Village Voice Shuts Down

September 2nd, 2018

The “alternative weekly” finally had no alternative to shutting down:

Three years after buying The Village Voice, and a year after the paper shut down its print edition, owner Peter Barbey told the remaining staff today that the publication will no longer be posting any new stories.

“Today is kind of a sucky day,” Barbey told the staff, according to audio obtained by Gothamist. “Due to, basically, business realities, we’re going to stop publishing Village Voice new material [sic].”

Barbey said that half of the staff, which is around 15 to 20 people, will remain on to “wind things down,” and work on a project to archive the Voice’s material online.

The rest of the staff will be let go today.

Since they announced they were ending print publication a year ago, this is no surprise.

It’s like when some musician who was briefly important in the sixties dies, and you go “Oh, wait, he was still alive?”

Alternative weeklies were useful for carrying club, event and restaurant listings, all things the Internet does better now. As far as I can tell, their “carrier medium for liberal opinion” business model is only viable two ways: Carry tons of sex ads (something else the Internet does better now), or have the tabloid as an adjunct to a large, profitable music festival (the Austin Chronicle model). Since the most recent super-geniuses running the Village Voice eliminated sex ads, plus the tremendous BS involved in running any business in New York City, the graffiti was on the brownstone wall.

Plus it’s not like readers have a crying lack of far left-wing voices in the media today…

Scott Adams on Kanye West on Rich People and Skill Stacks

September 1st, 2018

Scott Adams has an interesting periscope up on Kanye West talking about how black people need to “think more like rich people.”

Some of the points Adams covers about how Kanye West exhibits “rich people thinking” (especially compared to #BlackLivesMatter):

  • Think in systems rather than goals
  • Talk to everyone (networking)
  • Develop your skill stack
  • Take logical risks
  • Learn from mistakes
  • Make alliances
  • Be generous (do favors without asking for immediate returns)
  • Lead with love
  • Concentrate on the now, not the past
  • He ends with a discussion of the basic skills people in the inner city need to learn to be successful: How to keep your own books, how to find mentors, how to get your first job, how to dress for your first job. Even a boot camp on how to talk to the police.

    More interesting than I expected it to be…

    LinkSwarm for August 31, 2018

    August 31st, 2018

    Just when I think the Catholic Church can’t make itself look any worse in the wake of the burgeoning child rape scandal, they prove me wrong:

  • Papal spokesman on the Catholic Church’s spiraling child rape scandal:

    In an NBC News interview yesterday, Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago insisted that it was more than acceptable for Pope Francis to refuse to discuss Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò’s shocking testimony, which implicates a host of Catholic Church leaders — including the pope — in covering up sexual abuse and immorality.

    “The pope has a bigger agenda,” Cupich told interviewer Mary Anne Ahern when asked about the pope’s refusal to discuss Viganò’s claims. “He’s got to get on with other things, of talking about the environment and protecting migrants and carrying on the work of the Church.

  • Evidently Pope Francis and company were doing their darnedest to imitate the Babylon Bee.
  • Related: “Pope Starting To Suspect He Might Be Antichrist.”
  • How ObamaCare was designed to force independent doctors out of business. (Hat tip: Ian Murray at Instapundit.)
  • ICE arrests over 100 illegal alien workers at Load Trail LLC in Sumner, north Texas.
  • The U.S. share of mass shootings is actually lower than the global average.
  • President Trump’s Iran sanctions are working.
  • “There’s a widespread consensus that at no time in the past 40 years, since Saddam Hussein acquired absolute power and led Iraq into a series of ruinous wars, has Baghdad been as free and as fun as it is now.” (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • Remember Russia’s new T-14 Armata tank? They were going to build 2,300 of them. Now? 132. And that number is split between the T-14 and the T-15 heavy infantry fighting vehicle, which shares the same chassis. Which means Russia will have to continue to rely on older T-72 and T-90 tanks as the mainstays of their armored forces for the foreseeable future. By comparison the United States has over 1,500 M1A2s and over 4,000 M1A1s, both of which proved capable of taking out T-72s in the Gulf War. As Stalin once put it, “Quantity has a quality all it’s own.” And the essential brokeness of Russia is why I’m not worried about their costly adventurism in Syria. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • John McCain was admired by liberals; that is, when they weren’t calling him a senile plutocrat warmonger.
  • How Chicago 68 destroyed the Democratic Party:

    Humphrey would be the last Democratic presidential nominee to represent the values of Truman and JFK: compassionate big government at home, and resolute anti-Communism abroad. Instead, a new Democratic party was born, one that increasingly reflected the radical views of the Chicago protesters: that America, not Communism, was the real force for evil that needed to be contained and transformed. That Democratic party would nominate George McGovern in its 1972 convention and become a party obsessed with social justice, identity politics, and America’s past sins — essentially the party it is today. Meanwhile mainstream Democratic voters began their flight to the Republican party, “Reagan Democrats” who would enable the GOP to win four of the next five presidential elections and who later became the foot soldiers of the Trump insurgency.

