Luke Ford | No sacred cows.

Why Don’t Men Want To Marry Aging Spinsters?

Posted on March 21, 2016 by Luke Ford

A naive beta male wonders why there’s a dearth of single men willing to marry the aging spinsters he knows.

why don’t I know any single men who could be fixed up with a well-educated woman in her late 30s?

Smart people say the stupidest shit sometimes.

This seems to be a common situation among our friends. We know single women whom we believe would be wonderful companions and mothers, but none of the single men whom they are seeking as partners.

Wonderful companions and motherhood potential don’t make dicks hard.

A friend in D.C. says “Single women nearing 40 have spent decades perfecting their adult selves.

That’s their problem, right there. Instead of spending decades perfecting their adult selves, they should have spent some time getting serious with a man while their bodies were still perfect.

Men of the same age are still stuck in their teenage personality.”

Bitterbitch snark for normal, natural male sexual desire for younger, hotter, tighter women.

What is the explanation for this phenomenon?

Hard-on heuristics.

…finding an unpartnered adult male who is in possession of said good stuff seems to be impossible.

For mangy cougars. But for spry springboks, not at all impossible.

Separately, I’m wondering if the large quantity of involuntarily single-and-childless women shows poor life-planning strategies.

That Pill-lubed, anonymous urban living-facilitated cock carousel isn’t gonna ride itself!

These women have advanced education, great job skills, and good careers compared to the American average.

Yeah but do they have clear skin…?

Inadvertently, our plucky White Knight shilling for his starving cougars stumbles upon a payout system that likely incentivizes the pursuit of alpha fux over settling for beta bux.

we must observe that [women’s] after-tax income is in nearly every case lower than if they’d had sex with a dermatologist or dentist in Massachusetts and collected child support.

Note to dermatologists and dentists: if you’re gonna bang a desperate aging beauty, wear your own condom and dispose of it in the toilet.

(Most of these women want two children, which, if properly planned, could easily offer a tax-free cash yield of $200,000/year via child support (multiply by 23 years in Massachusetts).) See this from the Practical Tips chapter:
In most states, the potential child support profits from a one-night encounter are roughly the same as the profits from a short-term marriage. … “Women who want to make money from the system aren’t getting married anymore,” said one lawyer. “The key is recognizing that it is a lot easier to rent a rich guy for one night, especially if he has had a few drinks, than it is to get a rich guy to agree to marriage.”

All women can be mercenary given strong enough incentives, but luckily (for men) most women still strive to have children within a marriage. Single momhood is not (yet) a desired life outcome for psychologically healthy women, despite its inglorious rise over the past forty years. What this means is that for the typical man, the odds of getting fleeced by a woman pulling the ol’ gotcha pregnancy maneuver are low.

Rich men do have something to worry about, especially rich men with Game, because women will lose all sense around them (like men do around barely legal sexpots) and are liable to think pregnancy and child support entrapment are reasonable first date objectives.

From the point of view of having the children that they want prior to the exhaustion of their fertility and from the point of view of financial security, these women would have been better off spending their 18-22-year-old years having sex with married men rather than attending college. That’s not to suggest that 18-year-old child support profiteer is the optimum lifestyle for every American woman, but the fact that it would yield a better outcome measured against their own goals than what the women we know have accomplished suggests that they pursued a pretty bad life strategy.

Here’s a better idea that isn’t compiled in the abstracted kookland of the homo spergonomicus mind:

Women who want kids should get married in their early 20s and start having them by their mid-late 20s, then spend some years at home raising them, afterwards returning to their careers soulfully satisfied and serenely accepting of the fact that they can’t have it all and motherhood necessarily means the corner office won’t be a realistic option for them. No “child support profiteer” shenanigans needed. (Any woman who seriously follows such a cold, sociopathic blueprint deserves all the pain and suffering she will inevitably receive in the romance market.)

Readers: Looking at the 35-45 age group, and restricting to people who have a college degree, above-median earnings, agreeable personality, and responsible habits, what’s the ratio of single women to single men?

Who cares? It’s like asking what’s the ratio of garden slugs to single men. The one will have no influence on the behavior of the other.

The first commenter to the original author’s blog post gets to the heart of it:

Men select for beauty and fertility; both of which are on the decline in the women you mention. They also select for low-conflict behavior, kindness, etc., which may or may not be found among the women you mention.
Reality is, that any guy who is 40 and has his act together, is going to date younger; especially with the horrible economy -there are lots of 28yo women without a clear path to career at this point.
A 37yo with possibly 2 years of fertility left should be looking not for 40 or 42, but for someone about 50 to 54 who is in good shape and still wants to have 1 or 2 kids.

Satanic feminists have lied to women for so long that simple truths like “don’t wait too long to marry and have kids because your fertility window is short and men won’t be interested in you when you’re older and uglier” are willfully ignored or twisted into nostrums of oppression that should be fought against and actively denied through the alchemy of embracing gogrrl, leaned in, cock-hopping, careerist lifestyles that ironically will leave women more miserable than if they had just submitted to the patriarchy’s price of admission.

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WP: Trump questions need for NATO, outlines non-interventionist foreign policy

Posted on March 21, 2016 by Luke Ford

It’s as though Donald Trump’s favorite people are Americans.

It feels like every day Donald Trump is making front-page news. He’s a compelling character. It’s hard to stop reading about him.

Conservative Pundit tweets: “George Washington is no doubt rolling in his grave at the prospect that the US might stop involving itself in internecine Mid East wars.”

