We won the election! 🇺🇸🗽🎇
Today is a great day! 😁😃😊😀👍
❤️ Trump! 😍😘
It's morning in America! 🌅🌇🌄
What's ahead? 🛣💵🏭💰🏙💸🌆👷👮♀️👷♀️👮
Ideas matter. We won because our ideas are better. 🤔📚
Thank you, Ann Coulter.
Adios, America: The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole explained the immigration issue and changed the election. Trump requested an advance copy on his own initiative, then made politically incorrect remarks about immigration to kick off his Presidential campaign.
American patriot Ann Coulter didn't stop there. After speaking at a Trump rally, she wrote: In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome!
Thank you Front Page Magazine and Breitbart News Network.
Thank you Project Veritas and Wikileaks.
Thank you, Donald Trump!
#Trump2016
#DrainTheSwamp
#BuildTheWall
#LockHerUp
#MakeAmericaGreatAgain
Messages (56)
I applaud your enthusiasm!
MAGA!!!!
America wins!
Lefties film themselves beating up a Trump supporter
https://twitter.com/ebolajulius2/status/796560854288310273
Trump Picks Top Climate Skeptic to Lead EPA Transition
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/trump-picks-top-climate-skeptic-to-lead-epa-transition/
> Myron Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute, is spearheading Trump’s transition plans for EPA, the sources said.
mp Picks Top Climate Skeptic to Lead EPA Transition
Off to a yuge start.
cool @ climate skeptic. and thx for all the links/quotes you've been posting.
there are a lot of rumors about who Trump is picking for stuff. some people say he's picking Democrats and RINOs for stuff. i'm not gonna worry about it too much until he actually does stuff.
RIP, TPP
https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/796790790169260032
> RIP, TPP: Republican leaders have confirmed that Obama’s trade agreement with 11 Pacific Rim nations is dead
Bannon for Trump Chief of Staff?
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/10/us/politics/transition-briefing-passing-the-presidency-to-donald-trump.html
> Steve Bannon, the conservative provocateur and Mr. Trump’s campaign chief, is now a leading candidate to become White House chief of staff, but he’d have to beat out another campaign veteran in the running, Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions.
I agree might as well wait until Trump actually does stuff. Bannon would be amazing though.
Kris Kobach added to Trump's transition team!
More from the above NYT article. (Here's an archive: http://archive.is/Bvbhv)
> Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state and an ardent opponent of immigration, has been added to Mr. Trump’s transition team, according to local news reports.
GLICK on Trump's potential impact on Israel
http://m.jpost.com/#article=6022NDcxQkZDMzk0QUQ2ODVBNjM5NUE2MTEyMDc1QjU3RDE=
> During his four-year term, Trump may appoint as many as four out of nine justices.
...
> Vice President-elect Mike Pence is one of the most pro-Israel policy-makers in America. Former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is an outspoken ally of Israel and of the US-Israel alliance.
> Likewise, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, former senator Rick Santorum, retired general Mike Flynn, and former UN ambassador John Bolton are all extraordinary champions of the US alliance with Israel.
> Trump’s Israel affairs advisers during the campaign, David Friedman and Jason Greenblatt, are also among the strongest advocates of the US-Israel alliance who have arisen in decades.
...
> In a Republican presidential debate in 2011, Gingrich referred to the Palestinians as an “invented people,” and noted that they indoctrinate their children to perceive Jews as subhuman and seek their annihilation.
Ann Coulter on why Trump won
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0asyXVCGSs
> I know you've been playing some immigrants in America saying, "Oh, what's he going to do to Muslims and what will he do to us?", and the main point is, can we think about *Americans* for a little while? We've been thinking about the poor illegal aliens and the poor Muslim refugees who aren't living in this country already. But what about the people already here? Immigration is just a government policy like any other government policy, but it's the only one that politicians and the media don't even think about saying, "This should be designed to help the people who already live here."
Over 100 hate crime hoaxes, documented by Breitbart
http://www.breitbart.com/milo/2016/05/02/hate-crime-hoaxes-growing-epidemic/
> Little wonder that there’s been such an epidemic of hate crime hoaxes in the past few years, particularly among regressive activists on university campuses. We’ve seen students scrawl swastikas on the doors of their own dorm rooms, send themselves anonymous rape threats, and falsely accuse fraternities of queer-bashing.
...
> As British journalist Douglas Murray likes to say, the Left has a supply-and-demand problem with bigotry. There simply isn’t enough of it to go around, so reporters have to go “rape shopping” like Sabrina Erdely did for Rolling Stone, or they have to enlarge the definitions of “racism” and “homophobia” to include minuscule perceived infractions, called “microaggressions.”
> If you live in an Anglosphere nation, you are living in one of the most tolerant, peaceful societies in recorded history. Attitudes towards women’s rights, gay rights, and the rights of other races have never been more progressive. Among Millennials, attitudes to abortion, gay marriage, and other social issues are vastly more liberal than their parents. If history is any guide, the next generation is likely to be even more socially liberal.
> With the Left reduced to chasing imaginary microaggressions and pizza-shop owners who’d rather not cater lesbian weddings, it’s little wonder that they have to turn to hoaxes to convince the public that bigotry is still alive and well.
More from Ann Coulter CBC interview
Partial transcript I made from the previously-linked video
CBC:
>> Is [Trump] going to deport millions?
Ann Coulter:
> Yes. I never understood this idea that, is there a time limit to it? I mean, we don't need a deportation force. They don't have to be gone within the first week, but he's explained very clearly. Just let ICE -- that's our immigration enforcement outfit -- do their job. They're being prevented from doing their job now.
>> Are they? There've been more people deported under Obama than anyone else in the past, no?
> No, that's a myth. They changed the definition of deportation to include people turned away at the border. No, it has gone down dramatically under Obama, and President Bush wasn't exactly a warrior against illegal immigration. He tried to pass amnesty. Both parties have completely let the nation down on defending the borders and protecting Americans, and just allowing Immigration to do its job. Yeah, eventually we'll get to millions.
>> What about Muslims? He's been kind of all over the map on that one. What has to happen on Muslims entering the country? Anything?
> Well, there are lots of people who do not live in the United States. Billions, I believe. None of them have a Constitutional right to move to America. It is the President's authority to determine, and can have broad categories. If we want to, we can say, "Only redheads." We can say, "No redheads."
> The idea is: let's take people who are good for this country. Not only people who are smart, and educated, and not likely to go on welfare, but people who aren't likely to commit terrorist acts against us. it seems like common sense.
>> You don't think he should rule all Muslims, altogether?
