Collapse of the Global Elite

From Professor Eliot A. Cohen, at the Atlantic, "Witnessing the Collapse of the Global Elite."

Everyone at #MSC2018 is a has-been. Same with Davos. No new ideas coming out of any of these ego-stroking circle jerks. https://t.co/XudyBjcudW

— Milena Rodban (@MilenaRodban) February 20, 2018

White House Adviser Stephen Miller Escorted Out After Heated Interview with Jake Tapper on CNN (VIDEO)

This is so lame.

Stephen Miller's a patriot who refused to kowtow to the leftist press. And idiot progressives have already started a campaign to have him banned from television news, to say nothing of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's call to have Miller "removed" from office.

At Free Beacon, "CNN Source: Miller Escorted Out by Security When He Refused to Leave After Heated Tapper Interview."

And watch:

Laura Ingraham: President Trump Outsmarts the Establishment 'Intellectual Elite' (VIDEO)

Here's Ms. Laura with "The Angle," from last night:

The View of the Blinkered

From VDH, at American Greatness:

Another brilliant column by my favorite columnist. How does he consistently top himself? https://t.co/Omvt6c9ahi

— Jane (@Jane00245086) January 3, 2018

President Trump's Political Base Unshaken

Well, it's been almost a year in office. We have the midterms in about 11 months and then we're off to the 2020 races. For the life of me I don't know how President Trump's going to pull off reelection. I thought this immediately upon his election in 2016, with the entire political establishment against him: Democrats, establishment Republicans, the corrupt media, Hollywood, and just about every other cultural institution you can think of. I love what he's doing --- and I believe he's changing this country for the better --- but the odds of beating back all the forces of leftist hatred seem insurmountable.

It'll be a miracle. We need it, though, badly, so I'll pray.

In any case, here's the Associated Press, "In the heart of Trump Country, his base’s faith is unshaken":

.@AP spent the year traveling to communities that flipped from blue to red and helped propel Donald Trump to the White House. How do they think he's doing? Read today’s story: https://t.co/xki14Uxi8F
Find the Trump Country series here: https://t.co/c4f0f1jatD

— The Associated Press (@AP) December 28, 2017

SANDY HOOK, Ky. — The regulars amble in before dawn and claim their usual table, the one next to an old box television playing the news on mute.

Steven Whitt fires up the coffee pot and flips on the fluorescent sign in the window of the Frosty Freeze, his diner that looks and sounds and smells about the same as it did when it opened a half-century ago. Coffee is 50 cents a cup, refills 25 cents. The pot sits on the counter, and payment is based on the honor system.

People like it that way, he thinks. It reminds them of a time before the world seemed to stray away from them, when coal was king and the values of the nation seemed the same as the values here, in God’s Country, in this small county isolated in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains.

Everyone in town comes to his diner for nostalgia and homestyle cooking. And, recently, news reporters come from all over the world to puzzle over politics — because Elliott County, a blue-collar union stronghold, voted for the Democrat in each and every presidential election for its 147-year existence.

Until Donald Trump came along and promised to wind back the clock.

“He was the hope we were all waiting on, the guy riding up on the white horse. There was a new energy about everybody here,” says Whitt.

“I still see it.”

Despite the president’s dismal approval ratings and lethargic legislative achievements, he remains profoundly popular here in these mountains, a region so badly battered by the collapse of the coal industry it became the symbolic heart of Trump’s white working-class base.

The frenetic churn of the national news, the ceaseless Twitter taunts, the daily declarations of outrage scroll soundlessly across the bottom of the diner’s television screen, rarely registering. When they do, Trump doesn’t shoulder the blame — because the allegiance of those here is as emotional as it is economic.

It means God, guns, patriotism, saying “Merry Christmas” and not Happy Holidays. It means validation of their indignation about a changing nation: gay marriage and immigration and factories moving overseas. It means tearing down the political system that neglected them again and again in favor of the big cities that feel a world away.

On those counts, they believe Trump has delivered, even if his promised blue-collar renaissance has not yet materialized. He’s punching at all the people who let them down for so long — the presidential embodiment of their own discontent.

“He’s already done enough to get my vote again, without a doubt, no question,” Wes Lewis, a retired pipefitter and one of Whitt’s regulars, declares as he deals the day’s first hand of cards.

He thinks the mines and the factories will soon roar back to life, and if they don’t, he believes they would have if Democrats and Republicans and the media — all “crooked as a barrel of fishhooks” — had gotten out of the way. What Lewis has now that he didn’t have before Trump is a belief that his president is pulling for people like him.

