June 30, 2017

Tariff war to make supply chains American again, and Americans prosperous again

Although the DC Swamp and Deep State have thwarted the Trump agenda in military and immigration policy, and bogged down the Congress in unpopular items like Obamacare Lite and re-writing the tax code for the rich, there is one area where he and his base have been given wide latitude to re-shape policy in line with his campaign -- trade and re-industrialization.

While the RNC and GOP mega-donors would love to sign the TPP and ship even more manufacturing jobs out of the country, that agenda has prevented them from capturing the White House and thereby the rest of the Executive branch agencies. Trump was uniquely able to win the general election by promoting the re-industrialization of the Rust Belt, winning many Midwestern states that have not voted Republican in decades.

These working-class whites of the Rust Belt were willing to take a chance on Trump, and unless they see some major improvements, they will not be taking a chance on a Republican presidential ticket ever again, and the GOP will be shut out of the Executive branch for good.

The RNC may be blind and stupid, but they are not suicidal. Once someone showed them how to win the White House, they are happy to copy that strategy into the future. So, re-industrialization it is.

An article at Axios reveals that Trump and the economic nationalists are planning to launch a major trade war to bring back manufacturing to this nation once again:





Reminder that "trade" these days is largely not trade, it is the corporations in the rich countries using the Third World as a source of cheap materials, cheap labor, and cheap regulations, to cut their costs and boost their profits.

Sometimes the entire product is made in a crappy country, and then a real-country brand and logo is slapped on to fob it off on American consumers as though it were high-quality. ("Made in Bangladesh to the specifications of Harrington and Heathrow Clothiers".) Other times the various parts of the product are made in various countries, and are finally "assembled" here rather than being "made" here. ("Assembled in USA from textiles made in El Salvador".)

In either case, the strategy has been to make the supply chains global, in search of the lowest costs for each piece of the product, and each bit of labor used to make or put it together.

This gutting of American companies making their product here in America has driven down the standard of living for working-class and middle-class Americans: their gadgets and clothing costs somewhat less than it used to, but their incomes have fallen off a cliff because the high-paying American labor has been converted into low-paying Guatemalan or Vietnamese labor. Manufacturing has been replaced with cheap service sector jobs, and more and more of these are done by immigrants, further driving down incomes -- while driving up the price of housing (our main expense by far), with tens of millions of new residents overnight. Not to mention that the quality of our gadgets and clothing today is lower than it used to, being made in the Third World.

Restoring our standard of living to what it used to be before the 1980s requires us to bring these supply chains back within the borders of our own nation. Not so long ago, entirely within the South, raw cotton was grown, spun, and woven into a usable fabric, and then cut and sewn into a finished piece of clothing or bedding. In the Midwest, steel was made, fashioned into machine parts, and then assembled together into a whole car or washing machine. Out West in electronics land, Texas Instruments made calculators from start to finish, and Apple made their computers, keyboards, and mouses all within American borders (only the monitors from Apple were made in Asia).

That is why it's so crucial that the Trump plan is targeting not just raw materials like steel, paper, sugar, beef, and so on, but machine parts (semiconductors) and finished products (appliances). If there is a heavy tariff on parts and finished goods, it will make it too expensive for corporations to make these things abroad, and bring production back here instead. The manufacturers ought to be doing that out of a sense of national cohesion, but as greedy as the corporate boards and stockholders have gotten over the past several decades, they will require a beating to get them in line with what is good for America and the American people.

Finally, bear in mind that when manufacturing returns, it will create not only high-paying blue-collar jobs, but also create tons of openings for the various managerial and professional tasks that need to be done to operate a semiconductor foundry, a textile mill, and an auto plant. The only ones who have gained from outsourcing production have been the very elite managers like the CEO, who still works, lives, and gets paid in America, unlike the workers and low-to-medium level managers and professionals whose jobs got sent to the Philippines.

That is the only way that the middle class is going to enjoy a higher standard of living -- by earning twice as much income managing an auto plant, rather than getting a tax cut on their low income in a service job. Even if they got to keep all of their income that goes to taxes, it would not be enough. We need to raise incomes through the roof, and the Industrial Revolution is the only thing that has done that for working and middle-class people.

June 28, 2017

Interview interlude

Nationalist firebrand Katie McHugh gave two interviews recently about the experience of working for Breitbart during the Steve Bannon days, and where the site -- and conservative media generally -- has headed since Trump won. First one with Kevin Michael Grace of 2kevins, and second one with Mike Cernovich for the Alex Jones Show.

Russia scholar Stephen Cohen discusses the historically high level of tension between the US and Russia over the Democrats' conspiracy theories and witch hunts about "Russian interference in the elections," as well as the Pentagon's escalation in Syria. Interviewed by Michael Tracey for TYT Politics.

Lefty journalist Max Blumenthal, along with lefty hosts Rania Khalek and Kevin Gosztola, delve into the Left's changing stance on Middle Eastern politics -- away from anti-imperialism, and closer to Islamist identity politics. Strangely, even the far Left now champions the Western-backed jihadist rebels who are trying to take down a secular nation independent of Western control -- now in Syria, but formerly in Libya as well. (To me, smells more like CIA co-optation of major commie organizations than naive romanticizing of revolutions.) Conversation at Unauthorized Disclosure, from early May but even more relevant now.

June 27, 2017

Deep State boxing Trump into owning downside of Syrian disaster

Amid the renewed effort by Deep State to escalate our intervention in Syria toward WWIII...

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh had just written an article detailing the nature of the so-called "chemical attack" in April that served as the pretext for the Pentagon sending missiles into a Syrian government airfield. His quoted source is "a senior adviser to the American intelligence community, who has served in senior positions in the Defense Department and Central Intelligence Agency".

According to this source, the site of the alleged chemical attack was a jihadist headquarters with a weapons depot in the basement, and stores of fertilizers and chlorine cleaning products that were distributed to the local population. When the government struck this jihadist target, the explosion could have affected the fertilizers and chlorine so that it put off a toxic cloud in the area, causing the deaths that appeared to be chemical weapons-related.

So it was not a chemical weapons attack by the government against "their own people," but collateral damage when the government targeted the jihadists.

This report confirms the conclusions reached by lay skeptical observers at the time -- that it was either a false flag by the jihadists, or that a government strike had hit a place where chemical weapons or their precursors were being stored by the jihadists. It disproves the claims that Assad targeted his own people with chemical weapons, for whatever reason.

That's the kind of solid work we expect from Hersh, but there is a disturbing secondary narrative being advanced by his source -- that it was Trump himself who put the pedal to the metal on bombing Syria, against the intelligence community who had told him it was not a chemical attack by Assad, and against the wariness of his military leaders.

