To some conservatives, "real Americans" and "ordinary folks" are getting a raw deal. But just because it seems that way doesn't make it so.
Peter Beinart Aug 15, 2016
The number of high-profile conservative commentators who enthusiastically support Donald Trump is relatively small. But the number of high-profile conservative commentators who enthusiastically support “Trumpism” is higher. Trumpism is the belief that Trump’s followers constitute the “real America” and that anyone who does not validate their grievances is an elitist who neither understands nor cares about ordinary folks.
Few columnists have embraced Trumpism more fervently than The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan. In her writing, Noonan rarely cites interviews with actual Trump supporters or polls about what they actually believe. Nonetheless, she regularly speaks on their behalf. “Trump supporters have a more grounded sense of America and its problems” than do GOP elites, she wrote [ http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-party-divided-and-none-too-soon-1464907737 ] in June. “What Trump supporters believe, what they perceive as they watch him, is that he is on America’s side,” she declared [ http://www.peggynoonan.com/simple-patriotism-trumps-ideology/ ] in April. “And that comes as a great relief to them, because they believe that for 16 years Presidents Bush and Obama were largely about ideologies. They seemed not so much on America’s side as on the side of abstract notions about justice and the needs of the world.”
This is, indeed, what “Trump supporters believe.” It’s also false, paranoid, and bigoted. Unfortunately, in her desire to align herself with those “real Americans”—who don’t read The Wall Street Journal op-ed page—Noonan has adopted the habit of implying that whatever Trump supporters or their xenophobic European counterparts “believe” is true. Then she excoriates politicians for not shifting their policies in response.
Take Noonan’s latest column [ http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-global-elites-forsake-their-countrymen-1470959258 ] about German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision last summer to admit 800,000 asylum seekers. “The result,” Noonan writes, “has been widespread public furor over crime, cultural dissimilation and fears of terrorism.” Notice the conflation of perception and reality. Noonan doesn’t quite say that refugees increase rates of crime and terrorism or that they don’t assimilate, whatever that means. That would require evidence. (In fact, German police report [ http://www.thelocal.de/20151113/police-refugees-commit-less-crimes-than-germans ] that refugees are less likely to commit crime than other Germans and that the vast majority of crime they do commit is nonviolent.). Instead, Noonan merely says there has been a “public furor” about crime, terrorism, and a refusal to assimilate. Then she’s off to the races, excoriating Merkel for her insensitivity to those ordinary Germans “dealing with crime and extremism.”
What distinguishes Trump supporters is not their economic vulnerability. It’s their cultural, religious, and racial resentment.
Obviously, large-scale immigration—whether to the United States or Germany—brings strains as well as benefits. But Noonan makes no real effort to weigh them. (As evidence of the terrorism German refugees commit, she cites a July massacre at a Munich McDonald’s by a mentally disturbed, bullied German-Iranian teenager who, according to news reports [ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/07/23/munich-shooting-german-iranian-gunman-targeted-children-outside/ ], was inspired by the right-wing Norwegian mass-murderer Andres Breivik.) Rather, Noonan begins with the fears of those people most hostile to immigration, whom she dubs the “unprotected,” and attacks as elitist anyone who doesn’t make policy based on their desires. The phrase itself is revealing. Which Americans, according to Noonan’s definition, are “unprotected”? Not African Americans or Latinos, who overwhelmingly loathe Trump and generally support pro-immigration candidates. (After all, haven’t conservatives spent decades saying African Americans are too protected by the government?) Not young people [ http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/immigration/2016/03/21/poll-millennials-donald-trump-immigration-stance/81979416/ ], who also largely shun Trump and disproportionately back a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, despite being more economically vulnerable than their elders. By “unprotected,” Noonan means the older, overwhelmingly white, largely male Americans who support Trump.
