Category: Populism

Trump has Made News Great Again

Politics in hyperdrive. Who can keep up? And to what extent should one keep up? Here are a couple of articles that caught my eye:

The Islamic Republic's New Lease on Life. Mercifully brief, and very interesting.  In Foreign Affairs, by one Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar.  I'd be interested in Caiati's and Soriano's comments. 

Elon Musk is America's Dumbest Smart Person.  Roger Kimball is right, and he is a very good writer to boot,  unlike so many journo-punks now churning out bad prose. How do I know Kimball is a good writer? It takes one to know one.

It's a funny world. My opinion of the 'pre-historic' Fetterman has gone up during the same period that my opinion of the engineering genius Musk has gone down.  

I would put it like this. Donald Trump has injected the 'art of the deal' into politics. He has brought the transactional skills of a consummate businessman to bear with impressive results. He was politically naive but the seemingly providential interregnum provided him with a 'sabbatical' during which to 'bone up' with the help of brilliant advisors. That, and the stark contrast with the mentally inept, morally corrupt 'Traitor Joe' Biden have brought the Orange Man to power. Maybe God had a hand in it, or we just got lucky. I prefer not to bluster about the unknowable.

Musk, on the other hand, remains politically naive. You can't engineer politics.  

As for how much time should be spent following the events of the day, see my Is it Rational to be Politically Ignorant?

Musk's third party doesn't have a chance, and in any case, Third Parties are nothing but discussion societies in political drag, as I argue over at the Stack.

Nancy Pelosi in 1996: A Pre-Trumper on Tariffs

You have probably seen this by now, but in case you haven't, here is Nancy Pelosi in 1996 talking sense! I didn't think she had it in her, given the inanities she has been spouting for the last quarter century. I don't see much if any difference between what she said then about  tariffs, trade imbalances, and trade reciprocity and what Trump is saying now.

Part of what enrages contemporary Dems about Trump is that he has (a) stolen their thunder, and (b) is actually doing things they only talked about doing, e. g,  curtailing waste, fraud, and abuse at the federal level, controlling the borders, and shrinking the size of the federal government.

Blinded by their mindless rage, they cannot assess policy proposals on their own merits, but only on whether or not they are supported by Trump. If Trump is for it, they are against it, no matter what it is, and vice versa.

Anti-Trump Dems cannot stand the man because he has transformed the fat-cat GOP into a people's party.  The Never-Trump Republicans cannot stand him because he gate-crashed their rich guy club and exposed the bow-tied Beltway/Bulwark boys and girls for the effete and epicene bunch they are.  Interestingly, Trump has won the sympathy, though not the full support, of the socialist outlet, The Militant. See here for a recent article in support of my assertion.

But he wins because he is loaded too, and more importantly, loves his country, its people, and has the biggest cojones of the toughest hombre on the world stage at present.  

Why We Are Winning

Roland Fryer, WSJ, The Economics of DEI and MEI. (Merit, Excellence, and Intelligence)

Victor Davis Hanson, Five Ukrainian Fables

James Piereson, New Criterion, Too Many Democrats

Kimberly Strassel, WSJ, Trump's School Choice

Paul Craig Roberts, Every Vote for a Democrat is an Attack on America.  HT: Tony Flood who writes, "Salient line (for me): 'And still, American citizens vote for Democrats. How can a population this stupid be made great again?' "

We are winning, but it will remain a nasty slugfest for the foreseeable future, as my man Hanson fully appreciates. We need to get tough with our political enemies, as they reveal, day by day, the full depth of their depravity.

Victor Davis Hanson, New Criterion, MAGA agonistes. Excerpt:

Trump has now inherited an almost bankrupt country. The ratio of debt to annual gdp has reached a record high of nearly 125 percent—exceeding the worst years of World War II. The nation remains sharply divided over the southern border, which for most of Biden’s term was nonexistent. Trump’s own base demands that he address an estimated twelve million additional unvetted illegal aliens, diversity, equity, and inclusion mandates and racial quotas, and an array of enemies abroad who are no longer deterred by or content with the global status quo. The eight-year Obama revolution in retrospect did not change American institutions and policies nearly as much as the more radical four-year Biden tenure. And so often, when drastic remedies are proposed, their implementation may appear to the inured public—at least initially—as a cure worse than the disease.

