IS THE TRUMP ERA ALREADY OVER?

When Republicans stop apologizing, then they can start winning.

In 1992, Congresswoman Maxine Waters called President George H.W. Bush a “mean-spirited man who has no care or concern about what happens to the African-American community in this country.”

This was part of a National Press Club rant in which the fright wig from California also announced, “I believe George Bush is a racist.”

Waters tepidly backed Bill Clinton even though he, like “most whites in America are not good enough on the race question.”

Vice President Dan Quayle demanded an apology. No apology was forthcoming. “Dan Quayle doesn’t know me,” Waters told a cheering audience. “My mother couldn’t make me do that.”

Maxine Waters doesn’t apologize to anyone. But Republicans apologize to her.

When Bill O’Reilly joked about her wearing a James Brown wig, he was intimidated into apologizing. “Unfortunately, I also made a jest about her hair, which was dumb. I apologize.”

Meanwhile Maxine went right on hurling insults and threats at the President of the United States. “I’m out to get him. I’m gonna see him out of office.”

So much for that.

The left doesn’t apologize. It expresses no regrets. It just goes right on steamrolling its way forward. And if Republicans want to get anything done, they will have to fight the left just as hard as it fights them.

The big question is can Republicans fight? Or can they just fight among themselves?

First they couldn’t get anything done because the Democrats controlled Congress. Then they couldn’t get anything done because they controlled the White House.

It’s 2017. Republicans control the White House, the House and the Senate. Republican victories have swept states around the country.

So what’s the excuse now?

Republicans hold as much power as democratic elections are likely to give them. The goalposts can always be moved to utterly bulletproof majorities in the House and the Senate, 9 members of the Federalist society on the Supreme Court and the crowns of all the kings of Europe.

Instead Republicans may have achieved a golden moment that would be dangerous to squander. GOP gains have at least as much to do with the dysfunction of the Democrats under leftist rule. If Republicans are often the Stupid Party, Democrats have become the Crazy Party. And Republicans won record victories around the country in the expectation that they would stop the Crazy Party’s madness.

Instead it’s 2017 and Republicans continue to allow the left to set the agenda.

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It’s time to realize that it’s not about which parts of government Republicans control, but about whether they are ready and willing to use whatever parts of government they do control in a coordinated effort to fight the left and force through a conservative reform agenda that will break the left’s hold on America.

Every time Republicans win, they try to work with Democrats. And every time Republicans win, Democrats do every single thing that they can to cut them off at the knees.

After Republicans won, they decided to give Hillary Clinton and her scandals a pass. The left repaid their gentlemanly generosity by manufacturing a dozen fake scandals involving Trump and his people.

And Republicans were foolish enough to be roped into investigating them.

Instead of bringing those responsible for Benghazi, the Clinton Foundation, the IRS targeting and so much else to justice, Republicans decided to live and let live. But the left didn’t get the memo.

It never does.

Obama funneled planes full of foreign currency to terrorists through Iran. He was caught on a hot mic assuring Putin’s man that he would have more flexibility after the election. China hacked our biggest national security secrets due to the actions of Obama appointees. But instead Republicans took the pressure off and let the Democrats manufacture a fake scandal out of every Trump hotel.

The left will not allow Republicans to implement their agenda. The only way for President Trump and Republicans to stop the scandal train and get anything done is to expose the crimes the left committed.

The Democrats have made it clear that they will only work with Republicans if they are in charge. They’ll confirm Supreme Court justices if Schumer picks them. They’ll legislate, instead of obstruct, if it’s to protect ObamaCare. And too many Republicans are still eager and willing to fall for it.

If Republicans want to get anything done, they will have to fight for it with courage and conviction.

Democrat majorities in Congress managed to set much of the agenda under Reagan and Bush, and Obama got almost anything he wanted done despite the opposition of a Republican legislature. All that happened because the left knows what it wants to get done and it doesn’t get bogged down for long.

