Panicking US media labels Trumpist circus as ‘nazi’
A motley crew of demonstrators stormed the US Capitol yesterday in scenes that arguably had no precedent since August 1814 when (as part of the ‘War of 1812’) British troops commanded by Ulster-born Maj. Gen. Robert Ross captured Washington and set fire to the White House and the Capitol.
However, the War of 2021 was over pretty quickly.
US media and liberal academics have been quick to spout the usual nonsense about ‘nazis’ – yet even a cursory examination of the crowds at the Capitol shows that far from being part of a ‘nazi’ organisation (or indeed any disciplined force attempting a ‘coup’) this was an incoherent raggle taggle ‘army’ including many of the usual Israel-worshippers, religious fundamentalists, and fringe conspiracy theorists.
DC police who so blatantly failed in their basic responsibilities can count themselves lucky that this rabble wasn’t infiltrated by trained operatives from any terrorist group or hostile state.
In fact the one thing yesterday proves is that neither the Russian nor Iranian governments have any interest in promoting terrorist acts in Washington: had they wished to do so it would have been pitifully easy to use the rioters as cover to attack the pinnacle of US political life.
Observers in Tehran would have been especially entertained by the presence of would-be revolutionaries from Iranian monarchist groups loyal to the family of the ex-Shah and associated fantasists and hangers-on.
Now it’s back to basics for defenders of White civilization in the USA.
Trump was never one of us, and association with his regime has done our cause nothing but harm.
It’s been very surprising to see several ‘respectable’ leading voices of our movement in the USA defending Trump, indulging in nonsense about ‘stolen elections’, and at least semi-justifying the clownish antics of this Capitol Hill mob.
Who needs antifa when our own best and brightest are prepared to dig our political graves?
Perhaps it’s time for a new party, focused at first on securing representation at the most humble, local levels of public life; perhaps we should celebrate the imminent disintegration of the Republican Party; and perhaps we should be looking very seriously at proposals for a separate White American homeland recently advocated by Jared Taylor of American Renaissance.
One thing’s for sure. There’s absolutely no future in the ideologically vacuous and strategically clueless behaviour encouraged yesterday by Donald Trump. The soon to be ex-President’s fantasy of a dime store Götterdämmerung might entertain him in his retirement at some gold-plated penthouse. It has nothing to offer our movement.
Who Will Win the Special Election in Georgia on January 5th? – Report from H&D’s Washington DC correspondent James Knight
While a political solution to America’s racial and cultural divide may be a ship that has already sailed, politics is still very much alive. Control of the U.S. Senate will be determined on January 5, 2021 with two run-off ‘special-elections’ in the southern state of Georgia. Due to Georgia’s unusual rules, both these elections have gone to a run-off ballot after no-one won more than 50% of the vote in November.
Republicans still hold both seats with Senator David Perdue and Senator Kelly Loeffler (who was appointed in January to the US Senate post relinquished on health grounds by fellow Republican Johnny Isakson) being the incumbents. Perdue is running against Jon Ossoff, a Jewish journalist and Loeffler’s challenger is Raphael Warnock, a black pastor. Both are typically terrible left-wing Democrats, but Warnock is a follower of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the black nationalist preacher who famously counted Barack Obama as a follower for several years.
Both Loeffler and Perdue are rather standard Republicans with one big difference. Loeffler has an A+ rating from immigration control group Numbers USA while Perdue has only a C+ on the issue. Critically, both would almost certainly vote against a Biden amnesty proposal while both Democrats would vote for it. Loeffler has also made some mild criticisms against the racist Black Lives Matter movement, and got herself into trouble when photographed with former AF-BNP member Chester Doles, at a campaign event in rural Georgia a couple of weeks back, which was picked up by the main stream media – including the UK’s Guardian newspaper.
Wins for the Democrats would mean the Senate is technically tied. But the vice president votes to break any tie and that will be Kamala Harris, who will vote for amnesty and every other leftist and anti-white initiative.
Even if Republicans can hold a two-seat edge, there is a chance Biden can persuade weak Republicans like Mitt Romney, Lisa Murkowksi, Marco Rubio or even Susan Collins to cross the aisle and support amnesty.
Right now, the polls show a dead even race in both contests. But these same polls gave Trump a slight edge in November and he lost (by a mere 0.2 percent). Should Democrats win the election there will be literally nothing in the way of an extreme leftist agenda being forced on the U.S. And demographics will ensure this agenda is a permanent fact of life for Whites.
Separation will look better and better to a growing number of White Americans.
Footnote: James Knight’s article – “Trump Lost. Where Does The US Go From Here? Calls for Separation Growing After 2020 Election” will appear in the next issue – #100 of Heritage and Destiny, which will we hope be published in early January 2021.
Power Shift in Washington
Despite various possible legal and constitutional arguments, it seems obvious that Donald Trump has lost the 2020 election, but equally obvious that the result was far closer than pollsters and pundits predicted. From a racial nationalist standpoint, there are positive and negative lessons from these results.
On the positive side, White working class (in British terms) or middle class (in US terms) American voters have for the second successive presidential election defied political correctness and voted for a man who at least in terms of surface showmanship, seems to reject all of modern liberalism’s shibboleths.
As in 2016, pollsters and journalists failed to pick up the extent of White Americans’ rejection of the ‘woke’ agenda. Ohio – long seen as a marginal ‘swing state’ and where most pollsters predicted a gain for Biden this year – remained solidly pro-Trump, who (with 90% of votes counted) looks to have won the state 53%-45% compared to a 52%-44% victory against Hillary Clinton in 2016. Examples of increasingly loyal pro-Trump areas include Clark County, Ohio, voting 57% for Trump in 2016 and 61% for Trump this year. Clark County (75% White) was once a strong manufacturing area, but industry has declined catastrophically in recent decades and it is now among the most depressed areas in America.
The state of West Virginia, where White workers were once reliable supporters of Democratic presidential candidates – voting 68% for Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and even supporting losing Democratic candidates such as Hubert Humphrey in 1968, Jimmy Carter in 1980, and Michael Dukakis in 1988 – again strongly backed Trump with 68.5% in 2016 and 69% this year.
Some readers will remember the old National Alliance compound in Marlinton, West Virginia. This is part of Pocahontas County which backed Trump with 68% in 2016 and 69% this year. The new NA headquarters is even an even more pro-Trump area – Johnson County, Tennessee, voting 82% for Trump in 2016 and 83% this year!
Falls Church County, Virginia, where H&D editor Mark Cotterill once lived, is at the opposite political extreme, voting 76-13 in favour of Hillary Clinton in 2016, and 82-17 for Biden this year. The state of Virginia as a whole has shifted in the opposite direction to its West Virginia neighbour: once a ‘swing state’ that voted 62% for Ronald Reagan in 1984 and backed even losing Republican candidates George Bush (1992) and Bob Dole (1996), Virginia is now solidly behind the Democratic Party. This seems to reflect not only demographic change, with increasing numbers of black and Hispanic Virginians, but also a distaste for the modern Republican party among many younger, educated and fairly affluent White voters (especially young women) – although very wealthy Whites seem to have set aside their social liberalism and rewarded Trump for his tax cuts.
