;
===
More insights into Trump. (See 1 below.)
===
Dick
========================================================================
1)
What the cultural and political establishments can't grasp about Donald Trump
By Selwyn Duke
Perhaps it’s not surprising that Time magazine named Angela Merkel its “Person of the Year.” With her flooding of Europe with Muslim migrants, the German chancellor may, after all, go down in history as a primary destroyer of Western civilization. Yet there’s no question in my mind who is Man of the Year: Donald Trump.
After underestimating the businessman early on, some are starting to understand Trump’s ascendancy and staying power. Yet, even now, few truly appreciate what Trump represents: a political and cultural phenomenon heretofore unseen in America. His rise is historic, amounting to something even more astounding than the Reagan Revolution. This is true, and will be true, whether he ultimately wins or loses, whether you love him or hate him, or whether it turns out he’s driven by principle or personal ambition.
There are the obvious factors here: how Trump has tapped into anger against the Establishment and over immigration, and how he’s a plain-spoken breath of fresh air. Then there’s the astute observation made by the Weekly Standard’s Julius Krein in September:
“What differentiates Trump is not what he says, or how he says it, but why he says it. …He does not apologize for having interests as an American, and he does not apologize for demanding that the American government vigorously prosecute those interests.”
In other words, Trump professes a palpable politically incorrect nationalism in a time of prostrate, politically correct treason -- or, as some put it, “internationalism.” Yet even this is just the iceberg’s tip.
Many have said that Trump is not a conservative -- and they’re right. Nor is he a “liberal.” He is a populist. You only become a populist by exploiting what is popular, and in this the Trump phenomenon reveals a great truth about the great lie of our time:
What’s popular isn’t political correctness.
Why did politicians and pundits underestimate Trump? Why didn’t some other presidential aspirant beat him to the politically incorrect punch? A major reason is that they fell victim to the illusion that political correctness (PC) is far more popular than it is. They lost sight of what Reagan called the difference “between critics and box office.” And why? Because the academia/media/entertainment (AME) Axis -- the Cultural Establishment -- has us living in a Matrix-like faux reality in which elite swill masquerades as popular will. Agree with the idea or not, for example, relatively few Americans are actually “offended” by the proposal to halt Muslim immigration.
But while PC isn’t popular, it is potent. It’s much like the state ideology in the old Soviet Union: few average people subscribe to it in doctrinaire fashion. But most everyone is afraid of the ideological machinery of the state (“thought police” in our time). And this brings us to perhaps the most significant factor in Trump’s popularity.
Taking the Marxism analogy further, imagine it’s the old Soviet Union, and there’s a colorful dissident saying everything other citizens want to say but fear to. Now imagine the government sends its secret police to silence him, and they just get consumed. Bullets have no effect on him, and with every assault he simply becomes bigger. Imagine how frustrated and fearful the Kremlin commissars would become.
And imagine how the people would be in his corner.
(Oh, they might not always be willing to voice their support, but their hearts would be with him. And we see the same phenomenon today: a recent analysis indicated that Trump was under-polling because certain people, particularly the college-educated, were afraid to support him publicly due to social pressure -- which, mind you, will be absent in the voting booth.)
And Trump is that dissident. He’s the man saying things Americans want to say but fear to, stifled by the social code, PC, enforced by the AME Axis and elitist political establishment. Trump is their crusader against those hated oppressors. In fact, he is the first and only such champion they’ve ever had. The AME Axis destroyed Joe McCarthy. It pummeled Richard Nixon. It discredited Dan Quayle. (It didn’t destroy Reagan, but he never quite so brazenly bucked PC.) It guillotined all who dared oppose its diktats, boasting an unbeaten record.
That is, until Trump came along.
To understand why Trump is Superman and his adversaries Lex Luthor without Kryptonite, consider what typically happens when someone crosses the PC thought police. The media may demonize him, the elite political establishment may try to destroy him, and any high-profile position he has will be lost (e.g., ex-Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich, former Atlanta fire chief Kelvin Cochran). Obscure individuals also suffer at the hands of PC companies fearing bad press and lawsuits. And once cast to the winds, the victim can mount a soapbox and eloquently plead his case, but without media coverage he’ll be the tree falling in a forest with no one to hear it.
Why is Trump immune? First, he’s mega-rich. And the main impact this has is not, as many think, that he can’t be bought (many billionaires, such as George Soros, seem like the sort who would sell their own mother for another billion).
It’s that he can’t be bullied.
Trump has lost business -- notably a Macy’s contract -- for opposing PC. But he has what I’ll refer to as, avoiding the vulgar descriptive, go-pound-sand money. But he’s not just any old billionaire (they’re a dime a dozen now, aren’t they?). Most of the mega-rich are somewhat PC themselves or aren’t interested in politics, and most of the rest couldn’t effectively wage a propaganda war against the Establishment. But Trump has transcended his profession and even his wealth; he has long been a member of the glitterati, a celebrity in a celebrity culture, a natural-born character, the man who can colorize a drab news day. He’s one of the people People can’t do without, and note: that magazine has greater circulation than any news publication.
Thus, the media can’t wither Trump on the vine. Even if, let’s say, The New York Times aimed to and ignored him, it would simply wither its own exposure. So the media cover him big, and he uses it in a big way because he has a big personality; he likes the camera as much as it likes him. Yet there’s one more critical factor.
Imagine you went to a John Wayne movie years ago and the Duke, instead of being an intrepid champion of good, sheepishly apologized to the villain. You might have wanted your money back. For a hero stands up for what’s right, against all odds and even in a hail of bullets. And were he to back down, he would relinquish hero status.
Yet backing down is par for the course when confronted by the thought police. People will cower and apologize -- thus relinquishing any support they might have had. Why would fellow citizens stand up for you if you won’t even stand up for yourself? And virtually everyone makes this mistake.