“One thing I hear in here a lot is that nobody’s gonna push him into a corner,” says Whitt, 35. “He’s a fighter. I think they like the bluntness of it.”

He plops down at an empty table next to the card game, drops a stack of mail onto his lap and begins flipping through the envelopes...

More.

The Plot to Take Down President Trump (VIDEO)

Here's Laura Ingraham, from last night:

GOP Sees Difficulties in Trump Country

Well, I wasn't all invested in this race, but still. Alabama? A Democrat hasn't won there in 25 years?

At LAT, "In stunning 2017 defeats, Republicans see vision of difficulties in 2018":

Tonight's analysis: Democrats have learned to weaponize enthusiasm and cut a path to 2018. For Republicans, the last year has proved a reversal of fortunes: https://t.co/qbC6ulot06

— Cathleen Decker (@cathleendecker) December 13, 2017

Democrats who opened the year clashing among themselves and lamenting President Trump's election have closed 2017 with victories that demonstrated their ability to weaponize party enthusiasm and draw a template for success in a sharply competitive battle for Congress in 2018.

For Republicans, Tuesday night's stunning loss by Roy Moore in Alabama's Senate race — the first GOP loss in a Senate race there in a generation — underscored a bleak passage of time: A year that began in unified control of Washington has ended with the party bitterly split and redefined in the worst of ways, saddled with an unpopular president and a Senate candidate accused of child molestation.

The problems begin with Trump, for whom Moore's defeat represented a third straight repudiation.

The first came in September in Alabama, where Trump ambivalently backed incumbent Sen. Luther Strange, who lost to Moore in the Republican primary. Then Trump endorsed Republican Ed Gillespie in Virginia's gubernatorial race, only to have him lose by nearly double digits last month to Democrat Ralph Northam.

Finally, Trump transferred his Alabama endorsement to Moore and watched him lose in a state that has been ruby red for decades.
Even in Alabama, a state he won by 28 percentage points, Trump was unable to ease his candidate over the finish line. Exit polls Tuesday indicated one reason: Voters even in this heavily Republican state were closely split between approval and disapproval of Trump.

That's an ominous sign for Republicans heading into the midterm election. The key races next year will take place in states that are far less favorable to Trump than Alabama.

Related to Trump's broad unpopularity is the fact that his party is fractured. Those divisions began with the primary battle, which the president's former chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, who strongly backed Moore, helped turn into a referendum on the party's Senate leader, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

The splits only deepened after the Washington Post published accusations that Moore had fondled and kissed girls as young as 14 when he was a local prosecutor in his 30s.

The Republican National Committee and the party's Senate campaign committee pulled its backing from Moore after the Post story. When Trump, urged on by Bannon, decided to endorse Moore, the national committee returned to support him. The Senate committee declined to follow suit.

On election night, Moore's chief strategist, Dean Young, took off not against Jones or even the typical targets, Rep. Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco and Sen. Charles E. Schumer of New York, but against McConnell.

"I tell Sen. McConnell this: The people of Alabama are having an election tonight, and he should not overturn the people of Alabama," Young said, anticipating that a victory by Moore might be followed by a Senate Ethics Committee investigation.

On Tuesday night, it was clear that the bitter feelings among Republicans are likely to carry over to 2018 and beyond.

"The polls have been closed for 90 minutes & GOP could actually lose Senate seat. In ALABAMA," Alex Conant, a former spokesman for Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, tweeted Tuesday night. "No matter what happens next, hard to overstate what a huge political disaster this is for Moore-apologists like Trump, let alone Moore-champions like Bannon."

Moreover, in Alabama, and earlier in Virginia, Republicans found that arguments they have counted on to dispatch Democrats — that they are soft on crime, the military, immigration, guns and religion — no longer guarantee success...

More.

Paradise Papers

The world's elite shelter their assets. Well, that's not going to fuel the fires of populist revolt, or anything.

At the Guardian U.K., "Paradise Papers leak reveals secrets of the world elite's hidden wealth: Files from offshore law firm show financial dealings of the Queen, big multinationals and members of Donald Trump’s cabinet."

Huge leak reveals secrets of world elite's hidden wealth #paradisepapers https://t.co/KhkIQyz3qs

— The Guardian (@guardian) November 5, 2017

'SO JUST IN THE LAST FEW DAYS, two major centers of the anti-Trump resistance, Hollywood and the NFL, have collapsed...'

From Glenn Reynolds, at Instapundit, "Harvey Weinstein has destroyed Hollywood. Now what?"

BONUS: "TOWARD A UNIFIED THEORY OF CONTEMPORARY INSTITUTIONAL FAILURE."

The Populist Insurrection Spinning Beyond Anyone's Control

And beyond the president's control in particular.

