Posted on 03/23/2016 5:52:18 AM PDT by goldstategop
I think on the right we’ve been ignoring the mainstream media for years,” Matt Mayer, who runs a conservative think tank out of Dublin, Ohio, told me. “I think the real break was Rathergate. The view was that Dan Rather truly tried to alter the election by hitting Bush with that National Guard stuff, and I think that’s when the right finally said, ‘That’s it.’” And that, he continued, led to the rise of sites like Free Republic and Glenn Beck’s TheBlaze, with their communities of active commenters. Unfounded claims often take root and flourish. “In some ways it’s an echo chamber — some of the stuff I see I’m like, ‘Oh my God, really?’” Mayer said.
(Excerpt) Read more at fivethirtyeight.com ...
Trumpian conservatism:
“This is something he has in common with a lot of Americans. Sides and Tesler cite the work of political scientists James Stimson and Christopher Ellis, who have found that those who identify as conservatives often take liberal positions on things like the size of government. These voters are “symbolically conservative” but “operationally” liberal. According to Stimson and Ellis, that group made up nearly 25 percent of the electorate in 2008. Trump’s views on trade, which National Review called “silly and illiterate” are old-school-Democrat ones — globalization is really screwing over the little guy, huh?The idea that Trump could pick up white support that might typically go to Democrats in states like Ohio has become a truism of the 2016 race, though he lost the state to its governor, John Kasich, in the March 15 primary. “I am a commonsense conservative — Is that OK?” he asked the Super Tuesday crowd in Columbus. Trump has taken on the patina of conservatism, despite lacking a conservative orthodoxy.”
For a lot of people, conservatism is a state of mind, an attitude and a set of values about the culture and national identity and the size of government isn’t a pressing matter for them. Trump speaks for them when he calls himself a “commonsense conservative.”
Trump conservativisim is the same as regular GOP conservative orthodoxy with the exception of being againts the current system of globalized trade with cheating regimes and with unlimited illegal immigration. Also, there is now scepticism of neocon wars for no gain overseas.
“In some ways it’s an echo chamber — some of the stuff I see I’m like, ‘Oh my God, really?’” Mayer said.
This is just the opening volley against any site that allows its members to compare notes and uncover the lies of the MSM. For decades, the American public has largely taken anything and everything the major news outlets put out as truth. Realizing this, the networks began to experiment with putting their own spin on events and found out that they could get away with it.
Now, with the increasing ability of the general public to compare notes and information; they have been exposed as what they are, consummate liars.
They won’t go down easy or give up their hold on what gets to the eyes and ears of the American public. Don’t forget that they also have the support and backing of the underbelly of politics. I think that people like us, sites like Free Republic and the truth are in for a rough road in the near future.
Am I the only one who thinks Malone is an uncompromising elitist, looking down her nose at Trump supporters?
Long piece. The heavy insults start in the last third.
So, the conservative think tank in Dublin, Ohio is reading FR.... Good!!! Then they know we Ohioans are FED UP!!!
An exercise in typing, not writing.
“Mostly just shallow observations and narcissistic navel gazing.”
Sounds like the Donald and his supporters.
Dude hasn’t been paying attention for very long, has he? The media bias started (and was way more noticeable) long before Rathergate.
Rathergate had nothing to do with trying to get the horse faced buffoon Kerry elected.
The Clintons would have come down on Rather with both feet because it would have put Hillary out of the running for another 8 years not just 4.
Bush was making public the al Qaeda docs recovered in Afghanistan.
When Rather came out with the fake docs on Bush the left started making the claim you couldn’t trust what was in the recovered al Qaeda docs because Bush was forging docs.
Rathergate was the Alinsky tactic of “projection” accusing other of what you are guilty of.
is Truman Democratism.
Americans are not conservatives in any Lockean, Burkean, Buckleyan, or even Reaganian sense, because Americans are in general not philosophers but doers, not ideologues but pragmatists. They voted for Truman because he made them feel good about America and Dewey was an early version of Tricky Dick; they voted for Reagan because he made them feel good about America and Carter was Sad Sack; and they'll vote for Trump in November because he makes them feel good about America and Hillary! is Nurse Ratchet.
(Okay--please note that the following observation is not meant as a slam on Donald Trump (believe it or not). It is merely an observation of a phenomenon I have suspected for some time.)
In other words, these voters are white racial identitarians.
I used to believe that religion was objective, abstract, and universal (in fact I still do; it's one the things that make me the way I am). But I long ago noticed liberals insisted that "religion" (at least our own traditional beliefs) was an invention of white people to conquer and exploit "people of color." The same liberals who lambasted the Bible, made fun of creationists (by using mock Southern accents), and supported every immoral abomination to come into anyone's head practically worshiped Black chrstians (literalism, fundamentalism, ignorance, xenophobia, Southern accents and all) as "gxds." This didn't make any sense to me and still doesn't. I merely see now what's going on.
What we are experiencing now with the Trump phenomenon is the same thing from the opposite side--people to whom "conservatism" doesn't mean anything specific but a vague notion that America belongs to white people, who are reflexively labeled "right wing" but who basically want socialism that benefits them and doesn't demonize them. In other words: old time nineteenth century Populists (Bible-thumpers who wanted to nationalize a lot of stuff).
I must confess that in the nineteen years I've been online I have monitored and visited the web sites of neo-Nazi Jew-haters. One such site insisted that all our problems are in fact racial and could be solved simply by getting rid of all non-whites. Another said that while conservative opposition to big government was understandable, in order to solve our problems we would for a while have to have a bigger government than we have ever had.
Food for thought.
That is nonsense. And racist.
One of Trump's major strengths is that he spits in the eye of people that feel the need to bring race into every discussion. I've had enough of it myself.
The reason the conservative brand is dead is because the so-called leaders of the movement destroyed it. It means nothing in the mouth of a politician.
"White", in the sense that you are using it is prejudicial. Its a sideways insult. This election is about nothing less the survival of the middleclass which includes whites, blacks Hispanics, women, gays, Indians and any other freaking demographic marker the dhimmis want to label us with.
Stop thinking like a democrat.
I was surprised by the ending at the time, but completely understand it now.
At the end of the book, the triumphant white nationalists run the now "liberated" white USA the way the Khmer Rouge ran Cambodia.
All racial enemies are liquidated, all white "collaborators" and fraternizers with the enemy are punished and reeducated, and many are executed as examples.
The victorious white masses are deurbanized and go to work on collective farms to return to an agrarian utopia.
Basically, these guys want a racially purified white North Korea.
I think like a Theocrat. Because I am one.
Here's something: try thinking like an unhyphenated American, understand that we're all in this together, that the goal is to create a more perfect union.
It is democrats that first need to assign everyone a demographic pigeonhole before considering their opinion.
I call Bullsh!t on the very idea.
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