Donald Trump

Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, as applied in the Trump era

Mainstream media, Hollywood, Academia and the Regressive Left in general have adopted Saul Alinsky’s infamous “Rules for Radicals.” If you know what the “rules” are, you can better predict what’s coming from these Left Wing saboteurs.  Keep in mind that these days the Enemy referred to in the “Rules” is the Trump administration, particularly the President, his top advisers, the press secretary and cabinet members. Out on the street the category of Enemy can be expanded to “anybody who disagrees with you.”

Here’s a quick look at some of Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals.

“Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.”

There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.

Exhibit A here are the Saturday Night Live sketches ridiculing Trump (Alec Baldwin) and Press Secretary Sean Spicer (Melissa McCarthy) that have resulted in a ratings bonanza for a show that was otherwise fading from view.

Alec Baldwin as Donald Trump on SNL

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Donald Trump as Zionist

Given the record of frosty relations with Prime Minister Netanyahu, President Obama’s parting shot at Israel comes as no surprise. After years of standing up for Israel at the UN Security Council, the US has abstained from a resolution that, among other things, “reaffirms that the establishment by Israel of settlements in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, has no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law and a major obstacle to the achievement of the two-State solution and a just, lasting and comprehensive peace.” The resolution was framed by the US as intended to salvage the last vestiges of hope for a two-state solution in a situation where, as US UN Ambassador Samantha Power noted in her speech following the vote, there are 590,000 Israelis living on the West Bank. She also noted that Israel’s Netanyahu’s claim to still be pursuing a two-state solution contradicts his stated policy of being the most pro-settlement government in Israel’s history.

As a hard leftist, Obama, like other Social Justice Warriors, could not possibly support Israel’s ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and oppression of the Palestinians in good conscience. The same thing has happened with other parties of the left, notably the Labour Party in the UK. In taking this position, Obama is out of step with the predominantly Jewish donor class of the Democrats and with Democrat politicians, many of whom condemned the resolution, likely with the understanding that they must still deal with AIPAC if they want to be reelected. But it is unlikely that his action will be condemned by a very substantial percentage of the Democrat Party’s base —  only a bare majority of Democrats favor Israel (53%), compared to 23% for Palestinians.

The fact that Obama did this a month before leaving office is a powerful statement of the power of the Israel Lobby and pro-Israel sentiment in American politics. It would have been suicide for him to have done this prior to the 2012 election.

Donald Trump is in a much different position. After the vote, Trump tweeted:

Should this position disturb those of us on the Alt Right who see Trump as a president who would carve out an America First foreign policy, turn back the immigration onslaught, and fashion a nationalist trade policy? I think not, for the following reasons. Read more

Donald Trump and the American Counterrevolution, A.D. 2016

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Julius Nisle, “Pact between Faust and Mephistopheles” (engraving 1840)

Sooner or later even the darkest cloud must have a silver lining. This poetic justice is a central theme in the seminal work of European literature, with the incarnate cosmic Evil, the satanic Mephistopheles, admitting to young Faust: “I am part of the Power that would always wish Evil, and always works the Good.” (1335-1340).

Donald Trump may have never read Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Faust, or for that matter studied the meaning of chance and necessity in Sophocles’ dramas. His sudden emergence on the American political scene, however, is a portent of gigantic world changes which, even if he decides to backpedal now, can no longer be rolled back. This time around, the first woman on Earth, the all-gifted, albeit credulous and unfortunate Pandora, is letting a good gene out of her box. The supreme irony of history is that the state of America, which has stood in European eyes, for two and half centuries, as a prime symbol of international plutocracy and a land of “free movement of goods and people” will be now first to ditch them one by one. A country, which after World War II played a crucial role in setting up different political regimes around the globe, from the UN to WTO, from the EU to TTIP, is now in the process of dismantling them one by one — to the great joy of millions of both implicit and explicit White Americans and Europeans. Aside from many White fortune- tellers and twitter warriors bragging now how they “knew that Trump was coming,” no one could have divined Trump’s earth-shattering rise to world political prominence. The twentieth century was an American century; the twenty first century will be again the American century — albeit in a reverse fashion. Read more

America as a Promised Land for Jews: Threatened by Muslims, Israel and White Identity?

Note: This is an edited, linked version of my talk at the NPI conference in Washington, DC, November 19, 2016.

