July 27, 2016

No convention bump for Hillary's alienating and irrelevant campaign

During the most tone-deaf major campaign ever run, it comes as no surprise to see that Hillary's polls are flat or declining, even as her convention has taken over the mass media.

According to tracking polls from both Reuters and USC / LA Times, Trump's convention boost had begun the weekend before the event was even gaveled in. After its end, his numbers are holding still or increasing, rather than it being a fluke.

The "history-making" coronation of Clinton, on the other hand, has only seen a slowing in her rate of descent -- still falling, but not in free-fall as she was last week. But there are still two more days for her to alienate and anger normal Americans, so let's not count out another precipitous drop after her big speech.

Here are the Reuters and USC graphs (Reuters always underestimates Trump's true standing, but the trend is still clear).



How much cash do you think Team Hillary has been pouring into her convention, compared to Trump's? And yet what does she have to show for it? Still sagging polls. Turns out that having an order of magnitude "advantage" in spending money and employing staff doesn't mean jack squat if it's all pointed in the wrong direction.

I really, really hope that her big speech is a 50-minute version of her nerve-grating commercial about "How will innocent Mexican kindergarteners FEEL when they hear President Trump say that Mexican rapists and drug dealers are invading our country?" There could not be a more tone-deaf and mawkish harangue of ordinary Americans on behalf of America-corroding forces.

July 25, 2016

Boo's tonight when Bernie endorses Clinton and Kaine

In case you weren't going to tune in to the very boring Democrat Convention tonight, you must at least catch Bernie Sanders, who will give a unity speech making the case for Clinton -- and who will get immediately booed by hundreds of Bernie delegates during primetime TV.

This afternoon, he gave a stump speech to his Convention delegates -- not just random fans -- and got around to saying they have to "defeat Donald Trump" (no cheers), "And... elect Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine!"

When he said their names, the entire group of several thousand erupted in a thunder of boo's for at least 10 full seconds. They were mostly angry at who their nominees were, but I also sensed some anger at Bernie himself for so bald-facedly selling out and shilling for Crooked Hillary. After the boo's died down, they started chanting "Feel the Bern!"

Expect something similar to happen tonight when he mentions the names of Clinton and Kaine. Perhaps the delegates will be warned in the meantime not to boo, but the Bernie people have already claimed one scalp today (Debbie Wasserman-Schultz has been fired as chair of the DNC and now won't even address or gavel in the Convention).

Emboldened by the revelations coming out of the DNC email scandal (Wikileaks), they have tasted blood and are out for revenge after getting screwed time and again at the platform and rules committee meetings, where the populist demands were voted down by the Establishment delegates.

The only way Bernie could try to head off boo's is by using a generic circumlocution, like "We have to elect the Democrats" or "our party's nominees," rather than their personal names or distinctive titles ("Madame Secretary").

I think even that would elicit boo's, though not as loud, from the Sanders supporters. And it would probably anger the Clintonites, who might interpret it as trying to weasel out of the endorsement, rather than an attempt to calm down the Sanders delegates. So they might join in the boo-ing, too.

With this afternoon's speech coming so close to his primetime address, it looks like that will be the form his endorsement takes -- using both of their full names, which stings even more keenly than a generic reminder of Bernie having lost.

I hope they take it to the level of chanting "sell-out!" as he sanctimoniously lectures his populist supporters about why they need to vote for Crooked Hillary Clinton. But at least we can expect a good deal of primetime boo-ing for the party's nominee, unlike the boo-ing of the marginalized loser at the Republican Convention.

July 23, 2016

Landslide: Trump now up 49-33 on West Coast (Reuters)

In the mother of all Convention bumps, Trump is now polling at 49-33 among residents of the Far West region in the Reuters tracking poll. This graph shows the results from May 1 through July 22, and look at how sharp the rise has been over the past week (click to enlarge):


Trump has risen from roughly 10% to 50%, as Crooked Hillary plummets from roughly 60% to 30%. And generally Reuters tends to underestimate how well Trump does against Clinton, compared to other polls.

Only catch -- these respondents include unregistered / unlikely voters as well as registered and likely voters. Among registered or likely voters, Clinton is still up 25-30 points, although that itself is quite a narrowing from just before the Convention.

If the campaign and volunteer groups can spend the next several months finding these disaffected voters, registering them, and staying in touch to get out the vote on Election Day, the Trump movement can win back the historically deep red states of the Pacific, before the culture wars turned them off during the 1990s.

California has one of the lowest turnout rates in the nation, so it should not be hard to find disaffected voters there -- spin around and throw a stone. With its 55 electoral votes, California cannot be written off, especially when we're exploding in popularity after the Convention. They appreciate the drama and spectacle of showbiz! Can you imagine how boring, conformist, and pro-Establishment the Dems' Convention is going to be, especially when they see Bernie reduced to toadie status before Her Royal Highness?

Oregon had Trump up 42-40 in mid-May, so that would be the easiest place to convert.

Washington would be more difficult, but between blue-collar populism, bettering IT workers by ending work visa abuse, non-interventionist foreign policy, and helping Bernie / Greens to drive voters away from Crooked Hillary (perhaps just staying home), there just might be a "grungers and Microsoft" coalition for Trump.

I'm not plugged into the campaign or political orgs of any kind. If you are or know someone who is, get the word out and let's mobilize the West Coast for Trump! Landslide = mandate!

July 22, 2016

Trump not trying to win minorities and gays, but whites and straights who care about them

The key theme behind Trump's epic acceptance speech was that he was going to fight for and protect all Americans from whatever it is that's throwing their world outta whack.

