Considered including this in Friday’s LinkSwarm, but decided this panel with Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus at CPAC was important enough for a separate post.
A few points:
Watch the whole thing.
(Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
Posts Tagged ‘Steve Bannon’
Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus at CPAC
Sunday, February 26th, 2017LinkSwarm for February 17, 2017
Friday, February 17th, 2017Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Absent from this roundup is who really got National Security Advisor Mike Flynn axed, because there’s not enough time in the world to read all those links…
The Democrats have not done the kind of self reflection that they should have, starting in 2010. And I was talking about this in the ’10 elections. You’ve lost white working people, you’ve lost flyover land, and you saw in this election what happens when people get frustrated enough that they say, ‘I’m not going to take this Aristocracy.’ You know Bernie’s a good friend of mine, Bernie can talk about Aristocracies all he wants.
You know, the fact that you’ve made money doesn’t make you a member of that philosophy. Look at Franklin Roosevelt. But there is an Aristocracy now that pervades American politics, it’s got to be broken somehow, in both parties, and I think that’s what the Trump message was that echoed so strongly in these flyover communities.
One wonders if Webb was using “flyover country” for emphasis, or if Democrats actually use “flyover country” seriously when taking amongst themselves. If so, they might add that to the list of reasons middle America hates Democratic coastal elites…
Before I moved to Jerusalem, I was very pro-Palestinian. Almost everyone I knew was. I grew up Protestant in a quaint, politically correct New England town; almost everyone around me was liberal. And being liberal in America comes with a pantheon of beliefs: You support pluralism, tolerance and diversity. You support gay rights, access to abortion and gun control.
The belief that Israel is unjustly bullying the Palestinians is an inextricable part of this pantheon. Most progressives in the US view Israel as an aggressor, oppressing the poor noble Arabs who are being so brutally denied their freedom.
Snip.
IT WASN’T until the violence became personal that I began to see the Israeli side with greater clarity. As the “Stabbing Intifada” (as it later became known) kicked into full gear, I traveled to the impoverished East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan for a story I was writing.
As soon as I arrived, a Palestinian kid who was perhaps 13 years old pointed at me and shouted “Yehud!” which means “Jew” in Arabic. Immediately, a large group of his friends who’d been hanging out nearby were running toward me with a terrifying sparkle in their eyes. “Yehud! Yehud!” they shouted. I felt my heart start to pound. I shouted at them in Arabic “Ana mish yehud! Ana mish yehud!” (“I’m not Jewish, I’m not Jewish!”) over and over. I told them, also in Arabic, that I was an American journalist who “loved Palestine.” They calmed down after that, but the look in their eyes when they first saw me is something I’ll never forget. Later, at a house party in Amman, I met a Palestinian guy who’d grown up in Silwan. “If you were Jewish, they probably would have killed you,” he said.
Snip.
Even the kindest, most educated, upper-class Palestinians reject 100 percent of Israel ‒ not just the occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank. They simply will not be content with a two-state solution ‒ what they want is to return to their ancestral homes in Ramle and Jaffa and Haifa and other places in 1948 Israel, within the Green Line. And they want the Israelis who live there now to leave. They almost never speak of coexistence; they speak of expulsion, of taking back “their” land.
Iran is dying, and no one knows it better than Vladimir Putin, who worked successfully to raise Russia’s fertility rate, unlike Iran’s theocrats, who have failed to persuade Iranians to have children.
Russia’s relationship to the only Shi’ite state of significance is less an alliance than a dalliance, motivated by Moscow’s fear of Sunni radicalism and its desire to establish a strategic beachhead in the Middle East.
But Iran is a depreciating asset whose value will disappear within a 20-year horizon. The question is not whether, but at what price Russia will trade it away.
Snip.
First, Iran may well become the first country in the world that will get old before it gets rich. Its fertility rate (the number of live births over the lifetime of an average woman) fell from 7 in 1979 to perhaps 1.7 today.
That produced an enormous generation of people now in their 20s to 40s who have very few children. As this generation ages, the proportion of Iranians over the age of 60 will soar from about 7% today to around 40% by mid-century.
Other countries face an aging crisis, but with ten times the per capita income: Iran’s nominal GDP per capita is only US$5,300, compared with US$56,000 for the United States, for example.No poor country can care for an elderly population comprising two-fifths of the total. Iran will undergo an economic disaster unprecedented in history. That is baked in the cake, and nothing its government can do will make much different at this late stage.
