Is Trump like Hitler?

People such as comedian Louis C.K. and Glenn Beck have asserted that Trump is like Hitler  but have offered only an emotional rave in support of that opinion -- with no detailed analysis.

But hysterical claims that Trump=Hitler should remind us all that Leftists also repeatedly said Bush=Hitler.  He wasn't, was he?  I have made a particular study of the Nazi period so I have been looking for a reasoned rather than rage-filled account of the comparison.  I have finally found one: An essay by Professor Noah Riseman, a far-Left American Jew who doesn't know the difference between "rein" and "reign".  See his essay below.

In looking at the essay I will first mention something Noah has got right.  Weimar (pre-Hitler) Germany was a very decadent time with perversions of all sorts rife and a general loss of behaviour standards.  In Noah's words it was "progressive". America today, with its glorification of homosexuality etc. does seem very reminiscent of Weimar Germany. Noah and I agree on that. So it is reasonable to ask if America too will create a Hitler for itself.

And it is understandable that a Jew should be nervous at any semblance of Nazism.  But Noah has very selective vision, in the best Leftist style.  For a start, he realizes that there is a big  hole in his story but makes only a rambling attempt to cover it:  The different electoral systems.

Germany had, and still has, an electoral system (proportional representation) that facilitates the rise of minor parties.  And Hitler used that to bypass the traditional parties of the Left and Right.  The American system is the opposite of that.  It  effectively keeps power in the hands of the two major parties -- the center-Left Democrats and the center-right Republicans.  Under the American system it is most unlikely that Hitler would have risen to power.  So there is a clear structural reason not to compare the present USA with prewar Germany.

With no apparent knowledge of history, Noah also says that "Republican control of the House of Representatives seems all but assured for the foreseeable future".  Up until very recently the Democrats controlled both houses so what has changed?  Noah does not say.  If my electoral history is correct, Democrats have been in control of Congress more often than the Republicans over the last 100 years.  But be that as it may, the American system is clearly good at rotating control of Congress.  Noah is making bricks without straw.

Noah's ignorance also shows in his comments about a Sanders presidency.  He seems to think that Sanders could put his ideas into practice.  To do so would however require a compliant Congress and that would be most unlikely.  A President's job is to enforce the law, not create it.  Obama forgot that and found Obamacare to be the only thing he could actually get through.  His wishes about immigration and global warming were blocked by Congress.  He had to skirt the law via EPA regulations and by refusing to enforce immigration law to get his way to some extent.  Sanders' ambitions are much larger however so he too would be left scratching at the margins of the system.

The only substantial points in the screed below are the ones I have highlighted. Let's look at the points involved:

* Torture: It seems reasonably clear that most, if not all,  administrations have used some form of it on particularly dangerous captives and Trump has said that he will stay within the law in the matter.

* Free speech:  All that Trump has proposed is to widen libel law to encompass political lies.  It should have been done long ago.

* International relations:  It seems likely that Trump will indeed be more assertive with other countries, Iran in particular.  Obama's spinelessness with the mullahs is very dangerous to America's safety.  Iranians have been chanting "Death to America" for decades.  If they get nukes they may well try it on.  For their own safety, Americans should vote for The Donald.

* Muslims:  Trump has NOT "demonized", Muslims despite undoubted temptations to do so.  He has simply proposed a temporary halt to Muslim immigration.

* Latinos:  Trump has NOT "demonized" Latinos.  He has undertaken to stop illegal immigration.  Given the high rate of crime among illegals and their offspring, that would be highly desirable.

Now for the things that Noah leaves out:

Trump's speeches are essentially rambles.  There is very little of the policy wonk in him.  Hitler, by contrast kept on message. He had three major themes: The wickedness of the Jews, a promise of equal rights and the promise that he would be a candidate of peace.

In his electoral promises Hitler was a peacenik.  That he did not fulfil that is of course another matter.  But promises of peace helped get him into power.  Trump is no peacenik and is a demonstrable friend of Jews.  See here.

And Hitler's promise of equality is mainstream Leftism.  Trump has made no such promises.  Below is one of Hitler's election posters from the 1930s in which he offers himself as standing for peace and equal rights.



And finally, there is the matter of style.  Trump's rallies are undoubtedly rambunctious but American political rallies have always been high spirited and lively.  Hitler's rallies and speeches were very different.  As anybody who has seen Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will" knows, the rallies were very disciplined, most unlike the rambunctious American performances.  And Hitler's speeches were unique too.  He would start out very quietly and calmly and would gradually accelerate to impassioned shouting.  It had none of the Trump jollity

And the origins of Hitler and Trump could hardly be more different:  The impoverished artist versus the rich businessman

So Noah simply does not know what he is talking about


The more I watch the 2016 election, the more I see parallels to Weimar Germany of the late 1920s and early 1930s. This was a society that was culturally and socially progressive, with Berlin in particular a hotspot for new liberal attitudes towards gender and sexuality.

It was also a period of economic hardship, political gridlock and fragmentation. The economic crisis after the First World War and Treaty of Versailles left many Germans disenchanted with capitalism and the international order.

Throughout Weimar Germany’s entire existence from 1919-33, there were tensions between left and right which erupted in parliamentary debates and in violence on the streets.

The extreme left – in the form of communism and anarchism – became one popular alternative to liberal capitalism. By the late 1920s, the other alternative that promised to make Germany great again was the extreme right fascist movement of the National Socialist Party (Nazis).

By the early 1930s, democracy was clearly broken (if it ever was working in Weimar Germany). Historians and political scientists have written extensively about why the Weimar Republic was so dysfunctional, including a flawed electoral system, the international impositions of the Treaty of Versailles and – what I find most intriguing – the notion that democracy has inbuilt logic designed to destroy itself (read Theorising Democide).

By the early 1930s, there were no working coalitions, political parties would not compromise and the political system reached crisis proportions. In the end it was the Nazis rather than the communists who came to power through the very political system they despised. They only won 33 per cent of the votes in the November 1932 election (incidentally, 2 million fewer voters than they had four months earlier). Whilst not a majority, the Nazis did have a plurality in the German Reichstag.

In January 1933 the president appointed Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany in the hopes that he would stabilise the situation and perhaps even reign in the Nazi Party. A few months later the Reichstag passed the Enabling Law, abolishing democracy and ushering in the Third Reich. I do not need to recap how that worked out.

I look at the United States in 2016 and am struck – indeed frightened – by the parallels to Germany circa 1932. While the causes of the present crisis are different, there are a lot of similar symptoms.

Again, there has just been a major economic recession. Whilst the US economy is improving, people are still angry – and rightfully so – because those who caused the economic crisis have gotten away with it and the political establishment has allowed that to happen.

The political system is not working at all. Congress is so polarised that nothing gets done, compromise has become a dirty word and politicians are willing to let the government shut down just to score points and get their way.

In Weimar Germany one reason for the political fragmentation was because *the electoral system allowed parties with minute percentages of the vote to win seats in the Reichstag*. In the US, political parties controlling the state legislatures have gerrymandered districts so much that now there are only a handful of marginal districts.

Instead, Republicans are fighting Republicans and Democrats are fighting Democrats to win primaries which may as well be the general elections in most electorates.

A serious consequence of the gerrymander is that Republican candidates for Congress often appeal to the hard-right fringe to win elections. Democrats are just as guilty at gerrymandering, except they have not been nearly as effective in most states, meaning that *Republican control of the House of Representatives seems all but assured for the foreseeable future*.

Like in Weimar Germany, a significant proportion of the population is looking for alternatives to the political mainstream. Popular movements on the political fringes, left and right, have manifested in the respective forms of presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump (not to mention Ted Cruz and the entire Tea Party).

I openly admit to being a Sanders fan, and many of his cause celebres (i.e. universal healthcare) are common sense in other developed countries. But in the United States, a self-proclaimed socialist who advocates a revolutionary overhaul of American capitalism is someone from the left fringe.

*A Bernie Sanders presidency* would send shockwaves through the American political system, but it would not mean the end of democracy. Bernie Sanders wants change, but he still believes in the core tenets of the Bill of Rights and the principles of civil rights.

In fact, he would expand the notion of rights to include economic rights. Notwithstanding a groundswell of support especially from young voters, a Sanders nomination for the Democratic Party seems unlikely given the delegate maths.

A Trump candidacy and presidency, however, is becoming ever more plausible, and this truly frightens me. Trump is the culmination of over 30 years of Republicans convincing many Americans that government is the enemy, or what conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks calls 30 years of antipolitics.

As former liberal Congressman Barney Frank argues, in power Republicans have dismantled government programs and regulations in a self-fulfilling prophecy that reinforces the perception of government’s ineffectiveness. Now, to the horror of the Republican establishment, Donald Trump has seized their message and is channelling it with gusto, but with his own warped, authoritarian tinge.

