It’s no surprise to learn that FBI agents knew about the anti-Trump coup and stayed silent

 Did I call it or what? I said all along that the rank and file FBI agents would not speak up. The pressures of maintaining a middle-class lifestyle, especially when living in an expensive area like D.C. and the surrounding suburbs, would outweigh any moral considerations.

Let me say again that, much as I feel disdain for the choices these employees made, I’m not sure that I would have had the moral fiber to do better. I’d certainly like to think that, if I saw the Federal Bureau of Investigation plotting a coup against a duly elected president, I’d speak up, but I don’t know. I can imagine myself thinking, “I’ve got a Mortgage, college funds, insurance payments, car payments, a house in a good neighborhood with good schools,” and a whole laundry list of other things (and people) dependent on my salary and, even more importantly, my benefits. I can then imagine telling myself that the FBI management must know what it’s doing, that everything will work out or, maybe, that I should have the taxpayers buy me insurance to protect all my middle-class concerns. 

Middle-class fragility is real. This isn’t like that stupid “white privilege, white fragility” garbage that Critical Race Theory spouts. CRT holds that whites will viciously protect their turf to make sure that all the various non-white groups don’t take from them. Nonsense. Middle-class people aren’t driven by race fear. They’re driven by mortgage payments fear. And these FBI agents were willing to go along with trying to overthrow an elected president to keep paying those mortgages.

Shame on them! And, God willing, if I ever face that kind of moral dilemma, I hope I make better choices.

Disenfranchising Millions of New Republican Voters Makes No Sense

A top Republican consultant whined last week, "Donald Trump is hijacking the Republican Party."

Really?

This is a common and almost comical complaint these days from the establishment wing of the GOP, the same people who have hijacked the party pretty much since the end of the Reagan era.

In his disgraceful rant against Trump on Thursday, Mitt Romney even unveiled a new strategy by the establishment: Keep Trump from getting a majority of the delegates (though he is very likely to win a plurality) and then steal the election from Trump at the convention. Ironically, these are the same people who were making fun of the Democrats for "rigging" their nomination process to favor Hillary Clinton.

What is clear is that the party's brain trust, such as it is, is doing everything it can to disenfranchise millions of new Republican voters and deny Trump the nomination.

Romney and the Republican elites keep scratching their heads after each election loss and wonder why voters have concluded that the GOP doesn't "care about people like me." After listening to the way the GOP brain trust disses Trump voters, maybe these working-class folks are right.

I'm not taking sides in this race, and I have policy disagreements with Trump. But I did say publicly last week, to the consternation of many friends and colleagues, that what impresses me greatly about Trump is he is attracting millions of blue-collar, working-class Americans back to the GOP. They are abandoning the Democrats. Hallelujah, right?

But all I heard from conservatives was: Why are you standing with these "low-information voters" who don't seem to understand what a fascist Trump is?

I am not going to endorse Trump, but how many of his critics have been to a Trump rally? I have. You will meet truck drivers, soccer moms, veterans, taxicab drivers, immigrants, construction workers, young people and not a lot of Wall Streeters or political consultants. They are patriotic. They are seething in anger at both parties.

Trumpism isn't hard to explain. We've had eight years of a mostly failed Republican president followed by eight years of a completely failed Democrat. Over this whole period, the middle class hasn't seen a pay increase -- while GOP political consultants rake in millions as a reward for losing. The fact that four of the wealthiest counties in America are inside or near the Washington Beltway says everything to voters about who is benefiting from a $4 trillion government.

The Republicans have only themselves to blame for this working-class revolt. These are voters who are horrified by what Barack Obama has done to our country and, so, in the 2014 midterm elections, they naively put their faith in Republicans to at least try to fix thing.

The exit polls from Super Tuesday's elections showed yet again an overwhelming anger by voters over the "betrayal" of the Republicans in Washington.

Why wouldn't they feel betrayed?

Republicans have promised these voters they will build a wall, solve illegal immigration, balance the budget, rein in the IRS, cut the waste and fraud and defund Obama's illegal executive orders. But every time they are handed the controls of government, they invent some new excuse for not delivering.

The fiscally catastrophic budget that the Republicans in the House and Senate passed did the opposite of everything the GOP had pledged to do when they were trying to get these people's votes.

Now we have the political establishment going to their billionaire check writers to fund their banal super PACs. Super PACs have become a way for the GOP to avoid talking to voters. Luckily, the super PACs have proven to be impotent, and if donors are dumb enough to dump another $50 million into the corrupt political-consultant sinkhole, so be it.

