The Right made Trump President but the Left will keep him there

Joe Hildebrand:

It has long been predicted that the left will eat itself but even the most diehard right-wing optimist could never have foreseen the giant human centipede now munching its way across the globe.

The past few weeks alone have proven there is no violation of New Left orthodoxy too great or too small, nor too surreal or hypocritical, to escape the tsunami of shit-filled silt that consumes all in its path and converts it into the selfsame excrement that sucked it in.

Barack Obama, a global bastion for the left the world over, has declared he is over the left – or at least the now-dominant part of it that seems to mistake social media outrage for social change.

Obama is without doubt one of the most highly intelligent and decent US presidents ever to hold office. Certainly his administration had many flaws, the greatest of which was a tragic and fatal policy failure in Syria, but he is certainly not stupid and he is certainly not conservative.

This is what he had to say: “This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re politically woke, and all that stuff — you should get over that quickly. The world is messy. There are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws.”

He went on to further define what he called this “danger”.

“There is this sense sometimes of ‘the way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people, and that’s enough … Like if I tweet or hashtag about how you didn’t do something right or used the wrong verb. Then, I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself because, ‘Man, you see how woke I was? I called you out.’ You know, that’s not activism. That’s not bringing about change,” he said.

And of course instead of bringing about any change, all the woke Twitter activists got outraged about how unwoke Obama turned out to be.

North of the border, Justin Trudeau also got a taste of what we might now call the Leunig Lesson. The insufferably smug Canadian prime minister, whose most famous quote was telling everybody what year it was, was all but undone at the last election after it emerged he had a shoe polish fetish that would put Al Jolson to shame.

The Trudeau blackface scandal led to him being dubbed “the prime minstrel” and forced his party into minority government, even though there was not a shred of evidence his stupid antics had an iota of malice or racism behind them.

Indeed, in the perfect proof that identity politics is one giant circle jerk, it was the Conservatives who leaked the photos knowing that it would detonate Trudeau’s bourgeois left-wing base.

And there are countless other examples of left-wing cannibalism across the planet, from [British] Jeremy Corbyn’s cheerless combination of socialism and anti-Semitism to [Australian] Bill Shorten’s allies threatening internal warfare if the failed ALP leader is blamed for failing the ALP.

Meanwhile groups of activists like Extinction Rebellion have managed to turn the popular mainstream cause of climate change action into a Pythonesque sideshow that has managed to piss off just about everyone with paid employment and access to soap.

Even the climate strikers have abandoned the climate supergluers.

So how well is the hard left’s Frankensteinian campaign to purge all but the clinically brain dead going when it comes to their stated objective of beating the right?

About as well as you’d think. In the UK Boris Johnson is odds on to romp home in the general election, with a double-digit lead over Labour and simply double the vote of the Liberal-Democrats. There hasn’t been a surer bet outside of Biff’s Sports Almanac in Back to the Future 2.

Meanwhile Donald Trump, widely derided as the dumbest president in US history and subject to every judicial, special and impeachable inquiry you can imagine, is uncannily positioned to pull off another surprise victory.

In the six vital swing states that delivered Trump his poll-defying win – Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida, Arizona and North Carolina – Trump is well in the hunt. Polling conducted and published by The New York Times – hardly a Trump cheer squad – shows there is only one Democratic candidate ahead of the Donald in these key electoral college battlegrounds.

That candidate is Joe Biden, a man who – despite seeming to be under the constant influence of an aneurysm – has some kind of connection with middle-American voters and is probably the Democrats’ best chance of beating Trump.

And, of course, as dictated by the laws of the left, Biden’s primary support is slipping and at this stage the momentum is with Elizabeth Warren for the Democratic nomination.

Unsurprisingly, this is the best possible outcome for Trump, according to the same Times poll. It shows Biden beating Trump in four out of six states – including the Florida mother lode – tied in Michigan and down by 2 points in North Carolina.

But up against Warren, the same poll shows Trump ahead by 6 points in Michigan and 4 points in Florida, 3 in North Carolina, even money in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and behind in Arizona by only 2 points.

In short, the candidate least likely to beat Trump is the Democrats’ new favourite.

This is entirely emblematic of the new disease that has overrun progressive politics. It is a culture that promotes ideological puritanism over electoral pragmatism and will happily consign itself to defeat again and again with all the resolve of a kamikaze pilot.

The right made Donald Trump president but the left will keep him there. And they will continue to keep conservative governments in power until they learn how to listen to mainstream middle and working-class people instead of constantly condemning them for not agreeing with every last wailing woke warrior.

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Boris Johnson tipped to win big at UK election, according to new poll

Boris Johnson could win a massive 96-seat Conservatives majority as Jeremy Corbyn faces an election wipe-out, a major new poll has revealed.

The Sun reports that a recent poll sees Mr Johnson returning to parliament with 373 MPs – 75 more than the 298 won in 2015.  Researchers estimate a 60 per cent chance of an overall Conservative majority – and just 12 per cent for Labour.

Though the vote share for Conservatives is actually projected to fall from 43.6 to 38.2 per cent, research by Electoral Calculus suggests Tories will sweep up lost Labour votes and therefore gain more seats overall. Major Labour losses are expected across all parts of England, Scotland and Wales.

Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party is predicted to receive 10 per cent of the vote but will not win any seats.

The Liberal Democrats would see their vote share almost doubling from 7.6 to 15.9 per cent. A number of high-profile Tory, Labour, Independent candidates have joined the party in the last year, ballooning their numbers from 12 to 20. The resurgent party would inflate further to 25 under the predictions for December 12.

