On the latest Alt Right podcast, Richard Spencer says about Steve Bannon: “I’ve never liked him…”
Eli: “The gorilla chapter is what I am waiting for.”
Richard: “There is a hilarious gorilla parody chapter online. He wanted to watch the ape channel.”
Eli: “There is a kernel of truth. He was talking about BET.”
Richard: “I don’t think he was a great political operative… He was the major leaker in the White House. The leaks have stopped. There would be a Washington Post story that according to 30 people we spoke to at the White House, the leakage was insane, but under [Chief of Staff John] Kelly, that’s stopped. [Bannon] was probably the one [leaking]. He seemed to be high on his own supply. His success has always been about jumping on these bandwagons.”
Posted inAmerica, Steve Bannon|Comments Off on Why Have The Leaks Stopped At The Whitehouse?
Richard: “Video games are the worst because they give a false sense of masculinity through heroism and honor. Weed is just an intoxicant.”
“These are all phenomena of escapism. In Japan, South Korea, this has reached levels that should not be possible. A couple was feeding a digital baby on a video game while their own kids started to death.”
South Korean police have arrested a couple for starving their three-month-old daughter to death while they devoted hours to playing a computer game that involved raising a virtual character of a young girl.
The 41-year-old man and 25-year-old woman, who met through a chat website, reportedly left their infant unattended while they went to internet cafes. They only occasionally dropped by to feed her powdered milk.
“I am sorry for what I did and hope that my daughter does not suffer any more in heaven,” the husband is quoted as saying on the asiaone website.
According to the Yonhap news agency, South Korean police said the couple had become obsessed with raising a virtual girl called Anima in the popular role-playing game Prius Online. The game, similar to Second Life, allows players to create another existence for themselves in a virtual world, including getting a job, interacting with other users and earning an extra avatar to nurture once they reach a certain level.
“The couple seemed to have lost their will to live a normal life because they didn’t have jobs and gave birth to a premature baby,” Chung Jin-Won, a police officer, told Yonhap. “They indulged themselves in the online game of raising a virtual character so as to escape from reality, which led to the death of their real baby.”
Richard: “The shut-in culture…of men who never leave the house, never have sex, order everything in, have no connection with the outside world. This is where we are.”
Evan McLaren: “This is exactly where I was when I was in this phase in 2010. I was phasing away from Alt Right activity. I could almost relate to someone who had never had contact with the Alt Right. I felt like there was no one I could talk to and there was nothing that could be done. All the things that plague us and upset up still hit me but there was nothing to do about it. The effort that Richard was putting in hadn’t born fruit. I was in this hopeless stage. It’s not a good place and it shouldn’t be promoted.”
Eli: “I was smoking weed when I got out of the army and then when I found this, I stopped.”
Evan: “It’s revealing that when you find something interesting to do, you are less interested in smoking weed.”
Richard: “I’m from a family where I can’t name an alcoholic or a teetotaler.”
Greg: “So you think if people shoot people in a video game, they’re less likely to do it on a battlefield?”
Richard: “Yes.”
Panelist: “Videogames are to violence as porn is to sex.”
Posted inAbuse, Alt Right|Comments Off on What Happens When You Try To Leave The Alt Right?
When Jews like Lenny Bruce and Al Goldstein were on the way up in America, it was a great thing to be offensive. In the 1950s and 1960s, Jews led the fight for free speech. Now they lead the fight for political correctness aka censorship. Now it is a bad thing to be offensive. When did this change? We used to celebrate transgression in popular culture.
Not only is there nothing in those tweets that offends me, I don’t recall being offended once in my life. Ergo, I regard all people who get offended as weak.
When I was growing up, being gay was horrible. Now it is celebrated.
Posted inHumor, Jews|Comments Off on When Did It Become A Bad Thing To Be Offensive?
Oprah Winfrey’s barnstormer of a speech at the Golden Globes highlighted the story of a black Alabama woman who was raped by six white men in 1944.
Winfrey, in speaking of the victims of sexual assault whose voices might never be heard, told the audience that Recy Taylor was a name they should know.
Taylor was 24 when she was abducted and raped as she walked home from church in Abbeville. The NAACP assigned Rosa Parks to investigate the case and she rallied for justice for Taylor.