The same party elites who have told us that we conservatives have to hold our noses and vote for Bob Dole or George W. Bush or Romney now say they will bolt the party if Trump is the nominee. Who's going to hand the election to Clinton in this spat? The party is cracking up. It's the establishment and the check writers versus the working class in America.

In this fight for the soul of the party, I will stand proudly with the workers who are victims, not beneficiaries, of a $4 trillion government that everyone in Washington keeps saying is "here to help them." I'm confident we will win, because this is still a democracy and, sorry, the rules are still "One person, one vote," not "One dollar, one vote."

Donald Trump, Class Warrior

Allow me to elaborate.

I'm a British immigrant, and grew up in a northern English working-class town. Taking my regional accent to Oxford University and then the British civil service, I learned a certain amount about my own class consciousness and other people's snobbery. But in London or Oxford from the 1970s onwards I never witnessed the naked disdain for the working class that much of America's metropolitan elite finds permissible in 2016.

When my wife and I bought some land in West Virginia and built a house there, many friends in Washington asked why we would ever do that. Jokes about guns, banjo music, in-breeding, people without teeth and so forth often followed. These Washington friends, in case you were wondering, are good people. They'd be offended by crass, cruel jokes about any other group. They deplore prejudice and keep an eye out for unconscious bias. More than a few object to the term, "illegal immigrant." Yet somehow they feel the white working class has it coming.

My neighbors in West Virginia are good people too. Hard to believe, since some work outside and not all have degrees, but trust me on this. They're aware of how they're seen by the upper orders. They understand the prevailing view that they're bigots, too stupid to know what's good for them, and they see that this contempt is reserved especially for them. The ones I know don't seem all that angry or bitter -- they find it funny more than infuriating -- but they sure don't like being looked down on.

Many of them are Trump supporters.

Trump's outrageousness is the key.  

The fact that he's outrageous is essential. (Ask yourself, what would he be without his outrageousness? Take that away and nothing remains.) Trump delights mainly in offending the people who think they're superior -- the people who radiate contempt for his supporters. The more he offends the superior people, the more his supporters like it. Trump wages war on political correctness. Political correctness requires more than ordinary courtesy: It's a ritual, like knowing which fork to use, by which superior people recognize each other.

This isn't the whole explanation of Trumpism, by any means, but I think it's part of the explanation. Supporting Trump is an act of class protest -- not just over hard economic times, the effect of immigration on wages or the depredations of Wall Street, but also, and perhaps most of all, over lack of respect. That's something no American, with or without a college degree, will stand for.

The country is in an "Eff you" mood and that's what Trump embodies.  Is he going to be a good President?  Who knows?  Can he do something about the nation's problems?  I hope so; he has managed to do some pretty great things in his chosen field.   Can he do something for the Middle Class; the men and women without the fancy college degrees who are living paycheck to paycheck and running up credit card debt?  Can he do something about the cost of higher education which has now gotten so expensive that it's unaffordable to people who are not millionaires?   Can he build that wall?  Can he bring good paying jobs back?   Who can be sure?

But he has not been flaked and shaped by the Washington food grinder into a homogeneous mush.  He has accomplished his dreams despite opposition from the political establishment, often by paying them off, often by using publicity.  He knew how to use the Bully Pulpit before actually acquiring the ultimate Bully Pulpit.  

Lots of people are saying that after the spectacular failures of the current Ruling Class: it's worth a shot.

Pat Buchanan: Donald Trump’s Rise Is Rejection of a Quarter Century of Bush Republicanism

In an exclusive statement to Breitbart News, Pat Buchanan declared that Trump’s rise represents a rejection of 25 years of Bush Republicanism— an ideology which Buchanan says has destroyed America’s once-great manufacturing core, flooded the country with low-skilled workers, and drained the treasury with ill-advised foreign adventures in the Middle East.

“In the GOP nomination race, the chickens of a quarter century of Bush Republicanism have come home to roost,” Buchanan told Breitbart. “Trump’s triumphs to date are due to his recognition of, and identification with, the Middle American revolt against Bush family ideology and policy, and what it has produced.”

Buchanan explained that “America is rejecting the Bush immigration policy,” which has “proffered amnesty” to “12 million illegals… because it said the United States is helpless to do anything about their presence here.”

“America’s establishment has failed America,” Buchanan said, “The single clearest message in the presidential campaign of 2015-2016 is that the American people would like to cleanse our capital city of its ruling class.”