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • The Missouri Democratic Party does not need any of you stinking moderates. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Biased liberal news sites hate being called biased liberal news sites. (Hat tip: Mark Tapscott at Instapundit.)
  • Philadelphia is bankrupt. So naturally the liberal mayor is trying to ignore the obvious. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Cahnman looks at gang rape in the Baylor football program. Add to this the news that Baylor planted moles in sexual assault survivor groups to report back on cases involving student athletes, and you start to wonder whether the NCAA out not to revive the “Death Penalty” for Baylor’s football program…or maybe their entire athletic department.
  • CNN lied, they know they lied, and they can’t stop lying.
  • Washington Post: “Russia hacked the election!” Also Washington Post: “We’re going to court to fight election transparency advertising law!” (Hat tip: Ace of Spaces HQ.)
  • Speaking of liberal mouthpiece newspapers, both the editor and the publisher for the Austin American Statesman are retiring.
  • This just in: Greece is still boned.
  • “If he’s cute, it’s flirting. If he’s ugly, it’s sexual harassment.”
  • “Abbas to close banks in Gaza, cut off all salaries.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Lancaster Independent School District violates state law with illegal electioneering.
  • Dick’s Sporting Goods move away from guns hurt their bottom line. “The anti-gun crowd must not buy a lot of sporting goods.​”
  • ESPN finally seems to understand that they should get out of politics and stick to sports. Took them long enough…
  • Chicanery at the Llano police department. Bad cop! No ribs!
  • Eat Steak and Live Longer.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Snowflake Kansas professor cancels office hours because concealed carry is no legal. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • There can be only one…going to prison. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • How ballpoint pens killed cursive.
  • Semiconductor Update: GlobalFoundries Gives Up On 7nm​

    August 30th, 2018

    GlobalFoundries has given up work on their 7nm process node. This is a direct result of AMD choosing TSMC over GlobalFoundries to fab their next generation microprocessor.

    GlobalFounderies was always something of an odd duck. It was spun out from AMD in 2009 to turn their manufacturing arm into a foundry because AMD itself could no longer afford the huge upfront capital investment state-of-the-art wafer fabrication plants demanded. As it exists today, GlobalFounderies​ is a Frankenstein’s monster of agglomeration, having gobbled up Singapore-based Chartered Semiconductor and what remained of IBM’s fab infrastructure (back in the day, IBM had some of the best semiconductor design capabilities in the world) in New York and Vermont. (SK Hynix, NXP and ON Semiconductor, all integrated device manufacturers rather than foundries, are similar merger-assembled aggregations.) GlobalFounderies actual owner is the Emirate of Abu Dhabi.

    With UMC screwing the pooch by letting Chinese spies walk out the door with Micron design IP, there was an opening for a (sorta, kinda) American chip foundry to provide a viable rival to TSMC, but GlobalFoundries evidently found it too difficult to do profitably.

    TSMC has already broken ground on a fab that will theoretically take them down to 5nm and is expected to cost $500 billion NT, which works out to over $16 billion US at current exchange rates. That’s more outlay than all the profit TSMC made all of last year.

    Some thoughts (partially based on scuttlebutt, gossip, etc.):

  • Right now there’s no non-TSMC foundry choice if a fabless chip company wants to attempt a sub 14nm design. It’s Taiwan or nothing.
  • To the best of my knowledge, no one outside TSMC, Intel and Samsung are even attempting 7nm. Word is that TSMC’s 7nm is actually closer to 10nm, and Intel is evidently in a world of hurt getting yields up on its 10nm process.
  • Samsung says they’re going to 7nm in 2019 using Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, a long, long awaited technological shift that will probably involve its own painful learning curve. Others have speculated that, despite those plans, Samsung seems pretty happy sitting at 14nm with high yields for most of its own chip needs (as opposed to its foundry customers).
  • What this means is that the cutting edge of wafer fabrication technology is probably going to be centered on the Pacific rim for the foreseeable future. China won’t be on that cutting edge, because they can’t steal technology fast enough or hire enough enough qualified process techs to get it done.

