Donald Trump

[Soupman]

You mean the facebook group. They type Donald Trump SEE. lol.

It's hard to take them seriously with a lot of the typings they come up with. It just sounds like they're more in it for the social popularity.

Te subtypes have a better orientation towards facts (Te has some commonalities with Ti), but the Ni-subtype of ILI doubles down on Ni-lead's inner reality (use Jung to define elements), so the last thing you're going to get is somebody who has a precise adherence to facts.

I thought you saw the "cognitive functions" as objective cognitive processes therein negating any interpretation that doesn't categorise people with differing information styles as the same type.

I'm guessing you are not a fan of DCNH right?

Anyway I don't know how you may want to put it but on Jung, key facts are that he's got a distorted view of phenomena and his "logic" is difficult to follow. That's being generous - he just waddles and after years of studying psychological types. It slowly emerges that it's a mess of impressions.

ON TRUMP
If you go by the Gulenko models, it's apparent SEE makes total sense for Trump, he's ultra inconsistent and like the Politician - says whatever he thinks people want to hear with hyperbole and no shame. He's very emotional - 4D ethics of emotions and he runs wild with people skills. Ethical men can be very aggressive and domineering, unlike MBTI were the harmonising subtype is that ethics means for them.

https://youtu.be/5UQyz5W11gg

https://youtu.be/5UQyz5W11gg

As for schools out there, I get the impression people are clear out for fame, but I personally don't care and instead hope there's a sage out there who can rescue socionics from its pseudoscience chasm. That's because tragically I see the theory as composed of half truths and full of inconsistencies. I'm not happy with schools out there, they can't fix socionics and a little group politics is preventing progress since personality cults litter some schools. East or West the same problems exist.

[Sol]

If you go by the Gulenko models

this site is about Socionics and you should go by its models. Trump is EIE

[Soupman]

this site is about Socionics and you should go by its models. Trump is EIE

Gulenko is a socionist and his work is socionics, furthermore socionics is meant to be research not religion were people abide to unquestionable sacred text (everything is up for questioning). After all, Gulenko's work even his new models are represented here.

Even then Gulenko's work is up for criticism, I don't agree with everything he has even though I like his work the most.

[Bertrand]

I feel like Sol got brainwashed by soviet norms so you gotta give him a little bit of a break with his strange attitude toward orthodoxy and ideology

[Soupman]

I feel like Sol got brainwashed by soviet norms so you gotta give him a little bit of a break with his strange attitude toward orthodoxy and ideology

Thanks, I had suspicions that there's equal divisions in the east as well. Equal passion about what is meant to be or not socionics.

[Sol]

Gulenko is a socionist

Gulenko would be socionist if would use Socionics: Jung + Augustinavichiute.
Somewhere in the middle of 90s he have shifted to own unbased heresy. One of the reasons he may mistake about types of some people like Trump.

[Soupman]

Gulenko would be socionist if would use Socionics: Jung + Augustinavichiute.
Somewhere in the middle of 90s he have shifted to own unbased heresy. One of the reasons he may mistake about types of some people like Trump.

Are you a fan of science or orthodoxy? Do you believe socionics is/should be a science or orthodoxy?

[Kill4Me]

I thought you saw the "cognitive functions" as objective cognitive processes therein negating any interpretation that doesn't categorise people with differing information styles as the same type.

That's a mind-bender of a sentence. Obviously you're characterizing stuff I have posted and not quoting me directly. I'll just put it this way....I apparently posit interpretations that categorize people with the key cognitive markers for a particular type as that particular type.

I'm guessing you are not a fan of DCNH right?

Interesting. I would indeed expect Ni-leads to be more comfortable rendering guesses whereas Ti-leads prefers to at least estimate. It's more that I don't give a fuck about DCNH because I use stackings. The social instinct correlates to the dominant subtype. The SP instinct correlates to the normalizing and harmonizing subtypes and sexual instinct to the creative subtype. Stackings and DCNH subtypes correlate so tightly that using one renders the other moot.

Anyway I don't know how you may want to put it but on Jung, key facts are that he's got a distorted view of phenomena and his "logic" is difficult to follow. That's being generous - he just waddles and after years of studying psychological types. It slowly emerges that it's a mess of impressions.

That's just due to the inner knowing of Ni that Jung leads with. Keep in mind that Jung is a primary resource in Socionics and MBTI so there wouldn't be any socionics without his functions. I recently cracked Hotel Ambush and his small clique of Anti-Jungians on this topic about a week ago.

ON TRUMP
If you go by the Gulenko models, it's apparent SEE makes total sense for Trump, he's ultra inconsistent and like the Politician - says whatever he thinks people want to hear with hyperbole and no shame. He's very emotional - 4D ethics of emotions and he runs wild with people skills. Ethical men can be very aggressive and domineering, unlike MBTI were the harmonising subtype is that ethics means for them.

No, SEE makes horrible sense for Trump because it's clear that he doesn't have Fi in his ego block. His people skills are weak since he's high in competitiveness and prefers to move against others. Good people skills would make him high in cooperativeness and give him a preference for moving towards others.

Furthermore, you are wrongly assuming that Trump is saying what he thinks people want to hear. You will note that he's been saying a lot of the same things for awhile now and likely believes what he espouses. This isn't the first election cycle he ran for president. It just happened that in this election cycle the political winds were blowing in his direction....in the elections he lost your logic would get turned upside down. Your reasoning is superficial because it's merely predicated on the fact he won.

As for schools out there, I get the impression people are clear out for fame, but I personally don't care and instead hope there's a sage out there who can rescue socionics from its pseudoscience chasm. That's because tragically I see the theory as composed of half truths and full of inconsistencies. I'm not happy with schools out there, they can't fix socionics and a little group politics is preventing progress since personality cults litter some schools. East or West the same problems exist.

Well with any so-called sage, you want to know whether they have a VI template for each socionics type or are simply building castles in the sky. Castles in the sky like the Alpha Quadra Values mythology lead to those inconsistencies you talk about. Next, you want to know whether the VI template is operational or structurally flawed (the visual logic of socionics new wave blows socionics.com out of the water). Then you want to know whether this "sage" has a pecuniary interest. Are they charging money in exchange for typing people or are they genuinely motivated by the truth. And you also want to know whether the "sage" actively engages in debate with those that disagree or whether they avoid arguing with those who oppose their ideas and instead just surround themselves with sycophants.

[Kill4Me]

Are you a fan of science or orthodoxy? Do you believe socionics is/should be a science or orthodoxy?

Actually, my sense is that you and Sol aren't all that different in your reasoning for Trump's type...the only difference is you both attribute those reasons to a different type. In that case, Sol would be right since being a ciphon for the feelings/hopes/hangups/moods of one's culture is intrinsic to Fe-dom. Fe takes the feelings of others and expresses it through a medium (Ni-creative gives the expression a more prophetic touch....Si-creative gives the expression a more common touch). But it's a moot point since you're both wrong.

[Soupman]

No, SEE makes horrible sense for Trump because it's clear that he doesn't have Fi in his ego block. His people skills are weak since he's high in competitiveness and prefers to move against others. Good people skills would make him high in cooperativeness and give him a preference for moving towards others.

Furthermore, you are wrongly assuming that Trump is saying what he thinks people want to hear. You will note that he's been saying a lot of the same things for awhile now and likely believes what he espouses. This isn't the first election cycle he ran for president. It just happened that in this election cycle the political winds were blowing in his direction....in the elections he lost your logic would get turned upside down. Your reasoning is superficial because it's merely predicated on the fact he won.

It makes total sense now, we are just not using the same models so our diagnosis aren't even mutually intelligible.

When you say "His people skills are weak since he's high in competitiveness and prefers to move against others" you are describing the the Dominant subtype, you are exactly describing the traits which make the subtype the least agreeable one. The "people skills" displayed there are strong, but they aren't "agreeable"; good-people-skills doesn't necessarily mean high agreeability, but if semantically it means so for you then I see where our differences of interpretation are.

Ethics of emotions, is what Trump is doing to reconnect with his base; steering and manipulating emotions is the hallmark of high EQ, emotional intelligence is not always good. You interpret these observations differently but that there is just differences of models (you can pick and choose which you prefer).

According to the energy model SEE have the creative function Fe/E, therefore such a model totally changes what is thought of an SEE as being thus all the intertype relations.

*Using Enneagram stacks to guess DCNH results in a distorted understanding of the ideas.

Dominants - want to win and have control in relations, even intimate ones, they need a steady partner.

Creatives - want to impress and be admired for their antiques, they need someone who'll entertain their chaos.

Normalisers - want perfection and order, a stable environment that's in control, but can't get that control themselves so needs someone who'll do it.

Harmonisers - want pleasure, harmony, to get along with others that are equally as considerate. They are most sensitive to the feelings of others, even logical types - which is surprising about DCNH. (They don't get along with Dominants or Normalisers as well)

[Bertrand]

yeah one way to look at is as the entire socion being essentially 4 people (alpha, beta, gamma, delta) within which theres 4 different gradients of aggression. if you take Trump to be a hyper-aggressive gamma it makes sense, but it feels so caricatured he's like the rich white version of the bum who hits me up for 50 cents in the grocery store parking lot and acts like he deserves it so much he's going to start a fight if I question his absolute right to my money. also he doesn't really want just 50 cents. in a certain sense there's this same SEE streak in donald, its just that he's managed to elevate himself from parking lots to the whitehouse, which is really quite amazing considering underneath it all he's still sort of a gibbering bum. it feels like that is not the essence of ethics, that "real" ethics wouldn't do such a thing, and then you realize there's no humanitarian impulse under it, rather its more about social control, and in that sense he could easily be seen as an ethical manipulator, just in its most base and superficial sense. to say he can't be SEE because ethics means more is probably a projection of beta/delta types on Trump. from the point of view of lacking humanity he seems to resemble SLE in his straightforward manifestations of psychopathy (social control being a somewhat unethical stance on ethics itself--pointing to a low Fi interpretation), but on the other hand he exhibits gamma values. so the question becomes is a SLE caricature of a gamma or is he really just a gamma. I think this actually hits on a primary schism in socionics where until we can really measure things people can only argue over it. I honestly think trump could be a SLE raised in the USA, on the other hand I could see him being SEE and that calling him SLE is just trying to not face up to the real gross side of gamma society as it really is. at the end of the day SLE raised in the USA or just a gross SEE actually mean the same thing. what Trump really represents is out of control Se and creative rationality scamming a nation who was looking for someone they could trust

[Kill4Me]

It makes total sense now, we are just not using the same models so our diagnosis aren't even mutually intelligible.

The difference is my model works in reality...it's knowledge. Your model breaks down when you factor in past elections Trump has been in and the fact he's been saying the same shit for years. If you put the VI template for Trump in SEE, then you have to put the template for SEE somewhere else. And then you have to put the VI grouping for that somewhere else and you eventually end up with a number of groupings that make no sense socionically. My breakdown comes out the most wisely measured without having to sacrifice either socionics cannon or visual/structural logic. Can your model do that? No! That's because your model doesn't function in reality....it's flawed. Socionics Britannica doesn't have a VI template for each Socionics type (nevermind a valid VI template) they can point to as a basis for its "knowledge". They're minor league.

When you say "His people skills are weak since he's high in competitiveness and prefers to move against others" you are describing the the Dominant subtype, you are exactly describing the traits which make the subtype the least agreeable one. The "people skills" displayed there are strong, but they aren't "agreeable"; good-people-skills doesn't necessarily mean high agreeability, but if semantically it means so for you then I see where our differences of interpretation are.

Fi still peeks out in these competitive SEE types. You must remember that Fi-creative is in the Ego Block. It's a prominent part of the SEE's cognition and makes said typing for Trump highly absurd. You're actually saying he's got Fi in his ego block.

Ethics of emotions, is what Trump is doing to reconnect with his base; steering and manipulating emotions is the hallmark of high EQ, emotional intelligence is not always good. You interpret these observations differently but that there is just differences of models (you can pick and choose which you prefer).

Trump didn't use ethics of emotion to reconnect with his base. He used force to connect with his base. There was no Fe or Fi involved in the drive to connect with the base...it's simply a tactical maneuver to win an election. Trump's victory comes down to the fact that the base wanted somebody like Trump this election cycle. That doesn't imply he's got high EQ. High EQ people are not so unnuanced and tonally deaf. Trump presents like a blunt instrument. He bludgeons people over the head like a billy club. That's not ethics of emotion.

According to the energy model SEE have the creative function Fe/E, therefore such a model totally changes what is thought of an SEE as being thus all the intertype relations.

*Using Enneagram stacks to guess DCNH results in a distorted understanding of the ideas.

Dominants - want to win and have control in relations, even intimate ones, they need a steady partner.

Creatives - want to impress and be admired for their antiques, they need someone who'll entertain their chaos.

Normalisers - want perfection and order, a stable environment that's in control, but can't get that control themselves so needs someone who'll do it.

Harmonisers - want pleasure, harmony, to get along with others that are equally as considerate. They are most sensitive to the feelings of others, even logical types - which is surprising about DCNH. (They don't get along with Dominants or Normalisers as well)

both stacks and dcnh describe the same aspect of reality, so it's a perfect understanding. The overlap might not be a hundred percent but it's close enough that it's not worth using the two separately. your definitions are mixed up and I don't have the time nor motive to straighten it all out...."want to be admired for their antiques." Huh! that makes no sense....sounds incredibly arbitrary. let's just make designations for people that want to be admired for their cars, or their houses, or their pet giraffes. And "want to win and have control in relations" sounds like you're basing the definition on your preconception that Trump is a dominant subtype....so you can justify typing him as SEE, thereby putting the cart before horse and wreaking more havoc to Model A.

[HERO]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulDKAitJm8Y



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YtzgA310t0



“His [Donald Trump’s] problem is that, if anything, he’s too transparent. He’s not Nixon. He’s the anti-Nixon. He’s too authentic.”




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gw8c2Cq-vpg

“****** was beaten as a child by his father so viciously that he ended up in a coma, I assume producing brain damage and the kind of severe trauma that leads to the kind of xenophobia and horrifying racism and murderousness that he exhibited as dictator of the Third Reich. Is [Donald Trump] like ******? When ****** was running for office, he’d already been jailed for the Beer Hall Putsch where he tried to overthrow a government. He was in jail and he wrote Mein Kampf in jail. I don’t believe that Donald Trump has ever been put in jail for attempting to overthrow a government."


https://www.bayoubuzz.com/bb/item/10...rage-president

“Trump, no Einstein IQ, but smarter than the average President” (Bayoubuzz Staff)

Forget the tax returns. What might be more interesting than his piggy-bank is Donald Trump’s I.Q. Before we get to the…45th President of the United States some general observations are in order. First of these is that an I.Q. test that yields a result above 150 is, for all intents and purposes, purely conjectural…

Donald Trump, despite speaking to the nation at a 4th grade reading level, is poised to become one of the smartest American Presidents, ever, based on his college admissions and lifetime of success in highly competitive businesses, politics included. Trump’s first college was Fordham University, a Jesuit school in the Bronx. After two years at Fordham, a liberal hotbed, he transferred to the posher Ivy League Penn. Though SAT test scoring has changed several times since Trump was examined, the relationship between high school GPAs and test scores, vis-a-vis college admissions, probably, hasn’t. Both universities require GPAs of between 3.7 and 3.8, on a scale of 4, and SATs ranging between a Fordham low of 1400, and a Penn high of 1590, based on current admission profiles. Both universities are rated as “somewhat selective” and have, approximately, the same acceptance rates, though Penn takes transfer students with as low as a 2.0 GPA. In other words, you need at least a B+ average, more or less, to get into both schools but only a C- to transfer to Penn from somewhere else. Trump graduated from Penn State with a B.S. in Anthropology and Economics. He, also, took business courses while a student even if he isn’t, exactly, a Wharton grad.

Based on a limited and imperfect data set, and his worldly achievements, Trump’s I.Q. can be estimated to fall in the 140-154 range. This does not take into account, however, other important indicia of intelligence, ones that are less capable of empirical analysis, like maturity, emotional intelligence, and empathy. Barack Obama was bright, for sure, but even if not at the top of the Presidential class, he led with his heart as much as his mind. When the 44th President cried over children killed in mass shootings he wasn’t acting. When he proposed health care for all Americans his verve wasn’t fake. Obama was good that way, better than most chief executives who’ve led the nation and that made him, both, caring and smart, a good combination in a leader.

Using USNews’ scoring criteria, and they all differ in who’s the brainiest, and on what numeric scale, Trump’s high-side I.Q. of 154, if accurate, would place him in the second place spot behind John Adams’ 168, and just a tad above Thomas Jefferson’s 153. John F. Kennedy closes out the top four at 150. Whatever Trump does in the next four years you can bet it’ll be deliberate, meaning he shouldn’t get any Mulligans. The open question is whether Trump’s empathy will match his intellect. Let’s hope so.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07BIWx61WBY


https://alethonews.wordpress.com/201...ands-in-syria/

US presidential candidate Donald Trump says the Obama administration is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths in Syria and Libya.

In an interview with Fox News on Sunday, the Republican frontrunner pinned blame for the deadly Syrian conflict and the rise of the Daesh (ISIL) Takfiri group in Iraq and Syria on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama.

“She is the one that caused all these problems with her stupid policies,” Trump said on “Fox News Sunday.” “You look at what she did with Libya, what she did with Syria.”

“You look, she was truly, if not the, one of the worst secretary of states in the history of the country,” he added. “She talks about me being dangerous; she’s killed hundreds of thousands of people with her stupidity.”

Fox News questioned Trump about the claim. “What do you mean, ‘hundreds of thousands?’ ”

“She was secretary of state. Obama was president, the team,” Trump responded. “Two real geniuses.”

Syria has been gripped by deadly violence since March 2011. The United States and its regional allies – especially Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey – have been supporting the terrorists operating inside Syria since the beginning of the crisis.

The foreign-sponsored war against the Syrian state and people has killed more than 250,000 people and driven more than 10 million from their homes.

Daesh terrorists, who were initially trained by the CIA in Jordan in 2012 to destabilize the Syrian government, now control large parts of Iraq and Syria.


From The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left by Dinesh D’Souza; pages 1-3 (Ch. 1—Return of the Nazis):

Although fascism seems to be dead, it could have a second coming in different forms.—Walter Laqueur, ‘Fascism: Past, Present, Future’

…Blaming the victim is a lie, but a lie of a special type. Normally lying is a distortion of the truth. This applies to simple transference in the sense of the term. The qualities of the patient are shifted to the therapist. But when a perpetrator blames the victim, he does more than blame an innocent party. He blames the very party that is being directly harmed by his actions. Blaming the victim involves the perpetrator and the victim exchanging places: the bad guy becomes a good guy and the good guy becomes a bad guy. This is more than a distortion of the truth; it is an inversion of it. It’s a big, big lie.

The big lie is a term routinely attributed to Adolf ******. Supposedly ****** used the term to describe Nazi propaganda. In his autobiography, Mein Kampf, ****** contrasts the big lie with little or ordinary lies. “The great masses of the people,” he writes, “more easily fall victim to the big lie than to a little one, since they themselves lie in little things but would be ashamed of lies that were too big. Such a falsehood will never enter their heads and they will not be able to believe in the possibility of such monstrous effrontery and infamous misrepresentation in others.”

******, however, is not referring to his own big lies. Rather, he is referring to the lies allegedly promulgated by the Jews. The Jews, ****** says, are masters of the big lie. Now remember that Mein Kampf is a tireless recitation of libels and calumnies against the Jews. The Jews are accused of everything from being capitalists to being Bolsheviks, from being impotent to lusting after Nordic women, from being culturally insignificant to being seekers of world domination. The charges are contradictory; they cannot simultaneously be true.

Yet while lying about the Jews and plotting their destruction, ****** accuses the Jews of lying and of plotting the destruction of Germany. ****** employs the big lie even as he disavows its use. He portrays himself as a truth-teller and attributes lying to those he is lying about—the Jews. Could there be a more pathological case of transference, and specifically, of blaming the victim?

The big lie is now back, and this time it is about the role of fascism and Nazism in American politics. The political Left—backed by the mainstream of the Democratic Party—insists that Donald Trump is an American version of ****** or Mussolini. The GOP, they say, is the new incarnatIon of the Nazi Party. These charges become the basis and rationalization for seeking to destroy Trump and his allies by any means necessary. The “fascism card” is also used to intimidate conservatives and Republicans into renouncing Trump for fear themselves of being branded and smeared. Nazism, after all, is the ultimate form of hate, and association with it, the ultimate hate crime.

In this book, I turn the tables on the Democratic Left and show that they—not Trump—are the real fascists. They are the ones who use Nazi bullying and intimidation tactics and subscribe to a full-blown fascist ideology. The charges that they make against Trump and the GOP are actually applicable to them. The self-styled opponents of hate are the actual practitioners of the politics of hate. Through a process of transference, leftists blame their victims for being and doing what they themselves are and do. In a sick inversion, the real fascists in American politics masquerade as anti-fascists and accuse the real anti-fascists of being fascists.

https://israel-commentary.org/the-bi...dinesh-dsouza/

J. Kaufman (Jan. 2018?): “And, of course, the Jews are just a sliver away from being blamed by the Democrats for the whole ugly scenario. As a matter of fact, some of their more flagrant convention signs are doing exactly that right now.”


pages 11-23 (by D’Souza):

Once Trump was elected, the Democratic Left launched an unprecedented crusade to prevent his assuming office. They demanded recounts, which are reasonable when the margins are very close, as they were in the 2000 Bush-Gore election. But Trump’s margins were significant in all the crucial states in question. There was a recount or two, and Trump ended up gaining a few votes.