Washington Post: Donald Trump revealed part of his foreign policy advisory team and outlined an unabashedly noninterventionist approach to world affairs during a wide-ranging meeting Monday with The Washington Post’s editorial board.

The Republican presidential front-runner, for the first time, listed five of the people who are part of a team, chaired by Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), counseling him on foreign affairs and helping to shape his policies. They are Keith Kellogg, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Walid Phares and Joseph E. Schmitz.

Trump’s meeting with members of The Post’s editorial board covered a range of issues, including media libel laws, violence at his rallies, climate change, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the U.S. presence in Asia.

Trump — who is set to give a major address on foreign policy later Monday before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee — said in his meeting at The Post that he advocates an aggressive U.S. posture in the world with a light footprint. In spite of unrest abroad, especially in the Middle East, Trump insisted that the United States must look inward and steer its resources toward rebuilding domestic infrastructure.

“I do think it’s a different world today, and I don’t think we should be nation-building anymore,” Trump said. “I think it’s proven not to work, and we have a different country than we did then. We have $19 trillion in debt. We’re sitting, probably, on a bubble. And it’s a bubble that if it breaks, it’s going to be very nasty. I just think we have to rebuild our country.”

He added: “I watched as we built schools in Iraq and they’re blown up. We build another one, we get blown up. We rebuild it three times and yet we can’t build a school in Brooklyn. We have no money for education because we can’t build in our own country. At what point do you say, ‘Hey, we have to take care of ourselves?’ So, I know the outer world exists and I’ll be very cognizant of that. But at the same time, our country is disintegrating, large sections of it, especially the inner cities.”

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Trump Wants US Out Of NATO

Posted on March 21, 2016 by Luke Ford

John J.Mearsheimer has said for years that the US should get out of NATO and pivot to asia to contain China.

Daily Beast: In a meeting with The Washington Post’s editorial board, Donald Trump suggested NATO has outlived its usefulness and is a waste of money. According to the Post, the Republican frontrunner questioned the United States’ involvement in the intergovernmental military alliance, charging that some U.S. allies are “not doing anything.” He alleged that “we’re doing all the lifting” on Ukraine while other European powers remain silent. “Why are we always the one that’s leading, potentially the third world war with Russia?” he added. Ultimately, he reportedly concluded, NATO will need to be diminished in coming years: “We certainly can’t afford to do this anymore,” he said. “NATO is costing us a fortune, and yes, we’re protecting Europe with NATO, but we’re spending a lot of money.”

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Why I Can’t Take Bethany Mandel Seriously

Posted on March 21, 2016 by Luke Ford

Conservative commentator Bethany Mandel (wife of New York Post op/ed Editor Seth Mandel) writes for the Forward under this headline: “My Trump Tweets Earned Me So Many Anti-Semitic Haters That I Bought a Gun”

Wow, sounds horrible until you think about it. How many Trump supporters could honestly say that they have received so much hate that they had reasons for buying a gun? Thousands I would expect.

Anybody who has spoken out in public on controversial issues has received death threats. It goes with the territory. If you can’t handle the heat, get out of the kitchen.

Bethany writes: “As for Breitbart, it’s currently facing major upheaval, with five employees — writers and editors — having quit over the course of a week, with rumors of more to follow. Most reports of their resignations mention the site’s uncomfortably close relationship with Trump as well as its refusal to stand by one of its own reporters, whom Trump’s campaign manager assaulted.”

That doesn’t look like assault to me. Therefore, I can’t take anything she says seriously. She seems like a hysteric.

Bethany Mandel continues: “The most high-profile Breitbart employee to leave, Ben Shapiro, resigned on March 13. In response to Shapiro’s defection from the pro-Trump site, he himself was doxed. Editor-at-large Joel Pollak published a piece mocking Shapiro and linking to his State Bar Association page, which until very recently displayed his home address. Luckily, Shapiro had changed the address listed, protecting his family from the kind of in-person harassment Wilson and Erickson described.”

Linking to somebody’s State Bar Association page is doxxing? Ben Shapiro chose to put his home address on his State Bar page. Nobody forced him to do that. Thousands of California lawyers have chosen not to put their home address on their State Bar page. Ben knew his State Bar page was be public. He chose to make that information public. There’s nothing malicious in linking to somebody’s State Bar page.

Bethany Mandel: “To add insult to injury, the post mocking Shapiro was published under his own father’s pen name on the site, which Shapiro believes was done to force the disclosure of his father’s identity and endanger him as well. The elder Shapiro, David, adopted the pen name to avoid the same death threats his son has experienced in the past, especially as an outspoken Ted Cruz supporter on the pro-Trump site.”

Oh, cry me a river.

After Shapiro’s departure from Breitbart and the ensuing post, which not only mocked him but also made a point of noting that he is an Orthodox Jew, he has been inundated with anti-Semitic tweets — including ones from David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
“There are an outsized set of Trump supporters who will threaten your safety,” Shapiro told me. “I’ve been hit with a number of death threats, and sleep with a shotgun beside the bed. I’ve had my office address and phone number posted on the Internet by my own employer, Breitbart News, via a link to the State Bar website, after resigning from the publication and announcing I did so because of their allegiance to Trump.”