    We may finally have reached a point that building a cutting edge, state-of-the-art wafer fabrication plant is a money-losing proposition for everyone.

    That means fabless chip designers working at the cutting edge will be dependent on Taiwan and South Korea for the foreseeable future, a fact that has a lot of foreign policy relevance, especially in relation to China…

    The Texas Senate Race and the Case of the Ever-Shrinking Poll Sample

    August 29th, 2018

    Another week, another poll that shows Beto O’Rourke within striking distance of Ted Cruz. The entire sample size on the Emerson poll was only 550 registered voters. It seems that O’Rourke’s numbers go up as the size of the sample goes down.

    Let’s look at the crosstabs, shall we?

    First, this is among registered voters, not likely voters, as other polls have screened. That matters, because off-year elections have lower turnout than Presidential elections.

    Second, did they oversample Democrats? Why yes they did, albeit not as grossly as as some previous polls. Republicans checked in at 41%, Democrats at 35%, a six point difference as opposed to the nine point difference in party identification in 2016, much less the 16 points win Cruz enjoyed over Paul Sadler in 2012, or the 20 points Greg Abbott beat Wendy Davis by in 2014.

    Third, they’ve oversampled women 52.3% to 47.7% men. The last non-Presidential election poll show closer to a 51% women/49% men split.

    I’m guessing that the “closeness” of the race is heavily dependent on those factors.

    In other Texas senate race news:

  • O’Rourke blows off a debate with Cruz.
  • How to write the perfect fawning profile of Beto O’Rourke without having to do any of that annoying research.
  • President Trump Announces New Trade Deal With Mexico

    August 28th, 2018

    President Donald Trump announced a new trade deal with Mexico:

    President Donald Trump said Monday the U.S. and Mexico have reached a new trade deal, paving the way for the possible revision of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

    In an Oval Office announcement, Trump said the new agreement would be called the United States Mexico trade agreement and would replace NAFTA, which he said had “bad connotations” for the United States.

    “It’s a big day for trade,” he said. “It’s a big day for our country.”

    Trump said he intends to terminate NAFTA and that the U.S. would immediately begin negotiations with Canada, the third party in the trilateral trade pact that he has called the “worst deal ever.”

    “If they would like to negotiate fairly, we will do that,” Trump said. He said it’s possible that a separate deal could be reached with Canada.

    The announcement of a deal between the U.S. and Mexico comes after five consecutive weeks of talks between the two nations to revise key parts of the NAFTA.

    In a phone call with Trump, Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto called the deal “something very positive for the United States and Mexico.”

    The U.S. and Mexico are hoping to get a final deal signed before Peña Nieto leaves office on Dec. 1. But before the U.S. can sign the deal, Congress must be given 90 days’ notice. A formal notice will be sent to Congress on Friday.

    Pena Nieto repeatedly expressed interest for Canada to be incorporated into the agreement. Trump said the U.S. would have a deal with Canada “one way or another.”

    “It’ll either be a tariff on cars or it’ll be a negotiated deal,” he said. “Frankly, a tariff on cars is a much easier way to go. Perhaps, the other would be much better for Canada.”

    In Mexico City, Marcelo Ebrard, Mexico’s incoming foreign minister under President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, said Monday he was pleased to see the U.S and Mexico craft a new trade deal, according to Reuters.

    “We see the agreement announced today as positive progress … in the coming days we will continue in trilateral negotiations with Canada, which is vital to be able to renew the (trade) pact,” said Marcelo Ebrard, the future foreign minister.

    Douglas George, the Detroit-based consul general of Canada responsible for Michigan, Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky, sounded upbeat on Monday.

    “We’re encouraged by the optimism shown by our negotiating partners,” George told the Detroit Free Press on Monday. “Progress between Mexico and the U.S. is a necessary requirement for any renewed NAFTA agreement. While they’ve been negotiating, we’ve been in regular contact with them over the last weeks. We’ll continue to work toward a modernized NAFTA. We have a three-way negotiation that’s been ongoing.”​

    How can we analyze the costs and benefits of this agreement compared to NAFTA?