The media are incredulous, wondering why Trump is bothering to go after the black vote or the gay vote.

Unlike most politicians, however, he didn't address the various groups directly and try to win over their vote, as though it were a quid pro quo. He didn't put on a show about how "I feel your pain" to blacks who are out of the labor force because massive immigration has competed them out of the job market. Or to the gays, "I know how devastated you all must feel, but vote for me, and I'll protect you from Islamic terrorists who would attack your dance clubs."

Instead he spoke about them in the third person, as though his target audience didn't include many blacks or gays. Well, of course it doesn't -- gays make up only 1% of the electorate, and blacks have been members of the Democrat coalition since the 1960s.

Who is he really addressing, then? It's heterosexual people who put "concern for the gays" somewhere on their list of Really Important Political Goals. They are the ones who launched the gay marriage movement, who supported it among the electorate, and who are OK with it passing in the courts. The 1-2% of the population that's gay is not powerful enough to have done that all on their own, let alone in the span of one decade.

Likewise, when he talks about black unemployment and turmoil in black cities, he's addressing white people who put "concern for the blacks" on their list. If only blacks themselves were behind Black Lives Matter, there wouldn't be the kind of growing lawlessness that we're seeing. It's the white Minnesotans who are importing Somalis by the boatload out of "concern for the Africans". And it was their white Governor who came out and whipped the blacks up into a fury about how Philando Castile was shot by a racist cop (who was Mexican anyway).

If blacks were the primary demographic source of turning a state Democrat, then the South would still be Democrat. Those states have the highest percentages of blacks, all of whom vote Democrat, yet Southern states are solid Republican. And New England is deep blue, despite not having any blacks around to cast votes for Democrats. That difference is between white Southerners and white Yankees.

Aside from New England, the reliably blue states are those with intermediate levels of non-whites, where they're not like a second population (as in the Deep South, where they might be 20-40%), but where there's enough of them and in a confined area like a certain spot in a certain city (unlike the South where they range all over the geography). This makes the non-white population more like a pet zoo that the whites take care of.

Where there are no blacks, they're out of sight and out of mind. Where there are 40% blacks, why worry about them when there's enough of them to make up their own second society? But when there's 15% blacks, and they all live in five neighborhoods across only three cities, then whites adopt the mindset of "black community management," and are concerned for how government policies will help to manage black communities.

These are states like Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, New York, Pennsylvania, Colorado (with Hispanics), and so on. They are blue not because their black populations are so large (they're not), but because a big chunk of white voters in the state are concerned about the welfare of blacks and are voting on behalf of blacks, or as "allies of blacks" -- not necessarily as a single-issue thing, but as part of their broader list of liberal concerns.

This assessment is supported by recent data on the 2012 election, which shows that voters were a lot whiter than the experts had thought. It's white liberals who make so many states blue, not the non-white population.

That's even more stark for gay voters, who couldn't swing the vote in any state. It's straight people who are either pro-gay marriage or anti, that determines whether a state is red or blue.

Trump is therefore trying to peel off white liberals who are concerned about the welfare of blacks and gays, as part of his broader campaign to undo or sidestep identity politics. Black voters want someone who will feel their pain, be their symbolic presence in office, and so on. Trump is not offering that, so he won't be winning over much of them.

But white liberals aren't black themselves, and think of "the welfare of blacks" in more material and utilitarian terms, rather than symbolic, identity, and emotional terms. White liberals are at least open to the argument that importing massive numbers of immigrants, on top of the tens of millions who are already here, is bad for blacks because of lower-skilled labor market competition.

In material terms, competition from immigrants pushes black citizens further into poverty, and drives them out of entire cities when they can no longer afford rent, after losing out in the labor market.

That's not to mention the ethnic conflicts that erupt between Mexicans and blacks, with Mexican gangs ethnically cleansing the black hold-outs in formerly all-black neighborhoods out West.

The same goes for gays. Trump is not offering them feel-good identity politics, a la "We accept your way of life and want you to feel welcomed". He's offering them protection from gay-targeted violence, which will appeal to white liberals who view "what's good for the gays" as physical well-being rather than emotional stuff.

Certainly some white liberals share the symbolic and emotional view that blacks and gays themselves have. But there's a decent chunk of white liberals for whom "concern for _____" is a utilitarian matter.

Re-framing "concern for blacks" in material rather than symbolic terms will take a long time, because it's a paradigm shift away from identity politics. But that's what it meant back in the New Deal and Great Society eras, and the re-alignment under way now is a rejection of identity politics in favor of material concerns.

Peeling off white liberals will be harder than tapping into disaffected voters, since liberals tend to already affiliate so much with Democrats. Still, Trump only needs a decent enough share of them, in a certain number of states, to go over the top.

Re-framing "concern for blacks, etc." as a dispassionate concern to protect all groups of Americans, with whom the leader does not necessarily identify, let alone pander to, could convince enough white liberals to vote Trump when the alternative is the cynical panderer who will import hordes of immigrants who will impoverish blacks further and make gays the target of Islamic terrorists.

July 21, 2016

Cruz betrayal unifying all Americans, not just Republicans

Donald Trump Jr. was only half-joking when he said he'd never seen the party more unified than when they were collectively boo-ing Lyin' Ted for weaseling out of the pledge to support the nominee.

No doubt that party unity played a major role in deciding to set him up, not to mention neutralizing Cruz's 2020 campaign from the get-go.