I am going to talk about Jews. It’s not that I relish doing this, but somebody’s got to do it, and it’s definitely a subject that needs to be addressed as best we can, fairly and factually, and with the understanding that we are not talking about all Jews but about activist Jews and the general thrust of the organized Jewish community.

Beginning in the nineteenth century, Jews saw America as a promised land, whose “streets are paved with gold” as they often wrote to their families in Europe. Jews were therefore staunch advocates of unrestricted immigration. Writing in 1914, University of Wisconsin sociologist Edward A. Ross believed that liberal immigration policy was exclusively a Jewish issue and he quoted the prominent author and Zionist pioneer Israel Zangwill who articulated the idea that America is an ideal place to achieve Jewish interests.

America has ample room for all the six million [Russian Jews]; any one of her states could absorb them. And next to being in a country of their own, there could be no better fate for them than to be together in a land of civil and religious liberty, of whose Constitution Christianity forms no part and where their collective votes would practically guarantee them against future persecution. (Israel Zangwill, in Ross 1914, 144)

Zangwill wrote a famous play called The Melting Pot that premiered in 1908 in Washington, DC, the heart of American political culture. What’s interesting is his idea that America was a land where all the old ethnic hatreds would be abolished in a grand symphony of ethnic harmony. Sound familiar? In the play a Jewish immigrant fleeing Russian pogroms comes to America, writes a great symphony and marries a wealthy Christian woman. Audiences were wildly enthusiastic:

There were cries for Zangwill after every scene, and President Roosevelt himself joined in the applause. During the play he sat next to Mrs. Zangwill “and positively raved.” When Zangwill took his bows afterward, “the President shouted across the theater, ‘that’s a great play, Mr. Zangwill.’ “2 … Throughout the drama [the Jewish character] argues that the United States is a land of universal love and brotherhood. He sees it as a place in which the divisions among men will soon disappear. … Within the stirring and seething of the vast cauldron, the “Great Alchemist” was melting Celt and Latin, Slav and Teuton, Greek and Syrian, black and yellow. He was fusing together East and West, North and South, pole and equator, crescent and cross.”[1]

So there you have it. Crescent and Cross. Black, Yellow and White all coming together in blissful harmony — less than 50 years after the Civil War. The reception given the play, and remember this was over a century ago, shows that this optimistic image appealed to many Americans—prominent Americans like President Teddy Roosevelt. Read more

Dawn of the Deplorables: Trump, Trauma and the Triumph of Hate

The left’s recipe for a happy, harmonious society has been simple: tribalism and greed are compulsory for all groups except Whites in general and White men in particular. Minorities must be worshiped, majorities demonized. This recipe has now blown up in their faces with the election of Donald J. Trump as forty-fifth president of the United States. American Whites have begun to recognize themselves as a tribe and vote accordingly.

Spoil and victory

“But Trump is a beast!” the left are wailing. Well, yes: you could say he’s Nietzsche’s schweifende blonde Bestie — the roaming blond beast, “avidly rampant for spoil and victory,” who strikes fear into the hearts of the civilized and effete. The Marxists and Frankfurt-Schoolers who wrote the left’s recipe for society certainly seem to have made a close study of Nietzsche. They’ve then done the opposite of what he recommended, elevating the inferior over the superior, the diseased over the healthy, the parasitic over the productive.

Blond Beast: Donald J. Trump

Blond Beast: Donald J. Trump

To see the difference between a parasite and a producer, compare Barack Obama with Donald Trump. Obama has coasted on affirmative action throughout his entire life. He won the presidency because he had very powerful forces on his side. Trump won despite having the same powerful forces against him—indeed, the forces against Trump were more formidable as the White percentage of the electorate continues to decline. Trump has built things and succeeded in the tough world of business; Obama has been a part-time lawyer, a part-time “community organizer,” and a full-time narcissist. Trump is narcissistic too, but it’s quite justified. Read more

What Next? The Alt Right in the Age of Trump

“We can’t afford to take these statements as the ravings of extremists on the fringes of society. They are now at the gates.”
Richard Cohen, Southern Poverty Law Center

It was the best of times and, for our hostile elites, it was the worst of times. In a movement normally starved of optimism, every ounce of excitement and positivity should be wrung from the victorious march of Trumpism. Whatever may lie ahead, it will remain forever true that Donald Trump’s capture of the White House represented a seismic electoral triumph for our ideas. It is a triumph that has left our shocked adversaries, for the time being, in tactical disarray. Establishment newspapers are replete with the panicked and muffled grieving of irrelevant, discredited journalists. Like the last resort of a teenage attention-seeker, several of the urban centers of American liberal modernity have been reduced to neurotic self-harm. Portland and Indianapolis spasm with tiny tribes of shabby Canutes, who busy themselves nightly in primitive attempts to hold back the cultural tide with tossed bricks and burned trashcans. The authentic and dignified heart of America beats on, hopeful and expectant. The Alt Right, no less surprised than any of the actors in this great drama, stands amidst the wreckage of its opponents. Possessed with unparalleled momentum it is, however, presented with a question of tremendous importance: What next?