Donald Trump openly talks about implementing torture, undermining freedom of speech and the press and behaving belligerently with other nation-states. What worries me the most is that he scapegoats and demonises Muslims and Latino immigrants with alarming comparisons to Hitler’s rhetoric about Jews

Trump’s populist-nationalism may not mesh with traditional Republican conservatism, but it ticks many of the boxes for fascism.

Until last week I really believed that Trump would never be president. Now I do not know anymore, and it terrifies me. If we look at the outcomes of the Republican primaries, caucuses and polls, it is clear that Trump has a hard-core base of between 30 to 40 per cent of Republican voters.

That is not a majority of Republican voters or even a majority of Americans. But in a broken, fragmented system, that may be enough support to be elected president.

Would a Trump presidency turn America into a fascist state? I like to think that the constitutional system has enough checks and balances not to let that happen. I like to think that Congress would never pass enabling legislation to force Muslims to wear badges or to force the deportation of millions of Latino families. I like to think that the Supreme Court would exercise judicial review and that the executive branch would respect any rulings from the court.

But I just do not know any more. And even if Trump does not become president, I still cannot help but think that Weimar America will never be the same again.

SOURCE

There is a  new  lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- with news from Britain about current idiocies

****************************

For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

*********************************

Who made Trump the frontrunner?

There seems to be an emerging agreement that America's Leftist hegemony did.  Obama and the Democrats did -- along with their sycophants in the media, the bureaucracy and the education system.  They have foisted on America so many weird forms of correctness that the ordinary American has been left completely out of it:

Homosexuals are glorious; Men who feel they are women should be allowed to use women's restrooms; Fighting global warming is the main job of the armed forces;  Only Muslims are allowed to pray in public; Christians must betray their faith in the service of homosexuals; little kids must be given lessons about sex; Women should be put into frontline combat as Marines; you must not say anything negative about Muslims or illegal immigrants or blacks etc etc.

All of these positions go against the grain for normal people but it is they who are told they are wrong, not the Leftist establishment.  And if you express your honest opinion you run the risk of losing your job.

And the GOP have been no help.  They just fall in line behind the Democrats on most issues. They agree that you must not say anything negative about Muslims or illegal immigrants or blacks etc etc.  The GOP have been bullied into submission by Leftist shrillness.

Whether Trump has good policies or bad on various things hardly matters compared to the chance he gives of escaping from the Leftist mental straitjacket. His "incorrectness" is his main appeal

And note that his degree is in economics so he is unlikely to do anything foolish with the economy, which would be a welcome change -- JR

***************************

A British commentary on the rise of The Donald

Trump’s gains come after he has gone out of his way to alienate the Republican establishment – he has insulted them, pilloried their most recent president (George W Bush), and overturned their orthodoxies on a range of issues. His wins have also overcome extraordinary opposition from the elites of the party. In recent weeks, Trump has been called a racist demagogue and been attacked for not distancing himself from former Klansman David Duke. More and more Republican politicians have announced they won’t vote for him in November, if he is the nominee.

Of course, the contest is not over. Trump’s rivals  did well enough to stay in the race. But Trump is clearly the frontrunner now.

If this was any other candidate, the Republican leadership would say now is the time to unite behind him. And any candidate that excited so many to vote – turnout for the Republican primaries on Super Tuesday was up to 8.3million, versus five million in 2008 – would be hailed as the leader of a movement, like Obama was eight years ago. But instead, the Republican establishment for the most part is recoiling in horror – and appears clueless as to how to stop him. In recent weeks, we’ve seen a last-minute and chaotic attempt to block Trump’s rise. This will become more panicked and desperate.

The GOP leadership’s strategy of coalescing around a single candidate who could go head-to-head with Trump looks very unlikely. Republican rivals to Trump remained divided, and it’s hard to see how Cruz, Rubio or Kasich have any kind of path to become that clear favourite. The party hierarchy now seems set to adopt their version of Hail Mary: try, somehow, to just scrape together enough votes to stop Trump from obtaining a majority before the party convention in Cleveland in July. Then, at the convention, hope that they can cobble together support for a non-Trump candidate (or maybe a combined ticket of say Cruz and Rubio).

Let’s leave aside how, if such a cunning plan ever came to pass, it would mean denying the nomination to the candidate with the highest vote total. The most striking thing is how the establishment’s contingency plans all lack a key component: leaders who can make it happen. We now hear party donors and other elites saying they want to rally around Rubio, their favoured son, in Florida. But while there may be a Republican establishment in name in Florida and elsewhere, it’s in name only. In reality, there is not a coherent group with wide influence in that state, nor do the senior party people there have any loyalty to Rubio, even though he has served as senator for the state.

Likewise, you hear talk of stopping Trump at a ‘brokered’ convention. But the convention cannot be brokered without brokers – party elders or fixers who can knock heads together and force compromise. The ‘party bosses’ no longer exist.

The ineffectiveness of the Republican establishment – or indeed the absence of a true establishment - has been a major part of this contest. As a recent investigation by the New York Times found, ‘The party has been gripped by a nearly incapacitating leadership vacuum and a paralytic sense of indecision and despair’.

From the start, the Republican leadership underestimated Trump – because they overestimated the strength of their own candidates, and the popularity of their own messages. They assumed that, if they found Trump beyond the pale, then certainly their party’s voters must feel the same. They couldn’t imagine that a populist, anti-establishment campaign – a campaign against them – could succeed. Time and again, the party elites have proved to be out of touch. One reporter in New Hampshire interviewed GOP officials and found that they didn’t personally know anyone who supported Trump. ‘I don’t see it. I don’t feel it. I don’t hear it, and I spend part of every day with Republican voters’, said a leading Republican. And yet Trump won big in New Hampshire.

To the extent that the Republican establishment has cohered, it has shown poor judgement in selecting candidates to get behind. First the big money flocked to Jeb Bush (or Jeb!), who was as exciting as a wet noodle. More recently they have moved to support Marco Rubio, who is supposed to be the future of the party. After mis-steps, including a disastrous debate performance, Rubio took the advice of the party’s so-called thinkers and decided to throw insults at Trump. Rubio insinuated that Trump urinated on himself at the last debate, and joked about Trump’s penis size. That’s what the Republicans’ best and brightest has to offer.

The Republican establishment’s ineptitude has proved wrong the view that a big money cabal secretly pulls the strings in American politics (a view popularised by Bernie Sanders, among others). Money hasn’t won the day (ask Jeb Bush), nor have endorsements from prominent politicians mattered very much. The party officials and activists, conservative media (including Fox News) and Republican think tanks – all have been shown to have no power.  

We’re witnessing a hostile takeover of the Republican party. Trump is winning with policies that are either at odds with the leadership (like on healthcare) or more extreme versions of current views (as with immigration). And he has done so by mobilising people - mainly working-class, without a college education – who in the past tended to stay home rather than vote. These are voters who have either been ignored or treated with contempt by the party’s leaders. Trump’s takeover has revealed the Republican party for the empty shell it has become.

This is not just a case of party leaders being flummoxed by an unconventional candidate. The weaknesses of the Republican party are more fundamental, and have been evident for some time. While both right and left got excited about the Tea Party, it is less recognised how small in number, and – more importantly – out of the establishment’s control, these ‘movement’ conservatives are. It is striking how the Republican party is lacking in groups and institutions that can mediate between the leaders/donors and the voters. In this respect, the Republicans are in a worse state than the Democrats, whose elites have successfully rallied around Hillary Clinton (who also advanced towards her party’s nomination on Super Tuesday). Even though few within the Democratic Party are genuinely excited about Hillary, the party does have a wide array of interest groups, like public-sector unions and Planned Parenthood, who will work for them, knock on doors, and so on.

One reason why the Republican establishment is failing is that they have not properly understood Trump’s supporters. It is not the case – as both pundits and party representatives seem to think – that Trump supporters are angry. Just look at Trump’s huge events, which are festive and joking. Labelling Trump supporters ‘angry’ is a way to dismiss them as emotional and irrational. Moreover, it’s not the case that Trump’s fans hate the Republican establishment. They are better described as indifferent towards it – they have zero loyalty, because that establishment thinks they are nothings.

For the Republican establishment, that verdict from the masses is perhaps worse than outright opposition.

SOURCE

********************************

An Australian commentary on the rise of The Donald

By financial journalist Robert Gottliebsen

Don’t be shocked by the fact that Donald Trump is now the front runner for the Republican nomination for President of the United States of America.

Instead, understand the forces that have led to his rise and be aware that those same forces are building up here in Australia. In a few years, those forces could well cause either of our major political parties to take a radical turn away from the conventional approach to government.

The business community needs to understand that many of the basic assumptions now being embraced, such as globalisation, free-trade agreements, migration and bad behaviour on sharemarkets (start with shorting and legal insider trading), are now being challenged.

The main force driving support for Trump is that the US middle class is being hollowed out and salaries are not rising. Even worse many are losing their jobs and are being forced to take a salary cut to earn an income. And if the middle class is struggling, it makes it even tougher for low-income people.