Then the Left sought to discredit Trump’s win by highlighting that Hillary won the popular vote. Again, this seems like an odd thing to focus on when U.S. elections are not decided by popular vote. The American political system is designed to balance individual representation and state representation. This is for the purpose of preventing large states from monopolizing power. Consequently, the Electoral College gives larger states more electors but ensures that smaller states also have enough electoral clout to make a difference.

It’s not important to decipher the precise rules of the system. The main point is that this is a democratic system and these are the longstanding, agreed-upon rules of the game. In this respect, the rules of the Electoral College are like the rules of a tennis match, which is decided not by points but by sets. Does it make sense, in a match with a final score of 6-4, 6-4, 0-6, 1-6, 6-4 that the loser, despite winning only two sets out of five, nevertheless be awarded the prize on the grounds that he won more overall points than the winner? This is absurd. Trump prevailed by the rules of the game, and his win is clearly undiminished by the observation that Hillary would have won under some other set of rules.

Next the Left sought to directly pressure electors not to choose Trump in the Electoral College. Electors reported being inundated, harassed, even threatened. While most of this was pure desperation—and the effort ultimately failed—Peter Beinart in the Atlantic Monthly made a convoluted argument about why “the electoral college was meant to stop men like Trump from being president.” No matter what the voters decided, Beinart insisted electors should vote against Trump on the grounds that he is an “irresponsible demagogue” and his victory created a “national emergency.”*

*Valerie Richardson, “Electoral College Members Harassed, Threatened In Last-Ditch Attempt to Block Trump,” November 22, 2016, Washington Times, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...-maneuver-blo/

Finally, the Left sought to discredit the election by saying the Russians rigged it. They rigged it, supposedly, by hacking into Hillary’s private server. No proof was ever provided that the Russians did this. And why would the Russians prefer Trump over Hillary? One of Trump’s first actions in office was to launch a military strike against Russia’s ally Syria. So the very concept of the Russians weighing the scales in favor of Trump makes little sense.

But even if the Russians hacked Hillary’s server, they weren’t the ones who chose Trump over Hillary. The American voters did. So whatever evidence the Russians may have unearthed, in the end it was the American people who determined the value of that evidence. They are the ones who judged it sufficiently incriminating to give Hillary the boot.

Once Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, the Left—which had criticized Comey’s role in the election—went into high dudgeon, generating such a furious storm of accusation that former FBI Director Robert Mueller was named special counsel to investigate potential collusion between the Trump team and Russia. While Mueller’s charge was to objectively uncover the facts, the undisguised agenda of the Left is to use the probe to impede Trump’s performance, increase pressure for his impeachment, and (if all goes according to plan) to force his resignation.

As all this was going on, I scratched my head over the Left’s unembarrassed effort to suppress the valid result of a free election. Then I realized that Mussolini and ******, too, came to power through a lawful—or at least quasi-lawful—process. Neither Mussolini nor ****** staged a coup. The blackshirts marched on Rome in an atmosphere of chaos and Mussolini was invited by King Victor Emmanuel III to form a new government.

Although he never won a popular majority of German voters, ****** was the head of the largest party in Germany in 1933 when he was made chancellor by President Paul von Hindenburg. A few weeks later the German parliament, the Reichstag, approved the Enabling Act essentially transferring its power to ******. Democracy, in other words, paved the way for these despots to seize power. Consequently, for left-wingers who view Trump in the same light as ****** and Mussolini, an election victory is no justification for allowing an American fascist or Nazi to come to power.

Now it must be said that when a major political party basically rejects the outcome of a free election, we are in uncharted territory. This happened in the United States once before, of course, in 1860, when the same party, the Democrats, refused to accept the election of Abraham Lincoln. The result was a bloody civil war.

Not since Lincoln has an American president faced greater resistance to his legitimacy than Trump. Even so, despite some loose talk about California leaving the union, America is not facing a serious secession movement of the kind that developed in the South in 1860-1861. What we’re seeing, rather, is a breakdown of confidence, among the losers of the 2016 election, in the democratic process itself. From their point of view, how could democracy have produced such a frightening and preposterous result?

Nearly seventy Democratic lawmakers refused to attend Trump’s inauguration, an unprecedented violation of democratic etiquette that would have provoked massive media outrage had Republicans done it to, say, Bill Clinton or Barack Obama. And just weeks into his presidency, even before Trump had done anything that could remotely be considered unconstitutional, Democratic Congresswomen Maxine Waters and Tulsi Gabbard raised the issue of impeachment. Columnist Richard Cohen even suggested the need for a “constitutional coup”—basically an assembly of elected officials who, according to Cohen, have the authority to remove from office a president whom they deem “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”

Even more scandalous, a former Obama defense official, Rosa Brooks, raised the possibility of the U.S. military refusing to obey Trump’s orders and perhaps even ousting him from office. If Trump ordered the military to do something that the generals deemed insane, Brooks said, then they might refuse to obey it. And if Trump insisted, Brooks implied, they might have to get rid of him by military coup. A similar argument had been made before the election in the Los Angeles Times by James Kirchick of the Foreign Policy Initiative. Kirchick concluded his article, “Trump is not only patently unfit to be president, but a danger to America and the world. Voters must stop him before the military has to.”

While rarely stated explicitly, there were also calls for Trump’s assassination. Shortly after Trump’s election, British journalist Monisha Rajesh wrote, “It’s about time for a presidential assassination.” Lars Maischak, a historian at Fresno State University, tweeted, “To save American democracy, Trump must hang.” At the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., singer Madonna ranted, “Yes, I’m angry. Yes, I’m outraged. And I have thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House.” Comedian Kathy Griffin notoriously posted a photo of her posing with an image of a bloody, decapitated Trump, resulting in a fire storm of protest that forced her to apologize. The rapper Snoop Dogg released a music video for a song called “Lavender” in which he aims a handgun right at the head of a clown dressed as Trump and pulls the trigger, popping out a red and white flag that reads BANG. Another rapper, Big Sean, spoke of murdering Trump with an icepick.* It’s hard to know how seriously to take any of this, but one can only imagine the reaction if anyone talked this way about Trump’s predecessor Obama.

*Deroy Murdock, “Trump Haters Call for Presidential Assassination,” March 25, 2017, National Review, http://www.nationalreview.com/articl...gate-prosecute ; Jeffrey Rodach, “California University Professor: Hang Trump, Execute Republicans,” April 12, 2017, Newsmax, http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/us-.../12/id/784015/


A similar breakdown of confidence in the democratic process was instrumental in the fascist rise to power in Italy in the 1920s and the Nazi ascent in Germany in the early 1930s. Notice that we are talking about early fascism and Nazism. Today when we think about Mussolini or ****** it is in terms of World War II. It is impossible to think about Nazism, for example, without also thinking of the Holocaust. But of course this is not how the Italians or the Germans first experienced the fascists and the Nazis.

Nobody is saying that Trump today is ****** circa 1945. Trump has not started a world war or annexed or invaded other countries, and he has certainly not exterminated six million Jews. This is not the basis of the progressive Democratic critique of Trump. Rather, they liken him to pre-war Mussolini and ******, and they warn that, unchecked, he may end up doing horrific things just as those two men eventually did.

In the early 1920s and 1930s, however, it was the fascists and the Nazis who scorned parliamentary democracy with its cumbersome and, to their way of thinking, unworkable rules. These were the parties that declared democratically elected leaders illegitimate and openly backed strategies to oust them from power. So who is doing that in America? Not Trump. Rather, it is the progressive Democrats who continue to question the validity of Trump’s presidency. It is the progressives today who refuse to accept the results of election rules and procedures. They are the ones reacting, as the fascists and Nazis did, against what they perceive to be a malfunctioning democratic system.

Then there is the issue of violence. As every scholar of fascism and Nazism knows, the fascists and Nazis gloried in it. They were not alone in this: their political rivals, the socialists and the communists, also believed in violence. Naturally this was a recipe for street bloodbaths. The early days of fascism and Nazism saw routine confrontations between the rival political groups. In Italy, Mussolini’s blackshirts fought hand-to-hand with the socialists. Quite a few people were killed in those street battles.

****** describes in Mein Kampf how his brownshirts would come to political events, typically held in bars and beer halls, armed with bats and sticks. The communists might outnumber us, he writes, but in order to stop our meetings they are going to have to kill us. In ******’s account there are blows raining and combatants falling to the ground and there he is, continuing with his speech, refusing to be cowed by the mayhem around him. [******, Mein Kampf, Trans. Manheim, 487-492.]

These confrontations from early fascism and Nazism remind me of the showdowns between the Left and Trump supporters during the campaign. I do not mean merely that the latter are reminiscent of the former. I mean that the anti-Trump protesters view themselves as waging an anti-fascist struggle. Their posters liken Trump to ****** and Mussolini. One standard depiction is Trump with a ****** mustache. Another is side-by-side depictions of Trump and Mussolini. The protesters call themselves anti-fascists or Antifa for short.

The election period was dominated by these heated and sometimes violent confrontations. Interestingly they all occurred at Trump rallies; there were no incidents at Hillary rallies. In one case, Trump had to cancel a rally in Chicago because even the police couldn’t manage the chaos. In San Jose, leftists pelted Trump supporters with eggs, leading to heated exchanges, including pushing and shoving and blows. While this sort of thing was commonplace in Italy and Germany during the early twentieth century, it has not been seen in American politics since the frenetic outbursts of the 1960s.

Trump himself seemed impatient with the disrupters. In one case he said of a protester, “I’d like to punch him in the face.” Of another he said, “In the good old days, they’d have knocked him out of here so fast.” Trump once offered to pay the legal fees of supporters who got into scuffles with protesters. Yet never once did Trump urge the disruption of Hillary’s rallies. His general stance was, “We have some protesters who are bad dudes. They are really dangerous and they get in here and start hitting people.” When a group of Latino protesters attempted to disrupt a rally Trump held in Miami, he told his crowd, “You can get them out, but don’t hurt them.”

Later a group called Project Veritas released videotaped evidence that the Hillary campaign and leftist groups had paid protesters to provoke violence at Trump rallies. Still, the mainstream media blame the violence on Trump. The argument seemed to be that even when the Left started it, the violence was a natural and justifiable response to Trump’s incendiary rhetoric. The media portrayed the Antifa disrupters as heroic resisters trying to block the rise of Nazism in America.

I want to focus on post-election violence because that is very unusual in America. After all, the election is over and the president has been elected. Nevertheless, there were massive protests and disruptions at Trump’s inaugural events. These protests were organized by a mélange of groups, the most prominent of which seemed to be one called Refuse Fascism. According to one of its fliers, “It is the fascist character of the Trump/Pence regime which renders it illegitimate and a peril to humanity.” The group’s call to resistance was signed by, among others, actor Ed Asner, activist Bill Ayers, comedians Margaret Cho and Rosie O’Donnell, and author Alice Walker.

Police braced for a stormy inauguration week, and they were right to come prepared. The trouble started at the DeploraBall, an independently organized soiree by Trump supporter Mike Cernovich, who is accused of being “alt-right.” Hundreds of protesters gathered outside, shouting “Nazi scum” and holding up “Alt-Reich” signs as guests walked in. Two men, one in a ****** mask and the other in a Mussolini mask, held up signs that said, “Trump is Alt-Right with us.” When the Trump supporters yelled back at the protesters, the atmosphere became unruly and the leftist protesters threw bottles at DeploraBall attendees and police.

The official inauguration itself drew a much stormier response from the Left. Dressed in black with many wearing masks, the protesters hurled rocks, bricks, and chunks of concrete, smashing storefronts including a downtown McDonald’s, Bank of America, and Starbucks. Using garbage bins and newspaper boxes, they set fires in the middle of the street. They also overturned cars and burned them. Members of Black Lives Matter chained themselves to fences at security checkpoints, forcing the Secret Service to close those areas down.

With helicopters hovering overhead, police used chemical spray and noise grenades to drive the protesters back, but when one police SUV attempted to drive through the crowd, protesters pelted it with rocks, smashing the vehicle’s rear window. Leftist activists engaged in clashes with police, who finally dispersed them with pepper spray. More than two hundred people were arrested. Interestingly, eleven of them were journalists, who were supposedly there as media but who also seem to have taken part in the rioting.*

*Theresa Vargas, Taylor Hartz and Peter Hermann, “Inauguration Protesters Vandalize, Set Fires, Try to Disrupt Trump’s Oath, as Police Arrest More than 200,” January 20, 2017, Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local...=.0a910388a3a4

Around the same time, hundreds of masked resisters showed up at the University of California at Berkeley to prevent a Trump supporter, Milo Yiannopoulos, from speaking. They tore down rows of police barricades, smashed windows, battered ATMs, and threw firecrackers at police. They were joined by several hundred demonstrators, students and leftists from the larger Bay Area, carrying signs with such slogans as THIS IS WAR. The group organizing the protest was called By Any Means Necessary and it described itself as an anti-fascist organization.

The protesters released a statement saying they were fighting to stop “a major fascist operative” from invading their campus. “Let’s be clear: Milo Yiannopoulos is not engaging in free speech. He is consciously spearheading the Nazification of the American University.” In reality, Yiannopoulos is a conservative provocateur and comedian. He also is flamboyantly gay, proclaims himself a “Dangerous ******,” and calls Trump “daddy.” While he bashes Islam for its vicious suppression of women and homosexuals, he has no association with fascism or Nazism. I can only imagine how he would have fared in ******’s Germany. Even so, from the resisters’ viewpoint, Milo was the Nazi and they were protecting their community from Nazism.

The disrupters had no intention of being peaceful. Their clearly stated objective was to keep Milo out. Police couldn’t handle a disruption on this scale so the event was cancelled. Watching the protesters in their all-black attire, with their faces covered, some of them brandishing rods and sticks, I could not help but think of the Italian blackshirts and the Nazi brownshirts, parading the streets with their helmets, bats, brass knuckles, and chains. The surrealism of the atmosphere at Berkeley in a sense reflected the surrealism that has characterized American politics since the beginning of the election season.

So here we have an irony. The Berkeley protesters, like the Trump protesters in D.C., view themselves as anti-fascists. They are there in their masks and with their gear, they say, in order to stop fascism. Yet they are the ones who are enforcing censorship by blocking a speaker from speaking on a campus. They are also the ones lawlessly preventing Trump supporters from attending inauguration events. While the Trump people do their own thing, the leftists are the ones who are in their faces, harassing the Trump supporters, threatening them, breaking and burning things, and engaging in skirmishes with the cops. How, then, is it that the alleged fascists seem to be acting in a peaceful and lawful manner and the anti-fascists seem to most closely resemble the fascists they are supposedly resisting?


A Rationale for Violence

At first, I thought I was merely witnessing the shocked aftermath of a shocking election. The Left did not expect Trump to win. As late as October 20, 2016, the American Prospect published an article, “Trump No Longer Really Running for President,” the theme of which was that Trump’s “real political goal is to make it impossible for Hillary Clinton to govern.” The election result was, in the words of columnist David Brooks, “the greatest shock of our lifetimes.” Trump won against virtually insurmountable odds, which included the mainstream media openly campaigning for Hillary and a civil war within the GOP with the entire intellectual wing of the conservative movement refusing to support him. Initially I interpreted the Left’s violent upheaval as a stunned, heat-of-the-moment response to the biggest come-from-behind victory in U.S. political history.

Then I saw two things that made me realize I was wrong. First, the violence did not go away. There were the violent “Not My President’s Day” rallies across the country in February; the violent March 4 disruptions of Trump rallies in California, Minnesota, Tennessee, and Florida; the April anti-Trump tax rallies, supposedly aimed at forcing Trump to release his tax returns; the July impeachment rallies, seeking to build momentum for Trump’s removal from office; and the multiple eruptions at Berkeley.*

*Eric Levenson, “Not My President’s Day Protesters Rally to Oppose Trump,” February 18, 2017, http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/20/us/not...-day-protests/ ; Peter King and Ruben Vives, “Violence Breaks Out at Pro-Trump Rally in Berkeley,” March 15, 2017, http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/l...304-story.html ; Debra Heine, “Trump Supporters and Anti-Trump Agitators Clash at March 4 Trump Rallies Across America,” March 4, 2017, https://pjmedia.com/trending/2017/03...cross-america/ ; Eliott McLaughlin, “May Day Rallies Turn Violent in Several Cities,” May 2, 2017, http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/01/world/...s-around-world


In Portland, leftists threw rocks, lead balls, soda cans, glass bottles, and incendiary devices until police dispersed them with the announcement, “May Day is now considered a riot.” Earlier, at the Minnesota State Capitol, leftists threw smoke bombs into the pro-Trump crowd while others set off fireworks in the building, sending people scrambling in fear of a bomb attack. Among those arrested was Linwood Kaine, the son of Hillary’s vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine.* More of this, undoubtedly, is in store from the Left over the next four years.

*Alex Johnson, “May Day Protests Turn Violent in Portland as Police Cancel Permits,” May 2, 2017, http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/...ermits-n753611 ; Derek Hawkins, “Sen. Tim Kaine’s Son Among Several Arrested After Protesters Disrupt Trump Rally in Minnesota,” March 8, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.6b57689573a8


What this showed is that the Left was engaging in premeditated violence, violence not as outbreak of passion but violence as a political strategy. Many on the Left justified the violence and made the case for why it was right. How, then, in a democratic society, can citizens insist they are warranted in preventing others from speaking and in disrupting the results of a democratic election?

According to Jesse Benn, writing in HuffPost, Trump is a twenty-first century fascist. Moreover, “Trump doesn’t exist in a vacuum. He’s the natural consequence of Republicans’ longstanding embrace of racism…and using immigrants as scapegoats.” The rise of fascism, he says, is not a “typical political disagreement between partisans.” Fascists historically have only been stopped by “violent insurrection.” To believe otherwise, he insists, is to “risk complicity in a new era of fascist politics in the United States.”

Writing in the Atlantic Monthly, Vann Newkirk insisted that since “democratic institutions have not stopped the rise of Trump…why should people who he proposes to victimize and marginalize trust democratic institutions to protect them?” Trump’s very agenda, Newkirk argues, is based on violence: the violence of wall building, the violence of deportation, the violence of keeping people out of America because of their religion, the violence of “punishing women for abortions.” Consequently, a vote for Trump is “a vote for a wide promulgation of violence.” Facing a fascist threat to their lives and liberties, protesters have no choice but to use force to protect themselves. The only way to stop the violence is for Trump to give up his agenda or for his supporters to replace him with “someone less violent.”

Writing in the Nation, Natasha Lennard begins with the premise that since Trump represents fascism, “it is constitutive of fascism that it demands a different sort of opposition.” Lennard argues it makes no sense to fight fascism with argument; rather, fascism can only be stopped with physical force of the kind used by the militant brigades fighting Franco in Spain or the communist groups that fought Nazis in the 1920s and early 1930s. Anti-fascists, she concludes, are committed to stopping fascists from speaking: “the essential feature of anti-fascism is that it does not tolerate fascism; it would give it no platform for debate.”

Writing in Salon during the election season, activist Chauncey DeVega began by admitting that “in a functioning democracy, political violence should almost always be condemned.” In this case, however, DeVega was willing to make an exception because Trump is a “political arsonist” who is also “on the wrong side of history.” According to DeVega, leftist violence is “a response to the threats both overt and implied of physical and other harm made by Donald Trump and his supporters against undocumented Hispanic immigrants, black Americans, other persons of color and Muslims.” Carefully note DeVega’s language: even if Trump’s people are not actually violent, if they are seen to make “overt or implied threats,” then the Left is warranted in using actual violence against them.

These sentiments were also echoed in activist Kelly Hayes’s article titled, “No Welcome Mat for Fascism: Stop Whining About Trump’s Right to Free Speech.” Indeed the entire argument of all these writers can be summed up in a single phrase, “No free speech for fascists.” This phrase—it turns out—goes back to the 1960s, where it was used by the New Left in protests against the Vietnam War. The inspiration for that slogan came from a Berkeley professor named Herbert Marcuse, who is largely forgotten today, but who was a guru of the 1960s radicals and whose basic arguments are now at the center of the contemporary political debate.

Marcuse argued that the Left is the party of tolerance, but tolerance is not for everybody; it is only for tolerant people. In Marcuse’s view, the Left must not be tolerant of the intolerant. Intolerant people, according to Marcuse, are basically fascists. They refuse to respect the democratic process, so why should they be accorded the respect they withhold from others? Marcuse argued that far from putting up with these right-wing fascists, the Left should repress them, shout them down, even beat them up or kill them. Basically, the Left should destroy fascism by any means necessary, or else the fascists would destroy them.

Marcuse’s argument echoes ****** himself, who said that either the Nazis would destroy the Jews or the Jews would destroy the Nazis. “If they win,” ****** wrote, “God help us! But if we win, God help them!” Marcuse was himself a refugee from Nazi Germany. He fled the brutality of the Nazis. But at the same time he saw the effectiveness of the Nazis in routing enemies and in bringing fellow Germans into submission. Basically Marcuse argued that in order to defeat Nazism in America, it was necessary for the Left to use Nazi tactics.

By Nazi tactics I’m not referring merely to violence by angry students and activists. I am also referring to what the Nazis called Gleichschaltung. The term itself means “coordination” and it refers to the Nazi effort to use intimidation across the cultural institutions of society to bring everyone into line with Nazi priorities and Nazi doctrine. Progressives in America are using their dominance—actually their virtual monopoly—in the fields of academia, Hollywood, and the media to enforce their own Gleichschaltung.

