Luke Ford | No sacred cows.

Why Are Jews Hated?

Posted on May 5, 2016 by Luke Ford

Why are Japanese hated? Why are Gypsies hated? Why are blacks hated? Why are Nazis hated? Why are Muslims hated? Why are Seventh-Day Adventists hated? Why are whites hated? Why are Chinese hated? Why are Jews hated?

All groups are engaged in a struggle for survival and when another group threatens your group, your rational reaction is to hate it.

Jews are hated for the same reasons that other groups are hated — because they are a threat or a competition to somebody else. For instance, it would be a very weird and unhealthy Arab or Muslim who does not have some negative feelings about Jews because of the Jewish state of Israel occupying land they believe belongs to them. It would be a weird Christian who does not have some negative feelings about Jews given that Christianity came from Judaism and yet Jews resist its claims.

I love the quote at the top of my website: “Anti-Semitism is as natural to Western civilization as anti-Christianity is to Jewish civilization, Islamic civilization and Japanese civilization.”

The more intensely you identify with your group, the more likely you are to have negative feelings about out-groups. That’s why Jews fear when non-Jews develop their racial, religious and national identities. A strongly racial or specifically Christian or nationalistic America is likely to be less friendly to Jews than a multi-cultural multi-racial America.

Shmuel Rosner writes:

Are the Jews “absolutely righteous, or are they also partly to blame for the calamities they have suffered?”
This is a disturbing question, one that is at the root of Jewish existence in a world that is not always supportive. It’s a question that can be asked about Jews in general, like Talmon did, and one that can also be asked, more particularly, in reference to the state of Israel. This is so because today’s Anti-Semites do not present ‘the Jews’ as the official cause for their hatred – that designation is reserved for the state of Israel, its policies, its actions, its attitude. In that sense, Israel is a disappointing country, but there’s a certain element of relief in this disappointment. Israel is disappointing because it hasn’t solved the problem of antisemitism. On the other hand, there is some relief in that: it gives us evidence that the Jews are not to blame for antisemitism.
Like many of the anti-Semites, the early Zionist leaders had a tendency to put a lot of blame on the Jews themselves when they tried to explain the roots of the hatred they faced. Micha Josef Berdyczewski blamed their insistence on “the ethics of the book” instead of “the ethics of the sword.” Their submissiveness, their meekness, their piousness, the fact that they had become, in the words of Herzl, “unable to assimilate completely” – all of these are reasons for the hatred of the people among which they dwelled. Early Zionism hoped to cure the world of the malady of antisemitism by a chirurgical procedure – an operation that would separate between the Jews and their haters. The moment they are separated, so the theory went, the Jews will be cured of the illness of the diaspora and the non-Jews will be cured of the illness of antisemitism.

Posted in Anti-Semitism | Comments Off

Is crime genetic? Scientists don’t know because they’re afraid to ask

Posted on May 5, 2016 by Luke Ford

Brian Boutwell writes in the Boston Globe:

THE COUNTRY HAS made unprecedented strides in the fight against crime. Both violent and non-violent crime are way down from their highs in decades past. This is great news, of course, but the success could easily lull us into a false sense of security, believing that we have the problem solved. Indeed, what if much of what we know about the causes of crime is either deeply flawed or flat out wrong?

Imagine the trial of a new drug for an ailment that is as intractable as it is lethal. Researchers find 100 people with the disease and give the new drug to the first 50 patients who show up to the clinic. The next 50 trial participants are placed into a control group and given no treatment. The drug has a truly shimmering success rate.

As you may have guessed, problems abound with this experimental design. For starters, because it isn’t randomized and because preexisting differences among the participants aren’t taken into account, the study can’t answer the question: Did the new drug cause anyone to get better? Such a study would be laughed out of the medical research community. And yet much of the knowledge concerning the causes of crime (as well as a host of other issues in the social sciences) stems from designs that aren’t much better than the poorly executed drug trial example.