Maybe Ben Shapiro was inundated with anti-Jewish tweets because Ben Shapiro has gone after those with a strong white identity. Ben Shapiro said in an interview this year that we should “ruin their [racists] careers.” Did he expect there would be no blowback? He supports the ruining of lives over something as amorphous and morally empty as “racism.” There’s no such moral crime as racism. It is a made-up moral category. It has no precedence in Judaism and Christianity.

Bethany Mandel:

The conservative Jewish writers who have spoken out against Trump and received death threats in return are almost too many to list. These writers (myself included) have taken a stand at personal risk. We have been outspoken from the start of the Trump campaign. As it gained strength, many of us sacrificed a great deal, including our own family’s safety, to try to stop this wannabe strongman. We laid our bodies across the tracks in an effort to stop the Trump train…

Posted in Ben Shapiro, Donald Trump, Journalism | Comments Off

Hillary Clinton Runs To The Right Of Donald Trump On Israel

Posted on March 21, 2016 by Luke Ford

From Mondoweiss: If there was any doubt that Hillary Clinton is running to the right of Donald Trump on Israel, she removed it this morning with a fist-pumping hard-right speech to the Israel lobby group AIPAC that mentioned Israeli settlements just once, in passing, and continually derided the idea of American “neutrality” in the conflict, which Trump has embraced.

“We need steady hands, not a president who says he is neutral on Monday, pro-Israel on Tuesday and who knows what on Wednesday, because everything is negotiable!” Clinton said. In clear reference to Trump, she went on,”Well my friends, Israel’s security is not negotiable.”

The comments were a clear reference to Trump’s assertion that he wants to be neutral in what he says about the conflict because he aims to negotiate a deal between the sides as president, the hardest deal in the world.

“America can’t ever be neutral when it comes to Israel’s security and survival,” Clinton said. “Some things aren’t negotiable. And anyone who doesn’t understand that has no business being America’s president.”

The speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee was filled with red meat for Israel supporters. Clinton repeatedly denounced the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, BDS, as “anti-semitic”– an effort to “undermine Israel and the Jewish people.” She thereby equated Israel and Judaism, an equation that AIPAC wants her to make, but which many Jews do not accept.

She said that anti-Semitism was rife on American campuses and in Europe, and she told pro-Israel students: “Don’t let anyone try to silence you, bully you or try to shut down debate.”

Often projecting an adamant posture in the speech, Clinton said she was willing to use force against Iran if it violates the Iran deal, praised Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, and promised to invite the PM to the White House in one of her first acts in office. She concluded the speech by thrusting her fist in the air as she vowed to take the relationship to the “next level” so that Israel and the U.S. could face the future together.

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Ron Unz Running For US Senate

Posted on March 21, 2016 by Luke Ford

Steve Sailer writes: Ron was motivated by both parties of the Sacramento legislature voting quietly to put on the ballot in 2016 a ballot measure in effect repealing his signature Proposition 227. This 1998 measure switched the default in California schools from bilingual education to English immersion, passing with 58% of the vote.

Ron’s intervention, although strongly opposed by the Spanish language TV network Univision, successfully ended the bizarre but worrisome possibility that the state of California was subsidizing its own Quebec-style language imbroglio by encouraging Spanish-speaking students to postpone grappling with learning English until they were too old to pick it up easily.

Small children quickly learn languages that they are immersed in, so the old bilingualist orthodoxy perversely (or intentionally) weakened English acquisition.

The government subsidizing massive levels of public school teaching in Spanish sent the message that the powers that be wanted Hispanics to remain linguistically isolated, much as the government of Quebec sends that message to Quebec residents. As we’ve seen with Black Lives Matter, ethnic activists tend to demand most loudly what the government, with its tax dollars to spend, is hinting it wants them to demand.

It turns out, however, that when the government tells the children of immigrants to learn how to speak English, they learn how to speak English.

After all, all over the 21st Century world, speaking English is cool. I’ve often pointed out that even in heavily Spanish-speaking Van Nuys, CA, the Plant 16 movie complex rarely shows a movie dubbed into Spanish or with subtitles. I don’t have to give a single thought to whether a movie playing there will be in Spanish or English. The throngs of Latino teens who show up to watch, say, Oscar Isaac (a Latino who speaks English superbly) in The Force Awakens almost all comprehend English well enough that they would never do anything so awkward as admit they’d rather see the latest blockbuster dubbed.

But even though the English-dominant system molded by Ron in 1998 is popular with the children of California, it’s unpopular with ethnic activists. So the legislature decided to encourage voters to break what doesn’t need fixing. But they did it in a very understated manner to keep the public from noticing what’s going on.

So that’s why Ron decided to jump into the Senate race at the last moment: to draw publicity to what the profiteers of linguistic divisiveness are up to.

Interestingly, Ron’s previous campaign for office – his run in the 1994 GOP primary against incumbent governor Pete Wilson — was strikingly successful. Ron earned 34% of the vote challenging Wilson, who was strong enough to go on to defeat Kathleen Brown by 15 points (one of only two defeats in eight runs for governor suffered by the Brown dynasty of California; the only other politician able to beat a Brown for governor was Ronald Reagan).

COMMENTS:

* Then in 1998 he backed Prop 227 which banned bilingual education and mandated English immersion. Unz was the principal financial backer and public face. It passed. Some time in 1999 or 2000 or thereabouts, The New Republic had him on the cover as the man who runs California or something like that.

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Hillary’s Vulnerabilities

Posted on March 21, 2016 by Luke Ford

Luke Lea writes: Clinton’s vulnerabilities in the fall:

Her embrace of Merkel

Her embrace of Al Sharpton

Her vote on Iraq

Her advocacy of Eqyptian intervention

Her advocacy of Libya intervention

The Bengazi thing (thought personally I think this is a distraction).

