Read it.

The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) threw its support behind House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi in her race to retain her leadership post Thursday.

Who says Republicans can’t be bi-partisan?

Watch it.

Ordinarily I skip over these, but every now and one I stumble across one that’s worth a look.

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Please give generously. They keep track of the ongoing defense against the Muslim threat to the West pretty much full time so that the rest of us don’t have to; they are the ‘community organizers’, if you will, of Flyover America.

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One of Hillary Clinton’s campaign themes was her alleged competence, based on years of public service, which she tried to contrast with Donald Trump’s amateurism. Yet, Clinton, through her campaign once again demonstrated that she is not competent. That she was outperformed by an “amateur” undermines her “competence” theme all the more.

…

Hillary’s time at the State Department produced the failed “reset” with Russia, chaos in Libya, and a self-inflicted email scandal she couldn’t shake. More evidence, along with her health reform botch during Bill Clinton’s first term, of her incompetence.

Note that there is no mention of Hillary’s time in the Senate. That’s because it might as well not exist; Hillary did absolutely nothing of note during her time in the Senate, other than keep her name in the DemLegHump Media for a possible Presidential run to be named later.

Read it.

Oh, I am SO going to enjoy this Presidency.

Reporters were furious that Trump had “violated protocol.”

Who does he think he is? Doesn’t he know who they are?

“With his Tuesday night actions, the Trump Administration is shaping up to be the least accessible to the public and the press in modern history,” Alexandra Jaffe and Ali Vitali at NBC News said.

Note the equation of ‘the press’ and ‘the public’, as if they had any necessary connection. I have no doubt that Trump will be accessible to the public; the press, not so much.

“Once you are president, once you are president-elect, it is a matter of tradition, it is a matter of security, it is a matter of national interest that you don’t go dark — you’re not really allowed to be a private person anymore,” Maddow said.

I’m sure you think so, sweetheart. (I rather suspect that this is the first time in her life that Rachel Maddow has had anything good to say about tradition.)

“One week after the election, it is unacceptable for the next president of the United States to travel without a regular pool to record his movements and inform the public about his whereabouts,” the WHCA said in a statement.

Yeah, that really improves ‘security’. I’m trying to see how they have any say in what is ‘acceptable’ or ‘not acceptable’. What are they going to do? Refuse to cover him? They can accept it, or they can go pound sand — their choice.

It’s not as if he didn’t warn them.

Read it.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Jim Goad deconstructs the election.

Much of the media blamed it all on white racism, but that’s the media’s job, isn’t it? Statistically, 58% of whites yanked the lever for Trump. This included 63% of white men and 53% of white women, with the Clinton’s campaign’s attempts at launching an anti-male gender war stumbling as hard as Hillary did outside her van this past September 11. A majority of young whites voted for Trump. And despite the media’s ceaseless attempts to portray all Trump voters as uneducated—I’m still waiting for any mainstream outlet to use the term “non-college-educated black voters”—he was favored by a majority of educated whites.

But it wasn’t strictly a “whitelash,” as chocolate commie cueball Van Jones insisted. Trump performed more poorly among white voters than Mitt Romney did in 2012. And more nonwhites voted for Trump than they did for Romney. Electing Trump didn’t prove America is “racist.” It proved that shouting “RACIST!” no longer works.

Read it.

For months, the only thing that’s surprised me about Donald Trump is my friends’ astonishment at his success. What’s driving it is the class culture gap.

One little-known element of that gap is that the white working class (WWC) resents professionals but admires the rich. Class migrants (white-collar professionals born to blue-collar families) report that “professional people were generally suspect” and that managers are college kids “who don’t know shit about how to do anything but are full of ideas about how I have to do my job,” said Alfred Lubrano in Limbo. Barbara Ehrenreich recalled in 1990 that her blue-collar dad “could not say the word doctor without the virtual prefix quack. Lawyers were shysters…and professors were without exception phonies.” Annette Lareau found tremendous resentment against teachers, who were perceived as condescending and unhelpful.

Michèle Lamont, in The Dignity of Working Men, also found resentment of professionals — but not of the rich. “[I] can’t knock anyone for succeeding,” a laborer told her. “There’s a lot of people out there who are wealthy and I’m sure they worked darned hard for every cent they have,” chimed in a receiving clerk. Why the difference? For one thing, most blue-collar workers have little direct contact with the rich outside of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. But professionals order them around every day. The dream is not to become upper-middle-class, with its different food, family, and friendship patterns; the dream is to live in your own class milieu, where you feel comfortable — just with more money. “The main thing is to be independent and give your own orders and not have to take them from anybody else,” a machine operator told Lamont. Owning one’s own business — that’s the goal. That’s another part of Trump’s appeal.

Read it.