The problem with this categorization is that, compared with the rest of the American population, Trump supporters are fairly well protected. They are protected by their race and gender and even their age, since the American welfare state takes far better care of the elderly than of the young. As Nate Silver has noted [ http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-trumps-working-class-support/ ], Trump supporters actually earn more than supporters of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. After concluding a massive new study comparing Trump supporters with Americans at large, Gallup’s Jonathan Rothwell recently noted [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/08/12/a-massive-new-study-debunks-a-widespread-theory-for-donald-trumps-success/ ] that, although Trump says his supporters are “suffering because of globalization, … suffering because of immigration and a diversifying country, … I can’t find any evidence of that.”
What distinguishes Trump supporters is not their economic vulnerability. It’s their cultural, religious, and racial resentment. That doesn’t mean they don’t face economic hardship to which the government should respond. But it means that if the government responds to actual economic hardship, rather than the demographic anxiety that Noonan conflates with it, leaders will pursue policies utterly different from the ones she proposes. Making college more affordable, rebuilding America’s infrastructure, and expanding the earned income-tax credit might not alleviate the anxieties of those Trump supporters bothered by a less white, less Christian, and less patriarchal America. Such policies would, however, help millions of Americans make ends meet.
Throughout her column, Noonan suggests that Merkel, Obama, and other elites favor admitting refugees because they feel “little loyalty” to their “countrymen” and are instead motivated by “selfishness and mad virtue-signaling.” How, exactly, admitting refugees constitutes “selfishness” on Merkel’s or Obama’s parts, Noonan doesn’t explain. But the claim of “virtue-signaling” is intriguing. Noonan seems genuinely offended by those global leaders who think they bear a moral obligation to save some of the Syrians fleeing murder, starvation, and rape. Sanctimonious snobs! Holier-than-though hypocrites! When will they start listening to the common people again?
Former Arizona governor and Trump supporter Jan Brewer referred to Hillary Clinton as a “lying killer” and affirmed that Democrats would not flip her home state in November.
Making her weekly call-in Tuesday to Mac & Gaydos on KTAR News, Brewer said that if Democrats wanted to pump campaign money into the state economy that would be “good for us,” but they had no hopes of actually turning Arizona blue.
“People want a fighter. They’re tired of the lying killer Hillary Clinton and Bill Clintons of the world,” she said.
Asked if Trump could stay on message, she said she agreed that he could do a better job shifting from his bombastic primary style to talking more about jobs and the economy. His antagonists had been “baiting” him, she said, causing him to “bite.” But she predicted a “much tighter” campaign in the future.
Brewer was also pressed about Trump’s frequent assertions that the election would be rigged and that he seemed optimistic about returning to his pre-campaign life. “It sounds like he’s getting ready to lose,” one host said.
“Well, he is a candidate of a different kind, isn’t he?” Brewer said. “A candidate of a different color.”
Trump Casinos’ Tax Debt Was $30 Million. Then Christie Took Office. A deputy New Jersey attorney general wrote in 2007 that Donald J. Trump’s flagship casino, the Taj Mahal, had reported that it paid $2.2 million in alternative minimum assessment tax in 2003, which was not true. It had paid only $500 in income taxes. Mr. Trump and Gov. Chris Christie at a campaign rally in Texas in February. Mr. Trump has given Mr. Christie, a longtime friend, the task of heading his transition committee. Inside the Trump Taj Mahal. Though he was pushed out of running the company he founded, Mr. Trump said he would stay “very involved” with the casino company that would continue to bear his name. AUG. 16, 2016 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/17/us/politics/trump-chris-christie-casinos.html
The problem isn’t just that Trump doesn’t want to imitate a candidate with a semblance of rational bearing; it’s that he’s not believable when he does. PHOTOGRAPH BY ERIC THAYER / THE NEW YORK TIMES / REDUX
By David Remnick August 17, 2016
You have to say this for the crooked demagogues and reactionary populists of the American past: they may have stirred the bitter soup of nativist resentment with as much zeal as Donald J. Trump, but their family counselors did not take time out from politics to cruise the Aegean on a plutocrat’s yacht; their rhetorical counselors did not attempt, for decades, to instill fear in their employees through the most squalid sort of sexual terror; and their political counselors never worked in the interest of Slavic autocrats. Oh, Father Coughlin [ http://www.newyorker.com/books/double-take/back-issues-father-coughlin ], we hardly knew ye!