    Well, we can’t yet. The text of the agreement isn’t available. Ace of Spades zeroes in on this:

    According to a fact sheet from the United States Trade Representative, the agreement includes new rules of origin to incentivize manufacturers to source goods and materials in North America — including requiring 75 percent of auto content be made in the United States and Mexico.

    I’m going to guess that the point of this is to require Mexico to buy the bulk of the steel used in making cars from US/Mexican steel-makers, which probably means “US steel makers” in practice. Rather than, say, Chinese or Canadian or other makers.

    I’m not a fan of the trade warrior fetishization of steel over other industries, but as previously noted, President Trump’s unorthodox negotiating style seems to be lowering trade barriers for American products. The success with Mexico will likely increase pressure on Canada and Mexico to do the same.

    ACLU Finds Clue, Backs NRA On Banks

    August 27th, 2018

    This qualifies as news because it’s actually novel:

    The official view of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) remains that the Second Amendment protects a “collective right rather than an individual right.” But the organization nevertheless is helping the National Rifle Association (NRA) fend off extralegal attempts by New York state officials to put it out of business.

    In a brief filed in federal court today, the ACLU argues that New York’s strong-arm efforts to compel banks and insurance companies to ditch the NRA as a customer represent a glaring violation of the First Amendment.

    “Although public officials are free to express their opinions and may condemn viewpoints or groups they view as inimical to public welfare, they cannot abuse their regulatory authority to retaliate against disfavored advocacy organizations and to impose burdens on those organizations’ ability to conduct lawful business,” the ACLU says.

    The ACLU’s amicus brief never says the group agrees with the NRA’s positions on firearms. Instead, the group invokes a long series of First Amendment cases to argue that the regulators should not use their power in office to punish political enemies.

    A timeline prepared by the NRA suggests the intimidation campaign began last fall. The anti-gun group Everytown for Gun Safety met with New York officials in September 2017; a month later the Department of Financial Services began an investigation that started with a company called Lockton, which administered the NRA-branded personal liability insurance program known as Carry Guard. Despite a 20-year relationship, Lockton responded by abruptly ditching the NRA as a customer in February; so did Chubb and Lloyd’s.

    Emboldened by this initial success, Maria Vullo, head of the state’s Department of Financial Services, sent a pair of ominous letters to all banks, financial institutions, and insurers licensed to do business in New York. Vullo warned companies to sever ties with pro-Second Amendment groups that “promote guns and lead to senseless violence” and instead heed “the voices of the passionate, courageous, and articulate young people” calling for more restrictions on firearms. All companies receiving the letter, she advised, should “review any relationships they have with the NRA or similar gun promotion organizations, and to take prompt actions to managing these risks and promote public health and safety.”

    New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo underlined the regulatory threat in a tweet the next day: “The NRA is an extremist organization. I urge companies in New York State to revisit any ties they have to the NRA and consider their reputations, and responsibility to the public.'”

    As a result of those not-very-veiled threats, the NRA says, multiple banks withdrew bids to provide basic depository services. The NRA is also worried about being able to continue producing its NRA TV channel, with hosts including Dana Loesch and Cam Edwards, unless it can obtain normal media liability insurance. (In May, NRA sued Cuomo and Vullo, a former Cuomo aide when he was attorney general. See J.D. Tuccille’s Reason coverage at the time.)

    “If Cuomo can do this to the NRA, then conservative governors could have their financial regulators threaten banks and financial institutions that do business with any other group whose political views the governor opposes,” David Cole, the ACLU’s legal director, wrote in a blog post today. “The First Amendment bars state officials from using their regulatory power to penalize groups merely because they promote disapproved ideas.”

    A few decades ago, the ACLU acting like, you know, a civil liberties union wouldn’t have been shocking at all. (In fact, back in the dim mists of time, the ACLU back the Texas Review Society in a lawsuit against the University of Texas for prohibiting non-university on-campus newspapers, even though the Texas Review Society was a registered student group). Lately, however, the ACLU has seemed little more than an extension of the liberal overclass (it’s Twitter timeline seems to have gone to an “All ‘OMG The Illegal Alien Children’ All The Time” format), and recently it’s gone wobbly on it’s signature issue of free speech.