Social scientists generally, and criminologists especially, often lack the ability (usually due to both ethical and practical concerns) to perform randomized controlled trials, the gold standard of research. We might expect, for instance, that having low levels of self-control is a cause of criminal behavior. In fact, some of the most powerful explanations of crime have been built on this idea, and there is much evidence to support it. We might also hypothesize that bad parenting causes children to develop low levels of self-control. Yet we can’t randomly assign people to have different levels of self-control, and we most assuredly can’t randomly assign kids to parents. All of this is to say that criminologists may never know for sure whether parenting causes self-control and whether, in turn, self-control causes crime.

While criminologists typically can’t use randomized trials, they do use a variety of statistical methods to study parenting and self-control, and self-control and crime. They attempt to rule out the most likely alternative explanations for why bad parenting leads to less self-control and why less self-control leads to criminal behavior. This research has consistently revealed that parenting styles correlate with self-control development in children, and self-control in childhood predicts a variety of important outcomes, including criminal behavior. Criminologists make their living uncovering precisely these types of associations.

Yet these studies will never achieve the accuracy of a randomized controlled trial, because all of those factors, like self-control, delinquent peer affiliation, etc., are also, to some degree, heritable.

Ah, heritability. A term that is much maligned in disciplines like criminology and often serves as a wellspring of confusion. Humans differ in height, weight, personality style, and behavioral tendencies — not everyone is nice and outgoing, just like not everyone is as tall as a professional basketball player. But here’s the important part, heritability has to do with the origins of these differences. To say that something is heritable is to say that genetic differences play a role in creating observable differences.

Variety in our gene pool matters when we seek to understand why some people can dunk a basketball or compose a sonnet, and why some people persistently break the law. The effects of genetic differences make some people more impulsive and shortsighted than others, some people more healthy or infirm than others, and, despite how uncomfortable it might be to admit, genes also make some folks more likely to break the law than others.

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The Bermuda Triangle Part II: Dangerous Research & The Risks Worth Taking

Posted on May 5, 2016 by Luke Ford

Professor Brian Boutwell writes:

The late J.P. Rushton represents one of the most brilliant, yet oddly obscure, psychologists in the last several decades. Few would deny that Phil Rushton possessed a stunning intellect; his work on human altruism, in fact, was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1988. Yet, when he is spoken of in circles both within and outside of academia now, brilliance is not the first adjective that gets tossed around. Rushton’s interest in differences among human population groups would lead him to begin asking “dangerous” questions about how those differences arose. His book, Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective (published in 1995) represented the culmination of much of his work on the topic to that point in his career.

For Rushton, the book was his opus, but for many, it represented the detonation of an academic land mine. Make no mistake — Rushton was controversial before his book came out — but he was positively radioactive in the years following.

The crux of what Rushton argued was, as you might have guessed, hardly politically correct. Human differences across a host of important traits — from reproductive behaviors to intelligence — “had its roots,” he said (p.31), “not only in economic, cultural, familial, and other environmental forces but also, to a far greater extent than mainstream social science would suggest, in ancient, gene-mediated evolutionary ones.”

Critical rebuke was stinging and unrestrained. Consider the following from a review written shortly after publication by David Barash, a psychologist at the University of Washington. In the course of excoriating Rushton, Barash proclaimed: “Bad science and virulent racial prejudice drip like pus from nearly every page of this despicable book.”

For the rest of Rushton’s life, and even after he died, in 2012, the disparagement would continue; his death renewed a discussion regarding his legacy, which to many amounts to nothing more than a wasteland of racist pseudoscience.

Critique is fundamental to the scientific enterprise. But critiques of “triangle science” (i.e., race scholarship) take a decidedly different tone. Critiques like the one leveled by Barash only serve to vilify people like Rushton. Barash could have said almost anything he wanted, so long as he made it clear that Rushton was the enemy. It wouldn’t even matter that in the course of criticizing Rushton, he (Barash) unleashed his own misunderstandings upon the reader. Consider the following (p. 1132):

For example, speaking of the causation of human phenotypes, Rushton breezily announces ‘I would hold, on the currently available evidence, that the genetic and environmental contributions are about equal’ (page xv). He seems not to understand that the ‘genetic and environmental contributions’ are in fact inseparable, thus neither equal nor unequal.” Clearly, the reader must assume, Rushton was inept.

