By Anne Gearan, Jenna Johnson and John Wagner September 9 at 8:23 PM
NEW YORK — With Election Day less than two months away, Democrats are increasingly worried that Hillary Clinton has not built a formidable lead against Donald Trump despite his historic weaknesses as a national party candidate.
Even the Democratic nominee’s advisers acknowledge that she must make changes, and quickly. Clinton leads Trump by three percentage points, having fallen from her high of nine points in August, according to the latest RealClearPolitics average. That tightening has frustrated many Clinton allies and operatives, who are astonished that she isn’t running away with this race, given Trump’s deep unpopularity and his continuing stream of controversial comments.
“Generally, I’m concerned, frankly,” said former Democratic Senate leader Thomas A. Daschle (S.D.). “It still looks positive, and I think if you look at the swing states and where she is right now, she’s got a lead. But it’s certainly not in the bag. We have two months to go, and I think it’s going to be a competitive race all the way through. I would say she’s got at least a 60 percent chance of winning.”
At the same time, Daschle said, “all the things that Trump has done, the numbers should be far more explicitly in her favor, but they’re not.”
NYT calls for moderator ‘fact check’ after Lauer sins by allowing candidates to speak
By Ashe Schow • 09/09/16 3:45pm
The biggest news to come out of Wednesday night’s candidate forum was not anything said by either Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton or Republican nominee Donald Trump.
No, the biggest story of the night was how NBC host Matt Lauer allegedly failed at his job as a journalist. Lauer, who has been a journalist since 1979, who has co-hosted The Today Show since 1997, who was live during the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, and who has won numerous Emmy awards for his coverage.
Suddenly, Lauer is garbage, no better—in the eyes of the mainstream media—than some basement-dwelling right-wing blogger.
Hillary Clinton, You’re No John F. Kennedy Thankfully Donald Trump and the Republicans understand the JFK-Reagan supply-side solution.
By Lawrence Kudlow,
Sep 7, 2016
The election season is heating up, Donald Trump has pulled back even with Hillary Clinton, and every new economic number is being scrutinized for its supposed political meaning.
The unexpectedly soft August jobs report will lend a little political advantage to Donald Trump. In general, jobs came in 30,000 to 40,000 below expectations. Goods-producing and manufacturing jobs decreased, wages were near flat and retreated to 2.4 percent year-on-year, the private and manufacturing workweeks fell, and overall hours dropped.
However, this is far from a catastrophe. Jobs still climbed by 150,000 or so. And the third quarter ending in September will probably generate near 3 percent growth, as inventories reverse course and start rising again. These numbers may well lend some political advantage to Hillary.
But if you look under the economy’s hood, you’ll discover…
The fascinating, suppressed history of how JFK pioneered supply-side economics.
John F. Kennedy was the first president since the 1920s to slash tax rates across-the-board, becoming one of the earliest supply-siders. Sadly, today’s Democrats have ignored JFK’s tax-cut legacy and have opted instead for an anti-growth, tax-hiking redistribution program, undermining America’s economy.
One person who followed JFK’s tax-cut growth model was Ronald Reagan. This is the never-before-told story of the link between JFK and Ronald Reagan. This is the secret history of American prosperity.
JFK realized that high taxes that punished success and fanned class warfare harmed the economy. In the 1950s, when high tax rates prevailed, America endured recessions every two or three years and the ranks of the unemployed swelled. Only in the 1960s did an uninterrupted boom at a high rate of growth (averaging 5 percent per year) drive a tremendous increase in jobs for the long term. The difference was Kennedy’s economic policy, particularly his push for sweeping tax-rate cuts.
Kennedy was so successful in the ’60s that he directly inspired Ronald Reagan’s tax cut revolution in the 1980s, which rejuvenated the economy and gave us another boom that lasted for two decades.
Lawrence Kudlow and Brian Domitrovic reveal the secret history of American prosperity by exploring the little-known battles within the Kennedy administration. They show why JFK rejected the advice of his Keynesian advisors, turning instead to the ideas proposed by the non-Keynesians on his team of rivals.
We meet a fascinating cast of characters, especially Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon, a Republican. Dillon’s opponents, such as liberal economists Paul Samuelson, James Tobin, and Walter Heller, fought to maintain the high tax rates—including an astonishing 91% top rate—that were smothering the economy. In a wrenching struggle for the mind of the president, Dillon convinced JFK of the long-term dangers of nosebleed income-tax rates, big spending, and loose money. Ultimately, JFK chose Dillon’s tax cuts and sound-dollar policies and rejected Samuelson and Heller.
In response to Kennedy’s revolutionary tax cut, the economy soared. But as the 1960s wore on, the departed president’s priorities were undone by the government-expanding and tax-hiking mistakes of Presidents Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter. The resulting recessions and the “stagflation” of the 1970s took the nation off its natural course of growth and prosperity– until JFK’s true heirs returned to the White House in the Reagan era.
Kudlow and Domitrovic make a convincing case that the solutions needed to solve the long economic stagnation of the early twenty-first century are once again the free-market principles of limited government, low tax rates, and a strong dollar. We simply need to embrace the bipartisan wisdom of two great presidents, unleash prosperity, and recover the greatness of America.
2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees.
Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.
To ordinary conservative ears, this sounds histrionic. The stakes can’t be that high because they are never that high—except perhaps in the pages of Gibbon. Conservative intellectuals will insist that there has been no “end of history” and that all human outcomes are still possible. They will even—as Charles Kesler does—admit that America is in “crisis.” But how great is the crisis? Can things really be so bad if eight years of Obama can be followed by eight more of Hillary, and yet Constitutionalist conservatives can still reasonably hope for a restoration of our cherished ideals? Cruz in 2024!
