Someone gets it right

[Kaos]

Over the past 18 months, whether in Midwestern airports or New Hampshire and Iowa hotels, I learned the best way to spot a Donald Trump supporter was to note who was remaining silent.

As Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz or John Kasich voters enthusiastically shared their reasons for supporting their candidate, a family member or friend would often stand by quietly.

When pressed, if they came clean, it was often with downcast eyes or an apologetic smile: “I’m voting for Trump,” they’d almost whisper.

A few months ago, an Uber driver told me he was voting third party, then tepidly announced he was voting Trump as I exited the car. Why didn’t he just tell me this in the first place, I asked. “Because I thought you would judge me,” he said.

Here we can see why Donald Trump’s constant inveighing against political correctness was so ingenious. It forged an unlikely but unshakable bond between a Manhattan billionaire who had manifestly lived a life of “New York values” with conservative white Americans who feel under constant assault by a cultural elite that treats them with contempt.

Perhaps more importantly, it ultimately inoculated Trump against allegations that many believed would be his undoing: that he was a racist and misogynist who bragged of sexually assaulting women.

After all, these same voters have watched as every Republican candidate in recent memory has been accused of waging a “War on Women.” If Democrats are going to claim that Mitt Romney and John McCain hate women (and they did), then they shouldn’t be surprised when voters ignore them when they say Donald Trump hates women. If every Republican is a misogynist, then no Republican is.

While many liberals have dismissed the idea of political correctness as a right-wing manufactured hysteria, it is in fact a real thing. That Trump has stretched its meaning to encompass pretty much any horrible thing he wants to say makes its existence no less real.

Conservative white Americans have watched (often fearfully) as liberal cultural elites demand that everyone fall in line with their agenda or risk being called a homophobe, racist or misogynist. The concept of persuasion and debate has been overridden by a quest for immediate and forced cultural conformity. My friend Sally Kohn, the liberal commentator, summed up the left wing view fairly honestly when she told me in a recent debate over free speech that, “If [conservatives on campus] feel like they can no longer speak against positive social change, good.”

This is a paradigm where honest disagreement about abortion makes one a woman-hater, holding orthodox religious views on marriage equates to gay-bashing, and refusing to cop to white privilege — even if you are a working class white person struggling economically — defines you as a racist.

A recent Slate article explaining why a slight majority of white women voted for Trump asserted that these female Trump supporters were “self-loathing” racists who were doing the bidding of their husbands and fathers. This is the omnipresent lefty trope Republican women have lived with for a long time, yet people are actually shocked that they wouldn’t throw their support behind a party that too often casts them as gender-traitors.

It’s not hard to see how accusations against Trump as a racist and misogynist would be met with eye rolls and knowing murmurs of “political correctness” by people who have had their worldview constantly caricatured and demonized by the cultural elites in academia, media and politics.

We really are two Americas. But it wasn’t always so. Dave Wasserman of TheCook Political Report points out that Donald Trump won 76% of counties with a Cracker Barrel but only 22% of counties with a Whole Foods, a 54-point gap. Yet in 1992, when Bill Clinton won the presidency, the gap between those same counties was only 19 points.

There is a sense among many “Cracker Barrel” Americans that they are not only expected to accept rapid cultural changes, but they are obliged to never even express a reservation or ask for more time to adjust. The choice is full-throated embrace or nothing.

They wanted someone to stand athwart history and yell stop. Donald Trump was that man. So they made him president.

Cracker Barrel biscuits are pretty damn good.  And the open faced roast beef sandwich with carrots as a side?  Delicious. 

I will eat there today in honor of our president. 

[War Eagle!!!]

If every Republican is a misogynist, then no Republican is.

Probably my favorite line I have read on this.

[Kaos]

I'd marry this one.  She's fantastic. 

http://www.chicksontheright.com/open-letter-whiny-safe-space-liberals-crying-racist-sexist-country/

The first half of last night was stressful. I could barely eat. Stupid Florida, always keeping us on the edge of our seats. I switched my networks around last night. I mostly relied on Fox News and Twitter. CNN wasn’t calling states as fast, and MSNBC is a last resort kind of thing. I vowed to stay away from that channel, UNLESS things started shaping up for Donald Trump.

Then the results started coming in. Flyover nation. North Carolina. Ohio. Florida? Wisconsin?!!! That’s when the wheels started falling off their wagon. That’s when I started thinking about Hillary Clinton’s defeat. I never really allowed myself to go there before. I didn’t want to get my hopes up, but my country came through. We the People are not stupid.

We the People defeated MSM. We the People defeated the establishment. We the People saved the Supreme Court. We the People rejected the power-hungry, seahag criminal in a pantsuit.

After they announced Wisconsin, commentators started to change their tune. They looked visibly nervous. Eventually, Mockarena told me it was safe to flip to MSNBC, and it was hysterical. I thought Rachel Maddow’s face was going to fall off.  I flipped back to Fox News. Juan Williams practically peed himself. I watched the cheese slide off his crackers in real time. It was something.