From Robert Costa, at WaPo, "With or without Trump, GOP insurgency plans for a civil war in 2018 midterms":

A political insurrection that is with Donald Trump in spirit but entirely out of his — or anyone’s — control. https://t.co/mU25YE7Odk

— Robert Costa (@costareports) September 30, 2017

The next Republican revolution began last week on a bright blue bus parked at a nighttime rally in Montgomery, Ala., days before a firebrand GOP candidate won the state’s Senate primary.

But unlike previous Republican revolutionaries, the hard-line figures who stepped out to cheers did not want to yank the party to the right on age-old issues such as taxes or spending. They wanted to gut it and leave its establishment smashed.

Fury infused these insurgents’ raw remarks as did a common theme: The Republican Party has failed its voters, and a national cleansing is needed in the coming year, regardless of whether President Trump is on board.

Longtime Republicans see a charged civil war on the horizon.

“There is an emotional component,” former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R) said of the frustrations of Trump’s core backers, who have grown increasingly vocal. “They want someone to kick over the table. And my advice to every Republican is: You better have an edge, or you become the problem.”

That populist rage in the base as Trump struggles to enact his priorities — which lifted former judge Roy Moore to victory on Tuesday against Trump’s ally, Sen. Luther Strange (R-Ala.) — now threatens to upend GOP incumbents in 2018 as the latest incarnation of Republican grievance takes hold.

Stoked by former White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon and his incendiary media platform, Breitbart News, a new wave of anti-establishment activists and contenders is emerging to plot a political insurrection that is with Trump in spirit but entirely out of his — or anyone’s — control.

Central command is the “Breitbart Embassy,” a Capitol Hill townhouse where Bannon has recently huddled with candidates, from House prospects to Senate primary recruits. Hedge fund executive Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah — Bannon’s wealthy allies — have already pledged millions to the cause, said people briefed on their plans.

In the last seven years, the Mercers have emerged as some of the biggest political donors on the right, plowing tens of millions into GOP committees and super PACs. Their money has gone both to shore up the national Republican Party and to finance outside groups taking on the Washington establishment.

So far this year, the Mercers have contributed $2.7 million to federal political committees and campaigns, finance filings show.

Beyond cash, Mercer and Bannon also offer GOP rebels a vast media and advocacy ecosystem that generates attention on social media as well as small-dollar donations. Run by Rebekah, the Mercer family foundation has given $50 million to conservative and free-market think tanks and policy groups from 2009 to 2015, according to tax records compiled by The Washington Post and GuideStar USA, which reports on nonprofit companies.

And that blue bus — sponsored by the Great America Alliance and carrying former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, among other conservative celebrities, across Alabama — is scheduling stops across the country.

“If you don’t do your job, you’re going to see the bus, and you’re going to get bounced,” said Ed Rollins, the group’s strategist.

Rollins and Eric L. Beach, another adviser to the advocacy group, insisted that money would not save their elected Republican targets, pointing out that in Alabama they spent about $200,000, compared with the more than $10 million spent by the national GOP and Strange-aligned groups...

Still more.

What's Worse: Trump's Agenda or Deep State Subversion?

From Glenn Greenwald, at the Intercept, "What’s Worse: Trump’s Campaign Agenda or Empowering Generals and CIA Operatives to Subvert it":

DURING HIS SUCCESSFUL 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump, for better and for worse, advocated a slew of policies that attacked the most sacred prongs of long-standing bipartisan Washington consensus. As a result, he was (and continues to be) viewed as uniquely repellent by the neoliberal and neoconservative guardians of that consensus, along with their sprawling network of agencies, think tanks, financial policy organs, and media outlets used to implement their agenda (CIA, NSA, the Brookings/AEI think tank axis, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, etc.).

Whatever else there is to say about Trump, it is simply a fact that the 2016 election saw elite circles in the U.S., with very few exceptions, lining up with remarkable fervor behind his Democratic opponent. Top CIA officials openly declared war on Trump in the nation’s op-ed pages and one of their operatives (now an MSNBC favorite) was tasked with stopping him in Utah, while Time Magazine reported, just a week before the election, that “the banking industry has supported Clinton with buckets of cash . . . . what bankers most like about Clinton is that she is not Donald Trump.”

Hank Paulson, former Goldman Sachs CEO and George W. Bush’s Treasury Secretary, went to the pages of the Washington Post in mid-2016 to shower Clinton with praise and Trump with unbridled scorn, saying what he hated most about Trump was his refusal to consider cuts in entitlement spending (in contrast, presumably, to the Democrat he was endorsing). “It doesn’t surprise me when a socialist such as Bernie Sanders sees no need to fix our entitlement programs,” the former Goldman CEO wrote. “But I find it particularly appalling that Trump, a businessman, tells us he won’t touch Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.”

