I think a major reason that the pundits were so wrong about Trump is that half of them are Jewish and Jews tend to feel a visceral revolt against gentile nationalisms, racial consciousness, nativism, populism. Jews, by and large, feel great disgust for Donald Trump types. He’s vulgar! He’s so goyish.
Regular Jews often like Trump, while Jewish elites usually hate Trump.
Esther K tweets: “.@JewishJournal staff ideated but didn’t produce #TrumpAgainstHumanity in March. And now.”
Surely this type of call to violence is not who we are.
If you are saying Trump is against humanity, then you are calling for him to be assassinated.
Steve Sailer writes: Loose immigration policies tribalize domestic politics. When elites team up to import tribalist foreigners to lower their own citizens’ wages and to vote against the natives’ interests (and, now and then, murder them), why is it surprising when the poor dumb natives eventually get the message that they need a tribe of their own, too?
A methodological shortcoming of the various Nates’ models of American politics is that they ignored evidence from abroad. It has been pretty obvious from recent elections in Denmark, Australia, Sweden, Poland, Hungary, Germany, France, and so forth that immigration policy is a hot issue in the world today — even in Canada, where Justin Trudeau rode a spasm of sentimentality and smugness into office.
But these models ignore what voters are seeing on TV about the Camp of the Saints, terrorism, and sexual assault abroad. Instead, crimethink kicks in among pundits: protective stupidity about immigration policy as a subject that only bad people ever think about except in terms of ethnocentric schmaltz.
* Among our best and brightest (though obviously not perfect), it’s very important that Trump’s attractiveness not spring from his immigration policies. If we start thinking open-borders immigration ISN’T inevitable, it won’t be. They know that. Any given political ‘inevitability’ can disappear like a candle flame in Katrina. I think our Thinkies call that a ‘black swan’. The rest of us know it simply as limits of wishful thinking.
COMMENTS:
* It wasn’t just that he (along with many other pundits) got it wrong, it was in how derisive he was (they were) toward Trump’s prospects and how confident he was in his predictive analytics.
Simply put, his method is mostly garbage because it’s tough to quantify political outcomes far in advance with so many moving parts. Models using data from elections or primaries in the past cannot account for the numerous shifts in public opinion that polls don’t fully capture. Voters are people, and people are complicated. The rules of politics are free-flowing and ever changing. He says something to the effect that there aren’t enough data points (since presidential elections are every four years), but doesn’t realize this undercuts his argument that quantitative-based analytics best predicts political races.
* Among our best and brightest (though obviously not perfect), it’s very important that Trump’s attractiveness not spring from his immigration policies. If we start thinking open-borders immigration ISN’T inevitable, it won’t be. They know that. Any given political ‘inevitability’ can disappear like a candle flame in Katrina. I think our Thinkies call that a ‘black swan’. The rest of us know it simply as limits of wishful thinking.
* I’m amazed at Nate’s hubris in constantly criticizing “punditry,” then engaging in it himself rather than taking a strict “I’m just a dispassionate stats nerd” line that is more consistent with his brand anyway. Now he looks like a fool when the pure numbers for Trump should have made him more favorable to Trump than the average “pundit.”
* Nate Silver is all about stats or stat-factor. He seems blind to stars or star-factor.
Trump had a winning personality, at least compared to the others.
Obama also won on the power of his personality. (Most other blacks couldn’t have done it. He has an easy and smooth way with voters. So did Clinton.)
If we were living in a non-visual age, Trump might have lost.
But people watch politics as a visual sport, and Trump was entertaining.
Others looked dorky, gomer-pyle-ish, or ridiculous.
Cruz looks like a cartoon character.
Rubio looks like a boy in a bubble bath.
Walker looks like a 5 yr old carrying lunch to school.
Jeb looks like a turtle without a shell.
Kasich looks like a third rate high school coach.
Fiorina looks ungood as a ho.
Christie is a fatbody.
Trump just looked like a drill sergeant compared to the others. He ‘won’ most debates not by what he said but how he said it.
True, positions did matter in this race, but it had a lot to do with personality.
There was something about ‘chief’ about Trump.
He looked aggressive on the attack, annoyed on the defense.
In contrast, Conservative Inc has usually been defensive in aggression, and aggressive in defense. It’s as if Cons are afraid to go on the attack. I mean what if the attack is taken as ‘racist’, ‘sexist’, ‘homophobic’, etc.?
They are only aggressive in defense, like when NR kicked out Derbyshire. They sure spilled a lot of venom over that.
Now, Trump knows how PC works. He knows it is powerful, and there are certain things he can’t really touch: Jews, homos, and blacks.
But there are semi-PC areas that are sort-of-touchable, like immigration, Mexers, Muslims, and Chinese. Where there was some leeway for being politically incorrect, Trump pushed hard.
And Trump’s pro-Russian stance was a kind of masterful indirect anti-PC. Russia is hated most by Jews and homos. So, Trump’s call for peace was Russia was a roundabout kind of anti-PC.
* In fact, he kept coming up with completely ad hoc reasons to fudge the percentage chances of Trump winning primaries down with no justification beyond that he personally didn’t think the polls were believable. What the hell kind of data science is that?
* Data science is the fancy new term. Back in the day, it was stats, market research, OR, econometrics or their cousins.
One truism from any era of data analysis is that if you torture the numbers enough, they’re bound to confess what you want to hear. The further from STEM subjects, the more likely the standard deviants manipulate things.
* Remember Jeane Dixon? She was the noted psychic who supposedly predicted JFK’s assassination. She rode that to a 20+ year career in the psychic business.
Nate Silver got some things right about the 2012 election, but he may be the Jean Dixon of our time.
* It’s obvious that “conservatism” has evolved from an ideology into a theology. No longer a response to the excesses of 20th century statism, it is now a dogmatic religion that values blind faith over rationality.
The weirdest part is the fervent devotion on the altar of St. Ronnie by young conservatives who weren’t even born when he was president. Hell, I loved the guy at the time, but the problems we face today are not the problems we faced in 1976.
* We are in uncharted waters with just 6% of the populace having any trust in news media. 94% of Americans distrust the talking heads and the scribes who have for generations told the public what to think. And trust for government is hardly any better. The potential for severe social upheavals is very real. Anti-Trump riots this summer? What happens when the current stock market bubble deflates or even bursts? We have the Occupy Wall Street cum Bernie radicals, Black Lies Matter anti-white violent racists, Colin Flaherty documented Knockout Game aficionados, and finally the law & order middle-class and lower whites finally awakening thanks to Trump.
