Yeah, that story smelled of foul baloney from the start, but the AI haters and others lapped it up as if true. Snippets:
… Mainstream press took the industry’s story and ran with it, issuing a flurry of anxious dispatches fretting about dangerous AI. One CBS headline called it “very alarming,” while NBC fretted that it was “just the start” of an ominous trend.
Look beyond the alarmist headlines, however, and you’ll find a familiar pattern: a massive tech company using scare tactics to manipulate public opinion.
… It likewise follows the broader AI industry’s playbook. Anthropic, the company behind Claude, has deployed similar rhetoric, warning of a similar breakout in which a rogue AI agent escaped its cage all on its lonesome. In one strange instance, the company’s billionaire co-founder Chris Olah even warned the Pope that the Vatican needs to help stop rogue AI from “dominating humanity.”
“Netanyahu’s thirst for war”?!? CRINK is an geopolitical acronym for China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, representing a loose, transactional alignment of anti-Western nations. Of course they help each other against America. This is why I never understood why so many GOPers hated Ukraine and supported Russia against it. Russia has been America’s enemy for decades, Ukraine was fighting for its life and freedom, and Trump seemed to just want his grudge against Ukraine settled.
.. The wars in Ukraine and Iran are lingering over the upcoming November Midterms like a bad smell.
But recent polling by the Pew Research Centre showed that some 83 per cent of American adults have an unfavourable opinion of the Russian president.
The same research suggests that two-thirds of Americans do not have confidence in Mr Trump’s ability to make the right decision when it comes to Ukraine.
.. The visit of Laura Loomer, a citizen journalist and Maga cheerleader, to the Ukrainian capital on Thursday signalled a change in the wind.
Ms Loomer, who has the ear of the president, has gone to great lengths to accuse Putin of training and arming Iran’s armed forces in their efforts to kill American servicemen.
Geez!?!?! It took her over 5 years to figure out that Russia & Iran would help each other?!
.. Mr Zelensky arrives hoping diplomacy can deliver more weapons.
Mr Netanyahu arrives hoping diplomacy has already failed and strikes on Tehran can continue at pace.
Between them, Mr Trump faces a decision over which war he can afford to leave unfinished – or at least which one will bring him more success at the ballot box.
Since we’ve been discussing the Odyssey, I found the following interesting. What classic films do Matt Damon and Christopher Nolan like? They are recoded selecting them from the Criterion Closet.
Both chose One False Move (1991). Possibly Matt saw Chris’ video, but I’d guess not.
Others that caught my eye:
Double Indemnity 😉 Lost Highway The Killers 12 Angry Men
Chris said he did not particularly enjoy or like Lost Highway, but visions and thoughts about the film stuck with him over a longer period of time like some kind of dream he might have had.
The historian Niall Ferguson recently wrote about the growth of anti-Semitism and the failure of history-teaching to impart the needed lessons. My post and discussion here:
Fauci feared that a global pandemic he and others caused would be blamed on them. Ergo, their motive to cover-up the lab leak origins, and instead blame it on animal origins.
These “shenanigans” created motives to perpetuate a cover-up on the people and the world. It began evolving. The added motives grew to continue lockdowns through summer and fall to foil any Trump re-election
Tucker gives us a strangely and alarmingly coherent explanation of this coup d’tat conspiracy on a justly elected President, and the “treatment of the people used as lab rats.”
Malevolence unleashed to preserve a secret and prevent accountability. No wonder Biden’s henchmen arranged a blanket pardon for him.
It gets worse. Rand Paul’s exposure of the Fauci diaries is getting zero coverage in the Propaganda Media.
I happened upon a C-SPAN interview (by David Rubenstein) with Christopher Buckley. He generally produces a book every two or three years, but hasn’t produced one in about four years and no book was under discussion. Just the life of writing.
==
I’ve been familiar with him as the editor of one of the Forbes supplements (the one devoted to travel writing) and also (many years past) as a producer of occasional pieces for National Review. He’s never struck me as someone who took an interest in public affairs accept as a generator of material for imaginative literature. I did about 15 years ago a survey of Reader’s Guide‘s index of his pieces in political publications (nearly all for his father’s magazine, in fact) and discovered that his contributions consisted of humor writing, travel writing, and reviews of imaginative literature.
==
In his orientations and interests, he was always unlike his father. (Something underscored by his shabby treatment of his first wife).
==
Never much cared for him, but it’s rather distressing. The man at age 73 looks wretched. His aging over the last ten years has been severe and he looks to be suffering either from an essential tremor or tardive dyskinesia. The discussion drags because the pace of his speaking is notably slower than it once was.
== https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGHjHU_Z8d8
Regarding Iran and Trump, K T McFarland was interviewed on Fox Business to explain, and Breitbart transcribes the important analysis she provides. McFarland says that Trump is employing a rolling regime change strategy.
McFarland’s background was at high levels of the State Department under George W Bush. And later, during the beginning 6 months of Trump’s first term in 2017, she was in the West Wing advising his administration from the NSC,
“‘The best solution’ in Iran is ‘sort of a slow-rolling regime change, slow-rolling coup, where the IRGC loses control’ and others like the parliament gain control due to Iran’s economy struggling.’
As the economic sanctions bite, the bet is on parliament as well as the exertion of popular will. While also progressively degrading IRRC powers.
Keeping nuclear weapons unites the US with Israel. However, after that goal, our interests begin diverging.
The historian Niall Ferguson recently wrote about the growth of anti-Semitism and the failure of history-teaching to impart the needed lessons.
==
What has not been learned is an appreciation of effort and accomplishment. The grievance culture is ultimately a manifestation of the spoiled child complaining they haven’t been provided with what they demand. Israel is a marvelous piece of work. Prevalent in the Jewish population of the United States is an unfortunate attitude toward the rest of the country, but this stands alongside that population’s achievements in business and the professions.
In re the Astaire video – I wish it had included some clips of them dancing, but it was interesting to see all the old photos and get a look at their early career.
I was aware of Adele’s importance in Fred’s development, but didn’t appreciate its full scope.
IMO she was wise to step off stage at her peak. I would have loved to see a film of her and him together, though.
Training in basics of movement and performance, and the tutoring of the grinding vaudeville circuit, are things that I think new performers aren’t as well grounded in (although I could be wrong; I haven’t looked into it; though that’s certainly the case for actors, as we saw in the movie “sound problem” – they have never learned to speak clearly; are there still acting schools for film or stage?)
As for “speaking clearly” – it helps to have a clue what you are listening to. I was enchanted to learn from the AI captions that their mother played “oporadic” music on the piano.
Since my recent surprise BD present, humble me has started pondering new ways that the GOP could rid itself of the ‘Party of Whites’ label and start increasing its voter base. How can elections (even with cheating) be so close against a Democratic party with agendas such as Child Butchery, destruction of Israel, socialism/communism, Wokeness, etc.?
What is so wrong with the GOP’s messages or agendas that they seem unable to move beyond just being ‘even’ with the Dems?! Personally, I see plenty wrong with the GOP, but the focus of my pondering is now on breaking the ‘evenness’…so to speak.
Lost cause? Probably, but take a gander at this — OUT OF HER DEPTH:
Out-of-her-depth Seattle mayor loses cool at press conference after mass shooting as city’s police chief unveils woke new term for ‘gangs’
Seattle’s police chief now refers to gangs as ‘small groups’ in the wake of a mass shooting in the city that killed three.
The GOP can’t attack a message like that?! Use is against the Woke Dems?
Anyway, this particular pondering has been on my mind for some time now – dump white J. D. “Bootlicker” Vance from 2028 presidential considerations and toss the ‘Party of Whites’ label out the door. Hispanic, black, Indian, male or female, but no white man again…at least for a couple of presidential elections.
Possible?
Keeping nuclear weapons unites the US with Israel. However, after that goal, our interests begin diverging.
— TJ
Not very much they don’t. Of all our allies, Israel is the one whose national interests intersect with America’s the most consistently. A lot of people hate that fact, but it is still true. Most of the diversions that do exist arise primarily from geographic factors.
This is why I never understood why so many GOPers hated Ukraine and supported Russia against it.
— karmi
Largely because a large swath of the Buchanite Right saw Putin (delusionally) as a potential ally against the lefty/globalist elite class the dominates most of the West. Same reason the lefties support the Islamists, they see them as fellow travelers against the Western Right.
Also, Biden came out early for helping Ukraine, and much of the Right loathes Biden and his handlers. He was also sending vast amounts of money to help Ukraine while at the same time inviting in a vast invasion-scale inflow of illegal and legal immigrants. The two became linked in the public mind of the Right.
Biden and his handlers eagerly embraced Ukraine in part because of Fauci, oddly enough. At the time of the Russian invasion, Fauci was still all over the media, and he was fast becoming a PR liability. The Dem base, though, loved and adored him, so they had trouble getting him to clam up.