At the same time, the whole population is watching appalling behaviour on Wall Street and believes that technology, globalisation and free-trade agreements are pushing the profit share of the US economy higher and higher. If you let that happen in a democracy, then expect a voter backlash. In the US it was simply a question of when and whether the backlash would come from the right or the left.

I have always believed that unless the current US hollowing out of the middle class was addressed, the voter backlash would radically change the presidency in either 2020 or 2024 and could usher in an era of US isolationism.

That still might be right, but we are watching Donald Trump brilliantly handle these issues blaming free trade and migration for destroying the American dream. Trump promises to make America great again.

Remember we are talking politics not whether Trump is right or wrong, so saying Trump is wrong or can’t achieve his goals is irrelevant. This is a sales pitch.

Just as importantly, Trump has isolated another force that may be just as powerful around the world — ordinary people both in the US, Australia and many other places are sick and tired of the political correctness that has infiltrated so many of government bodies and the media. When incomes and jobs were booming it was tolerated. Trump is probably the most ‘politically incorrect’ political aspirant the world has seen since Ronald Reagan.

He has therefore become a folk hero among a lot of people. That does not mean he will win. The Democrats’ Hillary Clinton is a conventional candidate and she is hot favourite to secure the presidency. However, she is already being drawn to the Trump line on issues like the abuses on Wall Street.

Fascinatingly, the Democrats number two candidate, like Trump, has pitched his campaign to appeal to those in the American middle and lower income levels who are being hit.

But whereas Trump’s remedies come from the right, Bernie Sanders remedies come from the hard left.

In the UK, the Labour Party is being led by the hard left, while in Germany the opposition against migration is coming from the hard right. These events are a perfectly predictable response to what is happening in those communities.

In Australia, both our major parties pursue conventional policies and are united on the refugee issue, although there are internal differences within both parties.

But if by 2019 there is still an Australian income recession and the free-trade agreements have not delivered benefits to the middle- and lower-income levels, then the party that loses the 2016 election might well embrace radical polices, either to the left or right. And the Greens have an eye to the gap.

The problem for the US, Australia and all developed countries is that technology is going to replace vast swathes of middle class jobs. Much of Australia’s posterity has come from migration but if we see the current income recession drag on, then Trump- or Sanders-type policies will become popular.

The Business Council is trying to get the government to lower company tax — an incredibly dangerous political move given the income recession and the fact that Australian corporate tax rates after franking credits are not way out of line. What would have been far more sensible for the Business Council in the current environment would have been to advocate allowing companies to start new ventures that are taxed at a lower rate but not to have the benefits of franking credits for the profits of those ventures.

And we are seeing private health premiums rise, which hits the middle class, because governments are simply lazy or incompetent and will not tackle the duplication and waste in the system.

The rise of Trump is an alert to everyone.

SOURCE

****************************

For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

*********************************

Trump Taps Something That's Long Been Ignored

If Super Tuesday proved anything, it’s that a large number of American voters will, indeed, pull the lever for Donald Trump — and for valid reasons.  It’s clear Trump has found a trigger point among many voters. And he’s hitting it with incredible consistency.

“My market is the people in the country who want to see America be great again,” Trump explained. “It’s very simple. That’s a lot of people. That’s not broken down by age, or race or anything.”

While it’s all too easy to judge Trump supporters by the candidate they follow, Trumpmania’s real appeal goes much deeper than political theater — and it’s worth understanding.

As much as we despise politics via class stratification, that’s where we must begin. For it’s working-class Americans — blue-collar, lacking political power and without friends in high places — who believe they have at last found an ally, an advocate, a voice in the man who proudly claimed to “love the poorly educated.”

In an astute explanation of “Trump’s America,” Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute writes of “the emergence of a new upper class and a new lower class and … the plight of the working class caught in between.” Populating the new upper class are the elites — politicians, professors, cultural icons, business moguls. They shape policy, wield power, and are heard simply by nature of their status.

The new lower class includes those “who have dropped out of some of the most basic institutions of American civic culture, especially work and marriage.” Meanwhile, the working class is left in the middle. “Trumpism,” Murray writes, “is the voice of a beleaguered working class.” And “the central truth of Trumpism as a phenomenon is that the entire American working class has legitimate reasons to be angry at the ruling class.”

We’ve noted that he is the ace of anger affirmation before.

And indeed, it’s the so-called working class — not the ruling class — that has borne the impact of the exportation of millions of manufacturing jobs and the influx of illegal aliens who now hold many working class jobs.

Peggy Noonan describes it as the rift between the “protected” and “unprotected.” She writes, “The protected make public policy. The unprotected live in it. The unprotected are starting to push back.”

And if today’s “protected” make up the “ruling class” — those who create the world in which the rest of us live — is it any wonder the “unprotected” have grown disillusioned?

As Claremont Institute Fellow Angelo Codevilla writes, “Ordinary Americans have endured being insulted by the ruling class’s favorite epithets — racist, sexist, etc., and, above all, stupid…. No wonder, then, that millions of Americans lose respect for a ruling class that disrespects them, that they identify with whomever promises some kind of turnabout against that class, and that they care less and less for the integrity of institutions that fail to protect them.”

A look at who actually supported Trump on Super Tuesday bears this out. Residents of economically distressed communities were more likely to vote for Trump than voters in prosperous areas.

Need more convincing? Just listen to what a recent caller told Rush Limbaugh: “It’s kind of like a few callers ago said that us guys are low-informed voters. I mean, just ‘cause we didn’t march out of somewhere with a Harvard degree or whatever, I guess we’re not qualified to vote for the president of the United States. I feel like that’s the whole thing. It’s like we’re not important, yet here we’ve been carrying the country on our back with taxes for years and years and we get no appreciation whatsoever.”

We in our humble shop are hearing the same. A reader recently wrote, “The Patriot Post needs to quit bashing the best chance of defeating Hillary: Donald Trump. Support the guy who’s winning over the American People.”

Another says, “I am tired of the elite running my country into the ground. I served a career defending what used to be the USA, only to see the socialist and RINOs take and trash her.”

It’s for this reason Trump boasts, “I’ve brought in millions and millions of people into the Republican party.” That’s true, but with big caveats. As we’ve also argued, Trump’s supporters are right to be tired of the elite., and they’re asking the right questions.

No matter what we think though, the fact is Trump supporters aren’t necessarily voting for Trump because he’s someone important. Trump supporters are voting for Trump because he says they’re someone important. And they’ve been missing that for far too long.

SOURCE

**************************

Donald Trump: Defender of the Faith

Charles Krauthammer

What happened to the evangelicals? They were supposed to be the bedrock of the Ted Cruz candidacy. Yet on Super Tuesday he lost them to Donald Trump.

Cruz still did make a reasonably good showing, winning Alaska, Oklahoma and Texas, the latter by an impressive 17 points. But he didn’t have the great night he needed to put away Marco Rubio and emerge as Trump’s one remaining challenger.

Cruz had done all the groundwork to win evangelicals and sweep the South by putting together strong alliances with local pastors and leaders. And yet, outside Oklahoma and Texas, he lost them to Trump by stunning margins — by 21 points in Alabama, 13 in Georgia, 14 in Tennessee, 16 in Virginia and 36 in, of all places, Massachusetts.

How could this have happened? A more scripturally, spiritually flawed man than Trump would be hard to find. As several anti-Trump evangelical voices have argued, Christian witness cannot possibly support a thrice-married man with such an impressive list of sins, featuring especially spectacular displays of the seven deadlys.

These theological arguments are both eloquent and impassioned but, in this season of fear and anxiety, beside the point. This time around, evangelicals are not looking for someone like them. They’re looking for someone who will protect them.

They’ve tried backing exemplary Scripture-quoting Christians — without result. After Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum and considerations of Cruz himself, they are increasingly reluctant to support like-minded candidates who are nonetheless incapable of advancing their cause in a hostile political arena so dominated by secularism.

They have no illusions about Trump. They have no expectations of religious uplift. What he offers them is not spirit but “muscle” (to borrow a word from the notorious former Professor Melissa Click of the University of Missouri).

The transaction was illuminated by Trump’s January speech at Liberty University. His earlier halfhearted attempts to pose as a fellow evangelical were amusing and entirely unconvincing. At Liberty, he made another such I’m-one-of-you gesture by citing a biblical verse in “Two Corinthians,” thereby betraying a risible lack of familiarity with biblical language and usage.

Yet elsewhere in the speech, he described how Christians abroad are being massacred and Christians here at home are under cultural and political siege. He pledged: “We’re going to protect Christianity.”

Interesting locution. Not just Christians, but Christianity itself. What Trump promises is to stand outside the churchyard gates and protect the faithful inside. He’s the Roman centurion standing between them and both barbarians abroad and aggressive secularists at home.

The message is clear: I may not be one of you. I can’t recite or even correctly cite Scripture. But I will patrol the borders of Christendom on your behalf. After all, who do you want out there — a choir boy or a tough guy with a loaded gun and a kick-ass demeanor?