But it's really all stripes of Americans who are feeling strangely unified while vicariously joining in the audience boo-ing the weasel, and laughing uncontrollably afterward from schadenfreude. Who on Earth could not identify with these feelings?

Obviously not the shills on CNN panels, but over at MSNBC no one could hide how giggly they felt. Even the liberals were swept up in the ecstasy of watching the ultimate smartass getting wasted by a firing squad on live TV.

Here's the progressive Young Turks reacting live:



They're eating it up, too, unable to help but resonate with the Trump army. Even Ana Kasparian, who's usually a total sourpuss, was wearing a bright-eyed smile from ear to ear.

This is going to be one of those "Where were you when...?" moments that unifies the entire country when people reflect back on it. Dialing up the emotional energy so high from such a resounding chorus of boo's, is going to leave an indelible impression on the mind of anyone who saw it.

We're high on victory, and it's not even the end of the Convention yet. Better yet, the rest of the country is already sharing in that victory high -- and if they want to feel another Trump victory rush, they're going to have to vote for him again in the fall. We got 'em hooked!

Ted Cruz's tone-deaf pandering to the gays

In his cosplay Presidential speech seeking bipartisan healing on hot-button social issues, Lyin' Ted trotted out one whopper of a line:

"Whether you are gay or straight, the Bill of Rights protects the rights of all of us to live according to our conscience."

Somehow I doubt that either liberals or conservatives think of gay sex as "living according to their conscience" -- as though it was their conscience that compelled the homos to jam their tongue up another guy's butt and suck out a mouthful of AIDS.

The phrase he was angling for was "to live according to our preferences / what makes us feel good" -- which is what actually motivates gay sex, but then that sounds too permissive of degeneracy.

By going the extra mile in tone-deaf "middle way" pandering, Cruz must be staging a last-minute audition to be Crooked Hillary's running mate.

July 19, 2016

Generational cycles in ethnic conflict

In the last post, we saw that blacks act out against police as a form of anti-white resentment, instead of anti-authoritarianism as some naive civil libertarian types may believe. The take-home message was that to get to a more pacified police force, there needs to be a minimum of strife between demographic groups -- particularly different ethnic groups.

Shutting off immigration and repatriating illegals would go a long way to preventing future ethnic conflict, so restricting immigration ought to be a top priority for anyone who wants to eventually de-militarize the police.

But what about ethnic conflict involving those who will be staying here, like blacks? As in the 1960s, they are in the process of escalating collective violence against white people as a monolithic group, where the police are targeted for being the armed guards of the real group of interest (white people).

Unlike Mexican illegals, we're not going to be able to ship blacks out of the country in order to prevent the growth of ethnic conflicts in the future.

I think the only thing that's going to change the minds of blacks is to witness and experience a massive crackdown on their criminals. Race relations were generally amicable during the Great Compression because there were widespread race riots targeting blacks circa 1920, and neither side wanted to go through that ever again.

Sadly, once the next generation had not experienced the nadir of race relations, they were naive about how bad things could get by pushing black vs. white resentment. They would grow up to be the Civil Rights generation, which would plunge the nation back into a lawless and therefore heavy-handed police state circa 1970.

The people who experienced that most recent nadir during their formative years -- the Boomers -- are generally wary of stoking black vs. white tensions. Even if they're liberals, and even if they're black, they don't want another Watts Riot, or another assassination campaign against today's MLK, Malcolm X, and so on. They feel that chaos to be an embarrassing stain on the liberal banner, and they want to avoid promoting liberalism in a way that would only further stain it with an association of widespread ethnic conflict.

However, Gen X-ers and Millennials are too young to remember the ethnic explosions of the late '60s and early '70s, so they don't apply the brakes when they sense race relations moving in a more hostile direction. Especially the Millennials, who are too young to even remember the L.A. Riots of 1992, which was a relatively minor and isolated case compared to the conflagration of the 1960s.

Peter Turchin has found that outbursts of collective political violence appear in cycles of roughly 50 years. If the last peak was 1970, then we're due for another one in the near future -- caused by naive and reckless Millennial blacks who have no idea what they're about to bring down upon themselves in response.

Only after that will race relations improve, and the police force will moderate more in the Mayberry direction. Until that happens, though, it will be counter-productive to push hard for the de-militarization of police on "citizens first" grounds. Right now the zeitgeist is not about citizens vs. the state, but one ethnic group vs. another.

This is a cyclical solution whose dynamics largely play out on their own, not a permanent solution that can be carried out willfully like a repatriation of illegal immigrants. Although there will be recurring waves of collective black vs. white conflict, at least there are 50 years in between peaks, and at least the de-escalation happens more or less "on its own" at the grassroots level and does not require social engineering.

A more permanent solution would take the form of segregating blacks and whites at the regional level within the country, so that they had their own contiguous region and we had ours. For example, they could take the lowland Deep South where the highest concentration of blacks has existed since they first were brought there as slaves.

I'm not convinced that this regional separation would actually prevent ethnic conflict like sending the Mexicans back to Mexico. Blacks vs. white conflict would just take the form of a region vs. region conflict, like Northerners vs. Southerners. It may be that we're going to have widespread black vs. white conflict once every 50 years, and that what we need to work on is not preventing it but preparing for and dampening its effects when we know stormy weather is looming on the horizon.

July 18, 2016

For blacks, anti-police means anti-white, not anti-authoritarianism

Although we do have an overgrown police presence that would ideally look more like it did on the Andy Griffith Show, the necessary changes may have to wait for awhile because in the current climate, the main impetus behind "boo police" is anti-white sentiment among blacks.

