TV and Twitter ate the news. Donald’s tweeting from his jet and Bernie’s kickstarter went viral. Software is eating politics and the elites have lost control.

Read more here.

"Because elites have no answers to popular furor, the anger directed at them will only increase until they give up—or finally succeed in their grand agenda of a non-democratic, all-powerful Orwellian state."

Victor Davis Hanson writes in American Greatness,

Put simply, the middle classes are revolting against Western managerial elites. The latter group includes professional politicians, entrenched bureaucrats, condescending academics, corporate phonies and propagandistic journalists.

...elites never suffered the firsthand consequences of their own ideological fiats.

...The champions of open borders made sure that such influxes did not materially affect their own neighborhoods, schools and privileged way of life.

As for trade, few still believe in “free” trade when it remains so unfair. Why didn’t elites extend to China their same tough-love lectures about global warming, or about breaking the rules of trade, copyrights and patents?

How was it that elites themselves had made so much money, had gained so much influence, and had enjoyed such material bounty and leisure from such a supposedly toxic system—benefits that they were unwilling to give up despite their tired moralizing about selfishness and privilege?

In the next few years, expect more grassroots demands for the restoration of the value of citizenship. There will be fewer middle-class apologies for patriotism and nationalism. The non-elite will become angrier about illegal immigration, demanding a return to the idea of measured, meritocratic, diverse and legal immigration.

Because elites have no answers to popular furor, the anger directed at them will only increase until they give up—or finally succeed in their grand agenda of a non-democratic, all-powerful Orwellian state.

Read more here.

"Doing mostly the opposite of what elite conventional wisdom advocated since January 2017 has made the nation stronger, not weaker."

Victor Davis Hanson asks at American Greatness,

Remember the “new normal”? Our economic czars had simply decided anemic economic growth was the best Americans could expect and that 3 percent annualized GDP growth was out of the realm of possibility. Big government incompetence combined with Wall Street buccaneerism had almost melted down the economy in 2008. Recent presidents had doubled the debt—twice.

...How could Al Gore save us from our carbon emissions without his private jet? How could Nancy Pelosi craft drastic climate change legislation without flying to a Kona resort over the holidays?

How could Eric Holder stop prejudice without a jet junket to the Belmont Stakes with his kids? How could our Malibu elite nobly sermonize about their loyal gardeners and dutiful maids without walled estates?

How could Silicon Valley wizards pontificate about the evils of charter schools and the need for teacher unions, without private academies for their own? And how exactly could the heads of our intelligence agencies and justice department officials track down the crimes of Donald Trump without committing greater ones themselves?

Much of the Trump agenda, although nominally embraced by the Republican Party after the July 2016 convention, was largely crafted in antithesis to the bipartisan status quo that either could not or would not end illegal immigration, secure the border, call China out on warping world trade, seek greater reciprocity with allies, curtail optional military interventions, massively deregulate, expand fossil fuel production, and return the federal judiciary to a constitutional and constructionist framework.

...it is hard to calibrate whether any president has faced, from the moment of his election, the level of venom shown Trump by both political parties, and by the elite media, and the centers of progressivism on Wall Street, in Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Washington, and New York.

A country that once banned for life a clown from a state fair for wearing in puerile fashion a Barack Obama mask now ritually talks of impeaching, committing to an institution, overthrowing, or beating, burning, decapitating, blowing up, and shooting the elected president.

Certainly, we have never seen anything like the constant anti-Trump media hatred, the efforts since the election to remove Trump, in slow-motion coup style, by seeking to warp the Electoral College, to invoke the 25th Amendment and the Emoluments Clause, to unleash special counsel Robert Mueller with an unlimited budget, a toadyish media, a team of partisan lawyers and investigators, and prior help from the top echelons at the Obama Department of Justice, the FBI, the National Security Council, and the CIA.

The record of the Department of Veterans Affairs, Environmental Protection Agency, General Services Administration, IRS, CIA, and FBI between January 2009 and January 2017 does not qualify as “scandal free.”

...It’s unlikely Trump will be convicted of any crimes as outlined by the Mueller collusion investigation. It is more likely he will prove to be the most investigated, probed, and audited president in history. And even more likely, top officials at the Justice Department, CIA, and FBI will be facing eventual legal exposure for unethical and illegal efforts to damage the Trump candidacy, transition, and presidency.

For all the perceived chaos and disorder in the Trump Administration, it certainly has so far achieved a stronger economic record than did his predecessors, whether adjudicated by GDP growth, unemployment, energy production, or deregulation.

Even a shaky stock market is still much higher than it was when Trump took office. Likewise, abroad, for all Trump’s supposed unpopularity, privately most Americans and many so-called experts agree that the Iran Deal was fatally flawed, the Paris Accord was a charade, the “Palestinian” problem was ossified, a radically new policy toward China was overdue, the Pentagon needed to be recalibrated, and old American partnerships were in dire need of recalibration from NATO to NAFTA.

Victor then takes us on an exhaustive tour of our elite and concludes,

Doing mostly the opposite of what elite conventional wisdom advocated since January 2017 has made the nation stronger, not weaker.

Strangest of all, the elite’s furious venom directed at Trump, couched in ethical pretense, has had the odd effect to remind the American people how unethical and incompetent these people were, are, and likely will continue to be.

Read more here.

"The horizontal definition of politics, Left versus Right, is no longer truly applicable to our time. Instead, Trump represents the new vertical politics of our age: fighting for the majority below against the socio-economic minority above."

Brandon J. Weichert writes in American Greatness,

...Face it, the Left won the big economic battles of our age.