> No one, I think, seriously understood him to mean that, even when he said he was calling for a ban on Muslims. As my friend Peter Thiel said, the media refuse to take Trump seriously, but they insist on taking him literally. Whereas everyone else listening to him, like me, take him seriously but not literally. Look, this is a figure of -- I never thought it meant every single Muslim. Yeah, OK, this is the basic policy --
>> He's going to be President now, so --
> There will be exceptions. But we got the point of it by saying that.
>> Yeah, but, as President, we'll have to take him literally, right?
> No. This is pretending not to understand the English language in order to attack someone. It's been done to me my whole life. It's very annoying. It was never intended that way. Yes, there will be a general policy against Muslims, and yet, there will be exceptions.
>> What about... the "lock her up" crowd, who have been very vocal for the last few months. Does he prosecute Hillary Clinton? Yes or no.
> Possibly. [She's] not above the law in this.
>> Should he?
> The FBI is looking at crimes that may have been committed, and just because you run for President and just because you're a Clinton you don't get a pass on breaking the law. It's not a question of whether he prosecutes, it's what the FBI finds.
Michigan middle-school students threatened by police & teachers for chanting "build the wall"
https://twitter.com/CNN/status/796880215674855428
> This video shows students at a Michigan middle school chanting "build the wall"
>The footage went viral on November 9
>The school confirmed that the incident happened and released a statement
>Which said they are working with the students to help them understand the impact of their words
>They assured parents that the school will work with law enforcement on responding to any potential threats involving students
Breitbart expanding to Germany & France
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-trump-strategy-idUSKBN1342TP
> The right-wing Breitbart News Network is expanding its U.S. operations and launching sites in Germany and France, its U.S. editor-in-chief told Reuters
Siiiiiiiiiiiiiick
Breitbart expanding to Germany & France
> Social media platform Twitter banned [Milo Yiannopoulos] in July for inciting harassment of the actress Leslie Jones.
False. As usual, lots of lies in that story, but the lede looks true.
Grubhub boss tells pro-Trump employees to resign
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/11/10/boss-tells-pro-trump-employees-to-resign.html
> If you voted for Donald Trump, you may not feel welcomed at Grubhub.
> The CEO of Grubhub, an online food delivery service, sent a company wide email Wednesday suggesting employees who agree with President-elect Donald Trump’s behaviors and his campaign rhetoric should resign.
> “If you do not agree with this statement then please reply to this email with your resignation because you have no place here,” wrote Matt Maloney, Co-Founder of Grubhub. “We do not tolerate hateful attitudes on our team."
> Mark Horstman, co-founder of Manager Tools, says if he were advising Mr. Maloney -- he would have recommended he not send the note particularly because he's the CEO of a public company.
> "That note could be construed by his employees that someone who voted for Trump could be fired," said Horstman, who suspects other CEOs have sent similar notes. "It has a chilling effect on people's perception of their rights."
> While Maloney seemingly calls out Trump supporters at his company on the one hand, the young CEO boasted about the company’s supportive and inclusive culture on the other, saying he “firmly believes that we must bring together different perspectives.”
Grubhub's CEO is an ex-Googler.
greatagain.gov
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/greatagain.gov-trumps-campaign-slogan-becomes-a-government-website/article/2607093
> Donald Trump's iconic "Make America Great Again" campaign slogan is now the domain name for the president-elect's official transition website, where Americans can apply to work for his administration and familiarize themselves with his policy proposals.
http://greatagain.gov
The hollowness of the PC creed
https://www.facebook.com/nskinsella/posts/10154088364883181
Some good comments from Stephen Kinsella:
> People are sick of political correctness and social-justice warriors. They are tired of the speech codes on campuses, the double standards of the left.
> As the hollowness of the PC creed becomes more and more evident, they are resorting more and more to shouting down criticism, with speech codes, trigger warnings, safe spaces, shaming of dissent (hence the hidden Trump vote), and yelling and volume and stopping speeches by other voices.
> We are witnessing the thrashings of a dying beast--the PC-SJW left, as it becomes a parody of itself."
Coffin Handbills
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffin_Handbills
The "coffin handbills" were pamphlets libelling Andrew Jackson during the 1828 presidential election. Really bizarre stuff, like this:
> [one pamphlet] accused Jackson of "atrocious and unnatural acts" such acts including slaughtering 1,000 unarmed Native Americans, taking a nap in the midst of their corpses, and eating a dozen of them for breakfast.
A lot like the attacks on Trump.
It wasn't the White vote that won the election for Trump: it was the Black, Latino, and poor vote
http://www.therebel.media/wasn_t_white_vote_trump_s_big_gains_with_blacks_hispanics_women_youth_poor
I didn't check this out, but it looks interesting and plausible.
> Trump won 58 per cent of the white vote, to Clinton’s 37 per cent. Sounds huge, but actually, pretty normal these days. And look again — it’s only 1 per cent higher than what Romney got.
> Donald Trump’s support amongst white Americans only went up by one per cent, and if that were the only boost he got, he would have lost the election.
> Donald Trump won because he had big gains with minorities.
> Starting with black voters, he was up to 8 per cent from Romney's one per cent. Of course, the Democrats still dominate black voters, but that shift is a major breakthrough.
> The media told us Trump was a vicious anti-Latino bigot. Really? 29 per cent of Latinos didn’t think so. Maybe Hispanics who legally immigrated to America and became American citizens the proper way don’t like illegals sneaking over, including, as Trump accurately said, criminals.
> Look at the youngest voters — 18 to 29. The Millennials. Sure, they voted more for Clinton than for Trump. But Trump’s numbers are 5 per cent higher than Romney got.
> Look at the poorest Americans of all — people earning less than $30,000 a year. That’s unemployed, that’s barely employed, that’s part time jobs, that’s people having a really tough go of things.
> And of all the numbers I’ve shown you so far, it’s the one with the biggest shift.
> Sure, the Democrats still won the poorest of the poor, 53 per cent to 41 per cent. But while Mitt Romney got only got 25 per cent of these people. Trump got 41 per cent.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/adviser-says-trump-wont-rip-up-iran-deal-signals-he-may-not-move-embassy/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
some of Trump's people are squishy as hell. we'll have to see how things go...
Election could still result in Trump-Clinton tie: analyst
http://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-election-tie-519696
> ELECTION COULD STILL RESULT IN TRUMP-CLINTON TIE: ANALYST
> As of Thursday, three states remain electoral toss-ups, according to Associated Press projections: New Hampshire, Michigan and Arizona. If Hillary Clinton wins the combined 31 electoral votes from those states, she will still be short of Donald Trump’s 279 votes, more than the 270 needed to win the presidency.