They do this not merely through the type of blatant propagandizing and outright lying that would do Joseph Goebbels proud, but also through the relentless battering and forced exclusion of dissident voices from their cultural institutions, so that theirs is the only point of view that is communicated to the vast majority of students and citizens. Again, from the point of view of the Left such intimidation and exclusion is warranted because it is right and proper for anti-fascists to use repression against those they deem fascists.

This whole modus operandi—which Marcuse termed “repressive tolerance” and which is encapsulated in the no-free-speech-for-fascists doctrine—is now at the heart of our political debate. It raises two important questions. First, is it true that fascists do not deserve to be heard and that it is justifiable to deny them their civil and constitutional rights? Second—the bigger question—is it true that the people whom the Left calls fascists and Nazis are actually fascists and Nazis?


The Real Fascists

These are the questions I intend to answer in this book. The first question I defer to my final chapter, where I answer it with a resounding no. Interestingly enough, leftists should like my answer, because what I am basically saying is that we should not deprive them of their civil and constitutional rights. They are the real fascists, but even so, they deserve the full protection of the constitution and the laws. At the same time, I agree with the principle that fascists cannot be fought in the normal way. It takes special resolution to defeat a movement so vicious and perverse. What we need to defeat the Left is nothing less than Denazification, and at the end of this book I show how this can be done.

Having sort of given away the answer, I now turn to the other and larger question: who are the real fascists in American politics? This question is rarely asked in a serious way, and I want to give credit to two worthy predecessors who earlier ploughed this ground. The first is the economist Friedrich Hayek whose book The Road to Serfdom, first published in 1944, made the startling claim that Western welfare-state democracies, having defeated fascism, were themselves moving inexorably in the fascist direction.

Hayek indentified fascism as a phenomenon of the Left, a cousin of socialism and progressivism. And he warned, “The rise of fascism and Nazism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period but a necessary outcome of those tendencies.”


Pages 195-211:

“The legitimation of violence against a demonized internal enemy brings us close to the heart of fascism.”—Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism

Half a year later, the shock of Trump’s election has not yet fully subsided for the Left. Bitter, unremitting political battles rage between Trump and his adversaries. This is resistance of a volume and vehemence I haven’t seen before. The adversaries don’t just want to thwart Trump, to defeat and humiliate him, they also want to get him out of there. The underlying message of Trump’s enemies is the following: it is happening here, and we cannot rest until we’ve ousted this fascist and his supporters from the corridors of power.

But where is the opposition to Trump really coming from? Where’s its ground zero? It’s tempting to assume it comes from the Democratic Party. Yet the Democrats are the minority in both houses of Congress, and Republicans dominate the state legislatures and governorships. Despite the tenacity of Democratic opposition, there is only so much the minority party can do. Yet no one can discount the depth and ferocity of the anti-Trump movement, so the center of the resistance must be somewhere else.

Some Trumpsters on social media speak in hushed tones about a “deep state,” a covert state-within-a-state of opposition that is naturally mounted against an outsider president who has vowed to “drain the swamp.” These Trump allies point the finger at covert swamp rats, mainly in various government intelligence agencies from the NSA to the CIA to the FBI. Certainly there is bureaucratic resistance to Trump within the government, but this is something he can deal with, as head of that government.

The Left’s real power does not derive from any covert conspiracy but rather from a state-within-a-state that is very much in plain sight. The Left doesn’t need to rely on the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA because it already has three of the most powerful institutions of our society. The Left dominates academia, Hollywood, and the media. These are the three most powerful megaphones of our culture and they are the primary instruments for disseminating information to people, especially to young people. In a democratic society, whoever controls the flow of information controls public opinion that ultimately decides all questions. This state-within-a-state is the strongest, deadliest weapon of progressivism and the Democratic Party. Without it neither progressives nor Democrats could get as far as they have, or mount the kind of scorched-earth opposition they have against Trump.

While Trump’s victory and the GOP’s political domination are temporary, the Left’s state-within-the-state is permanent. The Left basically owns academia, Hollywood, and the media. We can see this by asking how we could go about changing them. It’s virtually impossible. Hollywood is an incestuous insider culture that is largely self-perpetuating. There is a conservative group in Hollywood, Friends of Abe, but it meets in secret and some of its members have to show up in disguise.

…This incredible story begins with a Nazi philosopher who happens to be one of the great philosophers of the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger. It continues with one of Heidegger’s Jewish students, Herbert Marcuse, who strangely enough learned his most important lesson from the Nazis and brought it to America. For reasons we will soon discover, Marcuse taught the 1960s Left to imitate the fascists while posing as anti-fascists. Finally, we turn to another refugee from Nazism who nevertheless in his youth worked with the Nazis and now directs, in much the same manner Mussolini and ****** did in their early days, his own private militia. Note that Trump doesn’t have a private militia, but this guy does. With him, as with Marcuse, fascist thuggery derives its moral legitimacy and public respectability from a fake anti-fascist pose. His name is George Soros.


The Left’s Favorite Nazi

Ever since the publication of his magnum opus Being and Time, Martin Heidegger’s philosophy has been widely influential. Specifically, it provides intellectual grounding for a whole series of progressive causes…

Heidegger was named rector of the University of Freiburg just months after ****** became chancellor of Germany in 1933. Later that year, on the eve of the Reichstag elections, Heidegger gave his Rektoratsrede or rector’s address in which he spoke out in favor of ******’s German “resurgence.” At the same time, Heidegger circulated a manifesto of German academics pledging their loyalty to ****** and the National Socialist State, thus establishing himself as one of the chief coordinators of Nazi Gleichschaltung.

In this now-infamous rector’s address, Heidegger mocked the notion of intellectual freedom saying it was a false freedom that should be subordinated to the larger objectives of ******’s new Germany. Heidegger said that true education isn’t merely about books but also involves participation in the Nazi Labor Service. In his words, “The National Socialist State is a workers’ state.” Heidegger’s talk was followed by a rousing rendition of the Horst Wessel song and shouts of Sieg Heil. Later Heidegger spoke of Nazism’s “inner truth and greatness.” Even after World War II, when the monstrous crimes of Nazism were undeniable, Heidegger maintained his silence about what the Nazis did to the Jews and other captive populations.

Despite Heidegger’s complicity with Nazism, many progressives rushed to defend him…

The problem for Heidegger and many of his left-wing apologists is that so much has come out to expose Heidegger’s close and abiding relationship to Nazism. This is a man who said rhapsodically of ******, “The Fuhrer alone is the present and future German reality and law. The Fuhrer has awakened this will in the entire people and has welded it into a single resolve.”* Not only did Heidegger embrace the Nazis, but he viewed his Nazism as arising out of his philosophy, a political expression of the groundbreaking themes in Being and Time. Moreover, the recent publication of Heidegger’s black notebooks, written over a forty-year period from 1931 to the early 1970s, show that he was a lifelong anti-Semite.

*Richard Wolin, ed., The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, 47, 49.

…Heidegger supported Nazism as a “blood and soil” affirmation of tribal ‘Gemeinschaft’. He detested cosmopolitan ‘Gesellschaft’ which he saw as eroding the bonds of tribal society. Heidegger associated ‘Gesellschaft’ with America, a country based on commerce and trade. He also associated ‘Gesellschaft’ with the Jews. In his black notebooks, Heidegger terms the Jews “worldless,” by which he means that they are people without a place, united across the continents by what he saw as the grubby pursuits of finance and trade. Even in this brief account we see how Heidegger’s affinities with Nazism spring from the depths of his philosophical commitments.

One of Heidegger’s students, Karl Lowith, protested against the effort to evade the connection between Heidegger’s philosophy and his Nazism, pointing out decades ago that Heidegger himself viewed his philosophy as leading to Nazism, so it made no sense for Heidegger’s disciples to pretend they understood Heidegger better than he understood himself. [The Heidegger Controversy, 182.] Yet Heidegger’s progressive acolytes refuse to heed Lowith’s protestations.

In a recent book, the leftist political scientist Sheldon Wolin attacks his fellow progressives for becoming such persistent, deluded apologists for a Nazi thinker.* Wolin sets about to resolve a mystery: how, he asks, could an avowed right-wing Nazi have become the darling of the contemporary academic and political Left? Of course, by this point we know that this is not a mystery at all. Nazism is left-wing, not right-wing. Thus it is hardly a puzzle that the same leftist convictions—hatred of God, technological capitalism and “Americanism”—that drove Heidegger to Nazism are precisely what makes him appealing to leftists today.

What’s Wolin up to? Basically he wants his fellow progressives to get back on track with the big lie. Wolin realizes that there is simply no way to win by covering for a Nazi enthusiast, whatever his philosophical pedigree. So Wolin is begging his fellow leftists to get rid of Heidegger, denounce him, stop making him one of their own. If I can put myself in Wolin’s place and state his argument in my own words, it goes like this: “So what if Heidegger was one of us? Mussolini was also one of us. Does that mean that we should try and restore Mussolini? Come on, leftists. We’ve made so much progress blaming Nazism on the right-wing. Let’s stick with our theme that Heidegger was on the Right and stay away from him. Let’s not blow our cover now, just to save this one guy Heidegger.”

Wolin’s sense of urgency about detaching Heidegger from the Left can be explained by seeing that Heidegger’s larger project and the Left’s larger project today are one and the same. Heidegger insisted that everything was political and this is also what the Left believes today. Heidegger said that free speech and academic freedom were myths. What really mattered was the larger community. Ditto for the Left once again. Heidegger favored not merely debate but open ideological indoctrination for young people. Sound familiar? Heidegger knew about and evidently supported the intimidation and eviction of Jews and other “undesirables” from the German campus. The Left today has a new category of undesirables; this time they are not Jews but conservatives. Finally, Heidegger’s goal was conformity or ideological unity, and while the Left blathers on about campus diversity it’s quite obvious that this diversity is merely a cover for ideological unity and conformity of precisely the kind Heidegger sought in his time and for his country…

*Sheldon Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason


Brownshirt Tactics 101

In 1925 the Jewish philosopher Theodor Lessing spoke out against the repressive political climate of Weimar Germany. Although Lessing’s explicit target was the cravenness of the Weimar regime of Paul von Hindenburg, his real target was the emerging power of Nazism, and he faulted the government for yielding to it. The Nazis immediately recognized the threat posed by Lessing. ****** youth at Lessing’s University of Hanover formed a “committee against Lessing.” They encouraged students to boycott his lectures. Nazi youth then showed up and disrupted Lessing’s classes. Lessing was forced to give up his academic chair the following year.

In his account of what happened, Lessing acknowledged he could do nothing to prevent being “shouted down, threatened and denigrated” by student activists. He was helpless, he said, “against the murderous bellowing of youngsters who accept no individual responsibilities but pose as spokesman for a group or an impersonal ideal, always talking in the royal ‘we’ while hurling personal insults . . . and claiming that everything is happening in the name of what’s true, good and beautiful.”* This was fascism, German style, in the 1920s.

*Gotz Aly, Why the Germans? Why the Jews?, 175-176.


In March 2017, the eminent political scientist Charles Murray—a former colleague of mine at the American Enterprise Institute—showed up to give a lecture on class divisions in American society at a progressive bastion, Middlebury College in Vermont. Hundreds of protesters gathered outside McCullough Student Center where Murray was scheduled to speak and engage in dialogue with Middlebury political scientist Allison Stanger. Murray is a libertarian who leans Republican, although he’s no fan of Donald Trump. Unlike Lessing, who taught at the university where he was harassed, Murray doesn’t teach at Middlebury, which is virtually devoid of conservative faculty. (Stanger is a moderate Democrat affiliated with the New America Foundation.)

In any event, the discussion promised to be a scholarly and illuminating one, giving students a perspective that they never get. But the Middlebury protesters were having none of it. The activists confronted Murray and Stanger, and at one point they struck Stanger. Inside Wilson Hall, protesters turned their backs to Murray and began to boo and shout. Murray found he simply could not be heard. College officials escorted Murray and Stanger to another location where their conversation had, for safety reasons, to be shown on closed-circuit television.

After the event, according to Middlebury spokesman Bill Burger, Murray and Stanger were “physically and violently confronted by a group of protesters.” The protesters were masked in the standard Antifa style. Murray and Stanger ducked into an administrator’s car, but the protesters attacked the car, pounding on it, rocking it, and seeking to prevent it from leaving. “At one point,” Burger said, “a large traffic sign was thrown in front of the car. Public safety officers were able, finally, to clear the way to allow the vehicle to leave campus.”

According to Burger, “During the confrontation outside McCullough, one of the demonstrators pulled Professor Stanger’s hair and twisted her neck. She was attended to at Porter Hospital later and is wearing a neck brace.” Murray praised campus security officers for the protection they provided but described what he experienced as “scary, violent mob action.”* This is so-called progressive antifascism, American style, circa 2017.

*Addison Independent, “Middlebury College Professor Injured by Protesters as She Escorted Controversial Speaker,” March 6, 2017, http://www.addisonindependent.com/20...ersial-speaker


Why does this purported anti-fascism on the part of progressives so closely resemble the fascism that it claims to be opposing? More profoundly, what is anti-fascism as the term is now used on the American Left? To answer these questions, we turn to the founders of the so-called anti-fascist movement on the progressive Left, the sociologist Herbert Marcuse and his colleague Theodor Adorno of the Frankfurt School or the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main, Germany…

The man who became the Frankfurt School’s most influential figure, Herbert Marcuse, was a student of Heidegger at Freiburg, where he also became Heidegger’s assistant. Marcuse was a young Marxist, and what attracted him to Heidegger was that he saw Heidegger as a revolutionary just like Marx. One of Marx’s central themes, alienation, is also central to Heidegger. Both were men of the Left who despised technological capitalism. Marcuse, in his work, sought to integrate Marx and Heidegger. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy terms Marcuse’s project an attempt to create “Heideggerian Marxism.” [“Herbert Marcuse,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marcuse/ ]

Marcuse recognized Heidegger’s burgeoning fascism, but this, by itself, wasn’t a problem. Fascism, as we have seen, is not inherently anti-Semitic. Marcuse knew that Heidegger’s hatred for individualism, capitalism, and “Americanism” were shared by both fascists and Marxists. Precisely for this reason, Marcuse believed a fusion of Marxian socialism and Heideggerian fascism was a logical synthesis. We see in young Marcuse’s intellectual project a confirmation of my earlier demonstration of the leftist and socialist roots of fascism. But Marcuse saw that ****** was also a raving anti-Semite. As a Jew, Marcuse understood the peril that German National Socialism posed for him personally.

So Marcuse broke with Heidegger and fled the country. He joined the Frankfurt School, which had been formed in 1922 but most of its scholars during the ****** era became German Jewish exiles living and working abroad. One of Marcuse’s colleagues was Theodor Adorno. Both Marcuse and Adorno came to the United States. Adorno worked at the Institute for Social Research, the Frankfurt School’s branch in New York City, and then moved to California for several years before returning to Europe in 1949. Marcuse worked at Columbia University, and then he moved during World War II to Washington D.C. to work with two government agencies, the Office of War Information and then the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner to the CIA.


http://time.com/5098422/in-praise-of-leaks/

“If Donald J. Trump decides as president to throw a whistle-blower in jail for trying to talk to a reporter, or gets the F.B.I. to spy on a journalist, he will have one man to thank for bequeathing him such expansive power: Barack Obama,” wrote investigative reporter James Risen shortly before Trump took office.


https://www.lifesitenews.com/blogs/i...s-hypocritical

“I was no Trump fan. But this hysteria is hypocritical.” by Jonathon van Maren

Jan. 31, 2017 - For the last couple of weeks, everyone has been going insane. I have never seen this level of hysteria, hyperbolic rhetoric, and fearmongering, not even when the Left collectively decided that George W. Bush was worse than ******.

It appears that the progressive movement has decided that a former New York liberal is the embodiment of pure evil and represents everything that must be opposed, however incoherently. Some of the critiques are warranted, but all of them, so far, have been hypocritical—especially considering that the other option for president of the United States was Hillary Rodham Clinton.

I was no Trump fan, but now that Trump is president, I take the same approach as Ben Shapiro and the National Review: Support the president when we can support him, and criticize him when we can’t. In other words, treat him like a flawed politician. The Left, however, is treating him like an invading demon that they must exorcise, and have completely lost their ability to see things objectively.

Consider just a few of the recent accusations being leveled at Trump:

Donald Trump is a fascist murdering America’s freedom because of his temporary travel ban from seven countries with a track record of producing jihadists, which he implemented in order to improve vetting processes. For the record, I don’t even have a strong opinion on this issue one way or the other. But what I do know is that Barack Obama suspended immigration from Iraq for six months, and nobody made a peep. Worse, one of Obama’s last acts before leaving office was ending America’s longstanding policy of granting asylum to Cuban refugees who arrive without a visa. Where was the outrage then for people fleeing a dictatorship, many with family members in Florida? Nobody cared.

Donald Trump is a “Russian puppet” because sources claim that Russian hackers may have been Julian Assange’s source for the leak of Democrat emails, regardless of the fact that the leaks merely showed the American people what politicos like John Podesta really thought. On the other hand, the Clinton Foundation could receive millions upon millions of dollars from countries specializing in human rights abuses—and nobody saw a problem. Evidently it’s alright to run a pay-to-play scheme—as long as you play for the right side.

Donald Trump is a misogynist pig because of his treatment of women in the past, and this means that The Patriarchy has returned. Now, I will be the first to say—and have written this many times throughout the election—that Trump is guilty as charged. His behavior has been that of a misogynist pig for decades. But the hysteria is a little hard to handle considering that the other option for president was a woman who enabled Bill Clinton, alleged rapist, serial sexual harasser, and predator who used a White House intern 27 years his junior for sex. Hillary, in fact, was in charge of suppressing what they called “bimbo eruptions” during the 1992 campaign, working to destroy the reputations of any woman who stepped forward to complain about Bill.

And the grievances go on and on. The Republicans obstructed Merrick Garland’s confirmation as Supreme Court justice, says the Left, and this was a travesty. They conveniently ignore the fact that the Democrats began the tradition of using the Court as an ideological cudgel when they smeared and slandered Robert Bork and tried to do the same to Clarence Thomas. They are wild with indignation at Trump’s use of executive orders, even though Barack Obama gave up on legislating long ago and passed nearly his entire agenda by fiat. In every instance, it is not what Donald Trump is doing that spawns the outrage, it is the fact that they have lost power. It’s not the methods he is utilizing, it is the fact that they disagree with his agenda.

The Left always uses the politics of demonization in order to silence and marginalize their opponents, and they are used to controlling the levers of power. The cultural troika of film, television, and music nearly always pronounces the same judgements and roots for progressive causes. The media has been in the bag for a long time, and abandoned all pretence of neutrality in the waning days of the campaign. And for nearly a decade, the progressives had Barack Obama in the White House, lighting up the grounds with the rainbow, hugging Cecile Richards, and using pre-existing legislation to force the biologically illiterate concept of “gender identity” into America’s schools. With Trump’s arrival, they have found that their exaggerated sense of self-righteousness does not entitle them to anything in a democracy. They gave up making arguments quite some time ago, and instead spent their time lecturing the rest of us sanctimoniously. People got tired of it, and took their power away.

It is ironic that while claims of Trump’s “fascism” run wild through the corridors of the Internet, it is actually the Left that is threatening democracy. It is the Left, after all, that is claiming the election was “stolen” from them. It is the Left that wants to reorganize the American political system (getting rid of the Electoral College) to ensure that it wins presidential elections. It is the Left that is claiming a democratically elected president is not the “legitimate” president simply because they disagree with his agenda and viscerally hate him. The dreadful Keith Olbermann went so far as to tell Bill Maher that America did not have an election: “We were invaded, is what it boils down to.”

Surely people can see that this neurotic seizure the Left is undergoing is not helpful. I was no Trump fan, but now that Trump is president, I take the same approach as Ben Shapiro and the National Review: Support the president when we can support him, and criticize him when we can’t. In other words, treat him like a flawed politician. The Left, however, is treating him like an invading demon that they must exorcise, and have completely lost their ability to see things objectively. Thus, a “temporary travel ban” becomes a “Muslim ban,” cabinet appointees with military experience become a “junta,” and the use of Obama tactics becomes “fascism.”

The Left has lost power, and it is panicking.

The next four years are going to be a street fight. The Left has caricatured Trump as some grotesque dictator, and the shouting is now so loud it is almost impossible for facts to pierce the din. The Second American Civil War is underway, and the fault lines could not possibly be more defined: The brazen hypocrisy of the Left combined with their swooning hysteria have revealed that they have lost their ability to see those they disagree with in political terms.


http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/198...deal-instincts

from Trump: The Art of the Deal by Donald Trump with Tony Schwartz; pages 45-8:

My style of deal-making is quite simple and straightforward. I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I’m after. Sometimes I settle for less than I sought, but in most cases I still end up with what I want.

More than anything else, I think deal-making is an ability you’re born with. It’s in the genes. I don’t say that egotistically. It’s not about being brilliant. It does take a certain intelligence, but mostly it’s about instincts. You can take the smartest kid at Wharton, the one who gets straight A’s and has a 170 IQ, and if he doesn’t have the instincts, he’ll never be a successful entrepreneur.

Moreover, most people who do have the instincts will never recognize that they do, because they don’t have the courage or the good fortune to discover their potential. Somewhere out there are a few men with more innate talent at golf than Jack Nicklaus, or women with greater ability at tennis than Chris Evert or Martina Navratilova, but they will never lift a club or swing a racket and therefore will never find out how great they could have been. Instead, they’ll be content to sit and watch stars perform on television.

