The sentimental mob boss

Asked about the arrest of Steve Bannon on charges he bilked donors to an online operation to crowd fund the Great Wall of Trump, he distanced himself from Bannon, claimed to have disapproved the project from the start repeatedly and publicly, and finished up saying the arrest made him sad.

Bannon and his associates illegally kept all the money for themselves.

And that's how arrests of his criminal minions always make the Boss feel. Sad. Or angry at the Untouchables of the Deep State.

Speaking of arrests that made him angry, Roger Stone, saved by presidential intervention from imprisonment, has dropped his very public fake efforts to get a new trial with the further lie that he cannot get a fair trial, ever, anywhere.

Bannon to Matteo Salvini: the Pope is the enemy

Trump’s ex-strategist advised Salvini ‘to target pontiff’s stance on plight of refugees’

Old news, but news to us.

Donald Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon advised Italy’s interior minister Matteo Salvini to attack the pope over the issue of migration, according to sources close to the Italian far right.

During a meeting in Washington in April 2016, Bannon – who would within a few months take up his role as head of Trump’s presidential campaign – suggested the leader of Italy’s anti-immigration League party should start openly targeting Pope Francis, who has made the plight of refugees a cornerstone of his papacy.

“Bannon advised Salvini himself that the actual pope is a sort of enemy. He suggested for sure to attack, frontally,” said a senior League insider with knowledge of the meeting in an interview with the website SourceMaterial.

After the meeting, Salvini became more outspoken against the pope, claiming that conservatives in the Vatican were on his side.

Populist (white) nationalism on the continent

Poland’s Populists Pick a New Top Enemy: Gay People

Poland’s governing party, Law and Justice, has seized on the declaration and the issue of gay rights in its campaigning for European Union elections in May and for national elections this fall.

Where the party once attacked migrants as a threat to the soul of the country, gay people have become its public enemy No. 1 in recent weeks.

It is part of a growing trend across eastern and central Europe, where nationalist and populist parties are increasingly turning to cultural issues — and attacks on gay people — to rally their faithful.

From Romania, where the government tried and failed to change the Constitution to ban same-sex marriage, to Hungary, where homosexuals are vilified as a threat to traditional families, the letters L.G.B.T. are being scorned as part of a broader struggle against what the nationalists and populists call “European values.”

Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the leader of Law and Justice and the most powerful politician in Poland, used the party’s convention in March to declare that this was a war Poland must win to survive.

. . . .

“I think that Poland will be a region free from L.G.B.T.,” said Elzbieta Kruk, who is running on the party’s list for a seat in the European Parliament. “I hope it will be.”

Somebody dreamed that Germany would be Judenrein, a while back, and we know how that worked out.

. . . .

Leading Polish figures in the Roman Catholic Church, itself reeling from revelations about sexual abuse by priests, have also joined in.

Ah, the same Polish Church that played so signal a role during and before the Holocaust is making Catholics the world over proud, again.

The Rev. Marek Dziewiecki, a well-known Catholic priest and educator, told a local radio station in a recent interview that the plus in “L.G.B.T.Q.+” stood for “pedophiles, zoophiles, necrophiles,” and that the ultimate goal was to “make people into infertile erotomaniacs.”

When some 1,500 supporters of far-right groups came to Czestochowa, Poland’s holiest site, this month, the Rev. Henryk Grzadko warned those gathered that Poland was experiencing a “civilizational invasion.”

. . . .

Rafal Trzaskowski, the mayor of Warsaw, who issued the tolerance declaration, said that while he had expected a cynical response from the government, he worried about the sort of propaganda state outlets had produced.

It was the same kind of bile, he said, that led a man to fatally stab the mayor of Gdansk, Pawel Adamowicz, on live television this year.

Matteo Salvini Announces New European Alliance of Far-Right Populists

Matteo Salvini, the anti-immigrant politician who is the most powerful figure in Italy’s government, on Monday announced the formation of a new European alliance of populist and far-right parties ahead of critical European Parliament elections in May.

“Others will join between now and the 26th of May,” the last day of voting, Mr. Salvini, leader of the League party in Italy, said at an event in Milan with allies from Denmark, Finland and Germany. 

“Our objective is to be the force of government and change in Europe.”

. . . .

Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s far-right National Gathering party, did not attend the announcement on Monday, though she has signaled her support for the new group.

. . . .

“We are working for a big party for the new Europe,” said Mr. Salvini, Italy’s deputy prime minister and interior minister, whose efforts overlap with those of Steve Bannon, the former strategist for President Trump.

. . . .

Jörg Meuthen, a leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, said at the news conference that there were absent partners “who will join us soon.” 

Immediately after the elections in May, he said, the allied parties will form a new group in the European Parliament called the European Alliance of Peoples and Nations, the result of numerous meetings over recent months.

