Luke Ford

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* The coining of the term “Fake News” by the leftist establishment was a more horrific blunder than they even realize yet.

Trump and the right will likely soon move beyond excoriating just Fake News and use the Fake descriptor to delegitimize, or at least impugn, all of the other phony stuff in the left’s arsenal:

Fake Education—The indoctrination that passes itself off as a real education that teaches man important truths.

Fake Entertainment—The propaganda, like female Ghostbusters or Modern Family, that pretends to be actual entertainment.

Fake Art—The modern monstrosities that debase and revolt man instead of uplift him like true art.

Fake Intelligence—”The election was hacked by Muh Russians.”

Fake Work—The worthless jobs that our economy has become saturated with. See affirmative action jobs, HR cat-lady workers, and all the time wasting activities implemented by managers and regulators for CYA purposes.

One could go on and on in this vein.

* Fake History – when “Hidden Figures” and cast win Oscars for their “black women pioneer the Space age” movie.

* It’s quite clear the establishment wants Trump gone ASAP and damn the consequences.

That said I understand why they’re so open about it. The establishment is betting the white working and middle-class will roll over and do nothing.

That’s one hell of a wager. Because the lower class whites won’t just see it as a assassination or impeachment but the establishment/cloud people telling them they aren’t allowed to have a say in the way things are run.

It’s not a bet I want to make, especially given that the establishment has been dead wrong about the public response to Trump from day one. I can see it all going pear shaped for them real fast.

* We have a pretty damned serious problem in this country.

The “elites” are 100% against Trump. Normally, only someone from the elite class is allowed to win.

Trump only won because the elites are 100% against the American people, too. (When you step back and consider that the previous president of the United States actively sided with foreigners who committed the crime of illegal entry instead of enforcing U.S. immigration law — to the point of bringing them to the State of the Union Address — that’s pretty bad.)

The elites are hell-bent on taking Trump out. And they’re capable of doing it. The problem facing Trump is that in order to survive, he’s going to need to play just as dirty as they do — in other words, by insisting that Trump is a “fascist,” the elites are going to box him in into a corner where he’s actually going to have to become one in order to survive the endless plots against him.

Trump did the right thing by holding a populist rally in Florida — but that’s all he’s got for support. The problem with populism is that common people don’t control the institutions of the state, so when push comes to shove their influence is pretty limited — unless they take to the streets and instill fear in the hearts of the elites. That’s the primary technique of fascism. I don’t see that happening yet, but it’s pretty hard to see Trump surviving four years unless he can get some key institutions on his side (first and foremost the Republican Party.

Failing that, it’s going to end up in the streets.

Not a good scene at all.

* On the one hand, the left and the media have gone increasingly crazy since Trump’s inauguration.

On the other hand, Trump, who seemed at the very beginning somewhat humbled by his rise to the Presidency and what it represents, seems now more and more comfortable and even emboldened by the power of the office. I think his performance in his most recent press conference is a sign of that. In addition, he seems to be getting some better sense of the operating constraints of a President.

I think Trump’s self-confidence in the role of the Presidency is just too much for the press to take — especially since he is so openly contemptuous of them. On some level, I’m sure they are suffering from a guilty conscience themselves. They know how they’ve tossed out all journalistic principle. Being accused by the most powerful man in the world of ginning up Fake News is causing an internal breakdown.

Everything is getting worse in terms of polarization. But where does it end? How does it resolve itself?

As the saying goes, trends that can’t continue, won’t. I’m just not sure where we’ll be when it stops.

If I had to guess, some of the people in the press will finally peel themselves off of the hysteria, as it proceeds to its farther reaches. They will be denounced, of course, but others will take heart from their decision and do the same. It will help that this will also be a very good career move at a certain point, because it will give them both an audience in the public and greater access in the Trump administration.

* You would think the incredible victory of Trump would be cause for some self-examination among the establishment, but quite the contrary. This reality show star went up against the Republican establishment, the entire Democrat Party, the entire media (with a few exceptions), and the whole entrenched liberal culture that dominates our nation, and he won. I myself voted for him despite not particularly liking him as a person and having serious doubts about his qualifications and temperament. Nevertheless, I was happy to vote for the first candidate in my lifetime who talked about the real problems of this country and offered real solutions, whether or not I believe he will be able to deliver. As far as I’m concerned, it’s Trump or “game over,” and it may be game over in any case.