Not to pick (too much) on Kesler, who is less unwarrantedly optimistic than most conservatives. And who, at least, poses the right question: Trump or Hillary? Though his answer—“even if [Trump] had chosen his policies at random, they would be sounder than Hillary’s”—is unwarrantedly ungenerous. The truth is that Trump articulated, if incompletely and inconsistently, the right stances on the right issues—immigration, trade, and war—right from the beginning.
But let us back up. One of the paradoxes—there are so many—of conservative thought over the last decade at least is the unwillingness even to entertain the possibility that America and the West are on a trajectory toward something very bad. On the one hand, conservatives routinely present a litany of ills plaguing the body politic. Illegitimacy. Crime. Massive, expensive, intrusive, out-of-control government. Politically correct McCarthyism. Ever-higher taxes and ever-deteriorating services and infrastructure. Inability to win wars against tribal, sub-Third-World foes. A disastrously awful educational system that churns out kids who don’t know anything and, at the primary and secondary levels, can’t (or won’t) discipline disruptive punks, and at the higher levels saddles students with six figure debts for the privilege. And so on and drearily on. Like that portion of the mass where the priest asks for your private intentions, fill in any dismal fact about American decline that you want and I’ll stipulate it.
Conservatives spend at least several hundred million dollars a year on think-tanks, magazines, conferences, fellowships, and such, complaining about this, that, the other, and everything. And yet these same conservatives are, at root, keepers of the status quo. Oh, sure, they want some things to change. They want their pet ideas adopted—tax deductions for having more babies and the like. Many of them are even good ideas. But are any of them truly fundamental? Do they get to the heart of our problems?
If conservatives are right about the importance of virtue, morality, religious faith, stability, character and so on in the individual; if they are right about sexual morality or what came to be termed “family values”; if they are right about the importance of education to inculcate good character and to teach the fundamentals that have defined knowledge in the West for millennia; if they are right about societal norms and public order; if they are right about the centrality of initiative, enterprise, industry, and thrift to a sound economy and a healthy society; if they are right about the soul-sapping effects of paternalistic Big Government and its cannibalization of civil society and religious institutions; if they are right about the necessity of a strong defense and prudent statesmanship in the international sphere—if they are right about the importance of all this to national health and even survival, then they must believe—mustn’t they?—that we are headed off a cliff.
But it’s quite obvious that conservatives don’t believe any such thing, that they feel no such sense of urgency, of an immediate necessity to change course and avoid the cliff. A recent article by Matthew Continetti may be taken as representative—indeed, almost written for the purpose of illustrating the point. Continetti inquires into the “condition of America” and finds it wanting. What does Continetti propose to do about it? The usual litany of “conservative” “solutions,” with the obligatory references to decentralization, federalization, “civic renewal,” and—of course!—Burke. Which is to say, conservatism’s typical combination of the useless and inapt with the utopian and unrealizable. Decentralization and federalism are all well and good, and as a conservative, I endorse them both without reservation. But how are they going to save, or even meaningfully improve, the America that Continetti describes? What can they do against a tidal wave of dysfunction, immorality, and corruption? “Civic renewal” would do a lot of course, but that’s like saying health will save a cancer patient. A step has been skipped in there somewhere. How are we going to achieve “civic renewal”? Wishing for a tautology to enact itself is not a strategy.
Continetti trips over a more promising approach when he writes of “stress[ing] the ‘national interest abroad and national solidarity at home’ through foreign-policy retrenchment, ‘support to workers buffeted by globalization,’ and setting ‘tax rates and immigration levels’ to foster social cohesion.” That sounds a lot like Trumpism. But the phrases that Continetti quotes are taken from Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, both of whom, like Continetti, are vociferously—one might even say fanatically—anti-Trump. At least they, unlike Kesler, give Trump credit for having identified the right stance on today’s most salient issues. Yet, paradoxically, they won’t vote for Trump whereas Kesler hints that he will. It’s reasonable, then, to read into Kesler’s esoteric endorsement of Trump an implicit acknowledgment that the crisis is, indeed, pretty dire. I expect a Claremont scholar to be wiser than most other conservative intellectuals, and I am relieved not to be disappointed in this instance.
Yet we may also reasonably ask: What explains the Pollyanna-ish declinism of so many others? That is, the stance that Things-Are-Really-Bad—But-Not-So-Bad-that-We-Have-to-Consider-Anything-Really-Different! The obvious answer is that they don’t really believe the first half of that formulation. If so, like Chicken Little, they should stick a sock in it. Pecuniary reasons also suggest themselves, but let us foreswear recourse to this explanation until we have disproved all the others.
Whatever the reason for the contradiction, there can be no doubt that there is a contradiction. To simultaneously hold conservative cultural, economic, and political beliefs—to insist that our liberal-left present reality and future direction is incompatible with human nature and must undermine society—and yet also believe that things can go on more or less the way they are going, ideally but not necessarily with some conservative tinkering here and there, is logically impossible.
Let’s be very blunt here: if you genuinely think things can go on with no fundamental change needed, then you have implicitly admitted that conservatism is wrong. Wrong philosophically, wrong on human nature, wrong on the nature of politics, and wrong in its policy prescriptions. Because, first, few of those prescriptions are in force today. Second, of the ones that are, the left is busy undoing them, often with conservative assistance. And, third, the whole trend of the West is ever-leftward, ever further away from what we all understand as conservatism.
If your answer—Continetti’s, Douthat’s, Salam’s, and so many others’—is for conservatism to keep doing what it’s been doing—another policy journal, another article about welfare reform, another half-day seminar on limited government, another tax credit proposal—even though we’ve been losing ground for at least a century, then you’ve implicitly accepted that your supposed political philosophy doesn’t matter and that civilization will carry on just fine under leftist tenets. Indeed, that leftism is truer than conservatism and superior to it.
