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.

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.

Obama Shafts Hillary With Amnesty and Ferguson

As Barack Obama invites in five million illegals to scoop up American jobs, and as those normal Americans lucky enough to still have jobs wait in traffic while morons block the freeway because some Swisher Sweets-puffing felon got himself killed, Hillary Clinton’s chances in 2016 plummet. So it turns out that Obama is likely to achieve one great thing as president – he’ll keep Hillary from ever occupying the Oval Office.

It is important to understand that neither the executive amnesty scam nor the bogus outrage over Ferguson actually had anything to with race per se. Obama and his gang are Marxists. This was always about class. The Obama coalition is not the traditional Democrat coalition. It is primarily a class coalition. It is the Democrat Party base and nothing more, made up of rich/academic upper class whites, the unionized government hack sub-class, and lower class welfare recipients. When it won in 2008 and 2012, the coalition added just enough others to push it over the top. But now, those others – primarily middle and working class people employed in the private sector – are fleeing to the GOP. And those were the people Hillary was counting on supply enough votes to win.

But if you are a regular person who works for a living, especially if you don’t live on a coast, Obama’s coalition doesn’t want you. In fact, it hates you. You’re a racist, and you’re greedy because you don’t want to give your hard-earned tax money to Democrat-voting deadbeats, and you are oh-so-uncouth that you probably never even listen to NPR. That leaves you just one potential political home, a home where Hillary does not live. I mean the GOP, not the bachelor pad Bill shares with his bimbos....

While this was great for solidifying the coalition that Obama hopes will keep him a power broker long after he leaves office, it’s an albatross for Hillary. Obama can remain a player with a 35% constituency, but Hillary needs 50% + 1 to win. The Obama coalition/Democrat base has the Chablis-swilling limo libs from Marin County, the AFSCME-dues paying DMV diversity consultants, and the big screen-watching EBT cardholder vote nailed down. Everyone else, not so much anymore. And Obama is clearly fine with that.

The Democrats War on Women as Demonstrated by Feminist Democrats

 Via Stacy McCain

The implicit assumption of the Democrat Party’s “War on Women” meme is that the sexist misogyny by which all women are allegedly victimized is officially endorsed by The Republican Party. Never mind the fact — as the viral video ironically demonstrated — that women’s victimization is quite often perpetrated by constituencies of the Democrat Party coalition. Feminism is a left-wing political ideology that serves the partisan interests of the Democrat Party and, when feminists aren’t busy offering to provide oral sex to Democrat men, they are busy accusing Republicans of being The Party of Rape.

It does not really matter whether you are male or female, black or white, straight or gay. The only thing liberals really care about is whether you vote Democrat, because the liberal’s sense of self-esteem is dependent on his belief that, by voting Democrat and encouraging you to do likewise, he proves himself worthy as one of Our Moral Superiors. (Thomas Sowell’s book The Vision of the Anointed explains this brilliantly.)

Major media anti-Christian

When you have major media outlets declaratively describing Robertson's expression of his Christian beliefs as "anti-gay," what you are really seeing is major media outlets outing themselves as anti-Christian.

Politico. CNN. The Hollywood Reporter. Entertainment Weekly. Yahoo. Variety. And so on…

Robertson listed more than a half-dozen sins other than homosexual behavior, including a number of heterosexual behaviors, and "the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers".

It is certainly possible to try to disguise anti-gay bigotry as Christianity. Singling out gay people and not distinguishing between homosexuals as people and homosexual behavior are two of the most glaring examples.

But Robertson did neither. What he did do was to speak a Christian truth about various sins, and the media know this.

Anti-sin is not anti-gay.

But because the media and left are desperate to toxify Christianity as bigotry and bully Christians into silence, Robertson's remarks are seen as the perfect opportunity to do both.

Of course it is an added benefit to the media to try to tarnish a culturally conservative mega-hit, and maybe drive it off the air.

What we have here is nothing more than the media practicing McCarthyism and disguising it as tolerance.

Matthews, Soap Opera and the Fanbois ("HE came amongst us.")

