[Please SCROLL DOWN FOR NEW POSTS: this one has been bumped up] The Gerard Vanderleun book website is open and the book is ready for purchase

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, here goes – it’s book launch time for Gerard Vanderleun’s book of essays! The title is The Name In the Stone.

Please go to the book website VanderleunBooks, take a look around, and order a book or books. It’s published in a very handsome-looking paperback edition, if I do say so myself, and there are a couple of hardcovers available as well [NOTE: The hardcovers, which were a very limited edition, are already sold out, but I’m going to order another print run of hardcovers, and so you can order them now although there will be an estimated delay of about ten days in mailing the hardcovers out to customers]. Here’s a link to the description of the book.

You can communicate with me about the book either at my usual email address of jaybean33@yahoo.com or at the booksite’s email address, which is info@vanderleunbooks.com . I plan to add a page of reader testimonials at the website, and you can send a review that way if you’d like.

A personal note on this election

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m still pinching myself about the election results. But it doesn’t seem like this will feature a repeat of the post-election reversals of 2020; the win was apparently too big for that. And yet still too close for comfort, given the abysmal candidacy of Kamala Harris.

I hope that Harris leaves the stage of national politics after she leaves the VP office. She doesn’t have much aptitude for it and I doubt the Democrats will be nominating her again.

Last night I didn’t look at any election results till after 9 PM. Too nervous. Once I started looking, it was clear that the signs were encouraging. So although it took me hours and hours to relax, I started feeling somewhat better by about 11 PM. I certainly hadn’t expected it to happen that soon.

There’s so much to think about. Strangely enough, I believe that an opinion column in non other than the NY Times summed up the general truth – at least, the following part:

“Populist Revolt Against Elite’s Vision of the US”

The assumption that Mr. Trump represented an anomaly who would at last be consigned to the ash heap of history was washed away on Tuesday night by a red current that swept through battleground states — and swept away the understanding of America long nurtured by its ruling elite of both parties.

No longer can the political establishment write off Mr. Trump as a temporary break from the long march of progress, a fluke who somehow sneaked into the White House in a quirky, one-off Electoral College win eight years ago. With his comeback victory to reclaim the presidency, Mr. Trump has now established himself as a transformational force reshaping the United States in his own image.

Because it’s the Times, of course, the article goes on to say that resistance to a female president was a factor. Should I add “goes on to say without evidence“? Because it was this candidate, not her being a female, that did her in, and this platform devoid of solutions or appeal to most people.

The rest of the article demonstrates the same stupidity – Trump violated standards (as though the left didn’t do that to a far greater extent in its attempt to destroy him), and is a “convicted criminal” (as though he isn’t the victim of kangaroo court persecution at the hands of the left and really is a criminal). There’s more outright lying in the piece, the repeat of Democrat talking points like the “dictator on day one” distortion and the like.

But I’m not going to dwell on the right now. Right now I want to enjoy the day. Hope you do, too.

More and more and more: an election roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

So many things of interest! It’s a happy day.

(1) Konstantin Kisin understands. If you’re not familiar with his podcast Triggernometry, you should take a look sometimes.

(2) Harris has called Trump to concede. Yay!:

Harris discussed the importance of a peaceful transfer of power and being a president for all Americans, according to a senior Harris aide. Harris was expected to address supporters later Wednesday afternoon.

(3) Biden also called Trump. I bet Biden was secretly a bit happy, unlike Harris.

(4) Jack Smith will be throwing in the towel on his anti-Trump cases, at least for now. What a destructive charade he put on. Obviously, the goal was to hurt Trump’s changes of re-election. Ironically, he may have helped. In addition, Trump probably could have pardoned himself for the two federal cases in which Smith is prosecutor. What of the more local cases? What of Judge Merchan, for example?:

Should Merchan proceed with the sentencing as scheduled, he’ll face the unprecedented task of deciding whether to impose a prison sentence of up to four years on a defendant who is set to occupy the White House come January. If he does order Trump to prison, Trump almost certainly won’t be required to serve that sentence until after he leaves office in 2029.

Left out is the fact that the case was almost certainly doomed anyway in appeals court, because it was another complete travesty.

