Luke Ford

Daily Caller: Department of Justice officials diverted millions of dollars slated for victims of the 2008 housing meltdown to politically favored third parties, including “left-wing radical groups,” according to the chairman of a House of Representatives oversight subcommittee.

Rep. Sean Duffy, a Wisconsin Republican and chairman of the House Financial Services oversight and investigations subcommittee, said Friday the officials “skimmed” off three percent from mortgage-related bank settlements. This created what he called a $500 million “slush fund” that could be steered toward favored groups.

“The first objective of a settlement is to make sure that we have victims who are made whole,” Duffy said, referring to millions of Americans who lost their homes during the meltdown that led to the Great Recession of 2009. “If you’re diverting money away from victims and sending it to third-party activist groups, you have victims who are being harmed not just once, but a second time.”

Justice officials were long able to “skim 3 percent of any settlement money into their own account to for the most part spend it the way they see fit,” Duffy told participants in the media briefing hosted by the Cause of Action Institute, a nonprofit legal watchdog group.

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* John Derbyshire’s “Cold Civil War” is starting to heat up. Trump supporters have a sense of dispossession–symbolically on the currency and on the stage (Hamilton) and now in the streets. Anything that reinforces that sense of dispossession (“It’s not my country anymore”) will help Trump.

* Civil society collapses when citizens have nothing in common. Neither long term interests nor a common culture and set of values. The USA is slowly crumbling down before us.
Trump could very well be the last chance to veer course, but what are you gonna do when half of the population consists of hostile aliens (including African Americans)?

* I wonder if the Mexican vs “Anglo” conflict is turning out to bear some similarity to what happened between the Serbs and Croats after the end of the Cold War. Those two Balkan populations lived together quite amicably (after WWII, in a dictatorship) and had a high rate of intermarriage until something happened that seemed to be a contest for resources mobilized by historical grievances. Only *some* similarity, since the Serbs and Croats are likely genetically indistinguishable even by Jayman’s standards and the rate of intermarriage between Mexicans and whites is I think pretty low outside Texas. Also, for now at least, the USG state is of course far too strong for anything resembling open conflict to break out.

* I’m not suffering economically but I remember one day being in a shopping mall and realizing that I felt like I was living in a foreign country – the America of my youth was gone. Am I wrong to feel that way? Is it “racist” and therefore evil to oppose having the historical population of your country replaced by people from other cultures, some of whom are violently incompatible with Western civilization? Are we morally obligated to open our borders because anything less would be “racist”?

Now I can understand that if you are a Mexican and you have only brought half of your friends and family over, you might be upset at the idea of someone closing the border before you can bring the rest of your village to join you, but this doesn’t seem to be a particularly righteous anger, just people who are upset at having their cheese moved, like the French labor demonstrators who are unhappy that the government wants to break their iron rice bowl jobs-for-life. In that sense, the demonstrators are the reactionary conservatives – they want things to stay the way they are (porous borders) and are angry at the person who is proposing change.

* The days of grabbing a cop’s gun out of the holster are largely past. Nearly all cops in big departments now utilize retention holsters, which make it impossible to pull the gun from the holster unless the cop depresses a small latch with his index finger as he’s drawing. Easy and fast for the cop, impossible for someone else.

About the only way to get a cop’s gun today is if he has already drawn it and then loses control of it.

Secondly, and I don’t mean to be pedantic here, I hate the phrase “it went off.” Guns don’t “go off;” people discharge them.

* Part of it is that Trump has been in the public eye for decades and is a natural and well practiced on camera and not easily flustered by low blow questions, but the other part of it is that the rules of the game have changed. Trump know (instinctively) what the new rules are but the other side has no clue and is still playing by the old rules, so they are getting their asses handed to them. The things that used to run up the score in their favor are suddenly own-goals in the new rule book, but they still keep kicking the ball into the net because they don’t know what else to do – they’re confused. The reporters (and all of Trump’s political opponents and their paid consultants) are like wizards with magic wands that always worked in the past – they cast their spell and wave their wand – “No tax returnium disclosurum” and instead of lightning bolts emanating from the wand and knocking Trump to the ground the way that they expect, nothing happens or else the bolts just bounce back at them and sting them instead.

* Trump is attracting support from people who want to keep their own nation.

That’s pretty clearly what this is about–nationalism. But a particular nationalism–white Americans actually expressing nationalism. That is what is making the non-natives restless.