They will say, in words reminiscent of dorm-room Marxism—but our proposals have not been tried! Here our ideas sit, waiting to be implemented! To which I reply: eh, not really. Many conservative solutions—above all welfare reform and crime control—have been tried, and proved effective, but have nonetheless failed to stem the tide. Crime, for instance, is down from its mid-’70s and early ’90s peak—but way, way up from the historic American norm that ended when liberals took over criminal justice in the mid-’60s. And it’s rising fast today, in the teeth of ineffectual conservative complaints. And what has this temporary crime (or welfare, for that matter) decline done to stem the greater tide? The tsunami of leftism that still engulfs our every—literal and figurative—shore has receded not a bit but indeed has grown. All your (our) victories are short-lived.
More to the point, what has conservatism achieved lately? In the last 20 years? The answer—which appears to be “nothing”—might seem to lend credence to the plea that “our ideas haven’t been tried.” Except that the same conservatives who generate those ideas are in charge of selling them to the broader public. If their ideas “haven’t been tried,” who is ultimately at fault? The whole enterprise of Conservatism, Inc., reeks of failure. Its sole recent and ongoing success is its own self-preservation. Conservative intellectuals never tire of praising “entrepreneurs” and “creative destruction.” Dare to fail! they exhort businessmen. Let the market decide! Except, um, not with respect to us. Or is their true market not the political arena, but the fundraising circuit?
Only three questions matter. First, how bad are things really? Second, what do we do right now? Third, what should we do for the long term?
Conservatism, Inc.’s, “answer” to the first may, at this point, simply be dismissed. If the conservatives wish to have a serious debate, I for one am game—more than game; eager. The problem of “subjective certainty” can only be overcome by going into the agora. But my attempt to do so—the blog that Kesler mentions—was met largely with incredulity. How can they say that?! How can anyone apparently of our caste (conservative intellectuals) not merely support Trump (however lukewarmly) but offer reasons for doing do?
One of the Journal of American Greatness’s deeper arguments was that only in a corrupt republic, in corrupt times, could a Trump rise. It is therefore puzzling that those most horrified by Trump are the least willing to consider the possibility that the republic is dying. That possibility, apparently, seems to them so preposterous that no refutation is necessary.
As does, presumably, the argument that the stakes in 2016 are—everything. I should here note that I am a good deal gloomier than my (former) JAG colleagues, and that while we frequently used the royal “we” when discussing things on which we all agreed, I here speak only for myself.
How have the last two decades worked out for you, personally? If you’re a member or fellow-traveler of the Davos class, chances are: pretty well. If you’re among the subspecies conservative intellectual or politician, you’ve accepted—perhaps not consciously, but unmistakably—your status on the roster of the Washington Generals of American politics. Your job is to show up and lose, but you are a necessary part of the show and you do get paid. To the extent that you are ever on the winning side of anything, it’s as sophists who help the Davoisie oligarchy rationalize open borders, lower wages, outsourcing, de-industrialization, trade giveaways, and endless, pointless, winless war.
All of Trump’s 16 Republican competitors would have ensured more of the same—as will the election of Hillary Clinton. That would be bad enough. But at least Republicans are merely reactive when it comes to wholesale cultural and political change. Their “opposition” may be in all cases ineffectual and often indistinguishable from support. But they don’t dream up inanities like 32 “genders,” elective bathrooms, single-payer, Iran sycophancy, “Islamophobia,” and Black Lives Matter. They merely help ratify them.
A Hillary presidency will be pedal-to-the-metal on the entire Progressive-left agenda, plus items few of us have yet imagined in our darkest moments. Nor is even that the worst. It will be coupled with a level of vindictive persecution against resistance and dissent hitherto seen in the supposedly liberal West only in the most “advanced” Scandinavian countries and the most leftist corners of Germany and England. We see this already in the censorship practiced by the Davoisie’s social media enablers; in the shameless propaganda tidal wave of the mainstream media; and in the personal destruction campaigns—operated through the former and aided by the latter—of the Social Justice Warriors. We see it in Obama’s flagrant use of the IRS to torment political opponents, the gaslighting denial by the media, and the collective shrug by everyone else.
It’s absurd to assume that any of this would stop or slow—would do anything other than massively intensify—in a Hillary administration. It’s even more ridiculous to expect that hitherto useless conservative opposition would suddenly become effective. For two generations at least, the Left has been calling everyone to their right Nazis. This trend has accelerated exponentially in the last few years, helped along by some on the Right who really do seem to merit—and even relish—the label. There is nothing the modern conservative fears more than being called “racist,” so alt-right pocket Nazis are manna from heaven for the Left. But also wholly unnecessary: sauce for the goose. The Left was calling us Nazis long before any pro-Trumpers tweeted Holocaust denial memes. And how does one deal with a Nazi—that is, with an enemy one is convinced intends your destruction? You don’t compromise with him or leave him alone. You crush him.
So what do we have to lose by fighting back? Only our Washington Generals jerseys—and paychecks. But those are going away anyway. Among the many things the “Right” still doesn’t understand is that the Left has concluded that this particular show need no longer go on. They don’t think they need a foil anymore and would rather dispense with the whole bother of staging these phony contests in which each side ostensibly has a shot.
If you haven’t noticed, our side has been losing consistently since 1988. We can win midterms, but we do nothing with them. Call ours Hannibalic victories. After the Carthaginian’s famous slaughter of a Roman army at Cannae, he failed to march on an undefended Rome, prompting his cavalry commander to complain: “you know how to win a victory, but not how to use one.” And, aside from 2004’s lackluster 50.7%, we can’t win the big ones at all.
Because the deck is stacked overwhelmingly against us. I will mention but three ways. First, the opinion-making elements—the universities and the media above all—are wholly corrupt and wholly opposed to everything we want, and increasingly even to our existence. (What else are the wars on “cis-genderism”—formerly known as “nature”—and on the supposed “white privilege” of broke hillbillies really about?) If it hadn’t been abundantly clear for the last 50 years, the campaign of 2015-2016 must surely have made it evident to even the meanest capacities that the intelligentsia—including all the organs through which it broadcasts its propaganda—is overwhelmingly partisan and biased. Against this onslaught, “conservative” media is a nullity, barely a whisper. It cannot be heard above the blaring of what has been aptly called “The Megaphone.”