When I look back at the deals I’ve made—and the ones I’ve lost or let pass—I see certain common elements. But unlike the real estate evangelists you see all over television these days, I can’t promise you that by following the precepts I’m about to offer you’ll become a millionaire overnight. Unfortunately, life rarely works that way, and most people who try to get rich quick end up going broke instead. As for those among you who do have the genes, who do have the instincts, and who could be highly successful, well, I still hope you won’t follow my advice. Because that would just make it a much tougher world for me.


Think Big

I like thinking big. I always have. To me it’s very simple: if you’re going to be thinking anyway, you might as well think big. Most people think small, because most people are afraid of success, afraid of making decisions, afraid of winning. And that gives people like me a great advantage.

One of the keys to thinking big is total focus. I think of it almost as a controlled neurosis, which is a quality I’ve noticed in many highly successful entrepreneurs. They’re obsessive, they’re driven, they’re singleminded and sometimes they’re almost maniacal, but it’s all channeled into their work. Where other people are paralyzed by neurosis, the people I’m talking about are actually helped by it.

I don’t say this trait leads to a happier life, or a better life, but it’s great when it comes to getting what you want. This is particularly true in New York real estate, where you are dealing with some of the sharpest, toughest and most vicious people in the world. I happen to love to go up against these guys, and I love to beat them.

PROTECT THE DOWNSIDE

People think I’m a gambler. I’ve never gambled in my life. To me, a gambler is someone who plays slot machines. I prefer to own slot machines. It’s a very good business being the house.

It’s been said that I believe in the power of positive thinking. In fact, I believe in the power of negative thinking. I happen to be very conservative in business. I always go into the deal anticipating the worst. If you plan for the worst—if you can live with the worst—the good will always take care of itself.


pages 4-5 [A Week in the Life (Monday 10:00 A.M.)]:

I call Don Imus to thank him. Imus has one of the most successful radio shows in the United States on WNBC, and he’s been helping to raise money for the Annabel Hill fund.

I’m amazed at how this has snowballed into such a media event. It began last week when I saw a national news report by Tom Brokaw about this adorable little lady from Georgia, Mrs. Hill, who was trying to save her farm from being foreclosed. Her sixty-seven-year-old husband had committed suicide a few weeks earlier, hoping his life insurance would save the farm, which had been in the family for generations. But the insurance proceeds weren’t nearly enough. It was a very sad situation, and I was moved. Here were people who’d worked very hard and honestly all their lives, only to see it all crumble before them. To me, it just seemed wrong.

Through NBC I was put in touch with a wonderful guy from Georgia named Frank Argenbright, who’d become very involved in trying to help Mrs. Hill. Frank directed me to the bank that held Mrs. Hill’s mortgage. The next morning, I called and got some vice president on the line. I explained that I was a businessman from New York, and that I was interested in helping Mrs. Hill. He told me he was sorry, but that it was too late. They were going to auction off the farm, he said, and “nothing or no one is going to stop it.”

That really got me going. I said to the guy: “You listen to me. If you do foreclose, I’ll personally bring a lawsuit for murder against you and your bank, on the grounds that you harassed Mrs. Hill’s husband to his death.” All of a sudden the bank officer sounded very nervous and said he’d get right back to me.

Sometimes it pays to be a little wild. An hour later I got a call back from the banker, and he said, “Don’t worry, we’re going to work it out, Mr. Trump.” Mrs. Hill and Frank Argenbright told the media, and the next thing I knew, it was the lead story on the network news.

By the end of the week, we’d raised $40,000. Imus alone raised almost $20,000 by appealing to his listeners. As a Christmas present to Mrs. Hill and her family, we’ve scheduled a mortgage-burning ceremony for Christmas Eve in the atrium of Trump Tower. By then, I’m confident, we’ll have raised all the money. I’ve promised Mrs. Hill that if we haven’t, I’ll make up any difference.

I tell Imus he’s the greatest, and I invite him to be my guest one day next week at the tennis matches at the U.S. Open. I have a courtside box and I used to go myself almost every day. Now I’m so busy I mostly just send my friends.


Pages 27-9 (WEDNESDAY):

3:30 P.M. A friend from Texas calls, to tell me about a deal he’s got working. He happens to be a very charming guy—wonderful looking, wonderfully dressed, with one of those great Texas drawls that make you feel very comfortable. He calls me Donny, a name that I hate, but which he says in a way that somehow makes it okay.

Two years ago, this same friend called me about another deal. He was trying to put together a group of wealthy people to take over a small oil company. “Donny,” he said, “I want you to invest fifty million. This is a no-lose proposition. You’ll double or triple your money in a matter of months.” He gave me all the details, and it sounded very good. I was all set to go forward. The papers were being drawn up, and then one morning I woke up and it just didn’t feel right.

I called my friend back and I said, “Listen, there’s something about this that bothers me. Maybe it’s that oil is underground, and I can’t see it, or maybe it’s that there’s nothing creative about it. In any case, I just don’t want to go in.” And he said, “Okay, Donny, it’s up to you, but you’re missing a great opportunity.” The rest is history, of course. Oil went completely to hell several months later, the company his group bought went bankrupt, and his investors lost every dime they put up.

That experience taught me a few things. One is to listen to your gut, no matter how good something sounds on paper. The second is that you’re generally better off sticking with what you know. And the third is that sometimes your best investments are the ones you don’t make.

Because I held back, I saved $50 million and the two of us have remained friends. As a result, I don’t want to reject him outright on his new deal. Instead, I tell him to send up the papers. In reality, I’m not too likely to get involved.


4:00 P.M. I call back Judith Krantz. You’ve got to give it to her: how many authors have written three number-one best-selling books in a row? She also happens to be a very nice woman. Trump Tower is the setting for her latest novel, I’ll Take Manhattan, and I’m a character in the book. At Judy’s request, I agreed to play the role of myself in a scene from the miniseries based on her book, and filmed at Trump Tower.

Now Judy is calling to say that the scene, with Valerie Bertinelli, came off well. I’m happy to hear it, although I’m not about to quit my day job. Still, I figure it’s not a bad way to promote Trump Tower—on national television, in a miniseries that runs during sweeps week and is virtually guaranteed to get huge national ratings.


Pages 33-34 (THURSDAY 2:45 P.M.):

A friend of mine, a highly successful and very well known painter, calls to say hello and to invite me to an opening. I get a great kick out of this guy because, unlike some artists I’ve met, he’s totally unpretentious.

A few months back he invited me to come to his studio. We were standing around talking, when all of a sudden he said to me, “Do you want to see me earn twenty-five thousand dollars before lunch?” “Sure,” I said, having no idea what he meant. He picked up a large open bucket of paint and splashed some on a piece of canvas stretched on the floor. Then he picked up another bucket, containing a different color, and splashed some of that on the canvas. He did this four times, and it took him perhaps two minutes. When he was done, he turned to me and said, “Well, that’s it. I’ve just earned twenty-five thousand dollars. Let’s go to lunch.”

He was smiling, but he was also absolutely serious. His point was that plenty of collectors wouldn’t know the difference between his two-minute art and the paintings he really cares about. They were just interested in buying his name.

I’ve always felt that a lot of modern art is a con, and that the most successful painters are often better salesmen and promoters than they are artists. I sometimes wonder what would happen if collectors knew what I knew about my friend’s work that afternoon. The art world is so ridiculous that the revelation might even make his paintings more valuable! Not that my friend is about to risk finding out.



From Canadian Money Saver magazine (September 2017); pages 26-7 (“President Trump On Canada: He Will Reduce Your Taxes” by Robert Keats):

The news coverage both in the U.S. and Canada after the November 8, 2016 U.S. Presidential election reminds me very much of the news coverage of the stock market crash/financial crisis of 2008 and 2009. The vast majority of newspapers and TV coverage back then and now is overwhelmingly negative. My unofficial guesstimate is that there are about 20 negative reports for every one positive in the new U.S. government. For those that lived through the 2008-2009 recession you may recall the sheer panic of the public from the media trying to say that the investing world was ending and things would never be the same. We would have all been broke and destitute if all this media hype were true.

The main purpose of this article is to point out the many positive things that are most likely to flow from the U.S. to Canada based on the new U.S. government being run for the first time in recent history by a business person rather than a career politician.

I am a dual citizen living in the U.S. with a business operating in both Canada and the U.S. with our corporate entities focused on helping Americans living, working or doing business in Canada or Canadians doing the same in the U.S. We have several Canadians working in our U.S. operation and at least one U.S. citizen working in our Canadian operation. Consequently, it is very important for us to understand the effect this current overwhelmingly negative media has on the general Canadian/U.S. public who is trying to separate fact from fiction, real news from fake news. As during the financial recession, many people were making personal decisions based on puffed-up but negative media coverage which is just as dangerous as trying to make rational conclusions based on the current negative media. Those that panicked in the financial recession were the ones that were the most hurt rather than taking advantage of the best buying opportunity in many decades. I believe those buying into the negative media rather than looking for opportunities will similarly be harmed when we look back on this time period.

The first opportunity which I feel will likely be the most positive impact for Canada is that income taxes could be reduced quite substantially, particularly for Canadian businesses. The U.S. tax reform in progress has mandated a 15% tax on both large and small businesses. This is an incredible tax reduction that brings the U.S. from amongst the highest tax on incorporated businesses in the world to close to the lowest. So, what do I think that will mean for Canadian businesses? I believe both the Canadian federal and provincial governments will reduce the corporate taxes combined to approximately this same 15% level. This would mean Canadian businesses, particularly with the lower Canadian dollar could still be very competitive and would have more after-tax capital to reinvest back into their businesses to create more jobs and make more capital investments in equipment and buildings. All of which would be great for the Canadian economy. Ontario Premier Wynne has already made commitments to reduce Ontario corporate taxes, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau didn’t finish off his March 2017 budget. He was waiting until he was able to see what the US was doing so he could adjust corporate taxes to keep Canada competitive in the fall budget updates.

[…]

The Canadian carbon tax imposed on all provinces, except for Ontario and Quebec because they already have a cap and trade system which is very similar, has started in January and will continue to increase substantially annually. As the carbon tax rate grows it will continue to make Canadian businesses less competitive with the U.S. Consequently, I believe that with President Trump’s active deregulation, opening more federal lands to oil and gas activity, projects such as the Keystone XL pipeline, and drilling in the Arctic, that this will put pressure on the Canadian federal government to curtail their desire to increase the carbon tax from its current level to five times as planned over the next few years. Canadians may benefit greatly through reduced emissions-type taxes. In addition, with more opportunities in the U.S. for Canadian oil and gas or pipeline companies, there may be substantial increase in employment to offset Alberta’s disastrous high unemployment in that industry.

The final controversial item that I believe will eventually be substantially helpful to Canada is The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Originally called the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement, which came into effect on January 2, 1988. This agreement was superseded by NAFTA in 1994, and broadened to include Mexico. This agreement is very outdated and has been in dire need of updating for many years. If you think back to 1989 the Internet was barely a twinkle in Al Gore’s eye. Google, Facebook, Twitter and other household name companies were not even formed yet. Apple, now the largest company in the world had barely introduced the first Mac. There have been many new occupations and industries created, old ones eliminated or updated, and the entire world economy has changed immensely. As a result, NAFTA has not been doing as effective a job as it could be if it was updated to the current state of the North American economy. An update has been past due for some time so if the three countires get together and they all act in their individual country’s best interest while respecting each other’s needs, an updated deal can be struck that will increase trade and employment in all three countries over current levels. For Canada and the U.S., the soft wood lumber dispute and dairy disputes should be cleared up which could mean a couple of major benefits to Canada in the form of lower prices on dairy products and lower greenhouse gas emissions. The magnitude of the greenhouse gas reduction, quite ironically, could easily have a more measurable effect than the Prime Minister’s carbon tax/cap and trade because it may leave millions of trees living in the Canadian Crown lands rather than being harvested and sold to build U.S. houses. Regardless of the banter back and forth between the various governments, Canada and the U.S. are each other’s largest and best trading partners and that is very unlikely to change regardless of what government is in power in Canada or the U.S.

The jury is still out whether President Trump and his business experience will ever be able to effectively run the U.S. and “Make America Great Again”. The task is enormous and even the President himself has admitted that the job is substantially harder than he expected and the swamp is much deeper and much wider than he had planned. In any effect, we live in interesting times and hopefully all the effects of the new government will yield such positive results that we can actually take a bite out of the incredible $10 trillion of debt with which the last government left the U.S. citizens.


From Why We Want You To Be Rich (2006) by Donald Trump, Robert T. Kiyosaki, Meredith McIver, and Sharon Lechter; pages 1-14 (Introduction by Sharon Lechter):

“The rich are getting richer, but are you?

“We are losing our middle class, and a shrinking middle class is a threat to the stability of America and to world democracy itself. We want you to be rich so you can be part of the solution … rather than part of the problem.”—Donald J. Trump and Robert T. Kiyosaki


Donald Trump and Robert Kiyosaki are both concerned. Their concern is that the rich are getting richer but America is getting poorer. Like the polar ice caps, the middle class is disappearing. America is becoming a two-class society. Soon you will be either rich or poor. Donald and Robert want you to be rich.

This phenomenon—the shrinking middle class—is a global problem, but predominantly in the richer G-8 nations (in countries such as England, France, Germany, Japan, etc.)

. . . U.S. children test above the world average levels at the 4th grade level. But by the 12th grade level, they are far behind. . . .

Donald Trump and Robert Kiyosaki also place the blame on the lack of education. But they focus on a different type of education, financial education. Both men are very concerned about the lack of quality financial education in America, at all levels. Both men blame the lack of financial education for the United States having gone from the richest country in the world to the biggest debtor nation in history, so quickly. A weak U.S. economy and a weak U.S. dollar (the reserve currency of the world) are not good for world stability. As is often said in other parts of the world, "When the United States sneezes, the world catches cold."


Both Men Are Teachers

Both Donald Trump and Robert Kiyosaki are successful entrepreneurs and investors. Both men do business and are recognized internationally. Both men are also teachers. Both men are best-selling authors, produce educational board games, speak at financial education events, and both have educational television programs. Donald Trump has his megahit network television show, The Apprentice and Robert Kiyosaki has his television show, Rich Dad's Guide to Wealth, on PBS, the highly acclaimed educational public television network.

Both men are teachers, not because they need more money. They are both teachers because they are concerned about the fate of you and your family, this nation and the world.

Rich people who want to make a difference typically give money to causes they believe in. But Donald and Robert are giving of both their time as well as their money. As the story goes, you can give a man a fish and feed him for a day or teach him to fish and feed him for a lifetime. Instead of just writing checks to help the poor and middle class, Donald and Robert are teaching them to fish. In addition, a portion of every book sale will be donated to other organizations that also teach financial literacy.

Financial Advice

There are three levels of financial advice: advice for the poor, advice for the middle class and advice for the rich. The financial advice for the poor is that the government will take care of them. The poor are counting on Social Security and Medicare. The financial advice for the middle class is: get a job, work hard, live below your means, save money, invest for the long term in mutual funds and diversify. Most people in the middle class are passive investors—investors who work and invest not to lose. The rich are active investors who work and invest to win. This book is about becoming an active investor—expanding your means to live a great life by working and investing to win.

Donald Trump and Robert Kiyosaki are best-selling authors and popular speakers because they teach people to expand their means and improve the quality of their lives, rather than work hard to live below their means. They want people to work and invest to win.

A Little History

During the Hunter-Gatherer Age of human development, humans lived in tribes and, for the most part, all people were equal. If you were the chief of the tribe, you still lived pretty much like the rest of the tribe. Chiefs did not have Lear jets, multimillion-dollar estates and golden parachutes.

In the Agrarian Age, there evolved a two-tiered society. The king and his rich friends on one tier and everyone else (peasants) working for the king on another tier. Generally, the king owned the land. The peasants worked the king’s land, and paid the king a form of tax by giving the king a share of their harvests. The peasants owned nothing and royalty owned everything.

In the Industrial Age, the modern middle class was born in America and so was democracy.

The founding fathers of America were so impressed by the five tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy, who lived in what is today known as New England, that they used the tribal model as the model for our democracy. That model elected representatives, an upper and lower house, and a supreme court (made up of entirely women).

At the same time the founders of America were copying the Iroquois form of democracy, the idea of democracy and a middle class was still considered unrealistic in Europe – all while a powerful middle class and democratic society were blooming in the United States.

Today, in the Information Age, the middle class is slowly dying and so is democratic capitalism. Unlike any other time in history, there really is a very wide and growing gap between the haves and have-nots. Are we going backward, into the Agrarian Age, when there was no democracy and only two classes, or will we evolve into a new form of capitalism and democracy?

Problems On The Horizon

Just as we are only now becoming aware of the effects of global warming, we are also only now becoming aware of the effects of the loss of our middle class. Currently, most members of the middle class feel safe and secure. They are content, even though most are aware that we have problems on the horizon.

They feel safe because they believe their government will step in and take care of them and protect them. Little do they know, there is little that government can do to protect them. Governments, even the U.S. government, cannot protect their people as they once could simply because the problems are now global problems. For example, the price of oil is determined by countries outside the control of the United States. Terrorism is not a war against nations. Terrorism is a war against ideas. A terrorist can strike anywhere and disappear into the populace. And globalization, causing the loss of so many American jobs, is the problem of multinational corporations becoming richer and more powerful than many countries. This globalization has also been made more possible through the World Wide Web making communication instantaneous anywhere in the world. Communication has become possible any time any where.

On the home front, just as environmentalists are noticing that some species of frogs are disappearing, economists are noticing that pensions and health care are disappearing for the middle class and poor. In a few years, the biggest baby boom generation in history begins to retire all over the world. Most governments do not have the financial resources to keep their promises.

Businessmen, Not Politicians

People expect their elected government officials to take care of the growing problems facing the poor and middle class. Donald Trump and Robert Kiyosaki are not politicians (although there is a strong movement brewing for Donald to run for president). They write this book as entrepreneurs, investors and educators.

Instead of promising to solve your problems, they want you to avoid becoming a victim of the problems. Do not expect your political and government officials to provide solutions. Do not think you are entitled to a secure, prosperous and healthy life. Instead Donald and Robert want you to become rich and become part of the solution to the problems we face as a nation and the world.

Not A How-To Book

When it comes to money, many people want to be told exactly what to do. They often ask specific questions, such as, "I have $25,000. What should I do with it?" When you tell people that you do not know what to do with your money, they are happy to tell you what to do ... and their recommendation is that you give your money to them.

This book is not a how-to book. Donald and Robert will not be telling you what to invest in. They will share with you how they think, why they win financially and how they see the world of money, business and investing.

A Matter Of Vision

Most rich people do not want you to know what they know or their secrets to becoming rich. But Donald and Robert are different. They want to share their knowledge with you.

One of the definitions of leadership is vision. This book is about vision, about seeing what most people never see through the eyes of two men who have won (and occasionally lost) at the game of money. Why We Want You to be Rich is a book about how these two men think and why they think the way they do. Through their eyes you will gain additional insight into how you can improve your financial future.


A Word Of Caution

In the world of money, there is another word often used—transparency. Transparency has many definitions. Three definitions applicable to this book are:

1. Free from pretence or deceit.

2. Sheer enough to be seen through.

3. Readily understood.

People want greater vision so they can see with their own eyes and make their own decisions. Because our educational system does not really teach people to be financially literate, people cannot see. And if they cannot see, there is no transparency. Due to this lack of vision and transparency, people are simply investing by giving their money to someone else to invest. They blindly follow the advice of "work hard, save money, invest for the long term in mutual funds and diversify." They work hard and follow this investment advice because they cannot see.

A word of caution: If you believe that working hard, saving money, investing for the long term in mutual funds and diversifying is good advice then this book may not be for you.

Donald and Robert do not invest in mutual funds because mutual fund companies are not required to be transparent; they are not required to disclose their true expenses. Since most amateur investors cannot see, this fact does not bother them. Professional investors, as Donald and Robert are, require transparency in all their investments.

While the financial advice of saving money and investing in mutual funds may be good advice for the poor and middle class, it is not good advice for people who want to become rich. This book is about seeing through the eyes of two rich men and understanding a world of money very few people get to see.

How History Affects Today

This book will also discuss how history has brought us to this financial state of emergency. Some important dates are:

1971: Our money stopped being money and became a currency when it ceased being backed by gold. This is the year that "saving money" became obsolete and bad financial advice. Today, the middle class has very little in savings.

Could it be because they know that savings is an obsolete idea?

1973: The first oil shock was felt. It was a political problem. However, today the current oil shock is an actual supply and demand problem that will affect all of us. Some of us will get richer, but most of us will become poorer as a result of today's oil shortage.


How will the current oil crisis affect you?

1974: ERISA, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act was passed. ERISA eventually led to what we now know as 401(k) plans. Few law changes have affected so many of us as this one. The 401(k) was originally an arcane subparagraph in the Tax Code originally created only for high-income CEOs and executives looking for a way to shelter a few more dollars. It became a revolution in retirement savings after the IRS ruled in 1981 that workers could use the same rule. The problem is that the 401(k) is a savings plan and not a retirement plan. Many workers who have 401(k)s will not have enough money to retire on simply because the 401(k) was designed for very high-income executives, not lower wage workers. In simple terms, the 401(k) savings plan will not be adequate for approximately 80 percent of all workers, especially those making less than $150,000 a year. Millions of middle-class workers will be downgraded to the poor class even though they have a 401(k) plan today.


Do you have a 401(k)?

1989: The Berlin Wall came down and the World Wide Web went up. In other words, communism, an economic system designed to protect the workers, failed. At the same time, in the same year, we entered the Information Age. Suddenly young Internet millionaires and billionaires were being created while baby-boom workers were losing their jobs.