This analysis is made crystal clear by the protestors themselves. Even though it’s bad “optics” for persuading actual American *voters*, the protesters just can’t help themselves and they bring *their* flags. These aren’t folks who are necessarily anti-nationalist. They are just against Americans and in particular white Americans having any nationalism. White people must just submit.

At root the protesters’ demand is that they be allowed to live among and loot white people. All of these people have their own race\ethnic group. The people from “immigrant communities” have their own nations. It’s just that white people create *better* nations–more orderly, more law abiding, more productive, more prosperous, more free. And these people demand that they be allowed to live in the white nation, grab the fruit that white people grow for themselves.

Trump supporters–quite morally and ethically–say “no”. They want to have the orderly, free and prosperous nation that their own efforts produce and pass it on for their children and grandchildren to enjoy.

Explaining Trump’s protestors is as simple as that: Parasites protesting against the application of antibiotics.

* The thing about Trump that really makes him a wild card in this election is precisely that he just tramples (trumples?) over the ordinary rules of what a Presidential candidate is supposed to say. This completely disarms and confuses his opponents — including his legion of opponents in the media — who have nothing in their playbook to counter such talk. They have come to realize that ratcheting up the usual invective does no good — they are already at 11, having gone long ago to Hitler to no apparent effect — and have no idea what to do next.

Trump has now turned his trash talk on Hillary and Warren, using “Crooked Hillary” almost as an Homeric epithet, and deriding Warren as “Pocahontus”. Usually, even surrogates of Presidential candidates would avoid such statements like the plague, because they were thought to tarnish the candidate himself.

What Trump has to hope for is that his sort of trash talk gets normalized in the public’s mind by the time of the election. Ironically, his opponents, who are now starting to engage in the same sort of talk in counterattack, do as much as Trump himself to render such things pretty ordinary.

My guess is that Trump’s election prospects mainly hang on whether, over the next 5 months, Trump can manage to recalibrate and detoxify his sort of rhetoric enough that it doesn’t repel too many of the voters. Ordinarily, such things take many years, even decades, but he has already made remarkable progress (is that what it is?) toward this end.

* Nothing makes Trump more popular than watching foreigners who are waiving foreign flags and speaking in foreign languages disrupt our national political process by destroying public property and assaulting police officers.

More protests please!!!

* Kevin Michael Grace, of the indispensable 2Kevins podcast, suggests that an unelectable Hillary may die suddenly from a previously undiagnosed respiratory ailment, AKA, smothered in her sleep with a pillow.

* Trump wants that. He picked on Susan Martinez in New Mexico. Yesterday, he picked on the judge in the Trump university case. He is smartly trying to frame Hispanics as “others” and not real Americans. This may be a winning strategy if it can rile up the Hispanics even more and lead to a hot summer. That and some BLM histrionics may even lead to some riots putting him in the White House.

* If Trump follows through with this, it’s going to be a big win for him with the voters. And it’s going to put Hillary in a huge bind: she can’t repudiate any aspect of BLM without alienating both the blacks and the liberal white voters whom she is counting on in the general. Bill could have his Sistah Souljah moment and still retain his liberal support; but liberals have moved well past that possibility at this time; only abject compliance with the dictates of black activists is allowed.

Frankly, it wouldn’t surprise me if rejecting the BLM movement doesn’t do more for Trump than his coming down hard against illegal immigration. The vast majority of white voters will never believe that what happened in Ferguson and Baltimore was all about white racism, and that blacks rioting and looting afterward was understandable and forgivable.

* The irony is that after both the terrorist attack in Paris as well as the attack in San Bernardino, Trump’s popularity increased and it was around this time he really soared above the rest of the 16 other GOP candidates. Also, soon after the attack in Brussels, Trump’s popularity soared again. It’s almost like his point of a temporary ban on Muslim immigration hit home “See? I told you guys, I warned you what would happen if this continued unchecked and these people crossed the border without being properly vetted.”

So if something unfortunate were to occur later this yr in the first world, how exactly would it prove detrimental to Trump’s presidential chances? If anything, and judging by recent terror attacks, it would only serve to increase his popularity again and perhaps help him in the polls.

* My guess is that both he and his father spent so many decades talking business with tenants, contractors and staff who had about a Grade 9 level of literacy that Trump has learned how to express himself effectively at that level of English. You can see him speak in much more nuanced terms in older interviews on CNN when he’s speaking in his indoor voice.