An unexpected aspect of racial politics this year involved Hispanic voters. While statisticians lump Hispanics together as a bloc, in reality they fall into two broadly opposed camps. This year Trump increased his support among strongly anti-communist Cuban immigrants (especially numerous in the crucial swing state of Florida) and some other conservative and/or Catholic Hispanics, who are alienated by the Democrats’ swing to the left, especially on social issues such as abortion. Though not himself noted for piety, Trump solidified his support among Christian conservatives by nominating Catholic legal scholar Amy Coney Barrett to the US Supreme Court a few weeks before the election.
While these Hispanics were repelled by the Democrats’ turn to the ‘left’ and more particularly by their obsession with feminism, ‘trans’ rights and general ‘wokeism’, a very different bloc of Hispanics is in the vanguard of semi-socialist politics. These voters backed leftwing challenger Bernie Sanders rather than Biden in the Democratic primaries, and were targeted by specialist sections of the Trump campaign using Facebook messaging etc. to persuade them that Biden was an establishment candidate who wasn’t worth backing.
Where Biden does seem to have improved on Clinton’s woeful campaign is among some White blue-collar workers who were persuaded to return to the Democratic fold. This was undoubtedly a factor in Biden recapturing two absolutely crucial states – Wisconsin and Michigan – by tiny margins. Equally if not more important is the long-term demographic change, with increasing numbers of Black voters tipping the balance in some states.
After he came down heavily on the side of ‘civil rights’ in 1964, President Lyndon Johnson confided to one of his closest aides that in doing so he had lost the South for the Democratic Party for a generation. Arguably this turned out to be two generations, but eventually (as Johnson implicitly predicted) increasing numbers of new black voters would compensate for the loss of White ex-Democrats.
Despite Trump slightly increasing his support among black voters (probably again concentrated among a small number of black Christian conservatives), the more important trend was the higher turnout of overwhelmingly pro-Biden blacks that helped offset support for Trump among ‘poor Whites’.
This (rather than over-hyped allegations of ‘fraud’) was the main reason why in states such as Pennsylvania and Georgia, early Trump leads were whittled down as ballots from black-dominated areas of Philadelphia and Atlanta were added to vote totals. Emblematic of this trend was Gwinnett County, Georgia. This county was 90% White as recently as 1990, but Whites have recently slipped to minority status here: appropriately enough, Gwinnett County’s ballots were among the last to be completely counted this year and seem likely to confirm Biden’s winning path to the White House – due to demographics, not fraud.
None of this should surprise H&D readers. If anything, the surprise is that after months of black rioting, tearing down statues, looting, and open insults to traditional notions of civility and order – even after all this, many White voters effectively surrendered to the radical ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement, either by voting for Biden or simply giving up on democratic politics.
One clear example was in Mississippi, where 68% of voters backed a change to the state flag, removing the image of the old Confederate battle flag. In 2001 a similar initiative was rejected, but BLM-related campaigns had renewed pressure this year. Even while backing Trump by a 59-39% margin, Mississippi voters this year gave up the battle to retain their 126-year-old flag.
Trump’s defeat is not the end of White America, but it is the end of a particular variant of populist White resistance. The very fact that many Trump supporters (taking their cue from the President himself) were so quick to take refuge in impotent rage about ‘fraud’ indicates the futility of their conspiracist, paranoid political strategy. Trump spent much of his presidency tweeting about the evils of the political establishment – despite controlling both the White House and Senate. The sad truth is that Trump didn’t have much of a concrete agenda and leaves behind little concrete legacy aside from a conservative majority on the Supreme Court – and even that becomes less tangible the closer one examines the meaning of ‘conservatism’.
The President’s devotion to Israel won him little support among Jewish voters, 77% of whom backed his opponent Joe Biden. For all the campaign rhetoric, US policy in the Middle East will change very little under Biden – US-sponsored efforts to build bridges between Israel and Arab dictatorships will continue, with the ultimate objective of a de facto Saudi-Israeli alliance against Iran. Just like Trump (but with less inflammatory tweeting) President Biden will seek a ‘tougher’ form of nuclear deal with Iran, though he might be more open than his predecessor to realistic voices in London, Paris and Berlin who favour something closer to the Obama-era deal with Tehran.
Trump was a modest improvement on the 2001-2009, neocon-dominated Bush Administration. Yet from day one his senior appointments lacked quality, integrity or ideological backbone: the Reagan era was a halcyon age by contrast. While Reagan Republicanism was a long way from the ideological spectrum of H&D‘s readership, the Reagan White House included some pretty solid paleoconservatives, and even those who weren’t on our ideological wavelength were generally a class above their Trump-era counterparts.
As in the UK, the US political scene is marked by an obvious racial consciousness among White working/middle-class voters, but lack of a serious political infrastructure giving those voters a voice. Following Trump’s defeat, the Republican party establishment will seek to reassert control and ensure selection of a more ‘moderate’ presidential candidate in 2024. Trump himself was sui generis, and there is no new Pat Buchanan or Ron Paul on the horizon. Even at humbler levels of the political system, it’s difficult to find high-quality defenders of White America. So-called ‘right-wingers’ are more likely to be crank conspiracy theorists such as newly elected Republican Congresswomen Lauren Boebert (Colorado) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (Georgia), who support the frankly weird and amorphous ‘QAnon’ theory. One factor this year (which alert readers will have deduced from statistics quoted earlier) was the almost total disappearance of third party candidates. Libertarian Party candidate Jo Jorgensen was on the ballot in every state but generally polled only 1% compared to 3.3% for Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson in 2016.
Wisconsin liberal attacked by BLM mob
Overnight yet another historic American statue came down: this time the victim was former Vice-President John Calhoun (1782-1850) whose statue had stood in downtown Charleston, South Carolina since 1896.
Meanwhile in another state capital a thousand miles north of Charleston, a liberal state senator was attacked by ‘Black Lives Matter’ rioters in Madison, Wisconsin.
State Senator Tim Carpenter, a 60-year-old LGBT etc activist, was punched and kicked by the mob when he photographed them. The rioters had earlier destroyed another two statues, including one of an anti-slavery activist, Col. Hans Christian Heg.
Senator Carpenter might now realise that these riots are not ‘political’ in the normal, civilised sense of the word. His crime (and that of Col. Heg) was simply to be White.
The paradox of course is that many of the rioters are themselves White, but they are determined to destroy their civilisation in an orgy of self-hatred.
First they came for the Confederates – and I did not speak out, because I was not a Confederate…
Virginia’s Democratic Party Governor Ralph Northam (himself from a slave owning family) has finally backed down to the BAME brigade and has instructed Richmond Council to take down the great statues of the Confederate Generals on Monument Avenue just outside of down-town Richmond.
