I just saw the news that Trump has won. Honestly, I never believed it was possible. I’d like to thank everyone who worked toward this victory, including Jared Taylor and all the other “Deplorables.”
But this is only the beginning. We’ve got some serious work ahead of us, if we’re to hold Mr. Trump’s feet to the fire, and get him to do the things he said he would do.
Aside from that, we’ve got a Republican congress. Hopefully, this time they’ll be more in tune with the will of The People, taking their cue from President Trump. It’s nice that legalized marijuana made some advances as well; government has more important things to do than prosecute people for smoking marijuana.
I’m certainly happy that Trump won as well. It was pretty amazing that he was able to pull it off, considering that the elite media, the donor class, Conservatism Inc., much of the GOP and virtually every other hand on the lever of power and influence in the country was opposed to him. A huge factor was the rise of alternative media sites like AmRen, VDARE, SBPDL, Occidental Dissent, Breitbart and The Drudge Report (and JAY, of course) that let us know that all of us who felt that the country was headed in the wrong direction weren’t just an isolated group of “deplorables.” I hope that he does fulfill his campaign promises and at the very least shows some level of concern for the people who are the backbone of this country and not the pet minority groups that our elites are enthralled of.
Actually, I’ve been feeling guilty. While other Trump supporters were giving messages of encouragement, I was discouraging people. Obviously, I need more confidence in humanity.
My strategy, which you might want to consider employing in a similar situation, is to say ‘Trump will lose, BUT we still need to fight for him. We need to decrease Hillary’s victory margin, we need to defend the GOP downballot, and so on.’ That way you don’t act as a discouraging agent but you stay realistic.
“A huge factor was the rise of alternative media sites like AmRen, VDARE, [etc.]”
It’s tempting to assume that, but how do you know? How large are the readerships on those sites? How much do the readerships overlap? How are those readerships distributed within the US?
None of the Trump voters I work with or am related to have heard of any of those websites. The internet distorts reality by appearing to amplify all signals: when a few isolated nuts show up online, the whole world seems nutty. When a few isolated friends show up online, the whole world seems friendly.
If you voted for Trump and are hoping he will show concern for Regular Americans, then that’s exactly what you’ll perceive him as doing. Trump is the Sphere.
http://www.worldtribune.com/losers-perspective-watergates-bernstein-blames-matt-drudge/
“The alternative universe of Drudge, alt-right, the different press and social media that we have seen almost dominate to some extent a big part of the electorate is a wholly new phenomenon,” explained Bernstein.”
I’m not surprised that the people you know would claim they don’t know anything about these websites. After all, “respectable” people don’t visit these kinds of websites.
So you know your favorite Alt Right websites helped win Trump the election because…a journalist told you so.
You seem to be saying there’s a big conspiracy among Trump voters where they all read your favorite Alt Right websites but have agreed to feign ignorance about them, even when talking to people they know are very conservative.
But hey maybe you’re right, and those websites have unique readerships from within the US measurable in the tens of millions, concentrated in key voting districts that wouldn’t have gone to Trump anyway. And I’m sure you have the data to prove it too: Anderson Cooper is beaming it into your tooth filling!
Yeah, that’s actually a point. The alt-right may have been a much smaller factor than Trump’s appealing to blue-collar white people, who probably have no clue who Jared Taylor is.
Heck, the Nazi Pepe memes may have even been counterproductive by giving the Dems some disreputable types to hang their rhetoric on. But I was wrong on Trump winning the nomination and the election, so I’ll refrain from claiming too many explanations.
It was also a great night for those of us with memberships in both The Tribe and the GOP. Eric Greitens, a former Navy SEAL, was elected governor of Missouri, and Dave Kustoff to the US House from Tennessee.
And let us not forget that while both presidential candidates have daughters who married Jewish men, only Ivanka converted and Donald has Jewish grandchildren.
I didn’t realize that. It certainly wasn’t a good night for snowflakes. Word has it they’re melting all over the country.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOMG4IOfH0I Netanyahu congratulates Trump.
I walked around elated all day.
