Category Archives: Elections

Historian Clyde N. Wilson Reviews ‘The Trump Revolution’

Donald Trump, Elections, Ilana Mercer, Literature, Paleoconservatism, Paleolibertarianism

Dr. Clyde N. Wilson has reviewed “The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed” (June, 2016), in Chronicles magazine, the flagship publication of principled paleoconservatism. “Sounding The Trump” was in the October 2016 issue of Chronicles (subscribe). A short excerpt:

In important ways, a revolutionary process has begun. So argues Ilana Mercer in the best extended analysis yet published of the Trump phenomenon: “Trump is getting an atrophied political system to oscillate” in “an oddly marvelous uprising.” For us revolutionaries there is still a long way to go, but we are entitled to a “modest hope” that “an utterly different political animal, Donald Trump, might actually do some good for the countrymen he genuinely seems to love.”

It is not Trump who is transforming American politics, the author asserts; “it’s the people of America doing the transforming.” Trump is the first politician in a long, long time who has regarded America as a country rather than a “proposition” and has actually spoken to and for “the people.” Far from being “divisive,” his plain speaking has enthusiastically united large numbers of Americans. …

… “White Lives Matter Less” has been, in Mercer’s words, “the creedal pillar” of our public life. Without ungraciousness to any, Trump has shown that it is OK for white Americans to declare that they have had enough of “the pigment burden” that has been piled on their backs. This paleolibertarian author does not disguise her disgust at the fashionable statism, indistinguishable from the collectivist left and without a clue to what “free trade” really means, that passes for libertarianism today. …

… as Mercer points out with tough realism, … In this post-constitutional time, it may be that “the best liberty lovers can look to is action and counter-action, force and counterforce in the service of liberty.” A president hoping for reform will face 160,000 pages of federal laws and regulations and relentless sabotage by the Banksters, Bombers, Bureaucrats, and Busybodies who now govern us. He cannot be a moderate if he hopes to accomplish anything.

On “Mercer’s Menckenesque ability to coin memorable phrases describing the empowered fools of our time,” Professor Wilson’s asks: “Does any contemporary writer do it better?”

Finally, a reviewer with a sense of fun; someone with the good sense to have a hearty chuckle at this verbal swordplay:

Mercer on the media: “news nitworks,” the “War Street Journal,” “idiot’s lantern,” “unsharpened pencil,” “tele-tarts,” a “circle jerk of power brokers,” “one-trick donkeys,” “celebrated mediocrities,” “another banal bloviation,” the “cable commentariat as a cog in the corpulent D.C. fleshpot.”

Mercer on our rulers and would-be rulers: “parasites in waiting”; “nation-building at the point of the bayonet makes [Hillary] barking happy”; “Banana Republicans”; “dwarf-tossing” (William Kristol’s promotion of nonentities as Trump alternatives); the “quaint expectation that voters, not party operatives, would choose the nominee”; the “silent majority that dare not speak its name”; “what our crypto-leftist conservatives are ramming down our proverbial gullets are dogmas, not values”; the “master-servant relationship between Republicans and the Religious Right”; the “think tanks’ industry for the god of war”; “neoconservatives speaking like Tocqueville but acting like Robespierre”; “neoconservatives standing athwart every valid form of American conservatism yelling stop.”

What a review and what an honor! Subscribe to Chronicles here.

It Takes A Village Idiot To Vote For Hillary

Donald Trump, Elections, Federal Reserve Bank, Foreign Policy, Hillary Clinton, Russia

“It Takes A Village Idiot To Vote For Hillary” is the current column, now trending on Townhall.com. An excerpt:

If you strapped Bill Clinton to a polygraph (or some lie detector that can’t be fooled by the Clintons)—I suspect he, too, might confess to a preference for Vladimir Putin over Barack Obama.

Mr. Clinton had been appropriately scathing, in 2008, about Obama’s mythical status in the media. A “fairy tale,” he called the current president.

However, his wife and her supporters on The Hill and in media have ruled that any remotely realistic utterance about the Russian president—such as that he’s a strong leader who’s popular with his people and acts in their interests—puts you outside the camp of the saints.

Mrs. Clinton is making it a habit to tell Americans what to say and how to think if they want to qualify as … Americans.