There’s a problem, though. That bit about “not being able to separate genetic and environmental effects” is utter hogwash. Behavioral geneticists parse these two sources of variation using twin studies — its done all the time. My colleagues and I, moreover, have found that these techniques estimate the relative contributions of genes and environment quite effectively (and without appreciable bias). Recently, a magnificent overview analyzing five decades of twin research further validated the proposition that about half of the variance in most human outcomes is the result of genetic differences. I would be remiss not to mention, of course, that the heritability of individual differences does not by definition mean that group differences — such as group differences in cognitive ability — are also explained by genes. But whether they are, or aren’t, is an empirical question, not a philosophical one. It’s a question we can answer.

In fact, if you’ve read until now and think that the essay is about whether Rushton was right or wrong in his arguments, you’ve completely missed the point. Whether Rushton was right in some respects, and wrong in others is a non-issue for our purposes. Rushton could have been wrong about everything, and his work would still have been of great value. Why? In proposing testable ideas, ones that could be falsified, it allowed other scientists, like me, to mine for the truth. Eventually, we might have to toss out every single one of Rushton’s propositions to get an accurate understanding of reality — or we may not. Either way, if one were to list out the criteria for evaluating the truthfulness of an idea, being inoffensive would not (and should not) be on the roster.

As I’ve written about in part one of this series, no one knows this better than Linda Gottfredson, a distinguished psychologist at the University of Delaware. Linda has received a torrent of criticism over the years for her work on general intelligence — not only from the public, but also from her own university. Over the course of a handful of years in the late 1980s and early 1990s, her and her collaborators’ academic freedom was violated in a cavalcade of innovative attempts at censorship (not the least of which involved denial of funding and promotion). In 2010, Linda chronicled those experiences in an essay entitled, “Lessons in Academic Freedom as Lived Experience,” detailing the consequences of being ideologically controversial in science.

In the confines of that essay, she described how critics strategically maneuver in order to take certain types of research (more often than not involving the genetic basis of group differences) off the table (p. 276): “Labeling an idea dangerous makes it a target, and the label simultaneously provides moral justification for suppressing it.” she wrote. “Thus does suppression claim the moral high ground: danger and evil require such suppression in the name of the greater good.”

Doubtless drawing on her own experience with baseless accusations of racism, Gottfredson wrote in defense of Rushton in 2013, describing the machinations of (p. 218) “how mob science works to ‘discredit’ valid research and enforce collective ignorance about entire bodies of evidence.”

The strategies of mob science are uncomplicated and as both Rushton and Gottfredson would learn first hand, they are terrifyingly effective. The use of emotionally evocative words, like when Barash tossed out the descriptor “pus” to describe Phil Rushton’s work, represent a classic method for alerting the reader that something nefarious must be going on. Other examples, like using the monikers of (p.221) “diseased”, “sorry mess”, “dangerous”, “odios” and “same old lies,” similarly just stir our emotions; they don’t shift any real cognitive gears; they are “high talk, and low blows” to borrow Gottfredson’s words (p.221).

Today, the most straightforward approach for dealing with research on race is to simply decry the topic of race differences as being a “non-topic” altogether. If science really has shown that race is a social construct, the argument goes, then anyone talking about race must simply be trying to resurrect a scientifically defunct — and insidious — topic.

The trouble with this argument is that it’s not exactly honest. The roadmap of our ancestry exists in our DNA; our genes provide evidence of where we come from. Though self-identified race doesn’t always fully capture our geographic ancestry, the two undoubtedly overlap. In 2005, for instance, one study demonstrated that our (p.268): “ancient geographic ancestry, which is highly correlated with self-identified race/ethnicity — as opposed to current residence — is the major determinant of genetic structure in the U.S. population.” An individual’s self-identified race, in other words, doesn’t move in the opposite direction of their genetic ancestry — the two align to some degree. There is no doubt that future studies will continue, and should continue, forcing us to remold our notions of human ancestry and race. But at the same time, they haven’t yet laid waste to the idea that population groups differ for reasons other than culture alone (just as Phil Rushton suggested).

