The Big Club Spit on Trump but Embraces Biden

 The “Big Club” is the establishment, deep state, cabal, elites, ruling class, or whatever you want to call those in power.

Looking at politicians, it is clear who is in the big club and who is not. Most Democrats are in the big club, with few exceptions such as Bernie Sanders or members of The Squad. They may serve as useful idiots to further the Democrat agenda but will never get close to the reins of power, as Bernie learned twice during his ill-fated presidential campaigns.

Some Republicans are club members, typically those referred to as RINOs - Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney, the Bushes, and former conservatives, now known as NeverTrumpers. Media cranks like Chuck Todd, Jake Tapper, and Chris Wallace are in the big club. Other media bigwigs like Rush Limbaugh were never in the club.

Members of Congress not in the Big Club are treated like leppers, examples being Devin Nunes, Lauren Boebert, and Marjorie Taylor Greene.

A simple litmus test is whether someone is given a pass for transgressions that would normally land someone not in the club in prison. Think Bill and Hillary Clinton or Hunter Biden. BLM rioters are part of the club and released from jail lickety-split. Those let into the US Capitol on January 6 by Capitol Police, not part of the club, are rotting away in solitary confinement for months.

 

Read the whole thing.

American values are foreign to Silicon Valley because three-quarters of Silicon Valley workers are from foreign countries with foreign values.

 This explains a lot.  From a GAB editorial:

The establishment is our enemy because the establishment is the enemy of Truth.

This includes establishment “conservatives.”

Gab is not being built for the establishment.

It’s being built to dismantle it.

Our terms of service have always been unapologetically American and place the First Amendment above all else as a guiding principle when it comes to content moderation. This is something most “woke” American companies won’t do. This is something the vast majority of politicians would never endorse. This is something Silicon Valley will never do.

American values are foreign to Silicon Valley because three-quarters of Silicon Valley workers are from foreign countries with foreign values. Would American workers unilaterally censor fellow Americans at the behest of a corporation? Perhaps, but there would undoubtably be a few more dissenters and whistleblowers.

Gab is the only technology company in the world brave enough to authentically stand against Big Tech tyranny and offer people a real choice.

Going, Going. Gone

The credibility of the mainstream press establishment is shimmering into nothingness, like the last bit of winter snow after a week of warm spring days; just as our respect and trust for such federal bureaucracies and establishments like the FBI are similarly evaporating. While acknowledging and accepting that such establishments are operated by mere mortals, with all the weaknesses and moral failings that ordinary human beings are heir to, and grudgingly accepting the understanding that the establishment news media trends strongly to the left in political sympathies … look, we can accept all that and a certain degree of human bias, but what’s getting hard to swallow of late is the sheer, mind-numbing, flaming incompetence of them all. Which might be a blessing, for terrifying competence on the part of our current Ruling Class and their minions would make protesting or opposing them that much more difficult. Instead, as Kirk so memorably put it last week,

“What we have is, instead, an aristocracy of dunces, men and women who tell the rest of us how smart they are, and then screw up the entirety of civilization based on fantasies they’ve come up with. The rest of us need to start recognizing that the emperor not only isn’t wearing any clothes, he’s drunk off his ass and waving his wing-wang in our faces. The people who’ve flim-flammed their way into power are all dangerously inept and terminally deluded. If you doubt me, open your eyes and look around yourself: Is there anything, anything at all that these soi-disant “elites” have gotten right in the last century? Anything at all?”

I have to admit that I supported the Republican part of this "establishment" in part because the Democrats were undoubtedly worse.  In part I allowed myself to be deluded (McCain, Romney). But the Never-Trump part of the Right has self-identified as deranged poltroons.  The curtain has been ripped in two and the fakery, the genuine incompetence and venality has been exposed.   And it was due to one man who the establishment could not destroy or dominate.  God really does work in mysterious ways with imperfect tools.  Thanks be to God.

George Bush Criticizes Trump

Ace of Spades

One thing that strikes me is that Bush was pretty ignorant of the press as president or at least posed as being ignorant of them. On one hand, I guess, he was trying to float above them.

On the other hand, he very rarely rebutted the actual opposition party in the country, the national media, and I know many of his supporters pulled their hair out begging for him to actually do some presidential communications on this front. (And trying, futilely, to do for Bush what he couldn't or wouldn't do for himself.)

Strange to me that guy whose Administration was hit by a thousand Grim Milestones and cooked-up scandals (Valerie Plame, for example) would be so kind to the media.

My theory is that both the Democrats and the semi-deposed Establishment GOP have few hands at the levers of power -- except for their friends in the media and the permanent DC bureaucracy, so both have some investment in cultivating those power centers and pushing for them to have continued power.

Or even expanded power: Bill Kristol tweeted he favored the Deep State over the Trump state.

In the Democrats' case, it's just more of their same strategy of 60 years. In the Establishment GOP's case, it's making peace with an old adversary to destroy an even more dangerous, existential-threat adversary.