Ukraine came along at just the right time to get Fauci off the screen, and they even tried to spin Biden as a ‘war president’ now and everyone should rally behind him. Which was a terrible tactical error, Ukraine being invaded is not the same as a direct attack on the USA, and Biden himself was incapable of fulfilling the role of ‘war president’ after Afghanistan. They dropped that line in a week or so because it was already backfiring.
But the world simply won’t permit the visions of the Buchanites to be made real, and Putin just isn’t who they want him to be, just as the ‘red green’ alliance will always end, wherever it wins, in the green killing the red.
Suspicion Grows About OpenAI’s Tale About Its Rogue Hacker AI
Yeah, that story smelled of foul baloney from the start, but the AI haters and others lapped it up as if true. Snippets: — Karmi
From journalist Joe Wilkins: Look beyond the alarmist headlines, however, and you’ll find a familiar pattern: a massive tech company using scare tactics to manipulate public opinion.
Uhm… OK. Is this possible? Sure. So OpenAI secretly directed its new model to attack HuggingFace and it succeeded. Then HF spent some significant time trying to stop and correct the attack and they succeeded without too much damage. Then the HF honcho reports to the world how amazing this all is:
“It’s quite mind-blowing that all of this happened autonomously!” Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue tweeted, seemingly backing the story. “The investigation is ongoing, and we’ll share more learnings from what might be the first incident of its kind!”
No, Delangue isn’t “seemingly” backing the story. He IS backing the story. In fact, he and his company are the story. So, the two companies must be in cahoots! Possibly, but I think the whole supposition is rather far fetched.
Since my recent surprise BD present, humble me has started pondering new ways that the GOP could rid itself of the ‘Party of Whites’ label and start increasing its voter base. How can elections (even with cheating) be so close against a Democratic party with agendas such as Child Butchery, destruction of Israel, socialism/communism, Wokeness, etc.?
…
What is so wrong with the GOP’s messages or agendas that they seem unable to move beyond just being ‘even’ with the Dems?! Personally, I see plenty wrong with the GOP, but the focus of my pondering is now on breaking the ‘evenness’…so to speak.
— karmi
Why? Because the social class that dominates the GOP doesn’t want to. They are (that’s gradually changing now, but it’s been true for decades) primarily motivated by corporate/business interests. The GOP upper levels see themselves as being the Party of Business, and social and security issues are mostly talking points. The Business Agenda.
This goes back decades. From FDR to Reagan, the public image of the two parties was that the GOP was the ‘party of the rich’ and the Dems ‘the party of the working man’. On its face that makes no sense, both parties then and now were dominated by wealthy men. But in fact it reflected reality in that at that time, what those phrases actually meant was that the GOP was the party of the employer, and the Dems the party of the employee. That was a very accurate perception for long time.
The 1960s broke that, the Dems began to become less and less about unionized labor and more and more about college-educated ‘limousine liberals’. The GOP soaked up some of the alienated voters, but to a large extent remained the party of business in terms of policy.
The problem for the GOP is that the Business Agenda that is dear to their hearts and bank accounts is profoundly unpopular. The corporate class wants free trade, open borders, no regulation of working conditions, ‘any willing worker’, they want low wages and high property values, and they grew up in the same social class as the Dem elites and are social liberals themselves.
(Plus the fact that an aborted baby is cheaper than a child who might need medical benefits, or a mother who might have to refuse a transfer or take time off to deal with it.)
Also, contra the illusions of the Libertarian Right, the CEO class isn’t enamored of free markets. Free trade, yes, free markets, no. Nobody hates capitalism more than successful capitalists. They want the state to backstop failure with tax money, ‘private profit and socialized loss’. It’s in their interests.
In 1994 the GOP took control of Congress for the first time in 40 years or so, on the strength of backlash against Clinton’s social and international agenda. But they proceeded to try to govern based on the Business Agenda, and Clinton regained the upper hand politically when they did. Bush II had the upper hand politically until 2006, when he started trying to implement the Business Agenda, specifically Comprehensive Amnesty. It cost the GOP control of Congress.
At one point, in response to complaints that the GOP in control of Congress at that time had done nothing for their voters, McConnell and Ryan could only come up with “we made it easier for American oil to be sold overseas!”
Yeah, that’s the ticket. That’ll satisfy the voters. 😆
The Senate held ~30 meaningless show votes to undo Obamacare. It eventually provoked Ted Cruz to an angry rant on the Senate floor because they were just putting on a meaningless show.
When 2016 gave the GOP the House, the Senate, and the White House, Trump told them to send him the repeal bill for Obamacare. PANIC! The thing is that their business donors liked Obamacare, so the GOP had no real interest in undoing it. They bickered and fought and squirmed and at one point Ryan tried to disguise an immigration amnesty as a fake repeal bill. Eventually it all came to nothing because the GOP had never figured on having to do anything about it.
In Trump’s first term, they implemented tax cuts…and as far as the Congressional GOP were concerned, they were done. Nothing else to do (except confirming some Trump judges). They did try to send Trump several Amnesty bills under various kinds of chicanery, though. Business wanted amnesty. Business still wants amnesty.
A measure of GOP stupidity at the State level: the Missouri electorate voted in a sick leave mandate. The GOP controlled State Legislature voted to undo it, because business didn’t like it. Mega-STUPID. Maybe they’ll get away with it, but it’s exactly and precisely the sort of thing that keeps the GOP stuck at ‘even’.
The GOP can’t get better than ‘even’ against the Dems because so many people who hate what the Dems are doing also don’t believe in or trust the GOP do what they want, and do trust them to do what they hate.
Anyway, this particular pondering has been on my mind for some time now – dump white J. D. “Bootlicker” Vance from 2028 presidential considerations and toss the ‘Party of Whites’ label out the door. Hispanic, black, Indian, male or female, but no white man again…at least for a couple of presidential elections.
Possible?
— karmi
Nope. It would make things a 100 times worse. You’d alienate the white voters and get nowhere with the minority vote, because the ‘party of whites’ label is a pure media creation and they will not change it. Thinking he could sway the media is part of why McCain failed.
The press constantly tries to spin elections as pure racial/gender contests, but in fact Trump has already led the GOP to significant gains in the black and hispanic vote. He didn’t do it by racial appeal, that won’t work. He did it by running on and advocating things that both the black and white and hispanic working classes believe in and want. Common interests rather than racial pandering.
Both the black and white working classes have priorities and interests in common with each other, and diametrically opposed to the Business Agenda. They both gain by limiting illegal immigration. They both are relatively conservative socially.
(When California passed a referendum against gay “marriage’ in 2008, the high black turnout for Obama also pushed that over the top because blacks tend to be socially conservative. It created such a Dem panic that they had to start spinning that ‘Mormons’ did it.)
The GOP are not rejected by minority voters because they are white. The GOP is rejected by minority voters primarily because of economic issues. The Business Agenda is political poison.
AesopFan:
I’m not sure, but I don’t think there are any clips of Adele and Fred dancing.
The GOP are not rejected by minority voters because they are white. The GOP is rejected by minority voters primarily because of economic issues.
==
Don’t believe this interpretation is at all reasonable.
Geez, HC68, most EXCELLENT input! Am 80 and didn’t start voting until GW Bush’s 2002 midterms…9/11 got out my vote. Am certainly not well informed on the GOP’s history. Have placed the blame on voters (myself included)…at least equal blame.
My short voting experience has pretty much convinced me that the GOP is better at putting more money in working people’s pockets. Retired criminal here, but I held enough legal jobs to qualify for Social Security, and my electrical work was solid under GOP presidents but got worse under the Dems. Obama looked so bad that lots of construction jobs dried up months before he even took office.
I can accept the “Party of Business” label and actually liked it when I had legal jobs.
I’ll need to reread your great comment to fully dig into it all, but I wanted to toss out a few thoughts now.
Nope. It would make things a 100 times worse. You’d alienate the white voters and get nowhere with the minority vote, because the ‘party of whites’ label is a pure media creation and they will not change it. Thinking he could sway the media is part of why McCain failed.
There’s got to be a fancy word for that kind of dire prediction – that running a black or brown candidate would alienate white voters and make everything a hundred times worse. Yeah, I won’t blame the media for the ‘Party of Whites’ label – it sticks easily no matter who throws it. But claiming that simply putting forward a non-white candidate would drive white voters away?!?!
McCain… geez, where’s my medical marijuana!? He basically ruined it for Sarah Palin. I liked her the moment I heard her speak at the convention that year. No wonder the GOP stays stuck even with the Dems…
I’ve voted for Trump three times but can barely stand him. First term was a disaster right out of the gate—the “buck” never stopped at his desk. He’s done better this time, except for siding with his buddy Putin against Ukraine. Still a horrid military leader…though I cut him slack for the solid move on Iran.