Her advocacy of Syrian intervention

Her Ukrainian intervention

Her position on illegal immigration: no wall needed, no such thing as an illegal immigrant basically

Her history in favor of Nafta, Gatt, WTO, etc..

Her careless attitude towards US national security. as evidenced by her private email server, which she justified as a matter of “convenience.”

Her and Bill’s foundation accepting large donations from Saudis and other dubious Islamic sources in Middle East.

Dependence on the donor class, including Goldman Sachs, the poster boy for Wall St. misbehavior

Her once saying, “Fuck them!” in reference to Bill’s blue-collar constituency during his first term as President

Her enabling of Bill’s past sexual assault history, including credible accusations of rape; and her defense of a rapist back in Arkansas

Her failure with healthcare reform during Bill’s first term, a complete Rube-Goldberg disaster

Her full backing of the Obama administration, including bad relationship with Israel while she was Secretary of State

Her infatuation with Saul Alinsky back in her college days (including her honors thesis).

Her complete lack of any major achievements on her own, riding her husband’s coattails into national prominence, in contrast to a real female leader like Margaret Thatcher.

Can readers add to this list of vulnerabilities that Trump might exploit in the fall?

You have to feel sorry for, as well as worried about, for poor Israel, finding herself in the middle of an Islamic world seething in violence and hatred and basically at war with the West. The long-term survival of the state seems no longer quite the sure thing, or even the desirable thing, it did in the latter decades of the 20th century. Giving all Israeli Jews dual American citizenship would reduce American Jewish anxieties, which means a paranoia driven neo-conservative foreign policy might lose some of its steam. America would become world Jewry’s final refuge, their New Jerusalem, in case all else fails. But to prepare the ground American Jews need to be less hostile to the interests of working-class Americans, especially on the issues of trade and immigration.

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Gay Jew James Kirchick: Donald Trump Is Turning Me Liberal

Posted on March 21, 2016 by Luke Ford

I’m enjoying the Jewish hysteria.

James “two-time winner of a National Lesbian & Gay Journalist Association Award!” Kirchick writes: I find Trump’s contempt for the basic functions of democracy—in particular the First Amendment to the United States Constitution—absolutely appalling. His call to ban all Muslims from entering the country is fundamentally evil. Naturally, Trump has also said he’s unsure whether President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II was wrong, despite official condemnations by later American presidents. The casually dispensed threats to those who might challenge his authority as president, from the Speaker of the House (“he’s going to have to pay a big price”) to military officers who refuse his hypothetical illegal orders mandating commission of torture and war crimes (“They’re not gonna refuse me”), has literally kept me awake at night with visions of the country gradually transforming into a North American caudillo-stan. If a recent Washington Post article about therapists reporting an outbreak of “Trump anxiety” among their patients is any indication, I am hardly the only Jew dealing with such existential worry.

Trump’s Nuremberg-esque rallies, where entranced audiences obliviously raise their right hands in impromptu loyalty oaths, evince a frisson of seething aggression. One has come to expect that black and Latino protesters, not to mention fellow journalists, will be roughed up, behavior Trump has repeatedly and explicitly endorsed. His call for deporting 11 million illegal immigrants raises the prospect of nationwide nighttime raids and are the harbinger of a police state. His unapologetic mockery of the physically disabled—one of the Nazis’ earliest victims—resembles a CliffsNotes’ Nietzchean will to power. If Trump doesn’t get his way at the Republican National Convention this summer, that he will deploy some sort of organized paramilitary force—transforming Cleveland into a far-right phantasmagoria of Chicago 1968—is hardly idle speculation.

Watching the Trump drama unfold, I have felt a sense of being transported back to my earlier posting abroad as a correspondent for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, in which capacity I covered upheaval across the former Soviet space and North Africa. This is the sort of candidate and the type of politics we associate with failed states and military dictatorships, not the world’s oldest constitutional democracy. If Trump wins the nomination and, God forbid, the presidency, I anticipate race riots in major American cities. Philip Roth’s alternate history novel, The Plot Against America, envisioning the narrow election of a President Charles Lindbergh who keeps America out of World War II and presides over a worsening climate of anti-Jewish persecution, is no longer the stuff of my Bubbie’s tsuris.
Given his wink-wink, nudge-nudge circumlocutions about the Ku Klux Klan, it’s easy to understand why Trump terrifies racial minorities. Yet Jews qua Jews have been left out of the discussion about Trump’s bigotry. Trump’s daughter Ivanka, after all, is a convert to Orthodox Judaism, having married the scion of another corrupt New York real-estate mogul, Jared Kushner, and Trump has accumulated an abundance of Jewish friends and business partners over his many years in the Big Apple. As he reminded the debate audience last Thursday night, he was once the Grand Marshal of New York’s annual Salute to Israel Parade. Indeed, as my Tablet magazine colleague Liel Leibovitz wrote last year, at a time when many still viewed the Donald’s campaign with a sense of curious bemusement rather than resigned terror, there is something of the macher in the “vaudevillian” Trump, an “heir to a precious Jewish tradition.”