(5) This is well worth watching:

(6) It looks like the GOP will keep the House, although the margin will remain small. However, it’s still very very important to maintain control for a host of reasons. Then there’s also the question of who will replace McConnell in the Senate. Pleasant prospects to contemplate.

Thoughts on the election

The New Neo Posted on by

Wow, what a night. And, as has become typical in recent years, we still don’t know about several Senate races or who will take control of the House.

But much as Trump dodged a real bullet on July 13 in Butler, PA, the US dodged a metaphorical bullet last night. And it was thanks to the hard work of Trump, Vance, their staffs – including many election lawyers who acted on reports of possible fraud and other problems in the days leading up to the election in a timely and effective fashion – and perhaps most of all, the American voter. In particular it was thanks to many erstwhile Democrat voters who decided that they couldn’t in all conscience vote for Harris and either sat home or voted for Trump this time, giving him a more solid victory than ever before.

Will the Democrats manage to find those extra votes to put them over the top in the states that are still undecided? About twenty years ago, Hugh Hewitt wrote a book entitled If It’s Not Close They Can’t Cheat. And although I assume that some of the as-yet-undecided places in which Trump is only slightly ahead now, or races in which another Republican is barely leading, will ultimately turn blue, I think this Trump victory is decisive enough that it will hold, and that there’s little question that the Senate will be controlled by the GOP.

More and more things are going to emerge about this election as time goes on and they crunch the numbers, but here are my thoughts so far:

(1) Polls were essentially worthless this year. But at least the pollsters didn’t speak with false confidence; they basically said “Hey, it’s 50/50 but what that means is that we haven’t a clue.” So I appreciate the honesty.

(2) Yes, there is a “shy Trump voter” phenomenon. I’m one of them. A lot of people say they’ve never been called by a pollster, but I’ve gotten many such calls and I always say, “I’m not interested” and hang up.

(3) Trump’s energy is astounding for any age, much less for a man of his age.

(4) I had almost forgotten about Melania. It was nice to see her up there on the dais – or the podium or whatever it’s called – looking beautiful and happy.

(5) Barron was by far the tallest person standing in front of that crowd late last night, and in general it’s a very tall bunch and so that’s saying something.

(6) J. D. Vance turned out to have been a tremendous asset, whereas Tim Walz was one of many poor decisions by Harris.

(7) Harris was rude to her supporters, choosing not to address them last night.

(8) The pundits on Fox looked giddy last night, the CNN folks looked very glum. And the CNN newspeople seem as clueless as ever; they were analyzing why Trump won and why Harris lost and several sadly and condescendingly said “racism and sexism.” Keep thinking that rather than pointing out her extraordinary weaknesses.

(9) Remember Michael Steele, who was head of the RNC from 2009-2011? I don’t generally watch TV news and hadn’t seen him or thought of him in ages, but last night I discovered that he’s found a home on MSNBC and is a NeverTrumper. He said some extraordinary things during the few minutes of the broadcast I watched. One was that, somehow, the Republicans had succeeded in tying Kamala Harris to the failed Biden administration. Ya think? And this was uttered as though making such a connection would require some sort of pretzel-like gymnastics to pull off.

(10) There was one guy on MSNBC – I didn’t catch his name – who pointed out some interesting things, while standing in front of maps. He looked at a number of blue states and blue districts that Harris won, and compared them to Clinton’s total share in 2016 and Biden’s total share in 2020. Harris consistently did worse than both of them. Also, the gap between Biden’s percentage of the vote and Harris’ percentage of the vote was often about a five percent dropoff.

(11) Jen Psaki has also found a cozy gig on MSNBC. I hadn’t missed her, either.

(12) Someone (again, I don’t recall who) on MSNBC mentioned that Harris lost ground with all demographics compared to Biden, except for white college-educated women. I guess Biden gets to say, “See, you should have let me run again,” although of course many other factors have changed compared to 2020, including Biden himself.

(13) I don’t know which thing I’m more relieved about – that Trump won or that Harris lost. Let’s call it 50/50.

(14) Trump will have his work cut out for him.

(15) We still don’t know who won the House, but the Senate results are heartening.

(16) I’m struck once again at how, when there’s a trend – in this case it was that Trump did better than most polls and pundits predicted – the phenomenon is often exhibited across the board. He did better almost everywhere.

