Will the Democrats Miss Middle America Again?

Yes.  Next question.

Here is what most of Trump’s critics don’t understand about why this new conservative populist coalition voted for Trump over not just Clinton but also 17 very qualified, distinguished, mostly establishment Republican candidates in the party’s primary battle.

It was never about Trump. It was always about their communities. Trump was the symptom, not the cause.

These voters aren’t going to budge. It’s not that everyone who voted for him considers his first term a massive success that has improved America’s economy and made us safer. It’s that Democrats and NeverTrump Republicans have done nothing to reflect on why they lost to this guy. They’d rather make fun of the voters—it is easier and makes for great sport on Twitter—than admit their contribution to this flee from normalcy.

Why It’s Not Surprising Voters Don’t Think Trump’s Rhetoric Is Disqualifying

Because they are not stupid. 

It’s very, very true that so much of what passes for “civility” in the center-left consensus in This Town is anything but. Official Washington Civility™ is more often than not a cloak for the backstabbing petty “Mean Girls” nonsense that’s really going on over lunch at The Palm...

 They saw what was going on but were afraid prevented from saying it

...

And because media and major institutions all lean left and apply most of the pressure in civil society, it tends to be one group of people disproportionately biting their lips. Those same people snapped in 2016.

Why did they snap? Well, Barack Obama was a well-spoken, generally nice guy. He also sued nuns to make them pay for abortions. Everyone in his orbit spent months in 2012 calling Mitt Romney — Mitt Romney! — a racist felon who gave people cancer. Obama brought a mobbed-up Chicago banker to the White House and emphatically endorsed that mobbed-up banker’s run for his old Senate seat. He made excuses for the Internal Revenue Service going after his political enemies. He lied repeatedly about health care. He gave cash to terrorists and guns to cartels, and his own “wingman” at the Justice Department said people were racist for asking questions about the latter.

 And don't get us started about that pant-suited criminal:

 After Obama, Hillary Clinton came along — we’re going to elide a lot of historic Clinton lowlights and skip straight to the 2016 campaign — and said half of Trump’s voters belonged in a “basket of deplorables.” (This line got her laughter and applause, by the way.) She then went on to say they were “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic – Islamophobic – you name it.” Worst of all, she said many of them were “irredeemable.” Unlike Trump, she is not known for pro-wrestling levels of hyperbole.

The cretins on the Left all thought the same way, real people saw it differently.

Supporting Voter ID does not make you racist. Being against abortion does not make you sexist. Wanting border security does not make you xenophobic. And thinking that baking cakes at the point of a gun is a bad idea does not make you homophobic.
I have no illusions about Trump’s way of engaging and debating people and why it coarsens politics. But discrediting and even dehumanizing your opposition was the dominant form of politicking before Trump came along, and that was obvious to voters no matter how much the media and administrative state tried hide it or give it a patina of respectability.

Stephen Miller is spot on when he says that permanent bureaucracy is a mortal threat to America.

Miller explained:

It is best understood as career federal employees that believe they are under no obligation to honor, respect, or abide by the results of a democratic election. Their view is, ‘If I agree with what voters choose, then I’ll do what they choose. If I disagree with what voters choose, then I won’t, and I’ll continue doing my own thing. So basically it’s heads I win, tails you lose.

If you elect Hillary Clinton, then I’ll implement all of her policies very faithfully, and if I see massive evidence of corruption on Hillary Clinton’s part, then I’ll keep it all a secret. If you elect a candidate I disagree with, then I’ll lie, I’ll leak, I’ll cheat, I’ll smear, I’ll attack, I’ll persecute, and I will refuse to implement, and I will obstruct at every single step of the way.

We’ve made clear that your leaks will backfire and your sabotage will fail, and we’ll simply implement the policy doubly. Not only will you not change the outcome, but the more that you try to leak and disrupt, the more determined the president will be in his course to accomplish that which he was sent here to do.

The same people who made wrong judgment calls in Iraq, with respect to strategy in Afghanistan, Libya, Egypt, too … the people who made all these decisions now are so utterly convinced that they alone know what the right policy is.

Never has someone occupied the Oval Office who is more undeterred and undaunted in executing the task that he was brought here and has pledged to execute.

A lot of us thought, if you go back many years before Donald Trump ever declared for president, we might never live to see the day when somebody would have the audacity to promise to fundamentally change a broken status quo then get to Washington and proceed to execute on every single thing that he promised to do no matter what was thrown his way. It is truly a miracle to behold.

There is something providential about this.  It reinforces my belief in God.

Cultural Civil War

He sees President Donald John Trump waging a Kulturkampf, ...