In the minds of most blacks, the police are the foot soldiers and open-air prison guards who keep blacks submissive, at the behest of the institutional racist white system that feels threatened by blacks doin' they own thang.

Therefore, holding anti-police views -- or escalating to anti-police actions -- stems from resentment against white people as a group. To them, the police are white folks' hired goons, so neutering or taking out the cops is just the first step toward taking down the wealthy and powerful whitey himself, who will be left with no protective forces.

That is quite a different motivation from civil libertarian types who are skeptical of the police because they are their own interest group, who may or may not have the public's safety at the top of its priorities, depending on the circumstances. Harassing white teenagers who are loitering around a parking lot? Easy, but pointless. Throwing themselves into a violent conflict to break it up? Harder to get them to do, yet more important for public safety.

This wariness of a too-big-too-fail police force has nothing to do with favoring one faction within a bitter conflict between ethnic groups, economic classes, generations, or any other kind of demographic conflict. Rather, it has to do with relations between agents of the state and the citizens. It is the same kind of concern that we have over whether Senators are directly elected, whether the military can draft soldiers, and so on.

Normal white people won't support radically altering the police forces when that matter is a hot-button topic in a broader ethnic conflict between blacks and whites. So, unfortunately the project of restoring the police back to the Mayberry model will have to wait until we get a better handle on various civil conflicts where one faction views the police as a mercenary militia that protects the other faction in the conflict.

Certainly that will not be taking place when anti-white movements like Black Lives Matter have escalated their tactics to murdering cops in ambushes, and when a good chunk of the black population is unmoved by or even sympathetic to those tactics.

The last time we transitioned out of a heavy police presence to the friendly neighborhood cop was the Great Compression. Before then, during the Progressive Era, the stereotype of the cop was still a skull-knocker who was looking out first for himself and other cops, and secondarily for the citizens.

First the Progressive Era had to restore order to a society that had begun to spiral out of control during the laissez-faire Gilded Age, and imposing order on chaos is going to stoke the sense of grievance among those demographic groups that are more prone to crime and destabilization. It might have been Ellis Island immigrants in the Progressive Era, while today it's blacks. But order has to be restored, and that may require us to tolerate a heavy-handed police force until the chaos has been controlled.

In general, all of the social worker programs that liberals desire -- the New Deal, the Great Society, etc. -- can only begin once there is basic stability among demographic groups. It's like Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, where you need to take care of the most basic pressing needs (food, shelter) before attending to higher ones (fulfilling work). We had to kick out a bunch of immigrants and shut off immigration during the Great Compression, in order to focus on taking care of a more cohesive and unchanging population.

If there is open civil conflict, we are drawn back into "basic needs" mode, and that includes tolerating a police force that is stronger than we'd like.

The upshot for people who see a de-militarized police as ideal, is that we need to shape the population so that open civil conflicts are minimal and shrinking over time. The most pressing task now is to send the illegals back and shut off immigration, to prevent the emergence of further factions in the ethnic conflict arena.

For those who will be staying here, like blacks, I'll cover in a follow-up post about generational cycles within groups who are here permanently.

July 15, 2016

Media censorship of white victims, vs. fanning flames of black victims

I don't know why the media are trying to censor the pictures and video clips of the carnage left by yet another Islamic terrorist, yet again in France. ("Too graphic for us to show.") Do they think nobody is connected to the internet?

Nearly 100 Europeans murdered for no reason by a Muslim? Sorry, can't show that on TV.

One or two black bodies are shot by police under uncertain circumstances? Let's run that on a loop for the next week.

They know that airing videos like that will whip up ethnic hatred among the group that the victims belonged to. It has been clear since the Rodney King footage that their goal has been to incite race riots to keep whitey in his place.

But now they are revealing something new -- at least in their minds, whitey himself is so close to launching an ethnic attack, that white victims must be censored at all costs, lest it incite a white riot.

We're about to find out how correct their assessment is. These things are happening too often, and with such a disgusting cover-up from the media afterwards, that whitey is about to strike back. And we don't half-ass things by driving trucks through a crowd to kill dozens -- we're poised to drop a nuke on Riyadh. When the 29-page report on the Saudis funding 9/11 is released tomorrow, we'll be even closer.

It's mind-boggling how ignorant of history the media is -- do they not remember us dropping not one nuke but two on Japan only 70 years ago? Not exactly ancient history. Whitey will only be fucked around with for so long, and then we end the problem for good.

Of course, they're not that stupid. They know about white people laying waste to their enemies throughout history. They see it as their goal to prevent such large-scale collateral-damage attacks ever again, and their method is to keep white people from any awareness of how they're being fucked around with, all while cheerleading for a ratcheting up of the forces that are cooking whitey's goose.

In their minds, people are just a bunch of insensate robots whose only perception of the real world comes through a media stream. Control the flow of mediated information, and you control their perception, and therefore their willingness to act.

Fortunately for us, we are flesh-and-blood human beings with functioning sense organs and half a lick of common sense. Only a retard couldn't tell what's going on around him.

Some will play up the role of the internet media, which can circumvent the centralized mass media, and provide images and videos of the carnage in Nice that the propaganda outlets will censor. There's some truth to that, but angry mobs have been stirred to torches and pitchforks before modern media were invented -- simply by word-of-mouth reports of what atrocities have been committed against their people by some other people.

Word-of-mouth among family, friends, acquaintances, and co-workers is not something that the corporate media can control. And it doesn't take long for word to spread.

