Trump

What I Saw at the Revolution.

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Zulu Dawn

News from the front today. First, Glenn Reynolds explains where Trump came from.

The thing is, we had that movement. It was the Tea Party movement. Unlike Brooks, I actually ventured out to “intermingle” with Tea Partiers at various events that I covered for PJTV.com, contributing commentary to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Examiner. As I reported from one event in Nashville, “Pundits claim the tea partiers are angry — and they are — but the most striking thing about the atmosphere in Nashville was how cheerful everyone seemed to be. I spoke with dozens of people, and the responses were surprisingly similar. Hardly any had ever been involved in politics before. Having gotten started, they were finding it to be not just worthwhile, but actually fun. Laughter rang out frequently, and when new-media mogul Andrew Breitbart held forth on a TV interview, a crowd gathered and broke into spontaneous applause. A year ago (2009), many told me, they were depressed about the future of America. Watching television pundits talk about President Obama’s transformative plans for big government, they felt alone, isolated and helpless.

Bingo !

Now, we have Act Two. Will Hillary’s “Thin Blue Line of rust belt states hold ?

Lt William Vereker, on a routine patrol from the British camp at Isandlwana looked down into the Ngwebeni valley to find it boiling with the hitherto unseen main Zulu Army of 20,000 men.

As in 1879 the political scouts are rushing back to inform the camp of the unanticipated development. Shocked but still undaunted, the pundits remain confident that the threat can be stopped by the Democrat “Blue Wall” in the industrial and upper Midwest. There, media artillery and the technologically superior liberal ground game are expected to hold the line against the angry white voter.

Read the rest, as Glenn says.

Now, we have the horrified GOPe. To Peter Wehner, Trump is the scary black face in the forest.

It is stunning to contemplate, particularly for those of us who are lifelong Republicans, but we now live in a time when the organizing principle that runs through the campaign of the Republican Party’s likely nominee isn’t adherence to a political philosophy — Mr. Trump has no discernible political philosophy — but an encouragement to political violence.

Mr. Trump’s supporters will dismiss this as hyperbole, but it is the only reasonable conclusion that his vivid, undisguised words allow for. As the examples pile up, we should not become inured to them. “I’d like to punch him in the face,” Mr. Trump said about a protester in Nevada. (“In the old days,” Mr. Trump fondly recalled, protesters would be “carried out in a stretcher.”)

OMG! What happened to “hit back twice as hard!” or “Bring a gun to a knife fight?” Rudeness will not be tolerated in the GOPe.

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Who’s More Fascist: Presidential Candidate Donald Trump or Former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke?

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How Economists Facilitated the Transition of Erstwhile “Market” Economies to Fascism

The Left calls Donald Trump a fascist invoking the memory of Hitler and Mussolini, to which Trump might reply: “they were losers; I’m no loser.” Fascism is in essence the political control of the private economy, historically justified by democratically elected leaders to defend against perceived or orchestrated external threats. Progressive war politicians from Presidents Wilson and FDR to Johnson and Obama and now candidate Clinton have pursued this same goal in the US as has the social democratic European Union.

At the recent meeting of the G20 leaders and central bankers political responsibility for and control over their respective economies was assumed, but their Alfred E. Newman “what, me worry” smiling faces belie the fragility of the current global economy. The political distortions to both the financial and real economy have arguably never been greater, to which politicians and their economist enablers prescribe more of the same mostly wasteful public spending financed by money printing, a cure reminiscent of medieval bloodletting.

Having never been of much use to business, economists mostly followed “Say’s Law” that supply creates its own demand (for academic economists). They got their first pervasive shot at political power when President Wilson – an academic who chafed at constitutional constraints – created the Federal Reserve which helped US bankers fund the Allies until he could mobilize a war economy, making the first WW “Great.” The unprecedented death and destruction of the Great War knocked the global economy off kilter and the massive international war debts made stabilization politically difficult. As the creditor and least damaged victor, the US economy boomed in the roaring ’20s, followed by a bust.

