“The problem is not that some unnamed White House official is disloyal to the president. The problem with the anon and gutless op-ed in the New York Times is that so many in our political class are disloyalty to … voters.”

UPDATE (9/11):

“Crazy” to Never Trumpers means keeping campaign promises:

Trump’s preference to pull out of Afghanistan is depicted in the Woodward book as yet another crazy impulse that the “adults in the room” successfully rein in. Somehow waging war for 17 years with no demonstrable gains is automatically the sane, sober, serious position.

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) September 12, 2018

Apartheid In Black And White: Survivalism, Not Racism (Part 2).

Africa, America, History, Nationhood, South-Africa, The State

NEW COLUMN is “Apartheid In Black And White: Survivalism, Not Racism” (Part 2). It’s now on Townhall.com. You can also read it on the Unz Review and WND.Com.

An excerpt:

Monomaniacal Westerners—they have one thing on their minds: it begins with an “R”—have come to think and speak of apartheid as a theory of white supremacy.

It was not.

The policy of “separate development,” as it was admittedly euphemized, was not a theory of racial supremacy, but a strategy for survival.

But first: To perceive the fundamental way in which the Afrikaner and American creeds differed early on we must first examine the former’s ideas of what a nation and a state were, respectively.

America, being a rib from the British ribcage, was built on liberal individualism; Afrikaner culture was first and foremost grounded in the survival of the Volk.

This is not to say that Afrikaners were not fiercely individualistic; they were, even more so than early Americans.

For the Boers, however, the nation encompassed “the land, the culture, the terrain, the people.” The state, on the other hand, had no such prestige for the Boers, who regarded it as just “the coercive apparatus of bureaucrats and politicians.” Against this apparatus, above all, the Boer rebelled.

The 19th century found him still resisting majority rule, by which time Americans had thoroughly submitted to it. Although the Boer’s outlook remained passionately political, his preference was for parochial self-rule.

It might be said, then, that if in the Americans the vagaries of the frontier bred an atomistic individualism, those same vagaries bred in the Afrikaner a very different attitude, namely, a keen sense of the collective and the need to preserve it. “The worth of the nation is even higher than the worth of the individual,” exclaimed one Volk philosopher.

To the existential threat which they faced on the Dark Continent, Afrikaners therefore responded by circling the wagons metaphorically (much as they had done, literally, during the 1830s) and devising the corpus of racial laws known as apartheid.

“We shall fight for our existence and the world must know it. We are not fighting for money or possessions. We are fighting for the life of our people,” thundered Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd (1958 – 1966).

Prime Minister D. F. Malan (1948 – 1954) had already used different words for the same sentiment, announcing his devotion to, “My God, my people, my country.”

Malan’s successor, Prime Minister Strijdom (1954 – 1958), believed unswervingly that if they were to survive as a group, the whites of South Africa would need to retain a position of guardianship, and that ultimately, white hegemony was indispensable for the good of all.

The Cape Town-Stellenbosch axis of the nationalist intelligentsia, which was the most influential lobby in Malan’s National Party (NP), almost without exception defended apartheid not as an expression of white superiority but on the grounds of its assumed capacity to reduce conflict by curtailing points of interracial contact. …

… READ THE REST. NEW COLUMN is “Apartheid In Black And White: Survivalism, Not Racism” (Part 2). It is now on Townhall.com. You can also read it on the Unz Review and WND.Com

‘Take Me In, Dear Donald,’ Smiled The Never Trumper Snakes. And Donald Did.

Donald Trump, Ethics, Foreign Policy, Journalism, Media, Morality

“Lie Down With The Enemy, Get Up Without The Presidency,” I wrote on 2017/03/16.

Trump ran on NOT taking in snakes that’ll bite the American people.

A ballad called “The Snake” became a theme along the Trump campaign. Donald Trump seemed to find “The Snake” a powerful metaphor for his campaign’s impetus.

Yet as soon as Trump took office, he gathered into his Administration many of the Never Trumper reptiles who had never supported the ideas he ran on.

Those idea are precisely the ones denounced in a New York Times’ yellow journalism op-ed:

“I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration: I work for the president but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations”:

Plainly put, the principles anon wishes to thwart are:

* Diplomacy with Russia and North Korea.
* Tough renegotiation of the multilateral trade agreements that had worked against the American worker.
* Very little sympathy for European and British leaders (“our allies” in the above op-ed), who’d exposed their own Deplorables—their innocent countrymen—to millions of hibernating snakes from the Middle East and North Africa.

Sixty million Americans liked these ideas enough to choose their progenitor, Trump, as their next president.

But not the failing New York Times’ anon.

Take foreign policy: In public and in private, President Trump shows a preference for autocrats and dictators, such as President Vladimir Putin of Russia and North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, and displays little genuine appreciation for the ties that bind us to allied, like-minded nations.

Astute observers have noted, though, that the rest of the administration is operating on another track, one where countries like Russia are called out for meddling and punished accordingly, and where allies around the world are engaged as peers rather than ridiculed as rivals.

On Russia, for instance, the president was reluctant to expel so many of Mr. Putin’s spies as punishment for the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain. He complained for weeks about senior staff members letting him get boxed into further confrontation with Russia, and he expressed frustration that the United States continued to impose sanctions on the country for its malign behavior. But his national security team knew better — such actions had to be taken, to hold Moscow accountable.

Smoke him out, Mr. President. Clean house, for once.

Business Is Already Mounting Pressure To Import Cheap Labor

Business, Donald Trump, Education, IMMIGRATION, Labor, Morality, Paleolibertarianism

On August 31st, President Trump signed an “executive order to boost retirement savings.” It’ll allow “small businesses to band together to offer 401(k)s.”

But what do you know? A businessman present lamented “a very tight labor market, which is tight because of the success of [the president’s’] economy. And we’re all grateful for that, but it is causing us a little bit of problems.”

There we go again.

Replied Trump obediently:

We have so many companies coming back to our country, which nobody thought was going to happen. And they want to be where the action is. And we’re going to — I can tell you, we’re going to start looking at, very seriously, merit-based immigration. We have to do it, because we need people. We need people to run these great companies that are coming in.

Big or small, American business is focused above all on elephantine-like expansion and greed.

It is not enough to do well and train American talent, so that fellow Americans can become part of the success story: this is never an option. If business is able to petition The State to import the world at a price subsidized by the American taxpayer—why not?

Again: It’s not enough to be doing smashingly well with the labor available. Or, with a view to training American talent. Or, with a view to paying more for American labor. Oh no. Greedy American Business is forever poised to pull one over the American worker.

The New York Times has featured the “heartbreaking” story of “Rob Hurst, manager of Edgartown Commons on Martha’s Vineyard, has had to scrub bathrooms this summer because five Jamaican workers who had long worked at the hotel couldn’t get visas.”

It concluded:

In practice, businesses say the increased red tape has made it harder to secure employment-based visas. That has added to the difficulty of finding qualified workers with the unemployment rate falling to 3.9 percent.
A recent analysis of government data by the National Foundation for American Policy, a nonpartisan research group, found that the denial rate for H-1B visa petitions for skilled foreign workers had increased 41 percent in the last three months of the 2017 fiscal year, compared with the third quarter. Government requests for additional information for applications doubled in the fourth quarter, a few months after Mr. Trump issued his order.

See: “Companies Say Trump Is Hurting Business by Limiting Legal Immigration.”

Isn’t this about growth per capita, too—and perhaps community? And not just about GDP growth.