These biographical details, meant to reassure Jews who may be on the fence about the billionaire, are cold comfort. From the cult of masculinity to the boastful anti-intellectualism, Donald Trump has unleashed ugly passions that any Jew with even the most tenuous connection to Jewish community, history, or tradition ought instinctively fear. Nativism, racism, populism, physical and rhetorical thuggery, blatant lying—these are things that should disturb all people of good will. But they are anathema especially to the Jewish “critical spirit,” that rich tradition of skepticism and humanism loathed by know-nothing anti-Semites throughout history. To those Jews who contemplate making peace with a President Donald Trump: He is the candidate of the mob, and the mob always ends up turning on the Jews.

More disheartening than any of Trump’s individual policy pronouncements and behaviors is the fact that so many Americans are unbothered by them. According to political scientist Matthew MacWilliams, Trump supporters have an “authoritarian” disposition. They admire strength to the exclusion of any other characteristic including decency, consistency, and compassion, never mind respect for the rule of law. This trait has long eluded political pollsters because, like me, they didn’t think that a predisposition toward authoritarianism was a characteristic worth measuring in the American electorate. That it so clearly is does not bode well for the future of our republic.

***

If Trump has brought out the worst in the American right, so has he elicited the worst from a segment of the American left. To their everlasting credit, many conservative intellectuals have forthrightly denounced Trumpism, providing a moral example for the many spineless Republican elected officials (with the heroic exception of Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse) who have shamefully chosen to stand on the sidelines as their party moves closer and closer to nominating an authoritarian demagogue as its presidential nominee. This elite-level repudiation was most clearly expressed in “Against Trump,” a cover story symposium published by National Review, and an open letter lambasting the Republican front-runner signed by over 100 prominent GOP foreign policy and national security experts, many of them friends and colleagues and whose views I enthusiastically endorse. Both initiatives placed country over party, stressing the threat that Trump poses not merely to conservative values and the future viability of the GOP, but more importantly the fundamental tenets of America’s democracy and global standing.

To a certain species of left-wing pundit, however, these patently good faith sentiments are the result of darker, malign motivations. What really angers the conservative establishment, these commentators believe, is Trump’s refusal to bow before the “neoconservatives,” a political classification often indistinguishable from “Jewish foreign policy hawk.” MSNBC talking head Chris Matthews—who in a tirade last year attacked “piggish money people,” “a rotten crowd out there that is very hawkish,” and “wants to fight more wars”—believes that Trump’s condemnation of Operation Iraqi Freedom is what turned the “war hawks” against him. Never mind that Trump’s supposed heresy of GOP foreign policy dogma is as muddled and inconsistent as his views on any other matter, and reeks of opportunism. After National Review published its symposium, Matthews invited the magazine’s Washington editor Eliana Johnson onto his television program. There, the Father Coughlin of MSNBC demanded Johnson admit that Trump’s latter-day opposition to Iraq was the reason her magazine so strenuously opposed his candidacy. Matthews, who after the network fired Pat Buchanan ably assumed its designated slot for blowhard tribune of the lace-curtain Catholic, insisted of the contributors that “regime change is in their bloodstream” and that “every name on that list supported the Iraq War.” Not only is the latter claim demonstrably false; the word “Iraq” does not appear once in any of the 22 separate contributions.

Writing for Glenn Greenwald’s The Intercept, Zaid Jilani, last seen losing his job at a liberal think tank for calling various American politicians “Israel-firsters,” says Trump is “setting off alarm bells among neoconservatives who are worried he will not pursue the same bellicose foreign policy that has dominated Republican thinking for decades.” Professional neocon watchers Ali Gharib and Jim Lobe, meanwhile, predict, “There’s little doubt that the neocons and their allies will, sooner or later, call for another Big War in the Middle East, and when they do, it seems President Trump will be wholly unresponsive.”

In the National Interest, Jacob Heilbrunn singled out Brookings Institution scholar Robert Kagan, who has written two, bracing Washington Post op-eds denouncing Trump and declared his support for Hillary Clinton should Trump become the Republican nominee. “Kagan is an eloquent writer, but he elides the fact that many of Trump’s positions are not all that different from what the GOP has espoused in the past when it comes to domestic issues. It is on foreign affairs where Trump represents a marked shift and it is this that truly troubles the neocon wing,” Heilbrunn declares. Because the liberal media’s obsession with supposed neocon machinations is endless, the New York Times gave Heilbrunn an opportunity to repeat his case last week, arguing that neocons are “interlopers” terrified at the prospect of Trump’s rise bringing about an end to their iron grip over American foreign policy.

I have a simpler, not to mention more charitable, explanation for why so many Jewish conservatives—er, “neocons”—viscerally oppose Trump: He’s a fascist demagogue.

Heilbrunn, of all people, should understand. He wrote an entire book in which he quite properly identified memory of the Holocaust and a resultant heightened sensitivity to totalitarianism as crucial factors in shaping neoconservatism, the centerpiece of which was fervent, moralistic opposition to communism. Is it not more likely that it’s the aforementioned, objectively disturbing aspects of Trumpism—and not an absence of warmongering blood lust, which Trump actually displays far more than the neocons—that most disturbs Jewish hawks?

Undeniably, neoconservatives have much to loathe in Trump’s putative foreign policy. Praising Vladimir Putin as a “strong leader,” commending the Chinese communists for their “strength” in massacring thousands of students in Tiananmen Square, attacking free trade, slandering our close allies as freeloaders, promising to unwind the postwar international liberal world order that America constructed and has maintained for seven decades, and, yes, promising to be “neutral” on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—all of these positions are ones that neoconservatives oppose.