Purveyors of the “dismal science” had previously counseled that politicians had to own up to the cost of war until the private economy recovered. While the “arts” of manipulating the value of currency and public spending financed by coercive taxes and often uncollectable debt as well as coercive regulation were as old as politics and war itself, post WW I economists became noticeably less “dismal” and purportedly more “scientific,” believing that such “macroeconomic” interventions could be calibrated to “tame business cycles” in part by transferring or defaulting on war debts. This was complemented by “microeconomic science,” the recent objective of which has been to prove that individuals aren’t always perfectly rational (and by inference in need of paternalistic political protection and direction). Macroeconomists contend that this psychological defect is contagious, conjuring irrational mobs running on banks (or attending Trump rallies).

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Quote of the Day

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Glenn Reynolds:

The Tea Party movement — which you also failed to understand, and thus mostly despised — was a bourgeois, well-mannered effort (remember how Tea Party protests left the Mall cleaner than before they arrived?) to fix America. It was treated with contempt, smeared as racist, and blocked by a bipartisan coalition of business-as-usual elites. So now you have Trump, who’s not so well-mannered, and his followers, who are not so well-mannered, and you don’t like it.

A Problem with Trump

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I remember my father telling me when I set out for college that I’d meet people with strange habits: to never act surprised, even when they put catsup on their steaks. I never developed the habits they tried so hard (perhaps too hard) to instill, but I’ve never put catsup on my steaks. So, yes, I do find this alarming. (This comes thanks to Instapundit, but the original interview is in the NYTimes, which may have being put on – could they tell? Apparently some of the commentors at Instapundit couldn’t.)

Is Trump the Alinskyite Radical in this election?

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Allowing a stupid person to demonstrate their stupidity by asking them a hard question does not confer responsibility for their stupidity upon the questioner.

By choosing to hold a rally at UIC, Trump knew that he could get his enemy to demonstrate who they are and what tactics they prefer. It does not make him responsible for what they chose to do. And what he ultimately chose to do was prevent violence, not promote it.

Trump was pushing a negative so hard it became a positive and allowed him to ridicule his opposition. BLM, OWS and SJWs are being turned into the Bull Connor of the 21st century by their own actions. Trump is just giving them the opportunity to reveal themselves. Then he makes them live by their own rules. On Hardball:

MATTHEWS: When you set up rally in Chicago where it’s mostly Hispanic and blacks, you knew there would be a lot of people that have the time to come out and protest your situation. It was no surprise here, was there in what happened? Given the venue of your event,

TRUMP: It shouldn’t matter. You’re the first one to say it. It shouldn’t matter whether it was whoever lives in the city. It shouldn’t make a difference. Whether it’s white, black, Hispanic, it shouldn’t matter.

MATTHEWS: They don’t like what you’re saying. They don’t like what you’re saying.

TRUMP: We shouldn’t be restricted from having rally here because of ethnic make up or anything like that. I’m somebody that feels strongly it shouldn’t make any difference. You usually feel that too. I’m surprised you’re bringing this up because it shouldn’t matter,

Do you believe those were spontaneous responses? You can almost see Trump restraining him self from saying, “Alinsky…You magnificent bastard. I read your book.”

Look at Alinsky’s rules and recall how many of them have been observed by Trump thus far. Trump stopped the War on Women by applying Rules 2, 4, 5, 6, 9 and 12 to Hillary through Bill Clinton, with a big assist from Bill Cosby. He froze his 16 Republican competitors to the point where none of them could effectively respond to him.

Cruz is still my preference, but should Trump win the nomination he will give a master class to whom ever the Establishment grants the Democrat nomination in the tactics they have used to dominate the national debate for the last 30 years. And should Cruz prevail, he would do well to learn from Trump’s demonstration of Alinskyite tactics.

* RULE 1: “Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.”
* RULE 2: “Never go outside the expertise of your people.”
* RULE 3: “Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.”
* RULE 4: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules
* RULE 5: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.”
* RULE 6: “A good tactic is one your people enjoy.”
* RULE 7: “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.”
* RULE 8: “Keep the pressure on. Never let up.”
* RULE 9: “The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.”
* RULE 10: “If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.”
* RULE 11: “The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.”
* RULE 12: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”