Back on Planet Earth, we know from Trump's famous Twitter history that he repeatedly and vociferously demanded that Obama not bomb Syria over an earlier phony narrative about Assad and chemical weapons. He ran his campaign on leaving Assad in place, on reminding Americans that "the rebels" in Syria are jihadists who want to fly planes into our buildings, and on getting along with Syria's patron state Russia.

Only a few days before the strike on Syria, Trump sent his Press Secretary, UN Ambassador, and Secretary of State to spread the message that we are getting out of the regime change business in Syria, and Assad's fate will be decided by the Syrian people, not us. General Mattis was asked about this message at a press conference in London at the same time, and he dodged the question entirely -- hardly what you'd expect if he was the wary one, and Trump the warmongering one in the White House.

But it's not enough for Hersh's source to portray Mr. "We never should've gone into Iraq" / "The Syrian rebels are probably ISIS" as a warmonger, and the CIA and the Pentagon as unsung helper angels struggling to defuse a militaristic escalation in the Middle East.

The source goes to pains to reinforce the elite caricature of Trump as ignorant ("He doesn’t read anything and has no real historical knowledge"), irrational and hot-headed ("emotionally energized by the disaster"), low-info ("a constant watcher of television news"), and a reckless outsider who is out of his element in the world of government. ("He can accept the consequences of a bad decision in the business world; he will just lose money. But in our world, lives will be lost and there will be long-term damage to our national security if he guesses wrong.") The military and intelligence leaders are "the adults in the room" babysitting the toddler Trump.

This endless string of slander is clearly coming from a Deep State swamp creature that views Trump as an uncouth interloper. The tone that is dripping with disdain should be a clue that perhaps this source has ulterior motives.

Then there's the risible attempt to paint the chief proponent of "getting along with Russia" as hostile to even letting Russia know beforehand that we were going to bomb an airfield where they had their own people stationed. ("The president was also initially opposed to the idea of giving the Russians advance warning before the strike, but reluctantly accepted it.")

The only way this makes sense is for the source to be targeting an audience that had already been skeptical of the official story about the chemical attack, and trying to pin the blame on Trump rather than the CIA and Pentagon whose leaders clearly pressed Trump into doing their bidding, against years and years of his own exhortations against militarism in the Middle East. The target audience is anti-imperialist or anti-militarist, more on the Left than on the Right, and prone to believing the elite caricature about Trump the mouth-breather.

All rational analysis pointed to the Deep State and Pentagon being the culprits behind the strike on Syria, and the escalation there since -- but some people are so consumed by a bitter disdain toward Trump the person, that all a psy-ops agent has to do is pander to that caricature, and the audience will ignore the facts that are staring them in the face. Along with their cheerleading for James Comey (after he got fired), there may be a good size of the Left that begins to believe, "That stupid Cheeto Hitler -- thank God for the CIA and the Pentagon, or we might get sucked into another war in the Middle East!"

The larger goal of the psy-ops appears to be making Trump himself own the downside of the disaster that our intervention in Syria is turning into. If it somehow works out the way the Deep State wanted it to, then great -- they don't need credit, or want it. They want to stay relatively out of sight from the public. As long as they get to topple another nation that is independent from the US empire, they don't care whether they get a parade or not.

But if things don't pan out the way they wanted, that failure will have to be pinned on someone -- and it sure as hell isn't going to be the CIA or the Pentagon in charge of things over there. They will try to make the President the fall guy, so that they live to fight another day. "Gee, we really didn't want to escalate militarily in Syria, but that bull-headed ignoramus Drumpf -- amirite? We often get tasked with the impossible by the White House, and we're only human."

Cover your ass, and pass the buck. The fact that the Deep State propagandists are putting this spin out there so early after the first strike suggests that they realize how likely the situation is to get catastrophically worse than it is to get better. Not that that's going to stop them from pushing things in the wrong direction -- only that they are preparing to shift the risk away from themselves and onto someone who is against their ridiculous and reckless plans.

It's the inverse of "skin in the game" -- making those who do not want to take some action, assume all of the risk of taking that action. The elite brass in the military and intelligence sectors are parasites.

The most effective antidote here seems to be ridicule of the portrayal of the CIA and Pentagon as unwilling participants and eager to shed light on intel that should prevent a strike, rather than callous warmongers who prefer to obscure or lie about such evidence. Also remind people of Trump's long and inflexible history of skepticism about rash decisions to escalate in the Middle East, and his cynicism about who "the rebels" are.

The target audience here is more on the Left (commenters at Moon of Alabama), but also somewhat on the Right ("Trump is an idiot who never read Kant, and is easily swayed by tearful appeals from Ivanka"). If our intervention really drags on, though, the audience will grow to the whole electorate. Time to nip this buck-passing narrative in the bud.

June 24, 2017

Stock bubble to burst after Wall St party (D) no longer in power?

[Inspired by similar comments from both Nassim Taleb and Peter Schiff, here and here.]

During the campaign, Trump said that the stock market was in a big fat bubble, and that if he won, the Fed would wait to raise interest rates until he took office, so that the bubble bursting would not be blamed on Obama but on Trump. He never was a stock market guy, keeping his company from becoming publicly traded, and never basing his wealth on stocks.

Eager to point to good news during his tenure so far, especially on economic indicators, he has hyped the rise of the stock market since his election. His surrogates such as Kellyanne Conway do likewise on the media, hyping the trillions of dollars of wealth added thus far.

But this is just the bubble continuing to inflate, and none of that added wealth is real. When it pops, Trump ought to have distanced himself as much as possible from the stock market -- otherwise he will be blamed for "crashing the markets" or "blowing up the economy" or something else that frames wealthy stock-owners as the only class worth caring about, rather than the workers who put Trump over the top in the Rust Belt.

Working-class and middle-class people have been doing worse for 30-40 years straight, whether the stock market has been bulls or bears. The overall trend in stocks has been only upward over this time, though, meaning that if anything the stock market must crash and stay cut down to size if the working and middle classes are to recover the standard of living they used to enjoy before the yuppies took over during the 1980s.

Trump and his team must remember that Wall Street does not form any part of their base -- it is the main power group within the Democrats, not the Republicans (whose main power group is the Pentagon). He owes no part whatsoever of his victory to Wall Street, so he is in a position to tell them to go eat shit, and to put the blame for a declining Dow squarely where it belongs -- on the Wall Street party, the Democrats, for inflating the bubble during Obama's entire eight years. [1]

The Fed is already starting to raise interest rates, making debt more expensive to pay back, and with the gigantic amount of debt out there, pretty soon the rate hikes are going to set off a pretty big drop. So it's just like Trump said about the Fed waiting until the Democrat was out of office, and a Republican could be blamed.