I’ve experienced a taste of “mob science” strategies first hand. My co-authors and I have drawn on some of Rushton’s insights in order to propose an evolutionary theory of criminal behavior. Reviewers were not shy about insinuating that only a cadre of bigots would suggest that criminal behavior might have anything at all to do with genetics, as we did in the paper. Some colleagues balked at the idea that we would even cite Rushton, as if including his name would somehow taint our research, our reputations, and me in general. Maybe it has; maybe I’ll never fully realize the damage that has been done. I do know that I’ve lost count of how many times senior colleagues (many of whom I respect greatly) have implored me to study anything else but race. What possible good comes from taking such a risk? Just don’t talk about it, they suggest, at least not until you’re tenured. I cannot in good conscience steer away from a topic that interests me, though, only because it is politically incorrect.

Gottfredson’s thoughts on the matter in 2010 are perhaps the best way to encapsulate my thinking about Rushton, race, and controversial science in general (p.279):

When the profession selectively impedes ideas that fail some non-scientific standard, such as alleged social harm, it breaks the covenant between society and academe that accords scholars freedom of inquiry.

Posted in Phil Rushton, Race | Comments Off

The Bermuda Triangle of Science

Posted on May 5, 2016 by Luke Ford

Professor Brian Boutwell writes:

This is an essay about how to avoid carpet-bombing your career as a scientist. The academy, in general, is a wonderful place to work, but not everyone plays nice. Veer too far from carefully charted courses and someone may slip quietly up behind you and slide a cold piece of steel in between the ribs of your budding research career.

They’ll do this believing that they are serving public interest by snuffing out dangerous research agendas, but that won’t make any difference to you. It’ll be your reputation that will suffer grievous injury. What in the world might elicit such harsh rebuke from a community of otherwise broadminded, free speech spouting scholars? What is so verboten that it constitutes academia’s Bermuda Triangle, a place where careers disappear more often than ships in the actual Bermuda Triangle? In one word, it’s race.

Now, had I written this a decade or more ago, general intelligence would have topped the list of forbidden academic fruit. This is not to say that intelligence research has magically become mainstream. It still carries its fair share of controversy. On one level, the continued debate about intelligence strikes me as quite funny, honestly. If you want to watch academics glorify a trait that many still think, “doesn’t exist” or “doesn’t matter”, hang around them when student applications are being reviewed. It’s hilarious to watch folks froth at the mouth over sky-high test scores that they would otherwise tell you measure nothing at all.

Nonetheless, the evidentiary base regarding the existence of general intelligence and its ability to predict important life outcomes — including health, longevity and mortality, as well as other key variables — is beyond compelling, it’s overwhelming. And if you find yourself feeling like you can do damage to this evidence base by invoking arguments about “multiple intelligences” or something of the sort, let me save you the effort. Those urges illustrate unfamiliarity with any of the serious research done on the topic in the last several decades. If those urges haunt you, I’d recommend Stuart Ritchie’s excellent primer on the topic. The waters of intelligence research, though controversial, no longer require that you be Magellan to navigate them. As we will see below, however, it is only one small step from banal psychometric work on IQ, to the mother-load of academic controversy. Stay tuned.

Quantitative genetic work on human behavior has also had its time in the spotlight as arguably the most controversial subject in science. Like intelligence, the evidence base regarding the heritability of human outcomes is beyond reasonable dispute. However it hasn’t always been like that, as folks like Thomas Bouchard can rightly attest. Some controversy still erupts from time to time, but the general themes of these controversies often have more to do with fine-grained methodological points, and not the wholesale dismissal of the notion that human behavior is heritable. So, while not exactly free from rancor, behavior and molecular genetics represents a sea of much calmer waters than in prior years.

Evolution, as it applies to the social sciences, would have also made the list some decades back. But pioneers like E.O. Wilson, Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, David Buss, Margot Wilson, and Martin Daly (as well as a number of others) have absorbed many punches and blows for us younger generation of scholars. Their efforts produced a sizeable evidentiary base regarding the role that evolutionary processes have played (and continue to play) in sculpting human psychology. Debates still rage, and controversies still exist, but nowadays arguing that natural selection played some role in molding human psychology will no longer jeopardize your career.

There have, of course, been other controversial issues that have popped up. I might have talked about the study of sex differences for example, which has drawn the ire of critical scholars for years. Yet much of that discontent was because people were approaching the subject in an evolutionary/biologically informed framework (for more broad insight on academic controversies see Steven Pinker’s discussion in The Blank Slate).