Hanson wrote, "The real source of Trump derangement syndrome is his desire to wage a multifront pushback -- politically, socially, economically and culturally -- against what might be called the elite postmodern progressive world. Contemporary elites increasingly see nationalism and patriotism as passe. Borders are 19th century holdovers."

This is a power struggle.

...
Leaders inspire. Conservatives finally are rising from the canvas.
...
President Trump does not just fight. He wins. He took the battle to the liberals. You cannot have a Cultural Civil War if one side refuses to fight back.

Hanson wrote, "In a way, the left-wing Democratic presidential candidates understand Trump best. If he wins his one-man crusade to stop the progressive project, they are finished, and their own party will make the necessary adjustments and then sheepishly drift back toward the center."

Bring it on. Our numbers grow stronger. Winning is a magnet.

Read the whole thing then read my essay A war doesn’t start until somebody fights back.

Just in case you were wondering about the economy

Data Show Poorest Americans Are Benefiting Most from Strong Economy

The Flight 93 Election

Worth re-reading.

The Truth Factory - Russian and why Hillary Lost the Election

The Stormy Daniels outrage shows the media still don't get Trump and why he won

I commented on this here: The President and the Porn Star

The Washington Examiner agrees.

It’s confounding reporters and TV commentators without critical thinking skills (take your pick off the “Morning Joe” set) that people just don’t seem to care about Stormy Daniels, the porn actress President Trump allegedly paid off to keep quiet before the 2016 election.

Why isn’t this hurting him?!

The answer is simple: 1) Everyone knows Trump has a tacky history; voters chose him anyway, and 2) by the way — we have a country we're trying to save here!

Point one still scandalizes the media, but the rest of the country has its eyes on point two.

...

The always hysterical liberal columnist Charles Blow wrote in the New York Times, “If this were Barack Obama, Tiki-torch-toting Nazis would have descended on the White House and burned it to the ground. Not only that, America’s racist folks masquerading as religious folks would have used Obama’s moral failing as proof of a black pathology.”

...

That his supporters, including Evangelicals, were willing to overlook Trump’s gaudy past in favor of his policies on immigration, the economy, and Islamic terrorism demonstrates how powerful those issues are and how well Trump captures the national mood.

The media don’t understand why the Stormy Daniels story hasn’t engulfed the White House. That’s because they don’t understand the issues Trump won with America.

Trump vs. The Swamp

[DRUDGE] Media working overtime to become the shittiest in the world

Trump asking the important questions: 

“Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?”

MEDIA GO WILD!

McAuliffe Says He'd Slug Trump: 'You'd Have To Pick Him Up off Floor'...

---

PEW: American media bias worst in world...

Middle-Aged White Americans Are Dying of Despair

In today's Virginian Pilot, Dick Meyer does a cut-and-paste job on an article printed in the Atlantic about increased mortality among "uneducated" white Americans dying of alcohol and drug abuse.

He ends with this:

Politics makes for an especially depressing subplot of the current mystery. In the last election, Donald Trump preyed on losses experienced by the white working class, offered no honest prescriptions and no realistic course of treatment. Instead, Trump and his party exploited the pain of the white working class — and some better educated, wealthier whites that feel and remember their pain — and channeled into resentment and anger at blacks, Mexicans, Muslims, immigrants as well as the “establishment” elite who rig the system.

That is a prescription that ensures no one will get better.

The new word for acknowledging people's issues is "PREYING" if those issues affect the low-skilled white working class and if the one who is paying attention is Donald Trump.

Bill Clinton was hailed by clowns like Meyer when he famously used and re-used the phrase "I feel your pain." But let Trump feel the pain of the people like Meyer despises - white men without a college degree - and it's "preying." And since Donald Trump, a few months into his Presidency has not solved this problem he's "preying."

Let me buy Dick Meyer a hint: the despair of white men without a college degree is caused by joblessness because factories that once employed them have closed and moved their jobs to Mexico and to China. This was done by the Establishment to fatten the bottom lines of corporations and promoted by the Washington Establishment who made trade deals that erased the jobs of millions of American men without a college degree.

So when Donald Trump made speech after speech promising to bring those jobs back he gave hope to the hopeless and reduced their despair. We have, mere months into the Trump administration, seen large corporations like Ford announce major investments in factories in this country.

People like Meyer are sightless because they will not see; they are blinded by their own political biases. Like Meyer and the rest of the press, they are Democrat operatives with bylines.  These are the people who wear elitist, bigoted and racist blinders. Thank God, they are going to be left in the dustpan of history.

Our Miserable 21st Century

Ever wonder how the poor get all those drugs, legally, with which they are killing themselves?