Day by day, news bulletin by news bulletin, the Trump campaign spirals to new depths of strategic confusion and moral chaos. On the escalators at Trump Tower, the direction is always down, down, down.
At the center of the campaign is Trump himself, and, summoning the spirit of Sinatra’s most irritating song [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xR4ICo8CosM ], he has made it clear that he will win or lose by doing it his way, by refusing to “pivot” or blandify his message and language. There is a kind of cracked integrity in this. No matter what the polls and cable gasbags say, he is going to be himself. “I am who I am. It’s me. I don’t want to change,” he told [ http://www.news8000.com/news/video-oneonone-interview-with-donald-trump/41229272 ] a local-television interviewer, in Wisconsin. “I mean, you have to be you. If you start pivoting, you’re not being honest with people.”
The people closest to Trump are his daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner [ http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/08/22/ivanka-trump-and-jared-kushners-power-play ]. Like the children of populist reactionaries the world over, they spent last week vacationing aboard David Geffen’s two-hundred-million-dollar collapsible dinghy, the Rising Sun, along with Rupert Murdoch’s former wife Wendi Deng. They Jet Skied and toured the old town of Dubrovnik. It is clear—both from legal documents and from Lizzie Widdicombe’s reporting—that Ivanka Trump and Kushner have occasionally been alarmed by the candidate’s public statements (particularly on Mexican “rapists”), but they are, despite their gestures toward feminism and social liberalism, completely committed to Trump and Trumpism. As their friend Reed Cordish put it, “They’re believers. They are all in. They have been all in from the get-go, without hesitation.”
With the polls suggesting a potential electoral wipeout in November, Kushner returned from Croatia and took part in meetings this past weekend that kicked Paul Manafort [ http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/18/us/politics/donald-trump-stephen-bannon-paul-manafort.html ], the campaign manager, either upstairs or to the side of the road, depending on your reading of the spin. This announcement came shortly after the Associated Press broke the story [ http://bigstory.ap.org/article/c01989a47ee5421593ba1b301ec07813/ap-sources-manafort-tied-undisclosed-foreign-lobbying ] that Manafort “helped a pro-Russian governing party in Ukraine secretly route at least $2.2 million in payments to two prominent Washington lobbying firms in 2012, and did so in a way that effectively obscured the foreign political party’s efforts to influence U.S. policy.” Under federal law, it is a felony if American lobbyists fail to report their ties to foreign political parties or leaders.
This story was just a new piece in a bewildering puzzle concerning the Trump campaign’s ties to, and the candidate’s own views on, the Putin regime. In an interview I conducted yesterday for “The New Yorker Radio Hour,” Jake Sullivan, Hillary Clinton’s closest adviser on foreign policy and national security, made it clear that the Russian issue would remain a focus of the Clinton campaign. Sullivan pointed to Trump’s statements excusing Putin’s [ http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/trump-and-putin-a-love-story ] anti-democratic behavior, his questioning of NATO’s commitments in Europe, and his proposal that he might lift sanctions on Russia. “Those are just some of the examples of where the Trump campaign and Trump himself have gone out and basically adopted not just the position but the logic and the rhetoric of Vladimir Putin,” he said.
Sullivan added that the release of Clinton’s e-mails [ http://www.newyorker.com/news/benjamin-wallace-wells/the-real-scandal-of-hillary-clintons-e-mails ], almost certainly engineered by Russian intelligence, might only be a first step. “Given Russia’s track record and Putin’s track record, it would be folly to assume that there isn’t more that they would try to do to disrupt the election, more e-mails that they would put out,” Sullivan said. “We have to proceed on the assumption that that is going to happen.”