I lived in Virginia for over seven years (1995 – 2002) and had the pleasure of visiting Monument Avenue three or four times during my time in America. It was one hell of a place. The giant statues were like nothing I had seen before.
Apart from General Robert E Lee (a direct descendant of King Robert the Bruce of Scotland), Richmond Council plan to take down the statues of President Jefferson Davis (who was of English/Welsh descent), General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson (who was of Ulster-Scots descent), and General James “Jeb” Stuart (also of Ulster-Scots descent). All were British-Americans.
Just this last week, the General Lee Statue was attacked and vandalised by hundreds of communist and anarchist demonstrators, who joined the BAME brigade, protesting the death of black career criminal George Floyd.
Floyd had been arrested by four police officers in Minneapolis, for passing forged $20 bills in local shops. He resisted arrest and was forced to the ground, where he died. Some years before in Houston, Texas, Floyd had been arrested for an armed home invasion (burglary) – he forced his way into a lady’s house and threatened her with a gun before robbing her. Due to a plea-bargain, he got away with just a five-year jail sentence.
I wonder how long it will be before the BAME brigade here in England and in the rest of the UK start demanding that our statues be taken down too, as they are not to their liking, i.e. too WASP-like. In Scotland under their neo-Marxist SNP Government this is already happening. And once Sinn Fein become the majority in Northern Ireland, they will follow suit.
And before you say that’s never going to happen, remember the BAME group are only 15% of the UK population now (and look how much sway they have). Long before they reach 50% you can say goodbye to our history, our heritage, our heroes: statues and all. Boadicea, King Billy, Oliver Cromwell, Lord Nelson, Duke of Wellington, Cecil Rhodes, Winston Churchill, Bomber Harris and many others. They will all be written out of the new PC history books.
End note: On the subject of slavery and the American Civil War, fewer than 10% of families in those Southern states that became part of the Confederacy in 1861-1865 owned slaves. And it should also be remembered that on the Northern side, many of them had owned slaves too in the recent past.
The rose-coloured myth of the Civil War is that the blue-clad Union soldiers and their brave, doomed President, Abraham Lincoln, were fighting to free the slaves. They weren’t, at least not initially. They were fighting to hold their nation – the Union – together. Lincoln was known personally to oppose slavery (which is one reason why the South seceded after his election in 1860), but his chief goal was preserving the Union. In August 1862, he famously wrote to the New York Tribune: “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.”
Lincoln was also part of a group in the Republican Party that wanted to remove former black slaves from the US altogether. From roughly late 1861 onward, he was involved in some very serious policy discussions about what the post-slavery US would look like, and one of his solutions that he offered, drawing on something that had long been a part of his political advocacy, was to colonise the black slaves abroad. Historically, the most famous example of this is Liberia, which was founded in 1816. Over the course of the next 50 or 60 years, several thousand former slaves migrated to Liberia and colonised it.
Lincoln liked this model, but wanted to expand upon it, and he was willing to look in Central and South America, and across the Caribbean. He pursued this policy for the better part of his presidency, secured funding from Congress in 1862, and carried it out in conjunction with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.
H&D Editor Mark Cotterill, who reports from semi-enriched Preston, was chairman of the Virginian-based American Friends of the BNP, from 1999 – 2001.
UPDATE: Saturday June 6th (76th anniversary of the D-Day landings).
It didn’t take long for the usual suspects to fulfil our editor’s prediction! The Churchill statue was vandalised twice this weekend, once as reported by The Sun in the link above, then again the next day (see photo below).
The video below was shot at 5 am on the morning of Sunday June 7th, showing widespread vandalism of statues in Parliament Square. St Nelson Mandela seems to have escaped unscathed, but Abraham Lincoln and an array of British statesmen from Disraeli to Palmerston were all sprayed with slogans such as BLM (Black Lives Matter) and ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards). The latter referring to the same ‘cops’ who had cravenly knelt before the mob in previous days.
H&D readers will have mixed feelings about some of the historical figures commemorated outside Parliament, but none of us should be in any doubt – this vandalism isn’t a commentary on the historical record of Abraham Lincoln or Disraeli. In fact we can safely bet that fewer than 1% of the black protesters had the slightest idea who Lord Beaconsfield might be.
Their impulse was to demonstrate control of the streets and contempt for white civilisation. Our political leaders – and following years of brainwashing, also our police – have allowed them free rein.
Loki on Health
reproduced with acknowledgments to The Scorpion, where this prescient article appeared in 2006
One advantage of submitting one’s copy to the Scorpion at (or beyond!) the ragged edge of the Editor’s forbearance with deadlines is that it does enable a certain topicality. So that I can open my remarks on the threat to the health of humanity posed by our present socio-economic system with the Dead Swan of Fife.
This is not the title of a sombre tone poem by some Scottish Sibelius, nor a dolorous ballad from the repertoire of Anne Lorne Gillies or Andy Stewart, but a deceased, and indeed somewhat decomposed, specimen of Cygnus cygnus found on a beach in the former Scots Kingdom of Fife a few days ago as I write. Although actually a whooper, it ended up as a very mute swan nevertheless bearing tidings of doom and despondency to be trumpeted throughout the media even unto the very gates of DEFRA (the British bureaucrats responsible for those relicts of our countryside not yet built over by the myrmidons of the sinisterly-named Office of the Deputy Prime Minister).
The Dead Swan owed its unhappy state to an avian influenza virus, H5N1, which, having despatched a few dozen hapless Vietnamese and Turks who had evidently become overt-intimately attached to its principal host, wildfowl and poultry, had been borne on migrating wings ever closer to our sceptred isle. Amid mounting media hype, usually of the form – page 1: NO NEED TO PANIC AS DEADLY BIRD FLU GETS NEARER (see pages 2-9 for further sundry scare stories and panicky reportage of the issue).
This is of course the latest of a steady series of similar pandemic scares in recent years, from SARS to AIDS. Your author still has a London Sunday Times magazine issued in 1986 purporting to contain reportage from the AIDS-ravaged Britain of the mid-1990’s: millions dead, not a family in the land untouched etc etc. Sadly for such Government-sponsored prognostications, AIDS stubbornly refused to behave in the predicted Politically-Correct equal opportunity manner. Retreating into a bigoted epidemiology characterised by racism, sexism and homophobia. Disproportionately afflicting Africans, male homosexuals and women, even sinking to prey on disadvantaged drug-injectors. Shocking! Still, what can one expect of a mere virus…?
All, thus far, have proved specious. After the headlines and the hype departed, humanity carried on much as usual. So, nothing to worry about then?
Sadly, not quite. Indeed, not at all. Regardless of how often or how speciously the media little boy cries “wolf!” there really is a big, dangerous beast out there. One we are pretty certain, sooner or later, to unleash on ourselves with apocalyptic consequences retroactively justifying every lurid headline and purple passage. As with almost every pestilence and plague throughout history, it will be in a sense self-inflicted, the price of the way we live. But not, this time, the unavoidable price, if we are prepared to change the way we live just a little. If we don’t, we will collectively deserve all we shall, sooner or later, get.