(Hat tip: Director Blue.)
The year isn’t off to a good start for the Park Slope Food Coop. In January, two members of the venerable Brooklyn institution were accused of stealing more than $18,000 worth of goods. Each had been caught shoplifting once, and when police consulted surveillance tapes, it turned out that the two men (one of whom was 79 years old!) had some seriously sticky fingers.
Snip.
In 2013, The New York Times reported the shop lost $438,000 in stolen items.
But that’s only a drop in the bucket compared to the value that’s recently been lost from the coop’s pension fund. The fund — which is for staff, not members — had been invested in small, speculative companies and racked up two years of losses.
According to the Times, “It appears to have gone into hedge-fund mode years ago, when one co-op member, also a hedge-fund investor, made stock-picking his unpaid job.” Last summer, members were told that the coop had to pour in more than $1 million to keep it flush.
Snip.
In 2011, for instance, coop members were caught paying other people — notably their nannies — to take over their 2-hour-per-week shifts at the market. As it turned out, the well-heeled bankers and lawyers and psychiatrists in the neighborhood who bill several hundred dollars an hour for their time didn’t think rearranging the broccoli was worth it.
Hat tip: Instapundit, who also offers up the following illustration:
@ScottAdamsSays You inspired me to write this: pic.twitter.com/Xd3hqGLviJ
— Caleb Hines (@calebhines) February 17, 2017
LinkSwarm for February 10, 2017
Friday, February 10th, 2017Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Here in Texas it’s looking a lot like Spring.
This LinkSwarm is heavy on border control and jihad issues.
By accepting the use of preelection statements to impeach and limit executive policy, the 9th Circuit is taking a dangerous step. The states’ argument is in essence that Trump is a bigot, and thus his winning presidential campaign in fact impeaches him from exercising key constitutional and statutory powers, such as administering the immigration laws.
This would mean that Trump is automatically disbarred, from the moment of his inauguration, of exercising certain presidential powers, not because of his actions as president, but because of who he is — that is, how he won the presidency.
(Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Here we go; this is what I’ve handled from Monday-Friday this week: rape, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, rape-assault and rape, extortion, blackmail, assault, violence against police, threats to police, drug crime, drugs, crime, felony, attempted murder, rape again, extortion again and ill-treatment.
Suspected perpetrators; Ali Mohammed, Mahmod, Mohammed, Mohammed Ali, again, again, again. Christopher… what, is it true? Yes, a Swedish name snuck in on the edges of a drug crime. Mohammed, Mahmod Ali, again and again.
Countries representing all the crimes this week: Iraq, Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, Somalia, Syria again, Somalia, unknown, unknown country, Sweden. Half of the suspects, we can’t be sure because they don’t have any valid papers. Which in itself usually means that they’re lying about their nationality and identity.
I’m ending my support of UC Berkeley, where I got my MBA years ago. I have been a big supporter lately, with both my time and money, but that ends today. I wish them well, but I wouldn’t feel safe or welcome on the campus. A Berkeley professor made that clear to me recently. He seems smart, so I’ll take his word for it.
I’ve decided to side with the Jewish gay immigrant who has an African-American boyfriend, not the hypnotized zombie-boys in black masks who were clubbing people who hold different points of view. I feel that’s reasonable, but I know many will disagree, and possibly try to club me to death if I walk on campus.
Yesterday I asked my most liberal, Trump-hating friend if he ever figured out why Republicans have most of the Governorships, a majority in Congress, the White House, and soon the Supreme Court. He said, “There are no easy answers.”
I submit that there are easy answers. But for many Americans, cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias hide those easy answers behind Hitler hallucinations.
In the end it would appear that Trump is playing the kind of game that I was taught to play by my coach. His opponents are never given time to mount an attack. Their queen – the MSM has been removed from the board and their favorite piece – the Celebrities are locked in a war of attrition while Trump gets the rest of his pieces on the board. Remember, these are all Tactics but Strategy flows from Tactics. Sooner or later the Left will find itself in some terrible position and the Strategy to drain the swamp will present itself.
(Hat tip: Zero Hedge.)