Trump did pull in some new voters and has thrown strong support behind Byron Donalds–a favorite of mine. Anyway, great comment, and I hope you’re wrong about white voters. Still, I suspect they’ll run J.D. “Bootlicker” Vance in 2028, and I’ll be voting against him. BTW, I’m an NPA (No Party Affiliation) voter in Florida.
HC68; Karmi:
There have been several black Republicans elected to Congress in majority-white districts.
Neo — yeah, and Florida has a great one in Byron Donalds. However, I’m talking Top Dog position here…President of the United States of America. 🙂 Still, as you point out — blacks are getting in ‘n “Movin’ on Up”. The Florida Gov race is a good test for him, and Trump has been a strong backer. Vance needs to be off the Presidential ticket in 2028…
HC68 quotes me at 1:55 pm. Readers should note my correction:
“Keeping nuclear weapons [out of Iran] unites the US with Israel.”
SORRY. My bad,
Karmi,
FL resident here and I will NOT be voting for Donalds in the upcoming primary. 1) He has not been endorsed by DeSantis. 2) and most important to me, he won’t debate his opponents. I’ll be voting for either Collins or Renner. The whole thing with Donalds smells like a setup by the FL GOP and that really grinds me. No Trump effect for me.
And in other news, Iran just launched a “surprise” missile attack on US forces according to CENTCOM. Time to blow them the hell up.
Adele was also famed for her colorful cursing.
TJ: “… after that goal [no Iranian nukes] our interests begin diverging [US and Israel].”
I don’t think the goals are very divergent. I suspect the world Israel wants to see is very similar to the one we want to see. However the priorities may not always be in alignment.
At this point, it looks like a feint, a bargaining chip. But this might change.
Here is a map of the inverted “V” shaped area around the Strait of Hormuz in question. One wag says “Just give it [this territory] to Oman” across the Strait! https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/4389711/posts
This might secure oil tanker’s safe passage. All the better if the US leads it, and is ready to cede it to an Arab occupation set of armies.
But claiming that simply putting forward a non-white candidate would drive white voters away?!?!
— karmi
I neither claimed nor implied anything of the sort. See Below.
HC68; Karmi:
There have been several black Republicans elected to Congress in majority-white districts.
— neo
Certainly.
Here is karmi’s statement that I was responding to:
Anyway, this particular pondering has been on my mind for some time now – dump white J. D. “Bootlicker” Vance from 2028 presidential considerations and toss the ‘Party of Whites’ label out the door. Hispanic, black, Indian, male or female, but no white man again…at least for a couple of presidential elections.
Possible?
Note the full question. Nominating a black candidate would not alienate white Republicans (not in any significant number, anyway). A black trumpian conservative would do better than a white RINO.
But deliberately nominating only minority candidates, for the sake a racial appeal, trying to prove ‘we aren’t the Party of Whites’, as the comment from karmi implied, that would alienate white voters. It would make the Tuckerite Right look prescient, and it would utterly fail to make any inroads with black or hispanic voters, because it wouldn’t address the economic and social factors actually driving the voting.
Remember, one of the reasons Barak Obama drew more than a few GOP crossover votes (albeit mostly from the squishier ranks) was the misapprehension that by voting for Obama they could demonstrate that America ‘wasn’t racist anymore’. We saw how much of an impact that made.
Yeah, I won’t blame the media for the ‘Party of Whites’ label – it sticks easily no matter who throws it.
— karmi
You should blame the media. They, together with the sell-out of the old civil rights ‘establishment’ is precisely why that perception exists. That is also why simply running black or hispanic candidates, for its own sake, makes no difference to it. No matter who the GOP runs, the Dem media and Dem-coopted ‘civil rights leadership’ will simply declare them ‘uncle Toms’ or ‘self hating’ or ‘race traitors’ or whatever label seems to work.
Any plan or approach that requires any ‘buy in’ from the Dem support groups to work has failed before it starts. Just ask John McCain’s ghost.
But appeal to common interests can work, and has worked in the past to varying degrees, and Trump has repeatedly made gains by that method. Those common interests are both social and economic. See below.
The GOP are not rejected by minority voters because they are white. The GOP is rejected by minority voters primarily because of economic issues.
— HC68
==
Don’t believe this interpretation is at all reasonable.
— Art Deco
There’s nothing inherently Democratic in the black vote. From the time of Grant to FDR, the black vote tended to go Republican. It wasn’t a civil rights driven shift, it was the Great Depression and economic issues. FDR built the New Deal coalition that would dominate American politics for the next 40 years on a foundation of economic policy. The electorate to this day still has not 100% forgiven the GOP for opposing the New Deal back then.
Many of the component factions of the New Deal coalition despised each other, but economics held them together up into the 1970s/80s. The GOP was seen as the party of the boss, the party of the employer, and the Dems the party of the working man. There was quite a bit of truth in that perception, in terms of policy.
After the 1960s, social issues and national security issues began to fracture the Dem mega-majority. The white working class reluctantly (and I emphasize reluctantly) began to switch over to the GOP as the Dems got crazier and crazier. The Dems and their tame media spun the motive as racism, and it must be admitted that there was a bit of that in play, but it was much more the ‘3 As’, ‘abortion, acid, and amnesty’, though back then that meant amnesty for draft dodgers.
The white changeover was slow and reluctant precisely, again, because they were wary of GOP economics. People used to talk about ‘fusionism’ but the factions never fused. The new Republican voters tolerated a certain amount of the Business Agenda (and agreed with a few bits of it, like tax cuts and a certain amount of deregulation), in exchange for opposition to what they perceived as Democrat lunacy.
What they wanted was for the Dems to get sane again. Jimmy Carter ran as the ‘anti-McGovern’, a conservative southern Democrat, and pulled quite a few working class whites who had backed Nixon back. He ran that way, but then he governed mcgovernite, radical Left on social issues and defense, and proved inept at the latter.
So the white working class swung back to Reagan, who held them for 2 terms by carefully moderating his opposition to the New Deal. He fired the air traffic controllers when they struck, and the public backed him because they thought the unions had overreached. But that didn’t mean they had rejected the New Deal outright, and it didn’t mean they had fully embraced the Business Agenda. Neither the Reagan Democrats nor the black working class revered Ayn Rand.
Clinton pulled them back in 1992 on the strength that the Cold War was over and people thought they could take a chance, and he seemed to be running as a ‘moderate Democrat’, a southern Dem from Arkansas, so that reluctant white working class swung back again.
NAFTA was passed by a combination of Dem and GOP votes, and the rank-and-file GOP voters hated it at the time. I can still remember hearing usually staunch Republican voters calling their NAFTA-voting GOP politicians ‘traitors’, and by that they meant ‘traitors to America’, not the Party.
But business wanted it.
In 2016, as Trump was rising to dominate the GOP primaries, we saw frantic GOP apparatchiks in the press and the party desperately struggle to discredit him, and nothing worked because their own voters were fed up. Trump made a comment that they couldn’t take away people’s social security benefits after they had worked for them. The press exulted that he had just wiped himself out in a GOP primary, only to see GOP voters flock to him, because they agreed with that.
I remember watching GOP press people and pundits trying desperately to find some way to claim that ‘free trade’ benefited working class voters, and the sole, only thing they could come up with was ‘their stuff is a little cheaper’. Emphasis on ‘little’, because most of the arbitraged gains of ‘free trade’ went to the investor class. The negative externalities fell on the working class.
As late as 2020, one of the reasons the Dem leadership anointed Biden was that there were still a very few older GOP voters longing for a ‘real Democrat’, meaning the old pro-employee, non-insane Dems, and Biden had an undeserved reputation as ‘lunch pail Joe’.
The black working class actually shared many of the same priorities all along, but they were poorer and thus economic issues bit harder. Plus, they were being assured by their own leaders that the GOP was a cracker party that wanted to reenslave them, and the news media echoed that. But over time they’ve followed the same overall path.
“Defund the police!” Very unpopular with blacks and hispanics. Unlimited immigration? Hurts them more than it does working class whites. Latinx? Comes across as an attack on the Spanish language. Popular culture that romanticizes thug life? Horrible for the black family and black economic aspirations. Gay marriage? ‘Trans men are women or vice versa?’ They think that’s just nuts, probably by higher percentages than whites.
That is where Trump was able to cut into the Dem hold. Not by pandering. Not by carefully picking the right balance of racial types in his appointments. By addressing their actual complaints and actual interests and actual priorities. The formerly dominant GOP class could not do that because those interests cut directly against the Business Agenda.
McCain… geez, where’s my medical marijuana!? He basically ruined it for Sarah Palin. I liked her the moment I heard her speak at the convention that year. No wonder the GOP stays stuck even with the Dems…
— karmi
Exactly. The press and the establishment GOP have insisted for 18 years that picking Palin wrecked McCain, which is obvious facial nonsense. Picking Palin saved McCain from a reverse-Reagan style electorate landslide. Without Palin, McCain would have turned most of the map blue on election day in 2008.