So this brings us back to the notion that race represents academia’s true Bermuda Triangle. Perhaps never has the topic of genetic ancestry been so important, yet despite its relevance, bright scholars continue to stay away from it in droves. Who can blame them, really? As John McWhorter has pointed out, screaming “racist” at every one who dives off into this topic has become a religious rite, of sorts. It will not matter how noble you think your motives are, if you factor in race as a variable, your actions are subject to impeachment, and your reputation may be sacrificed as a burnt offering to our new religion. Let me give you an example.

Linda Gottfredson is a brilliant, productive, and innovative scholar. Dr. Gottfredson, however, found herself in the Bermuda Triangle some years back, and her story should serve as a lighthouse for those looking to avoid the same fate. In an article published in the academic journal Personality and Individual Differences a few years ago, Gottfredson described her ordeal with the University of Delaware. I would encourage you to read her paper; it’s very accessible and non-technical. In it, Gottfredson unleashes an account of gross academic freedom violations, owing to a research program tainted with the stain of connections to race. After having grant dollars denied, which resulted in an initial complaint filed against the university, four more separate cases were also filed by Gottfredson and her collaborator Jan Blits. All told, the cases levied against the university detailed instances of denied promotions, removal of a course from course listings, and an atmosphere of general harassment on the part of the chair.

As I write about Gottfredson and Blits, and again read about their ordeal, I can’t help but recall many of the more recent, yet equally obscene, violations of free speech on college campuses. I am nonetheless encouraged of late to witness what seems to be a rising tide of support for the fundamental principals that should govern academic life; classical liberalism, freedom of thought, and freedom of speech. Yet, should those voices only be selectively employed? Should they only apply to topics that are fashionably controversial? I can assure you that few rush to the defense of someone who has drifted out into the Bermuda Triangle of academia. No flare is strong enough to cut the fog, no distress beacon can be seen, and no one is likely to welcome the call for assistance that crackles in over a weak radio signal; but why not?

For starters, crossing the boundaries of the Triangle (even if only to defend a colleague) can be frightening. Angry invectives hurled in your direction will come so fast, and so fierce, it will likely leave your head spinning…

Read on.

Posted in Crime, Race | Comments Off

The Best Of My Twitter Feed Today

Posted on May 5, 2016 by Luke Ford

* I follow @henrydampier because he’s a genius, & I follow @AliceTeller for novelty of a woman whose political opinions aren’t idiotic.

* Haven’t heard of any terror strikes on Europe in weeks. I bet, contra the doomsayers, all their Muslims are peacefully assimilated by now.

* No one notices that thousands show up for Trump for free but protestors are paid hundreds to show up.

* As a true Constitutional conservative, I look forward to conserving all the bold, new ideas Clinton’s SCOTUS picks put in the Constitution.

* NPR w/ Buchanan: Great example of msm condesension: on trade–“all the experts…” horror at hint of White identity

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There Have Been over 100 Hate Crime Hoaxes in the Past Decade

Posted on May 5, 2016 by Luke Ford

From Milo Yiannopoulos, Breitbart, May 2, 2016:

Victimhood is profitable. On the internet, it can get you thousands of dollars in crowdfunding donations. In the media, it can win you national prominence and a cooing audience of credulous sycophants. On campus, it can get you attention and plaudits from fellow grievance-mongers.

Convince enough people you’re a victim, and everyone from presidential candidates to celebrities will come rushing to support you.

So it’s little wonder that charlatans and opportunists regularly seek to take advantage of our species’ natural instinct for empathy. False flags, in which people deliberately stage attacks on themselves to win the support of society, are as old as history itself.

{snip}

{snip} The typical victim hoax is so clumsily implemented that it is only believable to those that are well trained to embrace their victimhood status and, as is also necessary, suspend their critical faculties.

{snip}

Victimhood isn’t just used to push agendas and win power. It can also be used to make money. Professional victims like feminist pest Anita Sarkeesian have received thousands of dollars in donations after complaints about unkind words on the internet.