1. Trump won, and I preferred him to Hillary.
2. Trump won, and I didn’t have to sully my conscience by voting for him, or for anyone else I didn’t really like.
3. I won several bets against people who didn’t think Trump would win.
4. I get to find out if my predictions about a Trump presidency will also come true. (The first of which can be found here: https://welldotdotdot.wordpress.com/2016/11/09/predictions/)
Looks like I should have offered to bet against you too!
“So you know your favorite Alt Right websites helped win Trump the election because…a journalist told you so.
You seem to be saying there’s a big conspiracy among Trump voters where they all read your favorite Alt Right websites but have agreed to feign ignorance about them, even when talking to people they know are very conservative.”
So you know something he doesn’t? Funny, Jared Taylor and Brad Griffin all stated that traffic to their websites increased massively after Clinton attacked the Alt-Right but you know more than they do it seems. Telling the whole world that you read and participate in Alt-Right websites has no risk whatsoever… there is no such thing as people loosing their jobs over posting online:
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/06/10/principal-fired-for-defending-cop-at-center-of-mckinney-incident-here-are-the-three-sentences-he-posted-online/
Tell us the facts then, please. I’m not going to hold my breath on that, though, considering the last exchange we had. By the way, are you just here to try to gin up traffic to your blog?
I have no doubt that traffic to Alt Right sites increased after Clinton’s Alt Right speech. But it’s a long stretch from there to saying that those sites were a “huge factor” in Trump getting elected.
Just because most people who visit website X keep it a secret, and also voted for Trump, doesn’t mean everyone who voted for Trump was secretly convinced to do so by visiting website X. That’s just basic logic. Besides, Trump was soaring long before Clinton gave her Alt Right speech.
When I’ve already said something on my blog that’s relevant to a conversation I’m having, I sometimes post a link instead of copying and pasting into a comment. I call you out a lot because a lot of what you say is illogical, and nobody else seems to be calling you out on it. It’s nothing personal. You do tend to get really upset when I spoil your echo chamber, and that’s kind of amusing, but I just don’t have a lot of sympathy about that either.
PS. Odds are when you talk to a friend and coworker who’s a Trump supporter and you say stuff like “I like John Derbyshire’s podcast. Do you ever listen it it? It’s at VDare.com” and your friend goes “Nope, never heard of it” he isn’t pulling your leg.
Oh yeah, and that principal in your link wasn’t fired for saying he reads Alt Right websites, he was fired for siding with a cop. There are so many other examples (like Mencius Moldbug for starters!) I can’t figure out why you’d pull out one that doesn’t even support your point.
“I call you out a lot because a lot of what you say is illogical, and nobody else seems to be calling you out on it. It’s nothing personal. You do tend to get really upset when I spoil your echo chamber, and that’s kind of amusing, but I just don’t have a lot of sympathy about that either.”
No, you’re wrong. I don’t get upset about it at all, I can assure you of that. Why? Because most of your arguments seemed to be based on nothing but your opinions and not on any factual evidence. For example, in this thread you “called me out” on my statement that Alt-Right websites were a significant factor in Trump’s eventual success. Typically, you failed to provide the slightest proof of this aside of your own musings which frankly is quite pathetic. Besides, calling me illogical falls flat on its face when you were the guy claiming that Trump was an imposter and now you’re claiming you were elated at his victory.
“Oh yeah, and that principal in your link wasn’t fired for saying he reads Alt Right websites, he was fired for siding with a cop. There are so many other examples (like Mencius Moldbug for starters!) I can’t figure out why you’d pull out one that doesn’t even support your point.”
Well…, I see that one flew over your head… The point I was making was that people have lost their jobs over expressing opinions that discomfort our elites’ protected classes. In the example I highlighted, the guy posted that he defended the cop at the center of the McKinney pool party incident, thus annoying “the community” and for that offense against the dignity of blacks he was fired. Now, imagine if someone was foolish enough to go around proclaiming to the four winds that he reads and posts at Alt-Right websites. The Alt-Right!!! The gathering place for Neo-Nazis, Klansmen, misogynists, homophobes, xenophobes, transphobes, you name it. All the scum of the earth! Just how long do you think he’d last in his job once the SJWs take note? Got it now, Well…?