Second, our Washington Generals self-handicap and self-censor to an absurd degree. Lenin is supposed to have said that “the best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves.” But with an opposition like ours, why bother? Our “leaders” and “dissenters” bend over backward to play by the self-sabotaging rules the Left sets for them. Fearful, beaten dogs have more thymos.
Third and most important, the ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty means that the electorate grows more left, more Democratic, less Republican, less republican, and less traditionally American with every cycle. As does, of course, the U.S. population, which only serves to reinforce the two other causes outlined above. This is the core reason why the Left, the Democrats, and the bipartisan junta (categories distinct but very much overlapping) think they are on the cusp of a permanent victory that will forever obviate the need to pretend to respect democratic and constitutional niceties. Because they are.
It’s also why they treat open borders as the “absolute value,” the one “principle” that—when their “principles” collide—they prioritize above all the others. If that fact is insufficiently clear, consider this. Trump is the most liberal Republican nominee since Thomas Dewey. He departs from conservative orthodoxy in so many ways that National Review still hasn’t stopped counting. But let’s stick to just the core issues animating his campaign. On trade, globalization, and war, Trump is to the left (conventionally understood) not only of his own party, but of his Democratic opponent. And yet the Left and the junta are at one with the house-broken conservatives in their determination—desperation—not merely to defeat Trump but to destroy him. What gives?
Oh, right—there’s that other issue. The sacredness of mass immigration is the mystic chord that unites America’s ruling and intellectual classes. Their reasons vary somewhat. The Left and the Democrats seek ringers to form a permanent electoral majority. They, or many of them, also believe the academic-intellectual lie that America’s inherently racist and evil nature can be expiated only through ever greater “diversity.” The junta of course craves cheaper and more docile labor. It also seeks to legitimize, and deflect unwanted attention from, its wealth and power by pretending that its open borders stance is a form of noblesse oblige. The Republicans and the “conservatives”? Both of course desperately want absolution from the charge of “racism.” For the latter, this at least makes some sense. No Washington General can take the court—much less cash his check—with that epithet dancing over his head like some Satanic Spirit. But for the former, this priestly grace comes at the direct expense of their worldly interests. Do they honestly believe that the right enterprise zone or charter school policy will arouse 50.01% of our newer voters to finally reveal their “natural conservatism” at the ballot box? It hasn’t happened anywhere yet and shows no signs that it ever will. But that doesn’t stop the Republican refrain: more, more, more! No matter how many elections they lose, how many districts tip forever blue, how rarely (if ever) their immigrant vote cracks 40%, the answer is always the same. Just like Angela Merkel after yet another rape, shooting, bombing, or machete attack. More, more, more!
This is insane. This is the mark of a party, a society, a country, a people, a civilization that wants to die. Trump, alone among candidates for high office in this or in the last seven (at least) cycles, has stood up to say: I want to live. I want my party to live. I want my country to live. I want my people to live. I want to end the insanity.
Yes, Trump is worse than imperfect. So what? We can lament until we choke the lack of a great statesman to address the fundamental issues of our time—or, more importantly, to connect them. Since Pat Buchanan’s three failures, occasionally a candidate arose who saw one piece: Dick Gephardt on trade, Ron Paul on war, Tom Tancredo on immigration. Yet, among recent political figures—great statesmen, dangerous demagogues, and mewling gnats alike—only Trump-the-alleged-buffoon not merely saw all three and their essential connectivity,but was able to win on them. The alleged buffoon is thus more prudent—more practically wise—than all of our wise-and-good who so bitterly oppose him. This should embarrass them. That their failures instead embolden them is only further proof of their foolishness and hubris.
Which they self-laud as “consistency”—adherence to “conservative principle,” defined by the 1980 campaign and the household gods of reigning conservative think-tanks. A higher consistency in the service of the national interest apparently eludes them. When America possessed a vast, empty continent and explosively growing industry, high immigration was arguably good policy. (Arguably: Ben Franklin would disagree.) It hasn’t made sense since World War I. Free trade was unquestionably a great boon to the American worker in the decades after World War II. We long ago passed the point of diminishing returns. The Gulf War of 1991 was a strategic victory for American interests. No conflict since then has been. Conservatives either can’t see this—or, worse, those who can nonetheless treat the only political leader to mount a serious challenge to the status quo (more immigration, more trade, more war) as a unique evil.
Trump’s vulgarity is in fact a godsend to the conservatives. It allows them to hang their public opposition on his obvious shortcomings and to ignore or downplay his far greater strengths, which should be even more obvious but in corrupt times can be deliberately obscured by constant references to his faults. That the Left would make the campaign all about the latter is to be expected. Why would the Right? Some—a few—are no doubt sincere in their belief that the man is simply unfit for high office. David Frum, who has always been an immigration skeptic and is a convert to the less-war position, is sincere when he says that, even though he agrees with much of Trump’s agenda, he cannot stomach Trump. But for most of the other #NeverTrumpers, is it just a coincidence that they also happen to favor Invade the World, Invite the World?
Another question JAG raised without provoking any serious attempt at refutation was whether, in corrupt times, it took a … let’s say … “loudmouth” to rise above the din of The Megaphone. We, or I, speculated: “yes.” Suppose there had arisen some statesman of high character—dignified, articulate, experienced, knowledgeable—the exact opposite of everything the conservatives claim to hate about Trump. Could this hypothetical paragon have won on Trump’s same issues? Would the conservatives have supported him? I would have—even had he been a Democrat.
Back on planet earth, that flight of fancy at least addresses what to do now. The answer to the subsidiary question—will it work?—is much less clear. By “it” I mean Trumpism, broadly defined as secure borders, economic nationalism, and America-first foreign policy. We Americans have chosen, in our foolishness, to disunite the country through stupid immigration, economic, and foreign policies. The level of unity America enjoyed before the bipartisan junta took over can never be restored.