First, it’s time to get to know Pestilence, the fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse. His colleague Death is several hundred million years old, introduced to our ancestors when they ended the arithmetically confusing practice of multiplying by division (binary cell-splitting or metazoan vegetative budding) and subcontracted reproducing to a minority of germ cells, leaving the rest to perish in an ageing body. Famine is probably an even more venerable fellow, manifesting himself to the first primitive mote of life to run out of primordial soup. War in the sense of battles between rather than within social groups of the same species introduced himself to our apish ancestors some millions of years ago. Ants and termites made his acquaintance much earlier. But, although he has been about since the first phage viruses began to afflict bacteria possibly billions of years ago, and pressed his unwelcome attentions doubtless upon our ancestors for much of the time since, Pestilence pretty much left our own personal ancestors alone for the past few million years, until relatively very recently.
The reason is that our ancestors, from perhaps 2 million to around ten thousand years ago, followed a lifestyle Pestilence found decidedly unconducive to his activities. We were not herd animals, on and amongst whom pestilential pathogens could themselves graze, assured of finding another host when they used up the current one, either by rendering it deceased or immune. Our hominid, and Palaeolithic human, ancestors were thinly spread across the land. Living in bands of at most 200 individuals, each defending a tribal hunting and gathering territory and meeting in larger numbers only infrequently. A situation not conducive to plagues. If disease did break out in one band, it might well infect all its members quite quickly. But such an infection would have run its course, killing or rendering immune and pathogen-free those infected, before they were likely to have met anyone else to infect. In fact, extreme isolation is not necessary – if conditions were such that each person whilst infectious on average infected less than one other, any disease would, sooner or later, die out even if it managed to spread amongst more than one band.
As was doubtless the sad (if one can spend sympathy on bacteria and viruses) fate of whatever disease organisms managed from time to time to jump the triple barrier that guards one species from the diseases of another. A barrier comprised firstly of the need to physically get from one host of one species to one of another. Not easy in the millions of years when humans generally only got close to other animals immediately before and during killing, cooking and eating them (which incidentally is why you won’t get bird flu from eating cooked chicken!). Secondly the disease has to actually survive and reproduce in the new host, without being simply swatted by the immune system that stops us being eaten, for example, by our own gut bacteria and the countless others that land on and in us constantly. This is especially difficult for viruses – bacteria basically just divide and multiply given a suitable food source, and we are quite suitable to many. But viruses, thousands of times smaller than bacteria, have to hijack a host cell, subverting it into making copies of the virus, before they can breed. Subversion which is highly selective in terms of whose cells can hear, and whose are deaf, to its genetic siren song. So the new disease has actually to succeed in making us ill. Thirdly – and this is the Third Barrier the H5N1 viral Bane of the Dead Swan of Fife has yet to cross – it has to be able to spread from one human to another before the first human is dead or all the germs invading him and her have been slain by the body’s very effective defences. Having got that far, almost all diseases to afflict our pre-agricultural ancestors simply died out after a brief local epidemic when they ran out of new hosts having the dual desiderata of being both still alive and not already immune.
To survive as a disease of human or humanlike hunter-gatherers, a pathogen had to gang exceeding warily. Being quite infectious, but not virulent, nor provoking a strong immune response. Subtly lurking in its hosts for decades, and killing, even debilitating most of them slowly or not at all.
The result is that, as genetic evidence has revealed, only one major affliction of historic humanity ever managed to inflict itself on us lastingly before we started writing our first histories. Tuberculosis. Human TB, alone of all ills to which mankind is heir, is most closely related to its counterpart in our nearest nonhuman relatives, chimpanzees. And its genetic clock shows human and chimp TB diverged when humans and chimps themselves did. It was a disease of our common ancestors, several million years ago. Its practice of lurking, latent, in infected victims for years, even decades, before becoming active and infectious when their immune systems weakens for any reason means it can become endemic even amongst hunter-gatherers. The same genetic clock, the accumulation of random mutations in non-critical genetic material ticking away in lineages of life after they have divided, that shows TB is the one major indigenous human disease shows that pretty much every other human disease is little if at all older than recorded human history. Many are much younger.
The reason is that both epidemic disease and recording history sprang from the same source. The “Neolithic Revolution”, the adoption of agriculture, the replacement of hunter/gatherers over wider and wider areas by farmers, leading in turn to towns, cities, civilizations, literacy and recording history. . Pestilence likes farmers.
There are a lot more of them to prey on, for a start. Even Neolithic-level farming can support tens of times, up to a hundred times, more people per square mile/kilometre than hunting and gathering. People living cheek-by-jowl in villages, and soon towns and cities, in herds hundreds and even thousands strong. Amongst whom even the most virulent plague can spread quickly enough to be likely to find a fresh host before the current one has died or defeated it. Whilst an endless supply of interesting new diseases is assured by people living in close association and proximity, over long periods, with other species whose herding or flocking behaviour long enabled endemic diseases to evolve for them. Early farmers shared their homes with pigs and cattle (often housed at the other end of their houses or in a ground-floor byre under the living floor) with ducks and chickens underfoot (much as in those areas of SE Asia in the news lately for deaths from SARS and avian flu, by no coincidence whatsoever).
The result was that disease after disease crossed the species barrier from domestic livestock to man. Smallpox was originally the cowpox of cattle. The same species’ rinderpest mutated into human measles. Jumping the species barrier a second time to become canine distemper. Pigs contributed whooping cough – again passed on in turn to poor old Fido, who has got the short end of the stick medically speaking from being Man’s Best Friend. Falciparum malaria was originally a disease of birds. The human form evolved from that found in ducks and chickens. Different strains of influenza have repeatedly crossed the species barrier to man from their original hosts in pigs and ducks. Southern China and Vietnam, where both pigs and ducks are kept in intimate proximity with impoverished peasants in unhygienic huts, has for this reason repeatedly contributed flu pandemics to the sum of human happiness. To help them make this contribution to mankind, said peasants have cultivated a taste for delicacies made from uncooked duck blood and similar suitably infectious tit-bits.
Agriculture, and the urbanisation it enabled, also allowed species we didn’t intend to share our space with to make themselves at home amongst us anyway and share their exciting diseases. Bubonic plague, for example, was in origin a disease of rats.