Two all-white, all-male grand juries decline to indict the men who admitted they assaulted her. She died in December, just before her 98th birthday.
Winfrey says Recy Taylor “lived as we all have lived, too many years in a culture broken by brutally powerful men.”
Like Ahab’s search for the Great White Whale, liberals’ search for the Great White Defendant is relentless and never-ending. When, in 1988, Tawana Brawley’s and Al Sharpton’s then year-old spectacular charge that several white men including prosecutor Steven Pagones (whose name Brawley had picked out of a newspaper article) had abducted and raped the 15 year old was shown to be completely false, the Nation said it didn’t matter, since the charges expressed the essential nature of white men’s treatment of black women in this country. When the Duke University lacrosse players were accused of raping a black stripper last year, liberals everywhere treated the accusation as fact, because, just as with the Nation and Tawana Brawley, the rape charge seemed to the minds of liberals to reflect the true nature of oppressive racial and sexual relations in America.
To see the real truth of the matter, let us take a look at the Department of Justice document Criminal Victimization in the United States, 2005. (Go to the linked document, and under “Victims and Offenders” download the pdf file for 2005.)
In Table 42, entitled “Personal crimes of violence, 2005, percent distribution of single-offender victimizations, based on race of victims, by type of crime and perceived race of offender,” we learn that there were 111,590 white victims and 36,620 black victims of rape or sexual assault in 2005. (The number of rapes is not distinguished from those of sexual assaults; it is maddening that sexual assault, an ill-defined category that covers various types of criminal acts ranging from penetration to inappropriate touching, is conflated with the more specific crime of rape.) In the 111,590 cases in which the victim of rape or sexual assault was white, 44.5 percent of the offenders were white, and 33.6 percent of the offenders were black. In the 36,620 cases in which the victim of rape or sexual assault was black, 100 percent of the offenders were black, and 0.0 percent of the offenders were white. The table explains that 0.0 percent means that there were under 10 incidents nationally.
The table does not gives statistics for Hispanic victims and offenders. But the bottom line on interracial white/black and black/white rape is clear:
In the United States in 2005, 37,460 white females were sexually assaulted or raped by a black man, while between zero and ten black females were sexually assaulted or raped by a white man.
What this means is that every day in the United States, over one hundred white women are raped or sexually assaulted by a black man.
The Department of Justice statistics refer, of course, to verified reports. According to the Wikipedia article on rape, as many as half of all rape charges nationally are determined by police and prosecutors to be false:
Linda Fairstein, former head of the New York County District Attorney’s Sex Crimes Unit, noted, “There are about 4,000 reports of rape each year in Manhattan. Of these, about half simply did not happen…. It’s my job to bring justice to the man who has been falsely accused by a woman who has a grudge against him, just as it’s my job to prosecute the real thing.”
No wonder there was such absolute belief in the guilt of the Duke students among the leading sectors of liberal America. A drug-addled, half-deranged, promiscuous black stripper accused three young white men of raping her. There are virtually zero rapes of black women by white men in the United States, and half of all rape charges against specific individuals turn out to be false. But in the gnostic, inverted world of liberal demonology, the white students had to be guilty.
Meanwhile, in the real America, week after week, the newspapers report the rapes of white women by black men—though, of course, without ever once using the words, “a white woman was raped by black man.” Just last week in the New York Post there was a story about a serial black rapist who invaded women’s apartments on Manhattan’s Upper West Side; you knew the rapist was black from a police drawing accompanying the story, and you knew the victims were most likely white from the neighborhoods where the attacks occurred. But even when news media’s reports of black on white rape make the race of the perpetrator evident (which the media only does in a minority of instances), no explicit reference is ever made to the racial aspect of the case. Each story of black on white rape is reported in isolation, not presented as part of a larger pattern. There is never the slightest mention of the fact that white women in this country are being targeted by black rapists. In the inverted world of liberalism, the phenomenon does not exist.
What’s The Best Predictor Of Levels Of Rape In A Community?
I’m looking at this new map and report and wondering if there are any patterns here:
It sure looks to me like the best predictor of the rate of rape is the percentage of blacks in a population.