The media are only inviting reprisals by censoring white victims so bald-facedly. We live in a more civilized age (or so it seems), so they can rest assured that we won't literally storm their office building with torches and pitchforks. But we will be busting up the corporate media monopoly to allow for honest networks to give it to us straight, whether it's whites committing crimes or, more likely, non-whites running amok yet again.

That will allow us to deal with small problems as they arise, and nip them in the bud. By encouraging a long steady build-up of resentment, the mass media are only ensuring that our solution will be a giant explosion rather than a series of smaller and controlled solutions.

July 14, 2016

The dramatic arc of Sessions' rise to VP

A comment I left at Conservative Treehouse:

I’m impressed by how well Trump is able to stage the VP stakes that even his diehard followers are on the edge of their seats — when there has never been any possibility other than Jeff Sessions. I understand the media all falling for it — they’re gullible and desperate for gossip. But he clearly knows what kind of drama the electorate wants as well.

Act I: Sessions is introduced and made familiar to the audience, and portrayed as an unlikely hero. First as the intro speaker during the Mobile rally of 35,000, then once Trump has dominated so many primaries, Sessions makes the rounds of the Sunday news shows.

Act II: Sessions is withdrawn from public view, to create dramatic arcs about him wavering in his resolve, unsure whether he has the courage to govern as VP. After the nomination is locked up, the decoys are deployed, who seem more capable and eager to accept the job, if he doesn’t step up and take the role that is made for him.

Act III: Sessions emerges from temporary obscurity, having firmly resolved to throw down the gauntlet against the Establishment, as the decoys are withdrawn.

Trump knows that the most compelling hero narrative involves an intermediate period of wavering, planting doubt in the mind of the audience and heightening the tension — will he heed the call or not? It makes his ultimate acceptance of the role a bold deliberate choice, rather than just being blown along by the winds of fate.

I don’t mind spoiling this before the movie is over, since some of you seem like you’re about to commit suicide if it’s an awful pick! O ye of little faith…

July 13, 2016

In battleground states, college-educated Boomers are key for Trump victory

A series of Quinnipiac polls in Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania show Trump ahead of Crooked Hillary in all three, when the Libertarian and Green choices are included.

Looking through the cross-tabs, the biggest difference I see from recent Presidential races is that college-educated whites and Baby Boomers are very strongly in favor of Trump on the East Coast, although not to the same extent in the Midwest, where Trump is within striking distance among those groups, but where he relies more on the non-college-educated and on Gen X (Juggalos for Trump).

He wins among those groups as well in FL and PA, but on the East Coast he is put comfortably over the top by the educated Boomers.

In related news, the Reuters tracking poll shows a steady rise in Trump's numbers in the Mid-Atlantic region, to the point where he's finally polling ahead of Hillary. He is likely doing even better there, since Reuters consistently underestimates his support and overestimates hers. Unfortunately there's no recent data from there based on age, although he's within single digits among the college-educated.

The region not only includes PA but also NY, NJ, MD, and DE. Perhaps this regional trend is being driven only by a very strong movement in PA, but I have to think that he's doing well (even if not leading) in other Mid-Atlantic states too. It's a liberal place, and now that the La Raza judge brou-ha-ha has gone away, and with Islamic terrorism coming back to the forefront after Orlando, places that were the sites of the 9/11 attacks are going to start giving Trump a serious hearing.

In general, Trump is making it respectable for East Coast professionals to be Republican again -- the message is not one of cultural apocalyptic doom, nor selling out the little guy in order to boost the 1%. The original 13 colonies aren't going to believe that the end is near, since they've been through a lot worse for a lot longer. And the tradition of civic engagement makes its professionals want to do something to look after the working class and small businesses, outside the mediation of churches as you find further inland.

On the flipside, the Quinnipiac polls suggest that young people will voluntarily repeal the 26th Amendment this time around. They have the highest rates of saying Johnson or Stein, although very few of them offer the answer of "someone else" when the pollster tries to restrict them to just Clinton and Trump. Translation: they don't like either of the major candidates, and while a small handful will vote third party, most will just stay home.

They're giving the Libertarian or Green response just to alleviate cognitive dissonance when prodded by a stranger. It allows them to feel both engaged and morally pure. But since they barely know who Johnson and Stein are, largely because neither is really campaigning, they don't know what they stand for. And that haziness may allow them to feel vaguely morally pure in "supporting" them to a pollster, but will not motivate them to locate the polling station, leave home, and actually push the button for them.

A voluntary quarantine of the Millennials is the best we can ask of them. Strange as it may sound, it's the Boomers to save the day -- but then, it's always the Wonder Years of the '60s and '70s with them, before the country went down the tubes in so many ways. They're the perfect audience for the non-ironic message of "Make America Great Again".

July 12, 2016

Trump's law-and-order appeal will be real, but not as high as Nixon's

With the return of 1960s-level civil conflict, various people are comparing Trump's law-and-order appeal to Nixon's in 1968 and '72. They are similar, but different enough to not get our hopes up about this issue giving Trump as much popularity as it did to Nixon.

There are two separate cycles going on: 1) societal cohesion, where periods of collective violence alternate with periods of collective harmony; and 2) individual opportunistic crime, where we see rising and falling rates of homicide, rape, etc.

Peter Turchin has described the cycles in societal cohesion, which show a 50-year period between high points (and between low points). The last low point was circa 1970, when there were race riots, students descending on the Pentagon to blow it up, labor strikes, and so on and so forth. The previous low point was circa 1920, which also saw even worse race riots, labor wars, and violent anti-war activism. Before that, it was the Civil War and Reconstruction Era of circa 1870.