The 62 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 did not vote for him because they wanted to slash federal government programs. Instead, they wanted Trump to make those programs more efficient and to ensure that only American citizens were granted the benefits the government had promised them. Had Trump behaved like a normal Republican presidential candidate (in other words, just another “beautiful loser”) and vowed a harsh plan of government austerity, he’d have lost to the other Republican duds in 2016. Those duds, in turn, would have lost to Hillary Clinton, who was promising every government handout and tax increase imaginable.

As for foreign policy, the Left created the dominant paradigm in that arena as well: it’s all about interventionism.

Just as with government spending, there was a time when there were true differences of opinions between the Left and the Right when it came to foreign policy. The Left tended to favor more aggressive and interventionist foreign policies whereas the Right had more variegated views (namely, there were those called “isolationists” who wanted no involvement with the wider world and others who were “realists,” who merely wanted to maintain a healthy balance-of-power). Since the Reagan Revolution, however, the so-called “neoconservatives” became the dominant figures in Republican foreign policy circles. Thus, interventionism became the dominant view for the Republican Party as much as it has been for the Democratic Party.

For the Left, their vision for an effective U.S. foreign policy had less to do with preserving the national interest and more to do with “maintaining global stability.” Left-wing interventionists believed that by protecting at-risk civilian populations in far-flung countries that most Americans could not find on a map, they were creating a more peaceful, stable world. Theirs was a commitment to shared international norms (whatever those are) and multilateral institutions intended to diminish American sovereignty and its overwhelming military power. Weirdly, it constantly uses overwhelming military force to accomplish these goals.

Both the neoliberal and neoconservative interventionists believed that open borders and free trade were the solutions to humanity’s warlike nature. It’s just that the neoconservatives on the Right tended to emphasize hegemony and were willing to use unilateralism and preemption to enforce America’s “unipolar moment” (the point at which the United States was the last remaining Superpower at the end of the Cold War). At least neocons used the rhetoric of national interest to advocate for their interventionism whereas the Left abandoned that concept entirely.

Traditional conservative views on foreign policy favoring such things as realism were pushed out of the GOP, while the traditional Liberals who favored non-interventionism at all costs, were ignored by the Democratic Party establishment. Despite the unpopularity of the Iraq War and the neocons, however, most Americans are still quick to support expansive military action in benighted corners of the world, such as Syria if it means ensuring that innocent people are protected (even when doing so risks wider war against a Syrian ally, like Russia). In effect, the Left managed to win out in the foreign policy debate as well: it’s all about armed humanitarianism these days. Trump is moving the Overton Window on this conversation, however, and thanks to Trump there is at least now room for debate.

Culture is now the last remaining great battle between Left and Right. Just as within the fields of economics and foreign policy, however, the Left is winning the Culture War—and why wouldn’t it? After all, the Left broadly dominates the media, the courts, academia, and the bureaucracy.

The real fight now is between up-and-down; those who comprise the elite and those who do not.

...President Trump is not a Republican, a conservative, or maybe even a rightist in the conventional sense. The horizontal definition of politics, Left versus Right, is no longer truly applicable to our time. Instead, Trump represents the new vertical politics of our age: fighting for the majority below against the socio-economic minority above. It is this framework that Trump, and the Republican Party, must operate in to win reelection in 2020.

Read more here.

Why do civilizations fall apart? Because the elites no longer warrant the respect they think that they deserve because they are out of touch with the people."

So said Victor Davis Hanson last night on the Tucker Carlson Show. Video and transcript available at Real Clear Politics.

Where have our "best and brightest" taken us?

Victor Davis Hanson writes at American Greatness,

Republicans “trust” Devin Nunes, because without his dogged efforts it is unlikely that we would know about the Fusion GPS dossier or the questionable premises on which FISA court surveillance was ordered. Neither would we have known about the machinations of an array of Obama Administration, Justice Department and FBI officials who, in addition to having possibly violated the law in monitoring a political campaign and unmasking and leaking names of Americans to the press, may have colluded with people in the Clinton campaign who funded the Steele dossier.

"You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic—Islamophobic—you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that… Now, some of those folks—they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America."

So said Yale law graduate Hillary Clinton, in an incoherent, factually unsubstantiated, and politically disastrous rant that may have lost her the 2016 election.

Yale law graduates are not dairy farmers. But those who milk cows know enough not to peddle lies that one can invest $1,000 in cattle futures, beat the one in a trillion odds, and pocket a speculative profit of $100,000, all through autodidactic study of “the Wall Street Journal”—about as a believable yarn as claiming 30,000 deleted emails on an illegal home-brewed server under government request concerned a wedding and yoga.

"And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Thus spoke candidate Barack Obama about another “they.” Obama apparently did not grasp that the so-called white population voted for him in greater numbers in the general election than it did for Al Gore or John Kerry, including the very constituency he wrote off as near Neanderthal.

On what criteria of excellence did Obama in 2008 justify separating himself from the objects of his stereotyped condemnations?

"All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement . . . my job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."

So said Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney during the 2012 campaign, in a similar fashion to the condescension that lost Hillary Clinton the 2016 election and nearly cost Barack Obama the 2008 nomination.

Romney’s rhetorical sins were somewhat comparable to those of Clinton and Obama and similarly reflected an out-of-touch sense of superior wisdom and insight not always warranted. Did the multimillionaire Romney not know that many citizens of the 47 percent who work nobly as minimum-wage peach pickers or clerks understandably need assistance through health or education subsidies?