Olli Kotro, a member of the Finns Party who attended the event, was more cautious, saying, “It remains to be seen who will join us.”

While they share common ground when it comes to strong borders against migration and an emphasis on traditional, national identities, Europe’s far-right populists also disagree on many points of policy. 

Mr. Salvini’s German and Scandinavian partners lean toward free-market economics, while their French allies are more protectionist.

Mr. Salvini has argued repeatedly that other European Union members must take their fair share of migrants, but some countries, like Hungary, have slammed the door shut. 

And Poland does not share the warmth that Mr. Salvini and other populists have toward Russia.

What the Christian right is after

is illustrated in part by this Guardian report.

US fundamentalists spent £38m on European politics

US Christian fundamentalist groups have spent over $50m (£38m) in Europe over the past decade, and have dramatically ramped up campaigning in recent years, according to a report by the UK political website OpenDemocracy.

. . . .

The Alliance Defending Freedom, which campaigned in favour of a law in Belize making gay sex punishable by 10 years’ imprisonment, has tripled its spending in Europe to £1.5m annually.

It spends £430,000 each year lobbying EU officials, according to separate EU transparency data. It told OpenDemocracy it was “exclusively privately funded by people from all over the world, who care about human rights”.

Another of the organisations is the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, which has spent over £1.3m in Europe since 2008.

The group has previously co-sponsored a conference in Italy with the Dignitatis Humanae Institute, a Catholic organisation supported by the far-right campaigner Steve Bannon with plans to transform a former monastery into a “gladiator school for culture warriors”.

Several of the organisations are partners of the World Congress of Families, which has been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) for its campaigns against LGBT civil and human rights.

The WCF is organising a conference in Verona, Italy this weekend that is expected to be attended by several far-right European activists and politicians, including the Italian deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini, leader of the far-right party the League.

Others scheduled to attend include a Nigerian activist who has compared gay people to the Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram, and a Ugandan politician who campaigned for gay people to be jailed for life or executed.

Channeling Alex Jones

Donald Trump Jr. Scolds Theresa May Over Brexit: ‘Was It All a Ruse?’

The party of lies and disinformation is in the White House and doing its best to shatter the EU, undermine NATO, and earn brownie points redeemable for cash from Vladimir Putin.

Bear in mind the Brexit plebiscite was non-binding and purely consultative.

It was the Tories and pro-Brexit others who have since then at every opportunity lied that it was actually a binding referendum leaving the decision entirely to the voters, the Parliament's remaining role in the matter being only to smooth the path.

But never in my life - I am seventy - has the blog name "Crooks and Liars" seemed so apt.

President Trump has offered the British prime minister advice on Brexit. 

The president’s son said this week that she should have followed it.

Donald Trump Jr. accused “the European elites” of trying to sabotage Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union, in an op-ed  in  The Daily Telegraph on Wednesday. 

He put some of the blame on Prime Minister Theresa May, and declared that “democracy in the U.K. is all but dead.”

“Next Friday, March 29, is supposed to be the British people’s Independence Day,” Mr. Trump wrote. 

“But because the elites control London from Brussels, the will of the people is likely to be ignored.”

During a visit to Britain last summer, President Trump told Mrs. May to “sue the E.U.,” according to her account of the meeting — advice the prime minister dismissed in favor of negotiating.

According to Stephen K. Bannon, the president’s former chief strategist, Mr. Trump told the British leader to “overshoot the target” on her deal, be on “terms agreed within six months” and “use every arrow in your quiver even if you have to do litigation later.”

“She laughed it off,” Mr. Bannon told the British network Sky News on Monday.

. . . .

Because she didn’t listen, the younger Mr. Trump wrote, “a process that should have taken only a few short months has become a yearslong stalemate.” 

Such an outcome, he added, was “exactly as the European elites were hoping.”

Plenty of Britons would dispute the claim that anyone is in control in London, where Mrs. May has been tripped up by one Brexit dispute after another. 

The notion that puppet masters in Brussels are pulling the strings might come as a surprise to European officials who have been exasperated by Britain’s paralysis.

. . . .

Mr. Trump described both Britain’s vote to withdraw and his father’s election as victories over establishments that have since tried to “overturn their mandates.”

“What we’re seeing now in Washington, London and Brussels is the desperate, last-gasp attempt by those previously in power to cling on to what was once theirs in the face of an overwhelming mandate for change,” he asserted.

He thinks you don't remember that the voters chose Hillary, a choice the Electors overruled in favor of the mad orange suffering mad cow now in the White House.

The Times helpfully reminds its readers, who probably need no reminding.

[T]he senior Mr. Trump won the presidency, despite losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, 45.9 percent to 48 percent.