But they are also positions that most Americans, never mind conservatives, oppose, and for good reason. “The neocons are right that a Trump presidency would likely be a foreign policy debacle,” Heilbrunn concedes, before divining the real reasons neocons loathe Trump. Not surprisingly, Heilbrunn’s argument drifts into incoherence, like when he describes a “belief in the exercise of unilateral military power” as a Trumpian conviction that used to reign within the GOP until the party was captured by the neocons, though elsewhere Heilbrunn (and others) have ascribed unilateralism as a fundamental tenet of neoconservative ideology.

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Make America Great Again

Posted on March 21, 2016 by Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* Those two guys are making it tough for media shakedown artists just trying to make a living. Poor millennial media grifters like Michelle Fields and Ben Shapiro are going to run out of places to work their con.

* I was a WCW fan back in those days but, as always, Trump knew where the big money was even if Vince McMahon’s WWF had to shamelessly plagiarize a lot of the WCW’s style and steal its stars.

The WCW was pro wrestling for adults. Sophisticated story lines that culminated in attacks during interviews and assaults far removed from the TV studio to the point you worried that the wrestler’s ( dressed in street clothes) would be arrested by police for fighting in a convenience store parking lot etc! It got to the point where Ric Flair actually feigned an attempted rape during one episode and I’ll never forget Tully Blanchard punching out his girl friend “Baby Doll’ after his manager, James J. Dillon, accused her of consorting with the enemies of the Four Horsemen.

Hulk Hogan was a cartoon character who could never risk his image engaging in those kind of story lines. Ironic, in a way, that Hulk Hogan and Donald Trump’s real lives more closely resembled a WCW story line than Ric Flair’s.

* Steve,

Like you, I’m a big fan of McMahon and the WWE/WWF.

You have to wonder how badly Vince wants to support Trump, but he knows advertisers will pull from his company faster than Macy’s dropped Trump.

Wrestlemania IV and V were held at Trump Plaza in Atlantic City (with the latter posting a HUGE live gate, actually making more money than Wrestlemania III did in Detroit).

Trump was even at Wrestlemania VI and VII (in Toronto and Los Angeles).

There’s nothing I want to see more than Vince to come out and give a big speech at a Trump rally. He could probably convince the Iron Sheik to attack him, just for the nostalgia value…

* This is the first presidential election where the republican candidate has a substantial following among the young crowd who produce a lot of the amusing content we see online.

* Great speech, I can see why he is so popular. Good work too co-opting traditional liberalism against the open-boarders fanatics: “We shall not import into Hungary crime, terrorism, homophobia, and synagogue-burning anti-Semitism.”

I wish Trump could give such a speech this eloquent. Really he could lift about 90% of this with minor changes. Orban uses a lot of formal rhetorical techniques like parallelism and metaphor: “beams creaking” “migration is a slow stream eroding the shores” etc. Besides being effective, it also signals to educated voters that he is not an uncouth con man the media portrays him.

* It is nice that Trump can fine tune the level of left-wing nut protesters at his rallies. I think his crowds like at least some of it as pure spectacle, so he’ll never want to dial it down to zero.

For Arizona, which I think is voting fairly soon, he probably wants to keep it down and focus on organizing and turning out supporters.

For Illinois, where resentment at obnoxious far left types is much higher among GOP voters simply because such leftists are all over the place in Chicago and college campuses, it helped Trump to dial up the leftist thug factor.

* Why again is it bad that the frontrunner is famous? I agree that a worthy candidate should have a little more beyond that, but winning the election is a necessary condition to do anything else. He doesn’t run the whole thing, he just has to pick the people who can run whatever part of it is actually operable.

Gordon Crovitz’s column in the WSJ made a good point in spite of itself: the expected Democratic opponent is another mere lowly celebrity as well, with no accomplishments, no credibility, no moral fiber… She’s such a celebrity in fact, that she’s earned first-name basis like Cher or Madonna. Nobody’s support for her is derived from tangible metrics or recent job performance.

* I hope Trump dials back the Rick Flair/Fred Blasie school of persuasion and starts adopting Orban’s approach. It would certainly help him burnish his image as presidential material.

* I wish a lot of things about Trump too, or I used to, now I’ve come to peace with the realization that he is who he is and so, when I get down to an Expected Value Calculation Trump saying the correct things on immigration, deportation, trade outweighs all of his negatives and the positives of the other candidates, and this with me knowing full well that his “extreme” positions are bargaining chips.

If not Trump, then no one else will champion these issues. Trump busts down the door. Hopefully better statesmen will walk through the door and continue the path he is blazing.

* Imagine Trump’s favorability and chances if the media weren’t all in against him. I know he benefits from some of the media attacks. But I think it does hurt him with a large segment of voters. These are people who are not political junkies. These are working stiffs who come home and watch the news served up by the MSM. I personally know a few of these. Good people who work hard, but are hesitant about Trump because of the non-stop doomsday vitriol directed against him.

* Some idiot feminist was on NPR today, going on and on about how much Hillary has sacrificed over the years to play the part of the dutiful wife. Like being Bill’s wife hasn’t been the single biggest boon to her career.

* No, it’s exactly like how much Governor Lurleen Wallace of Alabama back in the 1960s had to sacrifice her own ambitions for those of her shiftless husband George Wallace. Without his political deadweight dragging her down, Lurleen would have been Galactic Overlordess.