Romney was, of course, correct that someone like himself could never convince those culpable of unduly receiving entitlements to take responsibilities for their lives. But could someone else have done it through a general invigoration of the industrial and manufacturing sectors? Perhaps someone who used the pronoun “our” rather than “I,” and sought to jaw bone and persuade outsourcers and off-shorers to again create jobs in American in anticipation of a more favorable business, regulatory and energy climate, and as a way of helping “our miners,” “our farmers,” “our vets,” and “our workers”?

When a presidential candidate gives up on 47 percent of the country, or a quarter of the electorate or on an entire state, it is difficult to see any evidence of deep political insight. Elise Jordan no doubt found Romney a more fitting candidate than the raucous Trump. Yet neither a dairy farmer nor Trump so far has written off tens of millions of American as culturally hopeless.

One strange manifestation of elite contempt is a romance with illegal immigration—usually by needs conflated with legal immigration to caricature its opponents. Illegal immigration is often idealized in the abstract but rarely lived with in the concrete, and also is useful as a surrogate club with which to beat down the proverbial white working class.

But surely if there is decadent, lazy, spoiled white class it is not in places like Bakersfield or Dayton, but more likely on tony college campuses. There a new generation of “spoiled” elites is increasingly poorly educated but strident in its indoctrination. They are zealous about their claims on behalf of wisdom, but ignorant of any broad knowledge that might substantiate that zealotry.

Our best and brightest, with the most impressive resumes and degrees, not the “decadent, lazy, spoiled, whatever” of Middle America ran up $20 trillion in national debt. Our best failed over a decade to achieve 3 percent economic growth. The supposedly smartest warped the health care system. The brightest could not translate overseas interventions into a strategic or cost-to-benefit advantage. The anointed eroded the border. The most knowledgeable gave us state nullification of federal law. The purportedly most ethical weaponized the IRS, the FISA courts, the DOJ, and the FBI, undermined the idea of free-speech in the university, and politicized everything from the eroding NFL to the increasingly irrelevant Oscars.

Our so-called elite, not the middle classes, has made a desert and called it success.

Read more here.

Victor Davis Hanson saw it coming!

Victor Davis Hanson reminds us of the importance of the rule of law. "Sanctuary cities have been terrible for the American worker. It is elite versus the mass. The Democratic and La Raza elite want an unassimilated constituency that is replenished every year that ensures the demographics change, and that they can be spokesmen for group grievances rather than individual accomplishment. Employers want access to cheap labor, and then they dress it all up with utopian caring. In fact, it is one of the most amoral, uncaring phenomenon in the world! It is bad for the American poor. It destroys the rule of law. Who is to say when you start destroying the sanctity of the law that you can pick and choose which other laws people have to follow?"

If Americans do not believe they are better than the alternative, nobody else will either! For immigration to work in this country, it traditionally had to be legal! It had to be a melting pot, with assimilation, integration, and intermarriage.

To Eric Holder, the law was secondary. He politicized the Justice Department in favor of those he decided were oppressed. Obama tried to influence the Trayvon Martin jury by saying "Trayvon looks like the son I never had." The Left got everything they wanted: the House, the Senate, and a president very skilled in teleprompted rhetoric.

Can we be brave and be triumphant? Point out the hypocrisy! Obama says we have to watch out for CEOs, but he doesn't think that applies to him! Al Gore sells his failed cable news station to an anti-Semitic Middle Eastern authoritarian government that enriches him because of profits from fossil fuels, and, he does so in haste to beat capital gains tax increases!

Hanson finishes this July 2016 program by pointing out that the Republican party now is populist, and the Democrat Party is the coastal blue blood elitists! How prescient can he be?

A rejection of the elites

At The Guardian, John David Danielson gets it!

America is deeply divided, but it’s not divided between fascists and Democrats. It’s more accurate to say that America is divided between the elites and everybody else, and Trump’s election was a rejection of the elites.

That’s not to say plenty of Democrats and progressives don’t vehemently oppose Trump. But the crowds of demonstrators share something in common with our political and media elites: they still don’t understand how Trump got elected, or why millions of Americans continue to support him. Even now, recent polls show that more Americans support Trump’s executive order on immigration than oppose it, but you wouldn’t know it based on the media coverage.

During his first two weeks in office, whenever Trump has done something that leaves political and media elites aghast, his supporters cheer. They like that he told Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto he might have to send troops across the border to stop “bad hombres down there”. They like that he threatened to pull out of an Obama-era deal to accept thousands of refugees Australia refuses to admit. They want him to dismantle Dodd-Frank financial regulations for Wall Street and rethink US trade deals. This is why they voted for him.

The failure to understand why these measures are popular with millions of Americans stems from a deep sense of disconnection in American society that didn’t begin with Trump or the 2016 election. For years, millions of voters have felt left behind by an economic recovery that largely excluded them, a culture that scoffed at their beliefs and a government that promised change but failed to deliver.

...Part of Obama’s appeal was that he promised to end the unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, restore America’s standing in the international community and pursue multilateral agreements that would bring stability. Instead, Americans watched Isis step into the vacuum created by the US withdrawal from Iraq in 2011. They watched the Syrian civil war trigger a migrant crisis in Europe that many Americans now view as a cautionary tale. At home, Isis-inspired terrorist attacks took their toll, as they did in Europe. And all the while Obama’s White House insisted that everything was going well.

Amid all this, along came Trump. Here was a rough character, a boisterous celebrity billionaire with an axe to grind. He had palpable disdain for both political parties, which he said had failed the American people. He showed contempt for political correctness that was strangling public debate over contentious issues such as terrorism. He struck many of the same populist notes, both in his campaign and in his recent inaugural address, that Senator Bernie Sanders did among his young socialist acolytes, sometimes word for word.