Republicans get bogged down easily because they lack the same degree of conviction. It’s all too easy to run the same Alinsky games on them, to shame them, to make them doubt themselves, to drag them into aimless arguments and to control their actions by inducing a reflexive fear of political leaps of faith so that they don’t stray too far from the left’s policy plantation.

It’s 2017. Republicans control the White House, the Senate and the House. And they’re arguing with each other, investigating each other and waging an internal struggle that can only weaken their majority. And while many important executive orders have been issued and legislative steps taken, Republicans still find it easier to fight each other than to step up and fight the left.

As Freedom Center founder David Horowitz has frequently pointed out, Republicans don’t know how to fight. They think that winning elections is a substitute for the daily battles that the left loves to fight. The left doesn’t stop fighting once the election is over. That’s when it really begins fighting.

Republicans still believe that they can win on points. Too many of them think that some referee will step in and commend them for playing fair. And when that doesn’t happen, they panic and start surrendering. If the Trump era stands for anything, it’s a refusal to play the left’s game.

No amount of elections will ever be enough. When Republicans win elections, the left doesn’t recognize them. Republicans can hold the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court and it still won’t be enough because the left isn’t beholden to any values, laws, norms or standards. You can’t beat the left through any form of abstraction, whether it’s an election or a moral high ground. Republicans can only win by bringing real change and sweeping away the left’s power city by city and state by state.

The left refuses to surrender and apologize. It never backs down. If conservatives want to win, those are good places to start. When Republicans stop apologizing, then they can finally start winning.

Published in FrontPageMag.

You Are Being Lied To

Media schizophrenia.

Every quantum leap in mass communications also made possible a vast improvement in propaganda techniques. Nazi and Soviet propaganda looks as crude to us as a Babbage calculating machine. Virtual reality isn’t something that’s coming. It’s here. It’s been here for a while. The potent combination of media budgets and crowdsourced social media distribution has allowed for a previously unparalleled level of propaganda that creates and inhabits its own virtual reality.

There’s a name for that sort of thing. Schizophrenia.

What happens when the schizophrenic media reality collapses when it comes into too sharp of a conflict with reality is the same behavior that schizophrenics exhibit when their perceptions of the world conflict with the real world.

The people venting and rioting and screaming were living in a cozy reality. Everyone in that progressive reality understood that history was on their side, that the majority was with them and that the right was a decaying mass of racists and corporations soon to be swept away by the tide of change.

But this wasn’t reality. It was a carefully constructed narrative that fooled even the people who were building it. It was a virtual world overlaid over the real world. Its narratives were so integrated with the real world that it seemed as if it were real. There were stories and polls. Everyone in their social media bubble, except a few crazy uncles agreed with them. All the celebrities were on board.

And then the holodeck got switched off.

It wasn’t a unique experience. Most Nazis didn’t understand what was happening when the tanks broke through to Berlin. The average Russian wasn’t prepared for the fall of the USSR.

Propaganda is a very effective tool for managing a population. But the trouble with a lie is that sooner or later it falls apart. A narrative isn’t reality. It’s a story we tell. Reality has no story except one shaped by a far higher power than any mere mortal. No ideological victory is permanent.

The ideological narrative of the right side of history imbibed by the left is a delusion. Ideological victories are temporary. Even cultural dominance is a very slippery thing. It is a subtle tool that isn’t much good for the gross kind of control that it wants. A dictatorship like the USSR only lasts for so long. And then it falls and its ideology that everyone was forced to study once is forgotten.

A society can be transformed and changed. But the results of that change will ultimately be non-ideological. The USSR gave way to a totalitarian regime that is uninterested in Marxism-Leninism, but has duplicated everything else from the cult of personality to the secret police to the bribe economy to the pointless efforts at expansionism that waste resources and feed the hatred of its neighbors. The Communists failed to fundamentally transform Russia into their ideological paradise, but they certainly left a huge crater of a non-ideological stamp on it.

