US Politics Mega-thread - Page 8265

“We are soldiers in this war,” Jared Taylor told an overwhelmingly male and entirely white audience of around 300 late on Saturday. “And we will win.”

The founder and editor of American Renaissance, once a print magazine and now “the internet’s premier race-realist site”, no longer thinks whites can have America to themselves. But he wants an all-white “ethnostate”, carved out of US territory.

This weekend, American Renaissance held its annual conference at a venue in Montgomery Bell state park, an hour west of Nashville, Tennessee. Attendees and speakers clearly felt a growing confidence. They have seen appreciable growth in membership of established and emerging far-right groups. They have also seen the election as president of Donald Trump.

Speakers at the event addressed subjects including “Race realism and race denialism” and “Has the white man turned the corner?” One considered “The Trump report card – so far”.

When Taylor spoke, his audience was generationally diverse. Some, well into middle age or beyond, had heard it all before. But when he asked who was attending for the first time, the great majority raised their hands.

Many were millennials. Though all attendees wore conference dress code – jacket and tie – more than a few younger men sported the “fashy haircut”, short back and sides with a severe parting, which has become a signature of the so-called alt-right.

Many such young men lined up for selfies with Richard Spencer, the president of the white nationalist National Policy Institute thinktank who has achieved fame since greeting the election result with a cry of “Hail Trump”.

Others browsed vendor tables, buying books from Counter-Currents – the white nationalist publisher behind Towards the White Republic and In Defense of Prejudice – or picking up flyers from Identity Evropa, a group that markets white supremacy to millennials.

Taylor said such men were flooding to his group because they were “hopping mad”. “These young white guys,” he told the Guardian, “they have been told from infancy that they are the villains of history. And I think that the left has completely overplayed its hand.”

It was not clear if fear or anger was the dominant emotion of the conference. Speaker after speaker addressed the supposed genetic and demographic decline of the west; the supposed low IQ of migrants flooding western countries; supposed links between IQ and “social pathology”; supposed “anti-white propaganda that suffuses our society”; supposed academic conspiracies that have worked to cover all this up. A common theme was the supposed propensity of non-whites to crimes like rape.

Using color-coded maps, graphs and pictures of human brains, some speakers strove to give racism the kind of scientific respectability it has not claimed since the second world war.

Attendees were also told a lot about Trump. Taylor said the billionaire had provided “a great deal of excitement” when he was elected, but was now viewed with some skepticism.

Questioned by the Guardian, Spencer said Trump’s policy on Syria and the healthcare debacle were distractions from the only thing this crowd was interested in: immigration.

On August 01 2017 06:56 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
Hence the need for Worker protections, Universal healthcare, and Education. Mandated vacation etc.



Source

On August 01 2017 07:20 LegalLord wrote:

Puhlease. With the state of affairs in LA with traffic, you probably won't even notice.

On August 01 2017 07:36 Falling wrote:
The Mooch is pooched.

I watched the Cenk and Shapiro debate. Nothing too enlightening came out of it. While I often appreciate Shapiro's quick wit in Q&A formats, I don't find it as effective in a debate format, but then Cenk doesn't really shine either. I don't get Shapiro's reticence for campaign finance reform. His counter-point conflated the free market with the mechanism by which we change government, and I found the glib comparison rather frustrating.

On August 01 2017 06:52 FueledUpAndReadyToGo wrote:
I didn't expect him to do his last fandango so soon

On August 01 2017 08:05 TheTenthDoc wrote:
Huh. Trump has gone from -12% net overall approval in Rasmussen on July 3rd to -21% today. Approve dropped 5 points, disapprove rose 5 (rounded numbers). This isn't the trend we see in other polls in July (which I find kind of interesting) where Trump is basically holding steady with maybe a 2 point gap opening up.

I wonder what that says about the Rasmussen sample and methodology vs. other pollsters (or if it's more about the lack of a "no opinion" option in Rasmussen). Maybe it's all just idiosyncratic small numbers stuff, too.

On August 01 2017 08:04 Nevuk wrote:
https://twitter.com/kari_paul/status/892094633433604096

Since that was just a bit fluffy, a real story but kind of small in scope

https://twitter.com/NPR/status/892091762445099008

www.npr.org

My Party Is in Denial About Donald Trump
We created him, and now we're rationalizing him. When will it stop?
By JEFF FLAKE July 31, 2017

Who could blame the people who felt abandoned and ignored by the major parties for reaching in despair for a candidate who offered oversimplified answers to infinitely complex questions and managed to entertain them in the process? With hindsight, it is clear that we all but ensured the rise of Donald Trump.

I will let the liberals answer for their own sins in this regard. (There are many.) But we conservatives mocked Barack Obama’s failure to deliver on his pledge to change the tone in Washington even as we worked to assist with that failure. It was we conservatives who, upon Obama’s election, stated that our No. 1 priority was not advancing a conservative policy agenda but making Obama a one-term president—the corollary to this binary thinking being that his failure would be our success and the fortunes of the citizenry would presumably be sorted out in the meantime. It was we conservatives who were largely silent when the most egregious and sustained attacks on Obama’s legitimacy were leveled by marginal figures who would later be embraced and legitimized by far too many of us. It was we conservatives who rightly and robustly asserted our constitutional prerogatives as a co-equal branch of government when a Democrat was in the White House but who, despite solemn vows to do the same in the event of a Trump presidency, have maintained an unnerving silence as instability has ensued. To carry on in the spring of 2017 as if what was happening was anything approaching normalcy required a determined suspension of critical faculties. And tremendous powers of denial.