Evangelicals answered resoundingly. They went for Trump in a rout.

The essence of Trump’s appeal everywhere, far beyond evangelicals, is precisely the same: “I’m tough, I will protect you.” That’s why he remains so bulletproof. His lack of policy, the contradictory nature of his pronouncements that pass as policy — especially their capricious eruption and summary abandonment — have turned out to be an irrelevance.

Who cares? His support has nothing to do with actual prescriptions. Tuesday night, the immigration issue ranked low among Republican voters' concerns. Only about 10 percent deemed it their No. 1 issue. The political success of Trump’s draconian immigration stance lies not in the policy but in the attitude — a not-going-to-take-it-anymore defiance.

That’s the reason none of the rhetorical outrages that would have destroyed another candidacy have even left a mark on Trump. He mocks John McCain’s heroism, insults Carly Fiorina’s looks, fawns over Vladimir Putin — nothing. If anything, he gains support for fearless “telling it like it is” candor.

This is a man who three times last Sunday refused to disavow David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan. No other candidate could survive that. Trump not only survives, he thrives. Two days later, he wins seven out of 11 Super Tuesday states and ascends to the threshold of presumptive nominee.

Which is why the only possible way to stop Trump is a full-scale, open-the-bomb-bay-doors attack on the very core of his appeal: his persona of the tough guy you can trust to protect you.

It may be too late. But everything else will simply bounce off the Teflon.

SOURCE

********************************

Gov. Scott Walker on How Obama Helped Conservative Movement Thrive

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, said Thursday that President Barack Obama has helped the conservative movement expand during the past seven years.

Since Obama took office in 2009, Walker noted, the number of Democratic governors across the United States has fallen from 28 to 18.

“The only nice thing I can say about this president is he’s been an incredible recruiter for conservative candidates,” Walker said during the 2016 Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, at Maryland’s National Harbor near Washington, D.C.

He cited Matt Bevin’s unlikely win in Kentucky’s gubernatorial race in November as evidence that the grassroots conservative movement has gained momentum under the Obama administration.

Bevin’s defeat of Jack Conway, Kentucky’s former Democratic attorney general, made him the state’s third Republican governor since World War II and one of 31 GOP governors who currently hold office across the United States.

“The reason why we see that kind of change is because Americans are looking for leadership that counters the failed policies of Barack Obama,” Walker said.

Republicans also have seen their party grow in state legislatures. Since 2009, Walker said, roughly 1,000 new GOP lawmakers have been elected to state legislatures throughout the nation.

Walker noted that 27 state legislatures were controlled entirely by Democrats when Obama took office, and eight were evenly split between the parties.

Today, Democrats control 11 state legislatures. Eight remain split.

“The conservative movement is alive and well in states all across America,” Walker said. “Why? Because our policies are working.”

The Wisconsin governor pointed to Indiana Gov. Mike Pence’s success in bringing the unemployment rate down to the lowest it has been since March 2011. South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, meanwhile, has added 30,000 state residents to the workforce who previously were on welfare.

“Positive, commonsense, conservative reforms work on economic policy, they work on fiscal policy, they work on social policy,” Walker said.

Running through Saturday, CPAC offers conservatives across the country an opportunity to gather with fellow activists and leaders for speeches, panels, exhibits, and other activities at Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center, just outside Washington, D.C.

SOURCE

********************************

For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

*********************************

The Left are amusing: The "authoritarianism" explanation for Trump support

On Feb 25 I put up some comments on the accusation that Trump supporters are "authoritarian".  The article I critiqued was based on some research by a PR man named Matthew MacWilliams.

The claim is that "authoritarians" are fear-motivated and that Trump panders to those fears.  That authoritarians are fear motivated is a claim that goes back a long way.  Erich Fromm asserted it in the '50s and various subsequent authors have made feeble attempts to prove it, e.g. Sales, S. (1973). Careful researchers would use a measure of fear motivation and a measure of authoritarianism and try to show that the two were correlated.  But MacWilliams and his gurus skipped that awkward step as far as I can see.  They just defined authoritarianism in their own way and noted that it showed correlations with some fears.  That their measure of authoritarianism was in fact a measure of anything authority-related was not shown.  As far as I can see it at most measures old-fashioned thinking. But even the academic work that MacWilliams relies on -- work by Feldman & Stenner (1997) -- concedes that there is no direct relationship between authoritarianism and threat/fear.

And the research made elementary mistakes -- indicating a profound ignorance of the precautions that psychometricians normally take when doing survey research.  Recently, however, a new and much expanded article based on the MacWilliams research has emerged -- under the title "The rise of American authoritarianism", written by Amanda Taub.

I think my previous comments were sufficient to show that the work is a lot of hokum but maybe I can add a few more comments.

I might initially expand my comments about the naive nature of the questions they used to assess authoritarianism. They were "forced-choice" questions.  A typical question was

"Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: to be considerate or to be well-behaved?".

The option you chose was supposed to indicate whether you are authoritarian or not.  But what if you thought that BOTH attributes are important?  What if you wanted a kid who was BOTH considerate AND well-behaved?  The form of the question prevents you from saying that.  So the answers given might not well represent what the person actually thinks.

So is that naive form of question construction actually misleading?  It is. If the people don't like the choices they are offered, what is likely to happen is that a "Donkey vote" effect will result: If the choices in a forced-choice scale are labelled "a" and "b", the Donkey voter will, at the extreme, simply tick all the "a"s.  And I showed in my own survey research years ago that forced choice questions can push the results in a direction more or less opposite to what occurs with more straightforward questions

I think that alone invalidates their conclusions but "Wait! There's more"! -- as the steak-knife salesman said.

The "authoritarianism" researchers say that Trump appeals to "authoritarians" as defined by them and that Trump is the ideal candidate for authoritarians. So virtually all authoritarians should support him, it would seem.   So I was amused to read this about their research findings:

"Trump has ...  a full 52 percent support among very high authoritarians."

What a laugh!  Even high authoritarians split roughly 50/50 in support for Trump.  Nearly half of these sad people DON'T support Trump.  Where does that leave Trump as the ideal candidate for authoritarians?  As is common in Leftist researchers, they can't even read their own data.  They conclude what they want to conclude, regardless of their actual findings.  Keeping reality out is an essential skill for Leftists.

So they have a lovely theory but it happens to be wrong.  So they might have to accept that there really is something rotten in the state of American politics, and Donald Trump is bringing that to the fore.  The fault may lie with the political establishment, not with the personal inadequacies of Trump supporters.

Reference:

Sales, S. (1973) "Threat as a factor in authoritarianism".  J.  Personality & Social Psychology, 28, 44-57.

****************************

Forget Trump... what's the U.S. done to deserve Hillary?

By outspoken British columnist Richard Littlejohn

After Super Tuesday, the nightmare scenario has moved a step closer to reality. America is on the brink of electing a polarising president with a long history of dishonesty, scandals and shady finances.

No, not Donald Trump. While the Republican front-runner was once again dominating the media coverage of the primaries, Hillary Clinton effectively sewed up the Democratic nomination.

Her sole challenger, self-proclaimed socialist Bernie Sanders, is still in the race, but Hillary is now unstoppable. She was nailed on for the nomination before a single vote was cast.

Nobody of substance was prepared to stand against her. They were all terrified of the wrath of the Clinton attack machine, which has left a trail of bodies in its wake over three decades.

Nevertheless, her preordained progression towards the White House masks a distinct lack of enthusiasm on the part of the electorate.

Turn-out in the Democratic primaries has been well down, compared with the wave of excitement generated by the Barack Obama bandwagon eight years ago.

His optimistic ‘Yes We Can’ has been replaced by Hillary’s implied ‘It’s My Turn’. In a direct inversion of John F. Kennedy’s dictum, Mrs Clinton asks not what she can do for her country, but what it can do for her.

Hillary’s sense of entitlement dwarfs even that of our own Cherie Blair, who still bristles privately that she had to play a supporting role to her husband.

But while the Wicked Witch has settled for a pot of gold and a vast property empire, Hillary has unfinished political business.

Not that the Clintons are short of a shilling. When Bill left office in 2001, Hillary complained that they were flat broke. Yet 15 years later, they are reported to be worth in the region of $110 million (about £80 million).

Hillary is said to account for more than a third of that money. Which is why it was absurd to hear her condemning the wealthy and powerful at her victory rally on Tuesday night.

Wealth and power are what the Clintons live and breathe. Through their charitable foundation, which allows them to lord it like potentates, they have taken tens of millions of dollars from dubious foreign donors. Meanwhile, only 10 per cent of the foundation’s income has actually gone to charity.

Equally insulting this week was Mrs Clinton claiming to champion those who are struggling to ‘put a little away for their retirement’.

There’s little chance of Hillary having to choose between heating and eating in her old age.

You won’t find the former First Lady spooning cat food out of the tin, in front of one bar of an electric fire, at her home in upstate New York, while Bill wraps himself in a moth-eaten blanket and watches a scratchy video of Debbie Does Dallas.