To other countries, perhaps?

I should think that a good start would be to excise the tolerance that Democrats have traditionally shown for crooks and grifters in their own ranks, especially among candidates and office-holders. 90% of Hillary Clinton’s problems were due to her being a crook and a congenital liar, and yet Democrats were willing to die in the last ditch to support her. Every one of the special snowflake complaints against Donald Trump apply to Hillary Clinton, in spades, and yet she is still the Prom Queen. Non-Democrat voters see this and conclude, naturally enough, that every Democrat is a crook and a liar, because Democrats wholeheartedly support crooks and liars; so why not elect a crook and liar from ‘our side’? At least we may be allowed to wet our beaks a bit.

If Democrats don’t like the results of the political process, they’ve got nobody to blame but themselves.

Read it.

Where they can get raped and robbed by Muslim immigrants. Good plan.

I’ll chip in.

Read it.

The Re-Elect Trump 2020 campaign is off to a great start in the streets of many American cities and college campuses right now. As someone sagely commented, the left’s reaction to Trump’s election is one of the reasons Trump won the election. Rioters in Portland, Oregon, acted out the overdone metaphor of 2016 by setting an actual dumpster fire. Gotta give ‘em style points for that.

It’s about time we had a professional comedian in the White House.

Read it.

Many will say Trump won because he successfully capitalized on blue collar workers’ anxieties about immigration and globalization. Others will say he won because America rejected a deeply unpopular alternative. Still others will say the country is simply racist to its core.

But there’s another major piece of the puzzle, and it would be a profound mistake to overlook it. Overlooking it was largely the problem, in the first place.

Trump won because of a cultural issue that flies under the radar and remains stubbornly difficult to define, but is nevertheless hugely important to a great number of Americans: political correctness.

More specifically, Trump won because he convinced a great number of Americans that he would destroy political correctness.

Read it.

Funny how British journalism is so much better than American DemLegHumpMedia vaporings.

A Republican trifecta (controlling the White House and both Houses) would be the big news today as it signals a “change election”, and it hasn’t happened since 1928. But Trump is Trump, so that isn’t even mentioned today.

I guess they’re too upset about the sky falling.

One piece of cultural context Europeans invariably forget is that much of America’s politics is done locally, at the town, state, country and state level. Almost all policing is local. The federal government is a distant, often sinister thing, perceived in large parts with some paranoia. Electing Jefferson Smith to go to Washington is regarded as a calculated, prudent measure, not an act of idiocy.

The Crust forget that America isn’t a unitary state like most of Europe — even though they’re trying their best to make it one.

The tech oligarchs had an extraordinary ride of luck. Silicon Valley successfully disguised an attack not just on the heartlands, but the unwritten social contract. If you study Google closely, what emerges is how much the very idea of humans irritates it, what an inconvenience we are. “Post human” isn’t some sci-fi fantasy, it’s a reasonable description of a world in which many jobs have been automated, and the individual’s property rights and identity rights have been pared right away to the bone. People have begun to notice that Silicon Valley doesn’t create jobs or prosperity – except for the oligarchs themselves.

They’re the smartest people in the room, and they’ve got the checkbooks to prove it.

Trump’s victory, like Brexit, divides critics into two camps. It’s either a failure of the existing elites – such as the media and the current parties who have failed to heed people’s concerns, or it’s the fault of the people, who can then be vilified. The latter argument has the merit, for the elites, of absolving them from any fault for alienating voters, or pursuing self-indulgent and irrelevant pursuits – like having a tech policy. Eventually that leads to the elites wishing they had a new electorate, rather than listening and leading. And ultimately, that leads to a Trump.

‘The problem for the left is that, when everyone’s Hitler, nobody’s Hitler.’

— Mark Steyn

Read it.

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani has brought up the possibility of Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) charges against “Clinton incorporated,” and, according to a senior law enforcement official close to Giuliani, this is no joke.

What a delightful prospect.

He added, “I have a whole bunch of statutes they’ve violated. This is racketeering. This is a RICO statute –Clinton, Inc. I think it was one of the WikiLeaks that said this was ‘Clinton Inc.’ He does the speeches, they put the money in the pocket, she does the favors in the government. It all links up.”

Indeed it does.

Read it.

As John Schindler said on twitter, (words to the effect of) if you tell some people they should just crawl off into the desert and die, they’re likely to remember that when it comes time to vote. Who knew?

“White working class” is just people. They don’t stop being people because they’re white, they don’t live in a big city and didn’t go to college. Trump also won most white college-educated men as well. More people.

Most of the media bloviation I’ve seen today is focused on telling their fellows of the Crust what sort of people carried Donald Trump to victory, with the unspoken subtext that it wasn’t Us, it was Them, so we’re still the same Quality Folk we always were, and it’s the world’s fault for being a horrible place.