But Palin represents the same strain of rebellion that Trump would later embody, she was a direct threat to the authority of the Establishment and the Business Agenda. So, they’ve tried desperately ever since to pretend that she was the problem.
When the GOP lost Congress in the 2006 midterms, the GOP establishment immediately came together and basically announced that there were 3 options for President in 2008: McCain, Giuliani, or Romney. Pick one. All social liberals, all more or less open to the Business Agenda, all basically GOPe.
The pushback began immediately. People started wearing buttons with the words ‘Rudy McRomney’ and a slash through them. The GOP had set itself on a path to lose twice to Obama before Obama even announced his candidacy.
I remember hearing Limbaugh say something years ago that stuck with me. Paraphrasing, he said, “The GOP establishment has been trying to elect Nelson Rockefeller as President for decades, under various names and faces.”
It’s true. But the electorate has consistantly refused to go along.
In 2015, before Trump announced, I remember watching GOP pundits congratulating themselves on the strong slate of candidates they had for 2016. My own reaction was a face-palm and near-despair. That was not a strong slate, it was a whole bunch of Business Agenda candidates, vying for the privilege of losing to Hilary Clinton. But I really do think some of the GOP politicians and pundits sincerely believed it was a strong slate.
I’m not part of the media, yet over the years I’ve come to see the GOP as carrying the appearance (or at least the perception) of being the “Party of Whites”–or more precisely, the “Party of White Men.” I don’t recall mainstream journalists or news sites routinely using that exact phrase for the Republicans, though it’s possible I’ve seen it and forgotten.
What formed this impression for me wasn’t cable news or op-eds so much as spending time on Republican-leaning websites and comment sections. You can even catch traces of it in this very thread–not everywhere, and not from everyone, but often enough that the perception sticks. It feels like something that sits just beneath the surface.
My point isn’t to slap a permanent “Party of Whites” label on the GOP. I’m trying to figure out how the party can break out of the long-running near-evenness with the Democrats. When the other side is pushing things many of us find extreme (child medical transitions, hostility toward Israel, open socialism, aggressive wokeness, etc.), why do elections stay so close? That’s the real question I’m wrestling with.
One concrete data point that keeps nagging at me: the Republican Party has never nominated anyone other than a white man for president. From Frémont in 1856 straight through Trump in 2024, every single nominee has been a white male. Women (Margaret Chase Smith, Elizabeth Dole, Michele Bachmann, Carly Fiorina, Nikki Haley) and non-white candidates (Alan Keyes, Herman Cain, Ben Carson, Tim Scott, Vivek Ramaswamy, and others) have run in the primaries or had their names placed in nomination, but none ever secured the top spot.
That unbroken streak is part of why the “Party of White Men” perception is so hard to shake–and why I’m wondering whether sticking with another white male in 2028 (Vance or anyone else) simply locks the same demographic ceiling in place for another cycle.
I have difficulty expressing these ponderings at times–now is one of those times–so I’m just putting the thought out there.
Good stuff, HC68. Are you leaning toward Vance as the 2028 presidential nominee?
One concrete data point that keeps nagging at me: the Republican Party has never nominated anyone other than a white man for president. From Frémont in 1856 straight through Trump in 2024, every single nominee has been a white male.
— karmi
True. Also true of the entire history of the Democratic Party up until 2008. But the ‘GOP is the white party’ meme/trope was prevalent from ~1970 on. It was in place for decades while both parties ran white males.
It’s an artificial construct, a product of the Democratic media, the former civil rights movement (which is a branch of the Dems and a grift today) and the academic world (again, mostly a branch of the Dems). They’ll continue to push that narrative no matter what the GOP does. Nominate a white. Nominate a black woman. Nominate a black lesbian Hindu. Nominate a mixed-race black/hispanic lesbian Hindu. The narrative will remain in place in those quarters and whoever is nominated will be vilified as racist and misogynist and white supremacist, even if the Dems simultaneously run a white male. They’ve already demonstrated in actual elections that they are perfectly prepared to accuse black GOP candidates of being ‘white supremacists’, either as dupes or disloyal.
This has been a weakness of the GOP for decades, the desire to ‘win the press over’, to ‘make them understand’, to ‘placate them’. It simply cannot be done.
(We’re seeing the same tendency in Jewish liberals who ask how they can make the increasingly anti-semitic voices ‘understand’. They cannot.)
Those people who get their entire worldview from the ‘old media’ and their allies in the Academy and the ‘movements’, will continue to view the GOP as the ‘white party’, no matter who we nominate. They would simply declare that conservative policies are white supremacist no matter who implements them.
That unbroken streak is part of why the “Party of White Men” perception is so hard to shake–and why I’m wondering whether sticking with another white male in 2028 (Vance or anyone else) simply locks the same demographic ceiling in place for another cycle.
— karmi
It’s been so hard to shake because the press, the educational establishment, the cultural establishment, etc. refuse to stop pushing it. It’s as simple as that. GOP action or inaction has no effect on it. The minority voters hear it from the evening news, from their teachers and professors, from their churches (too often), from their ‘leaders’ in what was once the civil rights movement, from movies and TV, day in day out, from childhood. This narrative goes out without regard to anything the GOP does or does not do, and they will not change it.
The good news is that all those cultural power centers are rapidly declining in power. That is part of why Trump was able to get his message out to enough black and hispanic voters to matter. Not so long ago, they simply would not have heard any message that contradicted the Narrative.
Even now, look at Fauci. He has been utterly discredited and looks like an incompetent idiot (at best) from stuff that’s come out over the last few years. His diaries are damning. And dead silence about the story in the ‘mainstream’ press. Total invisibility.
Same deal with the ‘white supremacist’ narrative. If the GOP nominates a white it’s proof of white supremacism. If they nominate a black it’s proof of GOP dishonesty and white supremacism. If they nominate a woman it’s proof of ‘internalized misogyny’ in the candidate. All presented as fact, not even questioned. Until the last few years, that Narrative was omnipresent and all but unchallenged.
The Narrative still has not changed, but the power and credibility of the people pushing it has weakened enormously.
But we can’t change the Narrative, only defeat it.
When the other side is pushing things many of us find extreme (child medical transitions, hostility toward Israel, open socialism, aggressive wokeness, etc.), why do elections stay so close? That’s the real question I’m wrestling with.
— karmi
Because many of the minority voters (and other Dem voters) who loathe and hate child medical transitions, anti-Semitism, open socialism, wokeness, etc. also loathe and hate GOP economic policies. Furthermore, until Trump, the GOP has a long and documentable history of running on Dem insanity, and then ignoring that stuff in office to focus on their unpopular economic agenda.
The effective message to black and hispanic voters who hate gender insanity, child mutilations in the name of ‘trans’, pretending gay relationships are interchangeable with straight, defund the police, etc. has been, “Vote for us so we can ignore that stuff after we’re elected and implement free trade and open borders immigration that will undercut your economic standing.”
The message to those nearing retirement comes across as “Vote for us because the Dems are insane. We’ll do NOTHING about the insanity once in office, but we will try to privatize your Medicare benefits.”
The GOP has a track record, and it’s a overall it’s a crappy one. Trump is the first GOP President to make serious effort at actually doing something about the Dem insanities.
The GOP hasn’t been able to break above even, in spite of Dem madness, because they have a track record of ‘failure theatre’ and doing exactly what their voters don’t want when they win.
Given their track record over the last few decades, it’s only the fact of the Dem insanity that lets them even reach 50%, before Trump.
Are you leaning toward Vance as the 2028 presidential nominee?
— karmi
I’m not leaning toward or against anyone yet. It’s too soon for that. I’m watching Rubio, and Vance, and de Santis, and others, waiting to see.
2028 is still 2.5 years away. Right now the focus is on 2026.
@ HC68 — We’ll agree to disagree on the media being the culprit. 🙂 GOP is not going to break the evenness cycle by sticking their heads in the sand and blaming the media for everything. Heck, many GOP voters even complain about Vance’s wife being a non-white woman of Indian heritage.
“Perception is reality”
Blaming the media for everything that ails the GOP is a common modus operandi of many right-leaning sites, IMHO. Yes, the traditional “news media” as a whole constantly bashes the GOP and the right—nothing is going to change that until they go belly-up……unless more Bari Weisses start showing up as bosses.
We’ll see how U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds does in the Fl Gov race.
I’m not leaning toward or against anyone yet. It’s too soon for that. I’m watching Rubio, and Vance, and de Santis, and others, waiting to see.
2028 is still 2.5 years away. Right now the focus is on 2026.
“too soon” — really?! We’ll agree to disagree on that also. DeSantis probably ruined it for himself with the boot lifters…bummer.