Take the example of illegal immigration. Since Trump left office in January 2021, two major and unexpected developments have followed during the Biden years. First, the border did not just become porous but virtually disappeared. Indeed, Biden in his first hours of governance stopped further construction of the Trump wall, restored catch-and-release policies, and allowed illegal immigrants to cross the border without first applying for refugee status.

Given the magnitude of what followed—as many as twelve million illegal aliens crossed the border during the Biden tenure—the remedy of deportation would now necessitate a massive, indeed unprecedented, effort. The public has been increasingly hectored by the Left to fear the supposedly authoritarian measures Trump had in mind when he called for “massive deportations.” Left unsaid was that such deportations would only be a response to the prior four years of lawless and equally “massive” importations of foreign nationals. And yet, while the twelve million illegal entrances over four years were an insidious process, the expulsion of most of those entrants will be seen as abrupt, dramatic, and harsh. In addition, it was much easier for felons and criminals to blend into the daily influx of thousands than it will be to find them now amid a population of 335 million.

In-Lieu-of-SOTU: Trump’s Congressional Address

Fabulous address by Trump to both houses of Congress last night. It kept me up beyond my monkish bedtime. So I got up 'late' this morning at two a.m.

How good was it? The boneheads of The Bulwark are going bonkers. 

Can I say anything bad about it? Well, our boy spoke of two genders instead of two sexes. And he needs to learn  that the correct phrase is 'rare earth minerals,' not 'rare earths.'

Roger Kimball:

Many commentators have said that Trump 2.0 has accomplished more in six weeks than other administrations accomplished in four, six or even eight years. It is true.

Tonight, the president provided a detailed inventory of his initiatives. Within hours of taking office, he designated illegal immigration a national emergency. Trump noted that Democrats kept saying that new legislation was needed to fix the border. But in fact, he said, “all we really needed was a new president.” Trump declared war on inflation and took steps to undermine the deep state and its racist DEI initiatives, thus restoring merit and race- and colorblind justice to their proper place in the economy of American values. He also took a page from the Book of Genesis, and articulated the non-woke, matter-of-fact truth that there are only two sexes: male and female. The crowd (but not the Democrats) cheered at that bit of common sense. 

The president presented a bracing tour d’horizon in his opening sally. He ordered federal workers back to work: “They will either show up for work, in person, or be removed from their job.” As I write, the Trump administration is ending “weaponized government,” restoring free speech, underwriting English as the official language of the United States and pursuing a policy of “drill, baby, drill” to exploit America’s energy resources.

 

The Coalition of the Sane and the Reasonable

I have been using the title phrase for some time now to refer to Trump-supporting conservatives. But what makes us sane and reasonable? Victor Davis Hanson compiles a list in The Trump Counterrevolution is a Return to Sanity.

In an earlier post I referred to the take-back of our country as a National Sanitation Project, opining  that it might take a generation or two.  But what does sanity have to do with sanitation? The words are in fact connected etymologically, sharing as they do a common root in the Latin sanus,  meaning healthy or sane or sound, as in the Latin saying mens sana in corpore sano, "a sound mind in a sound body." We Trumpians are of sound mind, and some of us inhabit sound bodies.

We need to return the nation to health by draining swamps, enforcing laws, erecting barriers both territorial and  moral, and by fumigating institutions. Leftists want to tear down our institutions; we of sound mind want to fumigate them, removing therefrom the termites who presently infest them. 

You need to get with the program and do your bit. Don't be  slacker, a defeatist, an ingrate. But if you are on the wrong side of this struggle, understand that we consider you enemies.

A threat? No, a warning. Are you wise enough to heed a warning? I can't resist yet another reference to 'Biblical Bob':

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside and it is ragin’
It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin’
And the first one now will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’

The 2020 Theft Saved the Country

The argument of this article goes through even if the 2020 election was not stolen from Trump. Biden's reversal of Trump's good works has exposed the thoroughly depredatory nature of our political enemies and has galvanized Trump and his supporters. The Orange Man has learned a lot in the interim.  First-rate ass-kickers have joined his team, Elon Musk and J. D. Vance to mention but two. His four-year sabbatical has done him good.  Compare Vance to Pence to get a sense of what I mean.

I find it hard to avoid schadenfreude when I think of the pain of leftists, whether full-on Dementocrats or RINO-cratic fellow travelers.   So, to rub it in: if you depredatory chucklephucks hadn't opposed Trump with your vicious lies and dirty tricks, you would be done with him in four months. 