I scrolled through social media. Liberals were melting down. They wrote stuff like, “I don’t know how we consistently underestimated the quiet endurance of racism in America.” They whined over “flagrant sexism.”
 
I’m sick and tired of it. I’m sick and tired of these uninformed jackholes telling me that I’m racist, sexist, Islamophobic and homophobic. They have no basis for those claims. They’re consumed by their emotions. Do they honestly believe Hillary Clinton lost solely because she’s a woman? It couldn’t possibly have anything with her being a pathological liar who’s spent her entire life pursuing political power? It had nothing to do with the fact that America’s not satisfied with her vision for America– an America with open borders, higher taxes and more bureaucratic scumbags in D.C. telling us how to run our lives?

We’re not racist. We’re not sexist. We want people to come into this country legally. That’s not racist. Progressive leadership in the big, urban cities hasn’t pulled the black community out of poverty. It’s worsened it. Liberalism has failed them. We acknowledge that. We want them to prosper. That’s not racist.

And as for being sexist? All issues are women’s issues. I have no idea why liberals continue to separate them. Do they really believe we only care about vaginas, boobs and killing our offspring? Liberals assumed we (women) would vote for Hillary based on those reasons alone. THAT’S sexist, if you ask me. Women care about the economy. We care about national security. We care about the almost $20 trillion national debt. We care about the erosion of our freedoms. We care about the future of the Supreme Court. The list goes on and on and on.

I also saw some posts on how Trump’s victory signifies that America hates the LGBT community. NEWSFLASH: We elected a man who wants to keep dangerous anti-LGBT ideologues OUT OF OUR COUNTRY. Those people who want to throw them off rooftops? We don’t want them here. We want to protect the LGBT community. The fact that we stand for traditional family values and don’t want men in the women’s bathroom doesn’t take anything away from that. Not for one second.


You’re clueless. We were founded on the novel idea that we were endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights. Rights than cannot be given or taken away by a governing authority. This was about individual liberty. We reject government force and coercion. Votes. Favors. Political power. That’s the cycle of every progressive politician. We’re done. We’re sick of it.

Another part of Ronald Reagan’s 1964 speech, “A Time For Choosing,” comes to mind.

“Public servants say, always with the best of intentions, “What greater service we could render if only we had a little more money and a little more power.” But the truth is that outside of its legitimate function, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector.”
 
“Yet any time you and I question the schemes of the do-gooders, we’re denounced as being opposed to their humanitarian goals. It seems impossible to legitimately debate their solutions with the assumption that all of us share the desire to help the less fortunate. They tell us we’re always ‘against,’ never ‘for’ anything.”
But we are. We’re for economic prosperity. Individual responsibility. Fiscal responsibility. Less government. More freedom. We’re sick of the liberal do-gooders shoving their BS agenda down our throats and calling us bigots when we reject their horrid ideas. We’re sick of them scoffing at the principles of liberty.

Donald Trump is America’s middle finger to the media, Hollywood elites, progressive ideologues and everyone else in the world who hates our guts.

I’m drinking the tears of our political enemies in a mug today and loving every minute of it. We defeated them. We have one more chance to prove that our ideas work. We’re right. We always have been.

[Kaos]

Tomi does a victory lap

Tomi Lahren took a victory lap as she urged Donald Trump’s opponents to fall in line behind the president-elect.

The host from Glenn Beck’s “The Blaze” website attacked the political and media establishment in a Sarah Palin-esque rant normalizing the “deplorable” behavior of some Trump supporters.

“They don’t get us, they don’t get everyday Americans,” Lahren said. “They thought they could shame us with their labels. Yeah, for them, we were the racists, the Islamophobes, the sexists, the homophobes, the bigots, the deplorable, irredeemable rednecks with no education and no voice.”

“Well, they were wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong,” Lahren said. “The only thing they can label us now: winners.”

She urged Hillary Clinton supporters and “never Trump” Republicans who had “turned their backs on their fellow Americans” to salute the newly elected president.

“Stop, we need you,” Lahren said. “It’s not Trump supporters vs. the world anymore, and it shouldn’t be. It’s Americans with Americans with Americans with Americans — so start acting like it. Give the man the benefit of the doubt — after all, you’ve been wrong about him from the start.”

She said most Americans who thought Trump would make a bad president had been wrong about his chances of making it to the White House — so they had no credibility in her eyes.

“Put your ego and your sour grapes aside and work with the guy,” said Lahren, who has repeatedly suggested President Barack Obama encourages terrorism. “So he’s not ‘your guy’ — I get it, but what good does it do to sit in the corner and pout?”

[CCTAU]

Well. If they are in the corner pouting, they are out of my way!

[Kaos]

Another good take.  Dead on.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/columnist/wolff/2016/11/13/wolff-media-has-itself-blame-epic-election-fail/93649836/

The extent of the media failure to anticipate or predict the election outcome, along with its concerted bet on a wholly different result, rather curiously resembles the banking industry’s failure to anticipate the financial meltdown in 2007.