From Wikipedia: “The U.S. Department of Justice compiles statistics on crime by race, but only between and among people categorized as black or white. In 2005 there were 111,490 white and 36,620 black victims of rape or sexual assault. In 2005, out of the 111,490 cases involving white victims, 44.5% had white offenders and 33.6% had black offenders, while the 36,620 black victims had a figure of 100% black offenders, numbers of white offenders were estimated to be negligible (extrapolated from a sample size of fewer than 10 instances).”
The rate of execution for black soldiers was even higher for the rape of civilians, for which 25 blacks (87 percent) and 4 whites (13 percent) were put to death. In 28 murder convictions, 22 blacks and 6 whites were executed. Of the 12 executed for murder and rape, 8 were black and 4 were white. The other execution was that of Eddie Slovik, a white, for desertion. The United States Army Center of Military History in Washington says very little information is available on the subject. But one historian there, Russell J. Parkinson, was able to confirm the basic data that Mr. Lilly is using. “There’s clearly a black preponderance,” Mr. Parkinson said, after reviewing the execution records and finding Mr. Lilly’s quest a worthy avenue for scholarship.
Blacks were 7% of U.S. soldiers during WWII, but were 87% of those executed for rape. If I’m doing my math right (someone here should double check), black WWII soldiers were 89x more likely to be executed for rape than white soldiers. That’s a stunning statistic.
* “A Clockwork Orange” was inspired by the home invasion by American GIs in England during WWII of the house of Anthony Burgess’s future wife. Anybody known more about this incident?
* The “Ultra Violence” from the Novel a Clockwork Orange was partially based on the personal experience of the author, from Wikipedia “his pregnant wife Lynne was beaten and raped by four American deserters in her home and perhaps as a result she lost the child” Burgess was stationed in Gibraltar at the time and was denied leave to see her.
* One of my favorite ironies of history
1. Emmett Till’s father Louis was forced to go into the Army after he strangled Emmett Till’s mother after she found out he was cheating.
2. Louis Till father was hung after being found guilty of murdering one woman and raping two others while serving in Italy.
3. Ezra Pound of all people served prison with Louis Till and wrote about it in his Pisan Cantos:
Till was hung yesterday
for murder and rape with trimmings
* In an American military cemetery in France. In what is known as “Plot E” there are 96 markers with numbers and no names. Eighty of these graves belong to African-American soldiers including Louis Till, all of them executed for rape and murder.
Here’s a partial list of some of the “Greatest Generation” of Americans sent to “liberate” Europe and buried in Plot E of Oise-Aisne American Cemetery in France.
Till is buried in grave #73, buried near him in grave #62 is Private William Harrison, a black soldier of the U.S. Army Air Corps, He was convicted by a court martial for sexually assaulting and strangling to death 7-year-old Patricia Wylie in a field at Killycolpy, near Stewartstown, County Tyrone in Northern Ireland on 25 September 1944.
Also buried in Plot E are Corporal Robert L. Pearson and Private Parson Jones, both black soldiers of the 1698th Engineers, they were hanged on 17 March 1945. They were convicted by a court martial at Chard in Somerset for raping heavily pregnant Joyce Brown at Bonfire Orchard in Chard on 3 December 1944.
Private Aniceto Martinez, a 24-year-old Hispanic soldier, was hanged on 15 June 1945. He was convicted by a court martial at Lichfield in Staffordshire for raping 75-year-old Agnes Cope in her home at 15 Sandy Lane, Rugeley in Staffordshire on 6 August 1944.
Private Wiley Harris, Jr, a 26-year old black soldier, serving with the 626th Ordnance Ammunition Corp, was hanged on 26 May 1944. He was convicted by a court martial for stabbing to death Harry Coogan, a pimp, at Earl Street in Belfast, Northern Ireland on 6 March 1944.
Private John C. Leatherberry, a 21-year old black soldier, serving with the 356th Engineer General Service Regiment, was hanged on 16 March 1944. He was convicted by a court martial at Ipswich in Suffolk for strangling and battering to death 28-year-old taxi-driver Henry Claude Hailstone in a country lane south west of Colchester in Essex on 8 December 1943.