Some say that Trump is 'divisive.' Here is my 26 August 2017 rebuttal:

To say of Trump or anyone that he is divisive is to say that he promotes  division. But there is no need to promote it these days since we already have plenty of it. We are a deeply and perhaps irreparably divided nation.  So it is not right to say that Trump is divisive: he is standing on one side of an already existing divide.

Trump did not create the divide between those who stand for the rule of law and oppose sanctuary cities, porous borders, illegal immigration and irresponsibly lax legal immigration policies.  What he did is take up these issues fearlessly, something his milque-toast colleagues could not bring themselves to do.  

And he has met with some success: illegal immigration is down some 50%. 

So-called 'liberals' and their RINO pals call him a bigot, a racist, a xenophobe. That they engage in this slander shows that the nation is bitterly divided over fundamental questions. It also shows what kind of people our political enemies are. 

Too often journalistic word-slingers shoot first and ask questions never. Wouldn't it be nice if they thought before their lemming-like and knee-jerk deployment of such adjectives as 'divisive'?

Language matters.

We are in deep trouble as a country, and as a consequence, the world is as well.  The fight for civilization is only just beginning.

 

 

Repost from Election Day, 2016: Catholics Must Support Trump

This is an unredacted repost from 8 November 2016.  My opinion of Trump is higher now than it was then.  But the piece is basically on the right track and I stand by it. I threw the dice for Trump and the sequel showed that I was right to do so.  I was vindicated in my prediction that he would appoint conservative justices to SCOTUS.  That was and is a big deal. 

…………………..

It is astonishing that there are Catholics who vote Democrat, when the Dems are the abortion party, and lately and increasingly a threat to religious liberty to boot.  How then could any practicing Catholic vote for Hillary or support Hillary by voting for neither Hillary nor Trump?

So here's my final appeal on Election Day.  It consists of a repost from August, substantially redacted, and an addendum in which I reproduce a recent bit of text  from George Weigel.

………………….

Could a Catholic Support Trump?

Via Burgess-Jackson, I came to this piece by Robert P. George and George Weigel, An Appeal to Our Fellow Catholics (7 March 2016).  Appended to it is a list of distinguished signatories.   Excerpt:

Donald Trump is manifestly unfit to be president of the United States. His campaign has already driven our politics down to new levels of vulgarity. His appeals to racial and ethnic fears and prejudice are offensive to any genuinely Catholic sensibility. He promised to order U.S. military personnel to torture terrorist suspects and to kill terrorists’ families — actions condemned by the Church and policies that would bring shame upon our country. And there is nothing in his campaign or his previous record that gives us grounds for confidence that he genuinely shares our commitments to the right to life, to religious freedom and the rights of conscience, to rebuilding the marriage culture, or to subsidiarity and the principle of limited constitutional government.          

I will respond to these points seriatim.    

A. It is true that Trump is unfit to be president, but so is Hillary.  But that is the choice we face now that Trump has secured the Republican nomination.  In the politics of the real world, as opposed to the politics of utopia, it will be either Trump or Hillary: not both and not neither.  Are they equally unfit for the presidency? Arguably yes at the level of character.  But at the level of policy no clear-thinking conservative or Catholic could possibly do anything to aid Hillary, whether by voting for her or by not voting for Trump.  Consider just abortion and religious liberty and ask yourself which candidate is more likely to forward an agenda favorable to Catholics.

B.  Yes, Trump has taken vulgarity in politics to new depths.  Unlike milquetoast conservatives, however, he knows how to fight back against political enemies. He doesn't apologize and he doesn't wilt in the face of leftist lies and abuse.   He realizes that in post-consensus politics there is little or no place for civility.  There is no advantage in being civil to the viciously uncivil.  He realizes that the Alinskyite tactics the uncivil Left has been using for decades have to be turned against them.  To paraphrase Barack Obama, he understands that one needs to bring a gun to a gun fight.

C. The third sentence above, the one about appeals to racial fears,  is something one would expect from a race-baiting leftist, not from a conservative.  Besides, it borders on slander, something I should think a Catholic would want to avoid.  

You slander Trump and his supporters when you ignore his and their entirely legitimate concern for the rule of law and for national sovereignty and suggest that what motivates him and them is bigotry and fear.  Trump and Trump alone among the candidates has had the courage to face the Islamist threat to our country and to call for the vetting of Muslim immigrants. That is just common sense.   The milquetoast conservatives are so fearful of being branded xenophobes, 'Islamophobes,' and racists and so desirous of being liked and accepted in respectable Establishment circles, that they will not speak out against the threat. 