Looking over a list of recessions since WWII, it looks like they're more likely to hit under Republican Presidents. I wonder if the Democrats being the finance-friendly party goes back that far, and they've been setting up their Republican successors each time to take the fall.

Aside from sabotage by the opposition party, there's also the massive re-allocation of federal funds that the Republicans will undertake when they gain power -- away from finance and toward the military. There's only so much gravy to go around, so perhaps gorging the military is enough to starve the banks. Republicans deliver military bubbles rather than financial bubbles, and when the Democrats replace them, the military bubble pops and turns back into a financial one.

At least that's the pattern since Reagan, when the GOP became the militarist party (it was the Democrats who began and escalated Vietnam, and Nixon who ran on getting us out), and when it makes sense to talk about a "Wall Street party" inflating a stock market bubble. There was the double-dip recession of the early '80s, the isolated Black Monday of '87, and the early '90s recession, all under Reagan-Bush. Then silence under Clinton, while the tech / dot-com bubble inflates like crazy. That bubble pops under Bush Jr, and later so does the housing bubble. Then silence under Obama, while a new bubble inflates, still related to tech and internet companies. That's bound to get wiped out during the Trump administration -- and perhaps be followed by a second crash later into the eight-year term.

To prepare for what seems to be a certainty, with only the timing and severity unknown, Trump must not only distance himself from the bubble, but loudly and repeatedly put the blame onto the Democrats, who are controlled by Wall Street and do the bidding of the big banks. He's already made us familiar with the line "I inherited a big fat mess," so might as well stick with that one.

And he must also make clear that, unlike the typical Republican, he was elected thanks to working-class voters, and he is only going to pay attention to measures of their economic health when he judges the success or failure of his policies. They do not own any stock, and the stocks only soar in value when the companies slash costs by firing American workers (off-shoring and bringing in immigrant workers). So if the stock market crashes, it will be due to the phony bubble wealth evaporating, plus the companies having to hire American workers and pay them a decent income again.

I know Trump wants to please the business community, but not if it means continuing to inflate their bubble and continuing to peddle the view that the stock market is an index of the average American's economic well-being. He can tell them that the stock market declining will return big businesses to a more sound and robust state, and not soft and flabby from the government feeding them everything.

Might as well go straight to the American people by using Twitter, once the market crashes: "Wealth lost by 1% who own stocks = $10 trillion. Wealth lost by workers who own none = 0. Inequality narrowing -- nice!"

[1] He is beholden to the Pentagon, and cannot get his intended policy of "getting along with Russia" and letting Assad stay in power. Obama, in contrast, did not owe anything to the Pentagon, so he was more free to attempt a "Russian re-set," and stalled long enough on striking Syria and put it up to public debate, to the point where he could wiggle out of doing the Pentagon's bidding. But Obama was beholden to Wall Street, and had to go along with whatever they wanted, i.e. bailouts for year after year.

Even if Bernie had won, he would have found himself in the same position regarding bailouts that Trump is in regarding militarism -- campaigning against it, but forced into it by the main power group that controls his party.

June 21, 2017

Why GOP is blocking Trump agenda: He has political debt, not capital

The special elections last night remind us that the void left by Democrat failure is being filled by the unpopular cuckservative wing of the GOP, rather than the Trump movement expanding beyond the initial victory of the White House.

That is not for lack of Trumpian candidates in this year's GOP primary elections -- Gray in Georgia, Pope in South Carolina, and Stewart in Virginia, all of whom could have won their primary if only Trump himself had boosted them on social media and other standard means. Pope and Stewart nearly tied the Establishment candidates without any help from Trump, so his intervention would have been decisive for candidates backing his agenda.

Trump's stumping for Establishment Republicans like Handel and Norman, while remaining silent about Republicans who actually support his agenda, is part of a broader pattern of the President doing the work of the RNC and the GOP Congress rather than the other way around. The leadership of the Party and Congress continues to ignore the will of the American people, and keeps foisting unpopular cuckservative "choices" upon them who are only chosen because the Democrat alternatives are hostile anti-Americans, instead of Republicans who support the populist and nationalist platform that won so historically in November.

The only exception has been on trade deals, where the GOP has decided to cut American workers some slack and dial down economic globalization, in order to win the Rust Belt states that are its only path to the White House. Otherwise, the Trump campaign's signature issues -- on immigration, foreign policy, and populism vs. austerity measures -- have been not only ignored by Congress, but outright counter-acted. They have also refused to back his executive actions, leading to their disappearance over the past several months. Not to mention their ongoing acquiescence with, and often eager stoking of, the witch hunt by the media and Deep State to overturn the results of the election. [1]

We are already halfway through the first year of Trump, and the situation has gone from an insurgency of populists and nationalists against the globalist elites, to their leader becoming more and more of a figurehead for the status quo. What gives?

Earlier posts looked at the need for institutional analysis rather than a naive and myopic focus on individual personalities, the dominant power groups being Wall Street for the Democrats and the Pentagon for the Republicans, and the nature of Trump's leverage in the struggle among the power groups -- namely, the size of his support base that he alone can mobilize.

But rather than Trump threatening to mobilize his support base against his negotiating partners, whether Democrats or Establishment Republicans, he has only used them to advance the goals of the GOP elite against the desires of his own base.

That suggests the negotiating position is even weaker than we thought for our movement -- that Trump is being forced to first work off a political debt before the relationship enters the stage of quid pro quo negotiations between Trump and the Establishment. That is worse than merely arriving in Washington with minimal political capital due to being a first-time outsider -- he arrived with negative capital, and he is being detained in political debtors' prison until his account is at least up to zero.

Looking back on his campaign, from the primary through the general, it's understandable why the party leaders, the Congressmen, and the main power group (Pentagon) are all requiring him to work off a massive debt before they even begin to horse-trade with him. The populist and nationalist insurgency destroyed big chunks of political capital of the party elites, the donors, the think tanks, lobby groups, the conservative media, individual politicians and dynasties, policy platforms, and power group institutions like the Pentagon.

Everything they wanted to do was backwards at best, and corrosive at worst, so it's about damn time we change the way things are done around here. They were "more disappointing" than the Democrats, whose sabotage against America is to be expected. The message: they can either change direction and jump on board the Trump train, or they can go extinct.

With so much damage done to their public brand, and Trump's brand only soaring in value by attacking theirs, he was an existential threat to their electability with the general public. Now that the battlefield has shifted from popular support during an election, to political capital within the corridors of power, the badly damaged GOP is making Trump pay them political blood-money in restitution.

He must help get their style of politicians into office -- elected ones, but more importantly the appointed ones now that he's President. He must also stump for their failed and unpopular policy items -- anti-populist healthcare, tax code revision to enrich the rich, lax immigration enforcement, brinksmanship against Russia, ramped-up arming of Jihadi Arabia, and "toning down the rhetoric" against radical Islamic terrorism and Leftist political violence.