Private Madison Thomas, a 23-year old black soldier, was hanged on 12 October 1944. He was convicted by a court martial at Plymouth in Devon for raping Beatrice Maud Reynolds in a field at Albaston, near Gunnislake in Cornwall on 26 July 1944.
Private Lee A. Davis, an 18-year-old black soldier, was hanged on 14 December 1943. He was convicted by a court martial at Marlborough in Wiltshire for fatally shooting 19-year-old Cynthia June Lay and raping Muriel Fawden near Savernake Hospital, Marlborough on 28 September 1943.
The men accused of killing Till were combat veterans of World War Two and Korea with heroic and honorable service records. Don’t expect that to make it into the movie.
* All of the black World War Two soldiers in question were in service/support units, most of the rapes occurred in the U.K, they were far from the stress of combat white soldiers were under.
I was in the U.S. Army for 20 years I was “badly trained, poorly led and treated as less then human” for most of that time. It didn’t turn me into a rapist, I guess that’s just my white privilege.
Posted inBlacks, Rape|Comments Off on LAT: Winfrey highlights story of black woman raped by white men
Was the abomination that has become of the Catholic Church inevitable due to its celibate order?
Was the abomination that has become of Christianity generally also inevitable due to the preponderance of gay ministers?
My impression is the priesthood and the secular ministry alike attract gay men. Ritual and aesthetic devotion appeal to the same sensibility that produces the gay aesthete. The rites appeal to gay male congregants as well for the same reason. The repressed gay Catholic can sublimate his homosexual desire in a ritual order that has meaning and beauty.
It was inevitable that gay men would come to preponderate (I suspect dominate) not only in the priesthood but in its upper reaches. Behind the scenes there’s probably a struggle between a gay and a genuine celibate faction, between competing gay cliques.
But what it can’t have is a family faction, of men with children who have the same concerns as their parishioners. The Church has no skin in the game.
Posted inCatholics|Comments Off on Catholicism Is Gay
* The low musical abilities of Africans, except for their strong sense of rhythm, are consistent with their generally poor achievements in classical music. There are no African composers, conductors, or instrumentalists of the first rank, and it is rare to see African players in the leading symphony orchestras.
[Chaim Amalek: To be fair, if you were a musically talented Negro, why would you want to spend your talents mastering the works of long dead European composers when there is vastly more money, respect, and sex to be had by focusing on musical idioms native to the Negro in America? You would be a fool to focus on Mozart when the potential rewards are so much greater in hip-hop.]
* The problem of the genetic and environmental contributions to the low IQ of Africans has been debated since the early decades of the twentieth century, particularly in regard to the problem of the low IQs obtained by African Americans in the United States. Three positions have been taken on this question. The IQ difference between Blacks and Whites is wholly environmentally determined or at least there is no compelling evidence for any genetic contribution to the low Black IQ. This position has been taken by Flynn (1980), Mackintosh (1998), Nisbett (1998), Fish (2002), Brody (2003), and many others. The IQ difference is determined by some mix of genetic and environmental factors. This position has been taken by Loehlin, Lindzey and Spuhler (1975), Vernon (1979), and Waldman, Weinberg, and Scarr (1994, p. 31), who conducted one of the most important studies of this question involving the IQs of Black children adopted by White couples. The IQ difference is largely genetically determined. This position has been taken by Henry Garrett (1945, 1961); Frank McGurk (1953a, 1953b), who showed that when Blacks and Whites were matched for socioeconomic status, Blacks scored 7.5 IQ points below Whites; Kuttner (1962), who argued that Black-White differences in intelligence were reflected in the differences in the building of early civilizations; Shuey (1966), who made the first compilation of Black-White IQ differences, from 1916 up to 1965; Robert Osborne and McGurk (1982), who made an updated compilation of Shuey’s work covering the years 1966–1980; and Jensen (1969, 1974, 1980, 1998), who made numerous contributions to this issue and concluded that about two thirds of the American Black-White IQ difference is attributable to genetic factors. Others who have taken the largely genetic position are Shockley (1969), Eysenck (1971), Baker (1974), Levin (1997), Rushton (2003), and the writer (Lynn, 1994c, 2001).