White nationalist terrorism in New Zealand

New Zealand Shooting Live Updates: 49 Are Dead After 2 Mosques Are Hit

Forty-nine people were killed in shootings at two mosques in central Christchurch, New Zealand, on Friday, in a terrorist attack that Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern described as “an extraordinary and unprecedented act of violence.”

4 people in custody, one charged with murder.

They were unknown to NZ and Aussie police.

Reporters on CNN are saying they watched some or all of the 17 minute video made by the killer, a video of his killing spree, posted on social media.

Why?

Before the shooting, someone appearing to be the gunman posted links to a white-nationalist manifesto on Twitter and 8chan, an online forum known for extremist right-wing discussions. 

The 8chan post included a link to what appeared to be the gunman’s Facebook page, where he said he would also broadcast live video of the attack.

The Twitter posts showed weapons covered in the names of past military generals and men who have recently carried out mass shootings.

In his manifesto, he identified himself as a 28-year-old man born in Australia and listed his white nationalist heroes.

Writing that he had purposely used guns to stir discord in the United States over the Second Amendment’s provision on the right to bear arms, he also declared himself a fascist. 

“For once, the person that will be called a fascist, is an actual fascist,” he wrote.

Bozo, Breitbart, and white nationalist terrorists.

Heard just now on CNN, Steve Bannon at Breitbart urges people to read "Camp of the Saints", as Pat Buchanan used often to do.

I once tried to read it but I could not get through it.

A racist nightmare dripping with hate.

Sometimes it just seems right

Guilt by association, I mean.

Odds are, if you speak at a conference of this sort, you aren't there as an undercover FBI guy gathering info on people potentially linked to domestic terrorism.

Or a sane journo looking for an exclusive exposé.

This guy, of course, was neither.

Who is Darren Beattie? Donald Trump speechwriter fired over white nationalist conference ties.

MSNBC reported he was a close associate of Stephen Miller, who was himself a KA of Steve Bannon.

No surprise to find someone of this sort working for Steve Miller in Donald Trump's White House.

A Donald Trump speechwriter has been fired following the discovery that he appeared at a conference frequently attended by white nationalists.

The White House confirmed that Darren Beattie’s contract had been terminated after he was found to have spoken at the 2016 H.L. Mencken Club conference alongside anti-immigration activist Peter Brimelow.

“Mr. Beattie no longer works at the White House,” spokesman Hogan Gidley told The Washington Post. 

“We don’t comment on personnel matters.”

The H.L Mencken Club describes itself as an “organization for independent-minded intellectuals and academics of the Right.”

It started in 2008 and was named after the American journalist who once described Jews as “plausibly…the most unpleasant race ever heard of,” and an educated black person as being a “low-caste man” who will “remain inert and inefficient until fifty generations of him have lived in civilization. And even then, the superior white race will be fifty generations ahead of him.”

. . . .

Beattie confirmed his dismissal when approached by The Washington Post. 

“In 2016 I attended the Mencken conference in question and delivered a stand-alone, academic talk titled ‘The Intelligentsia and the Right.’ I said nothing objectionable and stand by my remarks completely,” he said in a statement.

“It was the honor of my life to serve in the Trump Administration. I love President Trump, who is a fearless American hero, and continue to support him one hundred percent. I have no further comment.”

Beattie, who worked as a professor of political science at Duke University, openly supported Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign. 

Speaking to the Chronicle, a Duke newspaper, Beattie said that Trump’s hard-line immigration policies were the main reason he backed him.

His Ph.D. thesis was based on the teachings of Martin Heidegger, the German philosopher who was also a member of the Nazi party, reported Forward.

Heidegger's work is regularly taught in courses on Phenomenological Existentialism, and grad students in philosophy not uncommonly write about Sein und Zeit and others of his major works.

But a political scientist would be focused precisely on his association with the Nazi Party and his relationship with his Jewish teacher, Edmund Husserl.

Identity Politics favors the dominant group

Because it is, after all, the dominant group.

"Hey, hey! Ho, ho! Western Civ has got to go."

And "the white race and all its works are a cancer upon the Earth."

That kind of talk plays straight into the hands of the mini-Fuhrer in America and all his like in Europe.

But it grossly distorts and misrepresents the real politics and views of the overwhelming majority of the center-left and left voters and their parties, who are after all both white and native born, both in Europe and in America.

Still, it's not the Democrats - nor the whites who are the majority of them - who today defend and even revere monuments to the white people who betrayed the Union in 1860 and fought a war to build a rump republic that would never end black slavery for as far into the future as anyone could then see, on purpose and for that very reason and no other.

Or who either by implication or outright attack the president who defeated those traitor armies.

How are the left and center-left - most of whom by far don't say - or think - such extreme things, anyway - supposed to talk about the criminal and vicious tribalism of the right in the US or in Europe and its horrific real world effects in both places without in a measure exacerbating the problem?