Some of Trump’s advocated assaults on D.C. orthodoxy aligned with long-standing views of at least some left-wing factions (e.g., his professed opposition to regime change war in Syria, Iraq/Libya-style interventions, global free trade deals, entitlement cuts, greater conflict with Russia, and self-destructive pro-Israel fanaticism), while other Trump positions were horrifying to anyone with a plausible claim to leftism, or basic decency (reaffirming torture, expanding GITMO, killing terrorists’ families, launching Islamophobic crusades, fixation on increasing hostility with Tehran, further unleashing federal and local police forces). Ironically, Trump’s principal policy deviation around which elites have now coalesced in opposition – a desire for better relations with Moscow – was the same one that Obama, to their great bipartisan dismay, also adopted (as evidenced by Obama’s refusal to more aggressively confront the Kremlin-backed Syrian government or arm anti-Russian factions in Ukraine).

It is true that Trump, being Trump, was wildly inconsistent in virtually all of these pronouncements, often contradicting or abandoning them weeks after he made them. And, as many of us pointed out at the time, it was foolish to assume that the campaign vows of any politician, let alone an adept con man like Trump, would be a reliable barometer for what he would do once in office. And, as expected, he has betrayed many of these promises within months of being inaugurated, while the very Wall Street interests he railed against have found a very welcoming embrace in the Oval Office.

Nonetheless, Trump, as a matter of rhetoric, repeatedly affirmed policy positions that were directly contrary to long-standing bipartisan orthodoxy, and his policy and personal instability only compounded elites’ fears that he could not be relied upon to safeguard their lucrative, power-vesting agenda. In so many ways – due to his campaign positions, his outsider status, his unstable personality, his witting and unwitting unmasking of the truth of U.S. hegemony, the embarrassment he causes in western capitals, his reckless unpredictability – Trump posed a threat to their power centers...

More.

Women Surviving in Trump's White House

A good piece, at Politico, "In Trump's WhiteHouse, the women are the survivors."

President Trump's War Against the Elites

I still don't think MSM types are getting it. It's not just President Trump. We're in a new age. A totally new era. Regular folks don't even care if you slam them for rejecting "the experts." Not a whit. The so-called experts are mostly leftists and almost always wrong.

Be that as it may, see Cathleen Decker, at LAT, "Analysis: Trump's war against elites and expertise":

When President Trump campaigned this spring at the Hermitage, the home of Andrew Jackson, one part of his predecessor’s approach got a special endorsement.

“It was during the Revolution that Jackson first confronted and defied an arrogant elite. Does that sound familiar?" Trump asked to laughs from his audience.

When Trump ally and National Rifle Assn. President Wayne LaPierre teed off six weeks later on America’s greatest domestic threats, he cited not homegrown terrorists but what he termed “the three most dangerous voices in America: academic elites, political elites, and media elites.”

The rhetoric against elites came from two men who would seem to be card-carrying members of the club: LaPierre made more than $5 million in 2015, the most recent year for which his compensation was publicly released. Trump lived before his inauguration in a gold-plated home in the sky above New York’s Fifth Avenue, a billionaire’s luxurious domain.

Yet for Trump and his allies, a war on elites has been central to the campaign which put him in the presidency and has maintained the loyalty of his core voters. Trump has taken particular aim at entities that could counter his power, which has helped stoke the ardor of his political backers.

Among his targets so far: the government’s intelligence agencies, the media, foreign allies, the Department of Justice, establishment politicians, scientists and the Congressional Budget Office. The last has played a large role in raising questions about Republican proposals to repeal and replace Obamacare, leading to a furious White House assault on its competence.

Trump has refused to accept the judgment of intelligence agencies that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. He has alleged, without proof and contrary to both Democratic and Republican officials in key states, that millions of illegal voters cast ballots last year. He has blamed vaccines for autism, despite the scientific debunking of that notion.

Excoriating elites “is classic populist language,” said Yale historian Beverly Gage. “Trump has taken it to a whole new level by not only attacking clueless elites but the entire idea of expertise.”

To voters listening for them, Trump’s anti-elitism signals have blared. As telling as his political and policy postures is his language — who else but Trump would angrily call his predecessor’s signature program “a big fat ugly lie” — and a perpetual sense of victimization.

“He’s a billionaire, and therefore a member of a certain type of elites,” Gage said. “But he’s also the guy from Queens rebelling against the know-it-all smarty pantses from Manhattan.”