Election eve

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a thread for the election results.

I’m staying away from coverage for another hour or two, but you can discuss everything here.

UPDATE 11/6/2024 at 12:40 AM:

I’m back. I still have PTSD from late returns in 2020, so I won’t comment on the presidential race. But I think you all know how it’s going so far.

I’ll say a few other things, though, that please me a lot.

Republicans will control the Senate, although it’s still not clear by how much.

Cruz’s race wasn’t even close, after all that blah blah blah from the MSM and the Democrats.

I can’t locate the link where I read the following statistics – and early statistics of this sort often change somewhat anyway – but it appears that Trump has done considerably better than previously with black voters (about 25% of black men), Jewish voters (about 45%), Hispanic voters, and Muslim voters. That’s an interesting mix for a neo-Hitler. And I also read that Harris did 6% worse than Biden did with black women.

It’ll be a while before I go to bed tonight.

Oh, and it looks like George Gascon, the abominable DA of Los Angeles, will be defeated.

And I guess Californians have gotten tired of the rampant shoplifting that has gone on since Prop 47 was passed, because they have voted for Prop 36, which reinstates tougher penalties.

UPDATE 1:50 AM:

Dare I say it? Fox calls it for Trump!

Obama was the turning point

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter “AesopFan.”]

I’ve long felt that, as the title of this post says, Obama was the turning point – not to some hoped-for racial reconciliation, but to a divisive leftist dominance in US politics. Here’s an article from yesterday that illustrates his malign influence [emphasis mine]:

At their Substack “Truth Over News,” independent journalists Jeff Carlson and Hans Mahncke report on the newly obtained transcript of a Jan. 17, 2017 meeting between then outgoing President Barack Obama and 17 unnamed “progressive” journalists, in which they discussed Trump’s upcoming term and allegations that Trump had colluded with Russia. As Carlson and Mahncke note, Obama knew the Russia allegations were false; his CIA director, John Brennan, had briefed him in late July on a “proposal from one of [Hillary Clinton’s] foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference from Russian security services.” …

It would be an understatement to say that the press fell for the scam; this entirely fake story became the dominant political narrative of the first two years of Trump’s presidency, and it is still believed by a narrow majority of Democratic partisans, who nonetheless consider Trump’s “Big Lie” about the 2020 election to be disqualifying from office. …

I highlight this briefing not only because the transcript is new but also because it points to the origin point for the derangement of American politics over the past eight years: the Obama faction’s weaponization of the security state and the press to deny the American people a legitimate opportunity to reject their agenda at the ballot box. That agenda was described (in part) in the first half of today’s Big Story: alliance with Third World regimes abroad and the cultivation of a Third Worldist political culture at home, complete with corrupt spy services, rigged elections, a lackey press, the censorship and legal harassment of the opposition, sectarian division of the population among party-designated identity categories (“LGBTQI+” and “AAPI”), and violent street displays targeting the perceived enemies of the ruling regime, whether “racists” and “cops” (as in 2020) or “Jews” and “Zionists” (as in 2023 and 2024). Indeed, both in and out of government, the party-state machine constructed by Obama did its best to create, in lieu of a governing program that could appeal to the majority of Americans, a vast public-private apparatus of censorship and thought control targeting dissident speech as “misinformation”—a project that was thwarted only by Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter in 2022. More recently, the criminal prosecution of Trump on absurdly inflated charges suggests a willingness to abuse the legal system to go after opponents and interfere with electoral outcomes—unless, of course, they suffer blowback at the ballot box.

Prior to Obama, presidents cared to a great extent what the people wanted, and tended to respond to public opinion if only because they thought the people might vote them out, but sometimes also because they thought that was their job. After the election of Obama, who was the first truly leftist president and the first Alinskyite president, the MSM became totally taken over by propaganda rather than partially, and the president became deceptive about his goals and methods. The Democratic Party began to veer more strongly and openly to the left as the Overton window moved.

Obama didn’t try to shape his policy to the needs and desires of the American people, but rather to do what he could to further a global rather than a US agenda, and if the people didn’t like it they were just going to have to accept it. That approach has become far more common in Europe as well – or rather, it may have began in Europe and Obama was following their example. In reaction to all of this, both here and abroad, populist movements have sprung up and the left has concentrated on demonizing them as Nazi-esque.