If they had, and if they had been courageous conservatives on other issues, there would be no need for Trump, he would have gained no traction, and his manifest negatives would have sunk him.  Trump's traction is a direct result of conservative inaction.  The milquetoasts and bow-tie boys need to look in the mirror and own up to their complicity in having created Trump the politician.  But of course they will not do that; they will waste their energy attacking Trump, the only hope we have, in violation of Ronald Reagan's Eleventh Commandment.  What a sorry bunch of self-serving pussy-wussies!  They yap and scribble, but when it comes time to act and show civil courage, they wilt.  They need to peer into a mirror; they will then know what a quisling looks like.

Reagan11CommdmtWeb

D. I concede that Trump's remarks about torture ought to worry a Catholic. But you should also realize that Trump's strategy is to shoot his mouth off like a rude, New York working stiff in order to energize his base, to intimidate his enemies, and to draw free media attention to himself.  Then in prepared speeches he 'walks back' his unguarded comments and adds the necessary qualifications. It is a brilliant strategy, and it has worked.

Trump understands that politics is a practical struggle.  It takes place in the street, in a broad sense of the  term, not in the seminar room.  We intellectuals cringe at Trump's absurd exaggerations, but Trump knows that Joe Sixpack and the blue-collared guys who do the real work of the world have contempt for 'pointy-headed intellekshuls' and he knows that the way to reach them is by speaking their language.

E. It is true that Trump's previous record supplies a reason to doubt whether Trump really shares Catholic commitments.  But is it not possible that he has 'evolved'?  You say the 'evolution' is merely opportunistic? That may well be.  But how much does it matter what his motives are if he helps with the conservative agenda?  It is obvious that his own ego and its enhancement is the cynosure of all his striving.  He is out for himself, first, and a patriot, second.  But Hillary is also out for herself, first, and she is manifestly not a patriot but a destructive hate-America leftist who will work to advance Obama's "fundamental transformation of America."  (No one who loves his country seeks a fundamental transformation of it.)

We KNOW what Hillary and her ilk and entourage will do.  We KNOW she will be  inimical "to the right to life, to religious freedom and the rights of conscience, to rebuilding the marriage culture, or to subsidiarity and the principle of limited constitutional government." Now I grant you that Trump is unreliable, mercurial, flaky, and other bad things to boot.  But it is a very good bet that some of what he and his entourage will do will advance the conservative agenda.  Trump is espousing the Right ideas, and it is they that count.  Can't stand him as a person?  Vote for him as a vehicle of the Right ideas!

So I say: if you are a conservative or a Catholic and you do not vote for Trump, you are a damned fool!  Look in the mirror and see the quisling who is worried about his status in 'respectable society.'

Companion post: Social Justice or Subsidiarity?

Here is what George Weigel has to say in NRO today:

The most obvious con is the Trumpian one. Over the past year, the Republican party was captured by a narcissistic buccaneer who repudiated most of what conservatism and the Republican party have stood for over the past half-century, cast venomous aspersions on Republican leaders and those manifestly more qualified than he is for president, insulted our fellow citizens, demeaned women and minorities, played footsy with the Russian dictator Putin, threw NATO under the bus, displayed a dismal ignorance of both the Constitution and the grave matters at stake in current public-policy debates — and in general behaved like a vulgar, sinister bore. In doing all this, Trump the con artist confirmed in the eyes of a partisan mainstream media every one of its false conceptions of what modern conservatism stands for and is prepared to do when entrusted with the tasks of governance.

This outburst does not merit reply beyond what I have said above and elsewhere; Weigel the man needs to seek help for a bad case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

But one last shot:  as for the Constitution, we KNOW that Hillary will shred it; Trump, however, has promised to appoint conservative justices to the Supreme Court, and he has provided a list.  How can anyone's head be so far up his nether hole as not to understand this?

The nation is at a tipping point.  Do your bit to save it.

Slouching Toward Totalitarianism

Can Trump save us?

Klingenstein: Is our regime totalitarian, emerging or otherwise? What makes it so? How far along are we? Can we fight back?

Ellmers: I think the essay that Ted Richards and I wrote for your website, and the several excellent responses that you published, cover this pretty well. 

Klingenstein: How much can Trump fix it?