There are seven major arguments for the presence of some genetic determination of the intelligence difference between sub-Saharan Africans and Europeans. First, the two races have evolved independently in different environments over a period of approximately 100,000 years (Mellars and Stringer, 1989; Cavalli-Sforza, 2000). When two populations evolve largely in isolation from each other for this period of time, genetic differences between them inevitably evolve for all characteristics for which there is genetic variability. These differences evolve as a result of genetic drift, mutations, founder effects, and most important, adaptation to different environments. The extreme environmentalist position that there is no genetic difference between the two races for intelligence defies this general principle of evolutionary biology and should be ruled out as impossible.
Second, the consistency with which Africans obtain low IQs in so many different locations can only be explained by the operation of a strong genetic factor. If only environmental factors were responsible for the different IQs of different populations, we should expect to find some countries where Africans had higher IQs than Europeans. The failure to find a single country where this is the case points to the presence of a strong genetic factor. Third, the high heritability of intelligence found in twin studies of Blacks and Whites in the United States, in Europe, Japan, and India shows that intelligence is powerfully affected by genetic factors and makes it improbable that the differences between Africans and Europeans, or between any other pairs of races, can be solely environmentally determined. Fourth, the brain size difference between Blacks and Whites points to a genetic difference, considering the high heritability of about 0.9 of brain size and the correlation of approximately 0.4 between brain size and intelligence.
Fifth, several egalitarians have proposed that White racism may be responsible for impairing the IQs of the Blacks. Thus, Weinberg, Scarr, and Waldman write that their result that Black children adopted by Whites have low IQs “could indicate the results of environmental influences such as the pervasive effect of racism in American life” (1992, p. 41) and “the IQ results are consistent with racially based environmental effects in the order of group means” (p. 40). Mackintosh (1998, p. 152) also falls back on White racism in a final attempt to argue that the low IQ of the Black adoptees can be explained environmentally and suggests that perhaps “it is precisely the experience of being Black in a society permeated by White racism that is responsible for lowering Black children’s IQ scores.” These egalitarians do not explain how hypothetical White racism could impair the IQs of Black children reared by middle class White parents. There is no known or plausible mechanism by which supposed White racism could impair the IQs of Blacks. Nor do they attempt to explain how it is that Africans throughout sub-Saharan Africa, who are not exposed to White racism, except in South Africa, have IQs of approximately 71. Furthermore, if racism lowers intelligence, it is remarkable that Jews in the United States and Britain should have IQs of around 110 (Lynn, 2011b), since Jews have been exposed to racism for many centuries. The high IQ of American Jews has been well known since the 1930s and has been extensively documented by Storfer (1990), MacDonald (1994), and Herrnstein and Murray (1994), yet it goes curiously unmentioned by environmentalists like Flynn (1980), Brody (1992, 2003), Neisser (1996), Mackintosh (1998), Jencks and Phillips (1998), Nisbett (1998), Montagu (1999), and Fish (2002).
Sixth, Black infant precocity is impossible to explain in environmental terms and can only be attributed to a genetically based maturation difference. Seventh, the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study carried out by Waldman, Scarr, and Weinberg (1994) was designed to show that when Black infants are adopted by White parents they would have the same IQs as Whites. The authors of this study examined groups of Black, White, and interracial babies all adopted by White middle-class couples. It turned out that at the age of 17, the IQs were 89 for the Blacks, 98 for the interracial individuals, and 106 for the Whites. Thus, a 17 IQ point difference between Blacks and Whites remains even when they are reared in the same conditions.
Being raised by White adoptive parents had no beneficial effects on the intelligence of the Black children because their IQ of 89 is the same as that of Blacks in the north-central states from which the infants came. The interracial group with its IQ of 98 falls midway between the Black and the White, as would be predicted from the genetic cause of the difference. A full analysis and discussion of this study has been given by Levin (1994) and Lynn (1994c), together with an unconvincing reply by Waldman, Weinberg, and Scarr (1994, p. 43), in which they assert “we feel that the balance of the evidence, although not conclusive, favors a predominantly environmental etiology underlying racial differences in intelligence and that the burden of proof is on researchers who argue for the predominance of genetic racial differences.” Notice that their use of the phrase “predominantly environmental etiology” concedes that they accept that genetic factors are also present.