Little wonder that there’s been such an epidemic of hate crime hoaxes in the past few years, particularly among regressive activists on university campuses. We’ve seen students scrawl swastikas on the doors of their own dorm rooms, send themselves anonymous rape threats, and falsely accuse fraternities of queer-bashing.

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Trump: Muslim Migration “Destroying Europe, I’m Not Gonna Let That Happen to the U.S.”

Posted on May 5, 2016 by Luke Ford

From Paul Joseph Watson, Infowars, May 4, 2016:

Fresh off his massive victory in Indiana, presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump told MSNBC’s Morning Joe earlier today that he would stick by his controversial policy on Muslim immigration because the migrant crisis is “destroying Europe”.

Trump’s proposal to place a temporary halt on Muslim immigration to the United States was perhaps his most incendiary of the campaign, but the New York billionaire shows no signs of walking it back.

Asked if he still believed “Muslims should be banned from entering the country until we can figure out what’s going on,” Trump said that he didn’t care if the policy hurt his chances in a general election.

“Look at what’s happening. It’s terrible what they have done to some of these countries of they are going to destroy–they are destroying Europe. I’m not going to let that happen to the United States,” said Trump, chiding Obama for refusing to even use the term “radical Islamic terrorism”.

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Meet Milo Yiannopoulos, the Appealing Young Face of the Racist Alt-Right

Posted on May 5, 2016 by Luke Ford

Jack Hunter writes: Milo Yiannopoulos is a beast.
The 32-year-old, boastfully gay Breitbart writer—or “dangerous faggot”—has quickly become a hero to young conservatives and libertarians for smacking down the ridiculous out-of-control “social justice warriors” who troll college campuses.
If Donald Trump defies political correctness, Yiannopoulos—an avid Trump supporter prone to calling The Donald “daddy”—obliterates it.
A woman confronted Yiannopoulos during his speech in a packed American University auditorium last month, asking if his controversial rhetoric “invalidated” minority views.
“F*ck your feelings,” he told her.
The kids loved it. Me too.
How could you not? As the student left becomes insufferably extreme, Milo’s become the perfect counterpunch.
He’s irreverent. He’s exciting.
To an old guy like me—a whole decade Milo’s senior!—he’s punk rock.
“At 6’2, punctuated by a tall poof of bleached hair… his friends will tell you, he is always ‘on,’ whether he’s railing against the matriarchy, bragging about his own fabulousness or discussing his love of ‘black d*ck,” wrote Fusion last year.
He’s a middle finger to the establishment, left and right.
Slamming #NeverTrump Republicans last week, Yiannopoulos scolded the GOP for offending young Trump supporters like himself, “Unlike most right-wing writers, my biggest demographic is 18-34 year olds.”
“Those weren’t just any old voters you were alienating,” Milo said to anti-Trump Republicans. “They include the next generation of conservative firebrands, who are currently gravitating to Trump, the alt-right, and me.”
“The alt-right.”
There are worse things than political correctness.

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The US Election

Posted on May 5, 2016 by Luke Ford

Comments:

* Part of the frustration over Hillary Clinton not having been coronated already is that women would vastly rather not go through a drag down knock out affair to assume power. Why should they? Right now they do a pretty good job getting others to wield power for them. The women’s movement could literally expend their entire political capitol to elect her and for what? Equality? That is the last thing they want. It would be vastly better for the feminists if she could just ascend up onto a pedestal and radiate her glory but instead she has to muck around like the whoring lawyer that she is.

* Trump has garnered more Republican voters than anyone else in the history of time, while Clinton has fewer voters now than she had in 2008. Furthermore, I’m not even sure Clinton will be her party’s nominee. She’s losing state after state and the email scandal has yet to be fully resolved. Look for a resurgence of the ‘Draft Biden” movement once it becomes apparent that Hillary could actually lose to Donald Trump.

Also, the news media are about to pivot in favor of Trump, beginning with Megyn Kelly’s exclusive interview. They all want to ride the Trump Train.

Those head-to-head national polls mean absolutely butt-crack nothing now, since they were all taken at a time when the Republican field was still open and thus a free playground for fantasy and projection. Now we have a nominee and we have a race. We have a national spotlight that is about to shine very brightly on the candidates and their doings. Trump will rise in the polls and destroy Hillary handily, if she even runs.