But we can probably do better than we are doing now. First, stop digging. No more importing poverty, crime, and alien cultures. We have made institutions, by leftist design, not merely abysmal at assimilation but abhorrent of the concept. We should try to fix that, but given the Left’s iron grip on every school and cultural center, that’s like trying to bring democracy to Russia. A worthy goal, perhaps, but temper your hopes—and don’t invest time and resources unrealistically.
By contrast, simply building a wall and enforcing immigration law will help enormously, by cutting off the flood of newcomers that perpetuates ethnic separatism and by incentivizing the English language and American norms in the workplace. These policies will have the added benefit of aligning the economic interests of, and (we may hope) fostering solidarity among, the working, lower middle, and middle classes of all races and ethnicities. The same can be said for Trumpian trade policies and anti-globalization instincts. Who cares if productivity numbers tick down, or if our already somnambulant GDP sinks a bit further into its pillow? Nearly all the gains of the last 20 years have accrued to the junta anyway. It would, at this point, be better for the nation to divide up more equitably a slightly smaller pie than to add one extra slice—only to ensure that it and eight of the other nine go first to the government and its rentiers, and the rest to the same four industries and 200 families.
Will this work? Ask a pessimist, get a pessimistic answer. So don’t ask. Ask instead: is it worth trying? Is it better than the alternative? If you can’t say, forthrightly, “yes,” you are either part of the junta, a fool, or a conservative intellectual.
And if it doesn’t work, what then? We’ve established that most “conservative” anti-Trumpites are in the Orwellian sense objectively pro-Hillary. What about the rest of you? If you recognize the threat she poses, but somehow can’t stomach him, have you thought about the longer term? The possibilities would seem to be: Caesarism, secession/crack-up, collapse, or managerial Davoisie liberalism as far as the eye can see … which, since nothing human lasts forever, at some point will give way to one of the other three. Oh, and, I suppose, for those who like to pour a tall one and dream big, a second American Revolution that restores Constitutionalism, limited government, and a 28% top marginal rate.
But for those of you who are sober: can you sketch a more plausible long-term future than the prior four following a Trump defeat? I can’t either.
The election of 2016 is a test—in my view, the final test—of whether there is any virtù left in what used to be the core of the American nation. If they cannot rouse themselves simply to vote for the first candidate in a generation who pledges to advance their interests, and to vote against the one who openly boasts that she will do the opposite (a million more Syrians, anyone?), then they are doomed. They may not deserve the fate that will befall them, but they will suffer it regardless.
Trump Stopped in Dr. Ben Carson’s old Detroit neighborhood- he couldn’t believe the size of a tree — that last time he saw, was only 2ft tall! Ben has a lot of great memories here. — in Detroit, Michigan.
Calls for a ‘civil rights agenda for our time’
By S.A. Miller – The Washington Times
Saturday, September 3, 2016
At a black church in Detroit, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump called Saturday for a “civil rights agenda for our time” that would deliver better education, good-paying jobs and and safer streets to inner-city neighborhoods.
Mr. Trump touted his effort to bring economic and social justice to minority but also stressed the need to restore Christian values and forge racial unity, as he reached out to minority voters who historically vote as a Democratic bloc.
UNL students restricted by new ‘respect’ policy
WILLIAM NARDI – ROGER WILLIAMS UNIVERSITY •SEPTEMBER 2, 2016
‘Nonnegotiable’ list of expected beliefs about diversity and inclusion
Calling the University of Nebraska Lincoln a place that “values acceptance,” the institution kicked off the fall semester with its newly installed chancellor essentially telling new students they should not say or do things that might be offensive or cause people to feel disrespected, calling the stance “nonnegotiable.”
“We insist on a culture of respect, and we recognize that words and actions really matter,” Chancellor Ronnie Green said during a speech at the new student convocation on Aug. 19.
While suggesting the university values free speech and freedom of expression, Green – who took the helm of UNL this summer – went on to declare: “We do not tolerate actions of hate and disrespect.”
The policy, being called by campus leaders a set of “belief statements” on diversity and inclusion, is also spelled out on its website.
Green’s comments come as Christianity and conservatism — even support of Donald Trump — is accused of being intolerant, hateful and racist on campuses nationwide.
Be careful when you’re meeting new people in the nation’s capital and elsewhere, because you could be a prime target for foreign spies.
That’s the warning FBI agents gave to presidential campaign staffers Wednesday during two separate security briefings in Washington, D.C., according to sources.
While the briefings were portrayed as routine, they come amid increasingly aggressive efforts by foreign governments to access U.S. secrets and potentially influence upcoming elections here.
Donald Trump called for the end to the “humanitarian disaster” of illegal immigration as he sought to strike a statesmanlike tone during his visit to Mexico on Wednesday.
Standing alongside Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto, the GOP presidential nominee read from a prepared statement touting the “shared objective” of ending illegal immigration.
“This is a humanitarian disaster — the dangerous treks, the abuse by gangs and cartels and the extreme physical dangers — and it must be solved,” Trump said. “It must be solved quickly.
“No one wins in either country when human smugglers and drug traffickers prey on innocent people, when cartels commit acts of violence, when illegal weapons and cash flow from the United States into Mexico or when migrants from Central America make a dangerous trek — and it is very, very dangerous — into Mexico or the United States without legal authorization.”
I have accepted the invitation of President Enrique Pena Nieto, of Mexico, and look very much forward to meeting him tomorrow.
10:33 PM – 30 Aug 2016
The Washington Post first reported Tuesday night that Trump was considering the last-minute trip to Mexico City. Trump tweeted confirmation shortly before he took the stage for a rally in Washington state Tuesday night, but he did not mention the visit in his remarks.
Pena invited the mogul to visit him and discuss campaign issues, unidentified sources told the Post. The effort was reportedly facilitated by his campaign’s CEO Steve Bannon.