The GOP and the Pentagon believe that as long as it's a popular figure like Trump selling these deeply unpopular policies, the people will buy them and the government will go back to business as usual, after an initial disruption.

But they are wrong: Trump succeeded not on his personality or salesmanship, but on his policy stances. Jeb and the other cuckservative rejects never figured that out, and tried to ape his alpha mannerisms and his in-your-face persona rather than his positions on the issues. Trump voters would have voted for Trump's policies if sold by wimpy awkward Kasich, rather than Kasich's policies if sold by alpha charismatic Trump. Trump's take-no-prisoners attitude was the icing, not the cake.

So one of two reactions will happen: Trump may go along with the "paying off his debt" situation in good faith, or he may decide that the bad-faith backstabbing GOP will never consider his debt paid off, and go back to insurgent once again.

It's impossible to predict where things will be after four years, but so far they are clearly in the "going along" lane. If the GOP, the Pentagon, and the Deep State have convinced him that they will take him and even the entire country down if he tries to go insurgent again, he will stay in that lane. That is only artificially suppressing the pressure building up in this country, making the inevitable explosion all the more devastating when it does happen.

If there's 4-to-8 years of Trump advancing Jeb Bush policies, and 4-to-8 years of the populist Democrats getting their act together, Americans will elect their Salvador Allende in 2024, to be followed by our own coup d'etat that will impose Jeb Bush / Hillary Clinton policies at the barrel of a gun, since they cannot win at the ballot box.

Trump and the Trump movement should not favor this artificial short-term stability that causes a larger blow-up down the line. We need to relieve the pressure now so that the explosion is as contained as it can be. If the GOP, Pentagon, and Deep State cannot be persuaded to de-escalate in the interests of our society, then they must be confronted head-on. Trump might as well turn against the cucks in Congress, since they're not intending to give him anything anyway, and Trump supporters should begin holding marches and protests against the Establishment in order to give the President cover at the popular level.

[1] Aside from trade deals, where there has been actual GOP support for the Trump agenda, the only exception has been reduced illegal border crossings and reduced immigration from the countries listed on the Muslim ban, despite its being blocked by the courts (and the GOP Congress refusing to strip district courts of jurisdiction over national matters like immigration).

These changes reflect only the fear effect that Trump's election has created in the minds of would-be immigrants -- not changes in actual immigration policy, let alone changes advanced by the GOP on behalf of Trump. When/if the immigrants figure out that the GOP is actually blocking the Trump agenda on immigration policy, they will begin to stream back in at much higher rates. That may already be taking shape, as the government is admitting higher numbers of guest workers and refugees and other legal immigrant groups -- the Establishment will simply make them legal rather than illegal immigrants who drive down American wages, drive up American housing prices, and displace and destabilize American culture.

Democrat void not being filled by Trumpers, but cuck GOP

After yet another disappointment for Democrats in special elections, Trump supporters should not get too carried away and think that these GOP wins are going to help advance the populist and nationalist agenda that Trump got elected on. Now that the rush is starting to wear off from laughing in the loser Democrats' faces again, let's take a cold hard look at what the special elections have meant so far.

They have not flipped any seats since they were Republican to begin with. They were held by Republicans, less than a year after already being won by Republicans last November. Democrats have been losing Congressional seats for years and years, so this is nothing new.

None of the new Republicans are aligned with the Trump movement, representing instead the stale and unpopular cuckservative wing of the GOP. So these elections have upheld the status quo not only at the party level, but at the policy level within the party.

Trump supporters actually did run in the primary stage -- Gray in Georgia and Pope in South Carolina -- but they got no support from the RNC, the GOP Congress, or the President himself. Also, in the primary for Governor of Virginia, Trump did not boost the big-league Trump supporter Corey Stewart, who narrowly lost to Establishment cuck Ed Gillespie, in what will be a toss-up race during the general election.

Perhaps it would have made a difference if there were more grassroots activism on their behalf, in the media, on social media, and through PACs, but it would have been far more cost-effective for Trump to build his supporters up on Twitter.

The fact that he didn't, and used a generic phrase like "Republicans get out and vote" during the Georgia primary, is contrary to his behavior during the 2016 season when he favorably tweeted about Paul Ryan's GOP primary challenger, Paul Nehlen, before ultimately endorsing Ryan when the polls showed there was no way for the challenger to win. But Handel was not going to have an over-the-top win in her primary, and Norman just barely won his primary in South Carolina. Trump's support could have easily put Pope into the House, and given Gray a fighting chance as well.

If Trump switched behavior from boosting an anti-cuck challenger in 2016 to laying off the cucks entirely in 2017, it means the RNC and GOP Congress have enough leverage over him to get him to help their agenda and elect their style of politicians, without them helping out much with his agenda (immigration, foreign policy, populism -- aside from trade).

The RNC and Congress are not worried about partisan wins, since Trump supporters would still be Republican -- they specifically want the elitist and globalist agenda of the Paul Ryan "Better way" BS. They are OK with a Deep State coup to oust the election-winner who is their antithesis, and they want to impose austerity measures on the American people like we're some backward Third World shithole being dictated to by the IMF and World Bank -- a vision that Trump savaged all throughout his campaign as inhuman.

Of course, the cucks are enemies who at least can be negotiated with, compared to Democrats who are enemies that refuse to negotiate one bit. But judging from the legislative agenda for the first two years of the Trump administration, the failure of Congress to help enforce the Trumpian executive orders, and their refusal to shut down the coup under way, the cucks have substantially more leverage than the Trump movement does within Washington where things actually get done.

Going forward, we are going to have to work a hell of a lot harder at the grassroots level, since we cannot count on Trump himself to promote his own supporters -- not out of callousness or lack of awareness, but because that would trigger a retaliation by the RNC and Congress against him. After the election, we were thinking "How awesome will it be to see Trump target the cucks for primaries using only a few tweets!" That has turned out to be wrong, so we need to do the work ourselves.

In that work, we only need the numbers, not the symbolic victories. Primarying Paul Ryan would be the ultimate scalp, but he will be a 20-year, 10-term incumbent who is third in line for the Presidency, and will have an unlimited war chest and media campaign if need be. Whatever it would cost us to defeat him, would be far better spent across multiple primary contests, at least some of which we could win.

We cannot turn into the self-destructive Democrats, whose mindset is to target high-risk symbolic-reward-only contests like the Georgia seat last night. Invest instead where the general election is a safe R, and where there are enough Trump supporters in the voting pool who could get one of our guys through the primary against an electorally weak cuck.