Obama has changed America. But the left will find that these changes will be largely non-ideological. Radical change breaks the system. It leaves scars. It crushes civic institutions. That. more than any of the ideological victories, will be the real impact of the Obama years.

The left’s conviction that demographic change will give them ultimate power was always a foolish delusion. Latin America is not an exclusively left-wing domain, though it can sometimes look that way. Barring an overt tyranny, there would always be a right. Its values might have little in common with those of traditional American conservatism, but it would exist even if the left managed to achieve its demographic transformation.

The left’s efforts at absolute power scar societies. That can be easily seen across Asia, Latin America and the territories of the Warsaw Pact. It can also be increasingly seen in the United States.

The level of political polarization continues to rise. There is increasingly no middle ground. The left blames this on Republicans, but historically it’s the left that has abused its power to force change more than the right. Obama taught a master class in simply doing whatever you want because history is on your side. The reaction to that led directly to President Trump. And too much of the left is incapable of the self-awareness needed to grasp this simple fact.

The rules of a society exist for a reason. If you break them, expect everyone else to break them too. And expect that the result will be a society in which those rules no longer matter.

If you walk into a bar and shoot someone… and then get away with it, then the next step is that everyone else will be doing it too. The left is shocked, baffled and angered at the consequences of the violence it has inflicted on American society. It has inhabited the narrative of victim-hood so thoroughly that it isn’t aware of the fact that its “change” is a form of violence.

Instead of stopping, the left is doubling down. It is convinced that it can break through if it pushes hard enough. And it’s probably right. But its victories are temporary. The damage is long-lasting.

The left broke through the Bush years with Obama. But it hadn’t grasped that its unprecedented delegitimization of Bush led directly to the Republican delegitimization of Obama. It wasn’t racism that led Republicans to reject Obama as illegitimate. That was part of the comforting narrative that the left told itself. Republicans were reacting to the new rules created by the left.

Bush was illegitimate. Therefore Obama was illegitimate. Therefore Trump is illegitimate. Therefore whoever succeeds him will be illegitimate. This is a non-ideological change created in the name of ideology. Any future president will be deemed illegitimate by the losing side.

The right is not free of blame in all this. But it’s reacting to what the left does rather than initiating it. It takes the ball and runs with it further down the field. Then the left runs with it down the field for ten times the distance. And the rest is history and crumbling pillars and great wastelands.

The left won’t win. But it can destroy America. And many of its ideologues hate the country enough that they would consider that a victory. If nothing else, America provided a model that served as a counterweight to the ideal leftist society. Wrecking that model is already an ideological win for the left. The right didn’t have to fix Communist societies. That was a bonus. It just had to wreck them. The left doesn’t have to fix America. It just has to wreck it so that it’s seen as unworkable.

The question though is how many Americans to the left of center really want to be part of such a project. Not many. That is why the media bubble really exists. The narratives exist less for the sake of the center, let alone the right, but to manage the constituency of the left. The narrative is already healing after the shock of the Trump win. Activists are being urged to rally around victim allies and continue fighting until the bitter end. The bitter end being the collapse of everything.

The bubble is a lie. Everything inside it is a lie. It’s a virtual space filled with propaganda as pervasive as anything out of the USSR or North Korea which utterly misrepresents everything to those inside it. The USSR could keep the game going longer because it controlled the vertical space of total power as well as the horizontal space of messaging. The left’s grip on power is shaky. Its grip on messaging is total. And that is where media schizophrenia creeps in.

Citizens of totalitarian regimes recognize that they are being lied to. Statistics show a level of recognition of media bias among Americans on par with that of any totalitarian regime.

The media should be panicking over such numbers. But it doesn’t care if 80 or 70 percent of Americans don’t trust them. They are a secondary audience. Its core goal is to manage the beliefs of those who do. They are the revolutionary vanguard. They have to be shaped and directed.

And when they look over the iron curtain and past the media wall, reality no longer fits the narrative. Media schizophrenia kicks in. And they lose their grip on reality and lose their minds.

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Originally Posted on Sultan Knish