> However, AP analyst Michael McDonald, who teaches political science at the University of Florida and runs the United States Elections Project, an election statistics website, says he is skeptical that Trump won Wisconsin, as the AP projected. If that state flips for Clinton and she wins the other toss-up states, she and Trump could be in a tie at 269 votes each.
The left is still cheating at the polls...
I hope Bannon or Miller advise Trump away from these disastrous Israel policies.
Trump's First Day in Office / effects of memes
Check out this 40-second video: Trump's First Day in Office I find it oddly funny.
I wonder how much these memes and meme videos did to turn the tide of the election. Yes, there were great videos explaining his policies rationally, but things like this and (Can't Stump the Trump #4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKH6PAoUuD0) must have had an effect.
What do you think? Are these kinds of memes effective? A waste of time? Drive the culture in a worse direction? Better direction, overall, because they're pro-trump? Should people be making these kinds of videos instead of "Make America Strong Again"?
Trump sending mixed messages to Israel
http://www.timesofisrael.com/trump-hails-israel-as-beacon-of-hope
> US president-elect Donald Trump hailed Israel as a “beacon of hope to countless people” on Friday in his first public message to the country since his upset victory.
> “Israel and America share so many of the same values, such as freedom of speech, freedom of worship and the importance of creating opportunities for all citizens to pursue their dreams,” Trump said in the message published by the Israel Hayom newspaper.
> “Israel is the one true democracy and defender of human rights in the Middle East and a beacon of hope to countless people.”
So far so good, but then...
> He added that he hoped his administration would play a “significant role in helping the parties to achieve a just, lasting peace,” saying that any deal would have to be directly negotiated between the two sides.
WTF is this bullshit, @realDonaldTrump? That isn't at all consistent with what you said above. How do you expect Israel, our greatest ally and the only moral country in the region, to "negotiate" with the very savages who want to wipe them off the face of the earth?
@#7541 in general you want to compete at stuff where ideas matter more.
but in elections you want to get votes from people who don't even know what MAGA stands for (one of the FB comments on the 1st day in office vid), so there's room for both. there's way more people who can do memes than who can do ideas, though, so working on ideas is better if you can.
Trump personally is kinda bad on Israel (but more out of ignorance than hatred). But he's made campaign promises to be good on Israel which he'll make some effort to keep.
Nice explanation of why the popular vote is irrelevant
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2016/11/09/your-candidate-got-more-of-the-popular-vote-irrelevant/
1.4 million Obama amnesty applicants on deportation hit list
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/1.4-million-obama-amnesty-applicants-on-deportation-hit-list/article/2607171
> Some 1.4 million illegals who followed President Obama's request to sign up for two controversial amnesty programs could be among the first to face deportation under the new administration.
> The reason: In exchange for getting into the two programs, they handed over their identities, home addresses, and admitted to being in the United States illegally, making them the easiest to find and legally deport.
What do you guys think? Should ICE deport the illegal aliens that signed up for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferred_Action_for_Parents_of_Americans ? My sense is that ICE should instead focus on the illegals that *didn't* sign up, because they were less blatantly breaking the law.
> Some 1.4 million illegals who followed President Obama's request to sign up for two controversial amnesty programs could be among the first to face deportation under the new administration.
> The reason: In exchange for getting into the two programs, they handed over their identities, home addresses, and admitted to being in the United States illegally, making them the easiest to find and legally deport.
Wow, think about it, Obama set them up for that.
Do you know child benefit in the UK is used to track children? People sign up to the state for freebies then they get shafted.
It's interesting how the left and right kind of work together in that manner, they are like both sides of a coin of evil. Leftists complain of the right, but it's the left that puts them in their hands.
An example is welfare state, the benefits the left gives make people dependent on the state and incompetent and allow the right to make a tragedy out of their lives.
But then people get angry with the right and don't understand how the left is actually making it possible for the right to do so called fascist tyranny on them.
Sanction of the evil!
Trump Explains How To Make Mexico Pay For Wall.
http://www.vdare.com/articles/trump-explains-how-to-make-mexico-pay-for-wall-msm-conservatism-inc-dont-want-to-hear-does-cruz
Interesting ideas here, including blocking and taxing remittances to Mexico.
> If you wish to pressure the Mexican government, preventing people from sending money back to Mexico accomplishes this purpose.
The leftist media reactions to Reagan were the same as Trump
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/11/the-great-liberal-freakout.php
> The Great Liberal Freakout is under way, as we’ve noted below. Here’s my haul.
> The head of the Joint Center for Political Studies, which the Washington Post describes as a “respected liberal think tank,” reacted to Trump’s landslide thus: “When you consider that in the climate we’re in—rising violence, the Ku Klux Klan—it is exceedingly frightening.” Castro, still with us, said right before the election: “We sometimes have the feeling that we are living in the time preceding the election of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany.” Claremont College professor John Roth wrote: “I could not help remembering how economic turmoil had conspired with Nazi nationalism and militarism—all intensified by Germany’s defeat in World War I—to send the world reeling into catastrophe… It is not entirely mistaken to contemplate our post-election state with fear and trembling.” Esquire writer Harry Stein says that the voters who supported Trump were like the “good Germans” in “Hitler’s Germany.” Sociologist Alan Wolfe is up in the New Left Review: “The worst nightmares of the American left appear to have come true.” And he doubles down in The Nation: “[T]he United States has embarked on a course so deeply reactionary, so negative and mean-spirited, so chauvinistic and self-deceptive that our times may soon rival the McCarthy era.” The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, keeper of the “Doomsday Clock” that purported to judge the risk of nuclear annihilation, has moved the hands on the clock from seven to four minutes before midnight.
> Oh wait, did I say this was the reaction to Trump?? Sorry—these are what the left was saying the day after Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. Some things never change.
Fact-checking claims of violence by Trump-supporters
https://twitter.com/i/moments/796396412325871616
> Don't believe anyone who tells you a Muslim person, or a gay person, or a black person, or whatever "oppressed minority" was "too afraid" to report a horrific hate crime they endured to the police. This is, by far, the most popular excuse used to justify spreading unsubstantiated rumors on sicial media to try to depit Trump supporters as rabid monsters who were just waiting for the opportunity to attack everyone different who crossed their paths.
This reminds me of people who just want to automatically take the woman's side in any dispute. This approach doesn't correct errors.
> If there's no proof, it didn't happen.
Not 100% correct, but a useful first assumption.