* My gut feeling is that Trump cannot win. Any recent immigrant won’t vote for him. Most women will vote for Hillary. And so on.

And yet: I know a guy who invited me to go have lunch on Inauguration Day, 2009. I backed off, I was busy at work. But 30 minutes later, I swung by to see what was up, and he was standing at the bar watching Obama’s swearing in, and there were tears streaming down his face.

Today, he is a fervent supporter of Donald Trump, and believes he can win.

So, miracles do happen. Hey, are we gonna do a Cinco de Mayo thing here, or what?

* The people who are so confidently predicting a Trump loss in November are largely the same people who assured us that Trump was a joke, that he’d fade away before the end of 2015, and that surely he’s gone too far this time and the voters will punish him.

* Also, its best to examine state by state polls to see where Trump is up and where he needs more work to do. Guessing that since the gun control issue is now part of Hillary’s campaign that Trump just solidified the entire South behind him (and also TX; OK; KS), so we are talking about 150-180 electoral votes.

Assume for a moment that Trump can match Romney’s 206 electoral votes. What he then needs is:

FL = (29), which brings the total to 235

PA = (20), which brings the total to 255

MI = (16), which brings the total to 271, which means he wins.

Can he win these three states? If I were part of the campaign, that’s the advice I’d give. Blitz those three states with wall to wall coverage of ads, media, etc. with major emphasis on local and counties within each of these states. Reading over the state by state primaries I’m encouraged that Trump over performed in both PA and FL, so this is doable. MI could just be the key. All three states have a sizable share of blue collar voters as well.

What was encouraging is that Trump won all three primaries so there seems to be a base of support. Neither three are particularly over the top Evangelical, so that won’t count vs him. PA does have a lot of gun owners (hunters) so this is doable. And its fortunate that Trump hasn’t gaffed himself in the mouth by going vs the auto bailout or anything stupid along those lines the way that Mitt did.

Also, if UT does flip cause they’re all in a hissy fit, Trump could conceivably trade UT for NV (another state where he over performed). But for the GE, he has to focus on FL; PA; and MI and he has a very good chance in GE. Whatever it takes, he has to blitz those three states with media.

On side note, in parts of PA, there were Trump and Cruz signs. There were also more Bernie signs than Hillary signs. She’s not popular with a lot of white folks. Just saying.

“Whatever it takes”—Chuck Noll

* Hillary has just officially announced that her two signature issues for the GE are Gun Control and Immigration Reform. Basically the two issues that are ivory tower wonk based, whereas Trump has offered immigration as in: build a wall, and enforce existing laws vs illegal aliens as well as get a handle on unfair trade agreements, like NAFTA, which her husband signed
into law.

Hillary’s nomination confirms every stereotype conservatives have said about the liberal Democrats that control their party for yrs, namely, they don’t give a damn for the white working class and havent since the ’70′s. All they care about are the gays, environment, gun control, etc. which, except for the 2nd Amendment issue, doesn’t register with ordinary voters.

FACT: It has been noted repeatedly in the MSM that Trump has brought millions of new voters into the primaries to vote for him, to cross over and vote or ones who haven’t voted in decades. Hillary has none of that. There’s no cross over appeal for her, and millions of GOP voters aren’t suddenly gonna switch and vote for her in November.

If anyone is doing the “Guns, gays, etc” stuff this time round it’s Hillary. Trump’s offering concrete issues that voters care about. Even the issue of Immigration, WHO has made that his signature issue for over the last yr? Not Hillary. WHO has been driving the election for nearly a year? It certainly hasn’t been Jeb!

* The nomination process will have asymmetrical effects on both party’s candidates, benefitting Trump more than Clinton. There is more up-side for Trump and more down-side for Clinton in the campaign for Presidency.

Clinton is already a “made guy” in political terms. So she will not gain much political capital from accepting what is, in any case, a political inheritance from her husband. But she will lose political capital as voters tire of her flat political style and somewhat tainted record.

Trump, by contrast has a lot of political capital to gain from the nomination process. He is s political novice who has emerged from the ruck to win the top prize. The imprimatur of the party will confer democratic legitimacy on his candidacy. Also, Trump had already endured an orgy of mud-slinging and shrugged it off. People are still interested in what he has to say, going by his ratings.