That suggests a new low point will be reached circa 2020 -- of course, it could happen a little sooner or a little later. But we're already seeing the outlines of it, with black racial grievances taking collective and violent form against the government, although no real youth / student movement, no anti-war movement, and no labor uprising. Leading up to the November election, there won't be nearly the same level of collective civil conflict that there was by November 1968, let alone '72.

As for the rate of violent crimes that are individual and opportunistic (rather than collective and ideological), it has been falling steadily since a peak in 1992. It looked to have plateaued in the 2000s, but has dropped continually through this decade. The same goes for property crimes (burglary, theft, etc.).

In 1968, by contrast, violent and property crime rates had been soaring for nearly a decade.

Nixon was therefore appealing not only to those who were sick with how close the society felt to civil war, but also to those who were sick of having to watch their back when they left the house to run errands, and coming home to find it burglarized.

In 2016, the rise of ethnic group violence from blacks lashing out at the white government is becoming more and more worrisome to normal voters. If more of the Islamic terrorists turn out to be American residents rather than 9/11 style invaders, then that too will provide another example of collective violence by aggrieved ethnic minorities.

Still, it hasn't spread to students and anti-war activists setting off bombs, or striking workers defending their picket lines with force against scabs. And people have never felt safer from crime -- they have almost no stories about robbery, burglary, let alone rape and murder, that are circulating through their social circles, compared to how commonplace it was during the last crime wave.

Trump's appeal to law-and-order themes will be real, especially when running against someone who is not only weak on this issue, but broadcasts and even brags about her weakness -- which normal people will interpret as only likely to worsen the situation, as the violent groups smell fear among political leaders and really go in for the kill.

But we shouldn't think that these themes will be as important for voters now as they were in 1968 and '72, when the situation was a lot worse for both individual and collective violence.

July 10, 2016

As Democrats sell out on platform, Trump officially "to the left" of Crooked Hillary on economics

At their cargo cult Congress meeting over the weekend, the Democrat delegates to the platform committee have been largely voting along factional lines for the topics that actually matter to ordinary Americans -- trade policy (TPP), single payer healthcare, stopping the revolving door between lobbyists and politicians, and so on.

With far fewer Sanders delegates, it has been rubber-stamping the corporate globalist elite agenda on one matter after another.

Although there had been widespread discontent among progressives that the Democrats have been turning into moderate Republicans, they had thought that the massive showing of a populist like Bernie Sanders during the primary would score them something this time around, even if it's a non-binding platform statement. Now that this minimal degree of compromise has been rejected by the Establishment, progressives are feeling betrayed rather than merely let down.

The talking head posers ("Hey fellow progressive kids") are trying to give the impression of building bridges to the "Bernie or bust" voters, but they're not having any of it. See the long list of dismissive replies to this tweet by Sally Kohn:


One of the party-wide changes this season has been the unmasking of supposed fellow travelers in the media, who now stand as bald-faced shills for the Establishment, against their populist-craving audience. For the Democrats, it began with Elizabeth Warren and then Rachel Maddow, right as Hillary clinched the nomination. Sally Kohn isn't as big of a figure as them (kind of a Jew dyke version of Laura Ingraham), but it's yet another example, and on yet another network.

Who knows if that trend will continue when Bernie inevitably endorses Crooked Hillary, but given the rest of the examples, it's not out of the question that his voters will shake their head and call him a sell-out.

If you search for Twitter responses to #DemPlatform that also mention Trump, their main gripe is that by being in favor of a job-off-shoring agreement like the TPP, the Establishment has handed the election to Trump, who will beat Crooked Hillary over the head with his populist stance. In fact, Trump has gone farther than Bernie by promising to pull us out of NAFTA, which we've already been in for nearly a quarter of a century, as well as slam 35% tariffs on off-shored manufactured goods.

As I discussed in this post, the downwardly mobile Sanders supporters will start to warm up to Trump, big-league. The progressives who have made it economically looked like they would eventually be brought back into the Democratic fold, but they seem pretty pissed by how little compromise there was on the platform. Whether they stay home, vote Green, or write in Bernie, it doesn't look like they'll be voting Democrat in the fall.

We'll have to wait until after their Convention to see which way they'll go. Right now they seem more demoralized and inclined to simply not vote at all. But if all hell breaks loose in Philadelphia, they just might be emboldened to launch a "Bernie write-in" campaign. If they had been gifted a candidate with more backbone, they could also draft him into campaigning himself as an Independent.

Major trainwreck ahead, either way, can't wait to tune in. We have a fractured party elite and a united electorate on our side -- they have a united Establishment and a fractured electorate!

July 9, 2016

Sean Hannity tries to get his street reporter lynched by angry black mob

The first segment on Hannity last night had a street reporter on the scene of a protest and stand-off with police in Baton Rouge, in the midst of rising tensions after two police officers shot an armed black ex-con who may or may not have been reaching for his gun.

Hannity kept trying to feed inflammatory questions to his poor street reporter, who wisely ignored most of what was coming into his earpiece, and escaped with his life. A tense protest of ghetto blacks is the last place where a civics debate makes any damn sense, but Hannity was in full cuckservative logic-master mode -- "Ask them if they believe in the presumption of innocence for the police officers" who just killed a member of their community, etc.

I was away from the TV screen at first, and thought he was just joshing the reporter, who was being a party-pooper. But then when I saw the scene, I understood why he didn't want to ask Hannity's questions -- he didn't want to become the first reporter to have his murder live-streamed on both Fox News and Wurlstah.