Before setting any firm goals or next steps, a useful preliminary measure must be the avoidance of becoming embroiled in an unhealthy focus on whether or not Donald Trump will stick to this or that campaign pledge. Already the comments sections of various Alt Right websites are beginning to fill with the crippling and all-too familiar sights and sounds of scepticism, pessimism, and suspicion. “You’ve been had,” has been the retort of choice for those who see in every Trump staffing choice, or rumored staffing choice, the shadow of Israel and the betrayal of tens of millions of voters. In this vision of things, Donald Trump hijacked our ideas merely to coast to power. Ensconced in the White House, Trump will proceed to use that power for purely selfish reasons, abandoning every pledge to the people in his own vainglorious pursuit of “power for the sake of power,” mammon, and the interests of those in his inner circle. In this bleak, Eeyore vision of our present situation, we are probably even worse off under Trump than we were under Obama. “We’ve been had.”

Such an attitude misunderstands both the nature and motivation of Alt Right support for Donald Trump. It also deprives the movement of agency and responsibility. Against it, I contend that we must avoid becoming overly-invested in the fact of the Trump presidency in either the positive or negative sense. Maintaining such a focus is not only intellectually wrong-footed, but would risk similar myopic miscalculations to those that have hobbled post-Brexit Britain. Read more

Trump won because of White people: Dance with the one who brought you

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In certain times, there is a surreal feeling of “being a part of history,” which is perhaps to say, we are living in a time period of dynamic change.  However unthinkable for the left it may be, Trump has been elected. We can add this to Brexit and other “unthinkable” events to come. To contemplate the details of what this may entail, such as the selection of cabinet members and policy priorities, which do indeed include “building that wall,” has something of a Christmas morning feeling—everyday.

To paraphrase an article from Die Welt, in Western Democracies, the status quo seems stable, and it is not generally considered possible for “extremes” to transpire.  But that is what we have seen, however we may want to quibble about what exactly is “extreme.”  Can Donald Trump, or the Alt-Right for that matter, be considered “extreme” after that electoral show of consent?  Regardless, when there is an endless back and forth between stultifying, uncourageous Republicans and the frankly anti-White agenda of the Democrats, “extreme” does not carry such a negative connotation, but instead implies a kind of deliverance.

We have been locked in a middle-class complaisance, and that is precisely why societies such as ours “are often surprised by the foreseeable and obvious.”   And alas, though it may be “unspeakable” to liberals, and though he was the object of such ridicule in our media, Trump is now “the most powerful man in the world,” as Die Welt puts it, perhaps with some apprehension.  Just let that sink in.

Explanatory Factors

Trump’s appeal may have been equally a reaction to Black Lives Matter protests as to immigration.  According to exit polls, 74 percent of Trump voters feel that Blacks are treated fairly by the criminal justice system, which by definition means that these voters are not sympathetic to BLM.  Overall, half of White voters (Democrats and Republicans) opined that Blacks are treated fairly by police.  Likely most of us will have anecdotal evidence that our non-Alt-Right family members and acquaintances were not amused by BLM.  Trump voters were especially unamused.

Of Trump supporters, 86 percent favor building the wall on the southern border, compared to less than half of all voters (54 percent oppose, 41 percent favor).  So antipathy towards both BLM and immigration can be said to have catapulted Trump to the presidency, in part by turning off mainstream middle-class White people, who are normally content with the status-quo.  Moderates may not want a wall per se, but they also may not complain too loudly when it’s being built.  And again, Trump’s actual voters want it built—unequivocally.

While losing some steam amongst college-educated Whites, Trump won the White working class by 39 points, an increase from Romney’s 26 point spread.  Ultimately, there is no simple narrative that emerges; Trump increased White support in different key swing states from different rural and suburban demographics in order to dominate the electoral college.  I won’t pretend to be Nate Silver, so let’s just say he won because of White people.