It’s really sad. So much of what they ‘know’ about the world is just theater, stories that they tell each other in order to make the narrow little bubble in which they live seem like an actual world. I suspect that it’s because they spend so much of their time in made-up worlds, worlds from novels or from plays or from films, rather than the Rest Of Us who (aside from the occasional TV show) spend most of our time with real people doing real things that are grounded in real life.

God help us when they figure out how to do virtual reality properly.

Read it.

They lied, of course, because that’s what they do, but it will be entertaining watching them squirm.

And, also of course, none of these people would be missed.

‘ “Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms” ought to be the name of a convenience store chain, not a Federal police agency.’ — David Zincavage

Read it.

Every presidential election produces a series of articles probing and prophesizing about the so-called “Jewish vote.” This year has been no different, with most observers agreeing that the majority of Jewish-Americans will vote Democratic.

Why are the ballots cast by Jewish-Americans, just 2 percent of the population, of such importance to politicians (and would-be politicians)? First, relative to their community’s small size, Jews contribute a disproportionate amount of money to political candidates and causes. They give half of the funds received by the Democratic Party and one quarter of the funds received by the Republican Party, according to American history professor Gil Troy. Second, many Jews live in the swing states of Florida (846,700 of 19.9 million), Pennsylvania (324,700 of 12.8 million), Ohio (173,700 of 11.6 million), and Michigan (105,200 of 9.9 million). And third, Jews tout a stellar turnout record—80 percent, on the word of several sources.

…

If there is a dual loyalty among mainstream American Jewry, it doesn’t involve a tension between the U.S. and Israel. Rather, it involves a conscience-splitting conflict between the traditional liberalism of the postwar period and the identity-obsessed progressivism of the twenty-first century.

Read it.

People forget, in the midst of watching the fight in the Republican Party between the Crust and the Filling of the GOP, that the Left has a similar fight going on.

The Filling may be waking up to the fact that the have more in common with each other than with their nominally contentious ‘parties’; the Crust, of course, has always known that, and acted accordingly.

Steve Sailer does some analysis.

You’re not supposed to say this in public, but the GOP traditionally gets most of its votes from people who more or less have their acts together, while the Democrats appeal most strongly to the various resentful fringes of the electorate.

The prototypical Romney voter might be the loser’s wife Ann Romney: married for 43 years so far, with five children and 18 grandchildren.

As for a prototypical Obama voter, it would have been hard to beat the President’s late mother Ann Dunham Obama Soetoro: impregnated at 17 by a passing polygamist, briefly and bigamously married to the African, then married for awhile to an Indonesian. She finally died unmarried and without her peeved son bothering to visit her. (I suspect that, in contrast, most of Ann Romney’s sons will call upon her before she dies.)

Just as importing poor, unskilled foreigners boosts the ranks of Democratic voters in the long run, the social decay of American culture creates more Democrats.

Read it.

Advice for how to run your day from the people who want Hillary to be President.

Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Read it.

Believing that James would at least soften the anti-Catholic laws that had left many adherents of the Old Faith impoverished, imprisoned, or dead, and that had only become more onerous after the Spanish Armada launched, Catholics were soon disappointed. James had no such intention, especially given a clinical paranoia that made King Herod look like a bodhisattva. (To be fair, James had been the object of earlier, failed Catholic conspiracies, called the Bye and Main plots. One of the plans had been to kidnap the king and hold him in the Tower of London until Catholics were granted full toleration, which becomes increasingly difficult to argue for when you’re holding the monarch captive, as there’s only so much antisocial behavior any king can tolerate before someone loses an eye.)

…

In light of this history, Fawkes is a strange choice to be the face of hacker activists like Anonymous and other anarchist movements. We’ve all seen that stupid mask, the one that looks like Gomez Adams just did it with Morticia.

Read it.

I think that these apply to government employees in certain circumstances.

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Some of us remember.

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Nowadays cars are much more reliable than they were and seem never to break down. But there is a law of the conservation of irritation caused by machines, like that of energy, and if one type of machine won’t irritate you anymore, another will soon step in to fill the breach.

At the moment it is my computer and the internet messages that irritate me. I keep getting unctuous communications from Airbnb thanking me for being part of their global community. I have never used Airbnb and if I had done so I would certainly not consider myself part of the Airbnb community, any more than I consider myself part of the Fyffes banana community because I once ate a Fyffes banana. If using a service or consuming a product gives us entry into a community, we are all members of thousands of communities.

Jim Goad reflects on leftist hypocrisy.