    So it’s nice to see the ACLU at least pretend it still cares about free speech for deplorables…

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

    Dinesh D’Souza Demolishes The Myth of the Southern Strategy

    August 26th, 2018

    The “Southern Strategy” myth refuses to die, mainly because it’s so useful for the political and media wings of the Democratic Party. In his new book, Death of a Nation: Plantation Politics and the Making of the Democratic Party, Dinesh D’Souza takes another whack at demolishing the myth:

    What dividends this explanation pays for progressive Democrats! In effect, it erases most of their history and gives them a Get Out of Jail Free Card. Democrats have never publicly admitted their role over nearly two centuries of being the party of slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, racial terrorism, the Ku Klux Klan, and also fascism and Nazism. Yet when pushed up against the wall with the mountain of evidence I provide in my book, how can they deny it?

    They cannot deny it. Therefore, their ultimate fallback—their only fallback—is to insist that they changed. The bad guys became the good guys. The biggest payoff for them is the corollary to this. Supposedly the Republicans also changed, in the opposite direction. The good guys became the bad guys. So now the Democratic Left not only gets to accuse Trump, conservatives, and Republicans of being the party of racism; they also get to take their own history of white supremacy—with all its horrid images of slavery, lynching and concentration camps—and foist it on the political Right.

    But is it true? Or is the whole doctrine of the Southern strategy and the big switch yet another piece of progressive humbug?

    Snip.

    We turn to Nixon’s Southern Strategy and the reasons for the other switch: the switch of the South from being the political base of the Democratic Party to now being that of the GOP. Here the progressive narrative is that Nixon was convinced by his malevolent advisers—notably Kevin Phillips, author of the bible of the Southern Strategy—to make a racist appeal to the Deep South, winning over Dixiecrats and segregationists to the GOP and firmly establishing the Republican Party as the part of white supremacy, a mantle that has now been inherited by Trump.

    The first problem with this Southern Strategy tale is that progressives have never been able to provide a single example of an explicitly racist pitch by Richard Nixon at any time in his long career. One might expect that a racist appeal to Deep South racists would actually have to be made and to be understood as such. Yet quite evidently none was.

    The two biggest issues in the 1968 campaign were the war in Vietnam and, closely related, the antiwar movement in the United States. Nixon campaigned on a strong anti-Communist, law-and-order platform. While embracing the welfare state—Nixon was no conservative on domestic issues—he also railed against what he termed the “excesses of bleeding heart liberalism.” Some progressives contend that while not explicitly racist, Nixon’s campaign themes reflected a covert or hidden racism. Nixon was supposedly sending “coded” messages to Deep South racists, speaking as if through a political “dog whistle.”

    Now I have to say I consider this “dog whistle” argument to be somewhat strange. Is it really plausible that Deep South bigots, like dogs, have some kind of a heightened awareness of racial messages—messages that are somehow indecipherable to the rest of the country? Not really. Even so, let’s consider the possibility. I concede of course that most public policy issues, from taxes to crime to welfare, are entangled with race. A tax cut, for instance, will have a disproportionate impact on some groups as compared to other groups.

    Precisely for this reason, however, it’s incumbent on progressives to have some basis of distinguishing “dog whistle” tactics from ordinary political appeals. Yet never have I seen anyone make this distinction. Progressive rhetoric almost inevitably assumes that Nixon is speaking in racial code. How can this be established, however, without looking at Nixon’s intention or, absent knowledge of his intention, of the particular context in which Nixon said what he did? Context, in other words, is critical here.

    Consider Nixon’s famous law and order platform which is routinely treated as a racist dog whistle. Now a call for law and order is not inherently racist, and this theme from Nixon resonated not merely in the South but throughout the country. It should be noted that Nixon’s law and order argument was directly not merely at black rioters but also at mostly white violent antiwar protesters. Nixon condemned the Black Panthers but also the Weather Underground, led by a man whom I’ve subsequently debated, Bill Ayers, and his wife Bernardine Dohrn. Last time I checked, both of them were white.

    What of Nixon’s supporters? Were they stereotypical segregationist bigots? The left-wing historian Kevin Kruse thinks so. Kruse portrays as racist the phenomenon of “white flight,” which refers to middle-class whites moving out of the crime-ridden inner cities to move to the suburbs. Kruse terms this the politics of “suburban secession,” a deliberate invocation of the Confederacy itself, as if whites were “seceding” from the cities and establishing their own white nation in the suburbs.