The figures used by Electoral Calculus were collated from opinion polls taken from October 25 to November 4 in a sample of 15,917 people.

According to the Telegraph, Andy Cook, chief executive of the Centre for Social Justice said: “We’re serving up evidence that low-income Britons make up a big voting bloc in our swing seats. The party leaders need to win them over and, on this evidence, they have a mountain to climb.

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Clinton Throws Cold Water on Elizabeth Warren

We keep wondering if Hillary is preparing to jump into the Democrat presidential field.

At the New York Times DealBook Conference on Wednesday, Hillary Clinton criticized Democrat presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren’s $52 trillion Medicare for All plan as being unrealistic. “I don’t believe we should be in the midst of a big disruption while we are trying to get to 100% coverage and deal with costs and face some tough issues about competitiveness and other kinds of innovation in healthcare,” Clinton argued.

However, Clinton acknowledged that she was fully in agreement with Warren’s aim of government-run healthcare, as she asserted that Medicare for All was the “right goal.” Clinton merely believes that an incremental approach toward the government takeover of Americans’ healthcare is more politically feasible than Warren’s blatant socialist power grab. As with Barack Obama’s lecture about “cancel culture” or Nancy Pelosi’s warning about Democrats moving too far left, Clinton’s criticism rings hollow. Remember, this is the woman who got the healthcare ball rolling in 1993 with her proposal of HillaryCare.

But Clinton’s criticism of Warren didn’t stop with Medicare for All, as she then conveyed disapproval of Warren’s planned wealth tax. “I just don’t understand how that could work,” Clinton noted. “I don’t see other examples anywhere else in the world where it has actually worked over a long period of time.” Clinton then argued, “If you were going to do a wealth tax and it was on assets … how you would value it is, I think, complicated to start with. But, assuming you can get some system of evaluation, people would literally have to sell assets to pay the tax on the assets that they owned before the wealth tax was levied. That would be incredibly disruptive, so I think there are other ways to raise the revenues.”

Why is Clinton now coming out against Warren? Is she still contemplating jumping into the Democrat primary? Possibly. With Joe Biden — the only leading non-hardcore leftist in the crowded field of Democrats — limping along amidst growing questions surrounding his involvement with Ukraine, Clinton may see an opening to exploit. If Hillary did jump in, it might spell the end for Biden, leaving her with the support of moderate Democrats. With socialist Democrats split between Warren and Bernie Sanders, Clinton may see a path for winning the nomination. It still would be a long shot, but not as long as many assume.

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Stop Blaming the One Percent

A study debunks the fundamental assumptions advanced by Sanders and Warren.

It’s been a popular theory for decades, gaining steam over the last few years with the Occupy Wall Street movement and through the presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren: The wealthy take more than their share and, as a consequence, exert excessive control on government, making the problem of income and wealth inequality even worse.

Recently, however, Chris Edwards and Ryan Bourne, who both write for the libertarian-leaning CATO Institute, made a punching bag out of the Sanders/Warren theory of income and wealth inequality being bad. Instead, they counter with the facts: The problem isn’t nearly as bad as leftist hype portrays, hasn’t increased at nearly the pace many believe is occurring, and to the extent it exists is made worse by the very types of programs and philosophies favored by the socialist Left.

In his analysis of the Cato findings, the Washington Examiner’s Brad Polumbo adds, “Clearly, Sanders’ socialist proposals would just make economic inequality worse. In fact, that’s what has happened in some of the countries he often points to as examples.”

The lengthy white paper by the Cato’s economist duo points to six different reasons the socialist axiom of wealth inequality doesn’t hold water, beginning with the inaccurate assumptions of economist Thomas Piketty, whose error-riddled book Capital in the Twenty-First Century is heralded as a bible by those who subscribe to the inequality theory. The Cato pair point out that Piketty and his cohorts missed a significant piece of the puzzle by relying so much on data from income-tax returns. This misses up to 40% of real income, argue Edwards and Bourne. Also missing: the “wealth” individuals hold with their Social Security and Medicare benefits — benefits that do more for the less well-to-do than the wealthy. Yet Social Security and Medicare also sustain the problem because they serve as a disincentive for those who need to save for retirement.

Another root cause of wealth inequality is a problem most acknowledge, but few take concrete steps to address: cronyism in government. While Edwards and Bourne acknowledge the problem is far worse in other nations where graft is king, the prospect of rent-seeking and other techniques to artificially expand markets and limit competition contribute to the inequality, even in America.

But the best and most cheering reason the “income inequality” crowd is all wet: Wealth in our nation is generally earned, not inherited. Only a small fraction of the “one percent” inherited their fortunes; instead, the large majority made their wealth by working hard and taking the risk to start a small business, creating their own market in many cases. Contrary to popular belief, those who inherited their wealth eventually fall off the “wealthiest people” charts because many huge fortunes are split several ways, and seldom do heirs have the drive to start again on building a fortune.

So rather than leveling the playing field at a low level of prosperity by taxing the wealthy until it hurts, perhaps the better approach is doing our best to encourage entrepreneurship and allowing more value to be added to our resources, such as through fair trade. While that doesn’t make for a system leftists would consider fair, we have no doubt there are many fortunes to be made in America — that is, unless Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and a host of other Democrats would take over and make being wealthy akin to committing a crime.

We already have the public shaming of wealthy people as society succumbs to the mantra that all rich people are evil, ignoring that those pillars of society often make the nonprofit world go ‘round. Wealth creation is the right model, not a stunted system built on envy fomented by wealthy Democrats.

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