This is a woman who, while railing against the bankers, has made a fortune from financial institutions. She was paid $675,000 by Goldman Sachs for three speeches.

When asked why she accepted so much money, she replied: ‘That’s what they offered.’

In other words, it would be rude not to. Her answer recalled that of the notorious American bank robber Slick Willie Sutton. When asked why he robbed banks, he replied: ‘That’s where the money is.’

Coincidentally, Hillary’s husband is also known as Slick Willie, not because he robs banks, but because he has made a career out of extricating himself from sticky situations.

Bill has been involved in a series of ‘bimbo eruptions’, most notably the Monica Lewinsky affair, which led to impeachment proceedings being brought against him. He came dangerously close to being kicked out of office for lying.

Throughout, Hillary stood by her man. One of Bill’s many conquests, Gennifer Flowers — who was his mistress for 12 years — recently came out of the woodwork to condemn Hillary for condoning his behaviour and hinted that there was more dirt to come.

Women who cross the Clintons have to endure a torrent of ordure poured from a great height. Lewinsky’s life was blighted for ever.

I recently met a ferociously bright, thirtysomething professor of U.S. politics at Cambridge.

She told me that while young American women would love to see a female president, they couldn’t abide Hillary — whom they accuse of being complicit in her husband’s crimes against the sisterhood.

Twice-divorced Trump is also frequently accused of mistreating women. If he wins the Republican nomination, reports suggest that we will witness the exquisite irony of Bill Clinton leading the attack on Trump’s suitability to be President.

It will be interesting to see how Trump responds to being called a misogynist by Slick Willie, who these days resembles a redneck roué in a Reno casino.

The Clintons have been mired in scandal, as far back as the Whitewater Controversy, which revolved around dodgy land deals in Arkansas, when Bill was governor.

After he became President, Hillary was accused of lying to an official inquiry into the sacking of several White House staff who were replaced by Clinton cronies.

Now Mrs Clinton is being investigated by the FBI for illegally using her own private email server to send and receive classified correspondence in connection with her position as Secretary of State, the American equivalent of Foreign Secretary, and deleting 30,000 messages she described as ‘personal’.

U.S. government officials have been sacked and prosecuted for less.

Mrs Clinton makes great play of her ‘experience’, but her record in office is dismal.

She was Secretary of State for four years until 2013. On her watch, the world became a more dangerous place.

Having once said she’d nuke Iran to protect Israel, she then supported the deal to bring the mad mullahs back into the fold, by lifting sanctions and allowing them to develop a ‘peaceful’ nuclear programme.

She lied about coming under sniper fire while on a visit to Bosnia.

Worst of all, she refused a request to send military reinforcements to protect the American embassy in Benghazi, Libya.

The result was an attack by jihadists on September 11, 2012, in which the U.S. ambassador was murdered.

Clinton has never accepted responsibility.

No wonder between 50 and 65 per cent of voters regularly say she is ‘dishonest and untrustworthy’.

While her husband has a roguish charm and a fierce intellect, Hillary is just plain weird.

She looks like a Botoxed beaver and has a voice like a blowtorch. She’s a grown-up version of Labour’s Yvette Cooper.

She claims to speak for the common people, but has been part of the self-serving elite for the past quarter of a century, a fully paid-off member of the insidious alliance between Washington and big business.

SOURCE

********************************

For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

*********************************

It's Trump

A lot of Trump's positions clash with orthodox GOP policies but most GOP politicans are overlooking that Trump is obviously offering the public what they want.  It may therefore  be the orthodox positions that have to change.  Since most of those positions are designed to fit within the straitjacket of Leftist political correctness, that could be a really good thing.

Trump seems likely to break the grip that Leftist  thinking has on American politics.  The GOP establishment have certainly shown no willingness or ability to break out from the Leftist mental straitjacket  -- which is why Trump has appeal.

Some of Trump's policies seem economically destructive to informed people but they are overlooking that his degree is in  economics.  Whatever he does is therefore likely to be tokenism rather than anything seriously destructive economically. Those of us who have qualifications in economics understand its instructive power.

The Gipper was derided as a fool too and his degree was in economics also.  And he broke out of the straitjacket of conventional thinking in his time.  Rather than appease the Soviets he said:  "I've got another idea:  We win, they lose".  And that was greeted with gasps of incredulity too.  But it came about


Donald Trump, leading a seismic transformation of the modern Republican Party, leapt closer to securing its presidential nomination with a near sweep of Super Tuesday states, scoring strong wins across the conservative Deep South, in liberal parts of New England, and almost everywhere in between.

With states that hold a quarter of the US population voting, Trump won among almost every demographic, robbing his rivals of room to claim victory and putting him into a commanding position that has flabbergasted the party establishment.

Just after the polls closed, Trump was declared the winner in Massachusetts, winning support from working-class voters around the state. He also won Vermont.

“We have expanded the Republican Party,” Trump said from Palm Beach, Fla. “I’m a unifier. I know people are going to find that hard to believe. But I am a unifier.”

Senator Ted Cruz claimed his home state of Texas as well as Oklahoma, allowing Cruz to argue that he is the GOP’s best alternative to Trump. Senator Marco Rubio, despite a flood of establishment endorsements and cash, notched his lone victory in the Minnesota caucus, helping Cruz prevent Trump from making a clean sweep of all 11 states that voted Tuesday.

Anger at Washington and a yearning for a leader to shake things up continued to fuel Trump’s extraordinary popularity. Exit polls showed that Southern Republicans were more likely to say they were “angry” with the government. Voters in nearly all states said they wanted an outsider in the Oval Office.

The Republican Party establishment has been flummoxed by Trump for months — with increasing alarm about his anti-immigrant and divisive rhetoric — but only recently has mobilized against him.

Top Republican congressional leaders Tuesday took a dramatic step to distance themselves from Trump, denouncing some of his comments when he declined over the weekend to immediately denounce the endorsement of David Duke, the former leader of the Ku Klux Klan.

“If a person wants to be the nominee of the Republican Party, there can be no evasion and no games,” House Speaker Paul Ryan told reporters on Capitol Hill. “They must reject any group or cause that is built on bigotry. This party does not prey on people’s prejudices. We appeal to their highest ideals. This is the party of Lincoln.”

Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell was equally forceful, saying, “Senate Republicans condemn David Duke, the KKK, and his racism.”

“There has been a lot of talk in the last 24 hours about one of our presidential candidates and his seeming ambivalence about David Duke and the KKK, so let me make it perfectly clear,” he said. “That is not the view of Republicans who have been elected to the United States Senate, and I condemn his views in the most forceful way.”

The Republican leader found himself straddling a difficult line between trying to avoid lasting damage from his party but also not dismiss the candidate who is winning overwhelmingly in state after state.

“If I’m going to win all these states tonight,” Trump said, “it’s awfully hard to say this is not the person we want to lead the party.”

Trump said he didn’t know Ryan very well. “I’m sure I’ll get along with him,” he said. “And if I don’t? He’ll have to pay a big price.”

With 595 delegates at stake across 11 states — and record turnouts in many of them — Trump was in a position to take a dominant role in the nomination contest. Although the delegates Tuesday will be awarded proportionally, Trump is likely to win a large share of them.

“Maybe the establishment needs to get out, too,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News Tuesday morning. “When you see what’s going on. They’ve lost two elections in a row. Big ones. The last one with Mitt Romney should have been easy.”

Trump also said Rubio should drop out of the race.

“I think he has to get out,” Trump said. “He hasn’t won anything, and Ted Cruz very rightly points out Marco has not won.”

According to CNN exit polls, voters who described themselves as “angry” turned out in Georgia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Texas, whereas Republicans in Northern states reported being “dissatisfied” with the government but not angry. Voters in nearly all states — with the exception of Texas and Vermont — said they were looking for an outsider candidate.

SOURCE

***************************

Inspector General: 4 of 11 Forward Bases at Border ‘Not Operational’

A new report from the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General (IG) shows that 4 of 11 Forward Operating Bases of the Customs & Border Patrol (CBP) along the southwest border are "not operational"; at several other bases the security cameras do not work, the security gates do not meet standards, and providing safe drinking water for the officers is a recurring problem.

The report, Conditions at CBP's Forward Operating Bases Along the Southwest Border, also found other problems, including an access road that is "treacherous" and a "safety concern"; air-conditioning that does not work properly; expired fire extinguishers; irregular inspections; and in nearly all these instances, despite numerous work orders, repairs that have not been made over the course of many years.

The inspector general review states that the IG's office visited the Forward Operating Bases in 2015, and its report was prepared for the commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection and released on Feb. 8, 2016.

A Forward Operating Base, or FOB, is a permanent station "established in forward or remote locations to sustain Border Patrol operations," reads the report, primarily in areas where there is a high degree of illegal alien crossings and drug running. A FOB is indispensable to Border Patrol intelligence, deterrence, and rapid response.