Throughout the last few thousand years, disease after disease has crossed the species barrier and sparked pandemic after pandemic. In each case, the story is the same. Animal diseases were repeatedly exposed to potential human hosts living in intimate and insanitary conditions with their original hosts. Given the very short generation times of germs – some bacteria go through one generation every nine minutes – they evolve rapidly. Mutant strains arise all the time. In situations of frequent opportunities to infect humans, any mutant able to take advantage would prosper. At first, again and again, they would find themselves trapped in a human host, able to multiply and exploit him or her, but with no way of spreading out of the body they were in should it die on them or become able to kill them off. The only escape was a lucky mutation that could escape into another human. With populations in each infected hosts in the high millions and generation times in minutes, such mutations were generally not long in coming. And another new plague was unleashed on humanity…
With, in general, initially devastating effects on populations with little or no natural immunity or resistance. Mortality rates frequently of 25-75% in the first epidemic. Effects mitigated over time in the interests of the disease rather than humanity. Because the disease organism’s best long-term interests lie in farming rather than exterminating its food supply – us! Killing the host before he has time to infect anyone else is clearly a bad career move, which has spared us so far from the likes of the Ebola virus which do this. But even slaughtering the human host herd to the extent that the population drops below the minimum necessary to maintain the disease as endemic amongst it is also inefficient. Although it’s also inefficient to fail to harvest the maximum sustainable yield of germs from the bipedal food supply. On the other side of the evolutionary battle, a virulent disease is actually breeding, and socially selecting, its hosts for resistance to it – it is only the survivors of its attacks, or those who avoided infection, who survive to carry on their kind and/or their healthier way of life.
The result is that, over time, evolution causes a gradual reduction in the virulence of each disease. And a progress away from devastating but intermittent plagues thereof to a permanent low-level endemic presence. Rinderpest, for example, is widely thought to have crossed the species barrier to become human measles in the 2nd Century AD, causing the devastating plague that caused over 25% mortality in the Roman Empire in the late 160’s AD, in the process ending the relatively idyllic Antonine apogee of Rome. After which it became endemic, with new mutations able to overcome immunity to earlier variants breaking out in a series of plagues of steadily decreasing virulence until, within a few centuries, it became what it was until the recent MMR vaccine came on the scene – a harmless (with the odd tragic exception) disease contracted by virtually every child in the host population, who thereafter became immune, and surviving at a stable level on that basis.
Such human-adapted diseases can still wreak havoc on populations that have co-evolved with them. When Europeans reached the Americas and then the Pacific Islands, they inflicted a string of new diseases on the natives. Some, like smallpox, were still pretty dangerous even to Europeans, with mortality rates approaching 50%. Among the urbanised Neolithic populations of Mesoamerica those rates hit 95%. The 5% survivors of course passed their higher (though not total) degree of resistance to their descendants. But their society had been destroyed, easy meat for the Conquistadores. Even diseases fairly harmless to Europeans, like measles, could cause significant mortality in populations that had never been exposed to them. Lower mortality, demonstrating that the relative harmlessness of the disease in long-exposed populations was due not only to the hosts evolving resistance but to the pathogen evolving to be less lethal. An example of coevolution in action fascinating unless you happen to be a 19th Century Hawaiian!
So the Dead Swan of Fife is not mere media hype. The fear that a new disease – or in this case a new variant of an old disease – will cross the species barrier from its non-human host and become an initially very deadly disease of people is well-founded. It is, as we have seen, the way we got pretty much every other disease to which humanity is now heir. From smallpox – first recorded in scabs on an Egyptian mummy from the 17th Century BC – to polio – the first epidemic of which was as recent as 1840, although it’s not yet clear which animal species we got that one from – and including wave after wave of New Improved Flus. Sooner or later – and more likely sooner than later – it will certainly happen again.
The trouble is that next time, or at least one of the times in the next decade or two, this happens it will be a disaster on an unprecedented scale. Because of the way we live now.
Disastrous disease epidemics, as we have seen, are already a result of changed human socioeconomics. Before we invented agriculture, they just didn’t happen. Now we have invented globalisation, they are about to get worse. A lot worse.
Why? The simple answer is that there are more people than ever before, they move around more and faster than ever before, and the short-sighted selfish greed that is the ruling ethos of globalisation has made it much more difficult in a number of ways for us to defend ourselves against new diseases (and indeed made them more likely to arise).
The unprecedented swarming mass of humanity, which has more doubled in number in the last 50 years to over 6,000 million, provides a feast for new pathogens as never before. Every year there are 74 million more juicy humans to prey on, an entire large European nation full – although the additional arrivals are not Europeans, of course. This seething biomass bred by Western medical and agricultural technology the prevailing ideology of the West caused to be sold, and sometimes given, to the rest of the World without thought of the consequences, beyond short term profit.
Now they seethe like maggots, eating up the rest of the living world. Living in swarming squalor in their sewer-free shanty towns and favelas, sitting ducks for the next major pandemic and an ideal breeding ground for such a new human pathogen. The epidemiological antithesis of their ancestral scattered bands of Palaeolithic hunters.
Their sheer numbers also mean people are pushing ever deeper into formerly thinly peopled wildernesses, some of which, such as African rainforests, are rich reservoirs of potential pathogens, currently preying on species such as chimps genetically very similar (98%) to us, making the species barrier the germs have to jump temptingly low. To help the germs even more, the African rainforests are now being raided on an ever growing scale for “bushmeat” to be sold and eaten in the vast squatter camps around the continent’s cities. Chimp meat is, apparently, a particular – if 98% cannibalistic! – delicacy, as is that of various monkey species. From one of whom has already come AIDS. So as to enhance our experience of potential disease diversity here in Britain, recent Court cases reveal that Africans have been smuggling chimp and other bushmeat into Britain, where it is apparently a prized delicacy at a number of African restaurants in London.
However, were any such diners to go down with some exotic germ here, they could be assured of swift and professional medical care. Not so in the teeming slums back home where most such prime cuts are more usually consumed. There any alien pathogens will be given every chance to try again and again to cross the species barrier to infect humanity in a medicine- and hygiene-free germ-friendly environment. Swarming with potential prey, their immune systems weakened by poor nutrition and in many cases in Africa AIDS. Welcoming any initially diffident bacterium or virus anxious to seek asylum from a rainforest animal host being hunted to extinction as its habitat is destroyed in the welcoming and abundant pastures provided by Homo sapiens – overwhelmingly Africa’s commonest large mammal. Though it would be churlish to pass over the peasantry of East and South-East Asia, living cheek-by-jowl with their pigs and ducks, in their efforts to help Mr Pestilence mount his horse for another good gallop through humanity.
In fact, he has got his foot in the stirrup a few times already of late. Lassa, Ebola and Marburg viruses have all managed to evolve strains capable of infecting humans and spreading from one human to another. However, so far every outbreak has aborted itself because the viruses turn their human hosts into a bag of goo too quickly to allow effective transmission to a wider public. Any mutation of these viruses that makes them just slightly less deadly and they will be in business. They don’t have to be any less deadly – and so far few have survived infection with Ebola or Marburg. They just have to be deadly a little more slowly, to take a few hours more to kill. And once these delightful creatures do manage mutate to epidemiological effectiveness (or maybe it will be something else not yet heard of, but we can count on ex Africa semper aliquod something rather nasty in the coming years) our delightful global Free Market economy will be there to waft Pestilence wherever he wants to go.