.@SenatorTimScott reads tweets criticizing his endorsement of Sen. Jeff Sessions: "I left out all the ones that use the n-word." pic.twitter.com/AhTnGaUyiz
— CSPAN (@cspan) February 8, 2017
Twitter had decided, in an election year, to surrender control of its platform to a crew of feminist social justice warriors (SJWs) designated the “Trust and Safety Council.” This secretive group of Soviet-style commissars included the notorious anti-male hatemonger Anita Sarkeesian, and soon Twitter began purging conservative accounts…. Jack Dorsey had made his company part of the Democrat Party’s campaign team and four months later, when Twitter banned popular commentator Milo Yiannopoulos, the partisan nature of “Trust and Safety” became transparent. Banning conservatives from Twitter was Dorsey’s contribution-in-kind to the Democrats.
Adventures in Branding Failure
Tuesday, February 7th, 2017Via Twitchy comes this news of a browser extension from American Bridge (one of David Brock’s liberal super-PACs) that changes “Trump” to “Steve Bannon.”
Evidently love now Steve Bannons hate.
This has to be one of the more remarkable branding failures of recent memory. Liberals have spent the last year engaged in nonstop demonization of Donald Trump, evidently believing that if they just called him SuperExtraMegaHitler with a side order of cheese fries enough, voters would come to see him with the gut-level personal distaste they did and he would never be elected.
This little prank from one of Brock’s groups confirms that tactic not only failed, but keeps failing. Instead of continuing their futile attempts to demonize President Trump, some liberal elites have obviously decided that it’s more productive to demonize Bannon as “the new Karl Rove.” The problem with this approach is that while everyone knows who Trump is, I doubt 90+% of the electorate knows who Bannon is.
Jimmy Kimmel should set up one of those man-in-the-street-quiz segments where people are asked: “Who is Steve Bannon? A. An aide to President Trump, or B. The guy who turns into The Incredible Hulk?” I’m betting most people pick B.
The other problem with this approach: the “demonize Karl Rove as the evil mastermind tactic” didn’t work either, as it failed to prevent Bush43 from being elected to a second term.
Trumpkrieg: Moving Fast and Breaking Things
Wednesday, February 1st, 2017I suspect very few observers, left or right, predicted that President Trump would hit the ground running quite as fast and hard as he has, and only his most ardent supporters suspected he would govern as conservatively as he has.
In the lead up to World War II, a new form of armored maneuver warfare was developed that came to be called blitzkrieg. The idea was that armored units, linked by radio coordination and supported by airpower, could move too fast for the enemy to react to, allowing the attacking force to first bypass, then encircle and destroy enemy units. By moving so rapidly, the attacking force induces the equivalent of a “nervous breakdown” in the defending force, which is reacting to maneuvers A or B while the attacking force has already moved on to E or F.
President Trump appears to be practicing the political equivalent of blitzkrieg. He’s making decisions, submitting cabinet appointees and upending so many sacred Washington applecarts that the Democrat Media Complex can’t react to what he’s doing in any coherent way, still stuck on something he tweeted last night. As Instapundit observed, Trump has gotten inside their OODA loop.
Another version of the same basic concept embraced by many IT startups: move fast and break things. The idea is that to successfully disrupt an industry, you should implement now and fix later, making your mistakes as quickly as possible. Indeed, Scott Adams says that “disruptive” is precisely the right framing for what President Trump is doing. “No one has ever tried moving at Trump’s speed before.” It’s a strategy that can work with a talented software startup, but its applicability to other venues (especially one as large and unwieldy as the federal government) remains to be proven.
Right now Trump is trying to implement more changes in Washington in his first two weeks than I’ve seen any administration attempt their first few months in my lifetime. There was no basking in the glow of the inauguration, no quiet period of consultation, just BOOM!, a firehose stream of decisive action.
Most gratifying for VRWC observers is that the vast majority of Trump’s official actions are solidly conservative. Outside of cancelling TPP and a few populist staff picks, it’s hard to think of any official Trump action (including the superb Neil Gorsuch supreme court pick) that wouldn’t have been carried out by, say, Ted Cruz. But it’s hard to imagine Ted Cruz moving this fast, much less Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush. (One imagines that at this point in a hypothetical Jeb Bush presidency he’d still be in the planning phase for his first illegal alien amnesty summit with congressional democrats.)