In July of 2009 I wrote this about Obama:

We’ve had experience with incompetent presidents and/or deceptive presidents before. But I submit that we’ve never before had a president with such malignant and radical designs who also was so deceptive in such a profound way. Nixon, for example, was deceptive about many things as well as malignant towards his “enemies,” but he was still well within the mainstream of American political thought regarding defending freedom around the globe, keeping America strong, and the economy. Also, Tricky Dick seemed tricky; we knew about this characteristic of his even before he was elected.

Obama does not seem deceptive on the surface — at least, he doesn’t to many people, and that’s what’s important. And yet he has been deceptive about something far more basic than Nixon ever was: who he is, and his underlying vision for America.

To Obama’s credit, over time he has become more honest about all of that. Perhaps not so much in his rhetoric, but in his deeds.

And by his deeds ye shall know him.

The Gulag academia

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an excellent article by a Jewish woman who emigrated to this country from Russia in 2012. An excerpt:

I immigrated to America from Russia in 2012 so I wouldn’t have to hide anymore. That hasn’t worked out so well for me.

Hiding our Jewishness was a family tradition. This was an understandable response given that my Ukrainian paternal grandfather, Danil Fyodorovich Bykoder, served 15 years, beginning in about 1923 at the age of 19, in the Solovki labor camp, whose anguishing cruelties were vividly described in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s epic work, The Gulag Archipelago. My grandfather’s tripartite crime was criticizing Stalin, being an intellectual, and being Jewish. …

… The children at school … threatened me, mocked me as a “cheap Jew,” and poured a syrupy Russian knock-off of Coca-Cola over my head. This was my baptism into a culture of fear.

After school, to avoid them, I would walk the long way, through a scrubby patch of forest, to reach the little house I shared with my mother. …

For these reasons, among others, I emigrated to America in 2012, declared and was granted political asylum, and became an American citizen. Now I am Irina Velitskaya, having changed my last name back in Russia because I, too, wished to avoid a certain stigma—in my case, the stigma of a name that represented hiding and shame. “Velitskaya” means “great,” and that was what I’d hoped to be, unfettered by the ugly superstitions of the Old World.

I was safe now.

Not anymore. She describes what has happened to her recently as a student at Berkeley. It’s worth reading the whole thing.

Election Day

The New Neo Posted on by

Not much to add at this point.

I’m trying to decide how to handle this evening: when to start watching, and how to maintain some sort of equanimity in the face of the tension. I don’t know whether we’ll know the outcome tonight.

Very nervous; caught between hope and fear.

How about you?

The left’s ugly racism towards black conservatives

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: I’m forcing myself to write at least one post about something other than the election.]

We’ve seen this picture before, many times:

(1) Larry Elder, black face of white supremacy:

“Larry Elder is the Black face of white supremacy. You’ve been warned”

Larry Elder smiled the smug smile of a Black conservative who could very well be liberal California’s next governor.

“Where do you start with the damage Gavin Newsom has done to the state that we both love?”

He leaned forward to gaze across the room of white Republicans who had come to a hear him speak in Orange County. …

(2)

(3) Clarence Thomas is an Uncle Tom.

But this particular virus is hardly limited to the United States. It’s rampant in the UK at present, due to the election of Kemi Bandenoch as head of the Tories. Brendan O’Neill writes:

Following the election of the first black leader of a major party in this country [the UK], Ms Butler took to X not to congratulate but to sneer. Not to cheer this final breakthrough for racial equality in the UK but to share a poisonous description of the person who made the breakthrough as the “black face” of “white supremacy.” It is one of the worst things a member of the ruling party has done since they came to power four months ago. …

[Butler] … retweeted some tips for “surviving a Kemi Badenoch victory” written by Nels Abbey, a London-based Nigerian journalist. He branded Badenoch “the most prominent member of white supremacy’s black collaborator class.” She’s the chief representative of “white supremacy in black face,” he sniped.