* There are a lot of ways to make a living as a celebrity if you are a gregarious extrovert, which Fabio looked to be. Ordinary people like a chance to meet a celebrity for a few seconds, so if you like doing meets and greets, you can milk a moment of fame for a long time. For example, I used to track how long the amateur hockey player who scored the winning goal in the 1980 Olympic “Miracle on Ice” victory over the Soviets could go without having to get a real job beyond motivational speaker and golf tournament celebrity guest.

On the other hand, it’s a tiring life for an introvert. That’s kind of what Sofia Coppola’s “Lost in Translation” is about: Bill Murray plays an introverted movie star making a TV commercial in Japan, which he finds depressing.

* Obama and Clinton did their best to turn Egypt, Libya and Syria into Islamist states under the pretense of bring the people living there a better life. The European migrant invasion is a direct consequence of the contemptible convergence of Obama’s hubris and stupidity. Obama destroyed enormous social capital to indulge his messianic fantasy. Tens and hundreds of thousands died, millions have had their lives irreversibly changed for the worse, and Democrats pretend to be interested in helping the weak, dispossessed and downtrodden.

Trump may indeed be unreliable, but he is not a Leftist cuck-socking idiot. Trump would have to hire a troop of Obamanoid nitwits to get a running start on the massive fluster-cluck Obama foreign policy has been.

Trump will be unreliable, but Trump has not been deluded by Marxist superstition. Vote Trump, and kiss the unforced errors of the last sixteen years goodbye.

* Sailer: I try to acknowledge a celebrity walking by with a respectful nod and saying his last name preceded by “Mr.:” “Mr. Voight” or whomever.

But when I’m out of L.A., I turn into: “Joey! Joey Ramone! I’m your biggest fan!”

* Trump is a black swan event, which means it’s a now or never type of opportunity. It’s inconceivable that a future candidate, intent on destroying the existing order, will be financed by that same order so that he can win the nomination and proceed to destroy the cozy oligarchy. I doubt that Trump will live up to expectations regarding the destruction of the existing order but he’s the only one who presents some chance of significant reform. There’s no upside to waiting for a better candidate because no better candidate will ever get this close to being in a position to do damage to entrenched interests. Money really does talk.

* You misunderstand Arnold.

I first met him at an agency party (we had the same agent); he was then the strongest man in the world and that and Conan was all we knew about him. He was very pleasant, and by chance the next day he met my wife in Nieman Marcus — it was a pre-Christmas party, and she was shopping for a present for me, we just having made a big sale (may have been Hammer, it was that long ago). He spent half an hour helping her look.

I know other such stories, all true.

He ran for governor as a lark, and when he was elected he got a pretty damn good team together to draft some fundamental propositions and constitutional amendments. They were pretty damned good.

The campaign for governor didn’t get very bitter — most thought he was a joke and the pro’s didn’t bother spending any money smearing him.

But the long knives came out over those propositions. Nurses in uniform at rallies screaming curses at him although most of the health professionals I know thought his reforms were needed and good; but wow did the unions hate them. It was the same all over: organized labor in particular called him the Austrian Hitler. He hated it. It really hurt him — he has a thinner skin than you might imagine. It got uncomfortable at home, too, what with his wife being a Kennedy clanswoman.

So when his propositions failed, he said the hell with it. They want crony government and gemutlicheit they can have it. Never took the job seriously again.
I’m not excusing him; he took the job, and he didn’t resign when he lost interest in it. He spent the rest of his office years making nice with everybody. Sure he became a joke and knew it, but it was better than nurses in uniform screaming NAZI at him.

* Trump and Arnold are quite different, but still, Schwarzenegger is about as good a precedent for a unique figure like Trump as we are going to get.

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Imagine If Social Justice Warrios (SJWs) Had Guns

Posted on March 20, 2016 by Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* Social Justice Warrior Millennials are quite violent for a group that has very low gun ownership. Can you imagine how even more violent Social Justice Warrior Millennials would be if they had gun ownership rates equal to that of Rednecks and Hillbillies.

If Social Justice Warrior Millennial Tommy DiMassimo was a gun owner, he would likely be trying to shoot politicians he disagrees with instead of trying to tackle them to the ground.

Social Justice Warrior Millennials would be using guns to shut down freedom of speech they disagree with, if they were 2nd Amendment supporters.

* But Cruz, as an ideologue, is the antithesis of the Sailer Strategy. Reliance on an increasing percentage of the white vote for GOP victory implies ideological moderation, and a pragmatic nationalist program to rebuild a gutted Middle America.

* Was also at the Phoenix rally. Was surprised by the amount of young people there as well. It was a good event, and seeing Trump in person gives you an idea that he’s going to win this big.

The impressions of Jeb and Hillary and Cruz were spot on tho even as they were kill shots, especially Cruz with his Bible.

* The utter lack of pretense at objectivity from media is astonishing. Forget hidden editorials we are getting screaming headlines that can only be described as lying. Protesters shutting down the highway in AZ was spun as “Trump rally violence”. It’s just bizarre.

The NYT has been running headlines that sound like the Huffington Post. The Washington Post has descended into a farce of SJW stories.

There is literally no somewhat objective, sober source of news anymore. Every story everywhere is an opinion piece and usually to the point of absurdity.

On a separate topic I was at Fountain Hills yesterday and heard something interesting. I walked by three young, bored looking African Americans. They were wearing NAACP t-shirts. One of them said “I don’t know I was just told to be here” and shrugged his shoulders. I don’t know what the question was but it is a good hint of how organic these protests are.