There are 4 FOBs on the U.S.-Canadian border and 11 FOBs at the U.S. Mexico border. The IG's office looked at the FOBs on the U.S.-Mexico border.

At the time of the IG's review,  3 of the 11 FOBs "on the southwest border were not operational." So the IG visited 7 FOBs in the El Paso, Rio Grande Valley, and Tucson Sectors. Six of the FOBs -- 3 in El Paso Sector, 3 in Tucson sector -- were operational; 1 FOB in the Rio Grande Valley was not operational.

For a FOB, several Border Patrol agents are assigned to work and live there, usually in 7-day stints, an 8-hour shift each day. The FOB is required to have bedrooms, showers and restrooms, a kitchen, a common area with TV, and a fitness room.

At one FOB, the IG found the facility had "experienced recurring issues with the air conditioning," in a region where the temperature sometime measured in the 100s. At least 10 work orders had been submitted between 2012 and 2014 to fix the A/C problems.The IG report discovered "security issues" at all 6 FOBs, as well as inadequate documentation of maintenance and repairs at the stations.

Another FOB did "not have a functioning closed circuit television (CCTV) security camera system," even though it is mandated under CBP rules as defined in the Office of Internal Affairs (IA) handbook.

As the handbook states, "all facilities are to have a functioning CCTV system of cameras, recorders, switches, keyboards, and monitors that record security videos and allow agents on guard duty to monitor the grounds and perimeter of the facility," reads the IG report.

"If agents cannot perform this task," states the report, "the FOB is more vulnerable to a security breach."

The Tucson Sector requested in January 13 that the security camera system be repaired.  Another work order was submitted 19 months later, in August 2014, because the cameras "were still inoperable," said the IG.

The repair was than marked closed in October 2014, but as the IG found, as of its April 2015 visit, "the security cameras had not been fixed."

At a FOB [name redacted], the security cameras stored recordings "on a network video recorder rather than digital video recorder," which is not in compliance CBP standards.For the six FOBs visited by the IG, "four had one or more" security cameras "that were inoperable." All but two of the cameras at one FOB have been "inoperable since August 2014, when they were struck by lightning," said the report.

The IG report noted, "Because of their proximity to the U.S.-Mexico border, it is essential that FOBs are equipped with proper, functioning surveillance equipment to maintain awareness and monitor the FOB grounds and perimeter."

The CBP IA handbook requires the FOBs to have an 8-foot high, chain link perimeter fence and an electronic gate. For the FOBs at the southwest border, they have the fences. But only 4 bases have electronic gates, the other 2 are manual gates. During the IG's visit, one of the manual gates was unlocked and open, as was one of the electronic gates.

At one of the FOB's [name redacted] with a manual gate, 10 CBP employees told the IG that "the manual gate is repeatedly left open."

"The practice of leaving the gate open increases the likelihood of someone gaining unauthorized access to the FOB," said the IG. "In 2011, Tucson Sector requested funds from CBP to upgrade the manual gate. To date, the gate had not been upgraded to an electronic access gate."

At another base, the access road is "unsafe and deteriorating," said the IG. "Large portions of the road have washed away completely; other parts are impassable because of craters in the road."

The DHS's Office of Inspector General conducted its inspection of the FOBs in 2015. The IG also visited and conducted interviews at three Border Patrol sector headquarters and six Border Patrol stations.

SOURCE

***************************

Moral Hazard in Flint, Michigan

If we bail out Flint, we'll have to bail out everyone else

The city of Flint, Michigan is, in short, a mess. The city is broke, and because of corrosive water from the Flint River, the water supply has become tainted with lead and other toxins. In response to the crisis, Democrats in the Senate are proposing an $850 million rider to an energy bill that would provide aid to Flint and other cities in cleaning up their water supplies.

Let’s be honest, this is a hard thing for a lawmaker to vote against. The optics of voting against cleaning up polluted water can be deadly, especially in an election year. But good optics and good policy are often different, and what the Democrats are proposing is terrible policy for a number of reasons.

There’s a term economists use called “moral hazard.” It describes a situation in which failure is made less costly, with the result that people are more willing to fail. By signaling that the federal government is willing to intervene in local crises to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, mayors, governors, and state legislators have less incentive to make sure their policies are good ones. If something goes wrong, the federal net will be there to catch them. The result of this will be a lot more cities like Flint in the future.

Such a move in Flint would set a poor precedent. If the Senate bails out a single ailing city, they will soon have to beat back an army of cities insisting that their own situations merit a similar bailout. There will be no end to the flood of money that will have to flow from Congress to the states, because failure to comply will be seen as uncompassionate, or worse in the case of cities with high minority populations, racist.

As the national debt continues to soar past $19 trillion with no end in sight, the last thing we need is to start shelling out for every mismanaged city in the country. Problems like the ones experienced in Flint were created at local level, and they ultimately have to be solved at the local level or state level. Otherwise, we might as well abandon all pretense of federalism.

SOURCE

********************************

For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

*********************************

How The Good Guys Win

History is filled with pitfalls and terrible occurrences. For most of human history, the early world consisted of nothing but war, theft, slavery, and obedience to a state which ruled through fear. While those of us living in the US live so comfortably, that not even kings from a different era could compare to even our lowest standard of living, there are many people throughout the world that still live in an environment where something is absent- liberty.

Since WWI, the United States has rocked back and forth between waves of socialism followed by waves of freedom, continually fighting a war of ideas waged before our eyes without some even noticing. With the amount of negativity seen on the mainstream media and throughout the internet, it's easy for people to become boxed in a frame of mind clouded in doubt, depression, and an absence of faith. I'm not going to tell you to look for silver linings, the upside to things, or say that storms bring better weather afterwards. What I want to tell you is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

In the end of all things, the good guys always win.

Philosopher and writer Ayn Rand once wrote, "Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it's yours.” While Rand pushed individuals to continually fight against the challenges and obstacles they faced, it's understandable that each and every one of us can be beaten down.

It's easy to be beaten down in your private life, but to encounter personal struggle and then to see the world around you spiral out of control can be heartbreaking. The current trends we see in our government are haunting, as we witness men and women swearing to uphold the US Constitution as they place their hand on a Bible, and then go draft legislation that encumbers the most important tenant of a civil society- the individual. It seems everyday the principles of liberty are being treaded upon by a government that sees itself as the caretaker of your wellbeing, instead of being the caretaker of your ability to have opportunities.

Consider a caged bird- if it has lived it's entire life in a cage given the promise that without the cage it would be harmed, how is the bird to ever fly if for an instance the cage is opened? Simple sayings carry larger answers though. Sometimes, as much as we feel bogged down pushing for ideas and solutions that fall on deaf ears, the most vital decision we can make is to wait to take action when the opportunity shows itself.

During a speech on behalf of 1964 Republican Barry Goldwater, a young Ronald Reagan once said the following :

    "You and I are increasingly told we have to choose between left or right. Well I'd like to suggest there is no such thing as left or right. There's only up or down: Up old man's dream--old-aged dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. And regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course... You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We'll preserve for our children this, the last hope of man on Earth, or we'll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness... He has the faith that you and I have the ability and the dignity and the right to make our own decisions and determine our own destiny."

The ways you can effect change in your community can be small, but still carry a large impact. The hard part is determining whether or not you want to continue hearing convenient lies or an inconvenient truth.

Part of the inconvenient truth many don't want to hear is that you weren't born to simply work, pay taxes, and die. There is nothing wrong with passing through this world a quiet, normal life, but what is important is the decisions you made and how you carved the world around you.

This election cycle is not another chance to play two parties against each other, or see which individual candidate you'd rather have a beer with; what is important is whether or not in your heart of hearts you made choices that advanced the message of free markets, individual freedom, peace, and prosperity. No one ever died wishing they had done less in life.

SOURCE

*********************************

Bureaucratic Bloat Endures

California Senate boss Kevin De Leon was recently asked to approve a new chief for the state’s Bureau of Electronic and Appliance Repair, Home Furnishings and Thermal Insulation. The startled senator replied that he “never heard of this department in my entire life until Rules Committee.” He may since have learned that this bureau, apparently a licensing body, has an eleven-member advisory council. The Bureau of Electronic and Appliance Repair, Home Furnishings and Thermal Insulation is part of the state Department of Consumer Affairs, and there has plenty of company. CDE director Awet Kidane, “oversees the nearly 40 regulatory entities and other divisions within the Department.” These include the Acupuncture Board, the Board of Barbering and Cosmetology, the Board of Guide Dogs for the Blind, the Structural Pest Control Board, the Telephone Medical Advice Services Bureau, and many others.

Boards and commissions also abound outside of the state Department of Consumer Affairs. Consider, for example, the state’s Sea Urchin Commission. Besides its five commissioners, this bureaucratic body includes members “representing government entities which are significant to the sea urchin fishery.” Consider also the California Cut Flower Commission, which boasts a board of eight commissioners.