Ellmers: Very hard to say. Showing up, as they say, is half the battle. Or, as you have noted, the first step in winning a war is to know that you are in one. Trump knows this. He has to keep making the case to the American people that they are true sovereigns, and the arrogant ruling class is illegitimate. The outrageous incompetence of the Secret Service, which failed to prevent the attempted assassination of President Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, is a good way to remind people that our so-called experts have no expertise. These bureaucrats are mostly blowhards, grifters, and phonies. 

I agree with Trump’s decision not to talk any more about how he was almost murdered, but incoming Vice President Vance should… a lot. In fact, I hope that Trump will continue to do what he does best as president — using his wit and populist rhetoric and negotiating skills to good effect — while the vice president’s office acts as the day-to-day juggernaut that ruthlessly dismantles the administrative state. 

Klingenstein: Will Trump win? What does it depend on? If you were his political consultant, what would you advise him to do?

Ellmers: I think he will win by a significant margin — too big, as people are saying, for the Democrats to steal. My friend Jim Piereson, writing in The New Criterion, has predicted that Trump will win the popular vote by six points, take all the swing states, and get 339 electoral votes. That sounds right to me. 

He seems to have been changed somewhat since he nearly took a bullet to the head. I would encourage him to remain upbeat and positive. 

Klingenstein: What will happen after Trump if he is elected in 2024?

Ellmers: Again, hard to say. Of course the Left will launch its resistance campaign, but I don’t think anyone knows how much support it will have outside the radical fringe. Some of my friends think I’m too optimistic, but I suspect that some energy and panache has gone out of protesting and rioting since the 2020 Summer of Left-wing Love. There will still be violence by Antifa and others, but I don’t think it will have the same mainstream support. And we should not discount the anger the hard Left will direct at the Democrat party. The media and the Beltway establishment really screwed up this election by lying about Biden, and I think the radicals will not take kindly to having their agenda thwarted by the complacency and arrogance of the Democrat’s leadership. 

Klingenstein: Is Vance MAGA? Is he the right choice for VP? He abhorred Trump before he lauded him. Does this make you hesitate?

Ellmers: It’s extremely important that Trump 1) went outside the decrepit establishment and picked someone who will help him fight the Beltway blob head-on; and 2) picked someone young and energetic who can carry on the MAGA agenda. That means Trump is thinking long-term. It was a good choice. 

Having just finished Hillbilly Elegy, I would say that Trump's VP pick was an outstanding choice, the best he could have made from the outstanding candidates on his short list.  A second brilliant move was his welcoming of RFK Jr. into his coalition. Here is the Kennedy clan's black (red?) sheep's Arizona Trump endorsement. 

Of Course Trump Won Iowa

Dov Fisher speaks his mind:

There has been only one truly great country in the entire world these past 150 years, the United States of America. 

[. . .]

America’s great secret always was equal opportunity. It remained a step behind its fullest potential as long as it denied equal opportunity to some of her citizens: Italians, Irish, Germans, Asians, Jews, Hispanics, Blacks. But America got past it. By the 1980s, equal opportunity went without saying anymore. That is how Obama got into Columbia with whatever grades he had. That is how he got into Harvard Law with whatever grades he did or did not have. That is how he got to be the president of Harvard Law Review without ever publishing a law review article, something all but unheard of. He became a law professor, building on a resumé that was sketchy. Blacks in America had all the opportunity in the world by the 1980s.

Obama changed America to focus on equal outcomes. Not opportunity that entails great risk but offers enormous reward, but outcomes that guarantee mediocrity for everyone. The Brave New World of Equal Outcomes applies everywhere except in areas where Blacks excel, like professional basketball and football. Notice that there is no affirmative action or DEI or equal outcomes in NBA basketball. Why not? If there is DEI in medicine and medical school, where lives are at stake, in law firms and in Disney, in Hollywood and on Broadway — why not in the NBA? Why not open the NBA to more Orthodox Jews? There is not a single one, although there is one who is competitive. Why not more Irish? More Germans? More Italians? More Plain Whites? If Whites are 76 percent of America, why isn’t the NBA 76 percent White? The NFL?

Obama destroyed America. 

 

Continue reading “Of Course Trump Won Iowa”

Populism Reload: An Interview with Steven K. Bannon

Steve Bannon talks sense. See if you don't agree: 

Mark Granza: Let’s talk about the “Deep State“. The term is widely used by people on the Right to describe the network of bureaucrats and organizations secretly running the country behind the scenes. Is this in your experience an accurate description of what’s going on in Washington?