PS: I see that my little jab about you trying to draw attention to your blog had the effect I was desiring. : )
Now you’re arguing an even weaker point. Obviously you can be fired for announcing yourself to be in the Alt Right, but you’re much more likely to be fired for just taking the wrong side in some big social justice story.
If I say “Michael Brown was a criminal and a thug who assaulted a man while robbing a convenience store and then grabbed for a cop’s gun and should have expected to get shot” I’m much more likely to suffer negative consequences in mixed company than if I say “Bonald’s theories on hierarchy are interesting”–because odds are that in mixed company none of them have heard of Bonald!
The Alt Right is much more obscure than its members think. That’s because everything feels big and influential online. That’s part of what I study for a living. When you move from cyberspace to meatspace, influence becomes more zero-sum.
There’s nothing contradictory about saying Trump isn’t a conservative who shouldn’t be celebrated by the Alt Right and being glad he won the election instead of Hillary. If you can’t hold those two things together in your mind at the same time then you’re much lower IQ than I’ve been giving you credit for.
“The Alt Right is much more obscure than its members think. That’s because everything feels big and influential online. That’s part of what I study for a living. When you move from cyberspace to meatspace, influence becomes more zero-sum.”
It’s hard to tell as I’ve never seen numbers given for the size of what is known as the Alt-Right but I honestly think that it’s substantially larger than what you think. The Drudge Report, for example, reached 1.47 billion hits in July of this year alone. Infowars, Breitbart and WND are among the top 15 political websites by Internet traffic for this month, for example. It’s large enough and influential enough that Clinton went after it in a major speech which ironically backfired on her and simply gave exposure to the phenomenon. It’s understandable that Alt-Right leaders are claiming to have been instrumental in Trump’s election but even publications that were not at all in favor of Trump and loath to given a platform to the Alt-Right such as The Economist are admitting that it helped carry him to the White House.
“There’s nothing contradictory about saying Trump isn’t a conservative who shouldn’t be celebrated by the Alt Right and being glad he won the election instead of Hillary. If you can’t hold those two things together in your mind at the same time then you’re much lower IQ than I’ve been giving you credit for.”
It’s well known that Trump isn’t a classic conservative and those on the Alt-Right seem to be very aware of that. However, you seem to be oblivious that from the viewpoint of the Alt-Right, conservatives are viewed with undisguised contempt and disdain, weaklings desperately attempting to curry favor with their moral superiors on the left; therefore the term cuckservatives. I know that there are some on the Alt-Right who appear to believe that Trump will be some sort of Savior/Messiah/Führer but I’m not among those. I’m certainly glad that he was elected but I won’t be elated until he’s president and starts fulfilling some of his promises to a reasonable extent. What do I mean by that? Making a serious effort to enforced our immigration laws and end once and for all the birthright citizenship/anchor baby racket, for example.
A lot of what you just said is very reasonable.
It’s important to remember that journalists don’t have any better information about the Alt Right than you or I do, so their claims about its influence on the election are even less trustworthy than their claims about data they actually have access to. Journalists are susceptible to the same scale-distorting effects of the internet as everyone else, too.
I’m fully aware that a lot of people on the Alt Right have tried to redefine “conservative,” and that is an interesting phenomenon in itself but not relevant here, and besides it needlessly muddies our language. I use “conservative” in the simple sense of someone who’s on the American political Right and opposes stuff like abortion, gay marriage, mass immigration, penalties on being a productive citizen, and the destruction of our historical icons and institutions. You know, like most of the people who voted for Trump.
It’s great that you’ve come around to see the naive Trump-worshiping going on in the Alt Right, and I hope all conservatives who voted for him will hold his feet to the fire on enforcing our immigration laws and other issues that are vital to the future of our country. I’m much less optimistic about Trump doing those things, though, and I also have a feeling he’ll not only manage to not do them, but he’ll mostly get a free pass from the Right and even the Alt Right.
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