Taxpayers might recall that Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger promised to “blow up the boxes,” the maze of boards and commissions that often serve as soft landing spots for washed-up politicians. The boards and commissions managed to survive. Like Senator De Leon, taxpayers may not have heard of these bodies and may harbor doubts about their utility. On the other hand, taxpayers may be certain that they are paying the bills.

SOURCE

****************************

NY Democrats like Trump?

Republicans have not been competitive in New York for quite some time. In 2004, only three years after 9/11, eventual loser John Kerry beat George W. Bush by 18 points. In his two terms, Barack Obama easily eclipsed 60 percent of the vote, notably pounding Mitt Romney in the Empire State by over 30 points. In any election, New York represents a reliable 29 electoral votes for Democrats.

Well, in any other election. Enter Trump:

    "Confidential polling data shows Hillary Clinton could lose the presidential election in heavily Democratic New York to Donald Trump as the GOP front-runner’s support grows to the point of being “surprisingly strong,” The Post has learned.

    The poll results, from Democratic and Republican legislative races, have surprised many leading Dems, virtually all of whom have endorsed Clinton, while confounding and energizing GOP leaders, many of whom until recently have been opposed to Trump.

    “There are some Democrats who think that Hillary can be taken if Trump mounts a strong campaign,’’ one of the state’s most prominent Democrats said.

    Most of the polling didn’t address the possibility that former Mayor Michael Bloomberg would run as an independent, but some of it did — and found the former mayor took “significant’’ votes away from Clinton in heavily Democratic New York City and the surrounding suburbs, a source familiar with the data said.

    The new polls, a second source said, showed Trump’s support, even without Bloomberg in the race, was “surprisingly strong’’ in Westchester and on Long Island, the key suburbs often viewed as crucial swing bellwethers on how statewide elections will turn out."

This is absolutely critical. If Hillary loses New York, it's a sure sign that Trump is resonating with Democrats to such a degree that this election might be a landslide.

SOURCE

********************************

Who Speaks for the American mainstream?

If there’s one thing the current election cycle has made clear, it’s the reality that millions of Americans feel utterly disenfranchised. Their anger and frustration are driven by the daunting realization that neither political party represents their interests. This despicable status quo begs the simplest question, one every candidate running for elective office in 2016 should be forced to answer: Who speaks for us?

We want to live in a nation where there is a clear understanding of right and wrong, not one dominated by the “anything goes” cultural sewage churned out on a regular basis by Hollywood and the mainstream media. Who speaks for us?

We want to live in a nation that puts Americans first — one with definable, enforceable borders and one where Rule of Law is paramount — not one that gratifies the desires of millions of illegals and their cadre of elitist supporters aiming to fundamentally transform our national character, using cheap votes and cheap labor to do so. Who speaks for us?

We want to live in a nation where we no longer cater to the lowest common denominator of human behavior to accommodate “root causes,” the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” or a multiculturalist mishmash that excuses misogyny, anti-Semitism, and racism under the rubric of “celebrating our differences.” Who speaks for us?

We want to live a nation with an educational system that teaches children how to think, not what to think. A system where ideological indoctrination social promotion, grade inflation, worthless diplomas, “creative” math, and the generalized dumbing-down of vulnerable children is tossed on the ash heap of history. Who speaks for us?

We want to live in a nation where merit and excellence matter, not one where millions of “snowflakes” have been cushioned by trigger warnings, micro-aggressions, speech codes and helicopter parents who believe everyone should get a trophy just for showing up. A nation where the content of one’s character is far more important than the color of one’s skin, one’s gender, one’s sexual orientation, or one’s membership in a particular grievance group. Who speaks for us?

We want to live in a nation where the Constitution is defended for what it actually says, not what some people would like it to mean because a “living” interpretation of the document accommodates their agenda, political correctness or the latest trend. Who speaks for us?

We want to live in a nation where we don’t burden our children and grandchildren with unconscionable levels of debt that will destroy their standard of living, one where able-bodied people are expected to work for a living, and one where the free-market capitalism that rewards ambition, risk-taking and talent isn’t subsumed by a government-controlled crony-capitalist oligarchy that stifles competition and picks winners and losers. Who speaks for us?

We want to live in a nation with the strongest military in the world, not one debased by social engineering. A military that only sends men and women into harm’s way when our national security is threatened, and one that utterly rejects such nonsense as “winning hearts and minds,” restrictive and dangerous Rules of Engagement, and politically correct warfare that elevates concerns for collateral damage above the lives of American soldiers. A military with only one objective in mind when it becomes necessary to put the nation’s blood and treasure at risk: unambiguous victory. Who speaks for us?

We want to live in a nation where states' rights are once again paramount, where 50 separate constituencies would be given maximum freedom to innovate, to compete, and do anything else to improve the lives of their citizens without the interfering heavy hand of the District of Columbia. A nation where people intuitively understand government operates best from the local level outwards, not the federal level inward. Who speaks for us?

We want to live in a nation where we treat our allies like the friends they are, and our enemies with the suspicion they have earned. A nation where foreign policy is grounded in reality, not faculty-lounge-inspired wishful thinking. A nation that will no longer send foreign aid to people who hate us, based on the dubious assertion we can buy their loyalty and admiration. Who speaks for us?

We want to live in a nation where we celebrate our exceptionalism, not identify only by our shortcomings. Those who insist otherwise should be asked to explain why people all over the world are beating a path to our shores. Who speaks for us?

As the opening of the Constitution states, “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity…”

“We the people” is us, not a bunch of self-interested politicians and their well connected benefactors. A “more perfect” union is an aspiration. We must not allow our pursuit of that perfection to be the enemy of our goodness. Same goes for establishing justice and insuring domestic tranquility.

As for the next two items, it’s important to note the critical distinction between providing for the common defense and promoting the general welfare. It is the government’s constitutionally mandated duty to provide protection for the nation. It is not the government’s duty to provide for the peoples' welfare, but rather to promote the conditions that allow a free people to provide for their own welfare, that of their families and those Americans who are truly in need.

SOURCE

*****************************

For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

*********************************

Stop saying Donald Trump can’t win. He can, and he may

It’s been a media mantra since Donald Trump began campaigning last summer: He can’t possibly become president.  It’s time that everyone realized that yes, he can.

Surveys show the billionaire New York businessman and TV personality has extremely high negatives — but so does likely Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton. And unlike Clinton, Trump can run as an anti-establishment candidate at a time when anti-establishment feeling is intense, gaining strength and bringing new voters to the polls.

We are mortified at what might happen if Trump rides this anger into the White House. Why? His casual cruelty, dishonesty and belligerence, his awful remarks about Mexicans and women, his ignorance about military and foreign policy issues, his open admiration for Russian dictator Vladimir Putin — all this and more make him unfit for a position of immense power and consequence.

But these extreme shortcomings are ignored by millions of Americans who believe that Trump grasps their problems and fears in ways the nation’s leaders do not. These Americans see an economy and a tax system that increasingly seem to help only the wealthiest acquire more wealth. They see decades of middle-class wage stagnation as something Washington blithely accepts. They look at the immigration chaos in Europe and the Middle East and wonder why the elites of both parties are so intent on bringing more people to a country that doesn’t have enough good jobs or money to help those already here. They consider our foreign policy under both Republican and Democratic presidents and doubt it’s made us safer.

Americans with some or all of these views are attracted to both Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont socialist who has done far better against Clinton in the Democratic nomination race than anyone expected. They see Trump and Sanders attacked by the media and the conventional politicians of both parties — and that makes them even more attractive.

But of the two, Trump is not going away. Given how popular he is even in the home states of GOP rivals Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and John Kasich, it is hard to believe he will not win the Republican nomination. And the old conventional wisdom about this leading to a Clinton general election landslide seems shakier all the time. The former secretary of state, New York senator and first lady is a symbol of the political establishment at a time when many voters will see that as a negative.

Trump knows this, as reflected by his gleeful assaults on Jeb Bush, the embodiment of the GOP establishment. He’s crude and vulgar, but he’s not stupid. If he tones down his act just a bit; if he picks a reassuring running mate; if there are other terrorist attacks like those in late 2015 in Paris and San Bernardino — Trump just might be the favorite to win in November. There are signs mainstream Republicans are figuring this out. On Thursday, Rep. Duncan Hunter of Alpine became among the first members of Congress to endorse him.

We hope that Trump self-destructs. But even if that happens, the Trump phenomenon and the Sanders near-phenomenon should make it clear to prominent politicians, their patrons and their parties that they need to respond to America’s mass alienation and disaffection with specific policies, not patronizing rhetoric. A populist fire is burning. Without the right response, it could become a political and cultural inferno.

SOURCE

*********************************

Weimar America

By Victor Davis Hanson

2016 is a pivotal year in which accustomed referents of a stable West are now disappearing. We seem to be living in a chaotic age, akin to the mid-1930s, of cynicism and skepticism. Government, religion, and popular culture are corrupt and irrelevant—and the world order of the last 70 years has all but collapsed.