> If you [had] definitive evidence that Trump supporters are as horrible as you believe they are, you'd make sure it's documented so no one can question your story. Every single publication in the country would jump at the opportunity to spread what happened to you far and wide. If you really truly believe Trump supporters are all mini-Hitlers and what happened to you will make everyone finally believe it, you'd want to do everything in your power to make sure people believe your message.
> And yet, in every single instance of a "TRUMP SUPPORTERS ATTACKED ME FOR BEING DIFFERENT!" hate crime so far, the alleged victim either refused to report the "crime," or the police department has forced the "victim" to admit it was a hoax.
The PD doesn't "force" them. They abandon their lies when their story doesn't hold up.
> The chaos in the streets is happenign, for sure. But it's leftist protesters making up fake hate crimes to make everyone panic and burning down cars.
Don't forget attacking people and beating them up.
The
Trump lesson drawing Hitler parallels costs Bay Area teacher
http://www.montereyherald.com/government-and-politics/20161111/trump-lesson-drawing-hitler-parallels-costs-bay-area-teacher
> A history teacher at Mountain View High School has been placed on paid leave after drawing parallels between Republican President-elect Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler in his lesson plan.
Go Mountain View! I’m surprised they would do that, even temporarily.
NYT dishonesty @Trump & popular vote
The NYT is so dishonest:
> In one of the odder moments on the “60 Minutes” interview, Mr. Trump seemed to suggest that the president should be chosen by the popular vote, not the Electoral College. That would mean his rival, Hillary Clinton, would be inaugurated in January.
No it wouldn't. If the popular vote mattered, both campaigns would have used their resources very differently, and it's not straightforward to predict what
the outcome would have been.
[What Trump actually said]
(http://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-donald-trump-family-melania-ivanka-lesley-stahl/):
> I would rather see it where you went with simple votes. You know, you get 100 million votes and somebody else gets 90 million votes and you win.
Slate lying about Trump "access hollywood" tape
One example of how just straight-up lies:
> A few weeks later, the Washington Post published a video in which Trump confessed to habitual sexual assault, boasting to Access Hollywood’s Billy Bush that he routinely grabs and kisses women against their will.
False. See for yourself in the transcript.
Dave Chappelle also pointed this lie:
> Chappelle further shocked the New York crowd by defending Trump. He took issue with the media stating as fact that Trump had admitted committing sexual assault in the recorded conversation. “Sexual assault? It wasn’t. He said, ‘And when you’re a star, they let you do it.’ That phrase implies consent. I just don’t like the way the media twisted that whole thing. Nobody questioned it.”
Another comment on popular vote
http://excessofdemocracy.com/blog/2016/11/hillary-clintons-popular-vote-margin-is-meaningless-in-every-way-except-pithy-tweets
Alan Dershowitz Defends Steve Bannon: ‘Not Legitimate To Call Somebody An Anti-Semite Because You Disagree With Their Policies’
http://www.breitbart.com/jerusalem/2016/11/15/alan-dershowitz-steve-bannon-smears-not-legitimate-call-somebody-anti-semite-disagree-policies/
> I think the larger problem – and it’s a very complicated one today – is how you assess a person who himself might not have negative characteristics, but who has widespread appeal to people who do. And I think that problem exists on the right and the left. I think there are left-wing candidates who appeal to some of the worst bigots on the hard left. Anti-Semites on the hard left. Anti-Israel people on the hard left. And I think the same thing is probably true of some very right-wing conservatives who appeal vertently or inadvertently to people whose values they probably themselves don’t agree with.
Bill Clinton tried to fix HRC's failure to connect with rural white voters
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/bill-clintons-lonely-one-man-effort-to-win-white-working-class-voters/article/2607228
> [Bill Clinton's Nov 6] comments in Michigan marked the last leg of a lonely, one-man war he launched earlier in the election to appeal to working-class and white rural voters, whom senior Clinton staffers reportedly told him were not worth the time or effort.
> ...
> "In the final weeks of the campaign, a despondent Mr. Clinton held a flurry of his own events in Ohio, Iowa, the Florida Panhandle and Wisconsin, talking to the white voters who like him but who view his wife with distrust," the New York Times reported.
> ...
> "Bill Clinton's viewpoint of fighting for the working-class white voters was often dismissed with a hand wave by senior members of the team as a personal vendetta to win back the voters who elected him, from a talented but aging politician who simply refused to accept the new Democratic map," the report added.
> ...
> The Clinton team never named a rural council, ignoring both the warnings of the former president and Obama's 2008 and 2012 campaign strategies, and had only one "staffer in Brooklyn" dedicated to rural outreach, Politico noted. That staffer was not even tapped for that assignment until the final weeks of the election, the report added.
Another comment on popular vote
Neil P's post linked to http://excessofdemocracy.com/blog/2016/11/hillary-clintons-popular-vote-margin-is-meaningless-in-every-way-except-pithy-tweets
This is the best explanation I've seen of why the popular vote is irrelevant. One nice quote:
> "[I]f the popular vote mattered, then campaigns would be designed differently. The most common analogy is to look at the 1960 World Series. The Yankees outscored the Pirates 55 runs to 27 runs. But the Pirates won the Series, 4 games to 3. That's because it doesn't matter if the Yankees won a game 16-3 or 12-0; the only thing that matters is winning 4 games."
Also, Trump said it succinctly (as usual) in a tweet today:
> If the election were based on total popular vote I would have campaigned in N.Y. Florida and California and won even bigger and more easily
USA Today lies @Trump saying "stop it"
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2016/11/15/twitter-says-its-cracking-down-on-hate-speech/93822902/
> [Twitter's] effort comes as an uptick in biased graffiti, assaults and other incidents have been reported in the news and on social media since Election Day, prompting president-elect Donald Trump to call for people to "stop it" during a 60 Minutes interview on Sunday night.
Trump did say "stop it", but what prompted it was interviewer Lesley Stahl repeatedly pressing him about unsubstantiated rumors of assaults by his supporters. Now the establishment media is spinning Trump's generous statement as evidence othat his supporters are assaulting people, when in fact (almost?) all the violence has been from the left.
The transcript makes this clear:
> When we interviewed him on Friday afternoon Mr. Trump said he had not heard about some of the acts of violence that are popping up in his name… or against his supporters. Nor he said had he heard about reports of racial slurs and personal threats against African Americans, Latinos and gays by some of his supporters.
> Donald Trump: I am very surprised to hear that-- I hate to hear that, I mean I hate to hear that--
> Lesley Stahl: But you do hear it?