It's not, after all, nothing but venting or seeking "psychic release".

These are realities that have to be named and criticized.

Not a hint, in this article.

Doubtless because it can't be done.

Still, one can and should avoid being needlessly provocative.

I suppose.

Why identity politics benefits the right more than the left

In a fascinating study, Karen Stenner shows in The Authoritarian Dynamic that while some individuals have “predispositions” towards intolerance, these predispositions require an external stimulus to be transformed into actions. 

Or, as another scholar puts it: “It’s as though some people have a button on their foreheads, and when the button is pushed, they suddenly become intensely focused on defending their in-group … 

"But when they perceive no such threat, their behavior is not unusually intolerant. So the key is to understand what pushes that button.”

What pushes that button, Stenner and others find, is group-based threats. 

In experiments researchers easily shift individuals from indifference, even modest tolerance, to aggressive defenses of their own group by exposing them to such threats. 

Maureen Craig and Jennifer Richeson, for example, found that simply making white Americans aware that they would soon be a minority increased their propensity to favor their own group and become wary of those outside it. 

(Similar effects were found among Canadians. 

Indeed, although this tendency is most dangerous among whites since they are the most powerful group in western societies, researchers have consistently found such propensities in all groups.)

. . . .

Understanding why Trump found it easy to trigger these reactions requires examining broader changes in American society. 

In an excellent new book, Uncivil Agreement, Lilliana Mason analyzes perhaps the most important of these: a decades-long process of “social sorting”. 

Mason notes that although racial and religious animosity has been present throughout American history, only recently has it lined up neatly along partisan lines. 

In the past, the Republican and Democratic parties attracted supporters with different racial, religious, ideological and regional identities, but gradually Republicans became the party of white, evangelical, conservative and rural voters, while the Democrats became associated with non-whites, non-evangelical, liberal and metropolitan voters.

. . . .

This social sorting has led partisans of both parties to engage in negative stereotyping and even demonization. 

(One study found less support for “out-group” marriage among partisan Republicans and Democrats than for interracial marriage among Americans overall.)

Once the other party becomes an enemy rather than an opponent, winning becomes more important than the common good and compromise becomes an anathema. 

Such situations also promote emotional rather than rational evaluations of policies and evidence. 

Making matters worse, social scientists consistently find that the most committed partisans, those who are the angriest and have the most negative feelings towards out-groups, are the most politically engaged.

What does all this mean for those who oppose Trump and want to fight the dangerous trends his presidency has unleashed?

The short-term goal must be winning elections, and this means not helping Trump rile up his base by activating their sense of “threat” and inflaming the grievances and anger that lead them to rally around him. 

This will require avoiding the type of “identity politics” that stresses differences and creates a sense of “zero-sum” competition between groups and instead emphasizing common values and interests.

Stenner, for example, notes that “all the available evidence indicates that exposure to difference, talking about difference, and applauding difference … are the surest ways to aggravate [the] intolerant, and to guarantee the increased expression of their predispositions in manifestly intolerant attitudes and behaviors. 

Paradoxically, then, it would seem that we can best limit intolerance of difference by parading, talking about, and applauding our sameness … 

Nothing inspires greater tolerance from the intolerant than an abundance of common and unifying beliefs, practices, rituals, institutions and processes.”

Relatedly, research suggests that calling people racist when they do not see themselves that way is counterproductive. 

As noted above, while there surely are true bigots, studies show that not all those who exhibit intolerant behavior harbor extreme racial animus. 

Moreover, as Stanford psychologist Alana Conner notes, if the goal is to diminish intolerance “telling people they’re racist, sexist and xenophobic is going to get you exactly nowhere. 

"It’s such a threatening message. One of the things we know from social psychology is when people feel threatened, they can’t change, they can’t listen.”

This has obvious implications for recent debates about civility. 

Incivility is central to Trump’s strategy – it helps him galvanize his supporters by reminding them how “bad” and “threatening” the other side is.

. . . .

By engaging in even superficially similar tactics, Democrats abet Trump’s ability to do this – as one Trump supporter put it, every time Democrats attack him “it makes me angry, which causes me to want to defend him more” – potentially alienate wavering Republican-leaning independents, and help divert debate from policies, corruption and other substantive issues.

Of course, there is a double standard here and this, along with the psychic release that comes with venting the anger and grievances that have been building over the past year, are the rationales given by the left for incivility. 

But against these must be weighed incivility’s impact on upcoming elections as well as the overall health of democracy. 

(Scholars consistently find that incivility spreads rapidly, generates anger and defensive reactions, demobilizes moderates and activates the strongest partisans, corrodes faith in government, trust in institutions and respect for our fellow citizens.)

. . . .

Perhaps ironically, identity politics is a both more powerful and efficacious for Republicans (and rightwing populists more generally) than it is for Democrats, since the former are more homogeneous.