As if that were not enough to promise an even uglier autumn, we’ve now learned that Roger Ailes, late of Fox News, is advising [ http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/17/us/politics/donald-trump-roger-ailes.html ] Trump before the opening Presidential debate, scheduled for September 26th at Hofstra University, on Long Island. That relationship is long-standing and close [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/08/17/how-roger-ailes-made-donald-trump/ ]. Trump advised Ailes on how to “handle” myriad accusations of sexual harassment when he was running Fox News; despite this counsel, Ailes was sent from the building (though he was clutching a forty-million-dollar severance). Ailes is a deeply experienced political operative, having advised Ronald Reagan on how to handle the “age issue” before a critical debate with Walter Mondale, and George H. W. Bush on how to employ the shiv of racial fear to defeat Michael Dukakis. Ailes and Trump have not always had a smooth relationship—they quarrelled publicly after Trump’s clash with Megyn Kelly during a debate last year—but they are in sync in their xenophobic ideology and their disregard [ http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/08/01/the-donald-trump-roger-ailes-nexus ] for the rights of women.
No matter how aggressive or skilled the new members of the Trump campaign team may be, their task, their set of problems, appears vast. If Trump is left to his own devices, if he does not get a decisive boost from another cache of e-mails pried loose by Russian hackers, if reporters fail to discover a level of sleaze at the Clintons’ foundation that is truly ruinous and dispositive, their route to winning the Electoral College will be trying at best.
The problem isn’t just that Trump doesn’t want to imitate a candidate with a semblance of rational bearing; it’s that he’s not believable when he does. His hallucinatory improvisations, his fact-lite flights of insult, conspiracy theory, and rage are him, the essence of Trump. His supporters sense that, and they credit it as a form of integrity and genuineness. When Trump is compelled to revert to a prepared text and the teleprompter, his discomfort is as evident as the fear of any hostage forced to read a statement of guilt into a video camera. Trump knows that his listeners know that this performance is not him at all, that he is making a gesture to campaign strictures for which he has nothing but impatience and contempt. In the end, not even those who admire and support Donald Trump most fervently will likely save Donald Trump from Donald Trump.
On this Wednesday, August 17 edition of the Alex Jones Show, we cover the latest news out of Milwaukee after Donald Trump gave a speech amid the civil unrest. Jakari Jackson and the Infowars crew give live updates from the ground. Also, Steve Quayle explains what the elite don’t want you to know about this election. We also analyze Hillary’s poor health and how she needs pillows everywhere she goes for support.
Black Lives Matter is a domestic terrorist organization.
Terrorism is defined as "the use of violence and intimidation in pursuit of political aims". This definition is the same definition used to declare ISIS and other groups, as terrorist organizations. Black Lives Matter has earned this title due to its actions in Ferguson, Baltimore, as well as all over the United States and Canada. It is time for the pentagon to be consistent in its actions - and just as they rightfully declared ISIS a terror group, they must declare Black Lives Matter a terror group - on the grounds of principle, integrity, morality, and safety.
Police In This School District Want To Pepper-Spray Kids On Their Own Terms The department calls a ruling to create stricter guidelines “heavy-handed intrusion.” 08/17/2016 Updated August 17, 2016 The Birmingham Police Department is in court this week to appeal a judge’s decision that it must create stricter guidelines around using pepper spray in schools. [...] Police officers are ostensibly placed to schools to keep students safe and protect them from armed intruders. However, their presence also means that students are sometimes arrested, pepper-sprayed or Tasered for small transgressions. At least 84 students have been Tasered by school-based police officers since 2011 [ http://data.huffingtonpost.com/2016/school-police/tasers ], according to a recent HuffPost analysis. Howard thinks the outcome of the Birmingham case will have national implications. “I definitely think the behavior of the officers in this case is representative of the behavior of a lot of untrained school resource officers,” she said. “I think what this case does ? as one of the first of its type and probably the first to get a decision from a district court ? is it signals to police departments across the country: We cannot put untrained officers in our schools and allow them to treat our children like animals.” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/pepper-spray-at-schools_us_57b486bfe4b0edfa80da986b [with comments]
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Cokie Roberts Calls Trump Supporters ‘Morally Tainted’
Video [embedded]: Who is Donald Trump's new campaign chief? Here's what you need to know about the Breitbart News chairman who just became Donald Trump's new campaign CEO.