It just surprises me -- in a way that perhaps it should not -- that so many "conservatives" are now taking the media's side, as it's tottering and wounded in a way that it has literally never been in my lifetime.

For some, it seems, the leftist media isn't the hero they deserve, but it's the hero they need.

One thing became clear to me after reading Bush's book about his father is that he is thoroughly Establishment, as is every member of his family.  He's not going to fight to change things for the American worker because they are cogs in the machine.  He and his class are very much a feudal aristocracy.  Noblesse Oblige and all that but Noblesse above all.

What’s Wrong with the Establishment? - a reply to Jonathan Tobin

Why are they unable to come to grips with the fact that people have finally turned on them?  Part of the establishment – its Left wing – is always ready to ask, after each terrorist attack: “why do they hate us?”  It’s actually not a bad question.  It helps to understand your enemy and what motivates them.  But the Left asks the question because it believes that American history and its people are wicked and wants to atone for its manifold sins. 

But the Jonathan Tobin wing – the neo-conservative wing of the establishment - has not really bothered to ask that question: “why do so many of the American people rise up against us?”  It makes the unsupported assumption that its policies and attitudes are the right ones and those who disagree are wrong. 

The latest Tobin article is a case in point.  Trump’s Tweets and American Honor begins with the time-honored tradition of accusing your opponents of being bigoted racists who are also stupid.

Like a lot of other conservative political writers who are critical of Donald Trump, I get a lot of interesting comments from his fans. Some are profane. Others are anti-Semitic. Those comments demonstrate how much cognitive dissonance some people have to deal with. The fact that a lot of bigots and racists think Trump is grand in spite of his Jewish grandchildren and willingness to toe the line for Israel in his speech to AIPAC is inexplicable.

The problem with Tobin’s analysis – I prefer to call it dismissal – of the people he labels as bigots and racist is that he has the same understanding of character as writers of third-rate books and plays; cartoon cut-outs wearing black or white hats.  Anything more complex, more nuanced, does not compute.

And while you have your boogie-man handy, why not smear your target?

But, of course, their views are no more contradictory than those of their idol, a man who dog whistles about race and bias and encourages violence against foes while also claiming to be a guardian of the Constitution.

“Dog whistles” are one of those tools that were once the province of Liberals who label words like “hard work” to be racist.  Now that they have found a common enemy they have picked up the dog whistle tool and are “working hard” to use it. 

Note the other tool that Tobin borrows from the Leftist weapons cache, ignoring the riot but condemning the reaction to it.  For the record, Trump has been the victim of thugs (“thugs” is another “dog whistle” according to those in the know) who have violently disrupted peaceful rallies of Trump supporters.  Trump told his security people to remove the disrupters and said that at other times they would have been “carried out on a stretcher.”  After much provocation, one member of the Trump audience actually struck one of the thugs.  Apparently, Trump is not very good at encouraging violence if that’s all that happened after so much provocation.   But in Tobin’s world Trump is the violent one.

When asked for reasons other than the fact that Trump supporters are all racist bigots, Tobin explains that he’s wrong, wrong, wrong:

But the more interesting comments from Trump fans are those that seek an explanation for my aversion to their hero. The easy answer to their question has come in dozens of pieces in which I’ve examined his lack of understanding of the issues, his substituting empty slogans for policy, his lack of respect for the Constitution, and his wrongheaded approach to foreign policy and economic issues. While he doesn’t seem to have any firm principles or ideology, he does seem to gravitate toward dangerous isolationist and protectionist ideas that are a prescription for disaster.

Which really doesn’t get to the question of why Trump is popular.  In between being just plain wrong about everything, is Trump addressing issues that Tobin as left unaddressed?  Despite the endless pieces that Tobin says he’s written that are right about the issues, he still has not managed to convince Trump supporters that he – Tobin – has the answers, the solutions that Trump supporters want. 

But wait, we’re not through.  Not only is Trump wrong, wrong, dangerously wrong on the issues.  He’s just not “our kind.”  Think I’m kidding?  Here’s Tobin:

But some readers dismiss these substantive disagreements and demand that I tell them what’s really eating at me about Trump. They also wonder if I’m judging them by treating the man of the hour as beneath my standards.

It’s evident that Tobin is not a big fan of democracy or elections.  Now, after Obama’s election, I was unhappy with the result.  I believed then that Obama was elected because he was a blank canvas, using “Hope and change” as a slogan into which anyone could project their own wishes.  However, Tobin exhibits exactly the kind of moral and intellectual superiority that has made his class despised.  He accuses Trump of gaining popularity on the backs of weak-minded individuals.  Let’s face it, what Tobin is referring to is White working class people.  These are people who had been abandoned by both the Left and the Right in favor of appealing to Latino and Black constituencies.  How many times have we heard that white working class (often labelled “angry white men”) are the past; the future belongs to Latino, Black, Muslim – the wave of the future. 