> Donald Trump: I don’t hear it—I saw, I saw one or two instances…
> Lesley Stahl: On social media?
> Donald Trump: But I think it’s a very small amount. Again, I think it’s--
> Lesley Stahl: Do you want to say anything to those people?
> Donald Trump: I would say don’t do it, that’s terrible, ‘cause I’m gonna bring this country together.
> Lesley Stahl: They’re harassing Latinos, Muslims--
> Donald Trump: I am so saddened to hear that. And I say, “Stop it.” If it-- if it helps. I will say this, and I will say right to the cameras: Stop it.
He called Clintons " Good People " I don't want to hurt them
Why the Left Should Be Terrified of a Trump Presidency
http://observer.com/2016/11/why-the-left-should-be-terrified-of-a-trump-presidency/
> The big fear among Trump advocates and critics alike was that the man is a loose cannon, far too volatile to be allowed near the nuclear button. What we see instead is that he is weaving together a basket of *dependables*. For better or for far worse, each and every person named is a visionary (or an ideologue, if that is more palatable) who views the American left not as the loyal opposition but as Public Enemy No. 1.
I approve..
> [Trump] has neither an interest nor inclination in negotiating with the left.
Good for Trump. "In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit." -- Ayn Rand
> For many years, progressivism had complete control over the boundaries of racial discourse in America
True.
> The left has lost control of the mic, and it is hard to see what other weapons they have in terms of discrediting their foes.
"lost control of the mic" -- good way to put it.
> Few Americans are comfortable with the idea that someone should be denied work because of their race. To deny this is unequivocally to be a racist and simply a bad person. But to claim that this principle demands that one also accept unlimited immigration from oversea nations filled with people who have (frankly warranted) hatred for the country that has been bombing their neighbors, is a bit of a stretch. Yet to avoid being called a racist in contemporary discourse, one needs to accept both these scenarios. For many, by this point they simply prefer to be called a name.
Righht.
Why the Left Should Be Terrified of a Trump Presidency
> But to claim that this principle demands that one also accept unlimited immigration from oversea nations filled with people who have (frankly warranted) hatred for the country that has been bombing their neighbors,
Wait, the hatred is not warranted.
> For many, by this point they simply prefer to be called a name.
This I agree with.
The tarring of Steve Bannon
http://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/nov/15/the-tarring-of-steve-bannon/
> Just because white nationalists and racists support Mr. Trump does not mean the president-elect nor his staff members support them. Like Mr. Trump, the KKK also endorsed President Reagan in 1984, and I cannot imagine anyone would dare accuse Mr. Reagan of such incendiary views.
I can easily imagine people accusing Reagan of racism, but I think it's still effective to remind people that the KKK also endorsed Reagan.
It could also be good to remind people of the awful people that endorsed Obama, or that Obama endorsed, like Saul Alinsky and Jeremiah Wright.
Breitbart’s Pollak, Defending Bannon, Calls Out NPR’s ‘Racist Programming’
http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2016/11/16/stephen-k-bannon-joel-pollak-npr-racist/
Calls out NPR as racist :) Emphasis below is mine.
> I think that we can talk about individual articles out of the tens of thousands at Breitbart, but, you know, NPR is taxpayer-funded, and has an entire section of its programming, a regular feature, called Code Switch, which from my perspective is a racist program. I’m looking here at the latest article, which aired on NPR, calling the election results “nostalgia for a whiter America.” So NPR has racial and racist programming that I am required to pay for as a taxpayer.
> INSKEEP: [Bannon] criticized feminists. He said, “Women that would lead this country would be pro-family, they would have husbands, they would love their children” — and I’m just reading the quote here — “they wouldn’t be a bunch of dykes that came from the Seven Sisters schools.” What’s he driving at, there?
> POLLAK: I don’t know. But *there’s a political correctness in this country that would say that if you said that once on a radio show, that you should be drummed out of public life.* I would defy you to find a person in the LGBTQ community who has not used that term, either in an endearing sense, or in a flippant, jovial, colloquial sense. I don’t think you can judge Steve Bannon’s views. What you can judge him [on] is how he conducted himself at Breitbart. And he brought a gay conservative journalist like Milo Yiannopoulos on board. And Milo has brought gay conservatives into the media, into the debate. At the Republican National Convention, Breitbart co-hosted a party for gay conservatives. So that’s not something you do if you’re anti-gay.
Agreed.
Trump responds to allegations of inappropriate conduct with women (Oct, 2016)
Remarks as prepared for delivery by Trump in FL on Oct 13, 2016 (video) (emphasis mine):
> [T]he slander and libels that was just last night thrown at me by the Clinton Machine, the New York Times, and other media outlets, [was] part of a concerted, coordinated and vicious attack.
> It is not coincidence that these attacks come at the exact same moment, and all together at the same time, as the WikiLeaks documents expose the massive international corruption of the Clinton Machine – including 2,000 more emails this morning
> **These claims about me of inappropriate conduct with women are totally and absolutely false** – and the Clinton Machine knows it is. It’s all fabricated. It’s pure fiction and outright lies. These events never happened. **The claims are preposterous, ludicrous and defy truth, common sense and logic.**
> We already have substantial evidence to dispute these lies, and it will be made public in the appropriate way and at the appropriate time. **These lies come from outlets whose past stories, and past claims, have already been discredited. The media outlets did not even attempt to confirm the most basic facts, because even a simple investigation would have shown these are false smears.**
> What’s happening to me is no different than what happened to other innocent people, like the story written in Rolling Stone Magazine ...
> Six months ago, the New York Times wrote a massive story attacking me, and the central witness they used said the story was false, that she was quoted inaccurately. She said I was a great guy, and never made those remarks.
> We demanded a retraction, but they refused to print it – just like they refused to print the comments from another source who praised me in her book, or the words of another wonderful woman who said nice things.
> That story was a fraud and an embarrassment to the New York Times... Now today, the same two discredited writers... tell a totally fabricated and false story that supposedly took place on an airplane more than 30 years ago – another ridiculous tale, no witnesses, no nothing.
> Also, a writer from people magazine who wrote a story on Melania and myself on our first anniversary. The story was lovely but last night we hear, after 12 years, a new claim that I made inappropriate advances. I ask a very simple question, **why wasn’t it part of the story that appeared 12 years ago?** I was one of the biggest stars on television, and it would have been one of the biggest stories of the year. Take a look at her words. It would have been the headline. **No, it only appears 26 days before the election.**
> This invented account has already been debunked by eyewitness testimony – the very witness identified by the author has said the story is entirely false.
