Luke Ford

LINK: Great comment from Dana Posey Zimbleman, in response to this NR article:

It is people like Vance who end up being the so-called representatives of the white working poor because they grew up among them and presume they understand them. I encounter these folks in academia all the time. They fled their rural, working class roots for better opportunities and an education, which is commendable, but they became embittered and contemptuous of home. For all their complaints about whites’ lacking empathy, they never seem to demonstrate any compassion or empathy for those they grew up with. They sneer at those people, their religion, their traditions, and tell their new friends they are glad they made it the hell out. I grew up working class and did a lot of sneering myself after graduate school in my twenties and thirties. However, something changed in me when I got older and took a look around academia and saw some of the most unhappy, miserable people I had ever encountered. Then when I’d go home and encounter my relatives who went to church, gardened, produced beautiful quilts, made homemade jams and jellies, and enjoyed playing with their kids, I realized the folks back home possessed a humility and a knowledge about life that my colleagues with all their advanced degrees had missed.

Vance and others delude themselves into believing that Trump supporters are desperate, drug-addled, miserable people. In truth, those who support Trump are the ones who get up and go to work every single day and are sick of seeing their communities rot because the welfare state has, in an odd way, made welfare dependancy a way to gentrify young women and n’er-do-well men who have one child after another. This behavior is condoned–even glorified– as “single motherhood.” Then the progressive, non-judgmental judgmentalists will tell those who object to such dissipation that they are the ones who need to check their “privilege.”

The “young man from West Virginia” doesn’t have to read Breitbart to know that elites hate him. If he enrolls in his local community college and tries to better himself, he’ll likely encounter a slew of essays about white privilege in his English Composition 101 reader. He’ll either agree with that assessment and join the ranks of the self-loathing white-collar classes that have forgotten where they came from or laugh at the utter nonsense of it, move beyond the stereotyping, and make something of himself.

From Return of Kings:

Ever since the end of the Republican and Democratic National Conventions last month, the mainstream media has been leading an unprecedented assault on Donald Trump. Rigged polls that oversample Democrats have consistently shown him trailing Hillary Clinton by double digits, and a succession of fake stories have alternately implied that Trump is either planning to quit the presidential race or the GOP is planning to oust him in a party-room coup. At the same time, the media has engaged in an extensive cover-up of Hillary’s increasingly obvious health problems, from her coughing and seizures to her reliance on stools and possible use of a catheter.

However, Trump’s immigration speech last Wednesday might mark the turning point of the general election. In two televised events—a visit with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto and a speech in Phoenix later in the day—Trump managed to break through the Great Wall of media bias and speak to the American voter. Trump’s immigration speech was a strong recovery for his campaign and will likely signal his victory in November.

Writers such as Mike Cernovich and Scott Adams have emphasized that a large part of Trump’s success comes from his ability to persuade and influence others. While numerous conservative presidential candidates have tried to win the public over with facts and figures, Trump has sold his nationalist platform through his charisma and charm, using the same strategies that he’s utilized in his business career.

In the case of his immigration speech, Trump set the stage perfectly by meeting Peña Nieto earlier in the day. His willingness to speak one-on-one with Mexico’s president—the country on whose border he wants to build a wall—defuses the left’s narrative of him being a crazy, irrational bigot. In particular, the optics of Trump shaking hands with Peña Nieto, who is both smaller than Trump and was unable to make eye contact with him, made him look presidential. Contrast this with Hillary’s increasing unwillingness to make public appearances and her continued refusal to give a press conference.

The speech itself was noteworthy for Trump’s use of rhetorical techniques to drive home the threat illegal immigration poses to Americans. The centerpiece was the Donald introducing the “Angel Moms,” mothers whose children have been murdered by illegal aliens. While many people might have a hard time processing statistics about the ruin that illegal aliens bring to America, the image of mothers grieving their dead children is one that hits almost everyone in the gut:

Leftists were unusually triggered by Trump’s speech, singling out the Angel Moms for particular derision:

This was Trump's most hateful speech. As a US Jew, I'm shaking not just from anger for the state of our nation, but from legitimate fear.

— David Harris-Gershon (@David_EHG) September 1, 2016

As an immigrant, I'm absolutely horrified and shaking right now.

— igorvolsky (@igorvolsky) September 1, 2016

I can't believe the number of seemingly honest journalists calling this a "POPULIST ALT-RIGHT" speech. It's racism. It's fascism. ENOUGH.

— Elliott Lusztig (@ezlusztig) September 1, 2016

I can't watch anymore. I'm shaking.

— Armando (@armandodkos) September 1, 2016

It’s worth noting that even with the polls slanted towards Democrats as they are, Trump’s numbers have improved considerably. FiveThirtyEight, beloved by the left for its supposedly “accurate” political forecasting model, now gives Trump a 28.5 percent chance of winning the election, a massive increase from August. Some pollsters have also begun publicly acknowledging that Trump supporters are massively undersampled in polls, due to the fact that many of his supporters did not vote in the 2012 election.

John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt writes in Foreign Affairs:

For the first time in recent memory, large numbers of Americans
are openly questioning their country’s grand strategy. An April
2016 Pew poll found that 57 percent of Americans agree that
the United States should “deal with its own problems and let others
deal with theirs the best they can.” On the campaign trail, both the
Democrat Bernie Sanders and the Republican Donald Trump found
receptive audiences whenever they questioned the United States’
penchant for promoting democracy, subsidizing allies’ defense, and
intervening militarily—leaving only the likely Democratic nominee
Hillary Clinton to defend the status quo.

Americans’ distaste for the prevailing grand strategy should come
as no surprise, given its abysmal record over the past quarter century.
In Asia, India, Pakistan, and North Korea are expanding their nuclear
arsenals, and China is challenging the status quo in regional waters.

In Europe, Russia has annexed Crimea, and U.S. relations with Moscow
have sunk to new lows since the Cold War. U.S. forces are still fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, with no victory in sight. Despite losing most of its original leaders, al Qaeda has metastasized across the region.

The Arab world has fallen into turmoil—in good part due to the
United States’ decisions to effect regime change in Iraq and Libya and
its modest efforts to do the same in Syria—and the Islamic State, or
isis, has emerged out of the chaos. Repeated U.S. attempts to broker
Israeli-Palestinian peace have failed, leaving a two-state solution further away than ever. Meanwhile, democracy has been in retreat worldwide, and the United States’ use of torture, targeted killings, and other morally dubious practices has tarnished its image as a defender of human rights and international law.

The United States does not bear sole responsibility for all these costly debacles, but it has had a hand in most of them. The setbacks are the natural consequence of the misguided grand strategy of liberal hegemony that Democrats and Republicans have pursued for years. This approach holds that the United States must use its power not only to solve global problems but also to promote a world order based on international institutions, representative governments, open markets, and respect for human rights. As “the indispensable nation,” the logic goes, the United States has the right, responsibility, and wisdom to manage local politics almost everywhere. At its core, liberal hegemony is a revisionist grand strategy: instead of calling on the United States to merely uphold the balance of power in key regions, it commits American might to promoting democracy everywhere and defending human rights whenever they are threatened. Read on.