Going with the ‘GUT‘ right now — looking like AOC vs J. D. “Bootlicker” Vance in 2028. The MAGA bunch made hard sells for Trump three times, and they will probably do the same for Vance this time, IMHO. I’ll vote for AOC before Vance…
Karmi:
You write: “many GOP voters even complain about Vance’s wife being a non-white woman of Indian heritage.”
We don’t know that at all. We don’t know how many, and we don’t know if they’re bots or paid trolls or people from other countries or who they are. We DO know that someone like Nick Fuentes has said it, and we also know that he is not a GOP voter. He has made that explicit.
We don’t know who most of these people are or even if they’re people, and we don’t know if they are GOP voters or even voters. They may or may not be.
Neo: Yes, JD Vance has defended his wife, stating that anyone who attacks her “can eat s—” and that judging people by ethnic heritage is “disgusting.” Yes, these criticisms came overwhelmingly from white nationalist/groyper-type online voices, not from mainstream Republican elected officials, major party figures, or the bulk of GOP voters. Yes, we don’t know how many. How about SOME GOP voters…probably a better choice anyway.
Karmi:
How about we, and you, don’t know if they are GOP voters?
But you aren’t a GOP voter anyway, being a humble NPA, so why the interest and “concern?”
Karmi:
“Some” is rather meaningless. Two? Two hundred? Two thousand? Two hundred thousand? Two million?
om – I wasn’t concerned. Neo & Vance were concerned.
So, NPA voters are of no “concern” to you?
Humble NPA voters in Florida = 1
GOP voters in Florida = 5,569,028
Dem voters in Florida = 4,040,000
Minor Party voters in Florida = 493,188
NPA voters in Florida = 3,324,324 3,324,323
Suspicion Grows About OpenAI’s Tale About Its Rogue Hacker AI
Yeah, that story smelled of foul baloney from the start, but the AI haters and others lapped it up as if true. Snippets:
Trump caught between Zelensky’s wish for peace and Netanyahu’s thirst for war
“Netanyahu’s thirst for war”?!? CRINK is an geopolitical acronym for China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, representing a loose, transactional alignment of anti-Western nations. Of course they help each other against America. This is why I never understood why so many GOPers hated Ukraine and supported Russia against it. Russia has been America’s enemy for decades, Ukraine was fighting for its life and freedom, and Trump seemed to just want his grudge against Ukraine settled.
Geez!?!?! It took her over 5 years to figure out that Russia & Iran would help each other?!
Americans Have Become Less Confident in Trump’s Decision-Making on Ukraine
Since we’ve been discussing the Odyssey, I found the following interesting. What classic films do Matt Damon and Christopher Nolan like? They are recoded selecting them from the Criterion Closet.
https://www.facebook.com/CriterionCollection
Both chose One False Move (1991). Possibly Matt saw Chris’ video, but I’d guess not.
Others that caught my eye:
Double Indemnity 😉 Lost Highway The Killers 12 Angry Men
Chris said he did not particularly enjoy or like Lost Highway, but visions and thoughts about the film stuck with him over a longer period of time like some kind of dream he might have had.
The historian Niall Ferguson recently wrote about the growth of anti-Semitism and the failure of history-teaching to impart the needed lessons. My post and discussion here:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/77376.html
At the end of May, Jeffrey Tucker laid out the breadth and depth of the Fauci conspiracy (11m). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HuaQBFEbuQ
Fauci feared that a global pandemic he and others caused would be blamed on them. Ergo, their motive to cover-up the lab leak origins, and instead blame it on animal origins.
These “shenanigans” created motives to perpetuate a cover-up on the people and the world. It began evolving. The added motives grew to continue lockdowns through summer and fall to foil any Trump re-election
Tucker gives us a strangely and alarmingly coherent explanation of this coup d’tat conspiracy on a justly elected President, and the “treatment of the people used as lab rats.”
Malevolence unleashed to preserve a secret and prevent accountability. No wonder Biden’s henchmen arranged a blanket pardon for him.
It gets worse. Rand Paul’s exposure of the Fauci diaries is getting zero coverage in the Propaganda Media.
I happened upon a C-SPAN interview (by David Rubenstein) with Christopher Buckley. He generally produces a book every two or three years, but hasn’t produced one in about four years and no book was under discussion. Just the life of writing.
==
I’ve been familiar with him as the editor of one of the Forbes supplements (the one devoted to travel writing) and also (many years past) as a producer of occasional pieces for National Review. He’s never struck me as someone who took an interest in public affairs accept as a generator of material for imaginative literature. I did about 15 years ago a survey of Reader’s Guide‘s index of his pieces in political publications (nearly all for his father’s magazine, in fact) and discovered that his contributions consisted of humor writing, travel writing, and reviews of imaginative literature.
==
In his orientations and interests, he was always unlike his father. (Something underscored by his shabby treatment of his first wife).
==
Never much cared for him, but it’s rather distressing. The man at age 73 looks wretched. His aging over the last ten years has been severe and he looks to be suffering either from an essential tremor or tardive dyskinesia. The discussion drags because the pace of his speaking is notably slower than it once was.
==
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGHjHU_Z8d8
Regarding Iran and Trump, K T McFarland was interviewed on Fox Business to explain, and Breitbart transcribes the important analysis she provides. McFarland says that Trump is employing a rolling regime change strategy.
McFarland’s background was at high levels of the State Department under George W Bush. And later, during the beginning 6 months of Trump’s first term in 2017, she was in the West Wing advising his administration from the NSC,
https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2026/07/27/mcfarland-best-solution-is-slow-rolling-regime-change-in-iran-trump-bibi-disagree-on-that/
“‘The best solution’ in Iran is ‘sort of a slow-rolling regime change, slow-rolling coup, where the IRGC loses control’ and others like the parliament gain control due to Iran’s economy struggling.’
As the economic sanctions bite, the bet is on parliament as well as the exertion of popular will. While also progressively degrading IRRC powers.
Keeping nuclear weapons unites the US with Israel. However, after that goal, our interests begin diverging.
Oh. And tracking the media’s non-coverage of a major story Fauci’s diaries is Newsbusters.
https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/jorge-bonilla/2026/07/28/omission-abc-nbc-pbs-newscasts-ignore-biden-tapes-fauci-diaries
The historian Niall Ferguson recently wrote about the growth of anti-Semitism and the failure of history-teaching to impart the needed lessons.
==
What has not been learned is an appreciation of effort and accomplishment. The grievance culture is ultimately a manifestation of the spoiled child complaining they haven’t been provided with what they demand. Israel is a marvelous piece of work. Prevalent in the Jewish population of the United States is an unfortunate attitude toward the rest of the country, but this stands alongside that population’s achievements in business and the professions.
In re the Astaire video – I wish it had included some clips of them dancing, but it was interesting to see all the old photos and get a look at their early career.
I was aware of Adele’s importance in Fred’s development, but didn’t appreciate its full scope.
IMO she was wise to step off stage at her peak. I would have loved to see a film of her and him together, though.
Training in basics of movement and performance, and the tutoring of the grinding vaudeville circuit, are things that I think new performers aren’t as well grounded in (although I could be wrong; I haven’t looked into it; though that’s certainly the case for actors, as we saw in the movie “sound problem” – they have never learned to speak clearly; are there still acting schools for film or stage?)
As for “speaking clearly” – it helps to have a clue what you are listening to. I was enchanted to learn from the AI captions that their mother played “oporadic” music on the piano.
FWIW, there is a very nice children’s picture book about the sibling stars: Footwork: The Story of Fred and Adele Astaire.
https://www.amazon.com/Footwork-Candlewick-Biographies-Story-Astaire/dp/0763662151
Since my recent surprise BD present, humble me has started pondering new ways that the GOP could rid itself of the ‘Party of Whites’ label and start increasing its voter base. How can elections (even with cheating) be so close against a Democratic party with agendas such as Child Butchery, destruction of Israel, socialism/communism, Wokeness, etc.?
What is so wrong with the GOP’s messages or agendas that they seem unable to move beyond just being ‘even’ with the Dems?! Personally, I see plenty wrong with the GOP, but the focus of my pondering is now on breaking the ‘evenness’…so to speak.
Lost cause? Probably, but take a gander at this — OUT OF HER DEPTH:
The GOP can’t attack a message like that?! Use is against the Woke Dems?
Anyway, this particular pondering has been on my mind for some time now – dump white J. D. “Bootlicker” Vance from 2028 presidential considerations and toss the ‘Party of Whites’ label out the door. Hispanic, black, Indian, male or female, but no white man again…at least for a couple of presidential elections.
Possible?
— TJ
Not very much they don’t. Of all our allies, Israel is the one whose national interests intersect with America’s the most consistently. A lot of people hate that fact, but it is still true. Most of the diversions that do exist arise primarily from geographic factors.
— karmi
Largely because a large swath of the Buchanite Right saw Putin (delusionally) as a potential ally against the lefty/globalist elite class the dominates most of the West. Same reason the lefties support the Islamists, they see them as fellow travelers against the Western Right.