I’ve been sympathetic to this impulse to denial, as one doesn’t ever want to believe that the government of the United States has been made dysfunctional at the highest levels, especially by the actions of one’s own party. Michael Gerson, a con­servative columnist and former senior adviser to President George W. Bush, wrote, four months into the new presidency, “The conservative mind, in some very visible cases, has become diseased,” and conservative institutions “with the blessings of a president … have abandoned the normal constraints of reason and compassion.”

For a conservative, that’s an awfully bitter pill to swallow. So as I layered in my defense mechanisms, I even found myself saying things like, “If I took the time to respond to every presiden­tial tweet, there would be little time for anything else.” Given the volume and velocity of tweets from both the Trump campaign and then the White House, this was certainly true. But it was also a monumental dodge. It would be like Noah saying, “If I spent all my time obsessing about the coming flood, there would be little time for anything else.” At a certain point, if one is being honest, the flood becomes the thing that is most worthy of attention. At a certain point, it might be time to build an ark.

Under our Constitution, there simply are not that many people who are in a position to do something about an executive branch in chaos. As the first branch of government (Article I), the Congress was designed expressly to assert itself at just such moments. It is what we talk about when we talk about “checks and balances.” Too often, we observe the unfolding drama along with the rest of the country, passively, all but saying, “Someone should do something!” without seeming to realize that that someone is us. And so, that unnerving silence in the face of an erratic executive branch is an abdication, and those in positions of leadership bear particular responsibility.

There was a time when the leadership of the Congress from both parties felt an institutional loyalty that would frequently create bonds across party lines in defense of congressional prerogatives in a unified front against the White House, regardless of the president’s party. We do not have to go very far back to identify these exemplars—the Bob Doles and Howard Bakers and Richard Lugars of the Senate. Vigorous partisans, yes, but even more important, principled constitutional conservatives whose primary interest was in governing and making America truly great.

But then the period of collapse and dysfunction set in, amplified by the internet and our growing sense of alienation from each other, and we lost our way and began to rationalize away our principles in the process. But where does such capitulation take us? If by 2017 the conservative bargain was to go along for the very bumpy ride because with congressional hegemony and the White House we had the numbers to achieve some long-held policy goals—even as we put at risk our institutions and our values—then it was a very real question whether any such policy victories wouldn’t be Pyrrhic ones. If this was our Faustian bargain, then it was not worth it. If ultimately our principles were so malleable as to no longer be principles, then what was the point of political victories in the first place?

If this was our Faustian bargain, then it was not worth it. If ultimately our principles were so malleable as to no longer be principles, then what was the point of political victories in the first place?”
Meanwhile, the strange specter of an American president’s seeming affection for strongmen and authoritarians created such a cognitive dissonance among my generation of conservatives—who had come of age under existential threat from the Soviet Union—that it was almost impossible to believe. Even as our own government was documenting a con­certed attack against our democratic processes by an enemy foreign power, our own White House was rejecting the authority of its own intelligence agencies, disclaiming their findings as a Democratic ruse and a hoax. Conduct that would have had conservatives up in arms had it been exhibited by our political opponents now had us dumbstruck.

It was then that I was compelled back to Senator Goldwater’s book, to a chapter entitled “The Soviet Menace.” Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, this part of Goldwater’s critique had seemed particularly anachronistic. The lesson here is that nothing is gone forever, especially when it comes to the devouring ambition of despotic men. As Goldwater wrote in that chapter:

Our forebears knew that “keeping a Republic” meant, above all, keeping it safe from foreign transgressors; they knew that a people cannot live and work freely, and develop national institutions conducive to freedom, except in peace and with independence.

So, where should Republicans go from here? First, we shouldn’t hesitate to speak out if the president “plays to the base” in ways that damage the Republican Party’s ability to grow and speak to a larger audience. Second, Republicans need to take the long view when it comes to issues like free trade: Populist and protectionist policies might play well in the short term, but they handicap the country in the long term. Third, Republicans need to stand up for institutions and prerogatives, like the Senate filibuster, that have served us well for more than two centuries.

We have taken our “institutions conducive to freedom,” as Goldwater put it, for granted as we have engaged in one of the more reckless periods of politics in our history. In 2017, we seem to have lost our appreciation for just how hard won and vulnerable those institutions are.

Jeff Flake is a Republican senator from Arizona. This article has been excerpted from his new book, Conscience of a Conservative. Excerpted by permission of Random House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

On August 01 2017 06:53 Gorsameth wrote:

No, the only sad about this story is him getting hired in the first place.
He knew the mess he was getting into, he made those statements knowingly.
Why should I feel sorry that some guy knowingly threw his life away for 15min of fame?

On August 01 2017 08:46 mozoku wrote:

Why should I pay more in taxes than the doofuses who spent more time partying in college than studying and consequently now have a lower income? Or the ones who couldn't finish high school that I wasn't even able to watch party through college?

The tirade Scaramucci was fired for wasn't meant to be published. It was more idiotic blunder in not realizing the reporter would take it to press than anything else. Colorful language is part of the company/team culture in some (relatively rare) corners of finance.

Trump likely greenlit his aggressive behavior, had him report directly to Trump, then threw him out after he sold his company and had his wife divorce him.

I'm not arguing the guy's an angel, but I have a little sympathy for him. And the "why should I feel sorry for bad decisions?" line rings quite hollow from a leftist to a conservative-leaning individual when I'm constantly expected to give up a portion of my income to have it redistributed to the groups I highlighted above.