As long, therefore, as politics is a fight between clearly bounded identity groups, appeals and threats to group identity will benefit Republicans more than Democrats, which is presumably why Steve Bannon infamously remarked that he couldn’t “get enough” of the left’s “race-identity politics”. 

“The longer they talk about identity politics, I got ’em ... I want them to talk about race and identity … every day.”

A makeover for France's National Front

A change in name only.

Front national : nouveau nom mais “même idéologie xénophobe”

Si la réélection de sa présidente constituait une simple formalité, c’est le changement de nom annoncé du parti qui retient l’attention en dehors de nos frontières. 

“C’est la fin d’une ère, la fin du Front national, juge le journal italien Il Foglio. 

Marine Le Pen, patronne du souverainisme identitaire français, a dit adieu au nom du parti que son père, Jean-Marie, fonda en 1972. 

Et elle a annoncé un nouveau costume, plus modéré et conciliant : Rassemblement national.”

“Marine Le Pen change le nom du parti pour lui donner une image moins agressive”, pointe aussi la Süddeutsche Zeitung, avant de trancher : “Mais l’idéologie xénophobe demeure.”

Good grief.

Bannon was there!

Urging them not to change their politics one tiniest bit.

Not to worry.

They didn't, and won't.

Côté américain, on retient avant tout la présence à Lille de Steve Bannon, l’homme qui a aidé Donald Trump à accéder au pouvoir. 

“La rencontre entre Bannon et le parti de Marine Le Pen survient à un moment particulièrement délicat aussi bien pour Bannon que pour le Front national : tous deux essaient de conserver leur place dans un univers politique impitoyable”, note The Washington Post. 

L’Américain a ainsi encouragé le parti frontiste à préserver ses racines nationalistes : “Laissez-les vous traiter de racistes. Laissez-les vous traiter de xénophobes. Laissez-les vous traiter de nativistes [anti-immigration]”, a-t-il lancé.

En accueillant l’ancien conseiller du président américain, Marine Le Pen “a quand même réussi une performance, assure le journal suisse Le Temps : celle de réapparaître comme une femme politique porteuse d’avenir dont la formation peut – dans le sillon de Trump et des récentes vagues national-populistes en Italie ou en Autriche – rassembler les colères et tourner la page de la défaite depuis mai 2017.”

Le quotidien de Lausanne prévient ainsi que “le Front national est loin d’être à terre” et qu’à un an des élections européennes “la remise en ordre de marche de son parti, entamé par Marine Le Pen dans ce fief électoral frontiste qu’est le nord de la France, doit donc être prise très au sérieux”.

From El Pais

Nuevo nombre, misma identidad. 

Marine Le Pen propuso este domingo rebautizar al viejo partido de la ultraderecha francesa como Reagrupamiento Nacional. 

Los militantes deberán ratificar la propuesta en un voto por correo. 

Le Pen, animada por los avances del nacional-populismo en Europa, planteó el cambio de nombre en un discurso de reafirmación de las esencias del Frente Nacional (FN) como partido nacionalista y antielitista contrario a la inmigración.

Bannon falls some more

He took on Bozo and got destroyed.

Steve Bannon stepping down from Breitbart

Steve Bannon, former chief strategist to President Trump, has stepped down from Breitbart, the far-right website he returned to over the summer as executive chairman after being ousted from the White House.

The website announced the news Tuesday afternoon in a short article posted to the site.

Outside the tent pissing in

Trump Tower meeting with Russians 'treasonous', Bannon says in explosive book

Fierce.

Steve Bannon outside the Trump White House and pissing in.

Week 33: Trump Blistered by Bannon’s Inside Job

As cunning as a raccoon, author Michael Wolff walked in the front door of the White House early last year and has returned with a book, Fire and Fury, that cements Donald Trump’s image as a shallow, narcissistic, dim, post-literate, impulsive, temperamental and doddering buffoon who blusters and lurches from crisis to crisis.

But it cost Bannon enormously.

Trump Breaks With Bannon, Saying He Has ‘Lost His Mind’

Mercer issues rare public rebuke of former ally Bannon

Led by the Mercers, Bannon’s Allies Abandon Him

From ‘The Great Manipulator’ To ‘Sloppy Steve’ – The Fall Of Bannon

Fire and Fury: Winners and losers from Trump-Bannon feud

McConnell dances on Bannon's grave

Joy this morning says in the book Wolff says everyone in the White House who has interacted with Trump thinks him stupid, incompetent, ignorant, and emotionally as immature as a child.

Of course, he Tweets endlessly that he is really, really smart.

Trump Defends His Mental Capacity, Calling Himself a ‘Very Stable Genius’

President Trump, in an extraordinary defense of his mental capacity and fitness for office, described himself on Saturday as a “genius” and “a very stable genius at that.”