In particular, Hillary’s AltRight screed, best described on Twitter as the Control-Alt-Delete speech, focused on Mrs. Clinton’s crusade against deviationists. Provided by a twitter handle called “Hillary’s PR Team,” here’s a distillation of the interminable smear against Trump and his supporters, peddled as “substantive” by the moron media:

Prejudice and paranoia, hate groups, harmful stereotypes, hateful supporters, systemic racism, dark conspiracies, dark conspiracy theories, racist lies, bigotry, racist, white supremacist bigot, white nationalist leader, KKK, racially tinged rumors, Alex Jones. …

Yes, Hillary’s Control-Alt-Delete harangue began with the biggest deviationist of all, Donald J. Trump. Trump “disregards the values that make our country great,” fumed the fire-and-brimstone Mrs. Clinton on that occasion.

To his great credit, Trump flunked another test of “true American principles,” established by Hillary, following the NBC’s “Commander-in-Chief” forum, on September 7.

As the media reminds us, Trump disqualifies himself for the presidency daily. This time it was for speaking the truth about Putin at the forum. The Russian people’s approval of their president stands at 82 percent. But the correct American values, as decreed by our northeastern elites, depend on disparaging Putin and his people. After all, Russians are stupid. They need Clinton and her Radical Republican counterpart, Speaker Paul Ryan (or a color-coded revolution organized by both), to induct them into the American government’s ways.

Enforcer Hillary (and Speaker Ryan) was having none of it. A preference for the Russian president over our American president was plain “unpatriotic and scary,” to be stamped out and marginalized.

“Hillary Rodham Clinton,” argues historian Clyde N. Wilson, whose métier is American intellectual history, “is a museum-quality specimen of the Yankee—self-righteous, ruthless, and self-aggrandizing.”

Wilson uses the term Yankee “historically to designate a peculiar group descended from New Englanders, who can be easily recognized by their arrogance, hypocrisy, greed, lack of congeniality, and penchant for ordering other people around.”

By Yankee, Dr. Wilson does not mean “everybody from north of the Potomac and Ohio. The firemen who died in the World Trade Center on September 11 [commemorated this weekend] were Americans. The politicians and TV personalities who stood around telling us what we are to think about it are Yankees.”

In their journey from the “hyper-Calvinism of their early days,” to “their present atheism,” Yankees like Hillary have long ago replaced religious zeal with a progressive’s political fanaticism. And while they’ve “abandoned anything that might be good in their religion,” contends Wilson, bossy busybodies like Clinton have never given up the notion that “they are the chosen saints whose mission is to make America, and the world, into the perfection of their own image.”

Again, by continuously enforcing the “standard of all things American and good,” Hillary is not that different from her Republican colleagues. They, too, deploy the values cudgel as energetically, to whip the base into shape. Or, to read many of us out of the American family.

To compound his unorthodoxy, Trump failed to fall back on the American exceptionalism exemption, in judging the actions of American leaders—good by default—relative to other world leaders. At the “Commander-in-Chief” forum, Trump intimated that Mr. Putin’s transgressions were “no less troublesome than Mr. Obama’s transgressions.” Quite right. Ask the innocent victims of Obama’s energetic drone program ongoing: villagers in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Libya and Yemen. …

… Read the rest. The complete column is “It Takes A Village Idiot To Vote For Hillary.”  Read it on Townhall.com, where it’s trending.

A Rear Admiral Gives ‘Rear’ A New Meaning

Donald Trump, Elections, Hillary Clinton, Military

She worked for and supported George Bush, master and commander of futile, unconstitutional, immoral invasions in the Middle East. But Rear Admiral Deborah Loewer, “a 31-year Navy veteran and director of the Situation Room during the September 11th attacks,” will be voting for Hillary, not least because Donald Trump—a civilian until now with no policy making background—is not making the right SOUNDS about Vladimir Putin, who, says the rear admiral, invaded his neighbors.

Remind me what “Rear” stands for in “Rear Admiral.”

Trump’s Most Impassioned Address So Far: Law-‘N-Order

Crime, Democrats, Donald Trump, Elections, Law, Republicans

From West Bend, Wisconsin, Donald Trump spoke about, “How to make communities safe again from crime and lawlessness.” He remarked that “Law and order must be restored. Violence is an assault on all. The main victims of the Milwaukee unrest are law-abiding members of the African-American community. There is no compassion in tolerating lawless conduct. Just like Hillary Clinton is against the miners; she is against the police, too:


“The Opening Statement” to “The Trump Revolution” already credits Trump with “fumigating some serious snake pits”: Media Complex, Party Complex, Pseudo-Conservative Complex.

My favorite section is this one; it’s pretty much the gist of “The Opening Statement” to my Trump Revolution:

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.