Roughly half the voting population of this nation feels the same way I do. Yet instead of taking our anger seriously, the establishment thinks it can just make this all go away by having liberal judges block Trump at every turn, having the press and entertainment industry attack him on a daily basis, and having congress do as little as possible to enact his agenda. But where do tthe elites think the anger is going to go? Do they think they can just double down, tell us, “No, America, you can’t have borders. No, you have to welcome a vast influx of Muslims. No, you have to step aside and let immigrants take your jobs. Sorry, we have to move your industry to countries with cheaper workers and fewer regulations.”

Can they really not understand that they’re playing with fire? They can call Trump “Hitler” all they want, but they have to confront the fact that we prefer the one they call Hitler to them.

* Ace of Spades: Dear Media,

We all watched you in tears on election night, on our TVs.

We saw your crying. There’s no denying it.

And there’s no coming back from that.

Anyone who cries like a baby while on television over the election results cannot claim to be able to put aside his deep emotional reaction and behave professionally and detachedly in the months to follow.

So:

We know what you are. We’ve always known what you were, but seeing the hysterical tears flow was proof to the rest of the world who suspected but did not know.

And we’ll never believe a word you say again.

Go f**k yourselves dead,

The People Who Used to Watch You On TV

* Most important thing to control is the army. Most of the ranks are already pro-Trump, and getting Trump’s picks in at the top will solidify control there. Second most important thing is the CIA and intelligence community. There’s where the big fight is going to be fought. Third is the FBI, and we can’t do a thing about Comey until his term is up, but there are people below Comey who support Trump. We can probably wait on them until Comey’s term is up. Tillerson is already cleaning house at State. From there, it’s lesser agencies like the EPA, Education, etc., which are easier targets. If we can get over the hump of the CIA-intelligence communities, it’s only a matter of time before we have the whole government. I don’t think the intelligence community realizes this is a fight they can’t win. You cannot fight your own incoming president like this when he has the power to hire, fire, and prosecute you.

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* I think that most “mainstream” conservatives (i.e. the Rush Limbaugh set, the Dittoheads) have this vague sense that the US Constitution is a magical document that, if followed to the letter, would produce only “good” outcomes, their notion of goodness being a rather unexamined one which will be discussed below. Therefore, any ruling by any court which they deem unconformable to their liking must be the result of liberal activist judges behaving unconstitutionally. In other words, since the Constitution is defined as doing no wrong, they simply beg the question on the constitutionality of unwanted rulings. This whole process came to a head most recently during the Obamacare fracas. When Chief Justice Roberts issued his opinion upholding the ACA, the mainstreamers were up in arms. They didn’t want or like the ACA, so obviously this was “unconstitutional,” right? The arguments adduced to condemn Roberts’ decision were a truly preposterous collection of calumnies ranging from the pop-psychological (“Life is high school, folks. You never get out of high school. Roberts just wanted to ingratiate himself with the cool kids in Washington.”) to the ominous (“What kind of dirt does the NSA have on Roberts that they could blackmail him like this?”) to the pathetic (“Roberts did not want to be the one to deny the First Black President his signature piece of legislation.”). Missing from all of this hysterical reaction was any willingness to entertain the idea that Roberts really did rule in accordance with the law; for all of the legal scholars whom I read at the time—who were no liberals, mind you—agreed that in the broad sense Obamacare was constitutional, even if it was a terrible idea. The Supreme Court did not find any grounds for striking down the law that were no so uselessly capacious as to invalidate pretty much everything the federal government actually does. The essence of the matter was very succinctly expressed in Roberts’ appropriation of Obama’s taunt: “Elections have consequences.”

