Luke Ford

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* The goy in Montana who allegedly punched a hostile reporter has comfortably won his special election to the U.S. House. Magically the election has immediately ceased to be an Important Test For The Trump Administration.

Follow up on Montana from Jeff Bezos’ emo blog:

The darker forces that propelled President Trump’s rise are beginning to frame and define the rest of the Republican Party.

When GOP House candidate Greg Gianforte assaulted a reporter who had attempted to ask him a question Wednesday night in Montana, many saw not an isolated outburst by an individual, but the obvious, violent result of Trump’s charge that journalists are “the enemy of the people.” Nonetheless, Gianforte won Thursday’s special election to fill a safe Republican seat.

“Respectfully, I’d submit that the president has unearthed some demons,”

Rep. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.) said.
 

Where is that name familiar from? Oh right, he used to be governor and he got caught having an affair… Anyway. You might think that this pos is going to whine that Trump’s anti media rhetoric has encouraged violence against the media. But actually,

“I’ve talked to a number of people about it back home. They say, ‘Well, look, if the president can say whatever, why can’t I say whatever?’ He’s given them license.”

…

“There is a total weirdness out there,” Sanford said. “People feel like, if the president of the United States can say anything to anybody at any time, then I guess I can too. And that is a very dangerous phenomenon.”

 

The real danger according to this REPUBLICAN is that Trump might make people feel free to speak their minds and criticize their rulers…

* Trump isn’t a liar- he always means exactly what he says at the moment he says it. He always says exactly what he believes at the very second he believes it.

The problem is, like Mr. Toad of Toad Hall, he’s forever changing his mind about what he believes and what he values. Toad was being totally truthful and sincere when he declared that he wanted to spend the rest of his life in a gypsy caravan. He just moved on to something else (in this case, cars) in a hurry, and truthfully claimed, “The caravan? That was just a whim, a passing fancy. THIS is my true calling!!!”

Donald Trump was probably on the level when he said immigration is bad and that we should build a wall. He probably meant what he said. But he’s already lost his enthusiasm for the project, and is likely to move on to another fad shortly.

Which means anybody relying on Trump to do anything he promises is delusional.

* Trump is an enigma inside a riddle, wrapped in a mystery. I suspect he never took any of his policies too seriously to be honest, and I’m not expecting many huge victories on immigration. Anyone who still thinks we’re getting a big beautiful wall for example is dreaming. However, Trump’s near-superhuman election win against BOTH the Bush and Clinton machines was probably the greatest blow against the forces of crypto-communist political correctness I’ve seen in my lifetime. He proved to us they aren’t invincible, and for that he is a hero in my eyes.

* Trump seems to have a cultural affinity to many of his supporters. If he were a Texan he would be accused of telling ‘Texas Tall Tales’, aka being a ‘Cracker’. Not a ‘whip cracker’, or racist, but part of the cultural continuum from the Celtic fringe through appalachia and the south.

We recognize the braggadocio and the blarney, and don’t take him literally. We don’t take it as deep seated dishonesty, as was the case with Hillary. And we think he is on our side, which we never suspected Hillary of being, or Obama after at most the first year.

* Trump’s supporters take him seriously but not literally. Trump’s enemies take him literally but not seriously.

Paul Gottfried writes:

Not all non-American societies are wracked by internal tribal conflict. Many are made up mostly or entirely of one ethnic group. Presumably Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, China, and Japan do not fit Tucker’s parochial picture of “elsewhere.” Tucker’s comments remind me of American immigrants whom I met as a kid who would tell me that everyone outside the United States was starving. One had to wonder how many inhabitants of the rest of the world these acquaintances of my parents had met.

It’s also ridiculous to claim that tribal identities had nothing to do with American politics before the current left came to monopolize our media and universities. I recall when party tickets for municipal officials in mayoral races in New York City were expected to include an Irishman, Italian and Jew. When the late Mayor Daley ruled over Chicago, he selected ward heelers on the basis of their ethnic identification with the Chicago neighborhoods to which they were assigned. Not only were the Poles, Italians, Jews, Irish, and Lithuanians given ethnically compatible liaisons with the mayor’s office. Black politicians in Chicago also got their start as ethnic representatives in the very expansive Daley-machine. Naturally the top posts went to Daley’s fellow-Irish but that’s the way American ethnic politics operated back then in the Windy City. Politics were much more tribal than, to use Tucker’s preferred state of mind, ”ideological.” But pardon my own preference: I didn’t mind the way Daley cut the municipal pie. It was sure better than having “ideological” warfare—or seeing the white working class shortchanged as in Hillary’s version of “inclusiveness.”

I’m also utterly puzzled by Tucker’s fear that we’re all becoming tribal. Does this apply to white Southerners who are watching Confederate monuments—celebrating the heroes under whom some of their ancestors fought—being torn down? Are these Southern “tribalists” receiving the same recognition as Black Lives Matter or do they enjoy the same respect as black politicians who say they’re offended by Confederate symbols? One might think, following Tucker’s logic, that in a society where all tribes are contending for power, Southern whites who valued ancestral symbols would be receiving the same encouragement as those on the other side. But of course this is not the case, because Tucker’s view of our present problem misses the point. Although tribalism has had serious historical consequences, it is not the same thing as multiculturalism. Tucker would do well to understand that the kind of tribalism permitted by multiculturalists is extremely selective and is not handed out to all groups in the same measure.

For years I’ve read and heard establishment Republican and neoconservative commentators warn that if we give in to the demands of black and Latino nationalists, we’d be opening the door to right-wing white tribalism. This has not happened to any significant degree; and where it has, the phenomenon has not resulted from following the multicultural ideology promoted by the left.

Clearly multiculturalists do not value all tribal identities equally. In fact they happily divide us into victimizers and victims. Presumably white Southern male heterosexual Christians are not intended to enjoy the same collective right to an historical identity as, say, a black lesbian or a Muslim gay activist.