Neither the president nor his would-be successors talk much about the fact that we are now nearing $20 trillion in debt—in an ossified economy of near-zero interest rates, little if any GDP growth, and record numbers of able-bodied but non-working adults. (The most frequent complaint I hear in my hometown is that the government lags behind in their cost-of-living raises in Social Security disability payments.)

No one can figure out how and why America’s youth have borrowed a collective $1 trillion for college tuition, and yet received so little education and skills in the bargain. Today’s campuses have become as foreign to American traditions of tolerance and free expression as what followed the Weimar Republic. To appreciate cry-bully censorship, visit a campus “free-speech” area. To witness segregation, walk into a college “safe space.” To hear unapologetic anti-Semitism, attend a university lecture. To learn of the absence of due process, read of a campus hearing on alleged sexual assault. To see a brown shirt in action, watch faculty call for muscle at a campus demonstration. To relearn the mentality of a Chamberlain or Daladier, listen to the contextualizations of a college president. And to talk to an uneducated person, approach a recent college graduate.

If all that is confusing, factor in the Trimalchio banquet of campus rock-climbing walls, students glued to their iPhone 6s, $200 sneakers, latte bars, late-model foreign cars in the parking lot, and yoga classes. Affluence, arrogance, and ignorance are quite a trifecta.

Bernie Sanders—a proud Eugene Debs-like socialist whose campaign in normal times would have been the stuff of caricature—is now running neck and neck with Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party nomination. He rails like an Old Testament prophet at Wall Street, often oblivious that Wall Street’s totem stands a mere three feet away on the debating stage.

Obama may have wrecked his party by losing the Congress and most of the state legislatures, but he certainly has moved it to the hard community-organizing left. Sanders has little appreciation that he is an artifact of free-market capitalism, which alone has created enough bounty for such a demagogue to call for massive redistribution—in a way impossible for socialists any longer in exhausted Cuba, Greece, Venezuela, or any other command-economy paradise. Where does Sanders think his statism has worked—China, North Korea, Bolivia, Cuba, or the ossified European Union?

Bill Clinton on the stump has reminded us that there need not be any dignity to the post-presidency He offers a blueprint to becoming fabulously wealthy by monetizing a mere eight years in office with lifetime quid pro quos and Putin-like leverage. He has managed to make the sanctimonious scold Jimmy Carter seem reverential in comparison. The mystery of Hillary Clinton is not that she should be indicted on charges that are routinely filed against lesser miscreant bureaucrats, but that her entire corrupt career has always somehow been exempt, from cattle speculation to withholding subpoenaed evidence.

Mrs. Clinton is now like a tottering third-world caudillo—she can’t really continue on in politics and she can’t quit trying if she wants to stay out of jail. Her possible indictment depends entirely on her political viability and utility. She and the once disbarred Bill Clinton might appear like tired, tragic dinosaurs, bewildered that politics have left them behind in their late sixties—were it not for these aging egoists’ routine petulance and sense of entitlement.

Donald Trump is probably not a serious student of the European 1930s, but in brilliant fashion he has sized up the public’s worries over a Potemkin economy, exhaustion with wars, and namby-pamby leadership. His own remedy is 1930s to the core: nationalism, crude bombast, mytho-history, and sloganeering without much detail. Trump’s trajectory is predicated on the premise that a jaded public cares more about emotion than logic, and how a leader speaks rather than what he says.

In European 1930s street-brawling fashion, no one knows quite whether Trump is a 1990s Clinton Democrat, a 1980s Reagan Republican, or a Perotist misfit. He has thrown a ball and chain through the pretentious glass of American campaigning. Trump excites voters because he can profane, smear, interrupt, and fabricate—on the premise that as a performance artist he reifies what they think but don’t dare say about a corrupt political class and its warped, politically correct values. Trump reminds Americans what deterrence is: the supposedly courageous media, the so-called truth-to-power leftists, and the sober and judicious careerist politicians are all terrified how he might reply or react to their criticism. None of them want to spend 2-3 days trading smears with Donald Trump.

The president has a strange tic: the more he lectures about either the peaceful tendencies or impotence of an Iran or ISIS, or the more he explains how an aggressive Russia or China is stupidly not acting in their own interests, the more we know that the world is becoming ever more dangerous to the United States. He peddles mythologies about Cuba’s Castro, Iran’s aspirations, non-Islamic jihadism, and hands-up, don’t-shoot racializing, on the premise that even as all else has failed him, he wins exemption from reasoned cross-examination due to his “transformative” and iconic status.

Israel is now a neutral at best—a sort of forgotten Byzantine outpost in a dangerous neighborhood, forsaken by the medieval West. China brazenly has established the principle that a superpower can create territory ex nihilo—along with territorial jurisdiction anywhere it wishes. The only brake on Putin’s Russia is his own energy level and whether he believes that routinely taking advantage of Obama’s United States is getting boring. ISIS did not wait for its full-fledged caliphate to start slaughtering its ideological and religious enemies, given that it assumes a corrupt world has no worries about its genocide and religious cleansing. It is baffled only because after raping, beheading, dismembering, strangling, smashing, drowning, and incinerating, it still cannot win the attention of the West—and is running out of methods to torture and slay the innocent.

Not since Pius XII has a pope proved as mysterious and exasperating as Francis. He seems not to have transcended the parochial time and space of Peronist Argentina. The well-meaning and kindly pope acts as if he is unworried about the historical wages of leftwing authoritarianism and government-mandated redistribution. Why would a pontiff, protected by medieval walls and Vatican territorial security, blast U.S. immigration policy toward Mexican illegal immigrants?

Since Obama’s reelection, the southern border has been wide open, in naked efforts to recalibrate American electoral demography. The U.S. has taken in more immigrants, legal and illegal, than has any other country—the only impediment for entry is being educated, skilled, with resources, and insisting on legality. The U.S. last year allowed nearly $80 billion to be sent in annual remittances to Mexico and Latin America, mostly from those here illegally. Certainly, Mexico, in a most un-Christian fashion, has built walls on its own southern border to prevent unlawful entry, published comic-book manuals to instruct its emigrants how to violate U.S. immigration law, and written into its own constitution repulsive racial prerequisites for emigrating to Mexico—all to the apparent ignorance of the otherwise intrusively editorializing pope. Mexico’s own obsession with exporting its indigenous people to the U.S. is predicated on historic Mexican racism, always emanating from grandees in Mexico City.

Popular culture has become a 1930s collective Berlin cabaret. Apple—whose iPhones cause more fatal distractions than driving while under the influence of alcohol or drugs—refuses to help the FBI to open one phone of a dead Islamic terrorist. It protects the last calls of a mass murderer as if the logs were records of Apple’s $180 billion stashed in offshore investment schemes.

To walk on an upscale bike path today is to see more pets than toddlers in baby carriages (I counted yesterday). Swerving semis on the freeway used to mean high blood alcohol levels, now they reflect text messaging. Is there some rule that demands that only movie stars, investment bankers, and tech moguls, who live in houses of more than 5,000 square feet or fly on private jets, have earned the right to lecture hoi polloi on their bad habits that lead to global warming? Is barbecuing a steak worse than burning up 5 gallons of aviation fuel a minute?

Segregation, not integration and assimilation, is the new trajectory of racial relations. “White privilege” is said to be such an insidious aid to career success that careerist whites like Elizabeth Warren, Ward Churchill, Shaun King, and Rachel Dolezal will do almost anything to insist that they are really non-white. The president of the United States invited a rapper for a White House visit. The rapper's latest album cover shows a dead white judge lying at the feet of celebratory African-American men, with fists of money and champagne held in triumph—in front of the White House. Reality imitates art. Could the president give another Cairo speech about such symbolism?

The half-time Super Bowl spectacle was Petronian to the core. Beyoncé, in apparent reaction to heightened racial tensions over the absence of a black Oscar nominee, performed an incoherent tribute to the Black Panthers, with an non-integrated retinue, damning the police and canonizing a fallen felon with a long history of violent criminal offenses. In the age where “cultural appropriation” is damned, a multimillionaire, decked out in dyed blond hair and bullet-stuffed bandoleers, is messaging to an apparently new segregated racial universe—perhaps in tune with the periodic racialist outbursts of the multimillionaire Kanye West. If in the past, jazz, soul and Motown offered a positive corrective to crude, heavy metal white American music, today rappers vie to trump the raunchiness of Miley Cyrus, Lady Gaga, and Madonna. Certainly to watch the Super Bowl, Oscar, or Grammy festivities is to receive a pop sermon from mansion-residing multimillionaires about just how unfair are the race, class, and gender biases of the world in which they somehow made fortunes. In Weimar America, that Will Smith has a 25,000 square-foot mansion, but not a 2016 Oscar nomination, is proof of endemic racism and deprivation.

I wish all this could end well. But history’s corrective to 1930s chaos was a different—and deadlier—sort of chaos. And so ours may well be too.

SOURCE

*****************************

For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

*********************************