“Among his supporters,” opines Thomas Friedman on Real Time with Bill Maher, “this was 80 percent about race, and the other 20 percent was about race.”  Good then, let’s accept the premise of liberals and draw the necessary conclusions.  If Trump triumphed on the basis of race issues, he now has a mandate on immigration, law and order, the wall, etc.

For the NYTimes David Brooks holding forth on PBS, Trump voters are “just going with their gene pool,” a rather bald statement that Trump voters are voting their ethnic interests. After the election, Brooks predicted that the country would be split into two factions, with one faction advocating ethnic separatism, what many on the Alt Right are already advocating. Would that it were so.

Nixon became known to history as the “law and order” candidate, which accurately characterized his proclivities vis-à-vis crime.  Trump, on the other hand, to leave no doubt, self-identified as the “law and order” candidate.  As liberals will complain, and as the alt-right will readily admit, “law and order” is understood as to mean that we will not tolerate Black violence and civil unrest.  Trump’s support, therefore, was premised on his intolerance for the very violence which his election has provoked (once again) from Blacks and other malcontent minorities, in the protests following his victory, which continue as I write this.

It is ironic that Blacks report feeling “scared” at the prospect of the Trump presidency, while they are in fact the progenitors of violence, and so far as I know, Trump never made any negative statements explicitly about Blacks.  Their violence and disorder has indeed “scared” the rest of civil society, contributing to Trump’s election.  Perhaps Blacks are expressing their fear by attacking innocent Whites, in this inverted reality.  How can we assuage these sensitive Blacks’ sense of fear?  Shall we become human punching bags?

You Can’t Always Get What You Want

If there is one thing that minorities have learned over the last eight years, it is that they get what they want, and Whites (perhaps as a natural corollary) do not.  Hence the indignation following this surprise victory.  Some journalists noted with amusement that Trump often played the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” at his campaign rallies.  I hypothesized that Trump liked the song for its beautiful choral section, which has a celestial quality that built anticipation for his arrival on stage.  Surely he paid little heed to the message of the lyrics, which discordantly seemed to suggest he was voters’ second choice.  But now it all makes sense.  I suggest that for our “underprivileged” people of color, it’s time you learned: you can’t always get what you want.

Not only is the POC attitude of entitlement and aggrievement ridiculous, it is also presumptuous.  Trump haters assume that whomever they happen to be speaking to at that moment shares their hatred for Trump and all that he represents — the liberal bubble that we see over and over again in big cities and universities.  Many of us who do not go about their day in a MAGA hat, and appear to be otherwise in step with the mainstream of American society, will often be confused with one who has accepted the anti-Trump bias of pop-culture, which is what all “educated” people after all must believe.  They seem to take for granted that as a White person, your chief goal is to champion their causes, what they believe to be important.  I’m afraid that no longer interests us, and we have instead decided to look to our own welfare.

Of course, minorities’ presumptuous attitude is the result of decades of a cultural Marxist program in the media and education, from which it seems only recently some Whites have begun to break away, however tentatively.  Not submitting to minorities’ racial-group interests at our own expense is equated with base racism in this formula.  Clearly even the bourgeoisie have become weary of these recriminations.  And the White working class is beyond weary of this crap.

Dance with the One Who Brought You

While the MSM claims that the onus is now on Trump to reach out to those who didn’t vote for him; i.e., Blacks, Hispanics, it would seem that he was given a mandate to serve the interests of those who did vote for him.  By this I mean the 86 percent of his supporters who want that wall.  So far, judging by his statements to the media, those he has chosen to keep in his inner circle, and those he has promoted in his cabinet, it is fair to say that Trump is staying true to his roots, while perhaps making some accommodations in order to ensure his agenda becomes a reality.

As for the POC, 8 percent of African Americans voted for Trump, after all that attention; and frankly, pandering.  Are we supposed to be excited that Trump increased Hispanic support from 27 percent in 2012 to 29 percent?  In a sense, these groups are not his constituents.  But we can take some comfort in how flummoxed establishment Republicans must be by the fact that Trump did better with their precious minority groups than Romney and McCain.  Surely they must be nursing a bad case of cognitive dissonance.

Yes, President-elect Trump must represent all Americans in the abstract; but let’s take the MSM at face value: If Trump’s candidacy was always a stealth pro-White Identity project, then it follows logically that he would now carry that project through, and enact the policies which mobilized that base, and put him in the Oval Office.

Contact Malcolm Jaggers