> This weekend, the New York Times published a full-page hit piece with another claim from an individual who has been totally discredited based on the emails and letters she has sent to our office over the years. But **the New York Times refused to use the evidence we presented them. Others have likewise were presented with this story, but after seeing the evidence we provided, refused to print it.**
> These attacks are orchestrated by the Clintons and their media allies. They are false and slanderous in every respect. We are now less than a month from the most important election of our lifetime – indeed one the most important elections in modern history – and the polls show us in a dead heat. And the new Rasmussen poll shows us 2 points ahead.
> So now, the Clinton Machine, has put forward a small handful of people out of the tens of thousands I have met, worked with and employed – in order to make wild and false allegations that fail to meet even the most basic test of common sense. Again, this is nothing more than an attempt to destroy our movement and for the Clintons to keep their corrupt control over this government.
Why Evangelicals voted for Trump
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2016/11/16/the_god_that_failed_132363.html (emphasis in the original):
> [Y]ou may wonder why [Evangelical Christians] voted in historic numbers for a man like Trump. Perhaps, as some have suggested, they are hypocrites. Perhaps they are merely partisans. But I will make a further suggestion: They are scared.
> Consider that over the course of the past few years, Democrats and liberals have: booed the inclusion of God in their platform at the 2012 convention (this is disputed, but it is the perception); endorsed a regulation that would allow transgendered students to use the bathroom and locker room corresponding to their identity; attempted to force small businesses to cover drugs they believe induce abortions; attempted to force nuns to provide contraceptive coverage; forced Brendan Eich to step down as chief executive officer of Mozilla due to his opposition to marriage equality; fined a small Christian bakery over $140,000 for refusing to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding; vigorously opposed a law in Indiana that would provide protections against similar regulations – despite having overwhelmingly supported similar laws when they protected Native American religious rights – and then scoured the Indiana countryside trying to find a business that would be affected by the law before settling upon a small pizza place in the middle of nowhere and harassing the owners. In 2015, the United States solicitor general suggested that churches might lose their tax exempt status if they refused to perform same-sex marriages. In 2016, the Democratic nominee endorsed repealing the Hyde Amendment, thereby endorsing federal funding for elective abortions.
Good list of grievances.
> Democrats seemingly took up the position endorsed by critical legal theorist Mark Tushnet:
>> The culture wars are over; they lost, we won. . . . For liberals, the question now is how to deal with the losers in the culture wars. That’s mostly a question of tactics. My own judgment is that taking a hard line (“You lost, live with it”) is better than trying to accommodate the losers, who – remember – defended, and are defending, positions that liberals regard as having no normative pull at all. Trying to be nice to the losers didn’t work well after the Civil War, nor after Brown. (And taking a hard line seemed to work reasonably well in Germany and Japan after 1945.) I should note that LGBT activists in particular seem to have settled on the hard-line approach, while some liberal academics defend more accommodating approaches. When specific battles in the culture wars were being fought, it might have made sense to try to be accommodating after a local victory, because other related fights were going on, and a hard line might have stiffened the opposition in those fights. But the war’s over, and we won.
"the war's over, and we won" - I wonder if the right has to be careful of taking this attitude? I don't think so, because the right is actually right. For one thing, the right is way more open to discussion than the left. The right knows how to make arguments and therefore doesn't need to rely on shaming and silencing people who advocate different ideas.
>> [Note from Josh: Tushnet's post ends with. "Of course all bets are off if Donald Trump becomes President. But if he does, constitutional doctrine is going to be the least of our worries.". This is not quoted in the main article.]
> An aggressive approach to the culture wars and the sneering condescension of the Samantha Bees and John Olivers of the world may be *warranted*, but it also probably cost liberals their best chance in a generation to take control of the Supreme Court.
That sneering condescension was never warranted, but even if they thought it was, it cost them.
Scott Alexander: The Left is Still Crying Wolf
Good piece by Scott Alexander called "You are Still Crying Wolf". Here are some excerpts (emphasis in the original):
> Trump made gains among blacks. He made gains among Latinos. He made gains among Asians. The only major racial group where he didn’t get a gain of greater than 5% was white people. I want to repeat that: the group where Trump’s message resonated least over what we would predict from a generic Republican was the white population.
> Nor was there some surge in white turnout. I don’t think we have official numbers yet, but by eyeballing what data we have it looks very much like whites turned out in equal or lesser numbers this year than in 2012, 2008, and so on.
Good point.
> Trump’s official message has been the same vague feel-good pro-diversity rhetoric as any other politician.
True.
The post quotes from a Washington Times article about Trump holding an "LGBTs for Trump" rainbow flag handed to him by someone in the crowd.
>> Within seconds, Mr. Trump was walking around the platform with the rainbow flag in his hands and moments later unfurled it in full display. You could see a huge smile on Mr. Trump’s face as he walked to both sides of the stage to proudly hold up the rainbow flag announcing support from the gay and lesbian community.
There's a great photo of this in the post.
> Trump has gone from campaign stop to campaign stop talking about how much he likes and respects minorities and wants to fight for them.
> And if you believe he’s lying, fine. Yet I notice that people accusing Trump of racism use the word “openly” like a tic. He’s never just “racist” or “white supremacist”. He’s always “openly racist” and “openly white supremacist”.
Good point.
> What if there’s a candidate who does something more like, say, go to a KKK meeting and say that black people are inferior and only whites are real Americans?
> We might want to use words like “openly racist” or “openly white supremacist” to describe him. And at that point, nobody will listen, because we wasted “openly white supremacist” on the guy who tweets pictures of himself eating a taco on Cinco de Mayo while saying “I love Hispanics!”
Yup.
> 1. Is Trump getting a lot of his support from white supremacist organizations?
> No, because there are not enough organized white supremacists to make up “a lot” of anyone’s support.
> According to Wikipedia on KKK membership:
>> As of 2016, the Anti-Defamation League puts total Klan membership nationwide at around 3,000, while the Southern Poverty Law Center puts it at 6,000 members total.
> The KKK is really small. They could all stay in the same hotel with a bunch of free rooms left over. Or put another way: the entire membership of the KKK is less than the daily readership of this blog.
Good examples to make it concrete.
> If you Google “trump KKK”, you get 14.8 million results. I know that Google’s list of results numbers isn’t very accurate. Yet even if they’re inflating the numbers by 1000x, and there were only about 14,000 news articles about the supposed Trump-KKK connection this election, there are still *two to three articles about a Trump-KKK connection for every single Klansman in the world*.