But how did so many millions of un-working men, whose incomes are limited, manage en masse to afford a constant supply of pain medication? Oxycontin is not cheap. As Dreamland carefully explains, one main mechanism today has been the welfare state: more specifically, Medicaid, Uncle Sam’s means-tested health-benefits program. Here is how it works (we are with Quinones in Portsmouth, Ohio):

[The Medicaid card] pays for medicine—whatever pills a doctor deems that the insured patient needs. Among those who receive Medicaid cards are people on state welfare or on a federal disability program known as SSI. . . . If you could get a prescription from a willing doctor—and Portsmouth had plenty of them—Medicaid health-insurance cards paid for that prescription every month. For a three-dollar Medicaid co-pay, therefore, addicts got pills priced at thousands of dollars, with the difference paid for by U.S. and state taxpayers. A user could turn around and sell those pills, obtained for that three-dollar co-pay, for as much as ten thousand dollars on the street.

In 21st-century America, “dependence on government” has thus come to take on an entirely new meaning.

Why Trump won

Thus the bittersweet reality of life for real Americans in the early 21st century: Even though the American economy still remains the world’s unrivaled engine of wealth generation, those outside the bubble may have less of a shot at the American Dream than has been the case for decades, maybe generations—possibly even since the Great Depression.

IV

The funny thing is, people inside the bubble are forever talking about “economic inequality,” that wonderful seminar construct, and forever virtue-signaling about how personally opposed they are to it. By contrast, “economic insecurity” is akin to a phrase from an unknown language. But if we were somehow to find a “Google Translate” function for communicating from real America into the bubble, an important message might be conveyed:

The abstraction of “inequality” doesn’t matter a lot to ordinary Americans. The reality of economic insecurity does. The Great American Escalator is broken—and it badly needs to be fixed.

With the election of 2016, Americans within the bubble finally learned that the 21st century has gotten off to a very bad start in America. Welcome to the reality. We have a lot of work to do together to turn this around.

The Press vs. The People

Via Liberty Blitzkreig, data from UC Santa Barbara



What does this graphic tell you?

Considering Donald Trump received 63 million votes and won the election, what does the above graphic tell you? It tells you, in no uncertain terms, that 63 million Americans have effectively no voice within the mainstream press. It tells you that the media is entirely disconnected from, and oblivious to, the concerns of about half the voting public. This actually speaks to a lot of what’s going on — for example, it explains the continued rise of alternative media sites such as this one.

By labeling independent news sites such as Liberty Blitzkrieg “fake news,” the mainstream press is simply trying to come up with any excuse possible to justify its historic failure, as well as promote censorship in a pathetic attempt to regain its former position of cultural influence. Unfortunately for them, this fabricated narrative has it all backwards.

The press' disconnect, it's contempt, for the American public isn't new, but the last election puts it in stark contrast.   The press used the election as an exercise to try to shame the American people into voting for Hillary!   If you voiced support for Trump you were deplorable, and irredeemable.  You were labelled a sucker falling for an obvious con by a huckster. 

Meanwhile ...

The America you lived in had race relations rubbed raw.  The America you lived in was shipping jobs overseas as fast as corporate CEOs could find factory space in Mexico or China.  The America you lived in had universities where Far Left ideological conformity was strictly enforced and males were branded as rapists for existing.   The America you lived in had sky-high gas prices while the government was doing its best to keep vast areas of land off-limits for exploration.  The America you lived in had food prices rising daily but your paycheck was stuck at zero growth.  The America you lived was giving up its leadership status in the world while it's President was telling you to get off your high horse because of the Crusades.   The America you lived in got warm in the summer and cold in the winter and sea levels were pretty much where they had been all your life, but the newspapers were screaming that the earth was drowning ... and it was your fault..  

In an alternative universe the press was telling you that you never had it so good thanks to the wise policies of its leaders ... and if you disagree you're racist.  That race relations where great except for those racist cops out killing innocent young black men who had their hands up begging the cops "don't shoot."  That America was great, had always been great so "Make America Great Again" is stupid slogan, or ... America was never great and doesn't deserve to be great because slavery; pick one.  The press was telling you to vote for Hillary because she has lady parts and that's critically important.  That Trump is Hitler and voting for him made you a Nazi.  The press was dutifully reporting Obama's claim that America had never been more respected in the world, Obama killed Osama and that ISIS was on the run.  In that universe the State of the Union was never better, jobs were being created at a record pace and unemployment had never been so low.  

After the election the press was telling you that Trump won - not because you wanted change - but because the FBI, because of "fake news," and that Putin "hacked" the election. 

I confidently predict that the editors of the Virginian Pilot will look at the graphic above and congratulate themselves on their wisdom.  They will see no disconnect between the press and the public because to them, the public are poor, stupid, uneducated rubes who need to be led by their betters.  And they are your betters. 

A Liberal gets it (F-word warning)