Trump has used both specific insults and the specter of powerful and mysterious external forces — he often describes them as an undefined “they” — arrayed against common Americans, with him as chief defender...

See what I mean? This piece makes some good points, but it's otherwise dripping with disdain.

I don't know if Trump can be reelected again. The left will mount an all-out war on him and everything he stands for in 2020. But whatever happens, we're at the point of no return. Too much has changed. I'd say it's like a cultural cold war, and it's not neatly divided into "left and right." The people vs. the establishment is more like it, and perhaps only Bernie Sanders has the proper sense of it among folks on the Democrat side. The culture war, things like transgenders in the military, also plays large. I mean who else but leftist establishment elites would think this a good idea? And rejection of science? Only leftists reject science to push a degenerate socio-political agenda. It's disgusting.

So, if anyone is ready and willing to stand up to the left's warmongering political onslaught come 2020, it's The Donald.

More at the link, FWIW.

Eric Bolling, The Swamp

*BUMPED.*

This just came out yesterday Tuesday. It's a great summer for conservative reading!

At Amazon, Eric Bolling, The Swamp: Washington's Murky Pool of Corruption and Cronyism and How Trump Can Drain It.

Joel Kotkin, The New Class Conflict

I've got this one on order, Joel Kotkin, The New Class Conflict.

Obama Warns Against Income Inequality While Delivering $7,700-a-Minute Speech

At Breitbart, via Instapundit, "OUR RULING CLASS IN A NUTSHELL."

Stop Lying to Us

From Kurt Schlichter, at Town Hall (via Instapundit and Memeorandum):

My new Townhall is up! || https://t.co/R1YkKNGwxN

— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) June 8, 2017

The most significant revelation that came out of the most recent London massacre of disarmed British subjects was not the bloodshed itself, but the pathetic sissy whining, in the midst of throats being slashed, at the Brit who refused to adhere to the comforting lie that the Muslims doing the slashing in the name of Allah were not Muslims doing the slashing in the name of Allah.

The left would rather you lie and die than tell the truth and live.

It’s exhausting being lied to 24/7 about the big issues, and don’t start with the “but what about Trump?” nonsense because…well, what about Trump?

Does Trump pretend that the Islamic State has nothing to do with Islam because to admit the Islamic State has something to do with Islam is an admission that the unquestionable idea underlying multiculturalism – that every culture is wonderful except the Western culture that brought about 95 percet of the learning and science that is making the grinding poverty and disease that was heretofore man’s fate a thing of the past – is an utter fraud?

Does Trump pretend that we are morally or scientifically bound by a non-treaty that was non-submitted to our elected representatives to solve the non-problem of climate change at the price of our non-employment and non-prosperity?

Does Trump blame Russians for the utter repudiation of Felonia von Pantsuit’s poisonous ideology of greed and huggy fascism? Does he contend Hillary skipped those icky workin’ folks in Wisconsin and Michigan because Putin tricked her?

I keep trying to find the big Trump “lies” and they always seem to end up being disagreements with liberal orthodoxy.

But for the so-called elite that seeks to rule us, it’s all lies, all day, every day, about everything, since they can’t be honest because we normals reject what they want whenever we are exposed to the truth and are allowed a say. So their go-to move to impose their sick will is to obscure or hide the truth, and try to suppress our voices...

The Sad Long List of Hillary's Excuses

From Amanda Prestigiacomo, at the Daily Wire, "The Complete (And Ever Expanding) List Of Hillary's Excuses For Election Loss."

SAD! The Full, Long List Of Hillary Excuses For Election Loss https://t.co/fbcFoPFSty @realDailyWire pic.twitter.com/j2w4jJfYNT

— Amanda Prestigiacomo (@AmandaPresto) June 1, 2017

Hat Tip: Ed Driscoll, at Instapundit, "DNC EXEC PUBLICLY (IF MOMENTARILY) BLASTS HILLARY FOR BLAMESHIFTING HER FAILURE."

Why Things Won't Go Back to Normal for Failed Elites

From John Kass, at the Chicago Tribune:

The media/Democratic flaying of #PresidentTrump. Will it bring America back to 'normal?' Or hide deeper problems? https://t.co/xPgLZdNcZN

— John Kass (@John_Kass) May 31, 2017

The New Nationalism in America

From Matthew Continetti, at Free Beacon:

The New Nationalism in America: How conservatism is changing in the Trump era https://t.co/ytTqhBYbTx via @continetti pic.twitter.com/GtJZRFZkCi

— Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) February 24, 2017

FLASHBACK: "The Political Establishment's Terrified by Donald Trump's 'Tangible American Nationalism'."