That Trump has harnessed the anger of a lot of voters may justify his behavior for some, but I don’t follow that reasoning. The Founders of our republic worried about the people being swayed by those who preyed upon the weaknesses of their fellow citizens.

You can be sure that if Jeb! had gotten the kind of pol numbers that Trump has, Tobin would have hailed the wisdom of his backers.

 

So, yes, dear Trump fans, it’s not just that your candidate is wrong on the issues. Sure, Obama is a terrible president on vacation from history, and Hillary Clinton has legal issues and is utterly inauthentic, as well as wrong on most of the issues. We’ve always had our share of lousy leaders, and we’re sure to get more. Democracy is like that. But Americans should also want a president who is a man of honor that deserves respect in the mold of the greats that we rightly revere. At the very least, we should want someone that will try to follow in their footsteps and treat the office and the political process with dignity and decency. Character should also count. If we don’t think that’s important anymore, then the fault is not only with Trump but also with us.

Who’s this “us” Tobin?  The fault is with you.  The reason that revolutions occur is that the Ruling Class forgets what the country class suffer.  People who write magazine articles would not be caught dead working on an assembly line for a living.  So when the assembly line – the job that paid the food and the mortgage moves to Mexico – it destroys the livelihood of the worker.  For the theoretician, the magazine writer, it’s the idea for another article.

The idea that Tobin’s kids make a living stocking the shelves at Kroger would make his hair stand on end.  They assumed that they were the natural leaders of the people, and when the people no longer follow, it’s the people’s fault. 

Yes, we want distinguished, nice, dignified people in office.  But Romney lost.  And it was largely because he was nice, dignified and completely out of touch with the concerns those people on the assembly line, the store shelf stockers, the truck drivers had. 

We are living in dangerous times with mass migration from some of the most dangerous parts of the planet.  Politically these are revolutionary times because the Ruling Class can’t seem to cope or denies there’s a problem.  Getting blown up is not an existential threat to President Obama with his lifetime protective detail.  It is to ordinary people getting on a train or a plane, or sitting down at a party. 

Sometimes revolutions are managed by the political aristocracy.  But they often attract a rough crowd, people who have lost it all and have nothing more to lose.  People who have been told they are the past and are no longer important.  People who have been yelled at and spit at, who have seen too many middle fingers thrust in their faces by people who have been pandered to by the Ruling Class.  And when they strike back, even once, they are accused by the Tobins of this world being the violent ones. 

Here's a clue to Jonathan Tobin, even though you may think of yourself as a conservative gunslinger, here's what people are asking as you pen your latest article ...

America to Establishment: Who the hell are you people?

To paraphrase a famous line from The Princess Bride: “inexplicable?”  Jonathan,  I don’t think that word means what you think it means. 

‘Best Trump ad I’ve seen in my life’

Can we elect people who won’t fold to the Democrats and vote for more pork?

Forget about what the Republican Establishment creeps want.  Focus on what Americans want.

An Establishment Unhinged

Calling for a moratorium on Muslim immigration “until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on,” Donald Trump this week ignited a firestorm of historic proportions.

As all the old hate words — xenophobe, racist, bigot — have lost their electric charge from overuse, and Trump was being called a fascist demagogue and compared to Hitler and Mussolini.

The establishment seemed to have become unhinged....

Set aside al-Qaida, ISIS and their sympathizers. Among the 1.6 billion Muslims worldwide are untold millions of followers of the Prophet who pray for the coming of a day when sharia is universal and the infidels, i.e., everyone else, are either converted or subjugated.

In nations where Muslims are already huge majorities, where are the Jews? Where have all the Christians gone?

With ethnic and sectarian wars raging in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Yemen, Libya, Nigeria and Somalia, why would we bring into our own country people from all sides of these murderous conflicts?

Many European nations — Germans, French, Swedes, Brits — appear to regret having thrown open their doors to immigrants and refugees from the Islamic world, who have now formed unassimilated clusters and enclaves inside their countries.

Ought we not explore why, before we continue down this road?

In some countries of the Muslim world, Americans who embrace “Hollywood values” regarding abortion, adultery and homosexuality, can get their heads chopped off as quickly as converts to Christianity.

In what Muslim countries does Earl Warren’s interpretation of the First Amendment — about any and all religious presence being banned in public schools and all religions being treated equally — apply?

When is the next “Crusade for Christ” coming to Saudi Arabia?...

Japan has no immigration from the Muslim world, nor does Israel, which declares itself a Jewish state. Are they also fascistic?

President Obama and the guilt-besotted West often bawl their apologies for the horrors of the Crusades that liberated Jerusalem.

Anyone heard Muslim rulers lately apologizing for Saladin, who butchered Christians to take Jerusalem back, or for Suleiman the Magnificent, who conquered the Christian Balkans rampaging through Hungary all the way to the gates of Vienna?

Trump’s surge this week, in the teeth of universal denunciation, suggests that a large slice of America agrees with his indictment — that our political-media establishment is dumb as a box of rocks and leading us down a path to national suicide.