Also, Biden came out early for helping Ukraine, and much of the Right loathes Biden and his handlers. He was also sending vast amounts of money to help Ukraine while at the same time inviting in a vast invasion-scale inflow of illegal and legal immigrants. The two became linked in the public mind of the Right.
Biden and his handlers eagerly embraced Ukraine in part because of Fauci, oddly enough. At the time of the Russian invasion, Fauci was still all over the media, and he was fast becoming a PR liability. The Dem base, though, loved and adored him, so they had trouble getting him to clam up.
Ukraine came along at just the right time to get Fauci off the screen, and they even tried to spin Biden as a ‘war president’ now and everyone should rally behind him. Which was a terrible tactical error, Ukraine being invaded is not the same as a direct attack on the USA, and Biden himself was incapable of fulfilling the role of ‘war president’ after Afghanistan. They dropped that line in a week or so because it was already backfiring.
But the world simply won’t permit the visions of the Buchanites to be made real, and Putin just isn’t who they want him to be, just as the ‘red green’ alliance will always end, wherever it wins, in the green killing the red.
Suspicion Grows About OpenAI’s Tale About Its Rogue Hacker AI
Yeah, that story smelled of foul baloney from the start, but the AI haters and others lapped it up as if true. Snippets: — Karmi
From journalist Joe Wilkins: Look beyond the alarmist headlines, however, and you’ll find a familiar pattern: a massive tech company using scare tactics to manipulate public opinion.
Uhm… OK. Is this possible? Sure. So OpenAI secretly directed its new model to attack HuggingFace and it succeeded. Then HF spent some significant time trying to stop and correct the attack and they succeeded without too much damage. Then the HF honcho reports to the world how amazing this all is:
“It’s quite mind-blowing that all of this happened autonomously!” Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue tweeted, seemingly backing the story. “The investigation is ongoing, and we’ll share more learnings from what might be the first incident of its kind!”
No, Delangue isn’t “seemingly” backing the story. He IS backing the story. In fact, he and his company are the story. So, the two companies must be in cahoots! Possibly, but I think the whole supposition is rather far fetched.
— karmi
Why? Because the social class that dominates the GOP doesn’t want to. They are (that’s gradually changing now, but it’s been true for decades) primarily motivated by corporate/business interests. The GOP upper levels see themselves as being the Party of Business, and social and security issues are mostly talking points. The Business Agenda.
This goes back decades. From FDR to Reagan, the public image of the two parties was that the GOP was the ‘party of the rich’ and the Dems ‘the party of the working man’. On its face that makes no sense, both parties then and now were dominated by wealthy men. But in fact it reflected reality in that at that time, what those phrases actually meant was that the GOP was the party of the employer, and the Dems the party of the employee. That was a very accurate perception for long time.
The 1960s broke that, the Dems began to become less and less about unionized labor and more and more about college-educated ‘limousine liberals’. The GOP soaked up some of the alienated voters, but to a large extent remained the party of business in terms of policy.
The problem for the GOP is that the Business Agenda that is dear to their hearts and bank accounts is profoundly unpopular. The corporate class wants free trade, open borders, no regulation of working conditions, ‘any willing worker’, they want low wages and high property values, and they grew up in the same social class as the Dem elites and are social liberals themselves.
(Plus the fact that an aborted baby is cheaper than a child who might need medical benefits, or a mother who might have to refuse a transfer or take time off to deal with it.)
Also, contra the illusions of the Libertarian Right, the CEO class isn’t enamored of free markets. Free trade, yes, free markets, no. Nobody hates capitalism more than successful capitalists. They want the state to backstop failure with tax money, ‘private profit and socialized loss’. It’s in their interests.
In 1994 the GOP took control of Congress for the first time in 40 years or so, on the strength of backlash against Clinton’s social and international agenda. But they proceeded to try to govern based on the Business Agenda, and Clinton regained the upper hand politically when they did. Bush II had the upper hand politically until 2006, when he started trying to implement the Business Agenda, specifically Comprehensive Amnesty. It cost the GOP control of Congress.
At one point, in response to complaints that the GOP in control of Congress at that time had done nothing for their voters, McConnell and Ryan could only come up with “we made it easier for American oil to be sold overseas!”
Yeah, that’s the ticket. That’ll satisfy the voters. 😆
The Senate held ~30 meaningless show votes to undo Obamacare. It eventually provoked Ted Cruz to an angry rant on the Senate floor because they were just putting on a meaningless show.
When 2016 gave the GOP the House, the Senate, and the White House, Trump told them to send him the repeal bill for Obamacare. PANIC! The thing is that their business donors liked Obamacare, so the GOP had no real interest in undoing it. They bickered and fought and squirmed and at one point Ryan tried to disguise an immigration amnesty as a fake repeal bill. Eventually it all came to nothing because the GOP had never figured on having to do anything about it.
In Trump’s first term, they implemented tax cuts…and as far as the Congressional GOP were concerned, they were done. Nothing else to do (except confirming some Trump judges). They did try to send Trump several Amnesty bills under various kinds of chicanery, though. Business wanted amnesty. Business still wants amnesty.
A measure of GOP stupidity at the State level: the Missouri electorate voted in a sick leave mandate. The GOP controlled State Legislature voted to undo it, because business didn’t like it. Mega-STUPID. Maybe they’ll get away with it, but it’s exactly and precisely the sort of thing that keeps the GOP stuck at ‘even’.
The GOP can’t get better than ‘even’ against the Dems because so many people who hate what the Dems are doing also don’t believe in or trust the GOP do what they want, and do trust them to do what they hate.
— karmi
Nope. It would make things a 100 times worse. You’d alienate the white voters and get nowhere with the minority vote, because the ‘party of whites’ label is a pure media creation and they will not change it. Thinking he could sway the media is part of why McCain failed.
The press constantly tries to spin elections as pure racial/gender contests, but in fact Trump has already led the GOP to significant gains in the black and hispanic vote. He didn’t do it by racial appeal, that won’t work. He did it by running on and advocating things that both the black and white and hispanic working classes believe in and want. Common interests rather than racial pandering.
Both the black and white working classes have priorities and interests in common with each other, and diametrically opposed to the Business Agenda. They both gain by limiting illegal immigration. They both are relatively conservative socially.
(When California passed a referendum against gay “marriage’ in 2008, the high black turnout for Obama also pushed that over the top because blacks tend to be socially conservative. It created such a Dem panic that they had to start spinning that ‘Mormons’ did it.)
The GOP are not rejected by minority voters because they are white. The GOP is rejected by minority voters primarily because of economic issues. The Business Agenda is political poison.
AesopFan:
I’m not sure, but I don’t think there are any clips of Adele and Fred dancing.
The GOP are not rejected by minority voters because they are white. The GOP is rejected by minority voters primarily because of economic issues.
==
Don’t believe this interpretation is at all reasonable.
Geez, HC68, most EXCELLENT input! Am 80 and didn’t start voting until GW Bush’s 2002 midterms…9/11 got out my vote. Am certainly not well informed on the GOP’s history. Have placed the blame on voters (myself included)…at least equal blame.
My short voting experience has pretty much convinced me that the GOP is better at putting more money in working people’s pockets. Retired criminal here, but I held enough legal jobs to qualify for Social Security, and my electrical work was solid under GOP presidents but got worse under the Dems. Obama looked so bad that lots of construction jobs dried up months before he even took office.
I can accept the “Party of Business” label and actually liked it when I had legal jobs.
I’ll need to reread your great comment to fully dig into it all, but I wanted to toss out a few thoughts now.
There’s got to be a fancy word for that kind of dire prediction – that running a black or brown candidate would alienate white voters and make everything a hundred times worse. Yeah, I won’t blame the media for the ‘Party of Whites’ label – it sticks easily no matter who throws it. But claiming that simply putting forward a non-white candidate would drive white voters away?!?!
McCain… geez, where’s my medical marijuana!? He basically ruined it for Sarah Palin. I liked her the moment I heard her speak at the convention that year. No wonder the GOP stays stuck even with the Dems…
I’ve voted for Trump three times but can barely stand him. First term was a disaster right out of the gate—the “buck” never stopped at his desk. He’s done better this time, except for siding with his buddy Putin against Ukraine. Still a horrid military leader…though I cut him slack for the solid move on Iran.
Trump did pull in some new voters and has thrown strong support behind Byron Donalds–a favorite of mine. Anyway, great comment, and I hope you’re wrong about white voters. Still, I suspect they’ll run J.D. “Bootlicker” Vance in 2028, and I’ll be voting against him. BTW, I’m an NPA (No Party Affiliation) voter in Florida.
HC68; Karmi:
There have been several black Republicans elected to Congress in majority-white districts.