In a series of Twitter messages that seemed to respond to revelations in a new book, Mr. Trump defended himself by charting his rise to the presidency, saying one of his chief assets throughout his life was “being, like, really smart.”

She showed a clip of Fredo shouting to Michael Corleone that he is smart, not dumb, and wants some respect.

Everyone in Trumpworld Knows He’s an Idiot

Ah, what really matters.

Charles Barkley: Roy Moore should have been disqualified 'way before this women stuff came up'

Former NBA star Charles Barkley weighed in on the Alabama Senate race Saturday, saying embattled Republican candidate Roy Moore should be disqualified from the race because of his association with former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon.

"I mean Roy Moore is running with Steve Bannon as his right-hand man, who is a white separatist," Barkley said, referring to Bannon's support among the so-called alt-right movement. 

"I'm not even get into the women stuff, but how can you be a white separatist and represent all the constituents in your state? I mean everybody is going crazy over the sexual allegations. Roy Moore to me, when he brought in Steve Bannon, should have been disqualified."

Barkley, who made the remarks to reporters before the Alabama-Auburn football game, added that the backing from Bannon should have "disqualified Roy Moore way before this women stuff came up."

What do you suppose he imagines to be the process of disqualification?

Anyway, Bannon is a white separatist as Moore is a pederast.

Which is to say, not at all.

Bannon seems to be a white nationalist to the point of wanting to keep a significant white majority in the US population, in the foreseeable future, so far as immigration policy alone can manage that.

He and Breitbart have repeatedly denounced racism and racists, specifically alluding to various white racist organization in doing so.

And immigration policy alone can't do that, anyway, in the face of nonwhite Americans' superior fertility rates to whites.

But it could delay the sorpasso, to re-purpose an Italian word that will be familiar to geezers from the immediate post-Cold War period to refer to the point in time when nonwhites become the majority among Americans.

As for Moore, so far as we now know he has never displayed a sexual penchant for pre-pubescents, which is what pedophilia actually is.

The youngest of his accusers was already too old even for Humbert Humbert, too old to count as a nymphette, all of fourteen and well past the beginning of puberty when he did what he did.

And she seems to have been uncharacteristically young for him, given the other accusations and rumors about him that report a preference for older high-school girls above the age of consent, sixteen in Alabama when he was in his cruising years.

Buchananism is not going away

A very interesting piece with a poorly chosen title by Steve M. on Buchananism and the future of the GOP.

Trump's biggest problem as a Buchananite president, a problem that has pretty much made Buchananite politics, legislation, and policies impossible for him and his administration, has been that Buchananism has no bench, no significant presence in the GOP, and no presence at all in the legislature or the "deep state".

The downticket work referenced in Steve's piece is how you build a presence in the party and a bench for future engagement.

Steve Bannon (and the Mercers) think the Koch brothers are rinos

That's not what separates them.

The Koches are "cultural libertarians" who stand for free trade and open immigration as well as amnesty for noncriminal illegals.

From Steve M.'s piece, it appears the Mercers align better with the likes of Steven Bannon and Pat Buchanan, and maybe Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity, on all these issues and maybe also on race.

Neither Bannon in the piece at the Brietbart site nor Steve M. at his own comments on foreign policy.

The differences between the America Firsters, as we saw during the 2016 campaign and have seen in the flaps over NATO, the EU, nuclear proliferation, our Pacific alliances, and Brexit, and the globalists of both parties are stark and could not be more important for the future of the USA or, more a propos, of the GOP.

Based on their participation in the 2016 campaign I would guess the Koches are committed globalists.

Not finding anything much about the views of the Mercers, though their support for Trump and his America First campaign, as well as for Breitbart and Bannon, are surely clues.

Update, later that same day.

Is there the least indication in the world that Roy Noodle is an America Firster in any significant sense, and in particular in the foreign policy sense?

He's a crackpot Christianist, but does anybody know anything else about him?

Is Steve Bannon finding any real Buchananists to promote?

Republican civil war looms as Steve Bannon takes aim at the establishment

The Duce on "taking the knee" for the national anthem at football games

The Duce embraces a blatant racial grievance in Huntsville, Alabama, while there campaigning against the Bannon/Palin/Buchananist pick, Judge Roy Moore, and for the Mitch McConnell establishment pick, Luther Strange, in the GOP primary for Jeff Sessions vacant senate seat.

A move to get his "white nationalist" supporters on board for his guy rather than their guy.

Alabama Senate race: It's Trump vs. Trumpland

President Donald Trump's political muscles are getting a workout in a Republican runoff election in Alabama that has an awkward dynamic: He's campaigning for the establishment-backed incumbent over an upstart beloved by many of his own most ardent supporters, including his former chief strategist Steve Bannon.