The Republican nominee has been publicly wrestling over whether to soften his immigration position and essentially reverse the hardline stance that he carried him through the primary.
Trump is scheduled to give a major immigration speech Wednesday night in Phoenix, during which he is expected to clarify his position. The trip to Mexico will be sandwiched between that speech and a fundraiser he’s slated to attend in California that morning.
Trump is successful because many many people are simply sick to death of politicians and want to try something new. Hillary Clinton is easily the most dishonest person to run for office in our lifetimes. She will say or do anything to push her profit-making agenda forward. Even if you by-in to the liberal/progressive/socialist agenda that she’s espousing, you have to be the most gullible person on the face of the earth if you believe for one second that she’s doing anything but spend YOUR money to keep poor people poor and voting Democrat. She wants to go down in history as the first woman President, and then make money from it. That’s it. Trump is just as much a narcissist, but at least might not immediately try and raise taxes or waste more money on Union-payout road building or funding more Solyndras.
Economic distress and anxiety across working-class white America have become a widely discussed explanation for the success of Donald Trump. It seems to make sense. Trump’s most fervent supporters tend to be white men without college degrees. This same group has suffered economically in our increasingly globalized world, as machines have replaced workers in factories and labor has shifted overseas. Trump has promised to curtail trade and other perceived threats to American workers, including immigrants.
Yet a major new analysis from Gallup, based on 87,000 interviews the polling company conducted over the past year, suggests this narrative is not complete. While there does seem to be a relationship between economic anxiety and Trump’s appeal, the straightforward connection that many observers have assumed does not appear in the data.
According to this new analysis, those who view Trump favorably have not been disproportionately affected by foreign trade or immigration, compared with people with unfavorable views of the Republican presidential nominee. The results suggest that his supporters, on average, do not have lower incomes than other Americans, nor are they more likely to be unemployed.
Yet while Trump’s supporters might be comparatively well off themselves, they come from places where their neighbors endure other forms of hardship. In their communities, white residents are dying younger, and it is harder for young people who grow up poor to get ahead.
By Max Ehrenfreund and Jeff Guo August 12
Economic distress and anxiety across working-class white America have become a widely discussed explanation for the success of Donald Trump. It seems to make sense. Trump’s most fervent supporters tend to be white men without college degrees. This same group has suffered economically in our increasingly globalized world, as machines have replaced workers in factories and labor has shifted overseas. Trump has promised to curtail trade and other perceived threats to American workers, including immigrants.
Yet a major new analysis from Gallup, based on 87,000 interviews the polling company conducted over the past year, suggests this narrative is not complete. While there does seem to be a relationship between economic anxiety and Trump’s appeal, the straightforward connection that many observers have assumed does not appear in the data.
According to this new analysis, those who view Trump favorably have not been disproportionately affected by foreign trade or immigration, compared with people with unfavorable views of the Republican presidential nominee. The results suggest that his supporters, on average, do not have lower incomes than other Americans, nor are they more likely to be unemployed.
Yet while Trump’s supporters might be comparatively well off themselves, they come from places where their neighbors endure other forms of hardship. In their communities, white residents are dying younger, and it is harder for young people who grow up poor to get ahead.
After reports of alleged Russian hacking into Democratic Party computer networks, some commentators have suggested that the Russians could hack the results of the U.S. elections. Other analysts have, well before this year’s campaign, suggested that election results in the U.S. could be electronically manipulated, including by our fellow Americans. So could an American election’s outcome be altered by a malicious actor on a computer keyboard?
I have had three jobs that, together, taught me at least one thing: If it’s a computer, it can be hacked. For Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, I served as the White House senior cybersecurity policy adviser. For President Barack Obama, I served on his five-person post–Edward Snowden investigative group on the National Security Agency, intelligence and technology. And for over a decade I have advised American corporations on cybersecurity.
Those experiences confirm my belief that if sophisticated hackers want to get into any computer or electronic device, even one that is not connected to the internet, they can do so.
GOP nominee tours disaster area while Obama, Clinton won’t be parted from politics and rest
by Keith Koffler | Updated 19 Aug 2016 at 2:28 PM
In a brilliant maneuver perfectly timed to complement his campaign revamp, Republican nominee Donald Trump today landed in Louisiana to witness first-hand the devastation wrought by flooding not seen there since Hurricane Katrina pummeled the Gulf Coast in 2005.
Trump’s arrival on the scene helps him on a number of levels. Most importantly, it provides a dramatic contrast to Hillary Clinton and President Obama, both of whom have neglected to visit a region where more than a dozen have died and tens of thousands have been forced out of their homes.
Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto said on Tuesday he was willing to meet with Donald Trump, months after comparing the Republican presidential candidate to Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.
“Yes, I would meet with him,” Pena Nieto said, referring to Trump in a pre-taped television interview broadcast on Tuesday night.
“I have never met him. I can’t agree with some of the things he has said, but I will be absolutely respectful and will seek to work with whomever becomes the next president of the United States.
It’s so great to be here tonight. I am honored to also be joined this evening by Governor Scott Walker, Chairman Reince Prebius, and Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
We are at a decisive moment in this election. Last week, I laid out my plan to bring jobs back to our country. Yesterday, I laid out my plan to defeat Radical Islamic Terrorism. Tonight, I am going to talk about how to make our communities safe again from crime and lawlessness.
Let me begin by thanking the law enforcement officers here in this city, and across this country, for their service and sacrifice in difficult times. The violence, riots and destruction that have taken place in Milwaukee is an assault on the right of all citizens to live in security and peace. Law and order must be restored. It must be restored for the sake of all, but most especially the sake of those living in the affected communities.
The main victims of these riots are law-abiding African-American citizens living in these neighborhoods. It is their jobs, their homes, their schools and communities which will suffer as a result. There is no compassion in tolerating lawless conduct. Crime and violence is an attack on the poor, and will never be accepted in a Trump Administration.