* Andy Grove was at Intel 30 years? He remembers when the computer components were made in America with a few made overseas. He saw all this off shoring going on. But back in his day it was Japan that was the leader in stealing our vital industries via trade wars and trade barriers. Also they had a gov’t agency MITI that coordinated Japanese industries to get established in important sectors then to climb up the technology ladder the way China is doing now. Japan is kind of enervated these days due to Fukishima, a blow to their pride, plus low birthrates. Actually Korea’s are lower but they are doing great in the tech world and business which is another blow to the Nips because they always feel superior to Koreans.
Taiwan is a super tech powerhouse. They were making laptops for Dell, HP and others 15 years ago. Now they design the tablets, laptops, smartphones in house in Taiwan and the manufacturing is done in China by their factories there such as Foxconn. Taiwanese owned.

* The litmus test is that anyone who supports more non-white immigration into a majority white country is a cuck. Anything else can be argued in good faith.

* Google for “Mormon General Conference.” It’s the big conference held every six months (the next one is the first Sunday in April) where many of the top leaders (“general authorities”) of the Mormon Church speak to the flock, who watch it via satellite, internet, or whatever. The top leaders are all mostly 60+ years old, and mostly all men who had careers in business. Watch a few score hours worth of it and you’ll get a feel for the kind of leaders Mormons tend to find acceptable. “Charismatic” is not considered a compliment, needless to say. Mormons will occasionally vote for charismatic legislators, but when it comes to executives the word to keep in mind is “staid.”

And that’s why Donald Trump in persona non grata in Utah (and large parts of Idaho and Arizona) – thank God.

* I wonder if any of the people calling for a return of manufacturing jobs to the USA have ever worked in a factory? Maybe each poster could put a little, yes I have, or no I haven’t, at the end (not that it is any proof).

Working in a factory is the worst experience I ever voluntarily endured. If needed to feed, clothe and shelter yourself, I would do it, otherwise, any other occupation is preferable. I even did physically hard groundskeeper one summer. You at least get different jobs, different places, variety and stimulation. Same for a stint in construction. One day one thing another something else.

In the factory you have a place to stand for 8 hours. Work arrives and it is frequently the same thing over and over for the eight hours with a few 15 minute stops, and an hour lunch. The lunch goes by like a New York minute. While working the boredom was bad. The time passed as slowly as a History class in high school (only 8 hours instead of 50 minutes). The surroundings were dirty, there could be danger (my father had a label machine trap his hand between a hot plate and a cradle for minutes while the heat cooked his hand – he was freed only when another worker stuck a bar in the jammed machine and pried his hand out; a coworker in a barrel factory has the tip of his finger caught in a machine that put bands around barrels, I watched him drop to his knees in pain in one second).

They are not good jobs. They were good next to farm jobs. They were good next to real poverty. They were good if there was no opportunity. You would not wish one on anyone. I support automation, freeing human beings from such extreme drudgery.

* I only worked in manufacturing for a month during one summer, but I know and have several relatives who did that kind of work.

The fact is that most jobs are repetitive and boring. The best jobs, in my opinion, are those that require a variety of different problem solving and not repetitive. However, such jobs are not common and furthermore I actually doubt that everyone would like that kind of a job. In fact, a lot of people want a very simple routine to their jobs.

As repetitive and boring as manufacturing is (it is a lot safer now), what exactly is the alternative? Long haul trucking is also boring and repetitive. Sitting in an office cube is also boring and repetitive, doing reports that no one reads or doing data entry. So is stocking grocery shelves or working a checkout. And so on.

The key is that manufacturing jobs put average and less than average people to work, and, thanks to unions, gave them the ability to have a real life.

I mean, bottom line, the vast majority of people have to work to survive, let alone raise children, most people’s jobs are boring and repetitive, and, just as most people spend a third of their lives sleeping, they spend a third of their lives in comparative soul crushing drudgery. Who’s gonna fix that? Especially since, from what I have seen, a lot of people spend the one third of their lives being bored out of their minds and/or getting involved in all kinds of bad sensually gratifying habits to chase their boredom.

I don’t know what the answer is, but making a large percentage of our population feel useless and keeping them in comparative poverty and/or dependence is not the answer.

* Factory jobs vary. The basic assembly, machine operator, etc. type jobs are mind-numbing and physically wearisome, but they generate the skilled labor positions that require intelligence and afford opportunity for creativity as well as build one’s skills. Toolmakers, die sinkers, millwrights, industrial electricians, welders, all-around machinists are all highly skilled people that would require a completely unskilled person several years to learn to the journeyman level.

It’s similar to IT/computer science positions. We call someone a “programmer” but there is a huge range from simple coders of easily taught languages to people who are systems architects capable of writing entire operating systems, designing whole languages, implementing compilers and assemblers and other tools. At the far end are people who are harder to train and require a rarer combination of creativity, drive, and IQ than board certified neurosurgeons, and whose work often generates orders of magnitude more money for their employers, and should make a lot more money. Most of the H-1B jobs are near to the first group and are desired for their willingness to be underhoused in places like Silicon Valley, their ability to be coerced into 80-100 hour work weeks, and their lack of potential to take the place over or leave and start a competing firm.

Stamp out H-1B and employers will be forced to hire Americans who want a solid middle class living for 40-50 hour work weeks and will either refuse to move to SV or will want pay commensurate with the living expenses.

Of course they could offshore. Then again, we could tariff.

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