In many ways, Trump’s agenda isn’t partisan in a recognizable way – especially on trade. Almost immediately after taking office, Trump made good on a promise that Sanders also made, pulling the US out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and proclaiming an end to multilateral trade deals. He also threatened US companies with a “border tax” if they move jobs overseas. These are not traditional Republican positions but they do appeal to American workers who have watched employers pull out of their communities and ship jobs overseas.

In his inaugural address, Trump said: “Today, we are not merely transferring power from one administration to another or from one party to another, but we are transferring power from Washington, DC, and giving it back to you, the people.” To be sure, populism of this kind can be dangerous and unpredictable, But it doesn’t arise from nowhere. Only a corrupt political establishment could have provoked a political revolt of this scale. Instead of blaming Trump’s rise on racism or xenophobia, blame it on those who never saw this coming and still don’t understand why so many Americans would rather have Donald Trump in the White House than suffer the rule of their elites.

Read more here.

Crimes that would put anyone else in jail

Victor Davis Hanson writes,

...After the current campaign — the maverick Trump candidacy, the Access Hollywood Trump tape, the FBI scandal, the Freedom of Information Act revelations, the WikiLeaks insider scoops on the Clinton campaign, the hacked e-mails, the fraudulent pay-for-play culture of the Clinton Foundation — the nuked political infrastructure may look the same. But almost everyone involved in the election has been neutroned.

...Who are the big losers of 2016, besides the two candidates themselves? The D.C. ‘establishment’ and its ‘elites’

Collate the Podesta e-mails. Read Colin Powell’s hacked communications. Review Hillary’s Wall Street speeches and the electronic exchanges between the media, the administration, and the Clinton campaign. The conclusion is an incestuous world of hypocrisy, tsk-tsking condescension, sanitized shake-downs, inside profiteering, snobby high entertainment — and often crimes that would put anyone else in jail.

They live in a confined coastal cocoon. They went largely to the same schools, intermarried, traveled back and forth between big government, big banks, big military, big Wall Street, and big media — and sound quite clever without being especially bright, attuned to social justice but without character. Their religion is not so much progressivism, as appearing cool and hip and “right” on the issues. In this private world, off the record, Latinos are laughed off as “needy”; Catholics are derided as near medieval and in need of progressive tutoring on gay issues. Hillary is deemed a grifter — but only for greedily draining the cash pools of the elite speaker circuit to the detriment of her emulators. Money — Podesta’s Putin oil stocks, Russian autocrats’ huge donations in exchange for deference from the Department of State, Gulf-oil-state-supplied free jet travel, Hillary’s speaking fees — is the lubricant that makes the joints of these rusted people move. A good Ph.D. thesis could chart the number of Washington, D.C., insider flunkies who ended up working for Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac or Goldman Sachs — the dumping grounds of the well-connected and mediocre.

In this world, there are Bill and Hillary, the Podesta brothers, Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner, Christiane Amanpour and Jamie Rubin, Samantha Power and Cass Sunstein, Andrea Mitchell and Alan Greenspan, and on and on. Jorge Ramos goes after Trump; his daughter works for Hillary; and his boss at Univision badgers the Clinton campaign to stay lax on open borders — the lifeblood that nourishes his non-English-speaking money machine. George Stephanopoulos, who helped run the Clinton campaign and White House, and who as a debate moderator obsessed over Mitt Romney’s answers to abortion hypotheticals, is the disinterested ABC News chief anchor.

CNN vice president Virginia Moseley is married to Hillary Clinton’s former deputy secretary at the State Department Tom Nides (now of Morgan Stanley) — suggesting “The Clinton News Network” is not really a right-wing joke.

Former ABC News executive producer Ian Cameron is married to Susan Rice, a — pre-Benghazi — regular on the Sunday talk shows.

CBS president David Rhodes is the sibling of aspiring novelist Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser for “strategic communications and Speechwriting,” whatever that fictive title means.

ABC News correspondent Claire Shipman married former White House press secretary Jay Carney (now senior vice president for “worldwide corporate affairs” at Amazon: not just “corporate affairs” or “worldwide affairs” but “worldwide corporate affairs”). And on and on. Is there a rule somewhere that requires a media kingpin to be married to a political operative or government official or like kind?

These nice people report on each other. They praise each other, award each other, make money together, and bristle with each other when they are collectively and pejoratively dubbed the “elites.” They write and sound off about the buffoon Trump and preen in sanctimonious moral outrage, as the rest of the country sees this supposedly lavishly robed imperial class as embarrassingly naked.

...Are Trump’s private boorishness and crudity worse for Republicans than Clinton’s now quite public corruption and dishonesty?

...After the election, don’t expect a rapid reconciliation. The Trump base, often in nihilistic fashion, does not wish to be part of Paul Ryan’s pragmatic world; and those who identify with the culture of the Wall Street Journal and the Chamber of Commerce have no desire to be seen with the NASCAR and tea-party crowd. For fleeting moments in the primaries a Marco Rubio or Scott Walker posed as a Reaganesque uniter, only to implode under national scrutiny and candidate infighting.

The Clinton Foundation Syndicate served largely as a sinecure for Clinton hangers-on between elections who were apparently otherwise unemployable. It offered free jet travel for the Clinton family. It oiled pay-for-play donations that would spin off into private speaking and consulting gigs for the insatiable Bill and Hillary. Oil profits — from Russia, the Persian Gulf, and the autocracies of the former Soviet Union — fueled the Clinton cash nexus. (How odd to oppose domestic fracking but to welcome carbon cash from medieval foreign petro-nations.)