The narrative that has been pushed aggressively for years now by our current Administration, and pushed by my opponent Hillary Clinton, is a false one. The problem in our poorest communities is not that there are too many police, the problem is that there are not enough police.
More law enforcement, more community engagement, more effective policing is what our country needs. Just like Hillary Clinton is against the miners, she is against the police. You know it, and I know it.
Those peddling the narrative of cops as a racist force in our society – a narrative supported with a nod by my opponent – share directly in the responsibility for the unrest in Milwaukee, and many other places within our country.
They have fostered the dangerous anti-police atmosphere in America. Everytime we rush to judgment with false facts and narratives – whether in Ferguson or in Baltimore – and foment further unrest, we do a direct disservice to poor African-American residents who are hurt by the high crime in their communities.
During the last 72 hours, while protestors have raged against the police here in Milwaukee, another 9 were killed in Chicago and another 46 were wounded. More than 2,600 people have been shot in Chicago since the beginning of the year, and almost 4,000 killed in President Obama’s hometown area since his presidency began. How are we serving these American victims by attacking law enforcement officers?
The war on our police must end. It must end now!
The war on our police is a war on all peaceful citizens who want to be able to work and live and send their kids to school in safety. Our job is not to make life more comfortable for the rioter, the looter, the violent disruptor. Our job is to make life more comfortable for the African-American parent who wants their kids to be able to safely walk the streets. Or the senior citizen waiting for a bus. Or the young child walking home from school. For every one violent protestor, there are a hundred of moms and dads and kids on that same city block who just want to be able to sleep safely at night. My opponent would rather protect the offender than the victim.
Hillary Clinton-backed policies are responsible for the problems in the inner cities today, and a vote for her is a vote for another generation of poverty, high crime, and lost opportunities. I care too much about my country to let that happen. We all care too much about our country to let that happen. Good policing saves lives.
My dear friend, Rudy Giuliani, knows a thing or two about this. The policies put into place by Rudy ultimately brought down crime by 76 percent and murder by 84 percent. Think of how many families were saved, how much heartache was prevented, when police were put into communities and criminals were removed.
Imagine how many lives could have been saved, all across this country, if Democratic politicians hadn’t blocked in their cities what Rudy did in New York City? I’ll make sure we deliver safe neighborhoods here in Milwaukee, and all across this country. It’s easy for Hillary Clinton to turn a blind eye to crime when she has her own private security force. I believe all Americans, not just the powerful, are entitled to security.
Hillary Clinton has had her chance. She failed. Now it’s time for new leadership. The Hillary Clinton agenda hurts poor people the most.
There is no compassion in allowing drug dealers, gang members, and felons to prey on innocent people. It is the first duty of government to keep the innocent safe, and when I am President I will fight for the safety of every American – and especially those Americans who have not known safety for a very, very long time. I am asking for the vote of every African-American citizen struggling in our country today who wants a different future.
It is time for our society to address some honest and very difficult truths. The Democratic Party has failed and betrayed the African-American community. Democratic crime policies, education policies, and economic policies have produced only more crime, more broken homes, and more poverty.
Let us look at the situation right here in Milwaukee, a city run by Democrats for decade after decade. Last year, killings in this city increased by 69 percent, plus another 634 victims of non-fatal shootings. 18-29-year-olds accounted for nearly half of the homicide victims. The poverty rate here is nearly double the national average. Almost 4 in 10 African-American men in Milwaukee between the ages of 25-54 do not have a job. Nearly Four in 10 single mother households are living in poverty. 55 public schools in this city have been rated as failing to meet expectations, despite ten thousand dollars in funding per-pupil. There is only a 60% graduation rate, and it’s one of the worst public school systems in the country.
1 in 5 manufacturing jobs has disappeared in Milwaukee since we fully opened our markets to China, and many African-American neighborhoods have borne the brunt of this hit.
To every voter in Milwaukee, to every voter living in every inner city, or every forgotten stretch of our society, I am running to offer you a better future.
The Democratic Party has taken the votes of African-Americans for granted. They’ve just assumed they’ll get your support and done nothing in return for it. It’s time to give the Democrats some competition for these votes, and it’s time to rebuild the inner cities of America – and to reject the failed leadership of a rigged political system.
I’m not part of the corrupt system. In fact, the corrupt system is trying to stop me. I’ve been paying my own way. The voters in the Republican Party this year defied the donors, the consultants, the power brokers, and choose a nominee from outside our failed and corrupt and broken system.
The other party – the Democratic Party – nominated the personification of special interest corruption. The Democratic Party rigged the nomination to give it to Hillary Clinton, thus giving the soul of their party this year to the special interests.
I am running to listen to your voice, to hear your cries for help. The quiet voices in our society, not the loudest demonstrators, need to have their demands heard.
Jobs. Safety. Opportunity. Fair and equal representation. We reject the bigotry of Hillary Clinton which panders to and talks down to communities of color and sees them only as votes, not as individual human beings worthy of a better future. She doesn’t care at all about the hurting people of this country, or the suffering she has caused them.
The African-American community has been taken for granted for decades by the Democratic Party. It’s time to break with the failures of the past – I want to offer Americans a new future. It is time for rule by the people, not rule by special interests.
Every insider, getting rich off of our broken system, is throwing money at Hillary Clinton. The hedge fund managers, the Wall Street investors, the professional political class.
It’s the powerful protecting the powerful.
Insiders fighting for insiders.
I am fighting for you!
When we talk about the insider, who are we talking about? It’s the comfortable politicians looking out for their own interests. It’s the lobbyists who know how to insert that perfect loophole into every bill. It’s the financial industry knows how to regulate their competition out of existence. The insiders also include the media executives, anchors and journalists in Washington, Los Angeles, and New York City, who are part of the same failed status quo and want nothing to change.