While the results of this study show that differences in family environment cannot explain the low Black IQ, it remains possible that Blacks provide an inferior prenatal environment as a result of poorer nutrition of pregnant Black women or possibly of the greater use of cigarettes that might impair the growth of the fetal brain. These possibilities are rendered improbable by studies showing that the nutrition of American Blacks throughout the twentieth century was not inferior to that of Whites (see Chapter 13, Section 7).
Another possibility is that Black babies might suffer greater impairment of the brain because pregnant Black women might smoke cigarettes more, since there is some evidence that smoking retards fetal growth, but this is rendered improbable by numerous studies showing that Blacks smoke cigarettes less than Whites.
Despite their commitment to the egalitarian position, it is interesting to note that Waldman, Scarr, and Weinberg (1994) concluded that their evidence shows that both genetic and environmental differences contribute to the Black-White IQ difference: “We think it is exceedingly implausible that these differences are either entirely genetically based or entirely environmentally based” (p. 31). Thus, while there is nothing in their data that can justify this conclusion, because they provide no evidence for any environmental contribution to the low Black IQ, their final position is not greatly different from that advanced by Jensen (1969), that both genetic and environmental factors are responsible for the low Black IQ; but where Jensen proposed that the relative contributions are about two thirds genetic and one third environmental, Waldman, Scarr, and Weinberg have concluded that both factors are involved, although they do not suggest a quantification of the magnitude of the respective contributions.
In fact, the results of the Minnesota Interracial Adoption Study show that both conclusions are incorrect. The conclusion to be drawn from this study is that rearing Black children in a White middle-class environment has no effect at all on their IQs at age 17.
Posted inBlacks, IQ|Comments Off on Who’s The Leading Black Classical Music Composer?
Sometime in the late 70s, my father was involved in an intervention staged by women who were hurt by him. He came, even knowing the content of the conversation that was to happen. And when they told him that his actions and behavior had hurt them, he cried and said, “Oy this needs such a fixing.” I do believe that the actions, advocacy work and the way he raised his daughters in the last years of his life showed remarkable listening and personal accountability.
I accept the fullness of who my father was, flaws and all. I am angry with him. And I refuse to see his faults as the totality of who he was.
When I talk about my shifting perspective, I believe it must be said that I do not recognize the version of my father that some people describe. To me, he was the kindest, most respectful, most loving person to my friends and me. I myself witnessed him as a deeply passionate supporter of the role of women as leaders. The year my father passed away, he was taken to Jewish court (beit din) by his own synagogue, furious that he had dared to allow me to sing beside him. Before I even knew that it was important, my father was shouting to the world that women must have the place to share their voices and be heard. He was one the first to support Anat Hoffman and the Women of the Wall. He trained and ordained women as rabbis far ahead of any of the recent advances for women we’ve witnessed during the past decade within Modern Orthodoxy. I don’t believe he understood how his voice would change the fabric of women’s prayer, but I believe that he hoped and prayed that the tides would shift.
That he did not live to see all that would come from these acts of radical love brings me great sadness. What might he have witnessed during these past 23 years since his death that could have pushed him to translate his public commitments to women’s equality into choices he made as a person? Who knows the apologies he might have made, if he might have been granted the chance to offer the public acknowledgements so many only called for upon his passing, if only he had been able to give more years to repair the world around him as a man brave enough to ask for forgiveness. I wish he had had that chance, and that he could have been part of the healing he necessitated, a healing he would have been particularly equipped to offer. I would have had the chance to ask my own questions, and perhaps to hear what he would have said in response…
When I was 9 years old, a trusted friend of my father’s, also a rabbi, a fixture in my home, came into my bedroom and molested me. For the child in my heart, who has walked through life in fear since that moment, I thank you all for shifting the tide. Our daughters, our sons, our children, must have a better world. And that, friends, must be our true focus. We must not stop our work, pouring out the music of our souls to rid our children’s worlds of pain, fear, and hunger of body and soul.