Buchanan exemplifies the strain of American culture that identifies with Middle America, populism and nationalism. The Bush family is part of the Ruling Class, Trump (despite his wealth) is part of the Country Class.  Trump is the beneficiary of the vision Pat articulated in 2008. The chickens are finally coming home to roost.

By a margin of nearly five-to-one, the American people believe these so-called free trade deals lower wages rather than raise them, according to Pew polling data.

Read the whole thing.

Fundamentally transforming the middle aged white male

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: The Atlantic: Middle-Aged White Americans Are Dying of Despair. “Nearly half of Americans in their 40s and 50s don’t have enough money saved for retirement to live as they’re accustomed to, even if they work until they’re 65. All of this is crashing down on Boomers, who were raised on the promise of the American Dream.”

I Am Trans Class, and I'm coming Out.

If you thing that gender and race is a social construct, what the hell do you thing class is?

I was born an 18th century Duke with a vast estate, a stable of two dozen hunters, a bevy of mistresses, a summer “nooky house”, more estates in the West Indies (where I can assure you that the workers are all very happy with their lot and address me cheerfully as “Massa Duke, Sir”), a beautiful if slightly remote wife who is related to the King, lots of paintings (especially of me) by Gainsborough and Reynolds, yet I am trapped in the body of a middle-class, middle-aged journalist in ugly, pointless, 21st century Britain.

And it is HELL, I tell you, hell.

That is why from now on, to help my cope with my disability, I shall expect to be addressed as “Your Grace”, be given the place of honour at those of your miserable dinner parties I deign to attend, and be treated at all times with deference bordering on worship.

Thank you, Rachel Dolezal for showing me the way. You may be a horrid wretched oik from the Colonies (job going on my West Indies estates, if you’re interested) but you have enabled me to become who I really am.

After all, it’s not the body you were born into that defines you. That’s just an oppressive social construct.

What truly defines you is how you feel so I’m going to say it proud and I’m going to say it loud:

I. AM. A. DUKE.

DRUDGE on life in Obama's America

STEVE WYNN SPEAKS OUT: AMERICAN RECOVERY 'PURE FICTION'...

TAKE-HOME PAY DECLINING...

RACE RELATIONS 'ALL-TIME LOW'...

Rich and Poor, Democrat and Republican

The delightfully droll Bud Norman reflects on race, gender and class.

 On class:

Class used to be simpler, too. In our younger days rich people were all right so long as they earned their money in an honest and socially beneficial way, poor people were all right so long as their poverty resulted from hard luck or heredity, and most people considered themselves somewhere in between and thought themselves all right as well. Back then the rich people were presumed Republican, the poor people Democrat, and the folks in between chose sides according to their personal preferences. Now the very rich and the very poor tend to be Democrats, which imbues both with a sense of nobility, while the folks in the middle tend to vote Republican, which earns them a reputation as boobs. Because the Democrats’ candidates are invariably from the wealthier end of the party, usually having earned their wealth through political connections and speaking fees and marrying rich widows and other not very honest or socially beneficial ways, it requires a more complex theory of class than Marx and Engels ever conceived. The wealthiest and most liberal communities in America are the most segregated by both class and race, the poorest and most liberal communities can be counted on to continue voting for the policies that have created their segregated squalor, and the new rules somehow allow the former to retain their sense of moral righteousness and the latter to retain an even more spiritually satisfying sense of victimhood.

One in three Americans has put off seeking medical treatment in 2014 due to high costs

The lied when they called it "The Affordable Care Act."

Obamacare, of course, had promised that it would help make health care more affordable for everyone, but the number of people who can’t afford a trip to the doctor has actually risen three points since 2013, before most Obamacare provisions took effect.

The hardest-hit: the middle-class. Americans with an annual household income of between $30,000 and $75,000 began delaying medical care over costs more in 2014, up to 38 percent in 2014 from 33 percent last year; among households that earn above $75,000, 28 percent delayed care this year, compared to just 17 percent last year.

Of course. Obama is a member of the ghetto part of the Democrat party. The middle class are his class enemies.

Obama's fundamental transformation of America

Well, he doesn't have to worry about his personal wealth, does he?  Barack Hussein Obama has done very well for his contributors in the 1%.

Median household net worth decreased by $5,046, or 6.8 percent, between 2000 and 2011. ... Between 2000 and 2011, experiences of households varied widely depending on their net worth quintile (See Figure 1). Median household net worth decreased by $5,124 for households in the first (bottom) net worth quintile, $7,056 (or 49.3 percent) for the second quintile, and $5,072 (or 6.9 percent) for the third quintile. Median household net worth increased by $18,433 (or 9.8 percent) for households in the fourth quintile, and by $61,379 (or 10.8 percent) for households in the highest (top) quintile.