Every day you pick up a newspaper, or turn on the nightly news, and hear about how some banker or some Washington insider says they oppose our campaign. Or some encrusted old politician says they oppose our campaign. Or some big time lobbyist says they oppose our campaign.
I wear their opposition as a badge of honor. Because it means I am fighting for REAL change, not just partisan change. I am fighting – all of us across the country are fighting – for peaceful regime change in our own country. The media-donor-political complex that’s bled this country dry has to be replaced with a new government of, by and for the people.
The leadership class in Washington D.C., of which Hillary Clinton has been a member for thirty years, has abandoned the people of this country.
I am going to give the people their voice back. Think about it. The people opposing our campaign are the same people who have left our border open and let innocent people suffer as a result.
The people opposing our campaign are the same people who have led us into one disastrous foreign war after another. The people opposing our campaign are the same people who lied to us about one trade deal after another.
Aren’t you tired of a system that gets rich at your expense?
Aren’t you tired of big media, big businesses, and big donors rigging the system to keep your voice from being heard?
Are you ready for change?
Are you ready for leadership that puts you, the American people, first? That puts your country first? That puts your family first? Let’s talk about what this means for the inner cities of America.
It’s time to break through the television noise, the entrenched interests. I understand that a lot of powerful people in our political system – a lot of people who’ve created our problems – will lose a lot of their contracts, and their special gigs, if African-American voters, and all minority voters, support my campaign.
It’s time to stop making the special interests rich. It’s time to make the American people rich.
I am going to Make America Wealthy Again.
The Democratic Party has run every inner city in this country for 50 years, and run them into financial ruin.
They’ve ruined the schools.
They’ve driven out the jobs.
They’ve tolerated a level of crime no American should consider acceptable.
Violent crime has risen 17% in America’s 50 largest cities last year. Killings of police officers this year is up nearly 50 percent. Homicides are up more than 60% in Baltimore. They are up more than 50% in Washington, D.C.
This is future offered by Hillary Clinton. More poverty, more crime, and more of the same. The future she offers is the most pessimistic thing I can possibly imagine. It is time for a different future.
Here is what I am proposing.
First, on immigration. No community in this country has been hurt worse by Hillary Clinton’s immigration policies than the African-American community. Now she is proposing to print instant work permits for millions of illegal immigrants, taking jobs directly from low-income Americans. I will secure our border, protect our workers, and improve jobs and wages in your community. We will only invite people to join our country who share our tolerant values, who support our Constitution, and who love all of our people.
On trade, I am going to renegotiate NAFTA, stand up to China, withdraw from the TPP, and protect every last American job. On taxes, I am going to give a massive tax cut to every worker and small business in this country, bring thousands of new companies and millions of new jobs onto our shores – and make it very difficult for our businesses to leave. I am going to reform our regulations so jobs stay in America, and new businesses come to America to hire workers right here in Milwaukee. Every policy my opponent has sends jobs overseas. I am going to bring trillions in new wealth back to the United States.
On education, it is time to have school choice, merit pay for teachers, and to end the tenure policies that hurt good teachers and reward bad teachers. We are going to put students and parents first. Hillary Clinton would deny opportunities to millions of young African-American children, just so she can curry favor with the education bureaucracy. I am going to allow charter schools to thrive, and help young kids get on the American ladder of success: a good education, and a good-paying job.
On crime, I am going to support more police in our communities, appoint the best prosecutors and judges in the country, pursue strong enforcement of federal laws, and I am going to break up the gangs, the cartels and criminal syndicates terrorizing our neighborhoods. To every lawbreaker hurting innocent people in this country, I say: your free reign will soon come crashing to an end.
On healthcare, we are going to get rid of Obamacare – which has caused soaring double-digit premium increases – and give choice to patients and consumers. Aetna, just today, announced they are dropping out – as are many of the major insurance companies.
On government corruption, I am going to restore honor to our government. We’ve seen the corruption of Hillary Clinton, the mass email deletions, the pay-for-play at the State Department, the profiteering, the favors given to foreign corporations and governments at your expense. We’ve seen a former Secretary of State lie to Congress about her illegal email scheme, risk innocent American lives, and bring dishonor onto our government. In my Administration, I am going to enforce all laws concerning the protection of classified information. No one will be above the law. I am going to forbid senior officials from trading favors for cash by preventing them from collecting lavish speaking fees through their spouses when they serve.
I am going to ask my senior officials to sign an agreement not to accept speaking fees from corporations with a registered lobbyist for five years after leaving office, or from any entity tied to a foreign government. This is all just the beginning.
We are going to make this a government of the people once again. This is our chance to take back power from all the people who’ve taken it from you. The reason you see the establishment media lining up behind my opponent is because they are scared that you, with your vote, can take away their power and return it to your family and community.
These are tough times. But I know we can make American Greater Than Ever Before. To do this, we are going to need a fighter in the White House. I will be your fighter.
To defeat crime and Radical Islamic Terrorism in our country, to win trade in our country, you need tremendous physical and mental strength and stamina. Hillary Clinton doesn’t have that strength and stamina. She cannot win for you.
Most importantly, she has bad judgment. Bad judgment on terrorism, bad judgement on foreign policy, bad judgment on trade. The only individuals she’s ever delivered for is her donors – not the people.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. My opponent asks her supporters to repeat three-word pledge.
Her pledge reads: “I’m With Her.” I choose to recite a different pledge. My pledge reads: “I’m With You – the American people.”
I will fight to ensure that every American is treated equally, protected equally, and honored equally. We will reject bigotry and hatred and oppression in all of its forms, and seek a new future of security, prosperity and opportunity – a future built on our common culture and values as one American people.
I am asking for your vote so I can be your champion in the White House. We will once again be a country of law and order, and a country of great success.
To every parent who dreams for their children, and to every child who dreams for their future, I say these words to you tonight: I’m with you, I will fight for you, and I will win for you.
Together, We Will Make America Strong Again.
We Will Make American Safe Again. And We Will Make America Great Again.