For not only is the vast human population swarming through the last wild refuges of exotic viruses and bacteria unprecedented. So is the speed and volume of human movement around the world. Fleets of jumbo jets roaring hither and yon in the service of the free movement of labour in the global economy. So that a germ that was caught in a village in Gabon or a shanty town around Lagos or a street in Shanghai in the morning can be coughed out into a crowded London Tube, Paris metro or New York subway carriage the same evening.
When the last big killer hit Europe, the Black Death in 1347, it took some years, and many thousands of germ generations, to spread West from its origin in China, giving the germ and its new host some chance to adapt to each other. Even then, one European in three perished. Now a germ can be in the heart of Europe and North America only a few tens of cell divisions, or in the case of a virus copyings by host cells of its genetic code from its first deadly incursion into our species.
No-one is going to stop the carrier if the next Black Death from walking through Passport Control at Heathrow if his papers are in order even if he is looking a little peaky. Any suggestion of thorough medical checks or even quarantine periods on people entering the West from Third World plague danger zones would be howled down.
Ostensibly, but doubtless effectively, with the parrot squawk of “racism” – though such controls would, to work, have to be applied with the same indifference to race, nationality and ethnic origin that most (though as AIDS shows not all) plagues themselves show. But actually because they would interfere with the vast profits to be made by the multinational combines who own the West from shipping people quickly and freely around the world. Third World labourers to the West to be exploited in dirty, dangerous and low-paid jobs that no Western worker would do – unless they were made cleaner, safer and better-paid, and where’s the profit in that? And Western managers to run “offshoring” operations in the Third World, milking the low-paid labour at source. But if they carry on, one day they will get something very different from profit from the Third World.
The BBC recently released on DVD its chilling 1975 series Survivors, showing exactly the sort of pandemic plague this article is talking about in action. Then it was portrayed as an escaped Chinese germ warfare agent. But very likely Nature can still show human folly a trick or two here. But the opening sequence, showing the Death spreading around the World in days in a mix of footage of jumbo jets overhead and passport stamps at airports, is even more apposite today, when air travel is vastly greater than it was thirty years ago. Nor is the sequel depicted, of the swift collapse of government and civilization as all but one in ten thousand perished in weeks, dated in the least either. That mortality rate would be unprecedented in the history of humanity. But so is our current social situation, in ways that make such a killer plague far likelier than it was in the past.
In fact, before the present day, Survivors’ plague, The Death, was, ironically, too deadly to spread around a world in which travellers were slower, better controlled, and fewer in number. More than a few decades ago, and Western Governments would have the time and the will to close their borders effectively as the Death rolled closer, to slam the gates in the face of onrushing Pestilence. With peoples who, as the patient endurance of the privations of the last World War by the ordinary people on both sides showed, were capable of reserves of discipline, dedication to the common cause and courage in crisis one suspects would be sought in vain amongst the consumerist hordes of their descendents, brainwashed into the selfish short-sighted greed that is the underlying ethic of 21st Century Western “civilization”.
Indeed, a few decades ago, not only would the next great plague of mankind be less likely to get into Western nations, there is a much greater chance it could have been beaten back even if it had done so. For the ingenuity and technological brilliance that is one of the better aspects of our civilization had, by the early 1940’s, come up with antibiotic “magic bullets”, stunningly effective against bacteria if sadly not viruses. But being able to beat bacteria alone secures us against the Black Death, and leprosy, and even the ancient human killer tuberculosis. Combined with widespread vaccination, which does work against viruses, this lead the US Surgeon-General in 1962 to proclaim that humanity had won its war against Pestilence.
Sadly, he reckoned without Pestilence’s good pal, Greed. And a socioeconomic system built on the mobilization of greed, and Greed’s ally Selfishness. The antibiotics, as everyone knew from the start, would eventually lose their effectiveness if they were used carelessly and promiscuously. So long as they were only deployed to save lives actually under threat and in controlled circumstances where the patient could be compelled to take the full course so there were no bacterial survivors of the attack, they would keep their effectiveness. Let them be used indiscriminately in doses not high enough or continued long enough to stamp out all the attacking germs, and some more antibiotic resistant germs would survive to pass on their resistance. Evolution by natural selection works if the best adapted organisms to a new environmental challenge – even if not yet fully adapted – get a chance to survive and breed. And, each generation, even better adaptation to the challenge was rewarded with better breeding success. With generation times in minutes rather than years, microbes can evolve fast and far – if they are given the chance.
Capitalist greed gave them that chance. The antibiotics were soon the preserve of giant multinational pharmaceutical companies. Who saw there was no profit in hoarding them and using them sparingly so as to preserve their effectiveness. The more widely they were used, the more they sold. Helped by the fact that it was discovered that putting antibiotics into animal feed in the burgeoning factory farms enhanced yields of eggs, milk and meat. To the point that today 70% of all antibiotics made are not used to treat disease but are used in agricultural food production – fed to battery hens and pigs and the like. Much of the rest is wasted in, for example, bactericidal washing-up liquid and tissues. This was combined with the deliberate fostering of selfishness in the interests of profit, under the guise of “human rights” serving “freedom”. So that compelling tubercular drug addicts and Haitian illegal immigrants in New York to complete their courses of antibiotics was deemed an “infringement of their human rights”.
The upshot was that bacteria were allowed to accustom themselves to antibiotics, constantly and widely exposed to dosages enough to favour resistant strains but not enough to kill them before their resistance had evolved to be complete. Thus Capitalism created MRSA – a strain of the ubiquitous bacterium of boils and zits, and wound infection and septicaemia, Staphylococcus aureus immune not just to methicillin but, in time, to every known antibiotic. Whilst tubercular trash of society exercising their “human right” to stop bothering to take their medication any more once it had cured their symptoms but before it had killed off the last most antibiotic resistant holdouts of TB germs in their bodies has bred a TB which is now almost as resistant to treatment as it was a century ago.
Compulsory universal vaccination exterminated viral scourges such as smallpox altogether by the late 1970’s (apart from inside sinister secret US and Soviet Government labs). But again the pervading social spirit of selfishness promoted to create profitable consumer populations insidiously undermined the eradication of other viral plagues.
To work, vaccination has to cover at least 95% of the host population, so the virus cannot find enough vulnerable hosts to sustain itself in the population. But it is not itself without a cost. Sadly, a very small proportion of those immunised are seriously harmed or even killed by the vaccine. Fewer than the disease used to maim and kill. But in today’s self-centred society the “rights” of the individual prevail against the good of the people as a whole. So, for example, a scare – later found to be unfounded anyway – alleging a link with autism caused British parents to opt their children out of the MMR vaccine. Which they were allowed, selfishly, to do. The result is that measles was not eradicated but broke out anew, and recently the first British child for decades died of the disease, whilst others were blinded or brain damaged because social selfishness backed by the courts allowed the eradication campaign to fail. In a different society – or our own a couple of generations ago – parents would have ensured their children’s vaccination out of social duty. Those few children who did die from the vaccine would be seen in the same light as soldiers who perished in battle or firemen who died on duty, as having given their lives nobly for the greater good of the whole, by their sacrifice saving the lives of the far more children who would have perished had the populace not been protected by vaccination.