… [Badenoch] was being depicted as mere dressing, as an exotic decoration for “white supremacy,” as the black mask our supposedly racist elites have decided to pull on. This is dehumanising talk: it robs Badenoch of her agency … and treats her as little more than the mouthpiece of a nefarious agenda that hurts her own kind. …

… The writer Kehinde Andres, in typically provocative style, shared his view that Badenoch is the “shining ebony example that the Psychosis of Whiteness is not reserved for those with white skin.”

… Other Tories from ethnic-minority backgrounds have likewise been branded the fodder of whiteness.

Sickening – to wrap oneself in the mantle of anti-racism while demonstrating a vicious kind of racism against both black people and white people. And unfortunately, this phenomenon seems to be rife on both sides of the pond. As more and more members of minority ethnicities have become conservatives, the left uses sophistry to declare them to be race traitors doing the bidding of their white supremacist controllers.

Anxiety about the election: plus, why would people vote for Kamala?

The New Neo Posted on by

I have zero idea what will happen tomorrow – or even how long it will take to name a president-elect. But when I think about the possibility of a Harris win I get more frightened than I ever have been of any election result before in my life. And that’s saying something.

Prior to the 2008 election I pretty much knew that Obama would win. It was hard to accept, and I also knew he would be very destructive. His pretense of being moderate and of being a racial uniter had already been revealed by his campaign as phony. In 2012 I was even more worried because now I knew how dangerous his administration had been in setting us on a leftist path, including the enabling of Iranian power and a very subtle way of undermining race relations while feigning being a lofty healer.

In 2016 I disliked both candidates, and although I knew I detested Hillary Clinton and worried about what I saw as a possible continuation of Obama’s terrible policies and approaches if she were to be elected, I also worried that Trump was a loose cannon who would be in way over his head and would cause chaos. It took me a few months after Trump’s inauguration to realize that wasn’t the case, and to relax. But then the 2020 election – after COVID and riots had reduced Trump’s chances of winning, and with the always-mediocre yet now cognitively-challenged Biden as a possible winner – represented a nail-biter. And the 2020 experience of going to bed thinking Trump had won and waking up seeing that he hadn’t was deeply disturbing.

And then of course there was the 2022 red wave that turned into a tiny trickle.

But none of those elections can compare to what I feel now. I perceive Kamala Harris as representing the worst of all those worlds: the duplicity and dislikability of Hillary, the leftist policies of Obama on steroids, the cluelessness and uniformly poor decisions of Biden as well as her own seeming cognitive (or purposefully vague?) way of not making sense when she speaks. Couple that with the further leftward movement of the Democrats, and knowing how radical their legislative agenda is, plus a lack of faith in voting security and the strong sense that they wouldn’t hesitate to do whatever they they can to win and then to consolidate power that will last indefinitely, has got me in a tizzy. I alternatively reassure myself that Kamala won’t win, and then fear that she will. Back and forth and back and forth.

So, why would so many people vote for Kamala – including almost everyone I know? Don’t they see and hear the vacuous meaningless statements, the relentless lies, the strange affect? Don’t they know her extreme leftist history? I actually think that the majority of Democrats I know have not watched her interviews and do not see and hear – or at any rate, that what they do see and hear is processed differently from the way a person on the right sees it. They either pay little attention and vote in a reflexive way for the Democrat – and a woman! and a black woman! and Republicans will take away your birth control! – or they have only seen Harris debate with Trump and her speech at the DNC, and in both of those appearances she probably seemed fine to them. And, even more importantly and decisively, they truly believe that Trump is all the horrible things the left says about him and their fear of him is real.

And no, they are not dumb. The ones I know are for the most part very smart indeed in most areas of their lives. But they continue to swallow propaganda without even realizing that’s what it is.

Now, you might say, as commenter “Chris B” does here:

The thing is, it is so easy to learn the truth nowadays if one really wants to. Even with biased search engines, anyone can google “did Trump really say…” and find out that what they are being told is a lie. I believe that in reality they don’t want to know the truth. The intense hatred they have for Trump they find intoxicating. The last thing they want is to to lose the high they get from expressing their righteous hatred with like minded friends.

