Category Archives: Elections

NEW COLUMN Updated (1/21): Dissident Deplorables Refuse To Be Dittoheads

Critique, Donald Trump, Elections, English, Family, Journalism, Media, Political Correctness

NEW COLUMN is “Dissident Deplorables Refuse To Be Dittoheads.”

In its attenuated form, the column appeared on Townhall.com. If you prefer lukewarm, milquetoast, bland fare (as much as this writer can do those), adapted for conservative tastes, then stick with this version: “Dissident Deplorables Deserve Decent Coverage.”

Otherwise, read the piece in full on The Unz Review. Or, look-away, FAST (as did others. Yes, the piece was spiked elsewhere). The more I read Mencken, the more I know this: If he were alive today, Unz Review woudl be the only place that would dare publish him.

Excerpt:

The happening featured beefcake Donald Trump Jr. and bimbo Kimberly Guilfoyle.

The couple was on stage at UCLA to promote the president’s son’s “book,” when they were jeered by dissident Deplorables for shutting down the Question-and-Answer segment.

“Book” here is in quotations to denote “so-called,” because the staple, ghost-written political pablum, penned by ambitious political flotsam, relates to literacy as H. L. Mencken relates to conformity—not at all.

Predictably, Guilfoyle opted out of the conversational give-and-take demanded by her man’s hecklers, and went straight for the groin:

“I bet you engage in online dating, because you’re impressing no one here to get a date in person.”

Why “predictably”? Well, a supple mind may not be one of Guilfoyle’s assets.

Kimberley’s cerebral alacrity was seldom showcased when seated in Fox News’ legs chair. During one of her last televised appearances on “The Five,” a Fox News daytime show, Guilfoyle protested that, “the U.S. has already reduced its [toxic] ‘admissions’ enough.”

I give you Guilfoyle, verbatim, in her own words: “So, we can keep doing what we’re doing. We can keep reducing our admissions. …”

To Make English Great Again, you reduce emissions, not “admissions.”

For a while, it even seemed that Trump, looking for curve appeal in a press secretary, was going for Guilfoyle. She certainly thought so and said as much, implying, at the time, that she herself is “a great communicator … with deep knowledge.”

And no; I do not digress. This all goes to the Guilfoyle’s knee-jerk, flirty, aim-for-the-groin reaction to her hombre’s hecklers.

Tellingly, the taunting of Donald Jr. by dissident Deplorables was covered very differently by the American Daily Beast and the British Guardian.

Descriptions of political positions and personalities were prefaced by the Daily Beast with “edifying” editorializing. The hecklers the Beast described as “fringe-right.” Their alleged instigator and inspiration was said to be “a white nationalist.” Perfectly legitimate demands from this disgruntled audience for a “Q&A” and for “America First,” the Daily Beast deemed tantamount to a right-wing insurrection or civil war.

Discrediting dissent is all in a day’s work for the American press.

What do you know? The hecklers at Trump Jr.’s book-flogging were also known, to the Daily Beast at least, as “Holocaust deniers.” As far as this reader can tell, the group taunting the empty suits on stage for refusing to answer questions had said not a word about the Holocaust. Nor had the disrupters been interviewed by the Daily Beast about their views on the Holocaust.

More to the point: Why is participation in our democracy predicated on one’s views on the Holocaust? What the hell does an individual’s opinion about that topic have to do with his right to solicit answers from members of Donald Trump’s politically active dynasty? I say this as a Jew whose family tree was truncated by the industrial-scale mass murder of millions of Jews that was the Holocaust. …

… READS THE REST. NEW COLUMN is “Dissident Deplorables Refuse To Be Dittoheads.” Or, “Dissident Deplorables Deserve Decent Coverage,” if you can’t take the heat.

UPDATE (11/21):

On WND: “Is political participation predicated on views about the Holocaust?” “Discrediting dissent is all in a day’s work for the American press,” says this Jew, whose family tree was truncated by the industrial-scale mass murder that was the Holocaust. MORE …

NEW COLUMN: GOP’s Texas Strategy: Hope New Voters Don’t Show Up

Elections, Gender, IMMIGRATION, Republicans

NEW COLUMN IS “GOP’s Texas Strategy: Hope New Voters Don’t Show Up.” It’s on The Unz Review and WND.COM.