It’s an institutional breakdown in the ability to do the basic job. Big banks should have hedged their bets against the subprime meltdown. Similarly, the media is supposed to keep enough of an open mind to the factors at hand to at least provide for the possibility of alternative outcomes. With both the housing bubble and the 2016 election, more caution on the part of the experts might have led to different tactics and strategies that might have altered history’s course.

This was not simple human error—“Dewey Defeats Truman”— which might have been bad enough. For both the media and the financial industry, the failure to maintain objectivity came, in large part, from becoming uniquely vested in one outcome. The banking industry saw its incentives in rising house prices, and became blind, willfully so, to the possibility of their decline. The media ideologically aligned itself not just against Donald Trump but with the demographic groups that made up its audience. It found itself telling the stories its audience wanted to hear, a problem compounded by the fact that these were the stories the people in the media most wanted to hear.

The media surely sees its culpability as qualitatively different from the banking industry’s villainy. Bankers were literally corrupt, actually knowing the housing bubble would collapse and yet, nevertheless, artificially holding it up. And yet, in fact, most of the fault in the banking industry — which is why there have been few prosecutions — fell somewhere on the scale between willful and passive ignorance, a place most media people found themselves in this election.

For one thing, it would have been quite a difficult bind for any serious or rising journalist in a national news organization to have actually been a Trump supporter — as odd a position as a trader insisting at the height of the market on a house market crash. Trump, after all, had been declared, by almost every news organization, “unsuitable.” In fact, to align with Trump supporters was to align with an ethos that might well have come perilously close to crossing the HR rules in most news organizations. To support Trump was to support racism and sexism. Most people in most newsrooms would likely have believed that. Perhaps all the Millennials in the newsrooms — their lack of experience and commensurate low paychecks making them the fastest-rising newsroom demographic — believed that.

Yes, but what is a journalist witnessing the rise of fascism to do? That has been the end-of-the-world newsroom view. Trump is post-truth. Journalists are fighters for truth.

In this instance, truth became something like a financial derivative — a construct based on the special knowingness of insiders and self-serving math.

Jill Abramson, the former editor of The New York Times and now a freelance advocate for good journalism, took to Twitter to excuse her former employer. “Great institution falsely blamed for ‘getting it wrong.’ Job of @nytimes is to inform and hold power accountable. Did both magnificently.” In fact, while those might be nice results, the actual job is to be accurate. Getting it wrong ought to be as dismal a result as when a bank loses money, with someone called on the carpet. When structural flaws in method and in intelligence make it increasingly difficult (if not impossible) to get it right, that’s an institutional crisis — a kind of bankruptcy.

This is not a question of condoning or supporting Donald Trump — and here, arguably, the media surely contributed to creating the Trump bubble, which it bet would burst — but an issue of being able to understand the ways in which he might be a credible candidate. In this, most media organizations applied vast research and data capabilities to assessing that the likelihood of his candidacy succeeding was nigh impossible.

The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, CNN, even Buzzfeed are perhaps too big to fail — at least in a journalistic, if not financial, sense. No one is going to hold them accountable for painting a picture of reality that was not real, indeed for trying to use their influence to bend reality. No one need take responsibility. Leaders at the Times and CNN, in fact, issued rousing encomiums to the greatness of their election coverage and the accomplishments of their staffs. Bad calls, even gross misunderstandings of the fundamental currents of the time, being merely yesterday’s news and hence easily forgotten.

In a time of deep media unpopularity, it would surely have been wiser and more honorable for these leaders to have fallen on their swords.

Already there is a circling of the wagons with regard to what Trump will do to the media. The media, as thin-skinned and defensive as any political candidate — quite Trump-like in fact — will likely go from making any effort to right itself, an introspective role it has never been comfortable in, to defending its virtues.

But the media, like the banks, will not so easily recover from what everybody knows: Aligning lock-step behind a political and cultural outlook, it produced for almost 18 months, with hardly a deviation anywhere in its ranks, a narrative which was off about 180 degrees from what was actually occurring and from the story that would ultimately unfold. In a sense, we would have been better served without a mainstream media at all.

[GH2001]

Sally Kohn, the liberal commentator, summed up the left wing view fairly honestly when she told me in a recent debate over free speech that, “If [conservatives on campus] feel like they can no longer speak against positive social change, good.”

That right there proves all the other articles right... ^^^ that. All of that. Either fall in line with our bullshit or you are demonized. This is what they believe. She's admitting it. And why is she a friend of the author? That is no friend. That isn't simply "disagreeing on politics". That is stifling liberty. F that bitch.

[GH2001]

Tomi does a victory lap

Not sure why she works for that hack beck. He's a mentally deranged shit bag. I can see him offing himself one day David Carradine style. He's a weird fuck. She is so much better than the fucking blaze.