Neo — yeah, and Florida has a great one in Byron Donalds. However, I’m talking Top Dog position here…President of the United States of America. 🙂 Still, as you point out — blacks are getting in ‘n “Movin’ on Up”. The Florida Gov race is a good test for him, and Trump has been a strong backer. Vance needs to be off the Presidential ticket in 2028…
HC68 quotes me at 1:55 pm. Readers should note my correction:
“Keeping nuclear weapons [out of Iran] unites the US with Israel.”
SORRY. My bad,
Karmi,
FL resident here and I will NOT be voting for Donalds in the upcoming primary. 1) He has not been endorsed by DeSantis. 2) and most important to me, he won’t debate his opponents. I’ll be voting for either Collins or Renner. The whole thing with Donalds smells like a setup by the FL GOP and that really grinds me. No Trump effect for me.
And in other news, Iran just launched a “surprise” missile attack on US forces according to CENTCOM. Time to blow them the hell up.
Adele was also famed for her colorful cursing.
TJ: “… after that goal [no Iranian nukes] our interests begin diverging [US and Israel].”
I don’t think the goals are very divergent. I suspect the world Israel wants to see is very similar to the one we want to see. However the priorities may not always be in alignment.
News on Iran war prep. Citing leaked Pakistan Intel documents, US military forces under Trump are preparing for possible deployment into Southern Iran. https://www.jfeed.com/middleeast/us-iran-invasion-capability
At this point, it looks like a feint, a bargaining chip. But this might change.
Here is a map of the inverted “V” shaped area around the Strait of Hormuz in question. One wag says “Just give it [this territory] to Oman” across the Strait! https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/4389711/posts
This might secure oil tanker’s safe passage. All the better if the US leads it, and is ready to cede it to an Arab occupation set of armies.
— karmi
I neither claimed nor implied anything of the sort. See Below.
— neo
Certainly.
Here is karmi’s statement that I was responding to:
Anyway, this particular pondering has been on my mind for some time now – dump white J. D. “Bootlicker” Vance from 2028 presidential considerations and toss the ‘Party of Whites’ label out the door. Hispanic, black, Indian, male or female, but no white man again…at least for a couple of presidential elections.
Possible?
Note the full question. Nominating a black candidate would not alienate white Republicans (not in any significant number, anyway). A black trumpian conservative would do better than a white RINO.
But deliberately nominating only minority candidates, for the sake a racial appeal, trying to prove ‘we aren’t the Party of Whites’, as the comment from karmi implied, that would alienate white voters. It would make the Tuckerite Right look prescient, and it would utterly fail to make any inroads with black or hispanic voters, because it wouldn’t address the economic and social factors actually driving the voting.
Remember, one of the reasons Barak Obama drew more than a few GOP crossover votes (albeit mostly from the squishier ranks) was the misapprehension that by voting for Obama they could demonstrate that America ‘wasn’t racist anymore’. We saw how much of an impact that made.
— karmi
You should blame the media. They, together with the sell-out of the old civil rights ‘establishment’ is precisely why that perception exists. That is also why simply running black or hispanic candidates, for its own sake, makes no difference to it. No matter who the GOP runs, the Dem media and Dem-coopted ‘civil rights leadership’ will simply declare them ‘uncle Toms’ or ‘self hating’ or ‘race traitors’ or whatever label seems to work.
Any plan or approach that requires any ‘buy in’ from the Dem support groups to work has failed before it starts. Just ask John McCain’s ghost.
But appeal to common interests can work, and has worked in the past to varying degrees, and Trump has repeatedly made gains by that method. Those common interests are both social and economic. See below.
— Art Deco
There’s nothing inherently Democratic in the black vote. From the time of Grant to FDR, the black vote tended to go Republican. It wasn’t a civil rights driven shift, it was the Great Depression and economic issues. FDR built the New Deal coalition that would dominate American politics for the next 40 years on a foundation of economic policy. The electorate to this day still has not 100% forgiven the GOP for opposing the New Deal back then.
Many of the component factions of the New Deal coalition despised each other, but economics held them together up into the 1970s/80s. The GOP was seen as the party of the boss, the party of the employer, and the Dems the party of the working man. There was quite a bit of truth in that perception, in terms of policy.
After the 1960s, social issues and national security issues began to fracture the Dem mega-majority. The white working class reluctantly (and I emphasize reluctantly) began to switch over to the GOP as the Dems got crazier and crazier. The Dems and their tame media spun the motive as racism, and it must be admitted that there was a bit of that in play, but it was much more the ‘3 As’, ‘abortion, acid, and amnesty’, though back then that meant amnesty for draft dodgers.
The white changeover was slow and reluctant precisely, again, because they were wary of GOP economics. People used to talk about ‘fusionism’ but the factions never fused. The new Republican voters tolerated a certain amount of the Business Agenda (and agreed with a few bits of it, like tax cuts and a certain amount of deregulation), in exchange for opposition to what they perceived as Democrat lunacy.
What they wanted was for the Dems to get sane again. Jimmy Carter ran as the ‘anti-McGovern’, a conservative southern Democrat, and pulled quite a few working class whites who had backed Nixon back. He ran that way, but then he governed mcgovernite, radical Left on social issues and defense, and proved inept at the latter.
So the white working class swung back to Reagan, who held them for 2 terms by carefully moderating his opposition to the New Deal. He fired the air traffic controllers when they struck, and the public backed him because they thought the unions had overreached. But that didn’t mean they had rejected the New Deal outright, and it didn’t mean they had fully embraced the Business Agenda. Neither the Reagan Democrats nor the black working class revered Ayn Rand.
Clinton pulled them back in 1992 on the strength that the Cold War was over and people thought they could take a chance, and he seemed to be running as a ‘moderate Democrat’, a southern Dem from Arkansas, so that reluctant white working class swung back again.
NAFTA was passed by a combination of Dem and GOP votes, and the rank-and-file GOP voters hated it at the time. I can still remember hearing usually staunch Republican voters calling their NAFTA-voting GOP politicians ‘traitors’, and by that they meant ‘traitors to America’, not the Party.
But business wanted it.
In 2016, as Trump was rising to dominate the GOP primaries, we saw frantic GOP apparatchiks in the press and the party desperately struggle to discredit him, and nothing worked because their own voters were fed up. Trump made a comment that they couldn’t take away people’s social security benefits after they had worked for them. The press exulted that he had just wiped himself out in a GOP primary, only to see GOP voters flock to him, because they agreed with that.
I remember watching GOP press people and pundits trying desperately to find some way to claim that ‘free trade’ benefited working class voters, and the sole, only thing they could come up with was ‘their stuff is a little cheaper’. Emphasis on ‘little’, because most of the arbitraged gains of ‘free trade’ went to the investor class. The negative externalities fell on the working class.
As late as 2020, one of the reasons the Dem leadership anointed Biden was that there were still a very few older GOP voters longing for a ‘real Democrat’, meaning the old pro-employee, non-insane Dems, and Biden had an undeserved reputation as ‘lunch pail Joe’.
The black working class actually shared many of the same priorities all along, but they were poorer and thus economic issues bit harder. Plus, they were being assured by their own leaders that the GOP was a cracker party that wanted to reenslave them, and the news media echoed that. But over time they’ve followed the same overall path.
“Defund the police!” Very unpopular with blacks and hispanics. Unlimited immigration? Hurts them more than it does working class whites. Latinx? Comes across as an attack on the Spanish language. Popular culture that romanticizes thug life? Horrible for the black family and black economic aspirations. Gay marriage? ‘Trans men are women or vice versa?’ They think that’s just nuts, probably by higher percentages than whites.
That is where Trump was able to cut into the Dem hold. Not by pandering. Not by carefully picking the right balance of racial types in his appointments. By addressing their actual complaints and actual interests and actual priorities. The formerly dominant GOP class could not do that because those interests cut directly against the Business Agenda.
— karmi
Exactly. The press and the establishment GOP have insisted for 18 years that picking Palin wrecked McCain, which is obvious facial nonsense. Picking Palin saved McCain from a reverse-Reagan style electorate landslide. Without Palin, McCain would have turned most of the map blue on election day in 2008.
But Palin represents the same strain of rebellion that Trump would later embody, she was a direct threat to the authority of the Establishment and the Business Agenda. So, they’ve tried desperately ever since to pretend that she was the problem.
When the GOP lost Congress in the 2006 midterms, the GOP establishment immediately came together and basically announced that there were 3 options for President in 2008: McCain, Giuliani, or Romney. Pick one. All social liberals, all more or less open to the Business Agenda, all basically GOPe.
The pushback began immediately. People started wearing buttons with the words ‘Rudy McRomney’ and a slash through them. The GOP had set itself on a path to lose twice to Obama before Obama even announced his candidacy.
I remember hearing Limbaugh say something years ago that stuck with me. Paraphrasing, he said, “The GOP establishment has been trying to elect Nelson Rockefeller as President for decades, under various names and faces.”
It’s true. But the electorate has consistantly refused to go along.