Rush Limbaugh calls it the “Soap Opera” playing out in the heads of the media. Ace of Spades calls it the “MacGuffin” and both are saying pretty much the same thing. The media are not interested in the American people and how Obama is destroying an entire culture. The media are focused on Obama, the “Hero” in the movie - or soap opera - playing in their heads.

Limbaugh:

"The object of the [a soap opera] is entertainment through a daily, hokey maintenance of suspense," i.e., Crisis. The Democrat Party, every day a new crisis. "This necessarily requires the viewer's suspension of disbelief, particularly when it comes to the lead characters. Depending on what improbable twists and turns the plot must take to meet the demands of day-in-day-out drama, the stars of the show slip seamlessly from villain's to hero's role, from incorrigible vice to transcendent virtue.

"Soap fans buy in because they know it is not real. It is, to the contrary, their escape from reality. Politics is our reality. It only seems like soap opera because of the way it is covered: Right into your living room, day-in-day-out, celebrity journalists present the adventures of their fellow dramatis personae, celebrity pols. The journalists portray politics, moreover, as suspense," the daily horse race. How's Obama doing? It's not whether Obamacare's decent, not whether it's harmful, not whether it's constitutional.  But is Obama gonna be helped or is Obama going to be hurt?

Ace of Spades:

Politics is now a MacGuffin in American politics, at least for the frothing fanbois of the Hero Barack Obama.

It doesn't matter what his goals actually are -- it only matters that he succeeds in those quests, whatever they might be.

And this isn't a new phenomenon, either. Since the beginning of this movie, the fanbois have cared very little for MacGuffins (notice they don't care how many thousands of Americans have died in Afghanistan), but have been intensely interested in the Hero's emotional response to it all.

You root for the Hero to win because you like the Hero -- not because you're particularly invested in the Hero's actual goals. And you despise the Villains simply because they're standing in the way of the Hero's triumph.

Chris Matthews sums up, neatly, his only genuine interest in American politics for the past five years:

“We have real people in this country with real power and status who have used that status of power to hurt the country so they could hurt the president.”

Only the Hero matters. The MacGuffin never does.

The Hero is our hopes and dreams. And the Hero has come to us; he has come amongst us.

Chris Matthews invokes the King James Version of the Bible as he talks of his god:

 “HE came amongst us.”  

He really said that!

 Fanatical followers, “fanbois,” he of the thrill up his leg. It will go down as one of the great “tells.” At this point you realize that idolatry is not an ancient concept but is alive and well in Progressive America.  The people you see above are not reporters, they are acolytes, apostles, followers, writing a movie script in which the American people are extras whose lives don't matter.  The people are the background over which their play is staged.  Their lives, their deaths, their dreams are unimportant.  Death in Afghanistan; who cares?  Losing your health insurance and your doctor; so what?  Lost your job and can't find another; so what?  What's important, in focus, crucial, is how HE feels, how HE achieves his goals, how HE wins the MacGuffin.  Meanwhile the producers of this soap opera are wealthy and don't have to worry about the things that the Country Class worries about.  If these people ever became self-aware could they live with themselves?  

Why are intellectuals, sometimes the most intelligent among us, so dumb?

Wes Pruden

Why are intellectuals, sometimes the most intelligent among us, so dumb?

This is the question that confounds everyone; some intellectuals most of all. The late William F. Buckley Jr., a certified egghead, once said he would rather be governed by the first 50 names in the Boston telephone book than by the professors at Harvard.

Another wit observes that an intellectual is someone who so prefers theory over experience that he would sit down on a red-hot stove, twice. You can be too smart for your own good, and have the blisters on your bottom to prove it.

The intellectual romance with the clever Barack Obama continues. Having invested so much in candy and flowers, they must ignore all the evidence of being dumped.

His cultivated demeanor and carefully applied patina of synthetic sophistication, fraudulent as it may be, is what attracted the adoration of intellectuals from across the political spectrum in 2008, says Charles Murray, the social scientist and an intellectual with impressive books, studies and learned papers. He admits that he’s a dumpee.

