Chaim Amalek: “Every time I see a white QB fall, I think of the fall of the White race.”<\/p>\n
Ilana Mercer writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n Donald Trump\u2019s mortal enemies in mainstream politics and media have shifted strategy. In the ramp-up to the Iowa, February 1 Caucuses, the culprits have been pushing presidential hopefuls Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio onto a defiant Republican base. The Cartel has taken to discussing Trump as a nightmare from which they\u2019ll soon awaken. Candidate Trump\u2019s energetic, politically pertinent speeches, and near daily rallies\u2014packed to the rafters with supporters\u2014are covered by media only to condemn this or the other colorful altercation. Ted Cruz, we\u2018re being lectured, is poised to topple Trump in Iowa.<\/p>\n But what do you know? On the eve of January 12, as if in recoil to the concentrated toxicity of Barack Obama\u2019s last State of Disunion address, featuring the divisive Nikki Haley in the GOP\u2019s corner, Trump punched through the lattice of lies. The media-political-complex was caught trousers down again. National polls have Trump at 36 percent, Reuters at 39 percent. A CBS\/NYT poll placed him 17 points ahead of Ted Cruz, his closest rival. In Iowa, Trump leads Cruz 28 to 26 percent.<\/p>\n The central conceit that currently defines media\u2019s self-serving surmises is that the Trump Revolution is confined to the Right and is thus self-limiting. While the Right is always more courageous in bucking sclerotic authority, the Trump Revolution isn\u2019t exclusively Republican or rightist.<\/p>\n I get the distinct impression that this Revolution encompasses Left and Right; Democrats, Republicans and Independents. As The Atlantic magazine cautioned, the polls are underestimating Trump\u2019s support. The slow kids of media have yet to discover the methodological flaws inherent in survey methodology. Subjects are more likely to reply truthfully in anonymous, online surveys than in face-to-face or telephonic questionnaires. As if to confirm that Trumpites are coming out of the closet, a January 13, YouGov.com poll, courtesy of the Washington Examiner, catapulted Mr. Trump to near 50 percent.<\/p>\n Something else has made the special-needs media boil with bile: It\u2019s the role of America\u2019s much-maligned, white majority\u201465 percent and rapidly declining\u2014in Trump\u2019s meteoric ascent. Trump\u2019s supporters are disenfranchised whites, left, right and center (or in an ideological no-man\u2019s land). The silent majority that dare not speak its name\u2014other than to flagellate for collective sins and perceived privilege\u2014is still the largest demographic bloc in the US.<\/p>\n Working class whites, in particular, have been led down a political cul-de-sac.<\/p>\n Omitted at last year\u2019s November 10, Fox Business, presidential debate were two loudly whispered secrets. The one was Marco Rubio\u2019s expensing the Republican Party for personal spending. The other: Terrifying data that a large segment of white America was \u2026 dying.<\/p>\n \u201cMortality among middle-aged Americans with a high-school degree or less increased by 134 deaths per 100,000 people between 1999 and 2013,\u201d wrote Olga Khazan of The Atlantic. Mortality among working-class white Americans has risen by half a percent a year. \u201cThat means \u2018half a million people are dead who should not be dead.\u2019\u201d Since these whites are dying from \u201csuicide, alcohol and drug poisonings, and alcohol-related liver disease,\u201d Khazan concluded sadly that, \u201cMiddle-aged white Americans are dying of despair.\u201d Otherwise, nobody has probed deeper than to advance reductive economic and educational causes.<\/p>\n My sense is that, \u201cwhile Americans in their 40s and 50s don\u2019t have enough money saved for retirement,\u201d there\u2019s more afoot than money.<\/p>\n Most of us have come across emaciated, gaunt, poor white men and women in our communities; middle-aged, often younger whites standing on the curb, begging for change. Indeed, we members of the informal, White Lives Matter movement notice that poor whites in America are very badly off.<\/p>\n But a political whiteout prohibits the candid discussion of their plight. Unless they\u2019re being dubbed throw-away racists, bigots, or has-beens who can\u2019t let go of white privilege\u2014white, working-class America is invisible. It has been so for decades.<\/p>\n Consider what befell Martin O\u2019Malley, Democrat for president, at the Netroots Nation conference, in Phoenix. \u201cBlack lives matter, black lives matter,\u201d activists chanted at O\u2019Malley, who dared to respond with the catchphrase, \u201cBlack lives matter. White lives matter. All lives matter.\u201d<\/p>\n The maniacal reaction to O\u2019Malley\u2019s truism was so vociferous, that soon he and the Democrats were denouncing the notion that all lives mattered, and apologizing to blacks for daring to imply that white lives mattered, too. A weak Bernie Sanders was practically chased off a Seattle stage by two Black Lives Matter women, and has since been silent about poor whites, except to promise proxy wars on Walmart and Wall Street.<\/p>\n Politically, at least, white lives are forfeit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Chaim Amalek: “Every time I see a white QB fall, I think of the fall of the White race.” Ilana Mercer writes: Donald Trump\u2019s mortal enemies in mainstream politics and media have shifted strategy. In the ramp-up to the Iowa, … Continue reading