The Gaming Den

Fox really went after Trump, and it's totally up in the air how that is going to go down. On the one hand, Trump exists in right winger reality where being attacked by the media means that you are right and being a confirmed sociopath means that you have leadership skillz. On the other hand, Fox News fucking creates that reality, and the winds of counterfactual beliefs blow as hot air from Fox News mouth holes. Nate Silver says that Trump can't win a fight with Fox News, but honestly I couldn't really tell you. We're talking about a group of people who are extremely angry and believe counterfactual things both about the way things currently are and what effects could be expected by making changes. The "keep your government hands off my medicare" people are basically insane, and Fox will eventually lose control of them. Is it today? I dunno.

Trump was declared the victor by more people than the next three contenders combined. So right now he's doing good. But he's still trying to get the Republican Party Establishment to nominate him in spite of hating and fearing him. So there's that.

Anyway, the big story is that Bush and Walker did abysmally poorly. Less than 4% of people thought Bush was the winner, and less than 1% of people thought Walker was the winner. Those guys were in 2nd and 3rd place, so to be the "winner" all they had to do was stay even while Trump lost a little ground to the lesser-knowns. That's an extremely low bar, and they obviously didn't reach it.

Kasich and Carson did the best of the "not Donald Trump" crew, which probably doesn't mean much.

-Username17

I'd place my money on Fox News being able to chop down Donald Trump. The fact is that he has too many heresies with conservative/fascist orthodoxy and as we can see from his performance from last night he doesn't have a better way to deal with these deviations than bombast his way through. Fox News won't be able to take him down by calling him out on his sexism or buffoonery, but they can paint him as an opportunistic quisling who deep down doesn't really want to go all-in on defending white privilege.

If someone else decides to pick up the 'Mexicans are rapists who are undermining our culture and the establishment is in on it' ball and run with it, Donald's support will collapse. Especially if it's someone who hasn't been tagged with the 'cuckservative' label yet like Ted Cruz or Scott Walker.

In other words, Donald Trump is going to be ascendant or at least remarkably resilient until a new culture warrior appears and/or Fox News goes all-in on painting him as a fake culture warrior. The problem is, of course, is that doing so is the equivalent of calling upon Mechagodzilla to take care of your King Kong problem.

I think Fox's best bet would have been to skip any attempt to get Trump to slip up, skip the facts, and just straight declare him to be outside the Republican tribal identity. You don't ask him about his donations to Hillary and give him a chance to respond, you just tell the base that he did it and recommend that he be burned as a witch. At this point, I think it's probably too late for that; his credentials as a nativist are too well-established, and Fox seems to have wasted its best ammo.

Tangentially, Jeb is the most breathtakingly wretched candidate I've seen since Martha Coakley. He's like a machine designed only to disappoint.

Pretty much, yeah. Any conservative candidate can blow Trump out of the water by fighting him for the 20% of Republican voters whose political platforms are evidently not just reinforced by threat narratives but are nothing else but threat narratives. Problem is, the GOP has finally realized that those 20% are preventing the party from branching out to vital demographics including both young people who are fine with gay marriage but can easily be sold a Libertarian economic view, and hispanic immigrants who tend to be socially conservative and religious but who are obviously not on board with threat narratives that paint them as the Other coming for yer jarbz and yer wimmenz. But it's really starting to look like they poured too much time and energy into creating that narrative to dismantle it in time to save their party. The speed with which society has done a 180 on these issues clearly took them off-guard and while it seemed natural to me at the time because it was concurrent with my becoming politically aware in the first place, in retrospect it does seem like the culture shifted pretty lightning quick.

Here's my take on the whole thing:

The best way to understand American bigotry, especially racial bigotry (because it has the distinction of being well-documented, long lasting, and not as interwoven in society's fabric as sexism) is to think of it in layers.

There's a small percentage of out-and-out white supremacists. They do not shrink from accusations of racism or eugenics, don't give a fuck that they're banned from polite society, and are completely immune to any attempts to appeal to self-interest that's not framed in racial terms. These people are small even within the Republican Party (I'd say that they comprise much less than 1% of all Americans) but they're notable for being immortal and unable to be cowed -- thus they're always providing the 'intellectual' impetus for the movement.