“It’s kind of embarrassing to admit it,” he tells an interviewer for the website Daily Caller, “but I responded in part to his rhetoric because he talks just like me.

“It’s his whole way of presentation of self … of a little self-deprecation in the argument and picking out a nuance here, which is all the ways that we overeducated people have been socialized in the same way. It’s the way we carry on discourse. Along with [seeing] what was a very engaging personality, I kind of ignored things which … a lot of working-class people glommed onto right away.”

 

President Obama's favorite footstool: The famous Resolute desk

Working-class stiffs, the people an earlier generation of political scientists called “Joe Sixpack,” having earned their blisters and calluses by heavy lifting, are too smart to take a seat on the red-hot stove even once.

Having been to some big towns and heard some big talk, they were too smart by miles to be taken in by a smooth-talking butter and egg man from Chicago.

“It’s not that I think he is not a patriot,” says Mr. Murray, “but remember the line, he said, ‘You didn’t build that.’ No American is going to think you can say that, no matter what your political views are, because it’s just disastrous to say that. He is clueless about this country in some profoundly disturbing ways.”

How could he not be clueless about his native land, when he absorbed anti-American venom in his tender and formative years as a child in the Third World? He was deprived of the instincts and cultural intuitions that are the native son’s birthright.

No other American president in anyone’s imagination would instruct the National Park Service to evict veterans of World War II, many arriving in wheelchairs or moving with unsteady gait on walkers and walking canes to see the long-awaited memorial to the celebration and sacrifice of their unselfish generation.

The veterans had run afoul of the instructions to the Park Service rangers to “make life as difficult for people as we can.”

Then, only days later, thousands of illegal aliens were invited to rally for privilege and amnesty on the very soil where the veterans, American citizens all, were forcibly told they were not welcome.

Presidents of all stripes usually think they’re special and should be treated that way. But no president before him has guarded his privacy like President Obama.

He constructed his personal history with a ghost-written autobiography and refused to answer questions. He let speculation about his birthplace fester for months, stretching into years, before producing the evidence that put the questions to rest.

This raised no questions from the intellectual class. Why would he have done that?

Inquiring minds didn’t want to know. Mr. Obama’s obsessive protection of personal privacy, however, does not extend to everyone else.

The government eavesdropping on telephone calls, the collection of Internet correspondence, the probing into everyone’s underwear at the airport is OK.

The private man in the White House says so.

So, too, the intimate and intrusive questions asked by the health care schemers, backed by the weight and authority of the Internal Revenue Service. Inquiring intellectual minds don’t want to know about that, either.

Fortunately for all of us, the working-class stiffs, often untutored and even crude in their impolite and impolitic curiosity, continue to “glom” onto the holes in the story of how he would be “the uniting president” of “hope and change.”

His approval ratings have dropped into the 30 percent range. Obamacare now frightens most of us.

The fraud and misrepresentation recognized years ago by Joe Sixpack and his buddies is writ so large now that even an egghead can see it.

Let me answer Wes Pruden's question.  "Intellectuals" are not  smart, intelligent or wise, they are glib.  They are good with words.  They are paid to manufacture words by the sentence, paragraph and page.  They infest academia, entertainment and the press.  And in my experience they really like "snark," the wise-ass put-down that isn't a reasoned response but instead dismisses an opponent with ridicule.  It's the stable of some of the highest paid entertainers on TV, people like Jon Stewart at Comedy Central who, believe it or not, is the source of much of the "news" that Gen X receives.  It reinforces their bigotry and class hatred.  And that's Obama's strongest suit; when he's not talking meaningless vapor like "HopeNchange" he's a snarkmaster.  Some people see that as being beneath a President,  the chattering classes see them as one of their own. 

Huge ‘We are all Trayvon’ mural showcased in Florida State Capitol

This is the face of Liberalism.
The face of hate.
The face of lies and deceit.
The face of racism.

The new KKK.

Painted by Miami artist Huong, pictured above, the mural depicts a standing and uninjured George Zimmerman firing at a hooded figure whose face is replaced by a mirror. It also features a bleeding Martin Luther King Jr. and the phrase “we are all Trayvon” written in several different languages.