Many older workers have to work for younger workers simply because they are not technically current. Instead of receiving pay raises as they did in the Industrial Age, many older workers are receiving pink slips because their years of education and experience are obsolete.

Are your skills obsolete?

1996: The Telecom Reform Act was passed. This Act allowed the world to be connected via fiber optic cable, facilitating globalization. This meant that white-collar jobs could be exported. It now makes economic sense to hire a programmer, doctor, lawyer and accountant in countries where the costs for these services are much lower due to the lower cost of living abroad.

Are you working in an area that fiber optic cable could change?

2001: China was admitted into the World Trade Organization (WTO). Today, America and many Western nations such as the G-8 nations have become consumers rather than producers. This sets up a huge balance-of-trade problem and also takes away our factories.

Many small businesses are not able to compete with companies like Wal-Mart, who has direct lines to China's factories.

Today in America and other Western nations, our middle class is shrinking as the middle class in China and India is growing.

Do you consume products manufactured overseas?

2004: During the Kerry-Bush debates, there was talk about the outsourcing of American jobs. But there is a bigger problem both parties avoided. There was little said about the outsourcing of American debt into the hands of foreigners.

While there is much discussion about illegal immigrants in our work force, there is a more serious immigration problem not being discussed: the amount of foreign capital that keeps the United States afloat. In 2004, 44 percent of our Treasury debt was owned by foreigners. No leading country in history has ever incurred this level of foreign debt. As a nation we cannot afford the payments to service this debt, and there is a limit to the amount of our debt the world will tolerate.

Are you able to service your own personal debt?

This book is not a political book. It will not blame Republicans or Democrats, Liberals or Conservatives. This book is about money, financial education and the effects of a lack of financial education and money management. It is about protecting yourself from national money mismanagement. Today's problems are bigger than our government can handle. That may be why our politicians avoid discussing the real problems.

The United States has the highest standard of living in the world. We have attained that high standard of living by becoming the greatest debtor nation in the world . The U.S. dollar is also the world's reserve currency and so far, the world has allowed us to print as many dollars as we want. Is this a fairy tale scenario or a nightmare? Donald and Robert do not think this fantasy can last much longer. They expect a global correction on a massive scale. Unfortunately, the poor and middle class will be hurt the most. And this is why they want you to be rich.

This Book Is Not About Changing The World

This book is not about changing the world. This book is about changing you so that you do not become a victim of a changing world. The world is changing rapidly. Politicians and government bureaucracy cannot change fast enough or protect everyone from these shifts.

It was recently announced that Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have joined forces to solve some of the world's most pressing problems. This is commendable as money does have the power to solve many of our world problems, such as hunger, affordable housing, and hopefully many diseases (such as cancer and AIDS).


The one problem money cannot solve is poverty. While there are many underlying causes of poverty, one of the causes is a lack of financial education. The problem with throwing money at the issue of poverty is that money only creates more poor people and keeps people poorer longer. This is why Donald and Robert are teachers. They know that the one true solution to worldwide poverty is financial education, not money. If money alone could solve poverty, they would donate their money. But since money cannot solve poverty, they donate their time. In addition, a portion of the profits of this book will be donated to charitable and educational organizations that also teach financial literacy.

[HERO]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9go5M0LzKY



“The libertarian community has rejected my argument that peaceful parenting and non-spanking will lead to a peaceful society . . . Donald Trump also is one of the small percentage of parents who is a non-spanker. He never spanked his children . . . He, as far as I can tell, according to mainstream narratives, according to mainstream standards, he is an excellent father. In fact, he is closer to my path for a free society than libertarian spankers are or libertarians who refuse to discuss spanking . . . Since I say non-spanking, non-physical aggression, non-emotional aggression against your children is the path to the free society, I have more in common with Donald Trump than I do with some anarchist who wants to yell at and hit his kids.”


From The America We Deserve [2000] by Donald Trump (with Dave Shiflett): pages 16-17:

There are candidates who’ve been in politics so long that they’re not capable of telling you a straight story. One candidate, Pat Buchanan, believes we should reduce our commitments abroad, and I agree. But his startling view that the Western allies should not have stopped ****** is repugnant. When he said that, he totally lost it. ****** was a monster and it was essential for the allies to crush Nazism. To say that ****** had no “malignant intentions” toward the United States is beyond belief. (Twenty years ago, Buchanan was less cautious. He called ****** “an individual of great courage, a soldier’s soldier . . . a leader steeped in the history of Europe,” and talked about his other extraordinary gifts.) My grandfather was German. But I am proud of the vital role that the United States played in defeating the Third Reich. Buchanan denigrates the memory of those Americans who, in the Second World War, gave their lives in the effort to stop ******. Moreover, his remarks about ****** suggest Buchanan would adopt a foreign policy today that is absolutely guaranteed to encourage the most oppressive, anti-American dictators in our own times.


Pages 153-4:

You think that terrorism isn’t a problem in this country? All right, say you want to discount the nut-case terrorism that’s been going on here at least since the assassination of JFK—lone-gunman terrorism. Or maybe you want a definition of terrorism that doesn’t cover the high school killers or Buford Furrow, the White supremacist loser who drove to Los Angeles so he could shoot up a Jewish daycare center. Perhaps you’d like to ignore the mystery figure who blew away eight people in a Texas church, apparently because he needed to express some deep-seated hatred of Baptists. Political terrorism? Not here.

Read the papers. Only a couple of months ago President Clinton gave clemency to eleven members of a Puerto Rican terrorist gang who had served nineteen years in jail. They were responsible for 130 bombings, many of them in bars and restaurants, resulting in six people dead and many more maimed. (At least one of those killed was a police officer. He was the father of two small sons.) But we were told these “freedom fighters” had disavowed violence. Jimmy Carter said so, Desmond Tutu said so. And probably the release would help Hillary’s Senate campaign among Puerto Rican voters in New York.

One of the leaders of the terrorist group, Ricardo Jimenez, was interviewed on Meet the Press. He was asked by moderator Tim Russert if his group had really been so nonviolent. Given their mode of operation, Russert wanted to know, “Isn’t there a pretty strong possibility that innocent people are going to be hurt and killed?”

No, Jimenez said, “you know, I think all precautions were taken, you know, to make sure that all human life was preserved. And in the end the measures were not taken that were necessary by the people who owned those establishments. . . .”

In other words, the deaths and maimings could be blamed on the people who owned or managed the places where the bombs went off.

It’s an outrage. Clearly these Puerto Rican killers have neither renounced violence nor expressed any remorse for their actions. It is almost beyond belief that President Clinton, for the sake of his wife’s Senate campaign, would release these murderers in order to pander for a few votes in the Puerto Rican community. The Clintons tell us they never discussed the matter and that Hillary’s campaign was not a consideration. Do you believe them? I don’t.

Hillary’s attempt to distance herself from the disastrous decision only compounded the matter. This is Clinton at his ham-handed worst.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUUC-SjwQp0



https://www.bayoubuzz.com/bb/item/10...rage-president

“Trump, no Einstein IQ, but smarter than the average President” (Bayoubuzz Staff)

Forget the tax returns. What might be more interesting than his piggy-bank is Donald Trump’s I.Q. Before we get to the…45th President of the United States some general observations are in order. First of these is that an I.Q. test that yields a result above 150 is, for all intents and purposes, purely conjectural…

Donald Trump, despite speaking to the nation at a 4th grade reading level, is poised to become one of the smartest American Presidents, ever, based on his college admissions and lifetime of success in highly competitive businesses, politics included. Trump’s first college was Fordham University, a Jesuit school in the Bronx. After two years at Fordham, a liberal hotbed, he transferred to the posher Ivy League Penn. Though SAT test scoring has changed several times since Trump was examined, the relationship between high school GPAs and test scores, vis-a-vis college admissions, probably, hasn’t. Both universities require GPAs of between 3.7 and 3.8, on a scale of 4, and SATs ranging between a Fordham low of 1400, and a Penn high of 1590, based on current admission profiles. Both universities are rated as “somewhat selective” and have, approximately, the same acceptance rates, though Penn takes transfer students with as low as a 2.0 GPA. In other words, you need at least a B+ average, more or less, to get into both schools but only a C- to transfer to Penn from somewhere else. Trump graduated from Penn State with a B.S. in Anthropology and Economics. He, also, took business courses while a student even if he isn’t, exactly, a Wharton grad.

Based on a limited and imperfect data set, and his worldly achievements, Trump’s I.Q. can be estimated to fall in the 140-154 range. This does not take into account, however, other important indicia of intelligence, ones that are less capable of empirical analysis, like maturity, emotional intelligence, and empathy. Barack Obama was bright, for sure, but even if not at the top of the Presidential class, he led with his heart as much as his mind. When the 44th President cried over children killed in mass shootings he wasn’t acting. When he proposed health care for all Americans his verve wasn’t fake. Obama was good that way, better than most chief executives who’ve led the nation and that made him, both, caring and smart, a good combination in a leader.

Using USNews’ scoring criteria, and they all differ in who’s the brainiest, and on what numeric scale, Trump’s high-side I.Q. of 154, if accurate, would place him in the second place spot behind John Adams’ 168, and just a tad above Thomas Jefferson’s 153. John F. Kennedy closes out the top four at 150. Whatever Trump does in the next four years you can bet it’ll be deliberate, meaning he shouldn’t get any Mulligans. The open question is whether Trump’s empathy will match his intellect. Let’s hope so.


https://alethonews.wordpress.com/201...ands-in-syria/

US presidential candidate Donald Trump says the Obama administration is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths in Syria and Libya.

In an interview with Fox News on Sunday, the Republican frontrunner pinned blame for the deadly Syrian conflict and the rise of the Daesh (ISIL) Takfiri group in Iraq and Syria on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama.

“She is the one that caused all these problems with her stupid policies,” Trump said on “Fox News Sunday.” “You look at what she did with Libya, what she did with Syria.”

“You look, she was truly, if not the, one of the worst secretary of states in the history of the country,” he added. “She talks about me being dangerous; she’s killed hundreds of thousands of people with her stupidity.”

Fox News questioned Trump about the claim. “What do you mean, ‘hundreds of thousands?’ ”

“She was secretary of state. Obama was president, the team,” Trump responded. “Two real geniuses.”

Syria has been gripped by deadly violence since March 2011. The United States and its regional allies – especially Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey – have been supporting the terrorists operating inside Syria since the beginning of the crisis.

The foreign-sponsored war against the Syrian state and people has killed more than 250,000 people and driven more than 10 million from their homes.

Daesh terrorists, who were initially trained by the CIA in Jordan in 2012 to destabilize the Syrian government, now control large parts of Iraq and Syria.


From The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left by Dinesh D’Souza; pages 1-3 (Ch. 1—Return of the Nazis):

Although fascism seems to be dead, it could have a second coming in different forms.—Walter Laqueur, ‘Fascism: Past, Present, Future’

…Blaming the victim is a lie, but a lie of a special type. Normally lying is a distortion of the truth. This applies to simple transference in the sense of the term. The qualities of the patient are shifted to the therapist. But when a perpetrator blames the victim, he does more than blame an innocent party. He blames the very party that is being directly harmed by his actions. Blaming the victim involves the perpetrator and the victim exchanging places: the bad guy becomes a good guy and the good guy becomes a bad guy. This is more than a distortion of the truth; it is an inversion of it. It’s a big, big lie.

The big lie is a term routinely attributed to Adolf ******. Supposedly ****** used the term to describe Nazi propaganda. In his autobiography, Mein Kampf, ****** contrasts the big lie with little or ordinary lies. “The great masses of the people,” he writes, “more easily fall victim to the big lie than to a little one, since they themselves lie in little things but would be ashamed of lies that were too big. Such a falsehood will never enter their heads and they will not be able to believe in the possibility of such monstrous effrontery and infamous misrepresentation in others.”

******, however, is not referring to his own big lies. Rather, he is referring to the lies allegedly promulgated by the Jews. The Jews, ****** says, are masters of the big lie. Now remember that Mein Kampf is a tireless recitation of libels and calumnies against the Jews. The Jews are accused of everything from being capitalists to being Bolsheviks, from being impotent to lusting after Nordic women, from being culturally insignificant to being seekers of world domination. The charges are contradictory; they cannot simultaneously be true.

Yet while lying about the Jews and plotting their destruction, ****** accuses the Jews of lying and of plotting the destruction of Germany. ****** employs the big lie even as he disavows its use. He portrays himself as a truth-teller and attributes lying to those he is lying about—the Jews. Could there be a more pathological case of transference, and specifically, of blaming the victim?

The big lie is now back, and this time it is about the role of fascism and Nazism in American politics. The political Left—backed by the mainstream of the Democratic Party—insists that Donald Trump is an American version of ****** or Mussolini. The GOP, they say, is the new incarnatIon of the Nazi Party. These charges become the basis and rationalization for seeking to destroy Trump and his allies by any means necessary. The “fascism card” is also used to intimidate conservatives and Republicans into renouncing Trump for fear themselves of being branded and smeared. Nazism, after all, is the ultimate form of hate, and association with it, the ultimate hate crime.

In this book, I turn the tables on the Democratic Left and show that they—not Trump—are the real fascists. They are the ones who use Nazi bullying and intimidation tactics and subscribe to a full-blown fascist ideology. The charges that they make against Trump and the GOP are actually applicable to them. The self-styled opponents of hate are the actual practitioners of the politics of hate. Through a process of transference, leftists blame their victims for being and doing what they themselves are and do. In a sick inversion, the real fascists in American politics masquerade as anti-fascists and accuse the real anti-fascists of being fascists.

https://israel-commentary.org/the-bi...dinesh-dsouza/

J. Kaufman (Jan. 2018?): “And, of course, the Jews are just a sliver away from being blamed by the Democrats for the whole ugly scenario. As a matter of fact, some of their more flagrant convention signs are doing exactly that right now.”


pages 11-23 (by D’Souza):

Once Trump was elected, the Democratic Left launched an unprecedented crusade to prevent his assuming office. They demanded recounts, which are reasonable when the margins are very close, as they were in the 2000 Bush-Gore election. But Trump’s margins were significant in all the crucial states in question. There was a recount or two, and Trump ended up gaining a few votes.

Then the Left sought to discredit Trump’s win by highlighting that Hillary won the popular vote. Again, this seems like an odd thing to focus on when U.S. elections are not decided by popular vote. The American political system is designed to balance individual representation and state representation. This is for the purpose of preventing large states from monopolizing power. Consequently, the Electoral College gives larger states more electors but ensures that smaller states also have enough electoral clout to make a difference.

It’s not important to decipher the precise rules of the system. The main point is that this is a democratic system and these are the longstanding, agreed-upon rules of the game. In this respect, the rules of the Electoral College are like the rules of a tennis match, which is decided not by points but by sets. Does it make sense, in a match with a final score of 6-4, 6-4, 0-6, 1-6, 6-4 that the loser, despite winning only two sets out of five, nevertheless be awarded the prize on the grounds that he won more overall points than the winner? This is absurd. Trump prevailed by the rules of the game, and his win is clearly undiminished by the observation that Hillary would have won under some other set of rules.

Next the Left sought to directly pressure electors not to choose Trump in the Electoral College. Electors reported being inundated, harassed, even threatened. While most of this was pure desperation—and the effort ultimately failed—Peter Beinart in the Atlantic Monthly made a convoluted argument about why “the electoral college was meant to stop men like Trump from being president.” No matter what the voters decided, Beinart insisted electors should vote against Trump on the grounds that he is an “irresponsible demagogue” and his victory created a “national emergency.”*

*Valerie Richardson, “Electoral College Members Harassed, Threatened In Last-Ditch Attempt to Block Trump,” November 22, 2016, Washington Times, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...-maneuver-blo/

Finally, the Left sought to discredit the election by saying the Russians rigged it. They rigged it, supposedly, by hacking into Hillary’s private server. No proof was ever provided that the Russians did this. And why would the Russians prefer Trump over Hillary? One of Trump’s first actions in office was to launch a military strike against Russia’s ally Syria. So the very concept of the Russians weighing the scales in favor of Trump makes little sense.

But even if the Russians hacked Hillary’s server, they weren’t the ones who chose Trump over Hillary. The American voters did. So whatever evidence the Russians may have unearthed, in the end it was the American people who determined the value of that evidence. They are the ones who judged it sufficiently incriminating to give Hillary the boot.

Once Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, the Left—which had criticized Comey’s role in the election—went into high dudgeon, generating such a furious storm of accusation that former FBI Director Robert Mueller was named special counsel to investigate potential collusion between the Trump team and Russia. While Mueller’s charge was to objectively uncover the facts, the undisguised agenda of the Left is to use the probe to impede Trump’s performance, increase pressure for his impeachment, and (if all goes according to plan) to force his resignation.

As all this was going on, I scratched my head over the Left’s unembarrassed effort to suppress the valid result of a free election. Then I realized that Mussolini and ******, too, came to power through a lawful—or at least quasi-lawful—process. Neither Mussolini nor ****** staged a coup. The blackshirts marched on Rome in an atmosphere of chaos and Mussolini was invited by King Victor Emmanuel III to form a new government.

Although he never won a popular majority of German voters, ****** was the head of the largest party in Germany in 1933 when he was made chancellor by President Paul von Hindenburg. A few weeks later the German parliament, the Reichstag, approved the Enabling Act essentially transferring its power to ******. Democracy, in other words, paved the way for these despots to seize power. Consequently, for left-wingers who view Trump in the same light as ****** and Mussolini, an election victory is no justification for allowing an American fascist or Nazi to come to power.

Now it must be said that when a major political party basically rejects the outcome of a free election, we are in uncharted territory. This happened in the United States once before, of course, in 1860, when the same party, the Democrats, refused to accept the election of Abraham Lincoln. The result was a bloody civil war.

Not since Lincoln has an American president faced greater resistance to his legitimacy than Trump. Even so, despite some loose talk about California leaving the union, America is not facing a serious secession movement of the kind that developed in the South in 1860-1861. What we’re seeing, rather, is a breakdown of confidence, among the losers of the 2016 election, in the democratic process itself. From their point of view, how could democracy have produced such a frightening and preposterous result?

Nearly seventy Democratic lawmakers refused to attend Trump’s inauguration, an unprecedented violation of democratic etiquette that would have provoked massive media outrage had Republicans done it to, say, Bill Clinton or Barack Obama. And just weeks into his presidency, even before Trump had done anything that could remotely be considered unconstitutional, Democratic Congresswomen Maxine Waters and Tulsi Gabbard raised the issue of impeachment. Columnist Richard Cohen even suggested the need for a “constitutional coup”—basically an assembly of elected officials who, according to Cohen, have the authority to remove from office a president whom they deem “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”

Even more scandalous, a former Obama defense official, Rosa Brooks, raised the possibility of the U.S. military refusing to obey Trump’s orders and perhaps even ousting him from office. If Trump ordered the military to do something that the generals deemed insane, Brooks said, then they might refuse to obey it. And if Trump insisted, Brooks implied, they might have to get rid of him by military coup. A similar argument had been made before the election in the Los Angeles Times by James Kirchick of the Foreign Policy Initiative. Kirchick concluded his article, “Trump is not only patently unfit to be president, but a danger to America and the world. Voters must stop him before the military has to.”

While rarely stated explicitly, there were also calls for Trump’s assassination. Shortly after Trump’s election, British journalist Monisha Rajesh wrote, “It’s about time for a presidential assassination.” Lars Maischak, a historian at Fresno State University, tweeted, “To save American democracy, Trump must hang.” At the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., singer Madonna ranted, “Yes, I’m angry. Yes, I’m outraged. And I have thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House.” Comedian Kathy Griffin notoriously posted a photo of her posing with an image of a bloody, decapitated Trump, resulting in a fire storm of protest that forced her to apologize. The rapper Snoop Dogg released a music video for a song called “Lavender” in which he aims a handgun right at the head of a clown dressed as Trump and pulls the trigger, popping out a red and white flag that reads BANG. Another rapper, Big Sean, spoke of murdering Trump with an icepick.* It’s hard to know how seriously to take any of this, but one can only imagine the reaction if anyone talked this way about Trump’s predecessor Obama.

*Deroy Murdock, “Trump Haters Call for Presidential Assassination,” March 25, 2017, National Review, http://www.nationalreview.com/articl...gate-prosecute ; Jeffrey Rodach, “California University Professor: Hang Trump, Execute Republicans,” April 12, 2017, Newsmax, http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/us-.../12/id/784015/


A similar breakdown of confidence in the democratic process was instrumental in the fascist rise to power in Italy in the 1920s and the Nazi ascent in Germany in the early 1930s. Notice that we are talking about early fascism and Nazism. Today when we think about Mussolini or ****** it is in terms of World War II. It is impossible to think about Nazism, for example, without also thinking of the Holocaust. But of course this is not how the Italians or the Germans first experienced the fascists and the Nazis.

Nobody is saying that Trump today is ****** circa 1945. Trump has not started a world war or annexed or invaded other countries, and he has certainly not exterminated six million Jews. This is not the basis of the progressive Democratic critique of Trump. Rather, they liken him to pre-war Mussolini and ******, and they warn that, unchecked, he may end up doing horrific things just as those two men eventually did.

In the early 1920s and 1930s, however, it was the fascists and the Nazis who scorned parliamentary democracy with its cumbersome and, to their way of thinking, unworkable rules. These were the parties that declared democratically elected leaders illegitimate and openly backed strategies to oust them from power. So who is doing that in America? Not Trump. Rather, it is the progressive Democrats who continue to question the validity of Trump’s presidency. It is the progressives today who refuse to accept the results of election rules and procedures. They are the ones reacting, as the fascists and Nazis did, against what they perceive to be a malfunctioning democratic system.