    Yet Kruse conveniently omits the equivalent phenomenon of “black flight,” which refers to middle-class blacks doing the same thing as soon as they acquired the means to move to safer neighborhoods. Witness today the prosperous black suburbs of Washington D.C., heavily populated with both whites and blacks who got out of the city. Does it make any sense to call all these people bigots? No. Wouldn’t Kruse himself do the same thing for the safety of his family? Of course he would.

    Kruse’s portrait of Nixon’s base of white middle-class Republicans as a reincarnation of the old South racists is contradicted by Norman Mailer, who reported on the Republican Convention in Miami Beach in 1968. He found “a parade of wives and children and men who owned hardware stores or were druggists, or first teller in the bank, proprietor of a haberdashery or principal of a small-town high school, local lawyer, retired doctor, a widow on a tidy income, her minister and fellow-delegate, minor executives from minor corporations, men who owned their farms.”

    As Mailer recognized, this was not a rally of Ku Klux Klansmen of the type that attended, say, the Democratic Convention of 1924. In fact, this was not a Southern-dominated group at all. Most of the attendees were from the Northeast, the Midwest, and the West. This was Nixon’s “silent majority,” the ordinary Americans whom Nixon said worked hard and played by the rules and didn’t complain or set fire to anything and, precisely for this reason, had been ignored and even reviled by the Democratic Party.

    Nixon had an excellent record on civil rights. Unlike Barry Goldwater, who opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Nixon supported it. He also supported the Voting Rights Act the following year. When Nixon was elected in 1968, nearly 70 percent of African-American children attended all-black schools. When he left, in 1974, that figure was down to 8 percent.

    Tom Wicker, the progressive columnist for the New York Times, gave his appraisal of Nixon’s desegregation efforts. “There’s no doubt about it—the Nixon administration accomplished more in 1970 to desegregate Southern school systems than had been done in the 16 previous years or probably since. There’s no doubt either that it was Richard Nixon personally who conceived, orchestrated and led the administration’s desegregation effort . . . .That effort resulted in probably the outstanding domestic achievement of his administration.”

    Snip.

    If it wasn’t because of white supremacy, how did the South—not just the Upper or Peripheral South, but also the Deep South—finally end up in the Republican camp? This question is taken up in political scientists Byron Shafer and Richard Johnston’s important study, The End of Southern Exceptionalism. This work, relatively unknown and with an admittedly strange title, provides a decisive refutation of the whole progressive theory of the Southern Strategy and the big switch.

    The key to Shafer and Johnston’s approach is to ask when the South moved into the GOP camp, and which voters actually moved from Democratic to Republican. Shafer and Johnston show, first, that the South began its political shift in the Eisenhower era. Eisenhower, who won five Peripheral South states in 1956, was the first Republican to break the lock that the FDR Democrats had established in the South. Obviously, this early shift preceded the civil rights movement and cannot be attributed to it.

    Shafer and Johnston, like Kevin Phillips, contend that after the postwar economic boom of the late 1940s and 1950s, the increasingly industrial “new South” was very receptive to the free market philosophy of the Republican Party. Thus Shafer and Johnston introduce class as a rival explanation to race for why the South became Republican. In the 1960s, however, they cannot ignore the race factor. Shafer and Johnson’s ingenuity is to find a way to test the two explanations—race and class—against each other, in order to figure out which one is more important.

    Shafer and Johnston do this by dividing the South into two camps, the first made up of the wealthier, more industrial, more racially integrated South—this is the New South—and the second made up of the rural, agricultural, racially homogeneous South; this is the Old South that provided the historical base of the Democratic Party. Shafer and Johnson sensibly posit that if white Southerners are becoming Republican because of hostility to blacks, one would expect the Old South to move over first.

    But, in fact, Shafer and Johnson find, through a detailed examination of the demographic data, this is not the case. The wealthier, more industrial, more integrated New South moves first into the Republican Party. This happens in the 1950s and 1960s. By contrast, the rural, agricultural, racially homogenous Old South resists this movement. In other words, during the civil rights period, the least racist white Southerners become Republicans and the most racist white Southerners stay recalcitrantly in the Democratic Party.

    Eventually, the Old South also transitions into the GOP camp. But this is not until the late 1970s and through the 1980s, in response to the Reaganite appeal to free-market capitalism, patriotism, pro-life, school prayer, family values. These economic and social issues were far more central to Reagan’s message than race, and they struck a chord beyond—no less than within—the South. In 1980, Reagan lost just six states; in 1984 he lost only Walter Mondale’s home state of Minnesota. Obviously, Reagan didn’t need a specific Southern Strategy; he had an American strategy that proved wildly successful.