Except Donald Trump. Not only doesn’t he apologize, but he gets in the thought police’s face, doubles down and may demand an apology from them.
And his supporters go wild. Obama said in 2008 "We are the ones we have been waiting for." But, no, the Trump phenomenon is what oh-so many have been waiting for: a crusader who takes on hated PC, can weather the storm and doesn’t back down. This is why people flock to Trump. He’s the one who’s got Mussolini hanging upside-down and is beating him like a piñata. And when you have a hero, leading the troops in the heat of battle against a despised oppressor, you don’t worry about his marriages, past ideological indiscretions or salty language. You charge right behind him.
This is what the cultural and political establishments don’t fully grasp and why they’re apoplectic. Their PC weaponry, heretofore deployed to such devastating effect, is as nothing. Trump is like The Blob: the more trash the thought police throw at him, the bigger he gets. And this is because PC has always been trash, foisted on us by cultural illegal dumpers who, proceeding contrary to the people’s will, have acted as undemocratically as the KGB.
Trump is taking out the trash. And the more it tries to burn him, the more people will want to see it burn.
=================================================================================
2)
Iran made public a new underground missile depot run by its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) on Tuesday, the second one to be unveiled since October, just days after the U.S.backed away from implementing sanctions on Iran’s ballistic missile program.
In response, Iranian President Hassan Rouhaniordered Iran’s ballistic missile program to be accelerated. Sens. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.), Richard Burr (R-N.C.), and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) issued a statement on Monday condemning the move to not impose sanctions. The statement read: “A continued failure of the administration to impose consequences on Tehran for its ballistic missile tests, which represent a clear violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1929, will confirm the dangerous perception of the regime in Iran that it can ignore its obligations with impunity and the Obama administration will do nothing.” Matthew Levitt, a terror finance expert formerly at the Treasury Department, wrote in The Wall Street Journal that retreating on sanctions “could send a dangerous signal, effectively inviting Tehran to test the boundaries of what violations it can get away with.”
Since the nuclear deal was reached in July, Iran has increased its aggression, including launching two ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads. The nuclear deal reached in July places restrictions on Iran’s ballistic missile program for eight years. In addition, UN Security Council Resolution 1929 already places restrictions on its program. Despite the restrictions, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, at a ceremony unveiling a new missile in August,said, "We will buy, sell and develop any weapons we need and we will not ask for permission or abide by any resolution for that.”
In the wake of this weekend’s escalation between Saudi Arabia and Iran, Washington seems to be increasingly favoring Tehran over Riyadh, Josh Rogin and Eli Lake reported for Bloomberg View on Monday.
After Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr was executed in Saudi Arabia on terrorism-related charges on Saturday, Rogin and Lake wrote that the State Department expressed concern that the Saudis were “exacerbating sectarian tensions.” Secretary of State John Kerry called Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif soon afterwards– before contacting his Saudi counterpart– and asked him to help calm things down. Later, State Department spokesman John Kirby seemed to contest the Saudis’ claims that the Iranian regime was culpable for the embassy attack by saying that Iran had arrested some of those involved. (The Saudis claim that after being informed of the threat of assault on the embassy, Iran waited more than 12 hours before sending security to protect the besieged diplomats.)
While the State Department insisted that it was not taking a side in the feud, Rogin and Lake reported that diplomats from the United States and the Arab world say that America’s Gulf allies see a decided tilt towards Iran.
According to Rogin and Lake, the American response to the heightened tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran has aggravated a perception that the Obama administration is aligning with Tehran, which is fueled by Washington’s treatment of the Islamic Republic under the nuclear deal. They wrote:
At the root of the problem for Sunni Arab states is the nuclear deal reached last summer by Iran and Western nations. When the White House sold the pact to Congress and Middle Eastern allies, its message was clear: Nothing in the deal would prevent the U.S. from sanctioning Iran for non-nuclear issues. Yet that has not been the case.
To illustrate this concern, Rogin and Lake noted that when Tehran complained at the end of last year that it was excluded from a visa waiver program, Kerry personally wrote Zarif a letter assuring him that the administration was prepared to issue waivers to anyone who had visited Iran, which would allow them to enter the U.S. without restrictions. After the administration planned to impose new sanctions on Iran for its illicit ballistic missile test in October, which a United Nations panel found had violated a U.N. Security Council resolution, it backed off from implementing them indefinitely in response to pressure from Iran.
In addition, Iran’s sentencing of Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian and arrest of Siamak Namazi, an American-Iranian dual national, led to no greater public friction between Washington and Tehran. The White House also pushed for closing the International Atomic Energy Agency’s investigation into Iran’s past illicit nuclear research, even though the agency had found that the Islamic Republic was working on developing a nuclear weapon more recently than previously thought.
In explaining the administration’s tilt towards Tehran, Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East peace negotiator and current vice president at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, told Rogin and Lake that the White House sees Iran as a stabilizing force in the Middle East. Thus, according to Miller, “the Iranians hold the Obama legacy in their hands.” He added, “We are constrained and we are acquiescing to a certain degree to ensure we maintain a functional relationship with the Iranians.”
Rogin and Lake observed that without Washington acting to confront Iran’s aggression, Saudi Arabia feels the need to do so itself, as “if Obama won’t punish Iran, Saudi Arabia will.”
In April, Miller wrote about the dynamic currently being played out:
It clearly makes sense to try to use diplomacy as a way to constrain Iran’s nuclear program. But we should have no illusions about two things. First, we won’t end Teheran’s nuclear weapons pretensions, and two, we are and will be enabling its rise in the region because of this nuclear diplomacy, not constraining it. (via TheTower.org)
=====================================================
|
No comments:
Post a Comment