The Democrats have been a dying disaster of a party for awhile now, outside of the Presidential election, where only Trump could score a decisive win against them. Still, replacing Democrats with Republicans, and laughing in Democrats' faces each time they lose more and more contests, has done nothing to improve how this country is run, because the Republicans who have taken their place are worthless sell-outs as well. They're simply less offensive during campaign mode, unlike the Democrats who relish in condescending to voters and insulting most of America.

Less-offensive elitist globalists is not exactly what we voted for last November, or what we burned down the GOP for during the primary. It's time to take the void left by Democrats and actually do something useful with it -- not just laugh at what terrible campaigners the Dems are.

June 18, 2017

Civil disobedience on the Right: Beyond ironic lulz



















June 15, 2017

Collective blame prevents rise of extremist minority (skin in the game)

Nassim Taleb has presented a straightforward model of how a zealous minority can impose its will over a gigantic scale.

The zealous minority insists on getting its way in some domain of life, while the remaining majority is neutral -- whether it's done this way, that way, or the other way, who cares? That allows the minority's preference to take over the whole group. Then, as that group acts as one piece of an even larger-scale group, and still assuming the majority is neutral at this higher scale, the minority's preference will take over that even larger group. And so on, through larger and larger scales of social interaction, until the entire society is following the ways of a zealous minority.

The example he gives are food taboos, where a minority strictly adheres to some taboo, while the rest of the people don't care one way or the other. If one individual within a family insists on eating Kosher food, and assuming the rest of the family doesn't mind, then that whole family will be eating Kosher because it's too costly to prepare two separate sets of meals all the time. When that family joins a larger group of families -- like at a weekend barbeque -- assuming the other families don't mind eating Kosher hot dogs and drinking Kosher lemonade, then the whole gathering of families will be eating Kosher, because it's too costly to prepare two separate sets of meals.

That could continue to scale up to the level of neighborhood, town, state, region, country, and even world. And all from just one person zealously insisting on Kosher. Here is a visual showing this spread from a single pink unit at the lowest level to the next level in a nested hierarchy, and the next level above that, until the whole hierarchy is taken over:

But somehow we don't see zealous minorities hijacking entire societies in every domain of life, and Taleb emphasizes that this process only goes as far as it does due to the majority being neutral, or where zealousness is asymmetric. Once the majority feels a high-enough cost from going along with the preferences of the zealous minority, they will refuse to adopt the minority preference, and it will be stopped from scaling to higher and higher levels.

For example, most non-Kosher eaters would not notice the difference between Kosher hot dogs and non-Kosher hot dogs. But what about vegan "hot dogs" and real-meat hot dogs? Suddenly the majority is going to squash the demands of the zealous minority, and there will never be a take-over by vegans of any larger-scale group where non-vegans are in the majority.

That is an example where the majority's intrinsic or natural preferences prevent the take-over by the minority. But the majority could also have those costs imposed on them from the outside. That is, the majority's natural feelings may be neutral, but some outside force imposes costs on them for remaining neutral. That will also have the effect of checking the spread of the zealous minority's take-over.

Perhaps the greatest example of this process is assigning collective blame, or guilt by association. In that family with one zealous Kosher eater, the rest of the family may feel neutral -- but suppose that in the larger gathering of families for the barbeque, there is a hostility toward Kosher food. They don't want any superstitious taboos to complicate the easy-breezy atmosphere of a weekend barbeque.

The other families will ostracize the family with the one Kosher member, in effect blaming the neutral members of that family as though they were all zealous Kosher partisans. The other families do not treat them as "that family with the one Kosher member" (blaming the individual) but as "that Kosher family" (blaming the whole group). And that makes sense, since the other families can only observe the final behavior of the family in question -- all members of that family are requesting Kosher food. The other families cannot see that it's only one member of the family that zealously insists on Kosher, while the rest are just going along because they feel neutral deep down. Outside groups can only see final behavior, not deep-down feelings.

Faced with that ostracism, the family in question cracks down on the zealous demands coming from its sole Kosher member. The members of that family tell the Kosher eater to bring their own separate Kosher food or go on a fast. "We do not want to get punished for your personal demands!"

Collective blame also scales up the social levels. Suppose that two schools are going to gather together for a party, and in one of those schools, a single individual has caused the entire school to eat Kosher food, spreading the preference from the individual to their family to the other families with kids at the school.

Suppose that the other school doesn't want any weird taboos getting in the way of a party atmosphere. That school will shame, ridicule, and ostracize the other school for being "that Kosher school" rather than "that school with the Kosher family" or "that school with the Kosher individual". Now the collective blame has been applied two layers above the original individual -- to their family, and then up to the school that encompasses all families who send their kids there.

Faced with being shut out of a gigantic party that would have brought together two schools, the families who share the school with the Kosher family will tell that family to knock it off with their Kosher demands. "We don't want our families to get punished for your family's demands!" That will in turn make the members of that family turn against the sole Kosher member: "We don't want the rest of us in this family to get punished for your personal demands!"

Notice that the outside group will assign collective blame at the highest level of organization that does not include the blamers themselves, or in other words the highest level to which the preference has risen. Those from the anti-Kosher school can only see that the other school has been taken over by the Kosher preference -- they cannot see the path that history took to get there. Maybe everyone there is a deep-down Kosher partisan, maybe only some families are, and maybe it's only one single individual.

If everyone else at the school felt neutral deep down, and only adopted the preference because they didn't care, they have made it impossible for outsiders to discern where the preference originated. Outsiders cannot localize the blame to "who started it," so they blame everyone who has allowed it to spread. Only the insiders can trace the path back to who started it, and put the pressure on them to knock it off, so that the whole group can get relief from the outside costs being "unfairly" imposed on them.

Outsiders can only tell that they themselves are not to blame, since they have the opposite preference. So they will assign collective blame to the next level down in the nested hierarchy.

Finally, it is possible that this practice of collective blame could itself be a take-over of a neutral-feeling majority by a zealous minority. At the anti-Kosher school, perhaps most people and most families feel neutral about Kosher vs. non-Kosher, but there is one zealous crusader against Kosher food. That preference scales up to his family, who will never eat Kosher food, and from that family up to the entire school, which will never serve Kosher food at school functions.

Just as we saw before, outsiders cannot tell how this whole school became anti-Kosher -- only the insiders can trace the history. Therefore the pro-Kosher school will blame the entire other school for being anti-Kosher. As it turns out, collective blame can be applied from either side, and zealous minorities can take over either side.

There would be a battle between two zealous minorities -- pro-Kosher and anti-Kosher -- with most people feeling neutral deep down, but who would receive collective blame from one side or the other. Then the winning side would be the one that imposes higher costs on the neutral majority. If the cost of not serving Kosher food is having a minority wag their finger in your face, while the cost of serving Kosher food is having a minority punch you in the face, then guess what -- no Kosher food will be served.