    Reagan’s success, however, was made possible by the sharp leftward move by the Democratic Party starting with the nomination of George McGovern in 1972 and continuing through the 1970s. This swing to the left, especially on social and cultural issues like school prayer, pornography, recreational drugs and abortion, receives virtually no mention by progressive scholars because it disrupts their thesis that the trend in the South to the GOP was motivated primarily by race.

    As far as congressional House and Senate seats are concerned, the South didn’t become solidly Republican until 1994. Again, this was due to the Newt Gingrich agenda that closely mirrored the Reagan agenda. Leftist historian Kevin Kruse lists the Gingrich agenda—reducing taxes, ending the “marriage penalty,” and more generally reducing the size of government—and then darkly implies that “this sort of appeal” also had a hidden racial component. But everyone who voted for the Contract for America, and one suspects, Kruse also, knows that this is not the case. Small-government conservatism is not racism.

    Finally, we can figure out the meaning of the title of Shafer and Johnston’s book. We are at “the end of Southern exceptionalism” because the South is no longer the racist preserve of the Democratic Party. The South has now become like the rest of the country. Southerners are Republican for the same reason that other Americans are Republican. And black Southerners vote Democratic for the same reason that blacks everywhere else vote Democratic. For whites no less than blacks, economic issues are predominant, foreign policy and social issues count too, and race has relatively little to do with it.

    See also this Prager University video from last year.

    Sen. John McCain, RIP

    August 25th, 2018

    Republican Senator John McCain has died at age 81 just days after ending treatment for brain cancer. McCain served his country honorably as a pilot before spending five years in a POW camp where he was regularly tortured by the Viet Cong. He became a Senator in 1987 and lost the 2008 Presidential race to Barack Obama.

    Condolences to his family.

    City of Austin: Here, Soccer, Have Some Tax Subsidies! Travis County: Not So Fast!

    August 25th, 2018

    Remember how the City of Austin voted to throw tax break subsidies in order to steal another city’s soccer team? Well, now Travis County has weighed in: “Homie don’t play that!”

    Oh hey, guess what? In its haste to approve a $100 million tax exemption for a new stadium for the soon-to-be-erstwhile Columbus Crew, the Austin city council neglected to consult Travis County, which would also be giving up a cut of taxes under the proposed deal. And Travis County commissioners are having none of it, threatening to sue to force the MLS team to pay taxes on its stadium if necessary:

    On Tuesday, Travis County commissioners unanimously voted to “authorize the county attorney to preserve the county’s right to challenge the tax-exempt status of the stadium company’s use of city property.”

    They also voted to “pursue negotiations with the city and other local taxing entities on expectations for preserving taxable value in the redevelopment of publicly owned real estate.”

    The city’s proposed agreement with Crew owner Anthony Precourt doesn’t actually say that the land would be tax-free — it just says the city would own the land and stadium and lease it to Precourt, which usually works as a get-out-of-property-taxes-free dodge. Usually, but not always: A New Jersey court ruled in 2014 that Red Bull New York had to pay property taxes on its team-run, city-owned stadium in Harrison, on the grounds that a pro soccer stadium isn’t an “essential public purpose.” (The Red Bulls and Harrison later settled out of court on a deal where the team basically makes payments in lieu of property taxes.)

    In Austin’s case, the tax-exempt status is up to the Travis Central Appraisal District, which is a county-run (I think — this information is not included among the CAD’s many, many frequently asked questions) agency that is in charge of appraisals. If the appraisal district grants an exemption, the county can, and it looks like probably will, appeal the ruling.

    So what happens now, with a giant tax bill for Precourt on the line? The Austin American-Statesman asked Mayor Steve Adler, who replied, “I don’t know that, but I do know that the agreement says the team is responsible for any such taxes, not the city.” Ducking out of the way and letting your partner take the bullets — a time-honored tradition, but not one I expect Precourt is likely to appreciate. Can’t wait to hear what he’ll have to say about all this once he’s done admiring his new logo!

    The odd thing about this story is that Travis County is usually marching in lockstep with whatever blatant far left idiocy the Austin City Council is promulgating at any given time. Having Travis County officials on the right side of an issue is somewhat disorienting. I suspect there were some wheels the pro-soccer subsidy team forgot to grease…