> 2. Is Trump getting a lot of his support from online white nationalists and the alt-right?
> No, for the same reason.
[snip evidence for estimate]
> Taking into account the existence of some kind of long tail of alt-right websites, I still think the population of the online US alt-right is somewhere in the mid five-digits, maybe 50,000 or so.
Fair.
> 50,000 is more than the 5,000 Klansmen. But it’s still 0.02% of the US population. It’s still about the same order of magnitude as the Nation of Islam, which has about 30,000 – 60,000 members, or the Church of Satan, which has about 20,000. It’s not quite at the level of the Hare Krishnas, who boast 100,000 US members. This is not a “voting bloc” in the sense of somebody it’s important to appeal to. It isn’t a “political force” (especially when it’s mostly, as per the 4chan stereotype, unemployed teenagers in their parents’ basements.)
Again, great examples to make it concrete.
> So the mainstream narrative is that Trump is okay with alienating minorities (= 118 million people), whites who abhor racism and would never vote for a racist (if even 20% of whites, = 40 million people), most of the media, most business, and most foreign countries – in order to win the support of about 50,000 poorly organized and generally dysfunctional people, many of whom are too young to vote anyway.
I think that's a killshot. Great point.
> Caring about who the KKK or the alt-right supports is a lot like caring about who Satanists support. It’s not something you would do if you wanted to understand real political forces. It’s only something you would do if you want to connect an opposing candidate to the most outrageous caricature of evil you can find on short notice.
Scott Alexander is (sometimes) a wise philosopher.
> 3. Is Trump getting a lot of his support from people who wouldn’t join white nationalist groups, aren’t in the online alt-right, but still privately hold some kind of white supremacist position?
[snip evidence for his estimates]
> [O]ur different ways of defining “open white supremacist”, even for definitions of “open” so vague they include admitting it on anonymous surveys, suggest maybe 1-2%, 1-2%, 4-7%, 3-11%, and 1-3%.
> But doesn’t this still mean there are some white supremacists? Isn’t this still really important?
> I mean, kind of. But remember that 4% of Americans believe that lizardmen control all major governments. And 5% of *Obama voters* believe that Obama is the Antichrist. The white supremacist vote is about the same as the lizardmen-control-everything vote, or the Obama-is-the-Antichrist-but-I-support-him-anyway vote.
> (and most of these people are in Solid South red states and don’t matter in the electoral calculus anyway.)
> 5. But even if Donald Trump isn’t openly white supremacist, didn’t he get an endorsement from KKK leader David Duke? Didn’t he refuse to reject that endorsement? Doesn’t that mean that he secretly wants to court the white supremacist vote?
> The answer is no on all counts.
> No, Donald Trump did not get an endorsement from KKK leader David Duke. Duke has spoken out in favor of Trump, but refused to give a formal endorsement. You can read the explanation straight from the horse’s mouth at davidduke.com.
> No, Donald Trump did not refuse to reject the endorsement. [many quotes from different media sources showing this]
> [N]otice that the evidence on the side of Trump being against David Duke includes twenty years of unambiguous statements to that effect. And the evidence of Trump not being against David Duke includes one statement along the lines of “I don’t know who he is but I’ll look into it” on an interview one time which he later blamed on a bad earpiece and said he totally disavowed.
Yeah. Also Ann Coulter wrote [a nice column about this]](http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2016-03-02.html):
>> (Tip for journalists: When WASPs don't want to answer impertinent questions from reporters, they often say, "I don't know," rather than the more urban "go f---yourself.")
Back to Scott:
> This gets back to my doubts about “dog whistles”. Dog whistling seems to be the theory that if you want to know what someone really believes, you have to throw away decades of consistent statements supporting the side of an issue that everyone else in the world supports, and instead pay attention only to one weird out-of-character non-statement which implies he supports a totally taboo position which is perhaps literally the most unpopular thing it is possible to think.
> And then you have to imagine some of the most brilliant rhetoricians and persuaders in the world are calculating that it’s worth risking exposure this taboo belief in order to win support from a tiny group with five-digit membership whose support nobody wants, by sending a secret message, which inevitably every single media outlet in the world instantly picks up on and makes the focus of all their coverage for the rest of the election.
Yeah. Reasonable point.
> Finally, no, none of this suggests that Donald Trump is courting the white supremacist vote. Anybody can endorse anybody with or without their consent. Did you know that the head of the US Communist Party endorsed Hillary, and Hillary never (as far as I know) “renounced” their endorsement? Does that mean Hillary is a Communist? Did you know that a leader of a murderous black supremacist cult supported Donald Trump and Trump said that he “loved” him? Does that mean Trump is a black supremacist? The only time this weird “X endorsed Y, that means Y must support X” thing is brought out, is in favor of the media narrative painting Trump to be a racist.
I suspected the communists had endorsed Hillary, but hadn't bothered to check for evidence. Nice that he found a link. I also didn't know about the "blacks for trump" endorsement. That also makes Scott's point.
> This, to me, is another form of crying wolf. One day you might have a candidate who openly courts the KKK, in the sense of having a campaign platform saying “I like the KKK and value their support”, speaking at Klan meetings, et cetera. And instead, you’ve wasted the phrase “openly courts the KKK” on somebody with a twenty year history of loudly condemning the KKK, plus one weird interview where he said he didn’t know anything about it, then changed his mind the next day and said he hates them.
Well put.
> 6. What about Trump’s “drugs and crime” speech about Mexicans?
> Trump said that:
>> When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
> Note how totally non-racist this statement is. I’m serious. It’s anti-illegal-immigrant. But in terms of race, it’s saying Latinos (like every race) include both good and bad people, and the bad people are the ones coming over here. It suggests a picture of Mexicans as including some of the best people – but those generally aren’t the ones who are coming illegally.
Wow, Scott gets it!
> [quotes from Bill Clinton and other previous campaigns omitted]
> When Democrats and Republicans alike over the last twenty years say that we are a nation of immigrants but that illegal immigrants threaten our security, or may be criminals or drug pushers, they’re met with yawns. When Trump says exactly the same thing, he’s Literally the KKK.
Yup.
> 7. What about the border wall? Doesn’t that mean Trump must hate Mexicans?
> As multiple sources point out, both Hillary and Obama voted for the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which put up a 700 mile fence along the US-Mexican border. Politifact says that Hillary and Obama wanted a 700 mile fence but Trump wants a 1000 mile wall, so these are totally different. But really? Support a 700 mile fence, and you’re the champion of diversity and all that is right in the world; support a 1000 mile wall and there’s no possible explanation besides white nationalism?