So far the Obama Presidency has been a slow motion disaster. Now things are speeding up.

It took a while to get rolling. Beginning with the “stimulus” that, to the surprise of those who believe bumper stickers, did not provide shovel ready jobs. So the economy was left to heal itself. It did so by shoving lots of people out of the work force … permanently.  It's in the process of decimating the Middle Class.  What do you do when there’s no chance of getting a job and you’re young. I dunno. Move to Ferguson and try a little looting? And what is the answer when the black community starts blaming the "Kenyan" black president? We’re about to find out.

Meanwhile Democrats focused like a laser beam on taking over America’s health care system. The image of competence in this sphere exploded when the website blew up. The real disaster, the greatest part of the destruction is not here yet, but it’s getting closer.

The Federal Reserve thought it would be a great idea to create so much money (Qualitative Easing they called it) that everyone would be a millionaire and bankers would have garage sales as they peddled their extra money. That didn’t happen but the effect of printing a few trillion dollars is beginning to be felt in the grocery store, and soon it will spread to the rest of the economy. We won’t be using wheelbarrows to take our money to the grocery store; we use credit cards which makes the trip a lot easier.

Meanwhile in another part of the forest, the group of people Obama called the “JV Team” suited up and decided that it would be fun to rid the world of everyone who didn’t bow to Allah. It’s attracting recruits from all over the world who like nothing better than to have their kids hold up the severed heads of their enemies. As a plus, they have revived the ancient practice of crucifixions. When a large group of their intended victims managed to escape from their mountain refuge, Obama took a victory lap, announced mission accomplished, and played another round or two of golf.

Despite assurances to the contrary, Ebola appears to be spreading. Perhaps nature is heeding the call of the Greens who have called for reduced population by depopulating Africa … or perhaps other parts of the world. We’ll soon know.

And in Europe it’s hard to tell the difference between the old USSR and modern Russia. Mr. Putting seems to see the loss of the old empire so much that he’s busy working to recreate it. The Ukrainian military may be just strong enough to begin World War 3. It's not strong enough to finish it.  Stay tuned, news at 11.

And the “leader of the free world?” He’s checked out. There are a few more parties to host, some golf to play and fundraisers to attend. But for the rest, don’t bother him. He’s got his eye set on a great house in California.

The Cloud Dwellers

Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish

Uncertainty and struggle are what we most often associate with poverty. Not knowing if you can still afford to pay next month's bills and worrying over how much more you can cut back when you're already barely getting by. This way of life has become more associated with the middle class than with those at the very bottom.

The statistic that shows that average black household worth is at $4,955 while average white household worth is at $110,729 is often quoted, but these numbers are not comparing similar things. Comparing the naked numbers is as misleading as comparing the average salaries in Tokyo and Bombay. What matters is not how much money you have, but how you live.

The $110,729 and $4,955 don't reflect different standards of living; but different ways of living. Much of that $110,729 is home equity. But why do you need to shoulder the burden of a mortgage, when the government will just give you housing for free?

It's misleading to think of the $110,729 families as privileged and of the $4,955 families as oppressed.

The $110,729 and $4,955 families both have large flat screen televisions, smartphones and the usual baseline consumer toys. They could both eat equally well, except that the $4,955 family doesn't bother watching its food budget. It just takes whatever it wants off the shelf and worries about prices later.

In terms of personal satisfaction, the $4,955 family is happier than the $110,729 family.

To understand this, think of the "Cloud". You can buy a laptop powerful enough to store all your programs and data. Or you can get by with a mobile device whose apps connect online to a "Cloud" of someone else's servers which store your data. The laptop is heavier to carry than the mobile device, but makes you more independent. Or you can just live in the "Cloud" confident that no matter how you mess up your device; your data will be backed up.

America is being divided between the workers and the dwellers in the government cloud.

The $110,729 families are independent while the $4,955 families are living in the cloud. Their cloud is "Social Capital". Social Capital is their support system within their extended families and the government. Instead of using real capital, they use the collective Social Capital of family resources and government aid.

The $110,729 family pays for everything. The $4,955 family pays for very little. The $110,729 family earns and saves money because that is its medium of exchange which it uses to obtain food, shelter and clothing. The $4,955 family uses money for luxury goods like televisions or sneakers. It doesn't need to save money because cash is just bonus points. Its necessities like food, medicine and shelter are covered by the social capital of the government.

Read the whole thing.