Our little investigation has shown some of the balancing forces that have prevented zealous minorities from taking over everything, and it has revealed the rationality behind collective blame or guilt by association, which "Intellectual Yet Idiot" types (in Taleb's phrase) tend to poo-poo as an irrational fallacy of primitives.

This rationality has two aspects. First, cognitive -- outsiders cannot see the other group's history in order to localize blame to whoever started the take-over. And second, strategically adaptive -- outsiders set off a chain reaction that roots out the original offenders on the other side, as the collectively-blamed group bores down into its own layers to localize punishment (since they do know who started it and how it spread within their own group), in order to free itself of the collective costs imposed by outsiders.

Naturally, readers will have been thinking about the political climate we are living in these days, and how partisan and polarized it has become. That will be taken up in a following post. But for now, suffice it to say that the most adaptive strategy is to assign collective blame at the highest level of a nested hierarchy that you do not yourself belong to.

After the attempted mass murder yesterday, Republicans ought to blame Democrats as a whole and impose costs collectively until the problem stops. At the next level down, the shooter was a Bernie Democrat rather than a Hillary Democrat, so the Hillary supporters will collectively blame the Bernie supporters. At the next level down, the shooter was obsessed with the Russia conspiracy theory, so the Bernie supporters who don't believe in it will collectively blame the Bernie supporters who do buy into it. Ultimately, what began as Republicans collectively blaming Democrats will get to the localized root of the problem.

June 14, 2017

It's not personal, it's collective: Shutting down Resistance after far-Left targets "Republicans" as a whole

After a far-left Bernie volunteer became radicalized by the media's Russia narrative, and emboldened by the growing Deep State coup to topple the winner of a free and fair election, he went hunting "Republicans" and opened fire on GOP Congressmen who were playing baseball.

This officially makes the conflict in this country into a collective war between groups, and not just individuals. Those who were shot today were not targeted on an individual basis -- for their particular voting record, their personal background, or their specific nuanced views. They were targeted broadly for being members of a group -- "the Republicans". Any member of that group was on the shooter's radar, and any dead Republican would have satisfied his desire for blood.

Officially, there are no longer distinct individual Republicans -- there are only interchangeable, faceless members of the overall group. You may not believe that -- but if the enemy believes that way, and acts accordingly, then you cannot avoid being targeted simply because "I'm not one of those kind of Republicans". If you are even tangentially Republican -- like me, who last voted in 2000 for Ralph Nader -- you are in their cross-hairs. They do not care about what subtle flavors "Republicans" or "Trump voters" come in.

The response to minimize the growing political violence must acknowledge the collective nature of the conflict (targets chosen as interchangeable members of a group), or it will fail, and the violence will only worsen.

So, there can be no appeals to "We're all Americans" -- no we are not. We are divided very sharply into groups, and one of those groups, the Left, has become so radicalized that they have declared open season on collective assassination of their enemy, the Right -- first on people's character ("all Trump voters are ____"), and now on their personal safety.

Sure, hashtag "Not all Leftists" and "Not all Bernie supporters" and "Not all Democrats" and "Not all liberals" are radicalized to the degree that they will open fire on what they feel to be faceless interchangeable members of the enemy group. But they are the group with that problem within it, they are the group with the problem of its members supporting the Deep State coup, and they are the group that is perpetuating the Russia witch hunt.

We will not try to treat the problem of generic "radicalization" or "political extremism," since the Right is not guilty of it. We will focus only on Leftist radicalization, Leftist extremism, Leftist witch hunts, and Leftist hysteria. Even if some on the Right retaliate, that is qualitatively the opposite phenomenon -- seeking to quell violence by nipping it in the bud, rather than instigating it first and launching pre-emptive strikes.

We cannot play by honest rules if the enemy will not show us the same respect. If they treat us all as interchangeable faceless members of some group, then we must treat them the same way, while acknowledging that it's regrettable, and that we will stop treating them as a faceless collective only after their side stops treating us violently as a faceless collective. They can demonstrate good faith for healing by joining us to neuter the extremists on their side. If they refuse to root out their problem individuals, they prove that they value loyalty to their group above societal cohesion, and they cannot be trusted as allies.

As we enter a new openly collective phase in political conflict, not seen since 1970 or 1920 before that, we ought to strategize about how to shut down the other side as an entire group, before the violence really gets out of hand. This is both how to interact with other people, and how to pressure the government, media, corporations, etc., at the elite level.

First, we must quickly shut down the Russia witch hunt ("probe"). Attorney General Sessions must rescind his recusal, fire the Special Counsel, declare the probe a baseless attempt to over-turn the results of a free and fair election, and block any future attempts to remove the President by anti-democratic witch hunt means.

Suspend the broadcast licenses (and other licenses and privileges for other types of media) of those outlets that have been promoting the Russia witch hunt. Give the country a cooling-off period of at least six months, free from the constant fanning of flames by the media. If they offend again after given the chance to resume their activities, permanently end their licenses. CNN and MSNBC, New York Times and Washington Post, ought to be first.

One of the major determinants of a successful coup is control over the media, and we cannot allow the coup plotters to use that weapon against Republicans / Trump voters. Fanning the violent flames of an anti-democratic coup is not "expression" -- it has proven itself to be a clear and present danger to the collective security of one-half of the American people (and more than one-half of Congressmen and Senators).

The DoJ must identify anyone affiliated with violent Leftist groups like Antifa and arrest them and hold them temporarily for the cooling-off period. They have already proven to be capable of collective violence against their political enemy group, so they are the first natural perpetrators of any would-be surge in violence. Pre-empt them.

The DoJ must also investigate the links between Antifa type groups and the Deep State, whose policies they closely align with. It certainly appears as though Deep State has infiltrated these groups and used them for their own goals -- attacking Trump supporters en masse in public. The findings must be made public to de-legitimize the appeal of Antifa among the liberal audience ("just CIA plants"), and offenders prosecuted on both the Antifa side and the Deep State side. Otherwise the CIA and other agencies will continue to co-opt these groups for their own anti-democratic purposes, to overthrow the Trump election.

The Treasury Dept, or whoever else, must block or freeze the financing of the relevant groups -- both the violent activists like Antifa, but also the Soros-funded propaganda organs like Media Matters, and other David Brock-run propaganda.

As for protests on social media or in real life, the DoJ must enforce anti-sedition laws. Participants can advocate for some cause -- single-payer healthcare, no war in the Middle East -- or for electing one politician over another, but they cannot call for the over-throw of the freely and fairly elected government just because they don't like the results, whether stated directly or indirectly. Democracy cannot tolerate anti-democratic agitation.