Steve Bannon: I think the nomenclature is important to get right. I would rather call it the “administrative state”, which is really a fourth branch of government never intended by the founders and, quite frankly, the American people. The Administrative State’s purpose, and really the Progressive Left, is to take over all functions of government through these agencies. Up until now they could issue their own regulations and laws, and now they control even their own law enforcement, whether it’s 87,000 IRS agents or these jackbooted FBI or the EPA, with armed security and guards. So our big focus should be its deconstruction. It needs to be taken apart brick by brick. You saw how out of control this was with the CDC and FDA when the pandemic hit, with Tony Fauci as the face of the administrative state that ruled without permission to be questioned. And it’s not that we don’t need an FDA or CDC, but they definitely have to be heavily repurposed. I would say the national security and the intelligence apparatus and part of the legal one are what we would more traditionally think of as a “deep state”, probably best personified in the first Trump impeachment. If you remember all that kind of fetish about the interagency process and the sacramental nature of the way those things should work when Trump was President, that was really the Deep State saying that Trump was unacceptable because deeply he did not believe in those processes. He did not believe in their function, nor their policies.

You can tell this now with Ukraine, these groups have their own goals. It has captured the American national security and foreign policy apparatus, and it needs to be defeated. They don’t believe in the Constitution, they don’t believe that a commander in chief should be able to make his own decisions. You know, I’ve advocated from day one that we need another Church Committee. In the 1970s, after Watergate, after Vietnam, after the assassinations and all the turmoil in the streets, it was determined that the FBI and the CIA had crossed the boundaries of what their mandates were on both surveillance of Americans, infiltration of groups, and all of their tasks really. And so you had the Church Committee set the modern structure for the FBI and CIA as a consequence. But I think that’s been blurred over time. You clearly still have a lot of nefarious activity going on and a lot of stuff that needs to be reviewed. I think we need to get back to that; a total revamping, rethinking and rejuvenation of these apparatuses, whether it’s the NSA, CIA, FBI, DOJ, the military or the armed forces. I’ve spent eight years as a naval officer. My daughter went to West Point. She was with the 101st Airborne Division and deployed to Iraq. So we are all big patriots and huge believers in serving in the military. But things have gone way off track and we definitely need to, not just take a hard look, but have massive reform at those levels.

Mark Granza Interviews Blake Masters: ‘Woke’ Capitalism and Kyle Rittenhouse

(Related: my Substack article, The Trial of Kyle.)

Here is the interview.  A couple of excerpts:

Mark Granza: A decade ago most people would have considered ‘Woke Capitalism’ a contradiction, and probably laughed at the idea. Today, nobody questions its existence. Do you think there are there inherent characteristics within Capitalism that transform it into a progressive machine, or are corporations simply responding to the ideological demands of the political class?

Blake Masters: Capitalism works. It’s a really good system for generating wealth. The problem with capitalism is that can work too well in a sense, it can create the conditions for people to grow complacent, which ultimately, as Ross Douthat has written, contributes to the sort of decadence we’re experiencing today. Capitalism’s an incredible engine of material progress, but it’s not a self-contained moral system. It has its own incentives, but those incentives aren’t always necessarily correlated with a conception of the good. Companies under capitalism just respond to profit incentives. If you act on them you’ll generate a lot of wealth, but it won’t tell you what to do with that wealth, which is why a parasite like Wokeness can basically spread and take over. An example is offshoring. Maybe it’s good for GDP, but if you have too much of it, that’s clearly really bad for the country and most people living in it. It crushes the middle class by sending jobs overseas by the millions. But such are the incentives that the capital owners are responding to. So I think problems like Woke Capitalism, or ‘globalization’, are actually much older and bigger problems than people think. Because you can’t just be a capitalist country, because a country is not just an economy. You also need a conception of yourself as a nation, as a people, and as a culture. And that’s what America is increasingly lacking today.

BV: The last three sentence are very important. A country is not just an economy. Do libertarians understand this? Not to my knowledge. They want to reduce everything to economics when it is the history, heritage, and culture of a nation that provides the framework within which a successful economy can operate. Or is the rule of law an economic concept?  How about the concept of citizen?