One might think that, with antibiotics growing less and less effective and vaccination less and less universal, and with a general awareness, as the Dead Swan showed, of the danger of a new pandemic plague, those responsible for finding new drugs would be concentrating their efforts on better antibiotics to fight bacteria and cheaper antiviral drugs to fight viruses. But the big profits for the pharmaceutical companies to whom such research has largely, in the privatised market-run world of today, been abandoned do not lie in pills taken briefly to defeat a deadly germ. They lie in those taken lifelong to stave off a lesser chronic ill – a gyppy stomach or a creaky joint. Or mood-altering drugs to help people cope with their crazy world. Or perhaps really expensive and profitable pills to save a few from cancer rather than cheap and unprofitable ones to save many from germs. So antibiotic research languishes and resistant strains rampage through homes and hospitals. Necrotising fasciitis anyone?
So we are right to fear the message the Swan of Fife died to bring us. Modern, cosmopolitan, global market society is making the worst pandemic disaster in human history much more likely, and making it much harder to resist it when it comes. The global market is playing a game of Russian roulette with Pestilence. He pulls the trigger on the revolver’s chamber loaded with AIDS. Click! Spin the magazine. Pull the chamber loaded with SARS. Click! Ebola virus. Click! H5N1 flu. Who knows? The hammer is still falling on the chamber. But sooner or later- BANG!
The last great pandemic, that caused by a new flu train in 1918, killed more people in four months than perished in the four years of the First World War. 80% of the United States soldiers who did not come back from serving in World War One died of this flu after the Armistice rather than in battle before it. The next, spreading much faster amongst a much more closely connected world with lots more people in it, will doubtless kill many more people. Perhaps most people. Though almost certainly not all people. But quite possibly civilized society, which will collapse if enough of its productive people perish. We do not know how many individuals comprising a society need to die to bring down civilization with them. 50%? 75%? 90%? We may be about to find out…
Yet the predicament humanity has got itself into in the first decades of the 21st Century is so grim that such a pandemic is not the worst thing that could – and probably will – happen to us. Our teeming population eating the Earth like locusts has started a race to get us by all the Four Horsemen. Pestilence, as we have seen, is currently a few lengths in the lead. But, as we turn farmland into desert ever faster each year, partly from exhaustion of the soil in the Third World but increasingly in coming decades due to climate change brought on by our greed and filth, Famine is coming up strongly on the stand side. As rising sea levels force entire nations such as the Bangladeshis to pour inland seeking new land for their hundred millions and drought in a warming world displaces billions in Volkerwanderungen to dwarf those which flooded over and drowned the Roman West , War is beginning to spur on his steed strongly. Add the wider spectre of top tier biosphere collapse brought on by the mass extinction of other species at the hands of the spreading plague of excess humanity on a scale already surpassing that when the dinosaurs departed, and Death, currently hanging back and saving his mount’s wind in the certainty that he will get us all in the end individually anyway, must be the bookies’ favourite to sweep ahead in the final furlong and claim our entire species as his prize.
Unless Pestilence rides a clever race and claims enough of us now to deny his fellow Horsemen their prey later. We are in such a plight by now, caused at root by far too many people, that a pandemic that killed enough people now might save us from worse to come.
Not too many people, everywhere, though to collapse that Western technological civilization which, once it has sloughed off its Capitalist carapace, still offers the last best hope for the long term future of our species. Indeed, resolute, determined and disciplined action in the face of pandemic might save one or a few Western nations more or less intact, whilst the rest of humanity perished. The survival of that part of human civilization which has stabilized its population already, freed from the certainty of being swept away in a tide of the desperate rest of humanity as it dragged us all down to disaster, might well be the last best hope of mankind.
The tragedy of our current plight is that, for humanity as a species to survive the next thousand years, most humans must die as soon as possible in the next hundred. If he can do that for us, without reducing the survivors to savagery, perhaps Pestilence is our friend after all, and the Dead Swan’s message is one of hope in the hour of our coming desperation.
Gangster president declares war on Iran
Gangster president Donald Trump has this morning effectively declared war on Iran by ordering the murder of Maj. Gen. Qassem Suleimani, the most significant state-sponsored assassination since Czech SOE agents killed Reinhard Heydrich in 1942 – and the most significant such assassination ever to take place outside wartime.
It is immaterial whether Trump’s action was dictated by his slavish devotion to the State of Israel, or was partly inspired by the need to distract attention from his own impeachment for criminal misdeeds.
During his election campaign four years ago, Trump gave American voters the impression that he would end the era of US entanglement in foreign conflicts. Instead he has today embroiled the US in what will be a far more serious conflict than the Iraq and Afghan wars combined.
The US now stands alone, without its NATO allies, as even the British Foreign Office rushes to distance itself from the White House Godfather. The only cheers have come from Trump’s fellow crook Benjamin Netanyahu and the neocon cabal whose influence Trump once promised to end, but who now enjoy more control over US foreign policy than under Reagan, Clinton, or Bush.
Secret tapes show politicians once dared to speak about race
In July this year the US National Archives released a previously secret tape recording of then President Richard Nixon and future President Ronald Reagan speaking frankly about racial differences.
Today two American scholars writing in The Atlantic reveal that these forbidden views were not held only Reagan and Nixon, a man who of course has long been demonised by the political establishment, but by an ultra-respectable academic.
The President was conversing in October 1971 with Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Harvard professor who had previously been an adviser to Nixon but was more closely associated with the Democratic Party. Indeed despite his bipartisanship, Moynihan was for decades an icon of America’s liberal intelligentsia.
Yet on this White House tape and in an earlier memorandum, Prof. Moynihan explicitly recognised racial realities. Commenting on an article on race and IQ by Richard Herrnstein published earlier that year, Moynihan wrote: “Herrnstein is, of course, very much worth reading. The findings of intelligence testing, which he summarizes, have profound implications for social policy. …Psychologists now think they know something of the ranking of the major races. Asians first; Caucasians second; Africans third.”
Moynihan agreed with the President that in implementing federal programmes to promote black education, he had to bear in mind their fundamental weaknesses – that because of their IQ blacks would basically be at a disadvantage “when you get to some of the more, shall we say, some of the more profound, rigid disciplines”.
His memo to Nixon concluded with pragmatic advice that no doubt influences even those few politicians today honest enough to address racial realities: “Finally, may I plead that you say nothing about this subject, nor let anyone around you do so. There is no possibility of your concern being depicted for what it is, a desire to respond to knowledge in a responsible and prudent manner.”
Moynihan died in 2003, but he would not be surprised that 21st century journalists and scholars are using these newly revealed tapes not to challenge their own liberal multiracialist dogmas, but to demonise Moynihan himself.