An excerpt:

Democrats, reports the Economist, “think they might win Texas in 2020.”

Demographers, being mostly Democrats, credit Donald Trump.

One of them, he’s from Rice University in Houston, claimed that Donald Trump was the “worst thing that ever happened to Texas Republicans”:

“Mr. Trump has alienated many white Republican women in Texas, and has also pushed away Hispanics, who account for around 40 percent of the state’s population. … According to a recent poll by the University of Texas and Texas Tribune, more Texans say they would sooner vote for a candidate running against Mr. Trump than re-elect the president.”

But even those afflicted with Trump Derangement Syndrome are forced to concede that,

“Long after Mr. Trump leaves office, demographic change in Texas will continue to exert an influence on the fortunes of Republicans, as the Hispanic population grows, millennials vote in increasing numbers and people continue to move to Texas from other states, bringing their more liberal politics with them.”

Yes, the country as a whole is moving leftward. And it’s not Donald Trump—although a border wall and a moratorium on immigration would have helped mightily. As the Economist attests, “Americans are more in favor of ‘big-government’ policies today than at any point in the last 68 years.”

The “public mood” in America is decidedly with statism and leftism.

Ultimately, even blame-Trump demographers must, on occasion, crunch data accumulated over decades and admit that, a “blue Texas” must be chalked up to demographic “changes,” which denote the swamping of the native population by a politically monocultural immigrant cohort …

… READ THE REST. NEW COLUMN IS “GOP’s Texas Strategy: Hope New Voters Don’t Show Up.” It’s on The Unz Review and WND.COM.

NEW COLUMN: How Democracy Made Us Dumb

America, Ancient History, Democracy, Democrats, Egalitarianism, Elections, History

NEW COLUMN IS “How Democracy Made Us Dumb.” It’s currently on WND.COM and The Unz Review.

An excerpt:

From the riffs of outrage coming from the Democrats and their demos over “our democracy” betrayed, infiltrated even destroyed—you’d never know that a rich vein of thinking in opposition to democracy runs through Western intellectual thought, and that those familiar with it would be tempted to say “good riddance.”

Voicing opposition to democracy is just not done in politically polite circles, conservative and liberal alike.

For this reason, the Mises Institute’s Circle in Seattle, an annual gathering, represented a break from the pack.

The Mises Institute is the foremost think tank working to advance free-market economics from the perspective of the Austrian School of Economics. It is devoted to peace, prosperity, and private property, implicit in which is the demotion of raw democracy, the state, and its welfare-warfare machine.

This year, amid presentations that explained “Why American Democracy Fails,” it fell to me to speak to “How Democracy Made Us Dumb.” (Oh yes! Reality on the ground was not candy-coated.)

Some of the wide-ranging observations I made about the dumbing down inherent in democracy were drawn from the Founding Fathers and the ancients.

A tenet of the American democracy is to deify youth and diminish adults. To counter that, I’ll start with the ancients.

The Athenian philosophers disdained democracy. Deeply so. They held that democracy “distrusts ability and has a reverence for numbers over knowledge.” (Will Durant, “The Story of Philosophy,” New York, New York, 1961, p. 10.)

Certainly, among the ancients who mattered, there was a keen contempt for “a mob-led, passion-ridden democracy.” The complaint among Athenians who occupied themselves with thinking and debating was that “there would be chaos where there is no thought,” and that “it was a base superstition that numbers give wisdom. On the contrary, it is universally seen that men in crowds are more foolish, violent and cruel than men separate and alone.” (p. 11)

Underground already then, because so subversive—anti-democratic thinking was the aristocratic gospel in Athens. Socrates (born in 470 B.C.) was the intellectual leader against democracy and for the even-then hated aristocratic philosophy. Socrates’ acolytes, young and brilliant, questioned the “specious replacement of the old virtues by unsocial intelligence.”