As the elderly black female homeless Trump supporter was curled in the fetal position on the sidewalk while street swine jeered at her from all sides, a black man leaned over and told her that she’d brought it all on herself:

Didn’t I tell you about five minutes ago that somebody’s gonna walk by here and no, I would not defend you? ‘Cause you spewed hate, and you got hate. You got exactly what you were dishin’ out. I told you. I warned you on that.

Black Lives Matter — unless it goes against the Narrative.

Read it.

Which tells you everything you really need to know about Amy Schumer and Seth Rogin.

Read it.

Speed the day.

Why aren’t they already there? Canada is much more to their liking than the U.S.

Read it.

I don’t even have to say anything, do I?

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If you live in a million-dollar-house, of course you sue Amazon, no matter what happens.

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When the Jewish German psychologist Kurt Lewin fled Nazi rule and moved to the United States in 1933, he, like many immigrants, found his new home a little puzzling. Especially when it came to friendships.

“Compared with Germans, Americans seem to make quicker progress toward friendly relations early in the acquaintance process and with many more persons,” he wrote in his 1936 paper “Some Social-Psychological Differences Between the United States and Germany.” “Yet this development often stops at a certain point and the quickly acquired friends will, after years of relatively close relations, say good bye as easily as after a few weeks of acquaintance.”

Lewin thought that this idea of friends as fast fashion—easily acquired, emotionlessly discarded when worn out—might be spurred by the United States’s high level of residential mobility. American society was mobile in his day and has only gotten more mobile since. People can move from sea to shining sea, dropping things as they go.

For really disposable friendships, see the previous post about dissolving corpses.

There’s an app for that….

David Cole reminds us of some history.

I thought it would be a bigger deal. Last week marked the 70th anniversary, to the day, of the hanging of the Nuremberg trial defendants, and I have to admit, I was expecting to read a lot more about it in the press. After all, with only two weeks to go before an election in which “literally Hitler” is the GOP candidate, I expected the media to use the Nuremberg 70th as an excuse to dredge up fond nostalgic memories of the “noble exercise in justice” (well, I’ll be damned…I typed that line with a straight face) that concluded with ten nasty Nazis dancing at the end of a rope (not counting the one who, in the words of every uninspired narrator to ever give voice to a World War II documentary, “cheated the hangman”).

Sarah Hoyt lays it out.

When you say someone should have “housing and food, a car, entertainment, health care” you’re not saying that angels will come down from heaven and grant this.  Or if you are, you really should tell us how to summon these angels.  What you’re saying is “we should violate someone’s most basic and fundamental liberties so that someone else can be the equivalent of a trustfund baby with never a worry in the world.”

Whose liberties?  Well, builders and farmers, entertainers and doctors.  And while you might think those people can “give” you’re not thinking of scale.  If “everyone” is entitled to this what you’re saying is that these people have to work so that other people can have everything for free even without doing anything.

This guy is American in his heart.

Freeberg demonstrates that politics is like Star Wars, eventually.

The liberal movement consists, in large part, of a sustained monologue taking place FROM the scheming elites TO the ignorant commons, with zero feedback, very much like the power structure among the aristocracy and the peasants in feudal times. A great portion of this monologue, measured either in volume or in priority, is concerned with instructions about how the ignorant-commons should do their living, their communicating, their thinking. The instructions run long on “do this, don’t do that” and run short on hard, helpful information. Passive-voice sentences appear very often in the message stream. And these are things the scheming-elites would never, ever practice themselves. Examples abound.

…

The ignorant-commons consistently fail to distinguish between statements about facts, versus statements about what facts might mean. Put more simply, they can’t think. Examples include emotionally unhinged sentiments of conclusion that purport to be statements of fact, such as “Health care should be a right and that’s a fact,” or “Education must be free and that’s a fact.” This makes it easy for the scheming-elites to program the ignorant-commons to have certain opinions; they say, “get the facts” about this-or-that. The ignorant-commons then obey, get told what to think, and with this emotion-over-reason juxtaposition in place, proceed to “feel” like they know something. From that feeling, they get a sort of a hit, like a hardcore junkie. It’s their soma.

Gavin McInnes isn’t impressed.

Modern feminism insists that women giving birth and sticking around is sexist but putting men’s shitty jobs on a pedestal is somehow feminist. I don’t even know what a strategist is, but I’d rather hear strategies from someone who has literally created a future America than some barren spinster with no stakes in the game. Look at any mainstream media source and you will see women who have put career over family. Sometimes they have one kid. Sometimes they spent $30,000 on in vitro and have two. Even in those rare cases, you are looking at someone who has paid a Third World immigrant to look after their children like some sort of maternal security guard. Why are these people telling us what’s best for the country? They don’t even know what’s best for their own family. When I bring this up with professional women, they tell me a housewife’s life is parochial and boring. What these power moms don’t realize is America is made up of millions of tiny “boring” microcosms who shape the economy.