Then there is the issue of violence. As every scholar of fascism and Nazism knows, the fascists and Nazis gloried in it. They were not alone in this: their political rivals, the socialists and the communists, also believed in violence. Naturally this was a recipe for street bloodbaths. The early days of fascism and Nazism saw routine confrontations between the rival political groups. In Italy, Mussolini’s blackshirts fought hand-to-hand with the socialists. Quite a few people were killed in those street battles.

****** describes in Mein Kampf how his brownshirts would come to political events, typically held in bars and beer halls, armed with bats and sticks. The communists might outnumber us, he writes, but in order to stop our meetings they are going to have to kill us. In ******’s account there are blows raining and combatants falling to the ground and there he is, continuing with his speech, refusing to be cowed by the mayhem around him. [******, Mein Kampf, Trans. Manheim, 487-492.]

These confrontations from early fascism and Nazism remind me of the showdowns between the Left and Trump supporters during the campaign. I do not mean merely that the latter are reminiscent of the former. I mean that the anti-Trump protesters view themselves as waging an anti-fascist struggle. Their posters liken Trump to ****** and Mussolini. One standard depiction is Trump with a ****** mustache. Another is side-by-side depictions of Trump and Mussolini. The protesters call themselves anti-fascists or Antifa for short.

The election period was dominated by these heated and sometimes violent confrontations. Interestingly they all occurred at Trump rallies; there were no incidents at Hillary rallies. In one case, Trump had to cancel a rally in Chicago because even the police couldn’t manage the chaos. In San Jose, leftists pelted Trump supporters with eggs, leading to heated exchanges, including pushing and shoving and blows. While this sort of thing was commonplace in Italy and Germany during the early twentieth century, it has not been seen in American politics since the frenetic outbursts of the 1960s.

Trump himself seemed impatient with the disrupters. In one case he said of a protester, “I’d like to punch him in the face.” Of another he said, “In the good old days, they’d have knocked him out of here so fast.” Trump once offered to pay the legal fees of supporters who got into scuffles with protesters. Yet never once did Trump urge the disruption of Hillary’s rallies. His general stance was, “We have some protesters who are bad dudes. They are really dangerous and they get in here and start hitting people.” When a group of Latino protesters attempted to disrupt a rally Trump held in Miami, he told his crowd, “You can get them out, but don’t hurt them.”

Later a group called Project Veritas released videotaped evidence that the Hillary campaign and leftist groups had paid protesters to provoke violence at Trump rallies. Still, the mainstream media blame the violence on Trump. The argument seemed to be that even when the Left started it, the violence was a natural and justifiable response to Trump’s incendiary rhetoric. The media portrayed the Antifa disrupters as heroic resisters trying to block the rise of Nazism in America.

I want to focus on post-election violence because that is very unusual in America. After all, the election is over and the president has been elected. Nevertheless, there were massive protests and disruptions at Trump’s inaugural events. These protests were organized by a mélange of groups, the most prominent of which seemed to be one called Refuse Fascism. According to one of its fliers, “It is the fascist character of the Trump/Pence regime which renders it illegitimate and a peril to humanity.” The group’s call to resistance was signed by, among others, actor Ed Asner, activist Bill Ayers, comedians Margaret Cho and Rosie O’Donnell, and author Alice Walker.

Police braced for a stormy inauguration week, and they were right to come prepared. The trouble started at the DeploraBall, an independently organized soiree by Trump supporter Mike Cernovich, who is accused of being “alt-right.” Hundreds of protesters gathered outside, shouting “Nazi scum” and holding up “Alt-Reich” signs as guests walked in. Two men, one in a ****** mask and the other in a Mussolini mask, held up signs that said, “Trump is Alt-Right with us.” When the Trump supporters yelled back at the protesters, the atmosphere became unruly and the leftist protesters threw bottles at DeploraBall attendees and police.

The official inauguration itself drew a much stormier response from the Left. Dressed in black with many wearing masks, the protesters hurled rocks, bricks, and chunks of concrete, smashing storefronts including a downtown McDonald’s, Bank of America, and Starbucks. Using garbage bins and newspaper boxes, they set fires in the middle of the street. They also overturned cars and burned them. Members of Black Lives Matter chained themselves to fences at security checkpoints, forcing the Secret Service to close those areas down.

With helicopters hovering overhead, police used chemical spray and noise grenades to drive the protesters back, but when one police SUV attempted to drive through the crowd, protesters pelted it with rocks, smashing the vehicle’s rear window. Leftist activists engaged in clashes with police, who finally dispersed them with pepper spray. More than two hundred people were arrested. Interestingly, eleven of them were journalists, who were supposedly there as media but who also seem to have taken part in the rioting.*

*Theresa Vargas, Taylor Hartz and Peter Hermann, “Inauguration Protesters Vandalize, Set Fires, Try to Disrupt Trump’s Oath, as Police Arrest More than 200,” January 20, 2017, Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local...=.0a910388a3a4

Around the same time, hundreds of masked resisters showed up at the University of California at Berkeley to prevent a Trump supporter, Milo Yiannopoulos, from speaking. They tore down rows of police barricades, smashed windows, battered ATMs, and threw firecrackers at police. They were joined by several hundred demonstrators, students and leftists from the larger Bay Area, carrying signs with such slogans as THIS IS WAR. The group organizing the protest was called By Any Means Necessary and it described itself as an anti-fascist organization.

The protesters released a statement saying they were fighting to stop “a major fascist operative” from invading their campus. “Let’s be clear: Milo Yiannopoulos is not engaging in free speech. He is consciously spearheading the Nazification of the American University.” In reality, Yiannopoulos is a conservative provocateur and comedian. He also is flamboyantly gay, proclaims himself a “Dangerous ******,” and calls Trump “daddy.” While he bashes Islam for its vicious suppression of women and homosexuals, he has no association with fascism or Nazism. I can only imagine how he would have fared in ******’s Germany. Even so, from the resisters’ viewpoint, Milo was the Nazi and they were protecting their community from Nazism.

The disrupters had no intention of being peaceful. Their clearly stated objective was to keep Milo out. Police couldn’t handle a disruption on this scale so the event was cancelled. Watching the protesters in their all-black attire, with their faces covered, some of them brandishing rods and sticks, I could not help but think of the Italian blackshirts and the Nazi brownshirts, parading the streets with their helmets, bats, brass knuckles, and chains. The surrealism of the atmosphere at Berkeley in a sense reflected the surrealism that has characterized American politics since the beginning of the election season.

So here we have an irony. The Berkeley protesters, like the Trump protesters in D.C., view themselves as anti-fascists. They are there in their masks and with their gear, they say, in order to stop fascism. Yet they are the ones who are enforcing censorship by blocking a speaker from speaking on a campus. They are also the ones lawlessly preventing Trump supporters from attending inauguration events. While the Trump people do their own thing, the leftists are the ones who are in their faces, harassing the Trump supporters, threatening them, breaking and burning things, and engaging in skirmishes with the cops. How, then, is it that the alleged fascists seem to be acting in a peaceful and lawful manner and the anti-fascists seem to most closely resemble the fascists they are supposedly resisting?


A Rationale for Violence

At first, I thought I was merely witnessing the shocked aftermath of a shocking election. The Left did not expect Trump to win. As late as October 20, 2016, the American Prospect published an article, “Trump No Longer Really Running for President,” the theme of which was that Trump’s “real political goal is to make it impossible for Hillary Clinton to govern.” The election result was, in the words of columnist David Brooks, “the greatest shock of our lifetimes.” Trump won against virtually insurmountable odds, which included the mainstream media openly campaigning for Hillary and a civil war within the GOP with the entire intellectual wing of the conservative movement refusing to support him. Initially I interpreted the Left’s violent upheaval as a stunned, heat-of-the-moment response to the biggest come-from-behind victory in U.S. political history.

Then I saw two things that made me realize I was wrong. First, the violence did not go away. There were the violent “Not My President’s Day” rallies across the country in February; the violent March 4 disruptions of Trump rallies in California, Minnesota, Tennessee, and Florida; the April anti-Trump tax rallies, supposedly aimed at forcing Trump to release his tax returns; the July impeachment rallies, seeking to build momentum for Trump’s removal from office; and the multiple eruptions at Berkeley.*

*Eric Levenson, “Not My President’s Day Protesters Rally to Oppose Trump,” February 18, 2017, http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/20/us/not...-day-protests/ ; Peter King and Ruben Vives, “Violence Breaks Out at Pro-Trump Rally in Berkeley,” March 15, 2017, http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/l...304-story.html ; Debra Heine, “Trump Supporters and Anti-Trump Agitators Clash at March 4 Trump Rallies Across America,” March 4, 2017, https://pjmedia.com/trending/2017/03...cross-america/ ; Eliott McLaughlin, “May Day Rallies Turn Violent in Several Cities,” May 2, 2017, http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/01/world/...s-around-world


In Portland, leftists threw rocks, lead balls, soda cans, glass bottles, and incendiary devices until police dispersed them with the announcement, “May Day is now considered a riot.” Earlier, at the Minnesota State Capitol, leftists threw smoke bombs into the pro-Trump crowd while others set off fireworks in the building, sending people scrambling in fear of a bomb attack. Among those arrested was Linwood Kaine, the son of Hillary’s vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine.* More of this, undoubtedly, is in store from the Left over the next four years.

*Alex Johnson, “May Day Protests Turn Violent in Portland as Police Cancel Permits,” May 2, 2017, http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/...ermits-n753611 ; Derek Hawkins, “Sen. Tim Kaine’s Son Among Several Arrested After Protesters Disrupt Trump Rally in Minnesota,” March 8, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.6b57689573a8


What this showed is that the Left was engaging in premeditated violence, violence not as outbreak of passion but violence as a political strategy. Many on the Left justified the violence and made the case for why it was right. How, then, in a democratic society, can citizens insist they are warranted in preventing others from speaking and in disrupting the results of a democratic election?

According to Jesse Benn, writing in HuffPost, Trump is a twenty-first century fascist. Moreover, “Trump doesn’t exist in a vacuum. He’s the natural consequence of Republicans’ longstanding embrace of racism…and using immigrants as scapegoats.” The rise of fascism, he says, is not a “typical political disagreement between partisans.” Fascists historically have only been stopped by “violent insurrection.” To believe otherwise, he insists, is to “risk complicity in a new era of fascist politics in the United States.”

Writing in the Atlantic Monthly, Vann Newkirk insisted that since “democratic institutions have not stopped the rise of Trump…why should people who he proposes to victimize and marginalize trust democratic institutions to protect them?” Trump’s very agenda, Newkirk argues, is based on violence: the violence of wall building, the violence of deportation, the violence of keeping people out of America because of their religion, the violence of “punishing women for abortions.” Consequently, a vote for Trump is “a vote for a wide promulgation of violence.” Facing a fascist threat to their lives and liberties, protesters have no choice but to use force to protect themselves. The only way to stop the violence is for Trump to give up his agenda or for his supporters to replace him with “someone less violent.”

Writing in the Nation, Natasha Lennard begins with the premise that since Trump represents fascism, “it is constitutive of fascism that it demands a different sort of opposition.” Lennard argues it makes no sense to fight fascism with argument; rather, fascism can only be stopped with physical force of the kind used by the militant brigades fighting Franco in Spain or the communist groups that fought Nazis in the 1920s and early 1930s. Anti-fascists, she concludes, are committed to stopping fascists from speaking: “the essential feature of anti-fascism is that it does not tolerate fascism; it would give it no platform for debate.”

Writing in Salon during the election season, activist Chauncey DeVega began by admitting that “in a functioning democracy, political violence should almost always be condemned.” In this case, however, DeVega was willing to make an exception because Trump is a “political arsonist” who is also “on the wrong side of history.” According to DeVega, leftist violence is “a response to the threats both overt and implied of physical and other harm made by Donald Trump and his supporters against undocumented Hispanic immigrants, black Americans, other persons of color and Muslims.” Carefully note DeVega’s language: even if Trump’s people are not actually violent, if they are seen to make “overt or implied threats,” then the Left is warranted in using actual violence against them.

These sentiments were also echoed in activist Kelly Hayes’s article titled, “No Welcome Mat for Fascism: Stop Whining About Trump’s Right to Free Speech.” Indeed the entire argument of all these writers can be summed up in a single phrase, “No free speech for fascists.” This phrase—it turns out—goes back to the 1960s, where it was used by the New Left in protests against the Vietnam War. The inspiration for that slogan came from a Berkeley professor named Herbert Marcuse, who is largely forgotten today, but who was a guru of the 1960s radicals and whose basic arguments are now at the center of the contemporary political debate.

Marcuse argued that the Left is the party of tolerance, but tolerance is not for everybody; it is only for tolerant people. In Marcuse’s view, the Left must not be tolerant of the intolerant. Intolerant people, according to Marcuse, are basically fascists. They refuse to respect the democratic process, so why should they be accorded the respect they withhold from others? Marcuse argued that far from putting up with these right-wing fascists, the Left should repress them, shout them down, even beat them up or kill them. Basically, the Left should destroy fascism by any means necessary, or else the fascists would destroy them.

Marcuse’s argument echoes ****** himself, who said that either the Nazis would destroy the Jews or the Jews would destroy the Nazis. “If they win,” ****** wrote, “God help us! But if we win, God help them!” Marcuse was himself a refugee from Nazi Germany. He fled the brutality of the Nazis. But at the same time he saw the effectiveness of the Nazis in routing enemies and in bringing fellow Germans into submission. Basically Marcuse argued that in order to defeat Nazism in America, it was necessary for the Left to use Nazi tactics.

By Nazi tactics I’m not referring merely to violence by angry students and activists. I am also referring to what the Nazis called Gleichschaltung. The term itself means “coordination” and it refers to the Nazi effort to use intimidation across the cultural institutions of society to bring everyone into line with Nazi priorities and Nazi doctrine. Progressives in America are using their dominance—actually their virtual monopoly—in the fields of academia, Hollywood, and the media to enforce their own Gleichschaltung.

They do this not merely through the type of blatant propagandizing and outright lying that would do Joseph Goebbels proud, but also through the relentless battering and forced exclusion of dissident voices from their cultural institutions, so that theirs is the only point of view that is communicated to the vast majority of students and citizens. Again, from the point of view of the Left such intimidation and exclusion is warranted because it is right and proper for anti-fascists to use repression against those they deem fascists.

This whole modus operandi—which Marcuse termed “repressive tolerance” and which is encapsulated in the no-free-speech-for-fascists doctrine—is now at the heart of our political debate. It raises two important questions. First, is it true that fascists do not deserve to be heard and that it is justifiable to deny them their civil and constitutional rights? Second—the bigger question—is it true that the people whom the Left calls fascists and Nazis are actually fascists and Nazis?


The Real Fascists

These are the questions I intend to answer in this book. The first question I defer to my final chapter, where I answer it with a resounding no. Interestingly enough, leftists should like my answer, because what I am basically saying is that we should not deprive them of their civil and constitutional rights. They are the real fascists, but even so, they deserve the full protection of the constitution and the laws. At the same time, I agree with the principle that fascists cannot be fought in the normal way. It takes special resolution to defeat a movement so vicious and perverse. What we need to defeat the Left is nothing less than Denazification, and at the end of this book I show how this can be done.

Having sort of given away the answer, I now turn to the other and larger question: who are the real fascists in American politics? This question is rarely asked in a serious way, and I want to give credit to two worthy predecessors who earlier ploughed this ground. The first is the economist Friedrich Hayek whose book The Road to Serfdom, first published in 1944, made the startling claim that Western welfare-state democracies, having defeated fascism, were themselves moving inexorably in the fascist direction.

Hayek indentified fascism as a phenomenon of the Left, a cousin of socialism and progressivism. And he warned, “The rise of fascism and Nazism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period but a necessary outcome of those tendencies.”


Pages 195-211:

“The legitimation of violence against a demonized internal enemy brings us close to the heart of fascism.”—Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism

Half a year later, the shock of Trump’s election has not yet fully subsided for the Left. Bitter, unremitting political battles rage between Trump and his adversaries. This is resistance of a volume and vehemence I haven’t seen before. The adversaries don’t just want to thwart Trump, to defeat and humiliate him, they also want to get him out of there. The underlying message of Trump’s enemies is the following: it is happening here, and we cannot rest until we’ve ousted this fascist and his supporters from the corridors of power.

But where is the opposition to Trump really coming from? Where’s its ground zero? It’s tempting to assume it comes from the Democratic Party. Yet the Democrats are the minority in both houses of Congress, and Republicans dominate the state legislatures and governorships. Despite the tenacity of Democratic opposition, there is only so much the minority party can do. Yet no one can discount the depth and ferocity of the anti-Trump movement, so the center of the resistance must be somewhere else.

Some Trumpsters on social media speak in hushed tones about a “deep state,” a covert state-within-a-state of opposition that is naturally mounted against an outsider president who has vowed to “drain the swamp.” These Trump allies point the finger at covert swamp rats, mainly in various government intelligence agencies from the NSA to the CIA to the FBI. Certainly there is bureaucratic resistance to Trump within the government, but this is something he can deal with, as head of that government.

The Left’s real power does not derive from any covert conspiracy but rather from a state-within-a-state that is very much in plain sight. The Left doesn’t need to rely on the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA because it already has three of the most powerful institutions of our society. The Left dominates academia, Hollywood, and the media. These are the three most powerful megaphones of our culture and they are the primary instruments for disseminating information to people, especially to young people. In a democratic society, whoever controls the flow of information controls public opinion that ultimately decides all questions. This state-within-a-state is the strongest, deadliest weapon of progressivism and the Democratic Party. Without it neither progressives nor Democrats could get as far as they have, or mount the kind of scorched-earth opposition they have against Trump.

While Trump’s victory and the GOP’s political domination are temporary, the Left’s state-within-the-state is permanent. The Left basically owns academia, Hollywood, and the media. We can see this by asking how we could go about changing them. It’s virtually impossible. Hollywood is an incestuous insider culture that is largely self-perpetuating. There is a conservative group in Hollywood, Friends of Abe, but it meets in secret and some of its members have to show up in disguise.

…This incredible story begins with a Nazi philosopher who happens to be one of the great philosophers of the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger. It continues with one of Heidegger’s Jewish students, Herbert Marcuse, who strangely enough learned his most important lesson from the Nazis and brought it to America. For reasons we will soon discover, Marcuse taught the 1960s Left to imitate the fascists while posing as anti-fascists. Finally, we turn to another refugee from Nazism who nevertheless in his youth worked with the Nazis and now directs, in much the same manner Mussolini and ****** did in their early days, his own private militia. Note that Trump doesn’t have a private militia, but this guy does. With him, as with Marcuse, fascist thuggery derives its moral legitimacy and public respectability from a fake anti-fascist pose. His name is George Soros.


The Left’s Favorite Nazi

Ever since the publication of his magnum opus Being and Time, Martin Heidegger’s philosophy has been widely influential. Specifically, it provides intellectual grounding for a whole series of progressive causes…

Heidegger was named rector of the University of Freiburg just months after ****** became chancellor of Germany in 1933. Later that year, on the eve of the Reichstag elections, Heidegger gave his Rektoratsrede or rector’s address in which he spoke out in favor of ******’s German “resurgence.” At the same time, Heidegger circulated a manifesto of German academics pledging their loyalty to ****** and the National Socialist State, thus establishing himself as one of the chief coordinators of Nazi Gleichschaltung.

In this now-infamous rector’s address, Heidegger mocked the notion of intellectual freedom saying it was a false freedom that should be subordinated to the larger objectives of ******’s new Germany. Heidegger said that true education isn’t merely about books but also involves participation in the Nazi Labor Service. In his words, “The National Socialist State is a workers’ state.” Heidegger’s talk was followed by a rousing rendition of the Horst Wessel song and shouts of Sieg Heil. Later Heidegger spoke of Nazism’s “inner truth and greatness.” Even after World War II, when the monstrous crimes of Nazism were undeniable, Heidegger maintained his silence about what the Nazis did to the Jews and other captive populations.

Despite Heidegger’s complicity with Nazism, many progressives rushed to defend him…

The problem for Heidegger and many of his left-wing apologists is that so much has come out to expose Heidegger’s close and abiding relationship to Nazism. This is a man who said rhapsodically of ******, “The Fuhrer alone is the present and future German reality and law. The Fuhrer has awakened this will in the entire people and has welded it into a single resolve.”* Not only did Heidegger embrace the Nazis, but he viewed his Nazism as arising out of his philosophy, a political expression of the groundbreaking themes in Being and Time. Moreover, the recent publication of Heidegger’s black notebooks, written over a forty-year period from 1931 to the early 1970s, show that he was a lifelong anti-Semite.

*Richard Wolin, ed., The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, 47, 49.

…Heidegger supported Nazism as a “blood and soil” affirmation of tribal ‘Gemeinschaft’. He detested cosmopolitan ‘Gesellschaft’ which he saw as eroding the bonds of tribal society. Heidegger associated ‘Gesellschaft’ with America, a country based on commerce and trade. He also associated ‘Gesellschaft’ with the Jews. In his black notebooks, Heidegger terms the Jews “worldless,” by which he means that they are people without a place, united across the continents by what he saw as the grubby pursuits of finance and trade. Even in this brief account we see how Heidegger’s affinities with Nazism spring from the depths of his philosophical commitments.