Many Republicans damn conservatives who would hold their nose and vote Trump in hopes of saving the Supreme Court or stopping the socialization of the federal government. They should spend a quarter of their time writing about the Clinton Foundation. In the past 50 years, have we ever seen anything quite like the listing of VIP foundation donors by name so they could cash in on Haitian relief contracts to pick over the carcass of a ravaged, impoverished nation — or blatant requests to medieval sheikdoms to send million-dollar presents or free jet service to the ex-president, the message routed by way of his secretary of state spouse? Dick Nixon would not have found a way to enrich himself on the backs of the Haitian refugees or think out loud about assassinating a troublesome political opponent.

There are three models for ex-presidents and their foundations. One is Jimmy Carter’s sanctimonious progressivism — of setting up a quite legitimate “center,” staying active in politics, and assuming a (sometimes tiring) role as senior citizen of the world who globetrots and editorializes on how humanity has disappointed him.

A second is more or less genuine retirement in the fashion of George H. W. and George W. Bush; their respective foundations and libraries are largely apolitical. Neither comments much on contemporary politics, nor do they trash their successors. Painting or sky-diving is preferable to returning to the campaign trail or slicing Obama.

The third is the Bill/Hillary Clinton paradigm of non-stop electioneering, tawdry enrichment, and massaging the office of president emeritus and a presidential foundation to feather one’s nest.

...When Hillary Clinton in the second debate directed the audience to her own website to “fact-check” Trump, we came full circle from naiveté to farce.

...Debate moderators follow assumed premises: an Anderson Cooper, Candy Crawley, Lester Holt, or Martha Raddatz envision themselves as crusaders hammering away at selfish and dangerous conservatives, in behalf of an ignorant audience that needs their enlightened help to avoid being duped. In a few of the worst cases, a scheduled debate question is leaked to the liberal candidate to ensure she is not embarrassed.

If a conservative candidate seems to have tied his opponent, the liberal moderator — witness a Matt Lauer — is considered a sell-out, soon to be shunned by the right people. Most are thus deterred from moderating “incorrectly.”

After 2016, we should either let the candidates go at it, or, better yet, let robot time keepers run things. The 2016 campaign is not quite over, and there are a few neutron bombs left to go off — but for many of our accustomed fixtures it is too late. They are nuked, and nothing remains but their shells.

Read more here.

Europe: "Suicidal elites, suicidal politicians, a suicidal media.”

Happy Acres finds this quote from a European,

“I don’t believe that the majority of the European people any more than a majority of the British or the American people are actually suicidal. It’s a great problem for us that we have suicidal elites, suicidal politicians, a suicidal media.” Douglas Murray (via konservativegedanken)

"The elites promote policies that they themselves do not live by."

Victor Davis Hanson writes,

The United States and Europe are seeing a surge in populist anger toward the so-called elites. The German public, for example, is furious at Chancellor Angela Merkel for her position on immigration from the Middle East. British voters have forsaken the postmodern European Union. And working class Americans have rallied around political outsider Donald Trump as their presidential favorite, something that neither the Clinton machine nor the establishment of the Republican Party anticipated.

But who exactly are these unpopular elites—and what exactly have they done that has enraged middle-class voters in Western democracies?

...Today, people are especially mad at political elites, a loose term for those who govern at the state and federal level. They include not just our elected legislators, governors, and President, but also the unelected (and unaccountable) members of the vast government archipelago—cabinet officers, bureaucratic grandees, top military officers, and regulators. Beyond these politicos, the Western elite is comprised, too, of the transnational mega-wealthy, who have been enriched by globalization, especially international finance, investments, and technologies that lubricate worldwide dissemination of capital and communications.

An elite is also defined by education (preferably Ivy League and its coastal counterparts), residence (primarily between Boston and Washington on the East Coast, and from San Diego to Berkeley on the Pacific), profession (executive positions in government, media, law, foundations, the arts, and academia), celebrity (name recognition from television, Hollywood, network news, finance, etc.), and ideology, such as those prominent in the progressive movement. To receive a glimpse of our next generation of elites, read the betrothal notices in The New York Times, look at the interns at Goldman Sachs, and consider the junior faculty at Harvard.

These select few define our culture, educate young adults on college campuses, run governments, make most economic and foreign policy, entertain America, and dispense the news. And the public is angry at them for a variety of reasons.

First, the elites seem to the middle classes to be out of touch and incompetent. Their sterling degrees and titles, voters increasingly think, do not reflect the quality of their minds or the depth of their educations, but have become status markers separating “them” from everyone else. On top of that, these elites sometimes utter silly things, like that there are 57 states, that soldiers are “corps-men,” and that ISIS is a “jayvee organization.” The ruling class is not like those who once built the Hoover Dam, triumphed at the Battle of Midway, or built the interstate freeway system. Instead, the Wall Street implosion of 2008, the negotiations over the Iran deal, California’s stalled high-speed rail project, the Affordable Care Act meltdown, and the doubling of the national debt in eight years reflect either inexperience and ignorance or perhaps indifference and callousness.

The immigration pushback was directed at the managerial class that allowed millions into the West without rudimentary vetting—the work of bunglers and ideologues, not true technocrats. Americans increasingly pass on going to the movies, a genre that has devolved either into tired pyrotechnics, pale remakes of prior classics, or psychodramas about the evils of corporations, the military, or the CIA. It is now expected that a New York Times article will be followed soon by corrections acknowledging basic mistakes of fact and sourcing.