So yeah, there is still some mileage in this horse race. And time for Trumps luck to let him take the pot.

Although I’ve got $100 on Hilary at 2.5 as I think the US has passed the tipping point of political demography.

* Negative partisanship will keep it fairly close, even if Trump runs a totally disastrous general election campaign.

The Clintons drive Republicans hysterically insane. Many Republicans aren’t too keen on Trump, but the thought of Hillary as president will bring them to the polls no matter what.

But I think Trump will actually run an effective general election campaign. Trump has abandoned a lot of the toxic positioning that usually kills Republicans among working class whites in the Midwest. He needs to pivot further to the center now that he’s won the primary and appeal to those voters. If he can flip Wisconsin, Iowa, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, he’ll win.

* Van Halen members’ likelihood of voting for Trump:

Sammy Hagar: 90%
Alex Van Halen: 75%
David Lee Roth: 70%
Eddie Van Halen: 60%

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Slogan: “For Ourselves and Our Posterity”

Posted on May 5, 2016 by Luke Ford

Commenter ABN suggests:

… maybe “For Ourselves and Our Posterity” would make a good slogan.

The repeated possessive pronoun “our” unmistakably draws a contrast between the American nation and foreign nations. The implication is that our government arises organically from a specific national community and has neither rights nor responsibilities outside this context. If there is an “us,” there must be a “them,” and the state must necessarily distinguish between the two.

Moreover, the reference to multiple generations of a single people is a standing repudiation of the globalist/immigrationist notion that our people’s problems can be solved by other people’s fertility. The solutions to any economic, spiritual, or demographic problems we have must be found among ourselves, or the inter-generational social contract will be broken and we will cease to exist as a nation. Also, the invocation of demographic continuity here implies an ethnic or racial component of national identity without being too explicit or divisive in that regard.

The reference to the Constitution also has the advantage of attracting some of the Cruz-supporting types who have created a kind of cargo cult around the country’s founding documents. The underlying message to them is that Trump’s nationalism and True Conservatives’ constitutionalism are complementary; the Constitution wasn’t written in a vacuum. The laws and the ideology can’t be separated from the people and the land.

Finally, it’s hard for the Left to attack the Constitution itself. If leftists attack “For Ourselves and Our Posterity” as “racist,” “xenophobic,” or whatever, we need only point out that it’s part of the written mission statement of the USA. There would be no better opportunity to implement Peter Brimelow’s advice to respond to the accusation of racism with the counter-accusation of treason. That aggressive posture would suit Trump’s style.

Comments: * Gavin McInnes says there are 14 types of Conservatives.

If there are 14 types of Conservatives, no wonder the Right is fractured and not united like the Left.

Can anyone here name 14 types of Liberals? Do that many different types of Liberals even exist?

* Just because the founders thought this was a catchy slogan fit for the times (the 18th century) doesn’t mean it must have the same appeal as now.

Sweden believes the fundamental mission of the country is to fight racism worldwide and 1% of their economic output at least every year should go towards helping mothers in Africa and such.

Why not adopt that mission instead?

* Yes the Constitution was dedicated TO a specific people and their descendants. Don’t tell me how much you worship the Constitution yet fail to realize that (silly cuckservatives).

I must say, it appears we are in the beginning stages of a social revolution which people like Steve seemed to think were impossible without “elite intellectual” support.

* Obviously there are not 14 mutually exclusive types of lib, but the same is true of conservatives.

But if you were to force 100 random Democrats and fellow travellers to tell you their primary agenda, I think at least one person would list each of the following (possibly using euphemisms):

1) black supremacy

2) female supremacy

3) taxing the rich more

4) killing the rich

5) Gay power

6) Lesbian power

7) Tranny power

8) anti-war

9) Latinx power

10) anti-christian

11) Sharia jihad

12) Weed legalization

13) Single payer healthcare

14) tuitionless college, student loan debt forgiveness

15) ban guns

I could probably name a few more

* Fauxcahontas hates Trump because he represents an America in which blue eyed blond haired lesbians don’t get career boosts from claiming to be Indians.

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