I spend many hours a day trying to “learn the truth” as best I can, and I really want to, as well. And yet I would never call it “easy” to do so, much less “so easy.” For example, the search engines are more than somewhat biased; they are constructed so that a person ordinarily has to scroll through reams and reams of suggestions that seem to validate all the bad things said about Trump and all the good things said about Harris before finding anything that differs.

So a person has to be committed to finding differing opinions and reading them, and to take some time in the process, while meanwhile all the anti-Trump propaganda is constantly reinforced by the search. When someone on the right does a search like that, the person knows it will be a quite a hunt, and he or she is aware of the need to be patient and to persevere. Plus, the person on the right is at least somewhat impervious to the propaganda; a mind is a difficult thing to change.

But there is no particular reason for the Democrat to be so patient, and that person probably is not already aware of the bias in the search results. That person will almost certainly see result after result that doesn’t challenge the propaganda but instead extends it and solidifies it. Why would that person keep going and going in the face of all that? And then, even if that person does keep going and finally finds a pro-Trump article, it’s from Fox or some other source on the right that the person has been told for decades is biased towards the right. Yes, every now and then a fact-check site defends Trump, but that’s often difficult to find as well unless one is willing to dig deep.

What’s more, why would a person start such a quest in the first place? To do so, the person would have to have a reason for challenging his or her own very solid and long-held belief system. Such a motive is rare on the left, but it’s actually rare on either side of the political spectrum. Political change is something I’ve written about at length, and most people will not ever be motivated to seek it.

And after all, as Chris B notes, not only does hatred have its own satisfactions, but righteous hatred can be a bonding experience: “the last thing they want is to lose the high they get from expressing their righteous hatred with like minded friends.” Indeed. I’m aware, for example, that my own presence in a group somewhat inhibits the people from a nice satisfying anti-right rant, and therefore including me in a group puts a damper on the fun even if I don’t say anything in opposition.

Why would Democrats be curious to learn whether the bad things they think about Trump are false? There aren’t many people in the world on any side of any issue who are eager to discredit their own belief system. All of most Democrats’ long-trusted media sources, and often all their friends, and all the professors and lawyers and smart people and oh-so-erudite NeverTrumpers agree: Republicans bad, and Trump just about the worst of all. To search for alternative points of view would require something that has engendered doubt about that proposition, and although that sometimes happens it’s easy enough to shake it off if it’s just an occasional flicker of hesitation.

For example, the very idea that Trump wasn’t referring to Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville as “fine people” would have to enter a person’s mind in order for the person to be motivated enough to look it up and check it out. And why would most Democrats ever do that? Why would it even occur to them? They’re not hearing it on the news they watch or read, and for those who live in blue cities their friends aren’t saying it either. The thought that it’s not true is in the nature of an unknown unknown – nearly unthinkable. And to at some point accept that it’s not true would require not only initially entertaining the thought that it isn’t true, but a much bigger shock: the knowledge that one’s political worldview, erected over a lifetime, might be a house of cards.

Don’t underestimate how threatening and difficult it is to even entertain that notion, much less believe it. It’s a long process and a shattering one, as I can report from personal experience.

And what’s the result? Why, you get to be a pariah to a lot of people you trusted and loved. Not all of them, of course; some will stand by you, and those are pearls of great price. But you are risking a lot. And it’s a facile response to say to that person, “Oh, if they desert you or grow cooler to you they weren’t ever your real friends.” Because you have a history that says they were friends, and especially if you’re older it is very difficult to replace those friends. In fact, you can’t, and you can’t replace family. Political change can even break marriage bonds and cause tragic outcomes for children.

So I have no problem whatsoever imagining why most people don’t pursue a course of challenging their own deeply-held belief system on politics. I never set out to do it myself, either – or not exactly. Although I actually always have been one to challenge a belief or a fact I think is true, changing my politics as a whole was something I never saw coming over twenty years ago when the whole thing started for me. I just followed this link and that, with a certain amount of naivete about the social consequences for me – in fact, with complete and utter naivete.

And yet once you cross that Rubicon there’s usually no turning back. I’ve gained a great deal from following where the quest led, but I’ve lost things too, and I don’t make light of why so many people would be deeply reluctant to even entertain a thought that might take them to that sort of upheaval.

[ADDENDUM: Please also see this relevant post that I wrote not long after the 2020 election].