Furthermore, the Dittoheads’ conception of what comprises a “good” constitutional outcome is indefensible and oftentimes just plain silly. The typical example to be cited regarding that point is the modern-day transvaluation of the controversy over slavery in the Southern States. The modern Dittos begin with the premise of strict constructionism: The US Constitution is the supreme law of the land and it must be obeyed as written (they are forever qualifying their panegyrics with innumerable ‘as-writtens,’ as if that clarified the matter). The modern Liberals respond to this premise with the objection that the Constitution must be a “living, breathing document”; for, after all, it codified slavery into law (“which we all agree is an unmitigated moral evil”) and we did away with that, didn’t we? To this the Dittos oppose an argument which is both historically inaccurate and tactically boneheaded. “Ah, but the wise and beneficent Framers, recognizing that the Union could never be preserved without making some provisions for the Southern States on this issue at the time, nevertheless placed into the Constitution the mechanism for getting rid of slavery at a later date.”

It should be pointed out that this argument, even by its own lights, enshrines the idea that an act of pragmatic state necessity (preserving the Union) takes precedence over any ideological commitments to universal human liberty, even in the case of an “unmitigated moral evil.” Thus, the premise of strict constructionism, along with any notion that the liberties guaranteed by the Constitution cannot be overridden by a supposedly higher purpose, is already hoist with its own petard. But of far greater weight is the swallowing whole of the description of slavery as inherently evil; which—since the Constitution can do no wrong—must on the Dittos’ view entail that the Framers were working behind the scenes from the beginning to eradicate this bane from the land.

That counterfactual claim is nothing but a cowardly concession to the spirit of our own times, and neither historical truth nor constitutional rigor has anything to do with it. What the conservatives should have done is oppose the entire spirit of modernity by speaking candidly on the subject of slavery by laying out the following:

1) That the condition of slavery is not an inherent moral evil and is not contrary to the natural law; contrarily, it actually benefits those who have proven themselves incapable of self-governance.

2) That during the long millennia prior to the modern age, every nation, every empire, every higher culture was completely dependent on slaves or servants for its very existence; and

3) That the only reasons we today delude ourselves that we are able to dispense with the eternal tension of master and slave is because our advanced machine industry has largely taken over menial labors in our native lands, while the menial work that still remains to be done is performed in foreign sweatshops by workers whom we never see. Thus, by immoderately proclaiming the blessings of liberty to one and all, and heaping condemnation upon our ancestors, we are engaging in an orgy of self-congratulatory moral preening to which we have no real title whatsoever.

The only conservatism worthy of the name is what you might call the anti-modernist, Traditionalist/Perennialist, reactionary kind—not the Constitutionalist kind. Constitutionalism is simply the leftovers of yesterday’s liberalism. The very notion of a separation of powers among the branches of government is contrary to the nature of power and ought, at least by now, to be regarded as a quaint production of an overstrained intellect which has never in fact been observed. It is one thing for men to voluntarily form a compact that provides for self-government and the mutual respect of one another’s property; it is quite another to suppose that the primordial forces of history can be countered by flourishing a text in their face. However, for as long as the Constitution remains the law of the land, it needs to be observed with at least a begrudging respect. Bill Kistol, by his own mouth, has confessed himself to be a traitor and an outlaw by preferring the rule of the Deep State to the rule of the constitutionally elected president, and has thereby forfeited any claim to the protections the Constitution might otherwise have afforded him. Let him be treated as such.

* The lawyers and doctors were having a convention and after a few two many drinks one lawyer while speaking to the group opined, “We wrote the Constitution, when you doctors were putting leaches on George Washington’s ass.” Its sort of true. A couple lawyers in the colonies created more human progress, wealth, satisfaction, goodness, than any other profession. Think of the wealth created in America (not because of magic dirt), the progress, the millions of people allowed to live their lives as they saw fit. People of the same genetic stock in UK and Europe do not match the United States in any way.

Surely a student of history 500 years in the future will study the Greece golden age, the Roman Republic and the USA as high points of individual freedom in a history of mankind sadly lacking in much of it.

* Glenn Greenwald, whose been making the interview rounds of late discussing the deep state in the context of the current events, mentioned Bill Kristol’s preference (and MSM, Neo Cons & democrats) for the destruction of this administration by that means as hypocrisy and absolutely dangerously undemocratic. He’s no Trump fan and would like to see by legal means Trumps policies thwarted, but he’s intellectually honest enough to see that these expedient partisan selective outrages are destroying our country.