In 2015, before Trump announced, I remember watching GOP pundits congratulating themselves on the strong slate of candidates they had for 2016. My own reaction was a face-palm and near-despair. That was not a strong slate, it was a whole bunch of Business Agenda candidates, vying for the privilege of losing to Hilary Clinton. But I really do think some of the GOP politicians and pundits sincerely believed it was a strong slate.
I’m not part of the media, yet over the years I’ve come to see the GOP as carrying the appearance (or at least the perception) of being the “Party of Whites”–or more precisely, the “Party of White Men.” I don’t recall mainstream journalists or news sites routinely using that exact phrase for the Republicans, though it’s possible I’ve seen it and forgotten.
What formed this impression for me wasn’t cable news or op-eds so much as spending time on Republican-leaning websites and comment sections. You can even catch traces of it in this very thread–not everywhere, and not from everyone, but often enough that the perception sticks. It feels like something that sits just beneath the surface.
My point isn’t to slap a permanent “Party of Whites” label on the GOP. I’m trying to figure out how the party can break out of the long-running near-evenness with the Democrats. When the other side is pushing things many of us find extreme (child medical transitions, hostility toward Israel, open socialism, aggressive wokeness, etc.), why do elections stay so close? That’s the real question I’m wrestling with.
One concrete data point that keeps nagging at me: the Republican Party has never nominated anyone other than a white man for president. From Frémont in 1856 straight through Trump in 2024, every single nominee has been a white male. Women (Margaret Chase Smith, Elizabeth Dole, Michele Bachmann, Carly Fiorina, Nikki Haley) and non-white candidates (Alan Keyes, Herman Cain, Ben Carson, Tim Scott, Vivek Ramaswamy, and others) have run in the primaries or had their names placed in nomination, but none ever secured the top spot.
That unbroken streak is part of why the “Party of White Men” perception is so hard to shake–and why I’m wondering whether sticking with another white male in 2028 (Vance or anyone else) simply locks the same demographic ceiling in place for another cycle.
I have difficulty expressing these ponderings at times–now is one of those times–so I’m just putting the thought out there.
Good stuff, HC68. Are you leaning toward Vance as the 2028 presidential nominee?
— karmi
True. Also true of the entire history of the Democratic Party up until 2008. But the ‘GOP is the white party’ meme/trope was prevalent from ~1970 on. It was in place for decades while both parties ran white males.
It’s an artificial construct, a product of the Democratic media, the former civil rights movement (which is a branch of the Dems and a grift today) and the academic world (again, mostly a branch of the Dems). They’ll continue to push that narrative no matter what the GOP does. Nominate a white. Nominate a black woman. Nominate a black lesbian Hindu. Nominate a mixed-race black/hispanic lesbian Hindu. The narrative will remain in place in those quarters and whoever is nominated will be vilified as racist and misogynist and white supremacist, even if the Dems simultaneously run a white male. They’ve already demonstrated in actual elections that they are perfectly prepared to accuse black GOP candidates of being ‘white supremacists’, either as dupes or disloyal.
This has been a weakness of the GOP for decades, the desire to ‘win the press over’, to ‘make them understand’, to ‘placate them’. It simply cannot be done.
(We’re seeing the same tendency in Jewish liberals who ask how they can make the increasingly anti-semitic voices ‘understand’. They cannot.)
Those people who get their entire worldview from the ‘old media’ and their allies in the Academy and the ‘movements’, will continue to view the GOP as the ‘white party’, no matter who we nominate. They would simply declare that conservative policies are white supremacist no matter who implements them.
— karmi
It’s been so hard to shake because the press, the educational establishment, the cultural establishment, etc. refuse to stop pushing it. It’s as simple as that. GOP action or inaction has no effect on it. The minority voters hear it from the evening news, from their teachers and professors, from their churches (too often), from their ‘leaders’ in what was once the civil rights movement, from movies and TV, day in day out, from childhood. This narrative goes out without regard to anything the GOP does or does not do, and they will not change it.
The good news is that all those cultural power centers are rapidly declining in power. That is part of why Trump was able to get his message out to enough black and hispanic voters to matter. Not so long ago, they simply would not have heard any message that contradicted the Narrative.
Even now, look at Fauci. He has been utterly discredited and looks like an incompetent idiot (at best) from stuff that’s come out over the last few years. His diaries are damning. And dead silence about the story in the ‘mainstream’ press. Total invisibility.
Same deal with the ‘white supremacist’ narrative. If the GOP nominates a white it’s proof of white supremacism. If they nominate a black it’s proof of GOP dishonesty and white supremacism. If they nominate a woman it’s proof of ‘internalized misogyny’ in the candidate. All presented as fact, not even questioned. Until the last few years, that Narrative was omnipresent and all but unchallenged.
The Narrative still has not changed, but the power and credibility of the people pushing it has weakened enormously.
But we can’t change the Narrative, only defeat it.
— karmi
Because many of the minority voters (and other Dem voters) who loathe and hate child medical transitions, anti-Semitism, open socialism, wokeness, etc. also loathe and hate GOP economic policies. Furthermore, until Trump, the GOP has a long and documentable history of running on Dem insanity, and then ignoring that stuff in office to focus on their unpopular economic agenda.
The effective message to black and hispanic voters who hate gender insanity, child mutilations in the name of ‘trans’, pretending gay relationships are interchangeable with straight, defund the police, etc. has been, “Vote for us so we can ignore that stuff after we’re elected and implement free trade and open borders immigration that will undercut your economic standing.”
The message to those nearing retirement comes across as “Vote for us because the Dems are insane. We’ll do NOTHING about the insanity once in office, but we will try to privatize your Medicare benefits.”
The GOP has a track record, and it’s a overall it’s a crappy one. Trump is the first GOP President to make serious effort at actually doing something about the Dem insanities.
The GOP hasn’t been able to break above even, in spite of Dem madness, because they have a track record of ‘failure theatre’ and doing exactly what their voters don’t want when they win.
Given their track record over the last few decades, it’s only the fact of the Dem insanity that lets them even reach 50%, before Trump.
— karmi
I’m not leaning toward or against anyone yet. It’s too soon for that. I’m watching Rubio, and Vance, and de Santis, and others, waiting to see.
2028 is still 2.5 years away. Right now the focus is on 2026.
@ HC68 — We’ll agree to disagree on the media being the culprit. 🙂 GOP is not going to break the evenness cycle by sticking their heads in the sand and blaming the media for everything. Heck, many GOP voters even complain about Vance’s wife being a non-white woman of Indian heritage.
Blaming the media for everything that ails the GOP is a common modus operandi of many right-leaning sites, IMHO. Yes, the traditional “news media” as a whole constantly bashes the GOP and the right—nothing is going to change that until they go belly-up……unless more Bari Weisses start showing up as bosses.
We’ll see how U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds does in the Fl Gov race.
“too soon” — really?! We’ll agree to disagree on that also. DeSantis probably ruined it for himself with the boot lifters…bummer.
Going with the ‘GUT‘ right now — looking like AOC vs J. D. “Bootlicker” Vance in 2028. The MAGA bunch made hard sells for Trump three times, and they will probably do the same for Vance this time, IMHO. I’ll vote for AOC before Vance…
Karmi:
You write: “many GOP voters even complain about Vance’s wife being a non-white woman of Indian heritage.”
We don’t know that at all. We don’t know how many, and we don’t know if they’re bots or paid trolls or people from other countries or who they are. We DO know that someone like Nick Fuentes has said it, and we also know that he is not a GOP voter. He has made that explicit.
We don’t know who most of these people are or even if they’re people, and we don’t know if they are GOP voters or even voters. They may or may not be.
Neo: Yes, JD Vance has defended his wife, stating that anyone who attacks her “can eat s—” and that judging people by ethnic heritage is “disgusting.” Yes, these criticisms came overwhelmingly from white nationalist/groyper-type online voices, not from mainstream Republican elected officials, major party figures, or the bulk of GOP voters. Yes, we don’t know how many. How about SOME GOP voters…probably a better choice anyway.
Karmi:
How about we, and you, don’t know if they are GOP voters?
But you aren’t a GOP voter anyway, being a humble NPA, so why the interest and “concern?”
Karmi:
“Some” is rather meaningless. Two? Two hundred? Two thousand? Two hundred thousand? Two million?
om – I wasn’t concerned. Neo & Vance were concerned.
So, NPA voters are of no “concern” to you?
Humble NPA voters in Florida = 1
GOP voters in Florida = 5,569,028
Dem voters in Florida = 4,040,000
Minor Party voters in Florida = 493,188
NPA voters in Florida =
3,324,3243,324,323🙂
Voter Registration – By County and Party
I’m late about finishing reading this thread, but have to commend HC68 on an overflowing cornucopia of excellent comments.
Pray tell, what was/is your day job, that you have such a wealth of information and verbal acuity?
Very much struck with admiration for both!