Second, public furor arises over elite sanctimoniousness and hypocrisy. Progressive elites are shielded from the ramifications of their own ideologies. Open borders advocates like former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa or Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, for example, condemn walls and fences as backward and inhumane—and then ensure that their own residences are quite well fenced and protected from hoi polloi.

Al Gore is a progressive green prophet—but sold his bankrupt cable channel for millions of dollars to Al Jazeera, a company that is fueled by carbon-exporting, monarchical, and largely anti-Semitic Qatar. John Kerry is a big-tax, big-government aficionado—except when it is a question of avoiding taxes on his multimillion-dollar yacht by moving it from high-tax Massachusetts to a cheaper berth in low-tax Rhode Island.

The hypocrisy does not end there. Jet travel is supposedly the worse example of an outsized carbon footprint—except for environmentalists like Leonardo DiCaprio or Bono. Academics decry wage imbalances among Wal-Mart employees, but remain silent about the far greater pay inequity on campus, where graduate students and part-time lecturers often make less than half as much as full-time faculty for teaching identical classes. Environmental elites in San Francisco demand that river water be diverted from agriculture to the sea to nourish delta baitfish—but they would not sacrifice a drop of their own claims on precious Sierra Nevada water. Again and again, the elites promote policies that they themselves do not live by.

Third, voters are tired of the condescension of the elites who castigate the backwardness of the non-elite. Such disdain focuses especially on the middle classes, who lack both the vulnerability of the truly impoverished and, supposedly, the culture and tastes of the higher classes. Out of work miners do not enjoy “white privilege”; those on Ivy League campuses who mouth such platitudes usually do—and then exercise it by living and schooling their children apart from the romanticized “other.” In emulation of medieval penance, the more one expresses pique at the perceived sins of someone deemed inferior, the more he is seen as virtuous—and exempt from social censure.

A perfect example of such disdain was Barack Obama’s 2008 rant about the working classes of Pennsylvania who failed him in the primary: “And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

When the future of Iraq hung in the balance, then Senator and subsequent Secretary of State John Kerry made similarly snobbish remarks. He warned students, “You know education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.” A year after Kerry’s putdown, largely working-class soldiers and officers won the peace in Iraq through their courage and expertise during the Surge of 2007-08.

...Fourth and last, the people feel that elites do not follow the laws. Sanctuary cities nullify federal immigration law—and yet if other less liberal cities were to follow such a Confederate precedent and declare federal handgun registration or protected species legislation null and void in their jurisdictions they would be castigated as insurrectionists.

The Clintons are the epitome of the rules not applying to ruling class. Hillary once rigged a cattle futures investment of $1,000 into a $100,000 profit at 34-trillion-to-1 odds and without consequences—and then added insult to injury by initially not paying taxes on her profits. As Secretary of State, she violated dozens of national security protocols, something that would earn other government employees either jail time or a pink slip. Bill, for his part, has become the highest paid “chancellor” in higher education history, earning nearly $17 million over five years by trading on the influence of his Secretary of State spouse—quite aside from plane rides he took aboard the “Lolita express” that would have earned others the charge of misogyny at the very least.

Read more here.

They just wanted to see their betters bleed.

Fred Reed writes,

It is easy to underestimate the peasantry, the little people. They appear well under control. All seems calm, unless one looks carefully. The means of control work smoothly: the legions, the church, the media, the secret police, the enforcers of political correctness. The serfs are cowed. Why worry about a distant peonage? Do we not have our castles? Let us dance and drink champagne.

And comes the guillotine.

...The guillotine was devised as a humanitarian measure to cut off a criminal’s head cleanly, the ax-wielding headsmen of the time being notorious for missed strokes and subsequent horror. When the meek and mild peasantry rose in 1789, proving to be less meek and mild than believed, the humanitarian aspects of the instrument were forgotten. The populace just wanted to see their betters bleed. They saw.

In the United States of today, clouds gather as the royalty toast each other with expensive wines. In numbers that a half century ago would have seemed impossible, the American young live with their parents, being unable to find jobs to support themselves. Waitressing in a good bar pays better in tips than a woman with a college degree can otherwise earn, assuming that she can earn anything at all. Employers having learned to hire them as individual contractors, they move into their thirties with no hope of a pension for their old age.

Unrest breeds surprises. Maybe Louis XVI thought, “It can never happen here.” Today the African population of America is openly insurgent, the middle class sinks, jobs continue leaving under the stewardship of the rich, the government either will not or cannot enforce its laws, the borders are open, half of the country seethes in fury at the other half, and the sale of guns is at record heights.

...Mussolini ended as an ornament in the Italian street, hanging upside down from a meat hook. He should have paid more attention.

A short walk from the Capitol in Washington, whole housing developments lie empty, their windows sometimes bricked up to keep the derelicts out. In abandoned houses turned shooting galleries, of which there are many, empty cans of Vienna sausages and old bottles of fortified wine lie among used needles and rags stained with things better not reflected upon. You can live for a surprising time on Vienna sausages, Night Train, and Ritz crackers. Many do. Their organs eventually fail.

...Fly-over land doesn’t really matter anyway.

Unless of course it does. In which case Uber should stock up on tumbrils.

Read more here.

Hey, it was populist agitation that went into making this wreckage!

Mark A. Signorelli writes at The Federalist,

As the accumulating crises confronting the Western world stuff our newsfeeds more and more each day, a certain broad narrative about what is happening seems to have gained near-universal acceptance. It says the populations of Western nations are presently ruled by an incompetent and out-of-touch “elite,” who evince no regard for, or even knowledge of, the people’s will on a variety of issues, ranging from immigration to free trade to education.