If Republicans aren't careful, they'll soon see true conservatism banished from their party.
By Ben Shapiro Ben Shapiro is editor-in-chief of the Daily Wire and author of several books including "Bullies: How the Left's Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences Americans." August 18, 2016 at 6:00 AM
Conservatives joked openly for months about “Trumpbart” and the transformation of Breitbart.com into, essentially, Bannon.com, but it was still something of a surprise that Trump would so publicly embrace Bannon, a man who helped transform a mainstream conservative website into a cesspool of the alt-right [ http://www.nationalreview.com/article/436738/donald-trump-alt-right-personality-cult ]. It also comes as a surprise - or at least it should - that the Republican National Committee appears ready to go along with the Bannon-Breitbart-Trump takeover over the party, even as the Trump campaign’s latest move means RNC Chairman Reince Priebus now sits, effectively, side by side with alt-right Trump fans.
The takeover, now a virtual fait accompli, represents the dangerous seizure of the conservative movement by the alt-right.
Constitutional conservatives can’t stand the alt-right. Conservatives - real conservatives - believe that only a philosophy of limited government, God-given rights and personal responsibility can save the country. And that creed is not bound to race or ethnicity. Broad swaths of the alt-right, by contrast, believe in a creed-free, race-based nationalism, insisting, among other things, that birth on American soil confers superiority. The alt-right sees limited-government constitutionalism as passé; it holds that only nationalist populism on the basis of shared tribal identity can save the country. It’s a movement shot through with racism and anti-Semitism.
But it wasn’t until March 29 that Breitbart’s full embrace of the alt-right became clear. That’s the day the site featured [ http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/an-establishment-conservatives-guide-to-the-alt-right/ ] Yiannopoulos’s lengthy piece glorifying the alt-right. Yiannopoulos had already given interviews in which he stated that “Jews run the banks” and “Jews run the media,” dismissing anti-Semitic memes as merely “mischievous, dissident, trolly.” He wrote, along with co-author Allum Bokhari, this insane sentence: “There are many things that separate the alternative right from old-school racist skinheads (to whom they are often idiotically compared), but one thing stands out above all else: intelligence.”
If Republicans aren’t careful, he’ll inflict similar damage on their party now that he’s the top man running their standard-bearer’s campaign. If they don’t know it yet, the alt-right surely does. As one of its own, Richard Spencer, explained [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/08/17/alt-right-rejoices-at-trump-s-steve-bannon-hire.html ]: “Breitbart has elective affinities with the alt-right, and the alt-right has clearly influenced Breitbart. In this way, Breitbart has acted as a ‘gateway’ to alt-right ideas and writers.” There’s now a path for this same kind of thinking to infiltrate the GOP.
None of this was Andrew Breitbart’s vision. He despised what he declared the dishonest, unspoken cooperation between the Democratic Party and major media outlets. In his memoir, “Righteous Indignation [ https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Indignation-Excuse-While-World/dp/B00A19TMNG ],” he wrote: “The left wins because it controls the narrative. The narrative is controlled by the media. The left is the media. Narrative is everything. I call it the Democrat-Media Complex - and I am at war to gain back control of the American narrative.” Andrew knew Trump wasn’t a conservative, and he despised racism - he routinely bragged about helping to integrate his fraternity at Tulane University, and was personally heartbroken over the accusations of racism directed at him after the Shirley Sherrod story [ http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/22/us/politics/22sherrod.html ].
But Breitbart News has become everything Andrew hated: a party organ, a pathetic cog in the Trump-Media Complex and a gathering place for white nationalists.
What does this mean for Trump’s campaign?
It means that like Breitbart, Trump will continue to tacitly embrace the alt-right, hoping, presumably, that adherents of its worldview will propel his campaign in the same way it has boosted Breitbart’s traffic by millions of monthly page views. Trump lives in a Breitbart fantasy world, and he’s now invited Bannon to personally decorate that world for him. The GOP establishment, too weak and cowardly to oust Trump earlier, risks displacing the true, constitutional conservatives for whom the party has been a natural political home, and now it looks prepared to ride the Trump train, next to alt-righters, all the way into the electoral ravine.