Motivated by personal loyalty and a sense that the race is newly competitive, Trump heads to Huntsville, Alabama, on Friday to campaign for Sen. Luther Strange, appointed in February to temporarily fill the seat that opened up when Jeff Sessions became attorney general. 

The winner of next Tuesday's runoff will be the GOP candidate in a December election to serve out the rest of Sessions' term, ending in January 2021.

Strange is locked in a tight race with former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, a jurist known for pushing unsuccessfully for the public display of the Ten Commandments and opposing gay marriage. 

A super political action committee tied to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who favors Strange, has pumped millions of dollars into the race, as Senate Republicans worry that Moore would be a disruptive figure in the chamber, or might even lose to Democrat Doug Jones.

. . . .

Challenger Moore, running on an anti-Washington platform, has backing from former Trump chief strategist Bannon and his conservative website Breitbart News, and the Great America Alliance, an advocacy group that supports Trump.

A rally for Moore Thursday night at a historic train shed on the banks of the Alabama River featured Trump allies including former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and former White House official Sebastian Gorka.

Palin stressed her support for the president, while arguing that Moore was a better match for Trump's "movement."

"A vote for Judge Moore isn't a vote against the president. It is a vote for the people's agenda that elected the president," Palin told several hundred cheering supporters.

Trump Calls on NFL Owners to Fire Players Who Protest, and Mocks Efforts to Make the Game Safer

His language was as harsh and direct as you would expect from a man firing an apprentice.

The NFL not with him.

NFL head and players speak out on Trump's calling for kneeling players to be 'fired'

And still more on the racial grievance front.

President Trump withdraws Stephen Curry’s White House invitation, slammed by LeBron James as 'bum'

President Trump said Stephen Curry is no longer invited to Washington to celebrate the Warrior's NBA title hours after the athlete announced he did not want to attend.

Hmm. Tendencies.

The Mooch Unloads: Steve Bannon Has A Messianic Complex And White Nationalist “Tendencies”

Despite Wikipedia, people who say they are white nationalists, making their usage similar to this of "black nationalism", say that what they want is an exclusively white homeland.

That is what defines white nationalism, according to them.

The traditional ethno-nationalists of Europe - Italian, German, or Scots, for example - would necessarily live in exclusively white homelands if they lived in exclusively Scots, German, or Italian homelands.

But that is not what they desire as ethno-nationalists.

It is untrue that who desires A desires every consequence of A, or even every logical consequence of A.

The infamous novel, The Turner Diaries, bedtime reading of Timothy McVeigh, espoused a version of white nationalism for which the desired, exclusively white homeland was to be the planet Earth, from which nonwhites were to be purged by extermination.

But not all white nationalists are exterminationists and not all whites who want to exterminate somebody want to exterminate everybody who isn't white.

White supremacists want something different, something far more like the old Jim Crow regime of segregation in America.

There are numerous white people who don't want any of those things, but do want to maintain the majority status of whites in America, and along with it the democratically, demographically, and numerically resulting white predominance in politics and culture.

The kind of "white skin privilege" that comes more or less automatically with whites being the majority in a democratic society in which no one is excluded from participation on account of race.

And these folks also seem generally to be called "white nationalists" by the media, ignoring the different usage of the people for and by whom the term was invented.

Too, a quick look around the Internet shows that definitions and usages of these terms vary quite a bit in different ways from the understanding here: white nationalist, white supremacist, white separationist.

But, anyway, if Bannon doesn't actually want any of the above options what does it mean to say he "has white nationalist tendencies"?

Was it nothing but a smear to please the viewers of The View?

Rasputin defenestrated

Steve Bannon out

The Rasputin of Buchananism in foreign policy, in undermining the deep state, in economic and racial nationalism, is out.

In his descriptive terms, his nationalist faction has ultimately lost to the globalists of the deep state and establishment DC.

Didn't make it to today's national security meeting at Camp David, called to finally decide what to do about Afghanistan, where the generals and the globalists want to send more troops and Bannon wanted to hand over the war to mercenaries who would eventually be the Afghans', not our, employees.

And Trump was leaning toward Bannon.

The story is he submitted his resignation August 2 to be effective August 14.

Hmm.

Update, MSNBC broadcasts audio of exultant cheers on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange greeting the announcement of the firing of Bannon.

The lemmings have had a bad week, what with Bozo proudly displaying his hooded Americanism.

Stocks turn mixed after bouncing on Bannon's exit

Stocks were mixed Friday after recovering from early losses on reports that Steve Bannon, one of President Donald Trump's top advisors, is leaving the administration. 

The Dow had dropped about 140 points since Monday, said Velshi.

Update, a source now says it was Kelly who decided Bannon had to go and got Trump to sign off.

A sympathizer on a panel at MSNBC says with dismay the firing means the globalists have won, the nationalists will be swept out of the White House and wherever Bannon was able to put them.