One of Heidegger’s students, Karl Lowith, protested against the effort to evade the connection between Heidegger’s philosophy and his Nazism, pointing out decades ago that Heidegger himself viewed his philosophy as leading to Nazism, so it made no sense for Heidegger’s disciples to pretend they understood Heidegger better than he understood himself. [The Heidegger Controversy, 182.] Yet Heidegger’s progressive acolytes refuse to heed Lowith’s protestations.

In a recent book, the leftist political scientist Sheldon Wolin attacks his fellow progressives for becoming such persistent, deluded apologists for a Nazi thinker.* Wolin sets about to resolve a mystery: how, he asks, could an avowed right-wing Nazi have become the darling of the contemporary academic and political Left? Of course, by this point we know that this is not a mystery at all. Nazism is left-wing, not right-wing. Thus it is hardly a puzzle that the same leftist convictions—hatred of God, technological capitalism and “Americanism”—that drove Heidegger to Nazism are precisely what makes him appealing to leftists today.

What’s Wolin up to? Basically he wants his fellow progressives to get back on track with the big lie. Wolin realizes that there is simply no way to win by covering for a Nazi enthusiast, whatever his philosophical pedigree. So Wolin is begging his fellow leftists to get rid of Heidegger, denounce him, stop making him one of their own. If I can put myself in Wolin’s place and state his argument in my own words, it goes like this: “So what if Heidegger was one of us? Mussolini was also one of us. Does that mean that we should try and restore Mussolini? Come on, leftists. We’ve made so much progress blaming Nazism on the right-wing. Let’s stick with our theme that Heidegger was on the Right and stay away from him. Let’s not blow our cover now, just to save this one guy Heidegger.”

Wolin’s sense of urgency about detaching Heidegger from the Left can be explained by seeing that Heidegger’s larger project and the Left’s larger project today are one and the same. Heidegger insisted that everything was political and this is also what the Left believes today. Heidegger said that free speech and academic freedom were myths. What really mattered was the larger community. Ditto for the Left once again. Heidegger favored not merely debate but open ideological indoctrination for young people. Sound familiar? Heidegger knew about and evidently supported the intimidation and eviction of Jews and other “undesirables” from the German campus. The Left today has a new category of undesirables; this time they are not Jews but conservatives. Finally, Heidegger’s goal was conformity or ideological unity, and while the Left blathers on about campus diversity it’s quite obvious that this diversity is merely a cover for ideological unity and conformity of precisely the kind Heidegger sought in his time and for his country…

*Sheldon Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason


Brownshirt Tactics 101

In 1925 the Jewish philosopher Theodor Lessing spoke out against the repressive political climate of Weimar Germany. Although Lessing’s explicit target was the cravenness of the Weimar regime of Paul von Hindenburg, his real target was the emerging power of Nazism, and he faulted the government for yielding to it. The Nazis immediately recognized the threat posed by Lessing. ****** youth at Lessing’s University of Hanover formed a “committee against Lessing.” They encouraged students to boycott his lectures. Nazi youth then showed up and disrupted Lessing’s classes. Lessing was forced to give up his academic chair the following year.

In his account of what happened, Lessing acknowledged he could do nothing to prevent being “shouted down, threatened and denigrated” by student activists. He was helpless, he said, “against the murderous bellowing of youngsters who accept no individual responsibilities but pose as spokesman for a group or an impersonal ideal, always talking in the royal ‘we’ while hurling personal insults . . . and claiming that everything is happening in the name of what’s true, good and beautiful.”* This was fascism, German style, in the 1920s.

*Gotz Aly, Why the Germans? Why the Jews?, 175-176.


In March 2017, the eminent political scientist Charles Murray—a former colleague of mine at the American Enterprise Institute—showed up to give a lecture on class divisions in American society at a progressive bastion, Middlebury College in Vermont. Hundreds of protesters gathered outside McCullough Student Center where Murray was scheduled to speak and engage in dialogue with Middlebury political scientist Allison Stanger. Murray is a libertarian who leans Republican, although he’s no fan of Donald Trump. Unlike Lessing, who taught at the university where he was harassed, Murray doesn’t teach at Middlebury, which is virtually devoid of conservative faculty. (Stanger is a moderate Democrat affiliated with the New America Foundation.)

In any event, the discussion promised to be a scholarly and illuminating one, giving students a perspective that they never get. But the Middlebury protesters were having none of it. The activists confronted Murray and Stanger, and at one point they struck Stanger. Inside Wilson Hall, protesters turned their backs to Murray and began to boo and shout. Murray found he simply could not be heard. College officials escorted Murray and Stanger to another location where their conversation had, for safety reasons, to be shown on closed-circuit television.

After the event, according to Middlebury spokesman Bill Burger, Murray and Stanger were “physically and violently confronted by a group of protesters.” The protesters were masked in the standard Antifa style. Murray and Stanger ducked into an administrator’s car, but the protesters attacked the car, pounding on it, rocking it, and seeking to prevent it from leaving. “At one point,” Burger said, “a large traffic sign was thrown in front of the car. Public safety officers were able, finally, to clear the way to allow the vehicle to leave campus.”

According to Burger, “During the confrontation outside McCullough, one of the demonstrators pulled Professor Stanger’s hair and twisted her neck. She was attended to at Porter Hospital later and is wearing a neck brace.” Murray praised campus security officers for the protection they provided but described what he experienced as “scary, violent mob action.”* This is so-called progressive antifascism, American style, circa 2017.

*Addison Independent, “Middlebury College Professor Injured by Protesters as She Escorted Controversial Speaker,” March 6, 2017, http://www.addisonindependent.com/20...ersial-speaker


Why does this purported anti-fascism on the part of progressives so closely resemble the fascism that it claims to be opposing? More profoundly, what is anti-fascism as the term is now used on the American Left? To answer these questions, we turn to the founders of the so-called anti-fascist movement on the progressive Left, the sociologist Herbert Marcuse and his colleague Theodor Adorno of the Frankfurt School or the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main, Germany…

The man who became the Frankfurt School’s most influential figure, Herbert Marcuse, was a student of Heidegger at Freiburg, where he also became Heidegger’s assistant. Marcuse was a young Marxist, and what attracted him to Heidegger was that he saw Heidegger as a revolutionary just like Marx. One of Marx’s central themes, alienation, is also central to Heidegger. Both were men of the Left who despised technological capitalism. Marcuse, in his work, sought to integrate Marx and Heidegger. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy terms Marcuse’s project an attempt to create “Heideggerian Marxism.” [“Herbert Marcuse,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marcuse/ ]

Marcuse recognized Heidegger’s burgeoning fascism, but this, by itself, wasn’t a problem. Fascism, as we have seen, is not inherently anti-Semitic. Marcuse knew that Heidegger’s hatred for individualism, capitalism, and “Americanism” were shared by both fascists and Marxists. Precisely for this reason, Marcuse believed a fusion of Marxian socialism and Heideggerian fascism was a logical synthesis. We see in young Marcuse’s intellectual project a confirmation of my earlier demonstration of the leftist and socialist roots of fascism. But Marcuse saw that ****** was also a raving anti-Semite. As a Jew, Marcuse understood the peril that German National Socialism posed for him personally.

So Marcuse broke with Heidegger and fled the country. He joined the Frankfurt School, which had been formed in 1922 but most of its scholars during the ****** era became German Jewish exiles living and working abroad. One of Marcuse’s colleagues was Theodor Adorno. Both Marcuse and Adorno came to the United States. Adorno worked at the Institute for Social Research, the Frankfurt School’s branch in New York City, and then moved to California for several years before returning to Europe in 1949. Marcuse worked at Columbia University, and then he moved during World War II to Washington D.C. to work with two government agencies, the Office of War Information and then the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner to the CIA.


https://www.lifesitenews.com/blogs/i...s-hypocritical

“I was no Trump fan. But this hysteria is hypocritical.” by Jonathon van Maren

Jan. 31, 2017 - For the last couple of weeks, everyone has been going insane. I have never seen this level of hysteria, hyperbolic rhetoric, and fearmongering, not even when the Left collectively decided that George W. Bush was worse than ******.

It appears that the progressive movement has decided that a former New York liberal is the embodiment of pure evil and represents everything that must be opposed, however incoherently. Some of the critiques are warranted, but all of them, so far, have been hypocritical—especially considering that the other option for president of the United States was Hillary Rodham Clinton.

I was no Trump fan, but now that Trump is president, I take the same approach as Ben Shapiro and the National Review: Support the president when we can support him, and criticize him when we can’t. In other words, treat him like a flawed politician. The Left, however, is treating him like an invading demon that they must exorcise, and have completely lost their ability to see things objectively.

Consider just a few of the recent accusations being leveled at Trump:

Donald Trump is a fascist murdering America’s freedom because of his temporary travel ban from seven countries with a track record of producing jihadists, which he implemented in order to improve vetting processes. For the record, I don’t even have a strong opinion on this issue one way or the other. But what I do know is that Barack Obama suspended immigration from Iraq for six months, and nobody made a peep. Worse, one of Obama’s last acts before leaving office was ending America’s longstanding policy of granting asylum to Cuban refugees who arrive without a visa. Where was the outrage then for people fleeing a dictatorship, many with family members in Florida? Nobody cared.

Donald Trump is a “Russian puppet” because sources claim that Russian hackers may have been Julian Assange’s source for the leak of Democrat emails, regardless of the fact that the leaks merely showed the American people what politicos like John Podesta really thought. On the other hand, the Clinton Foundation could receive millions upon millions of dollars from countries specializing in human rights abuses—and nobody saw a problem. Evidently it’s alright to run a pay-to-play scheme—as long as you play for the right side.

Donald Trump is a misogynist pig because of his treatment of women in the past, and this means that The Patriarchy has returned. Now, I will be the first to say—and have written this many times throughout the election—that Trump is guilty as charged. His behavior has been that of a misogynist pig for decades. But the hysteria is a little hard to handle considering that the other option for president was a woman who enabled Bill Clinton, alleged rapist, serial sexual harasser, and predator who used a White House intern 27 years his junior for sex. Hillary, in fact, was in charge of suppressing what they called “bimbo eruptions” during the 1992 campaign, working to destroy the reputations of any woman who stepped forward to complain about Bill.

And the grievances go on and on. The Republicans obstructed Merrick Garland’s confirmation as Supreme Court justice, says the Left, and this was a travesty. They conveniently ignore the fact that the Democrats began the tradition of using the Court as an ideological cudgel when they smeared and slandered Robert Bork and tried to do the same to Clarence Thomas. They are wild with indignation at Trump’s use of executive orders, even though Barack Obama gave up on legislating long ago and passed nearly his entire agenda by fiat. In every instance, it is not what Donald Trump is doing that spawns the outrage, it is the fact that they have lost power. It’s not the methods he is utilizing, it is the fact that they disagree with his agenda.

The Left always uses the politics of demonization in order to silence and marginalize their opponents, and they are used to controlling the levers of power. The cultural troika of film, television, and music nearly always pronounces the same judgements and roots for progressive causes. The media has been in the bag for a long time, and abandoned all pretence of neutrality in the waning days of the campaign. And for nearly a decade, the progressives had Barack Obama in the White House, lighting up the grounds with the rainbow, hugging Cecile Richards, and using pre-existing legislation to force the biologically illiterate concept of “gender identity” into America’s schools. With Trump’s arrival, they have found that their exaggerated sense of self-righteousness does not entitle them to anything in a democracy. They gave up making arguments quite some time ago, and instead spent their time lecturing the rest of us sanctimoniously. People got tired of it, and took their power away.

It is ironic that while claims of Trump’s “fascism” run wild through the corridors of the Internet, it is actually the Left that is threatening democracy. It is the Left, after all, that is claiming the election was “stolen” from them. It is the Left that wants to reorganize the American political system (getting rid of the Electoral College) to ensure that it wins presidential elections. It is the Left that is claiming a democratically elected president is not the “legitimate” president simply because they disagree with his agenda and viscerally hate him. The dreadful Keith Olbermann went so far as to tell Bill Maher that America did not have an election: “We were invaded, is what it boils down to.”

Surely people can see that this neurotic seizure the Left is undergoing is not helpful. I was no Trump fan, but now that Trump is president, I take the same approach as Ben Shapiro and the National Review: Support the president when we can support him, and criticize him when we can’t. In other words, treat him like a flawed politician. The Left, however, is treating him like an invading demon that they must exorcise, and have completely lost their ability to see things objectively. Thus, a “temporary travel ban” becomes a “Muslim ban,” cabinet appointees with military experience become a “junta,” and the use of Obama tactics becomes “fascism.”

The Left has lost power, and it is panicking.

The next four years are going to be a street fight. The Left has caricatured Trump as some grotesque dictator, and the shouting is now so loud it is almost impossible for facts to pierce the din. The Second American Civil War is underway, and the fault lines could not possibly be more defined: The brazen hypocrisy of the Left combined with their swooning hysteria have revealed that they have lost their ability to see those they disagree with in political terms.


From The Paradigm by Jonathan Cahn; pages 205-9 [Ch. 27: The WARRIOR KING (The Paradigm of the Warrior King)]:

Having defeated the former first lady in the north-eastern city, the warrior will turn his attention to the nation’s capital, which he must enter in order to be installed as ruler of the land.

After defeating Joram and Jezebel at Jezreel, Jehu turns his focus to the capital city in view of beginning his reign. So after defeating Hillary Clinton while in New York City, Donald Trump turns his attention to Washington, DC, in view of beginning his presidency.

The capital city will in many ways be a stronghold for the institutions and establishments the warrior has risen against. It will largely represent hostile territory. He will go there to bring shaking.

As Samaria was the stronghold of Ahab’s house and represented largely hostile territory, so too Washington, DC, would represent the stronghold for the establishment and institutions Trump had spoken and campaigned against. It would in many ways be hostile territory. He would go there, as did Jehu, to bring shaking.

The warrior will enter the nation’s capital with an agenda to purge the nation’s leadership of corruption. He will seek to remove from government those who stand against the ways of God. He will go to the capital city with a specific mission: to “drain the swamp.”

As Jehu’s mission was from the beginning to purge the nation’s leadership, and as the capital city would be the focus of that purging, so too Jehu’s antitype, Donald Trump, would go to Washington, DC, with the mission of Jehu, to purge the nation’s leadership of corruption and, in his own words, to “drain the swamp.”

The warrior will come as both an agent of judgment and hope—judgment to the establishment and to the forces that are at war against the ways of God, and hope to those upholding the ways of God.

As Jehu was both an agent of judgment and a vessel of hope, so in the modern replaying Trump was a threat, a danger, and a calamity to those of the Clinton camp and those who supported its objectives. He was a blow to their agenda. But to those who sought to be faithful to God’s ways, to most religious conservatives, he offered a ray of hope in the face of America’s spiritual darkening.

On the day of the warrior’s ascent to the throne the nation and its capital will be polarized into two camps. The warrior will proceed to the throne alongside God’s people. To those of the opposing camp his arrival in the city will produce dread, resentment, hostility, and anger. The day of his entrance will have the trappings of a military operation.

As was Jehu’s entrance into the capital city of Samaria, Trump’s inauguration in Washington, DC, was a day of polarization. Washington was a city divided in two camps, a microcosm of the nation. Thousands gathered to celebrate and witness the event, and thousands gathered to oppose it. Surrounding Trump were people of God and religious and nonreligious conservatives. But opposing Trump were demonstrations of protesters vowing to resist the new administration. Soldiers blanketed the city to contain the conflict. It had the appearance of a military operation.

Those engaged in the practice of witchcraft will see themselves at war with the new king.

When Jehu spoke of Jezebel’s connection to pagan practices, he used the Hebrew word keshaf, meaning to whisper a spell and to practice witchcraft. Those engaged in such practices would have seen the new king as their archenemy. And those witches and sorcerers who believed themselves able to cast spells would undoubtedly have done their best, or worst, to have stopped him.

For this facet of the paradigm to have any fulfillment in the modern case or the modern world would be stunning—but it did. After Trump’s ascension to the presidency a strange phenomenon took place. One month after the inauguration, all over America and the world witches gathered together at midnight under the crescent moon to cast spells against him. The gatherings were to take place continuously under every crescent moon until they achieved their results. They invited all of like mind and practice to join them. As one article reported:

“This is not an exclusive witches-only event . . . with . . . shamans . . . sorcerers and sorceresses . . . occultists . . . also invited and urged to take part.” [Chris Spargo, “Double, Double, Donald’s in Trouble: Witches Including Lana Del Rey Will Gather at Midnight to Cast a Spell on President Trump AND His Supporters in Hopes of Banishing From Office,” Daily Mail, updated February 25, 2017, accessed July 27, 2017, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...ald-Trump.html ]

Occult ceremonies would be performed:

“Mass rituals have also been planned in multiple covens, during which men and women will perform a spell to bind President Trump and all those who abet him by delivering a chant and holding a brief ceremony.”

Never in American presidential history had such a phenomenon taken place across the nation or world—but a war involving witches and witchcraft was part of the template of Jehu, and never in American presidential history had there been a figure who fulfilled that ancient template until Trump.

The warrior’s most radical enemies will be found among the supporters of the royal house and the priests and priestesses of the pagan gods.

Among the groups that saw Jehu as a threat to their interests and themselves as his enemy were those closest to the house of Ahab, along with the priests and priestesses of Baal and Ashtoreth who attended them. So in the case of Trump it was of course not only witches who viewed themselves as his enemies. There were many. Foremost among them were those opposed to biblical values, those who supported and allied themselves with the house of Clinton, and the modern equivalents of the ancient pagan priests. The day after Trump’s inauguration the modern priestesses of Ashtoreth, leaders of radical feminism, and others with anti-biblical agendas took part in rallying multitudes to the Washington Mall in a gathering designed to show their rage over the change that had taken place in the nation’s government.

And then of course were the modern-day priests of Baal, the nation’s abortion organizations, advocates, and practitioners. As the priests of Baal would have seen Jehu as their archenemy, so the proponents of abortion would see themselves as Trump’s enemy and set themselves at war against him. They had poured massive amounts of money to stop him from becoming president. Now they would pour massive amounts of money to stop him from taking any action that might impede their practices.

The warrior will remain a figure of controversy and an enigma. His nature will remain contentious, and his ways, questionable. Yet the question will also remain whether someone of a less radical nature or combative nature would have accomplished what was called for in view of the radical nature of the times.

Jehu would remain a controversial figure for over two and a half thousand years. The biblical record would commend him for overcoming the foremost evil of his day. But that didn’t mean that everything he did was commended—far from it. Jehu would also be rebuked in the Scriptures for, among other things, the bloodiness of his means.

So Donald Trump would remain a controversial figure. He could be commended for the good he had done in opposing evil. But not everything could be commended—just as not everything could be commended in the case of Jehu, his ancient prototype. Likewise it remained a question, as in the case of Jehu, as to whether someone of a less radical nature and less radical means would have accomplished the radical intervention that was required.

Despite his ways it will be through the warrior that the sealing of the nation’s course to apostasy will be averted, at least for a time. The war against God’s ways as waged by the royal house will be checked. The killing of the nation’s children will no longer be championed from the throne but opposed by it. The nation’s accelerating apostasy will be slowed. And the highest leader of the land will no longer sanction the persecution of God’s people but will seek to defend them.

In the enigma of Jehu this was the larger story. And so it was with the enigma of Donald Trump, or at least with regard to his stated agenda. The sealing of America’s apostasy was for a time averted, the killing of the unborn was no longer championed from the White House, the persecution of God’s people was no longer sanctioned, and policies that warred against the ways of God were overturned.

The following was written of the enigma and contradictions of the ancient warrior:

“He is exactly one of those men whom we are compelled to recognize, not for what is good or great in themselves, but as instruments for destroying evil, and preparing the way for good.” [“2 Kings 10:31” Pulpit Commentaries, http://biblehub.com/commentaries/2_kings/10-31.htm ]

For many the same exact words could have been said of his modern antitype.


Pages 157-60 (Ch. 21—The RACE):

The account gives the impression that everything happened in rapid succession. Jehu takes off in his chariot in a lightning-paced campaign to reach the city of Jezreel. There is little time for him to come up with any well-thought-out or detailed strategy. He acts on impulse. He appears to be improvising as he goes. And yet at the same time he is a military commander. He is well acquainted with strategizing. And in this case his strategy is speed. He intends to reach Jezreel before word of his insurrection can get there. To that end he takes steps to ensure the secrecy of his plan. The most powerful weapon of his campaign will be that of speed and surprise. If he can keep his opponents off guard, he can win.

And so Jehu enters the center stage of Israel’s history suddenly, abruptly, out of nowhere, and without warning. He will surprise the king, who will have no clue as to what is taking place. Jehu’s rise will come as a total shock to his opponents and the powers that be.

In the city of Jezreel, the watchman catches sight of Jehu’s approach:

“So the watchman reported, saying, ‘He went up to them and is not coming back; and the driving is like the driving of Jehu the son of Nimshi, for he drives furiously!” [2 Kings 9:20]

The watchman’s description is fascinating. Apparently Jehu’s chariot driving was so distinctive it would identify him even from a distance. The translation describes his driving as “furiously.” The definition of furiously is full of fury, rage, extreme anger, violent passion. The word thus would not only describe Jehu’s driving but also his temperament.