Keep in mind that the KKK was the creation of the Democrats.   She, and the people she represents want to demonize their opponents so that when it comes time to destroy them the mob will looking for blood be with them and everyone else will look the other way, believing they had it coming.  This is how these vicious haters operate: demonize, isolate and kill. 

ls Al Sharpton the Voice of Black America?

Jonah Goldberg recounts for us the unsavory history of the despicable Al Sharpton. The Al Sharpton of the Tawanda Brawley hoax, of the Crown Heights riots and murder, of the Freddy's Fashion Mart fiery deaths.

Goldberg asks the question of why Sharpton is embraced and empowered by the Liberal elite.  We know where he gets the microphone.  Here's the puzzle: where's his money, and how does a penniless man get invited to join the membership of the Grand Havana Room? 

 Taking up the penthouse floor of 666 Fifth Avenue, the Grand Havana Room is a private, invitation-only cigar club and four-star restaurant. Through its windows, you can see the toiling salary men 39 floors below as they scurry about like ants, some furtively smoking in doorways, ever fearful of Nanny Bloomberg’s All-Seeing Eye.

Named by Business Insider as one of the “11 exclusive clubs Wall Streeters are dying to get into,” the Grand Havana Room is where power brokers and celebrities hobnob with captains of industry in one of the last places where it’s still legal to smoke in the Big Apple.

Immune as I am to the seductions of class resentment and Jacobin envy, I will admit it: I love the place. If invited, and if I could afford it, I’d join.

The one question I have is: Who’s paying for Al Sharpton’s membership?

“The Rev” is an omnipresent member of the club. After his MSNBC show, he’ll swing by for dinner and cigars amid the other Masters of the Universe. I couldn’t confirm that he repaired there after he broadcast his radio show, Keeping It Real, from Zuccotti Park to show his solidarity with the 99-percenters.

The reason I ask who’s paying for his membership is that Sharpton’s relationship with money has always been complicated. When he claimed he didn’t have the resources to pay damages in a defamation suit he lost, Sharpton was asked in a deposition how he could afford his suits. He didn’t own them, he replied, someone else did. He was merely granted “access” to the garments as needed. The same went for his TV, silverware, etc.

 

So it turns out that he not only goads his followers to kill the Jews  and the "white Hispanics" and "creepy-ass crackers", he is a tax cheat.   But then, he fits in well with the other members of the Obama administration.  Which gets us to the headline question.  Al Sharpton manages to stir the passions of a lot of people.  Is he the voice of Black America?  Let me know because if he is we have more reason to be worried that you may think. 

‘If I Wanted America to Fail.’

Why Is Class Hatred Morally Superior to Race Hatred?

Class hatred created the killing fields in Cambodia.  Class hatred killed millions of Russian farmers in the Great Famine engineered by Stalin.  Class hatred is the reason for every Communist dictatorship in the world.  Race hatred was behind the Holocaust.  So why is class hatred viewed morally superior to rac hatred?  Dennis Prager asks a good question.

The major difference between Hitler and the Communist genocidal murderers -- Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot -- was what groups they chose for extermination.

For Hitler, first Jews and ultimately Slavs and other "non-Aryans" were declared the enemy and unworthy of life. For the Communists, the rich -- the bourgeoisie, land owners, and capitalists -- were labeled the enemy and regarded as unworthy of life.

Hitler mass-murdered on the basis of race, the Communists on the basis of class.

Because the Holocaust was unique in its industrialization of death and in its targeting of every Jew, including babies, for death, the post-World War II world has been rightly obsessed with eradicating racism (but not anti-Semitism!), i.e., the hatred of another solely because of race. But the world has not been obsessed with eradicating the other source of genocide: classism, or the hatred of others based on class.

The reason for this embrace is that class hatred is as fundamental to the left as the Trinity is to Christians, and the left dominates the media and education. This is dangerous because there is an ideological continuum from the democratic left to the Communist left. Making the rich into scapegoats for society's ills unites the left.

Read the whole thing.