The proof of the foolish, violent and cruel nature of the crowds is that the crowds, not the judges, insisted on making Socrates the first martyr of philosophy. He drank the poison at the behest of the people.

No wonder Plato, Socrates’ most gifted student, harbored such scorn for democracy and hatred for the mob—so extreme that it led this controversial genius to resolve that democracy must be destroyed, to be replaced by his planned society; “the rule of the wisest and the best, who would have to be discovered and enabled.” …

READ THE REST. NEW COLUMN, “How Democracy Made Us Dumb,” is currently on WND.COM and The Unz Review.

NEW COLUMN: Democratic Dystopia: End Anglo-America, Welcome The World, Evict The Unborn

Abortion, America, Democrats, Elections, Ethics, Feminism, Gender, IMMIGRATION

NEW COLUMN IS “Democratic Dystopia: End Anglo-America, Welcome the World, Evict the Unborn.” It’s on Townhall.com. Longer (and funnier) versions are on WND.COM and The Unz Review.

An Excerpt:

How does one distill the worldview of the Democrats vying for their party’s presidential nomination?

Outrace each other on racial righteousness?

End Anglo-America? Welcome The World? Evict the unborn? Speak Spanish; English is your second language?

All the above—and worse.

On display, again, during the second in a series of Democratic primary debates were the racial (read anti-white) dynamics.

Genial and meek uncle Joe Biden bowed and scraped to his multicultural rivals, whereupon they set upon him like a flash mob; a multicultural mugging, Pat Buchanan called it.

Race—more accurately, anti-white politics—is the Democrats’ central cri de coeur. They have no other passion other than hounding and excommunicating others for what are thought crimes—for thinking, speaking or tweeting in politically unpleasing ways.

But practicing ageism gives these social-justice warriors no pause. There’s no social justice for the aged in Democratic politics.

Leading the purge of the party’s elders was Eric Swalwell, a nasty bit of work who had mercifully dropped out after the first round of debates, late in June. At the time, Swalwell had called on older Democrats to “pass the torch.” “[I]t’s time to pass the torch to a new generation of Americans.”

“If we are going to solve the issue, pass the torch. If we are going to solve climate chaos, pass the torch. If we want to end gun violence and solve student debt, pass the torch.”

Swalwell obviously imagined such ugly sloganeering was a winning strategy. And who can blame him? However, other than a writer for the cause at The Atlantic, the representative from northern California galvanized nobody with his call to expunge Democrats in their dotage. (“The Millennial Left Is Tired of Waiting,” intoned said writer. That magazine is packed with verbally incontinent Millennials, all poised to torch deviationists.)

Mr. Nasty is gone, and Democratic voters are, so far, sticking with the safe bet: Looks like the party that habitually blackens white America is hoping the next U.S. president is an old, white American.

Are these hypocrites suggesting that there’s something confidence-inspiring about this much-maligned cohort?

The women on the stage, the lovely Tulsi Gabbard and the well-mannered Marianne Williamson excepted, alternated between the roles of shrew, scold and bully (of old, white men, naturally).

Following Kamala Harris’ lead, the insufferable Kirsten Gillibrand mooed about an old Biden op-ed in which he had warned that women entering the workforce would imperil the family. Who will write the chapter about women like Gillibrand who enter politics and imperil the nation?

For comedic relief, consider the choreography that must have gone into positioning the oddball candidates, striding onto the Fox Theater stage in Detroit. One could hardly place mini-man Pete Buttigieg—boy, has the military lowered its physical requirements—alongside candidates who’d stare down at tiny Pete from vertiginous heights.

Height, however, did nothing to increase a tall Democrat’s stature. The group’s pathological, self-immolating progressivism was the great leveler, although an unspoken pack hierarchy was certainly apparent among the candidates. Naturally, that pecking order was racial.

… READ THE REST. NEW COLUMN IS “Democratic Dystopia: End Anglo-America, Welcome the World, Evict the Unborn.” It’s on Townhall.com. Longer (and funnier) versions are on WND.COM and The Unz Review.