Here's the video (first segment, then resumes around 31 min):



Some portions that had to be cut for time constraints...

Johnathan, Johnathan -- Ask them if they think an all-black jury can deliver a fair decision to the black-killing police officers.

Johnathan, Johnathan -- Ask them if they think they should have to recite the Preamble to the Constitution in order to receive their EBT card.

Johnathan, Johnathan -- Ask them if they still support the first African-American President, when average black IQ has fallen two points since the Bush administration.

Johnathan, Johnathan -- Can you ask the one ranting about white people hanging black folks from trees, if he can start speaking English instead of Ebonics.

Johnathan, Johnathan -- Ask them if they feel triggered by a white reporter invading their comfort zone at the protest site.

Johnathan, Johnathan -- Ask them why they can call cops "pigs" but the cops can't call them "niggers".

Johnathan, you still there? -- Ask them what their Originalist basis is for sticking a shiv in your gut like that.

July 7, 2016

With flop of witch hunt over six-point star, Jewish media discovers America doesn't view them as a victim group

For over a week, the media has been desperately trying to pin the label of anti-Semitism on Trump for tweeting a picture of Crooked Hillary that had a six-point star in it, despite it being solid rather than interlocking lines like the actual Star of David.

Unlike some of the other witch hunts that were halfway successful for a short while anyway -- about disavowing the KKK, women who get an abortion, and a judge using reverse racism against Trump -- nobody is picking up this six-point ball and running with it. It's only Jews in the mainstream media, and in the SJW realm of Twitter.

Why is this one failing? The others had to do with what Jonathan Haidt calls sacred victim groups -- women who get an abortion and become the target of legal action, blacks, Mexicans, etc.

The non-reaction to this latest attempted witch hunt shows that Americans don't view Jews as a victim group, let alone one that ought to receive special reverence for its victimhood. The morons in the media kept trying to tie the six-point star to the piles of cash in the background of the image, to argue for the anti-Semitic connotation. Of course, if anyone in the audience actually bought that dubious connection, they would have been reminded that Jews are in fact incredibly wealthy, powerful, and influential -- and therefore, not a member of those who are poor, powerless, and marginal.

Since the culture wars erupted in the '90s, we've heard time and time again that "race plus power equals racism," hence why blacks cannot possibly be racist -- they lack the power to oppress whites. To the liberals who buy into that worldview, Jews fall into the same category as whites -- those with wealth and power, who if anything will be the perpetrators rather than the victims of racism.

That was more out in the open back in the '80s and '90s, when black leaders railed against Jews as much as against garden-variety whites (Jessie Jackson calling New York "Hymie Town," and the Crown Heights Riot between blacks and Jews in Brooklyn). Blacks don't have time to micro-analyze all the wavelengths of whiteness -- if you're Caucasian and wealthy and powerful, you're probably a racist just waiting to act on it. And you most definitely can never be the victim of racism.

Blacks hate Mexicans, too, but they at least allow them to be victims of racism, along with other poor and powerless minorities. When Jews tried to join in the victimhood club over the past week, finally having a tale to tell about how Trump did a problematic thing about their ethnic group, the ordinary black person didn't buy into that being racism, and at most thought to themselves:

"Yep, sucks to be you guys (witcho control over Hollywood, Wall Street, and the media). It's awesome being black -- we can cry racism over anything and get a public hearing."

Getting no support from the black section of their audience, let alone from white people, Jews in the media now understand that nobody buys the image they're hawking of their group being another victim group that is persecuted by the wealthy and powerful.

If they were reflective, they would understand that this is because Jews are wealthy and powerful themselves, and so it sounds just as ridiculous to try to claim victimhood status as it would for WASPs. But knowing their record, they will probably chalk it up to every group on the planet being secretly hateful toward Jews, a worldview that they will bitterly cling to for the rest of their days.

Hopefully this means they'll drop this failure of a witch hunt, but at the least we can tell that non-Jews no longer take claims of anti-Semitism seriously. They have to clear a certain threshold, whereas claims of racism against blacks get a pass no matter how baseless.

July 6, 2016

Downwardly mobile progressives not so fearful of losing liberal elite's respect, consider Trump

Progressives reacted to the announcement that Crooked Hillary will not be indicted with intense exasperation, as though they had been betting on an FBI indictment all along, which would have opened the door to Bernie receiving the nomination instead.

I had no idea how many of them had been holding out hope on this -- they didn't mention it much in public, perhaps so as not to jinx it, and were just crossing their fingers really hard. Even if Hillary had been indicted, did they really think that the Establishment would choose the anti-Establishment candidate to take her place? Sounds highly naive to me, but then it was their only hope, however remote.

With those hopes dashed, it seems unlikely that they will be voting for Hillary in the fall. If they had been so deeply committed that they were still convinced that Bernie had a conceivable path toward the nomination, just a few weeks before the Convention, it shows that they aren't party loyalists, whose mindset would have begun to change toward accepting Hillary a month ago, after the California primary.

In a further twist, I've noticed that most of the ordinary anonymous audience members for the higher-profile progressives are open to voting Trump, many saying outright "Trump before Hillary". There's no support for the Libertarian ticket, and only tepid support for the Green Party.