In response, the citizens of these nations have demonstrated their contempt for these elites in fairly dramatic ways, from the Brexit to the rise of the Front National to the Donald Trump campaign. It is a contest between populism and elitism, we are told, that defines our political moment.

...Populism is a spirit, an attitude, informed by varying degrees of pride, self-sufficiency, frustration, resentment, and wrath.

...This attitude of permanent disaffection has been the primary psychological note of modern progressivism ever since the uprisings of the 1960s. Over the last half-century, even as the Left has conquered one institution after another—the university, the media, the federal bureaucracy—this disposition to revolt has remained the chief feature of the progressive mind.

It is why the people running our civilization have never developed the virtues necessary to carry out their duties adequately. Determined to always think of themselves as persons out of power, they never learned to regard themselves as persons with power, and all the responsibilities power entails. They never learned to imagine the kinds of moral formation that would fit a person for rule, rather than for protest.

This is why we can listen to a close advisor to the president—a woman with access to the most effective levers of power in the world—declare her intention to “speak truth to power.” But as for speaking truth as power, as for directing their policies with the wisdom and prudence requisite to their offices, the populist elite in control of the Western world have never learned how to do this, because their own modes of juvenile self-fashioning have precluded them from ever admitting that they do indeed occupy such offices.

This is the dimension missing from most analyses of our present political circumstances—the historical dimension. We find ourselves saddled with a teetering institutional structure without considering the decades of populist agitation that went into making this wreckage. Coates’ own biography is uncannily symbolic in this regard. The son of a Black Panther, he continues to spout his father’s revolutionary creed, even as his society grants him an unrivaled authority to speak and to write. It is why a man heaped with accolades and honors can still think himself the victim of a “cosmic injustice;” why a writer privileged with a platform in one of his country’s most prominent organs can think of no other use for this platform than to cultivate deeply uncharitable sentiments in his own child. He is incapable of recognizing himself as the establishment figure he has unquestionably become.

Read more here.

Simple, isn't it?

At PJ Media Roger L. Simon writes,

News flash: The revolt against elites is real in the UK and America and it's only getting started. Maybe there will always be an England.

In a surprise, Leave won the Brexit referendum on whether to stay in the European Union by an equally surprising amount. British sovereignty won. David Cameron lost. Jeremy Corbyn lost. The EU lost. Bureaucrats lost. Angela Merkel lost. Barack Obama lost. Globalism lost. Authority figures almost everywhere lost. And, most of all, unlimited immigration lost.

So what happened to the vaunted British betting market that is almost invariably correct and was predicting by 80 percent a Remain victory? Or all those recent polls that were tilting Remain?

Answer: Those same elites had convinced each other they would win and therefore convinced the usual suspects—media, pollsters and, sadly, financial markets—that they were right. They were wrong. Watching them now on the BBC they still cannot comprehend what has happened. The peasants have revolted—oh no, oh no. There must be some mistake. Didn't they get the memo? The sky would fall if they left the EU.

Earth to elites: Citizens of truly democratic countries don't want unlimited immigration into their countries by people who couldn't be less interested in democracy. They also don't want to be governed by the rules and regulations of faceless bureaucrats whose not-so-hidden goals are power and riches for themselves and their friends. Simple, isn't it?

...That most elite of presidents, Barack Obama, who opened his morally narcissistic mouth supporting the Remain side and warning the British people, as he is wont to do, that there would be "consequences" if they voted to leave the EU, is in no position to do anything, even if he wanted to. And he doesn't.

Hillary Clinton is so elitist she practically defines the term. She was probably up all night figuring out what to do about the situation. I have a suggestion—move to Brussels.

Meanwhile, Trump should take up the gauntlet for the U.S. and the UK now. Why wait? Act like the president—we could use one. Donald has a natural ally in the leading Leave spokesperson conservative Boris Johnson. The two men are said to be similar and in many ways they are.

Read more here.

The talk about equality is a smokescreen

At the Chicago Boyz blog David Foster writes,

There was a bit of media coverage of Hillary Clinton choosing to wear a $12K Armani jacket while delivering a speech lamenting Inequality. The price of this jacket, of course, represents an utterly trivial proportion of the wealth the Clintons have amassed from their lifetimes of Public Service.

This little incident serves to emphasize a point I made several years ago in my post Jousting With a Phantom: leading ‘progressives’ for the most part don’t really believe in anything resembling equality – indeed, quite the contrary.

Consider, for example: Many people in “progressive” leadership positions are graduates of the Harvard Law School. Do you think these people want to see a society in which the career, status, and income prospects for an HLS grad are no better than those for a graduate of a lesser-known, lower-status (but still very good) law school? C’mon.

Quite a few “progressive” leaders are members of prominent families. Do you think Teddy Kennedy would have liked to see an environment in which he and certain other members of his family would have had to answer for their actions in the criminal courts in the same way that ordinary individuals would, without benefit from connections, media influence, and expensive lawyers?

The prevalence of “progressivism” among tenured professors is quite high. How many of these professors would be eager to agree to employment conditions in which their job security and employee benefits were no better than those enjoyed by average Americans? How many of them would take a salary cut in order to provide higher incomes for the poorly-paid adjunct professors at their universities? How many would like to see PhD requirements eliminated so that a wider pool of talented and knowledgeable individuals can participate in university teaching?

There are a lot of “progressives” among the graduates of Ivy League universities. How many of them would be in favor of legally eliminating alumni preferences and the influence of “contributions” and have their children considered for admission–or not–on the same basis as everyone else’s kids? Yet an alumni preference is an intergenerational asset in the same way that a small businessman’s store or factory is such an asset.