“Since that announcement, the world has witnessed a further wave of deadly, abhorrent terror attacks across the globe,” Twitter wrote in a blog post Thursday. “We strongly condemn these acts and remain committed to eliminating the promotion of violence or terrorism on our platform.”
The social media company noted that while there is no one “magic algorithm” for identifying terrorist content online, it was still working to expand its tool base to search out spam-bots and extremists.
When it comes to daily user suspensions, Twitter said its suspension rate was up 80 percent since last year, with “spikes in suspensions immediately following terrorist attacks.”
“Our response time for suspending reported accounts, the amount of time these accounts are on Twitter, and the number of followers they accumulate have all decreased dramatically,” the company wrote. “We have also made progress in disrupting the ability of those suspended to immediately return to the platform.”
Twitter continues to collaborate with other social media platforms on the best ways to prevent the spread of extremist content, they said.
Members of terrorist organizations like ISIS rely on social services to recruit and spread their message online, several reports have found. And earlier this year, the father of a young woman killed in last November’s deadly Paris took several tech companies to court for their role in spreading “extremist propaganda,” suing Google, Facebook, and Twitter in a U.S. District Court and claiming that the companies had given “material support” to the terrorists.
But according to the Obama administration [ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/obama-administration-isis-is-losing-ground-on-twitter ], ISIS is losing the fight on social media, with the extremist group’s Twitter traffic plummeting 45 percent in the last two years. And a 2016 Associated Press report showed an improvement over last year in the ratio of anti-ISIS content online compared to pro-ISIS messaging.
Twitter also acknowledged that it is working with entities funded by governments in the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, France to identify and shut down accounts -- a move likely to trigger accusations of censorship.
Full Show - Hillary’s Health: A Harbinger Of NWO treachery - 08/18/2016
Published on Aug 18, 2016 by The Alex Jones Channel
On this Thursday, August 18 edition of the Alex Jones Show, Dr. Steve Pieczenik explains why Breitbart CEO Stephen Bannon is replacing Paul Manafort to head the Trump campaign. Also, Clinton insider Larry Nichols reveals the Clintons next move as they get more desperate due to lack of real support despite mainstream media claim. And we also examine how mainstream polls can no longer hide the truth: Trump is winning.
'Rally effect' convinces Trump to deny Clinton lead seen in polls
The Rachel Maddow Show 8/18/16
Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, talks with Rachel Maddow about the remarkable lead polls show Hillary Clinton has over Donald Trump, and the "rally effect" that has Trump and his supporters convinced the polls are wrong. Duration: 9:01
Racist red flags follow Trump Breitbart hire, Steve Bannon
The Rachel Maddow Show 8/18/16
Rachel Maddow notes the atmosphere of racism that was overseen by Stephen Bannon at Breitbart News, both on its pages and by its staff, before Donald Trump chose to put him in charge of his entire campaign. Duration: 17:21
Rachel Maddow reports on a bizarre conspiracy theory developed in right-wing media that Hillary Clinton suffers from a variety of ailments, and notes the effort by Fox News and the Drudge Report to push the story into mainstream awareness.
Hillary Clinton Campaign Manager Takes On Donald Trump's Conspiracy Theory | Rachel Maddow | MSNBC
Published on Aug 18, 2016 by MSNBC
Robby Mook, campaign manager for Hillary Clinton, talks with Rachel Maddow about the decision to take on the Donald Trump campaign's spreading of bizarre conspiracy theories, and how they'll handle other Trump low-road tactics.
Donald Trump Embraces Radical Right With New Hire | Rachel Maddow | MSNBC
Published on Aug 18, 2016 by MSNBC
Rachel Maddow notes that Donald Trump's weirdest and most offensive behavior has a home in the right-wing fringe of American politics, a radical perspective that will now be the campaign's guiding voice as Steve Bannon, chairman of Breitbart News, has been made the campaign's chief.
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