But in the original lies something even more striking. The Hebrew word used to describe Jehu’s driving is shigaon. It literally means mad, insane, and crazy. In other words, Jehu normally drove his chariot crazily, insanely, and like a madman. It matches the picture we have of his nature—rash, impulsive, unrestrained, wild. One commentary puts it this way:

“As his temper is hasty and fierce, so is his march.” [Matthew Poole, “Commentary on 2 Kings 9:20,” Matthew Poole’s English Annotations on the Holy Bible, http://www.studylight.org/commentary/2-kings/9-20.html ]

Jehu must have at times appeared to be a man out of control, even reckless. Another commentary puts it this way:

“He came with such speed not merely because he had an errand to do, but because he was urged on by a headlong disposition, which had won him the name of a reckless driver, even among the watchmen.” [Dwight L. Moody, T. DeWitt Talmage, and Joseph Parker, Bible Characters, https://www.guternberg.org/files/547...-h/54736-h.htm ]

However much it may also apply to his nature, shigaon is the key Hebrew word given in the Bible to describe Jehu’s race to the throne. And yet despite the mad and furious nature of his race it would end up bringing him to his set goal. And that goal would mark the fulfillment of Elijah’s prophecy to King Ahab in the vineyard of Naboth.


The Paradigm of the Race

Now we open up the paradigm of the race.

Before the warrior comes to power, the messenger of God will anoint him and speak over him a prophetic word.

Jehu’s rise to power was set in motion by an anointing and the giving of a prophetic word. It was an unlikely event. Jehu was a man of bloodshed and far from godliness. But the act performed over him was holy.

So in the rise of Donald Trump to power could there have been any such act performed over him? The answer is yes. Though it may not have seemed likely at the start, he may have been the most prayed over and prophesied over presidential candidate in history. Throughout his campaign Christian leaders not only prayed for him and over him but also gave to him prophetic words. His inauguration would feature more prayers than any other in memory. In the case of Jehu the prophet’s word and anointing did not constitute a blanket endorsement of all that Jehu had done or would do. Rather it was a mark to signify that he would be used for a prophetic purpose. So too it was in the case of Donald Trump.

“So Jehu the son of Jehoshaphat, the son of Nimshi, conspired against Joram.” (2 Kings 9:14)

The warrior will turn his attention to the mounting of an attack against the leader of the land, the heir.

As soon as the prophet anointed him, Jehu, set his focus on the house of Ahab and the present head of that house, King Joram. Even before Trump announced his candidacy, he had begun mounting attacks against Barack Obama. Once the announcement was made, the attacks increased. They would continue up to the election. Trump’s campaign was first an attack on the reign of Obama.

“So Jehu rode in a chariot and went to Jezreel, for Joram was laid up there . . .” (2 Kings 9:16)

The warrior will begin a race to the throne to assume the highest office in the land.

Jehu mounted his chariot and raced to the king’s palace. The paradigm presents the warrior taking up a literal race to gain the highest office of the land. So Donald Trump would begin a race to the White House, the American throne, to become the new leader of the land. Behind it all was the paradigm of the ancient warrior’s race to the royal palace.

The warrior will enter the national stage abruptly, without warning, suddenly, and seemingly out of nowhere. He will rely more on impulse than strategy. He will make the most of his ability to surprise and shock. Catching his opponents off guard will be key to his success.

Both warriors, Jehu and his antitype, Donald Trump, appear on their nation’s stage suddenly as if coming out of nowhere. And as Jehu’s race to the throne seemed driven more by impulse than any carefully thought-out plan, so too Trump’s race to the White House appeared likewise driven by impulse more than anything else. As did Jehu, Trump continually caught his opponents by surprise and off guard. His campaign produced continual shocks, the greatest of all coming at the end—the shock of his victory, a surprise that not only caught his opponents off guard but even many of his staunchest supporters.

“ . . . the driving is like the driving of Jehu the son of Nimshi, for he drives furiously!” (2 Kings 9:20)

The warrior will lead his race to obtain the highest office of the land in a way that will appear to be crazy.

The Hebrew word used to describe Jehu’s race to the throne also best describes Trump’s race for the presidency—mad, insane, and crazy. The following is a sampling of how various translations render the biblical description of Jehu’s campaign:

“The one who drives the lead chariot drives like Jehu son of Nimshi; he drives recklessly.” [2 Kings 9:20, NET, emphasis added.]

“ . . . the pace of him who is coming is like the pace of Jehu, the son of Nimshi, for he comes impetuously.” [2 Kings 9:20, JUB]

“ . . . he drives like Nimshi’s son Jehu drives—irrationally!” [ISV]

“ . . . It must be Jehu son of Nimshi, for he’s driving like a madman.” [NLT]

“The troop’s leader is driving like a lunatic, like Jehu . . .” [GW]

“The driving is like that of Jehu son of Nimshi—he drives like a maniac.” [NIV]

“ . . . the driving [is] like the driving of Jehu son of Nimshi, for with madness he driveth.” [YLT]


Of all the presidential campaigns led by a major party in American history, the one campaign that would most accurately match all of these descriptions is without question the campaign of Donald Trump, the man who just happens to be the modern antitype of the man of whom those were written.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_G15Ugmg0Ig

“The Obama administration lied on issues of serious national policy. Trump lies because that’s what Trump does about silly things on a lot of issues . . . Typically the stuff that Trump lies about tends to be rather small potatoes when you compare it to the actual central policy ramifications of the stuff that President Obama lied about. . . .”

“The Obama administration was the foreign ministry for the Iranian government. They talk about collusion with Russia by the Trump administration? The same Trump administration that has killed some hundreds of Russians in Syria. The same Trump administration that has armed Ukrainian resistance with lethal weaponry . . . The Obama administration was covertly playing foreign ministry for the worst terror regime on planet Earth [Iran] (that was covertly pursuing nuclear weapons…)”




From Why We Want You To Be Rich (2006) by Donald Trump, Robert T. Kiyosaki, Meredith McIver, and Sharon Lechter; pages 1-14 (Introduction by Sharon Lechter):

“The rich are getting richer, but are you?

“We are losing our middle class, and a shrinking middle class is a threat to the stability of America and to world democracy itself. We want you to be rich so you can be part of the solution … rather than part of the problem.”—Donald J. Trump and Robert T. Kiyosaki


Donald Trump and Robert Kiyosaki are both concerned. Their concern is that the rich are getting richer but America is getting poorer. Like the polar ice caps, the middle class is disappearing. America is becoming a two-class society. Soon you will be either rich or poor. Donald and Robert want you to be rich.

This phenomenon—the shrinking middle class—is a global problem, but predominantly in the richer G-8 nations (in countries such as England, France, Germany, Japan, etc.)

. . . U.S. children test above the world average levels at the 4th grade level. But by the 12th grade level, they are far behind. . . .

Donald Trump and Robert Kiyosaki also place the blame on the lack of education. But they focus on a different type of education, financial education. Both men are very concerned about the lack of quality financial education in America, at all levels. Both men blame the lack of financial education for the United States having gone from the richest country in the world to the biggest debtor nation in history, so quickly. A weak U.S. economy and a weak U.S. dollar (the reserve currency of the world) are not good for world stability. As is often said in other parts of the world, "When the United States sneezes, the world catches cold."


Both Men Are Teachers

Both Donald Trump and Robert Kiyosaki are successful entrepreneurs and investors. Both men do business and are recognized internationally. Both men are also teachers. Both men are best-selling authors, produce educational board games, speak at financial education events, and both have educational television programs. Donald Trump has his megahit network television show, The Apprentice and Robert Kiyosaki has his television show, Rich Dad's Guide to Wealth, on PBS, the highly acclaimed educational public television network.

Both men are teachers, not because they need more money. They are both teachers because they are concerned about the fate of you and your family, this nation and the world.

Rich people who want to make a difference typically give money to causes they believe in. But Donald and Robert are giving of both their time as well as their money. As the story goes, you can give a man a fish and feed him for a day or teach him to fish and feed him for a lifetime. Instead of just writing checks to help the poor and middle class, Donald and Robert are teaching them to fish. In addition, a portion of every book sale will be donated to other organizations that also teach financial literacy.

Financial Advice

There are three levels of financial advice: advice for the poor, advice for the middle class and advice for the rich. The financial advice for the poor is that the government will take care of them. The poor are counting on Social Security and Medicare. The financial advice for the middle class is: get a job, work hard, live below your means, save money, invest for the long term in mutual funds and diversify. Most people in the middle class are passive investors—investors who work and invest not to lose. The rich are active investors who work and invest to win. This book is about becoming an active investor—expanding your means to live a great life by working and investing to win.

Donald Trump and Robert Kiyosaki are best-selling authors and popular speakers because they teach people to expand their means and improve the quality of their lives, rather than work hard to live below their means. They want people to work and invest to win.

A Little History

During the Hunter-Gatherer Age of human development, humans lived in tribes and, for the most part, all people were equal. If you were the chief of the tribe, you still lived pretty much like the rest of the tribe. Chiefs did not have Lear jets, multimillion-dollar estates and golden parachutes.

In the Agrarian Age, there evolved a two-tiered society. The king and his rich friends on one tier and everyone else (peasants) working for the king on another tier. Generally, the king owned the land. The peasants worked the king’s land, and paid the king a form of tax by giving the king a share of their harvests. The peasants owned nothing and royalty owned everything.

In the Industrial Age, the modern middle class was born in America and so was democracy.

The founding fathers of America were so impressed by the five tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy, who lived in what is today known as New England, that they used the tribal model as the model for our democracy. That model elected representatives, an upper and lower house, and a supreme court (made up of entirely women).

At the same time the founders of America were copying the Iroquois form of democracy, the idea of democracy and a middle class was still considered unrealistic in Europe – all while a powerful middle class and democratic society were blooming in the United States.

Today, in the Information Age, the middle class is slowly dying and so is democratic capitalism. Unlike any other time in history, there really is a very wide and growing gap between the haves and have-nots. Are we going backward, into the Agrarian Age, when there was no democracy and only two classes, or will we evolve into a new form of capitalism and democracy?

Problems On The Horizon

Just as we are only now becoming aware of the effects of global warming, we are also only now becoming aware of the effects of the loss of our middle class. Currently, most members of the middle class feel safe and secure. They are content, even though most are aware that we have problems on the horizon.

They feel safe because they believe their government will step in and take care of them and protect them. Little do they know, there is little that government can do to protect them. Governments, even the U.S. government, cannot protect their people as they once could simply because the problems are now global problems. For example, the price of oil is determined by countries outside the control of the United States. Terrorism is not a war against nations. Terrorism is a war against ideas. A terrorist can strike anywhere and disappear into the populace. And globalization, causing the loss of so many American jobs, is the problem of multinational corporations becoming richer and more powerful than many countries. This globalization has also been made more possible through the World Wide Web making communication instantaneous anywhere in the world. Communication has become possible any time any where.

On the home front, just as environmentalists are noticing that some species of frogs are disappearing, economists are noticing that pensions and health care are disappearing for the middle class and poor. In a few years, the biggest baby boom generation in history begins to retire all over the world. Most governments do not have the financial resources to keep their promises.

Businessmen, Not Politicians

People expect their elected government officials to take care of the growing problems facing the poor and middle class. Donald Trump and Robert Kiyosaki are not politicians (although there is a strong movement brewing for Donald to run for president). They write this book as entrepreneurs, investors and educators.

Instead of promising to solve your problems, they want you to avoid becoming a victim of the problems. Do not expect your political and government officials to provide solutions. Do not think you are entitled to a secure, prosperous and healthy life. Instead Donald and Robert want you to become rich and become part of the solution to the problems we face as a nation and the world.

Not A How-To Book

When it comes to money, many people want to be told exactly what to do. They often ask specific questions, such as, "I have $25,000. What should I do with it?" When you tell people that you do not know what to do with your money, they are happy to tell you what to do ... and their recommendation is that you give your money to them.

This book is not a how-to book. Donald and Robert will not be telling you what to invest in. They will share with you how they think, why they win financially and how they see the world of money, business and investing.

A Matter Of Vision

Most rich people do not want you to know what they know or their secrets to becoming rich. But Donald and Robert are different. They want to share their knowledge with you.

One of the definitions of leadership is vision. This book is about vision, about seeing what most people never see through the eyes of two men who have won (and occasionally lost) at the game of money. Why We Want You to be Rich is a book about how these two men think and why they think the way they do. Through their eyes you will gain additional insight into how you can improve your financial future.


A Word Of Caution

In the world of money, there is another word often used—transparency. Transparency has many definitions. Three definitions applicable to this book are:

1. Free from pretence or deceit.

2. Sheer enough to be seen through.

3. Readily understood.

People want greater vision so they can see with their own eyes and make their own decisions. Because our educational system does not really teach people to be financially literate, people cannot see. And if they cannot see, there is no transparency. Due to this lack of vision and transparency, people are simply investing by giving their money to someone else to invest. They blindly follow the advice of "work hard, save money, invest for the long term in mutual funds and diversify." They work hard and follow this investment advice because they cannot see.

A word of caution: If you believe that working hard, saving money, investing for the long term in mutual funds and diversifying is good advice then this book may not be for you.

Donald and Robert do not invest in mutual funds because mutual fund companies are not required to be transparent; they are not required to disclose their true expenses. Since most amateur investors cannot see, this fact does not bother them. Professional investors, as Donald and Robert are, require transparency in all their investments.

While the financial advice of saving money and investing in mutual funds may be good advice for the poor and middle class, it is not good advice for people who want to become rich. This book is about seeing through the eyes of two rich men and understanding a world of money very few people get to see…

This book will also discuss how history has brought us to this financial state of emergency. Some important dates are:

1971: Our money stopped being money and became a currency when it ceased being backed by gold. This is the year that "saving money" became obsolete and bad financial advice. Today, the middle class has very little in savings.

Could it be because they know that savings is an obsolete idea?

1973: The first oil shock was felt. It was a political problem. However, today the current oil shock is an actual supply and demand problem that will affect all of us. Some of us will get richer, but most of us will become poorer as a result of today's oil shortage.


How will the current oil crisis affect you?


…The United States has the highest standard of living in the world. We have attained that high standard of living by becoming the greatest debtor nation in the world . The U.S. dollar is also the world's reserve currency and so far, the world has allowed us to print as many dollars as we want. Is this a fairy tale scenario or a nightmare? Donald and Robert do not think this fantasy can last much longer. They expect a global correction on a massive scale. Unfortunately, the poor and middle class will be hurt the most. And this is why they want you to be rich.

This Book Is Not About Changing The World

This book is not about changing the world. This book is about changing you so that you do not become a victim of a changing world. The world is changing rapidly. Politicians and government bureaucracy cannot change fast enough or protect everyone from these shifts.

It was recently announced that Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have joined forces to solve some of the world's most pressing problems. This is commendable as money does have the power to solve many of our world problems, such as hunger, affordable housing, and hopefully many diseases (such as cancer and AIDS).


The one problem money cannot solve is poverty. While there are many underlying causes of poverty, one of the causes is a lack of financial education. The problem with throwing money at the issue of poverty is that money only creates more poor people and keeps people poorer longer. This is why Donald and Robert are teachers. They know that the one true solution to worldwide poverty is financial education, not money. If money alone could solve poverty, they would donate their money. But since money cannot solve poverty, they donate their time. In addition, a portion of the profits of this book will be donated to charitable and educational organizations that also teach financial literacy.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-a3-Z73gIHY




TIME; page 33 (“The Unpresident” by Michael Duffy & Nancy Gibbs):

Wolff reports that Trump, at least early on, repaired to his bed many nights, often as early as 6:30 p.m., with a cheeseburger nearby, to watch TV and make phone calls to friends, seeking advice. (Aides often spent time the next morning trying to talk the President out of acting on the nighttime suggestions.) Although Trump can be coarse and flamboyantly sexist in his references to women, he seems more comfortable taking advice from women than from men.

[Skepsis]

ESFj

Weak thinking in general, low intuition, very emotional.

[Cosmic Teapot]

What about... LSE?

no. go to your room

[ooo]

SiTe by Rod Novichkov™

[WinnieW]

ESFj

Weak thinking in general, low intuition, very emotional.

Am I to do it and judge Donald Trump? ...most possibly a conflictor of me. I'm tempted to mock at him.

Being emotional expressive doesn't mean having -ego,
-ego type have much better control of how they express emotions.
No, he values , but his is lower order, it's not in his ego block because his isn't mature enough.

[golden]

ESFj

Weak thinking in general, low intuition, very emotional.

He also arranges a mean bouquet of calla lilies and fiddlehead ferns

[niffer]

I’m starting to think he’s LII. Like the G-man himself.

[Sol]

SLE (ESTp) 75%
1981slater, aixelsyd, Anglas, anndelise, Aramas, ashlesha, Auguste, auhin, Bertrand, BFGDoomer, blackburry, blue hummingbird, Carrie, Chacha, Chae, Contra, Cosmic Teapot, darya, echidna1000, empineer, falsehope, glam, golden, HERO, inumbra, Jack Oliver Aaron, Jake, Jakuri, Jarno, Jenna, Jerdle, LifeIsDucky, lynn, MaviTilki, Milo, myshkin, Myst, Nelena, neproblems, Nevero, noaydi, Olimpia, Petter, Pole, ragnar, Resonare, S76, SheMaverick, silke, solid207, SongOfSapphire, Spermatozoa, strrrng, Subteigh, Suomea, The Exception, thehotelambush, thelocust, Troll Nr 007, uncivilized, Whoobie77, Without Warning, yeves, Zero, Zero11

local John Snows

[Bertrand]

yeah I sort of think hes more SEE nowadays, I think I let my prejudice against beta cloud my judgement

[niffer]

No he’s definitely SLE. Jesus Christ.

[Samson]

SEE is right.

He's the ultimate jock. Sounds dumb even if intelligent, great at relations and promotion, throws his weight around, heart of gold. Dualizes with nerdy but highly pragmatic and prudent ILI, not much interest in the IEI because has no use for fairy tale love stories (SLE on the other hand eats this shit up).

He's the archetype of the golden lion, the jock, the dumb blond, the popular kid.

He is Napoleon.

[timber]

He also arranges a mean bouquet of calla lilies and fiddlehead ferns

Gold plated Penthouse is tacky af.

[golden]

Gold plated Penthouse is tacky af.

But all the !!!!!!

[golden]

No he’s definitely SLE. Jesus Christ.

The complete lack of Fi gone to an ugly place is rather obvious, innit mate?

[timber]

But all the !!!!!!

Only Fe+Si is capable of such a thing..along with the otherwise *look at me look at me im so rich*

[golden]

Only Fe+Si is capable of such a thing..along with the otherwise *look at me look at me im so rich*

Just FYI, sarcasm is my native language

[Kernel]

not much interest in the IEI because has no use for fairy tale love stories (SLE on the other hand eats this shit up).

Hahaha, this was funny to read.

Agree with you on SEE.

[timber]

Just FYI, sarcasm is my native language

I figured the flower arrangement was sarcasm..yet in my estimation ESFj can be tacky - kitschy even. Si doesn;t take on that flavour in delta as opulence is down played in favour of utiltitarism. Opulence is more of a exterior ethics thing. This is just a merging of my own ESFj observations, even though I was the first months ago to say ESE for Trump, I still don't seriously believe it. Just saying, the gold Penthouse is not outside the range of Alpha Si.

[niffer]

SEE is right.

He's the ultimate jock. Sounds dumb even if intelligent, great at relations and promotion, throws his weight around, heart of gold. Dualizes with nerdy but highly pragmatic and prudent ILI, not much interest in the IEI because has no use for fairy tale love stories (SLE on the other hand eats this shit up).

He's the archetype of the golden lion, the jock, the dumb blond, the popular kid.

He is Napoleon.

He’s not popular. He looks like a lactating stay-at-home BBW.

[niffer]

The complete lack of Fi gone to an ugly place is rather obvious, innit mate?

It is unusual to make me have to agree to insult myself in a way to agree but yes I do agree

[golden]

It is unusual to make me have to agree to insult myself in a way to agree but yes I do agree

Fi polr can be endearing, except when it isn’t. :/

Like when the person in question is maliciously batshit and corrupt.

[golden]

I figured the flower arrangement was sarcasm..yet in my estimation ESFj can be tacky - kitschy even. Si doesn;t take on that flavour in delta as opulence is down played in favour of utiltitarism. Opulence is more of a exterior ethics thing. This is just a merging of my own ESFj observations, even though I was the first months ago to say ESE for Trump, I still don't seriously believe it. Just saying, the gold Penthouse is not outside the range of Alpha Si.

I don’t find him ESE whatsoever, but I think the gilded penthouse could fit any quadra as it’s more to do with the kind of decor chosen by anti-democratic “leaders.”

Do you think everyone behind the designs is this article is acting out of something socionics-y? Or perhaps something else, NTR, is more important:

https://www.politico.com/magazine/st...-design-214877

[niffer]

Fi polr can be endearing, except when it isn’t.

You are saying this to me, as someone of this type who knows this already.

What is your point?

[golden]

You are saying this to me, as someone of this type who knows this already.

What is your point?

Oh was I supposed to make a point? Oh dear

[Samson]

He’s not popular. He looks like a lactating stay-at-home BBW.

I doubt that you're being serious, but...

He's president of the US because he's popular. He was a successful reality star because he's popular. Popularity is one of the qualities he knew how to wield better than any of his adversaries when running for office.

How he looks is irrelevant outside of VI, which shows SEE > SLE for him.

[niffer]

Oh was I supposed to make a point? Oh dear

Lol. Fi ignoring is cute and endearing too I guess, except when it isn’t.

[niffer]

I doubt that you're being serious, but...

He's president of the US because he's popular. He was a successful reality star because he's popular. Popularity is one of the qualities he knew how to wield better than any of his adversaries when running for office.

How he looks is irrelevant outside of VI, which shows SEE > SLE for him.

You called him a stereotypical jock. I’m just pointing out that he’s literally a sack of porridge, so not that at least.