This response stands in contrast to the higher-profile progressives themselves, such as the Young Turks and David Sirota, who while happy to continue bashing Crooked Hillary, are still nervous to voice even a whisper of support for Trump. They know damn well that Trump is going to torpedo the TPP and other ruinous globalist trade deals, as well as pull us out of NAFTA. And they know damn well that he will end our imperialist foreign policy of nation-building, regime change, and provoking nuclear World War III with Russia.

But, these visible progressives would instantly become the target of the liberal elite and their minions if they were to give Trump an inch. And being higher up on the class pyramid than debt-saddled baristas and NEETs, losing their respectability within elite social circles is a strong enough deterrent to keep quiet about how Trump is superior to Hillary on at least these two central progressive goals.

As for those struggling baristas, though, they don't seem to care about their respectability in the eyes of the liberal elite. They may have tried to join the elite and failed to reach it, or they may have always set their sights more modestly, especially if they're the slacker type. Either way, their class interests do not involve connections with members of the elite. So they are not as easy to shame toward Hillary and away from Trump, compared to those professional-class progressives who want to socialize with writers for The Atlantic, or who want to some day give an over-glorified PowerPoint presentation at a TED Talk.

The struggling ones are not exactly the blue-collar Bernie supporters, since they've probably studied at college for at least a few years. In a period of general downward mobility, they are the ones whose family started off middle class, and they are ending up lower-middle class or below.

As a result, they do not live in the city itself, let alone in the trendy neighborhoods, like the professional-class progs do. They probably live in a middling suburb that they're in a love/hate relationship with, and find the trendy urban neighborhoods a little too pretentious and stuck-up once they visit them for real. They resent the fact that the progs with managerial type jobs in the city look down their nose at anyone who's poor and unfashionable enough to have to live in the suburbs.

When there is such a sharp divide between the voting behavior of urban vs. non-urban residents, perhaps it's no surprise to see the suburban Sanders supporters lending their ears to Trump, while the urban ones go to great lengths to reassure their fellow cosmopolitans that they're not proles like those Trump voters.

As one example of a broader type, there's Cassandra Fairbanks from Twitter (tens of thousands of followers), who recently put a video on YouTube called "Why I, a Bernie supporter, prefer Trump to Hillary Clinton," and whose description simply reads "and I'm not sorry" -- anticipating the attempts at shaming from lib elites and their minions, and flatly defying them.

At first she doesn't seem like a natural Trump voter -- Millennial, female, liberal, living in the deep-blue state of Maryland. But then there are signs of not belonging to, and not really aspiring to, the professional/managerial class: tattoos, swearing, (apparently) single mother, and living in Silver Spring rather than DC itself or an elite suburb like Bethesda or a striver suburb in Northern Virginia.

Blue-collar workers are natural Trump voters, but in this age of stagnation and widening inequality, the theme of "Make America Great Again" will also resonate with the downwardly mobile within the middle class. How can Crooked Hillary tell such people that "America is already great"? She is clearly targeting the yuppies with that message -- meaning the non-urban and downwardly mobile would rather gouge their own eyes out than trek out to the polling station to vote for her in the fall.

Before, it looked like they might just stay home -- and some undoubtedly will -- but I'm noticing more and more who are saying, "Yeah, Trump sometimes says things that your casually racist uncle would say, BUT..." The downwardly mobile liberals who are not joining in all the cosmopolitan reindeer games are becoming more open to putting aside their gripes in the culture war, if it'll improve their material situation.

The only trigger left to pull is some big solution to student loan debt -- like a one-time jubilee -- and these folks will be eager to leave the house on Election Day.

July 4, 2016

Songs that give shout-outs to different regions across America

I've been thinking about what classic songs could be used as "Make America Great Again" anthems, and settled on "In America" by the Charlie Daniels Band (1980). The line about "just try and lay your hand on a Pittsburgh Steelers fan" will be especially relevant this election, with Trump's focus on the Rust Belt.



Back when we had a more cohesive nation, songs like this at least mentioned various places around the country, and often provided some local flavor from each one. As our country has become more fragmented, you don't hear that anymore, a topic I touched on in this old post:

There are plenty of newer songs on the "America" theme list, although I doubt they kick as much ass as "Living in America" by James Brown, from the Rocky IV soundtrack. What's really fallen off a cliff are songs that highlight several regions specifically, not just an overall American theme, nor boasting about why your state is better than everyone else's. That's a sign of regional fragmentation.

"California Girls" (the Beach Boys or the David Lee Roth version), "Dancing in the Street" (the original or the Jagger / Bowie cover), and "The Heart of Rock & Roll" are the only ones that run a tour across the whole country. One of the songs from Bon Jovi's Slippery When Wet album has a fade-out that calls out a bunch of places -- Detroit, southern New Jersey -- but I can't remember which one, and lyrics websites don't say either.

There's also no more songs about red states, the last major one being "If You're Gonna Play in Texas" by Alabama, another triumph from that peak year in music, 1984.

If there's another song like "In America" during the Trump administration, it will probably have to refer to states or regions rather than cities, which have become so uniformly pro-Democrat since 1980.

A look around the county-level electoral map of Reagan vs. Carter reveals some notable exceptions from our point-of-view. Of course, most of the Northern industrial cities voted Democrat, but then so did a lot of the rural South -- that was the old New Deal coalition, no longer strong enough in numbers in 1980. And then there were quite a few big cities that voted for Reagan -- Indianapolis, Columbus, Cincinnati, Seattle, and Los Angeles. Also funny to see suburban DC voting Republican, on both the Maryland and Virginia sides.

The major change, though, is the surrounding metro area turning Democrat, where in 1980 it was usually only the city itself that was deep blue. Make the suburbs great again!