That is all how to deal with the enemy group. What about our group?

We must emphasize to any and all Republicans, Trump voters, conservatives, etc., that they are being targeted as interchangeable members of a faceless collective, and that the enemy therefore does not care who you are as an individual. "But I'm not a Trump supporting Republican" -- too bad, that far-Left assassin does not care, you are guilty simply for being a Republican. This will boost our numbers and increase our cohesion, so that we can act forcefully as a group, rather than be divided and conquered because each individual is trying to convince the enemy group "But I'm not one of the people you're looking for" -- yes you are.

We should also constantly demand Democrats, liberals, and Bernie or Hillary supporters that they disavow, shun, and punish the offenders. Best-case scenario: their side becomes fractured and ineffective. Worst-case: the milquetoast liberals join the radicals, AKA the status quo.

The President should deliver a primetime address that specifically mentions the collective nature of the violence -- on Republicans or Trump voters, not on any old "Americans". He should call on the Left to disavow, shun, and punish the violent radicals within their ranks if they want to be taken seriously and treated fairly. He can explain how the pause of propaganda from MSNBC / NYT is to prevent further violent radicalization of the Left, a regrettable necessity since "not all Democrats" are going to turn violent, but that is the only surefire way to keep the nation from exploding into group vs. group warfare. Agitation for sedition is not editorial expression.

The President should also seize the opportunity to clean house within the White House. Reince Priebus is a weak Trump-hating Establishment shill who has allowed the enemy to grow in intensity and brazenness, by preventing Trump supporters from getting hired, and by appointing so many Never-Trumpers into the administration. That only pours blood into the water for the coup plotters. Replace him with a hard-nosed loyalist like Newt Gingrich, who has more experience and connections inside-the-Beltway anyway.

Replace everyone on the weak, reactive, self-focused communications team with brutal vicious killers who are going to stand up for the administration rather than trying to curry favor with Democrats and the media. People who do not care how much the media slanders them, and who will therefore be immune to peer pressure by coup plotters and flame-fanners.

And end the daily press briefings, which are nothing more than a tribunal against the administration by unelected witch hunters. Do not cede them the authority to interrogate and deliver sentences against the administration, as though they were prosecutors, judges, and executioners.

Lastly, the Congress must drop its standard cuckservative agenda and re-orient toward law-and-order. Nobody ever did care about restoring corporate rape to the healthcare sector or passing tax cuts for the rich -- and now they really do not care. We want an immediate crackdown on the lawlessness pervading our entire society that threatens to blow the whole thing up for good -- an explosion that now includes the Republican Congressmen as targets, who used to think they were nice and insulated, but now see that it is open season on them, too, and not just the Trump supporters who got mobbed outside of Trump rallies.

If they are going to pursue anything else in the next year or two, it must be populist rather than elitist. Number one, because that's what Trump got elected to pursue, and number two, because that will de-fang the far-Left that bases much of its appeal on being against the plutocrat elitists, who they associate with the Republicans -- as though the Democrats were not already the Wall Street party.

The worst thing that the GOP can do is try to spin the attack as a populist citizen against an elite politician, trying to make common cause with other elite politicians on the Democrat side, and painting the assassin as scarcely different from a rabble-rousing Trump voter. Remember that the enemy sees things in partisan terms, and they are out to get Republicans, not elites in general (they will spare Chuck Schumer and other elite Democrats who are controlled by Wall Street).

The moment that the Republican Establishment makes overtures to the Democrat Establishment about "protecting all of us in government against violent citizens," that will concede defeat in the minds of the far-Left partisans, who will really start to ramp up their attacks on Republicans as a whole. They do not want a truce, but the total annihilation of "Republicans" as an entire group.

It was wrong for Trump supporters to blithely dismiss the Russia witch hunt, on the view that it would only further discredit the Democrats and make them lose elections even harder. It will have that effect -- but it will also fan the flames of increasingly violent collective conflict orchestrated by the Left. It's no longer a laughing matter, and the Resistance witch hunt must be shut down entirely as soon as possible. Otherwise we will experience a replay of the anarchic collective violence of 1970 and 1920.

We do not need to fundamentally and permanently alter our institutions -- we only need to pause what we're doing wrong until the conflict burns out. Letting the Left and the Deep State agitate for overthrow of the freely and fairly elected government is absolute suicide for democracy, and nipping it in the bud requires no tolerance whatsoever for the coup plotters. The group that is more cohesive and zealous will win.

Immigration battle headed in amnesty-ers' favor

While it is difficult to predict far into the future on a contentious topic like immigration, we can at least get a feel for which direction it is headed -- toward the nationalist or toward the globalist side.

Immigrants are not a homogeneous population, and will be dealt with by either side according to what kind of sub-group they are. Some are better, some are worse. The better ones will be harder to deport, the worse ones will be easier.

Since immigrants will be dealt with on a group by group basis, each side of the battle will prioritize which groups they want to deal with first, second, and so on until the last. Each side has opposite goals, so they will try to deal with groups in the opposite order.

The nationalists will try to deport the least sympathetic groups first -- gangs, for example -- and hold off on the most sympathetic groups until the end -- like the anchor babies or DACA people who were brought here as children by their parents.

The globalists will try to permanently amnesty and/or give citizenship to the most sympathetic groups first, and hold off on citizenship for the least sympathetic groups until the end.

Because there are so many people in any of the immigrant groups, they must be dealt with as an entire collective, rather than person by person. "Dealing with" some group means giving something like a blanket amnesty and citizenship to them, or sending law enforcement to deport them en masse (however long that may take).

So, to get a feel for which side is winning, we see which immigrant groups are getting dealt with as a collective first. If it's the sympathetic groups, then the globalists are prevailing; if it's the gang members, it's the nationalists.

So far, there is no program to round up and ship out the gang members or criminals en masse. Of course they are receiving priority -- or at least they were back when we were paying attention, a few months ago -- but the enforcement is still person by person rather than a collective response to round them all up.

This criminal is removed, that criminal is removed, some other criminal is removed. If there were a collective action, we would all know about it and see it, either on the media or in real life. It would be impossible not to see organized teams going through the major cities rounding up the gangs and criminals en masse. It would look like Operation Wetback, which targeted people as a collective -- any illegal -- rather than person by person.

And yet the Secretary of Homeland Security, General Kelly from the globalist Pentagon boarding party, keeps getting closer and closer to dealing with the DACA people collectively. From this recent article:

[Kelly] said he would not deport Dreamers but warned that the policy could change when someone else takes over his job, making the only solution congressional action. He said there is clear bipartisan support for some form of permanent legalization and urged lawmakers to take the opportunity that the Trump administration is giving.