Even more gratifying from an emotional standpoint has been the continued meltdown of the Democratic Media Complex in the face of the Trump onslaught. Democrats remain fractured despite the zillions of dollars George Soros has poured into his astroturf brigades, the loony left has gotten even loonier, the MSM seemed stunned that no one cares what they say anymore, and the DNC still hasn’t healed the Clinton Sanders split. They all know they hate hate hate hate HATE Trump, but their strategies to oppose him have failed miserably. That’s why their actions (scream, protest, call him racist) seem like the result of tribal instinct rather than coordinated action. “Let’s have a violent protest in the middle of a deep blue city! That will certainly stop Trump!”
Indeed, I can’t help but thinking that the nonstop irrational rage the left have hurled at Trump has made him into much more of a traditional conservative than he was. “Hey, maybe I should pay more attention to the people who aren’t calling me Hitler 24/7!” For things outside his main campaign issues (trade, immigration, etc.), it seems that he’s delegated a lot of the heavy lifting to movement conservatives like Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon (who seems to have become the Trump Administration’s designated “evil mastermind” hate totem role for the left previously held by Karl Rove under Bush43).
Another side effect: The withering of #NeverTrump. It was never a huge movement to begin with (as Evan McMullin’s 0.53% share of the popular vote in 2016 attests), but the Gorsuch pick and Trump’s immigration executive orders seems to have taken what little wind remained in their sails for all but the hardest core of NeverTrumpers.
Donald Trump was elected as a change candidate in 2016, and so far he’s delivering more change more rapidly than all but his most ardent supporters expected.
LinkSwarm for January 27, 2017
Friday, January 27th, 2017Welcome to the Friday LinkSwarm! The first week of President Trump’s administration has been incredibly active and consequential! Not everything will be covered here (and I have a few posts on various issues and executive orders at various stages of assembly), but it touches on a lot.
Mr. Trump’s version of stray voltage has a number of effects beyond just causing chaos and distracting his opponents. When everything is an outrage, nothing is an outrage. And when everything is an outrage, you expose yourself as a purely partisan actor, turning off large swaths of the American public.
Trump’s lack of fear of touching politically incorrect third rails that millions of Americans felt, but which had not been articulated so bluntly by a national politician, served him well. Incidentally, it also allowed him to shift the Overton Window on critical issues like immigration and Islamic supremacism.
When attacked for taking these positions, unlike those to come before him, Trump did not avoid the fray. Rather, he jumped into it, counterpunching.
Lulled into a false sense of security by Republicans who fought with their hands tied behind their backs, constrained by suicidal rules of political engagement for decades, the Left did not know how to react when hit.
Leftists could not believe that a political opponent had the gall to actually fight tooth and nail.
Trump does not give an inch to his critics, and neither should any other Republican. He defines the rules of engagement, and so should all on the Right.
Watching the confirmation hearings to date, we see many on the Left jabbing as if we are in a pre-Trump world. Their questions all hew to the same old narrative that if you are not a racist, sexist, or bigot, then you are an out-of-touch plutocrat or a shill for some special interest or other.
Like Trump, Republicans should challenge these charges head on. They should take issue with the Left’s premises from the start, showing that it is the Left who is projecting when it tries to discredit those who believe in capitalism, the power of the individual, and the sanctity of the individual’s rights, the rule of law, national sovereignty, federalism, and the Judeo-Christian morality on which the country is based.
Donald Trump isn’t the bully; he only insults and abuses people in power who have attacked him. They’re the fucking bullies. The left, with their smears, their witch hunts, their slanders, their insults and their weaponizing of the federal bureaucracy.
There aren’t any rules anymore because the left only applies them one way. And in doing so, they’ve left what once was a civil compact between the two parties in smoldering ruins.
I have no personal investment in Donald Trump. He is a tool to punish the left and roll back their ill-gotten gains, no more and no less. If he succeeds even partially in those two things, then I’ll consider his election a win.
Further, I no longer have any investment in any particular political values, save one: The rules created by the left will be applied to the left as equally and punitively as they have applied them to the right. And when they beg for mercy, I’ll begin to reconsider. Or maybe not. Because fuck these people.
This new philosophy has freed me of more emotional angst that I can describe. Literally nothing the left says or does matters to me anymore. I don’t care about their tantrums. I don’t care about their accusations. I don’t care if they say Trump is lying. I don’t care if Trump is lying.