She was thinking of the whole America First thing - trade, immigration, and isolationist foreign policies - that was in fact the beating heart of Trump's ideology, of Buchananism.

I hope she's right.

Miller versus Acosta

Stephen Miller is a White House staffer in the entourage of Steve Bannon.

Jim Acosta is a CNN newsie born in the US whose father came here as a child of 11 from Cuba.

In general use, cosmopolitan, said of a person, usually means something like urbane, sophisticated, or familiar with all or much of the world, an antonym of parochial, insular, or unworldly.

But it can also be used to refer to one who regards himself as "a citizen of the world," a person who in some manner rejects loyalty to one's own particular nation, nationality, or country, or such loyalty construed in a particular way or understood to have certain specific implications.

Picking up on this usage, some advocates of ethnic nationalism have deplored and continue to deplore "rootless" or "disloyal cosmopolitanism," regarding it as contrary to a moral duty of loyalty to one's blood and soil.

Miller, like Bannon, is a white populist nationalist as regards American politics and an anti-EU populist nationalist as regards European politics, in both of which the ingredients of blood and soil are quite conspicuous, though sometimes unconvincingly disguised behind Renanism, itself an unconvincing and unhistoric theory of nationhood and nationalism that excludes the whole matter of blood.

In a White House press conference exchange about President Trump's proposed new immigration law, Miller and Acosta had an exchange.

Acosta then repeated his original question about whether immigrants would have to speak English before coming to the U.S., asking “Are we just going to bring in people from Great Britain and Australia?”

Rather than addressing the question, Miller called Acosta’s comments offensive. 

“I am shocked at your statement, that you think only people from Great Britain and Australia would know English,” he said. 

“It reveals your cosmopolitan bias to a shocking degree. This is an amazing moment. That you think only people from Great Britain or Australia would speak English is so insulting to millions of hard-working immigrants who do speak English from all over the world. Jim, have you honestly never met an immigrant from another country who speaks English, outside of Great Britain and Australia? Is that your personal experience?”

“That is one of the most outrageous, insulting, ignorant, and foolish things you’ve ever said,” he continued. 

“The notion that you think that this is a racist bill is so wrong and so insulting.”

Miller concluded the debate by defending the White House’s proposed green card policy. 

“Insinuations like Jim made, trying to ascribe nefarious motives to a compassionate immigration measure designed to help newcomers and current arrivals alike, is wrong,” he said.

Acosta, of course, was not being literal when he asked, "Are we just going to bring in people from Great Britain and Australia?”

Miller, taking him so, was just being a douche, though the utter stupidity of the all too familiar argument from the poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty that Acosta attempted to sketchily reproduce against the immigration proposal Miller was discussing nearly excuses it.

Too, Acosta - anyway, as quoted - did not actually say the policy was racist, though that idea seems not to have been far from his intent; the guilty flee when no one pursueth.

But, anyway, it seems to me Miller's use of "cosmopolitan" made no sense, looking at its general meaning as well as at its more specific, political meaning.

No one seems to have noted that.

And, by the way, Acosta's reference to the poem at the statue's base was meant also to refer us to the age of mass immigration most familiar to Americans, the period from after the Civil War to the early 20th Century.

A period during which it seems most immigrants, by far, and including those from Europe, did not speak English when they arrived.

It is a mildly interesting question not only whether Acosta's, but whether Miller's, immigrant ancestors spoke English when they came.

Mine did not.

Update.

John Oliver - Stephen Miller’s ‘One Of The Most Revolting Humans I’ve Ever Seen’

Add Katrina Pierson.

Update.

Elsewhere in the discussion, Miller referred to it as "American Liberty Enlightening the World."

The statue's actual name is "Liberty Enlightening the World," and it is impossible to think Miller did not know that.

So, why did he lie?

OK, we know.

Because he's a right wing douche.

Bannon out, NSC back to normal

Steve Bannon Removed From National Security Council

President Donald Trump has removed Steve Bannon, his chief strategist, from the National Security Council, according to a filing in the federal registry.

As part of the shakeup announced Wednesday, two officials were added back to the NSC's Principal's Committee: the director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Joseph Dunford.

To cushion the public blow to Bannon, Flynn - no longer in the administration, anyway - goes under the bus.

Bannon was put on the Principals' Committee only as a check against then-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. 

Now that Flynn is gone, Bannon is no longer needed in that role, the official said.

Recordings of Bannon surface

Of Bannon on radio shows urging an end to all Muslim immigration and, on another occasion, complaining about engineering or medical students from South Asia staying on to work here and taking jobs from Americans, urging an end to immigration - not temporary visas for education or other purposes - altogether.

These are presented as damning recordings of a racist, religious bigot and his crazy man ravings.

Seen and heard on MSNBC.