> 8. Isn’t Trump anti-immigrant?
> He’s at least anti-undocumented immigrant, which is close to being anti-immigrant.
How so?
> And while one can argue that “anti-immigrant” is different than “racist”, I would agree that probably nobody cares that much about British or German immigrants, suggesting that some racial element is involved.
It could also suggest that a cultural element is involved.
> In one model, immigration is a right. You need a very strong reason to take it away from anybody, and such decisions should be carefully inspected to make sure no one is losing the right unfairly. It’s like a store: everyone should be allowed to come in and shop and if a manager refused someone entry then they better have a darned good reason.
> In another, immigration is a privilege which members of a community extend at their pleasure to other people whom they think would be a good fit for their community. It’s like a home: you can invite your friends to come live with you, but if someone gives you a vague bad feeling or seems like a good person who’s just incompatible with your current lifestyle, you have the right not to invite them and it would be criminal for them to barge in anyway.
Great explanation of the difference.
> 10. Isn’t Trump anti-Semitic?
I feel like an attempt to avoid crying wolf might reserve that term for people who didn’t win an Israeli poll on what candidate would best represent Israel’s interests, or doesn’t have a child who converted to Judaism, or hasn’t won various awards from the American Jewish community for his contributions to Israel and American Judaism, or wasn’t the grand marshal of a Salute To Israel Parade, or…
Nice. I think he pretty well de-bunked that claim.
> 13. Doesn’t Trump want to ban (or “extreme vet”, or whatever) Muslims entering the country?
> Yes, and this is awful.
Why?
> But why do he (and his supporters) want to ban/vet Muslims, and not Hindus or Kenyans, even though most Muslims are white(ish) and most Hindus and Kenyans aren’t? Trump and his supporters are concerned about terrorism, probably since the San Bernardino shooting and Pulse nightclub massacre dominated headlines this election season.
> You can argue that he and his supporters are biased for caring more about terrorism than about furniture-related injuries, which kill several times more Americans than terrorists do each year. But do you see how there’s a difference between “cognitive bias that makes you unreasonably afraid” versus “white supremacy”?
You want us to just accept terrorism as an act of nature, like floods. But there's a difference between dying due to carelessness and accident and being killed by someone intentionally. Maybe more people are killed by furniture accidents than by murders, but we still devote a lot of resources to police, and that's appropriate.
> 14. Haven’t there been hundreds of incidents of Trump-related hate crimes?
> [snip great debunking of this]
> 17. Isn’t this a lot of special pleading? Like, sure, you can make up various non-racist explanations for every single racist-sounding thing Trump says, and say a lot of it is just coincidence or Trump being inexplicably weird, but eventually the coincidences start adding up. You have to look at this kind of thing in context.
> Suppose you’re talking to one of those ancient-Atlantean secrets-of-the-Pyramids people. They give you various pieces of evidence for their latest crazy theory, such as (and all of these are true):
> [snip points]
This is a great comparison.
> ... Trump denounced North Carolina’s anti-transgender bathroom law, and proudly proclaimed he would let Caitlyn Jenner use whatever bathroom she wanted in Trump Tower, making him by far the most pro-transgender Republican president in history.
Good points.
Stefan Molyneux explains how smears work
In The Untruth About Steve Bannon | Donald Trump's Chief Strategist, Stefan Molyneux says:
> You're going to see a lot of this over the next 8 years, and following that, probably even longer. This is a game that people play; it's not an argument. The game that they play is: you have expressed a certain affinity to a particular belief set, so I'm going to trawl everyone who has also claimed affinity to that particular belief set, and I'm going to find something crazy they said, and use that to smear the entire belief set. It's not an argument. It's really boring. It's very predictable.
> If they had really good arguments, they wouldn't need to smear. When the debate is lost, as the saying goes, slander becomes the tool of the loser.
> It's a sports game. It's trash talking. It's got no relation to anything moral. It's just weaponizing slander.
Nice way of explaining the structure of that particular non-argument.
Stefan Molyneux on ethno-nationalism
In The Untruth About Steve Bannon, at 7m34s, Stefan Molyneux says:
> If you are opposed to ethno-nationalism, then you must be opposed to places like Japan, to places like South Korea which are ethnically almost completely homogeneous. You must really really criticize those people for their ethnic homogeneity and their desire to keep it that way. If you don't criticize those countries but you only criticize white nationalists, then you are two things:
> 1. You are a hypocrite, because you are attacking the least ethnically self-interested group in the world. Whites are notoriously not ethnically self-interested, opening their countries to just about everyone. So you are saying ethno-nationalism is really bad, but you're criticizing the least ethno-nationalist group in the world.
> 2. You're a racist, because you're only attacking whites for expressing preferences that you allow all the other races and all the other groups to have without criticism. You're singling out whites for criticism for which you're giving a free pass to all the other ethno-nationalist groups in the world. Therefore you're a racist, because you're applying [different] standards to whites and you're attacking only whites for something which you perfectly accept that other groups and ethnicities can claim a preference for (ethno-nationalism).
> You can disagree with ethno-nationalism, but then you have to go and attack South Korea and Saudi Arabia.... you have to really go for those other countries long before you'd ever get to white countries.
Stefan Molyneux: "The welfare state is a eugenics program"
In The Untruth About Steve Bannon, at 17m14s, Stefan Molyneux says:
> The welfare state is a eugenics program. It is a way of altering the gene pool of society through government force.
Some thoughts about the reports of supposed evidence of election irregularities in MI, PA, and WI
http://electionupdates.caltech.edu/2016/11/24/some-thoughts-about-the-reports-of-supposed-evidence-of-election-irregularities-in-mi-pa-and-wi/
Some analysis of the voting in MI, PA, and WI (the states Jill Stein claims to be seeking a recount in). Looks more reliable than what was reported in the press - it actually includes some data sources.
Scott Adams on Trump's victory
http://blog.dilbert.com/post/153559105081/a-lesson-in-cognitive-dissonance
> In order to explain Trump’s disavowal of White Nationalists and the KKK while holding onto the hallucination that Trump is a dangerous monster, you have to hallucinate that he is playing a clever game of pretending to be against racists while secretly planning to purge the earth of all non-orange people.
Good comments about the left
A few good comments from http://althouse.blogspot.com/2016/11/update-on-muslim-nyu-student-who-wrote.html :
> They said that a Trump victory would open wide the floodgates of Hate and Intolerance, and they were right.
Regarding the hate and intolerance from the left.
> if you voted for Trump and are in a heavily fascist (aka Democrat) area
Heh.