“I’m not going to let the Congress off the hook. You’ve got to solve it,” he said.

So he's passing the buck to Congress, but still moving the ball down the field for the globalist team.

Mr. Kelly also took a humanitarian view toward perhaps 250,000 migrants from El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua who have been protected from deportation for nearly two decades under temporary protected status, a program designed to make sure people don’t have to go back home to countries suffering natural disasters. ...

The secretary said he would try to encourage the Haitians to go back eventually. For the Central Americans, however, “it’s kind of hard” to root them out and send them back.

He suggested instead that Congress grant them “a way toward citizenship.”

Another group that is relatively sympathetic -- people fleeing natural disasters -- although you'd think by now, after 20 years, it's safe to go back. At any rate, not gang members or criminals, but relatively sympathetic.

Which immigrant groups are closer to getting dealt with collectively? The sympathetic ones, not the loathsome ones. That is the first domino to fall for the globalist side, and the last one for the nationalist side. But we're just at the start of things, so this cannot be a last domino. It must be the first to fall in favor of the globalist side.

You can see how the next groups will go in priority -- first the DACA people get citizenship, then the refugees of natural disasters get citizenship, then their families get citizenship, and so on, until the gang members get citizenship. What is up in the air is how far along this progression the action manages to reach. Maybe the gang members won't get citizenship -- the point is simply that the progression or prioritizing of which groups are going to be dealt with collectively appears to be the order that the globalist side favors.

If the nationalists had the upper hand, the gang members would get deported first, then those with criminal records would get deported, and so on until the DACA people got deported, and maybe the anchor babies after that. Again, what would be up in the air would be how far along this progression the action managed to reach. Maybe the DACA people and anchor babies would wind up as citizens -- the point is just that this is the order in which the groups would be dealt with collectively under nationalist dominance.

We began believing that the gang members would be collectively deported first, while the DACA people would be saved until the end -- as a bargaining chip, as an avoidance of bad PR right away, etc. Now it appears the reverse is happening: the DACA people will collectively get citizenship first, and the gang members will be saved until the end -- to bargain with ("Mess with our legislation, and we'll give citizenship to MS-13"), and to avoid bad PR up front.

Remember that it's not important when the DACA get amnesty or citizenship -- that is up in the air, as is how far along the chain they will get before stalling out. What matters is which group is first in line for getting dealt with collectively. It looks like DACA, and it's the globalists rather than nationalists who want to collectively deal with DACA first rather than last.

And sure, this is subject to change -- but only if the DACA people are tabled indefinitely, while the gangs move to the front of the line to be dealt with collectively. When and if we see anti-gang squads rounding up the immigrant gang members en masse, then we will know the nationalists have the upper hand in the battle.

In the meantime, if the globalists are succeeding, this framework tells us how to push back -- lobby your representatives (or friends, family, whoever) about dealing with DACA later, and that right now we have to remove all the gang members and criminals, and we won't even consider amnesty or citizenship for the DACA people until the gang deportation problem has already been solved. That's more or less what Trump ran on during the campaign, but the globalists sent by the Pentagon are reversing that so far.

June 11, 2017

Al Franken on Rob Reiner and gay pedo rings in Hollywood

From Breitbart writer Ryan Saavedra, here is a surreal bit by Al Franken during a roast of Rob Reiner at the NY Friars Club in 2000:

After joking about Carl Reiner having inappropriate boundaries with his baby son Rob, Franken goes on to joke about Carl inviting "his famous friends" in Hollywood to rape his child-aged son.

Rob Reiner looks nervous, frazzled, and fidgety throughout the whole thing. Not because he's shocked by the transgressive humor -- he's heard plenty worse in the entertainment business. I wasn't the only one who noticed such a bizarre reaction:

Now, the culture warriors on the Right are taking aim here at Franken for his taboo-breaking jokes. But in this case, truth may be stranger than fiction.

Here is an article from Radar Online, re-posted with comments at Blind Gossip, which both have a proven track record of accurate sources in the entertainment industry. It is about former child star Corey Haim naming one of his sexual abusers from when Haim was underage in the 1980s. Haim named his abuser to close friends before dying in 2010, and his friends so far have not revealed the name for fear of libel charges.

In the detective work of the many pages of comments, the only guess that makes any sense, and who has a known link to Haim during the mid-1980s, is Rob Reiner. (Charlie Sheen was a popular guess, but the article clearly says someone with a "family-man" facade -- obviously not Sheen, and perhaps a play on words, with Reiner staring in All in the Family.)

How is Reiner linked to Haim at the time of his abuse? From Wikipedia:

Haim had read for River Phoenix's role in Stand By Me while eating lunch in director Rob Reiner's backyard, and got the part the same day that he was offered Lucas. He later said he would not have changed his decision [to go instead with Lucas].

And of course Stand By Me stared another former child actor who keeps threatening to call out specific gay pedophiles who control Hollywood -- Corey Feldman, a close friend of Haim's. So there's the early link between Reiner and Feldman.

Was Al Franken joking that this kind of behavior started with Carl setting up his son Rob for abuse by Hollywood pedos, or was he thinly disguising a revelation that Rob himself was the kingpin of a pedo ring in Hollywood? (Or both -- that the practice ran in their Hollywood family?)

Franken is a liberal Jew who became famous in show business, so it's possible he doesn't disapprove of such behavior, and is enjoying the transgression on two levels -- violating the taboo against incest, pedophilia, and homosexuality, and sharing an earth-shattering secret in public, but one that only the in-group realize is truthful.

Then again, he is a do-gooder Minnesota type, so it's possible he disapproves of gay pedo rings in Hollywood, and is trying to shame Reiner as openly as possible while maintaining as much plausible deniability as possible (by switching Reiner's role from adult kingpin to child victim). Franken's tone sounds more dour than titillated, so I favor this explanation. Not all Jewish liberals from show-biz are so far out-there that they delight in thoughts about pedo rings.

This roast from 2000 was before the torrent of coverage in 2002 of Catholic Church abuse of underage boys. So Franken and Reiner might have felt safe to awkwardly take part in a joke about such things.

If you're on Twitter, post that Blind Gossip link whose comments repeatedly bring up Reiner's name as a strong lead for Corey Haim's abuser, and point out the link between Haim and Reiner (and Feldman) from Stand By Me. That is the far bigger story than Al Franken joking about a gay pedo ring (especially if he was only doing that bit in order to publicly hint at Reiner's dirty laundry).

Related post, "Prosecute pedophile rings to delegitimize Hollywood: Winning the culture war without warring over culture"

June 8, 2017


















Shitlib schemata: intact again. *deep sigh of relief*














June 3, 2017

Nationalist environmentalism



