U.S. Mid-Term Election Results Mixed, But Demographics Doom Republicans
(by James Knight for H&D)
The mid-term elections took place on November 6 in the United States. They were seen – correctly – as a referendum on President Donald Trump. In general, the results point to some trouble ahead for Trump. Despite a very strong economy, complete with low unemployment, Republicans lost control of the House of Representatives. They are now down by about 37 seats to the Democrats. On the other hand, the party increased its control of the Senate by one and now hold a two-seat lead in that chamber of Congress.
Most parties in power get defeated – often quite badly – in the mid-term elections. Trump’s losses are somewhat less that those suffered by Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama in 1994, 2006 and 2010 respectively. Democrats had a significant advantage in fund raising as almost all of Hollywood and the ultra-rich US elite support “The Resistance” against Trump. And nearly every single close election recount had Democrats winning over Republicans, which was almost certainly due to election stealing/tampering (more common in the US than many suppose).
The demographics of the election show the usual breakdowns. Non-whites voted for Democrats with the following percentages:
Blacks – 90%
Asians – 77%
Hispanics – 69%
Actually, Trump did slightly better among non-whites in 2016 than previous Republicans such as Mitt Romney and John McCain.
Among whites, Republicans only won by a margin of 54% to 44%. White men broke 60% to 39% for Republicans while white women were split 49% to 49%. The fact that so many whites decided to vote for Democrats is a big warning sign for Republicans. For years, the Republican party has been drifting toward becoming the party of white people. With roughly 80% of non-whites voting Democrats, and with the electorate getting less and less white with every election, the writing is on the wall for the GOP. Unless Trump can get the white vote up to 60% Republican in 2020, he will likely lose reelection.
Donald Trump pursuing the white working class vote in West Virginia during his 2016 presidential campaign
Working class whites in states such as Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania gave the election to Trump in 2016. This was due to his stance on issues such as immigration and trade and his populist rhetoric on economic issues. This base has been slowly drifting away from Trump in the last two years.
Likewise, the Dissident Right, which also came out for Trump in 2016, has been disappointed with his performance in the last two year. Ann Coulter routinely calls out Trump on Twitter for his tough talk but inaction on a border wall, birthright citizenship and stopping caravans of illegal immigrants. Gregory Hood of American Renaissance is even more blunt:
“President Trump has governed like a moderate, while speaking like a hardliner—the worst possible combination. He has done so unnecessarily. One struggles to recapture the sense of the 2016 campaign. In retrospect, it seems like something out of Homeric times, with almost supernatural forces intervening in the affairs of men. Everything had to break Donald Trump’s way; Hillary Clinton had to make every possible mistake. Somehow, everything happened exactly the way it had to, leading to one of the most remarkable upsets in American political history.
During both the primary and general election, candidate Trump seemed to run as much against the Republican as the Democratic party. Some of his promises had cross-party appeal—notably his calls for a massive infrastructure program and his pledge to protect certain entitlements. His health care proposals were admittedly vague, as he simultaneously promised to repeal Obamacare and replace it with “something great.” However, because President Trump had directly attacked the policy preferences of Republicans such as Speaker Paul Ryan and free-market institutions such as the Club for Growth, it seemed reasonable to believe he could lead the GOP away from the unpopular, wonkish economic policies that had little appeal outside the Beltway Right. The victory of President Trump was a victory for right-wing critics of Conservatism Inc., as he showed that its support for a liberal immigration policy, an interventionist foreign policy, and slashing entitlements had no real support among the conservative grassroots, let alone the larger public.
Yet since taking office, with rare exceptions, President Trump has governed like just another Republican. The president’s first major legislative initiative was a disastrous attempt to replace Obamacare. It is not surprising that President Trump did not have a specific “great” plan regarding healthcare, yet the conservative establishment’s failure to provide a workable alternative to Obamacare is testament to its uselessness.”
Conservative columnist Ann Coulter, once a pro-Trump campaigner, is now a critic
Demographic Realities
Since the election, the press has been making much of how demographics are turning formerly red states (Republicans) into blue states (Democrats). This is entirely due to mass immigration. The US takes in over 1 million legal immigrants every year. About 90% of these people are non-white.
My own Congressional district in northern Virginia (VA-10) is indicative of this. It went for the Democrats for the first time in 40 years. Conservative Republican Frank Wolf won the seat in the Reagan landslide of 1980 and didn’t relinquish it until he retired in 2014. That year, moderate Republican Barbara Comstock (who favors high immigration) won the seat by 16 points (56% to 40%) over her Democratic challenger. In 2016, her margin of victory was only 5.5 points. This year she lost by a margin of 56% to 44% to liberal Democrat Jennifer Wexton.
While there are many reasons for her loss, the main one is this. In 2008, VA-10 was 80% white. It is now 65% white.
Virginia used to be a rural, Southern and conservative state. It is now less than 56% white. Republicans have not won a state-wide election since 2009. This same trend is about to turn once solidly red states such as Georgia, North Carolina, Florida, Arizona and even Texas blue. Orange County, California (outside Los Angeles) used to be perhaps the most reliably conservative district in the nation. It was the home of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Yet it now has all Democrat representatives in Congress.
In terms of the 2020 elections, President Trump still has time to right the ship. Building his promised border wall with Mexico would be a great first step. He has also mentioned ending birthright citizenship (where children born in the US – even to illegals – are automatically given US citizenship) and affirmative action. If his actions can match his talking and threats, Trump can win reelection. But after 2020, demographics may permanently sweep the GOP away at the national level.
James Knight writes from increasingly vibrant northern Virginia.
Police join Antifa violence against Alt Right, ending U.S. tradition of free speech
[spacer height=”20px”]Today is the 40th anniversary of the Battle of Lewisham, on 13th August 1977, when 4,000 ‘anti-fascists’ (including many who had come equipped for a riot) fought police and National Front members in southeast London, attempting to prevent a lawful NF march.
The ensuing rioting saw the first ever use of police riot shields on the UK mainland. (Today’s edition of the left-liberal Observer newspaper has an anniversary feature, effectively celebrating the criminality of the far left.)
John Tyndall later wrote of Lewisham, and the tradition of extreme anti-fascist violence (tolerated by the state) which it spawned:
“It was noticeable that in the news media reporting of these clashes there was very seldom any honesty employed in directing the blame. The violence was wholly due to unlawful attempts by left-wing rowdies to stop perfectly lawful public demonstrations, but from the media’s treatment of the issue the public might have received the impression that the NF was at least half responsible, if not more so.”
In those days the USA (though in many ways already suffering from even worse racial problems) was seen as a haven of constitutionally protected free speech.
Four decades on, ‘anti-fascist’ violence has come to the USA, and this time the hypocrisy of the state is even more evident.
While police in Lewisham 40 years ago did at least try to enforce the law, this weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia, police actively collaborated with anti-fascists and helped them to target lawful White Nationalist demonstrators, including David Duke and Richard Spencer.
Americans can no longer be in any doubt that their entire heritage – constitutional and racial – is at stake.[spacer height=”20px”]