Posted inAbuse, Carlebach|Comments Off on Neshama Carlebach: My sisters, I hear you
* Lewandowski and Hope Hicks, the PR aide put on the campaign by Ivanka Trump, had an affair that ended in a public fight on the street…
* Shortly after Lewandowski, with whom Hicks had an on-and-off romantic relationship, was fired in June 2016 for clashing with Trump family members, Hicks sat in Trump Tower with Trump and his sons, worrying about Lewandowski’s treatment in the press and wondering aloud how she might help him. Trump, who otherwise seemed to treat Hicks in a protective and even paternal way, looked up and said, “Why? You’ve already done enough for him. You’re the best piece of tail he’ll ever have,” sending Hicks running from the room.
* The silver lining of the ignominy Melania Trump had to endure after the Billy Bush tape was that now there was no way her husband could become president. Donald Trump’s marriage was perplexing to almost everybody around him—or it was, anyway, for those without private jets and many homes. He and Melania spent relatively little time together. They could go days at a time without contact, even when they were both in Trump Tower. Often she did not know where he was, or take much notice of that fact. Her husband moved between between residences as he would move between rooms. Along with knowing little about his whereabouts, she knew little about his business, and took at best modest interest in it. An absentee father for his first four children, Trump was even more absent for his fifth, Barron, his son with Melania. Now on his third marriage, he told friends he thought he had finally perfected the art: live and let live—“Do your own thing.” He was a notorious womanizer, and during the campaign became possibly the world’s most famous masher. While nobody would ever say Trump was sensitive when it came to women, he had many views about how to get along with them, including a theory he discussed with friends about how the more years between an older man and a younger woman, the less the younger woman took an older man’s cheating personally. Still, the notion that this was a marriage in name only was far from true. He spoke of Melania frequently when she wasn’t there. He admired her looks—often, awkwardly for her, in the presence of others. She was, he told people proudly and without irony, a “trophy wife.” And while he may not have quite shared his life with her, he gladly shared the spoils of it. “A happy wife is a happy life,” he said, echoing a popular rich-man truism. He also sought Melania’s approval. (He sought the approval of all the women around him, who were wise to give it.) In 2014, when he first seriously began to consider running for president, Melania was one of the few who thought it was possible he could win.
It was a punchline for his daughter, Ivanka, who had carefully distanced herself from the campaign. With a never-too-hidden distaste for her stepmother, Ivanka would say to friends: All you have to know about Melania is that she thinks if he runs he’ll certainly win.
* Throughout his life, Trump had few close friends of any kind, but when he began his campaign for president he had almost no friends in politics. The only two actual politicians with whom Trump was close were Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie, and both men were in their own way peculiar and isolated. And to say that he knew nothing—nothing at all—about the basic intellectual foundations of the job was a comic understatement. Early in the campaign, in a Producers-worthy scene, Sam Nunberg was sent to explain the Constitution to the candidate: “I got as far as the Fourth Amendment before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head.”
* For quite obvious reasons, no president before Trump and few politicians ever have come out of the real estate business: a lightly regulated market, based on substantial debt with exposure to frequent market fluctuations, it often depends on government favor, and is a preferred exchange currency for problem cash—money laundering. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, Jared’s father Charlie, Trump’s sons Don Jr. and Eric, and his daughter Ivanka, as well as Trump himself, all supported their business enterprises to a greater or lesser extent working in the dubious limbo of international free cash flow and gray money. Charlie Kushner, to whose real estate business interests Trump’s son-in-law and most important aide was wholly tied, had already spent time in a federal prison for tax evasion, witness tampering, and making illegal campaign donations. Modern politicians and their staffs perform their most consequential piece of opposition research on themselves. If the Trump team had vetted their candidate, they would have reasonably concluded that heightened ethical scrutiny could easily put them in jeopardy. But Trump pointedly performed no such effort.
* Trump liked to say that one of the things that made life worth living was getting your friends’ wives into bed.
* Ten days before Donald Trump’s inauguration as the forty-fifth president, a group of young Trump staffers—the men in regulation Trump suits and ties, the women in the Trump-favored look of high boots, short skirts, and shoulder-length hair—were watching President Barack Obama give his farewell speech as it streamed on a laptop in the transition offices.
[Who is Trump boffing these days?]
Posted inAmerica, Donald Trump|Comments Off on Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