They created this Frankenstein. They own it. I am free of all obligation. I will never play defense again. I will attack, attack, attack, attack using their own tactics against them until they learn their lesson.
What I will not do is let them play my values against me ever again. I don’t need to prove that I’m better than them. I already know it.
- “I think they thought the liberal elite was looking down on them, and I guess, in some ways, we were.”
- “They got this picture that we’re all country bumpkins, the locals are, that we’re not educated. The people who move in talk down to the natives. I don’t know how you want to word that, but that’s the persona given off.”
- “I didn’t want to deal with these people. I didn’t want to be a part of what they were a part of. You’re talking about people from the Cities who are very progressive. I call them tree-huggers, a bunch of tree-huggers. They referred to us, meaning the people who’ve lived here and worked here all our lives, as a bunch of hicks. They just think they’re a little bit better than everybody else, and that we’re not as smart.” (And that’s from a former Democratic Party county chairman who switched to the Republicans.)
- “The bastards out here in the country are sick of the bullshit.”
Alas, it also includes that sturdy modern liberal journalism cliche, The Single Confederate Flag Mentioned To Suggest All Trump Voters Are Secret Racists.
Why are the relations between Donald Trump and the press so bad? There are two reasons. One is that Trump is a Republican, and the press consists overwhelmingly of Democrats. But the other reason is that Trump likes it this way, because when the press is constantly attacking him over trivialities, it strengthens his position and weakens the press. Trump’s “outrageous” statements and tweets aren’t the product of impulsiveness, but part of a carefully maintained strategy that the press is too impulsive to resist.
Snip.
The killer counter-move for the press isn’t to double down on anti-Trump messaging. The counter-move is to bolster its own trustworthiness by acting (and being) more neutral and sober, and by being more trustworthy. If the news media actually focused on reporting facts accurately and straightforwardly, on leaving opinion to the pundits, and on giving Trump a clearly fair shake, then Trump’s tactics wouldn’t work, and any actual dirt they found on him would do actual damage. He’s betting on the press being insufficiently mature and self-controlled to manage that. So far, his bet is paying off.
If it comes to the press reforming to ensure their own institutional survival, or clinging to their liberal bias, my guess is that the current press will choose the way of the dodo…
“The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for awhile,” Mr. Bannon said during a telephone call. “I want you to quote this,” Mr. Bannon added. “The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States.”
“The elite media got it dead wrong, 100 percent dead wrong,” Mr. Bannon said of the election, calling it “a humiliating defeat that they will never wash away, that will always be there.”
“The mainstream media has not fired or terminated anyone associated with following our campaign,” Mr. Bannon said. “Look at the Twitter feeds of those people: they were outright activists of the Clinton campaign.” (He did not name specific reporters or editors.) “That’s why you have no power,” Mr. Bannon added. “You were humiliated.”
“You’re the opposition party,” Mr. Bannon said. “Not the Democratic Party. You’re the opposition party. The media’s the opposition party.”
I will be making my Supreme Court pick on Thursday of next week.Thank you!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 25, 2017
🆘‼️👮😂 USA: Police in Portland (Oregon) responded very quickly to a traffic blockade of protestors. The wind has turned: Go Mr. President! 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/lwTL0EYGML
— Onlinemagazin (@OnlineMagazin) January 26, 2017
😃 Menswear Day 5 in Paris #pfw winter 2027/2018❗@thombrowneofficial 🎥 soon on @france24 pic.twitter.com/eU2eMfB20o
— Mode France 24 (@ModeF24) January 22, 2017
"I am Prince Emo of the Royal Cubist Guard! You shall bow before my non-Euclidean business suit!" @Daddy_Warpig
— BattleSwarm (@BattleSwarmBlog) January 23, 2017
LinkSwarm for November 18, 2016
Friday, November 18th, 2016Here we are, a week after one of the biggest political upsets in American history, and the reverberations are still being felt. Democrats seem to be stuck in the anger and denial phases of the Kubler-Ross grieving cycle, and probably won’t get to bargaining until the 2017 legislative session opens with Republicans in charge of the White House, Senate, and House.
(Note: You can skip the last 30 seconds of conservative cruise line ads.)
I will say this for West: He knows where to steal his riffs:
How many piece of Gnostic symbolism can you spot in that video?
Enjoy your weekend! Sometime next week I hope to tackle the DNC leadership race.