Mark Granza: I’d like to move from here to the issue of Justice in America. You were a vocal supporter of Kyle Rittenhouse before and during the trial. What do you think the fact that Kyle (as opposed to someone like Gaige Grosskreutz) was the one being prosecuted says about the US justice system?

Blake Masters: I think we’re very close to a two-tier justice system, if we’re not there already. Look how differently loyalists and dissidents are punished today. The Kyle Rittenhouse case was simple. The ruling class hated that a young man defended himself with an AR-15 because it contradicts their official narrative. And so they did everything they could to punish Kyle. The FBI literally withheld high-resolution version of the footage from Kyle’s lawyers, because it basically clearly exonerated Kyle and they found that inconvenient. Now I think the jury’s decision to acquit Kyle of all charges showed that you can still get sort of a fair trial in America, that there’s hope. But again, that only happened because in this case, there happened to be extremely clear video evidence in his favor. If there weren’t, Kyle would be in jail for life. So this case is a wake-up call. It’s crazy that Rittenhouse, and not his attackers, was on trial at all. Contrast that to how the BLM and Antifa looters and rioters who committed violent mayhem during the summer of 2020 – nothing happened to them! And on the off-chance one of them did get arrested, then-Senator and Vice Presidential candidate Kamala Harris was there with her bail fund, just waiting to bail them out. Meanwhile, the January 6 protestors, many of whom were not violent at all, are treated like terrorists, with some being held without trial in solitary confinement and others getting sentenced to many years in prison. If we don’t do something now, the rule of law will soon be gone forever. Anyone who questions the left’s narrative is going to be hunted down. I truly believe that. That’s what we’re fighting against.

BV: Again I say that the last three sentences are very important. 

Blake Masters gives a speech next to Donald Trump, December 2021.

Edward W. Farrell on Populism

An impressive essay by an old friend of this weblog. Excerpts:

Populists feel betrayed by the movers and shakers of the world who they faintly hoped were working in their best interests but were actually working in the interest of something else. What is this "something else?" Nothing less than a perfectly homogenous world untroubled by nationality or biology or religion, a world superficially diverse in ethnicity, race, and sexual orientation but lockstep in rigid ideology and hatred of dissent; a world, oddly enough, that's perfectly suited to fuel the engines of global commerce which feeds the global lust for feel-good distraction. The down payment for this perfect world is the perfect elimination of populists. Populists have discovered this by observing the inexorable erosion of their accustomed way of life over several decades along with the livelihoods that once supported their freedom of self-determination–all to the tune of "things are getting better all the time."  When they have the temerity to ask "getting better for whom?" and become too loud to be ignored, or God forbid they support a Trump, they receive a scornful lecture that they're working against their own best interests, which they are too stupid to understand. But they understand what this means: shut up and quit interfering with the best interests of your employers, their employers, all the government wonks that tirelessly work to support the wealth brokers to whom everyone grovels, and everyone else who knows nothing except that you and your kind are an albatross hung on civilization's neck.

[. . .]

Identity Politics and the Transformation of Civil Rights My discussion here is based largely on Christopher Caldwell's The Age of Enlightenment, though of course he cannot be blamed for any tangential interpretations or conclusions I've drawn from it.

The path of race relations since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 reveals the true depth of the chasm between progressives and traditionalists. The traditionally-minded American sees America as exceptional: a beacon, "the city on the hill," built on constitutional foundations that are wise, sound, and unprecedented. In this view civil rights was never intended to alter American exceptionalism or the foundations that supported it. Rather, civil rights was seen as an effort to bring blacks, oppressed first by slavery and then by discriminatory Jim Crow laws in the South, into full citizenship with the majority of US citizens with all their attendant privileges and opportunities. The ultimate goal here was "race neutrality," a concept whereby race would no longer be a factor that lead to discrimination or preferential treatment.

By 2020 it became obvious that many progressives had something entirely different in mind. They did not share the vision of America as a "city on a hill;" rather, they believed racism was central to America's ethos and that all of its institutions were racist. Racism had not so much to do with individuals and their treatment of other individuals. Racism was "built into" all of Americas laws and institutions; in fact, the notion of race neutrality was simply a dodge that perpetuated white power. And the progressive goal of racial equality (as opposed to neutrality) demanded that the institutions, laws, and cultural ethos that supported white power be destroyed or otherwise rendered harmless to its victims. Identity politics became the means of determining which group was the most oppressed and thus stood first in line for their share as white power was dismantled and redistributed.

How did this divide come about?

Read the rest.