The reality is that “progressivism” is not in any way about equality, it is rather about shifting the distribution of power and wealth in a way that benefits those with certain kinds of educational credentials and certain kinds of connections. And remember, power and connections are always transmutable into wealth. Sometimes that wealth is directly dollar-denominated, as in the millions of dollars that former president Bill Clinton was paid in speaking fees last year, or the money made by a former government official who leverages his contacts into an executive job with a “green” energy company–even though he may have minimal knowledge of either energy or business. And sometimes the wealth takes the form of in-kind benefits, like a university president’s mansion. (Those who lived in the old Soviet Union and Eastern Europe can tell you all about in-kind benefits for nominally low-paid officials.) And, almost always, today’s “progressivism” is about the transfer of power from individuals to credentialed “experts” who will coerce or “nudge” people to do what those experts have decided would be best.

To a very substantial extent, the talk about “equality” is a smokescreen, conscious or unconscious, behind which “progressives” pursue their own economic, status, and ego agendas.

Read more here.

First we’re taking back the Republican Party, then we’re taking back the whole country.

Kurt Schlicter is tired of paying the price for elitists to feel smug. He writes at Town Hall,

Attention flyover people down there below the elite’s private jets – time (for you) to make some sacrifices for Mother Earth! So what if the actual climate data refuses to cooperate with the climate change theory? So what if the elite predicted an ice age back in the 1970s? The solution to the problem of non-existent global warming is the same as the solution to phantom ice ages – give the elite more money and power.

In fact, there is no “problem” that can’t be solved by us giving the elite more of our money and more of our power.

Sure, some of us don’t live in coastal cities and we need SUVs for our families (we still breed out in here in America, you know), and some of us have jobs where we need gas-guzzling trucks. But the elite’s fetish for eradicating the scourge of the fossil fuels that made modern society possible trumps our petty livelihoods. Another couple bucks a gallon, another couple hundred a month for heat? Shoot, the elites can afford that, and the fact that the normals can’t shouldn’t keep their betters from enjoying the moral ecstasy that comes from imposing deep sacrifices on other people!

Of course, we are always those other people.

When elitists talk about how terrible the cops are, guess who gets mugged or worse when the crime rate goes up? Surprise! It’s never the coastal elitists and moral posers who love hamstringing the cops.

And when they talk about “gun crime,” how come the solutions always seem to involve making it harder for normal people to protect themselves and their families? How come these “common sense gun controls” never seem to target actual criminals? Hmmm, it’s almost like they would rather have us vulnerable and docile instead of able to protect ourselves from thugs…and tyrants.

Is it a secret where the vast majority of gun crime happens and who commits it? Here’s a hint: Democrat big cities and their residents. How about doubling up the cops in the ghettos, arresting the crooks everyone knows are crooks, and supporting the cops when they do it? Just kidding! There are no poser points to score by cracking down on real criminals; the moral superiority money shot comes from pressing that Manolo Blahnik high heel down on us normals and grinding away.

Resentful of Democrat-voting losers and bums who don’t feel like working but who expect you to toil to pay them off? Selfish!

Think that just because one of us would go to prison for, say, mishandling hundreds of classified documents, then a member of the elite should too? Sexist!

Upset that some skeevy weirdo pretending to be a girl is going to crash your daughter’s high school locker room for a bit of live entertainment? Transphobic!

Yeah, if you’re a normal American, you’re pretty much the root of all evil. You’re the worst of the worst. You suck.

Welcome to Political Three Card Monte. Whatever the issue, you lose.

But now we’ve done asking the elite for help. Now we’re telling the establishment how it’s going to be. Put just Trump, Cruz and Carson together and the insurgents own way over 50% of the GOP electorate. They can try to beat us down, but we’re finished thanking them and asking if we may have another. First we’re taking back the Republican Party, then we’re taking back the whole country. And then that feeling you elitists will be feeling won’t be smugness anymore. It’ll be fear.

Our birthright!

Open Blogger writes at Ace of Spades about the Declaration of Independence, which he posts for us to read.

That document was written 239 years ago by an assembly of the brightest human minds ever joined for one purpose in the history of mankind. Those men accepted the challenge presented by an uncontrolled aristocracy seeking to rule over all people, as had been the case throughout history, and calmly and clearly destroyed the idea of an oligarchy. What a brilliant victory for mankind, for liberty, for freedom for self expression.

Unfortunately you and I are living in the era of Revolution 2: The Oligarchy Strikes Back. Make no mistake, the oligarchy has struck back, hard. Most of the freedoms guaranteed to We The People by the follow up document to the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, have been abandoned or overturned. King kills rule of law. Obergefell killed the 1st Amendment. Roe invented imaginary new “rights” somehow magically hidden in “penumbras and emanations". Wickard basically gives the Federal Government leave to do anything it wants under the guise of “regulating commerce”. Plyler v. Doe dilutes the birthright of Americans, rendering it meaningless. The list goes on. A small cadre of elites, both elected and unelected, has managed to almost completely gut the rights that we are born with. They have succeeded because we have been too busy to notice, or too lazy, or too afraid. The majority of us, Nock's “Mass Man” (what we call LIVs today), have been complicit in their own enslavement. All of this has already come to pass. It is done. Over. Finished.

Except for one tiny thing......

The birthright. Your birthright. My birthright. OUR BIRTHRIGHT.

They. Can. Not. Take. Our. Birthright. Away.

Read more here.

Protect or control?

Is Homeland Security more interested in controlling law-abiding Americans or protecting law-abiding Americans? Mark Steyn believes it is the former.