Then there's a much larger but still minority faction of fair weather white supremacists. They're quite sympathetic to the goals and methods of the Steve Sailer types but they're not willing to put their ass on the line in the face of certain defeat. They quite gleefully support fascist policy but can be cowed by appeals to decorum or threats of being banned from polite society. They're not a threat unless they smell blood in the water or they feel the noose around their neck. They're still a minority, but they're a large enough minority to drive the debate when they're organized. They're the Death Eaters who only respond to Voldemort's call after they won a few battles despite openly talking about the decadence of the Wizarding World and dropping massive hints that those muggles should be put in their place when they feel that they're in safe spaces.

Then you have the 'I like racial privilege, but I'm not willing to fight too hard for it' types. They only ally with the above two groups as long as they make it easy for them. And the way to make it easy for them is through political inertia. They'll oppose strengthening American Civil Rights or affirmative action policies, but they won't hit the streets to do so nor do they stay motivated to do so if it looks like the above two groups are slipping or the racial egalitarians are culturally or politically dominant. While they're not eager to do things like put Japanese-Americans in concentration camps and shove Mexicans into cattle cars, once the process is underway they're all 'meh, as long as I get a good job out of it'. They're the people who joined the second wave of the KKK once membership reached over a million and they're the ones who started leaving it once the reputation of the group became bad. They're ultimately the biggest problem because while the above two groups of racial bigots can't form a majority on their own, with their help they can.


And make no mistake, racial bigotry is the driving force of Trump's ascension. From a pure 'I hate this particular group of citizens and would be willing to go out of my way to make their lives hell' perspective, Mike Huckabee has more bigot street cred than Trump or practically anyone. Huckabee also has gone over the line more times and further than Mr. Toupee ever did. However, the reason why Huckabee is at the sub-10% level while Trump is currently at 30%+ is because Huckabee's bigotry is framed in religious terms. Trump's bigotry is framed is in racial terms. Not all bigots are created equal; a lot of leftists assume that the bigots and their ideologies are interchangeable such that the neo-Nazis, while preferring an explicitly racialist bigot like Trump, would be okay with Huckabee as a consolation prize. Not so. In their eyes, a genuine culture warrior and political conservative like Huckabee is nothing but a quisling and a sellout and a white squish, unable to hold a candle to someone with much dodgier credentials like Trump.

This is the other reason why Trump is going to be difficult for Fox News to take down unless they're able to paint him as a culture traitor and soon. The number one taboo of the Very Serious People punditry is to talk about the inherent meanness and bigotry of American conservatism, especially when it comes to racial bigotry. They occasionally can tiptoe to the line when it comes to heteronormative or religious bigotry, but racial bigotry is completely off limits. Which is troublesome not just because it reveals the cowardice and collaboration of the Very Serious People, but because it allows the third category of racial bigots to hit critical mass. Which didn't use to be a problem back when conservatives were still able to form a natural majority even with an energized Rainbow Coalition, but as of 2015-16 it seriously threatens the plutocracy's plans to further enrich and entrench their economic class.

First, this is fun: http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/hell ... an-primary

Second, with regards to bigotry: We mentioned this before, but Lee Atwater sort of hit it on the head.

I'll even go one further than Lago, though. American bigotry isn't relegated to a single party. It's present at every level of society. Every person in the United States, to some degree, is bigoted and often aware of it. In this, the US isn't particularly special among nations; where we're different is that by and large society knows this is bad, and it's become an issue we can (and do!) discuss and even try to address. Bigotry and race is part of the national discourse in America in a way that it isn't in, say, Japan - probably because the US myth of homogeneity is a frayed and threadbare thing at this point.

More than that, there's the uncomfortable grain of truth at the core of bigotry and stereotypes which makes them hard to defeat. There are a lot of Jews in Hollywood, illegal immigrants from Mexico do come across the border to live and work in America. That underlies - and undermines - a lot of American discourse on the subject. Forget "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore." - the US has been controlling the flow of immigration for over a hundred years, in a weird alliance of nativism and realpolitick. Harping on "illegals" is really just another way to say "n-word, n-word, n-word"; it's just another way to cast blame on the other, to play to their prejudices.

And, it's going to fail. Not because it's a terrible narrative, but because the country as a whole is getting less bigoted and more mixed up every generation. Trying to turn out the base didn't work the last two times, and that was white guys vs. a black guy.

Is it possible that the Boris Johnson effect* is coming into play with Trump? People supporting him because he's crazy and stupid enough that it's funny - and that enough people doing that can actually put a clown into a position of power? Admittedly, that's unlikely to carry him through the national election, because at that point it wouldn't be "hahaha no-one will vote for him, I'll do it on a lark".

*The former mayor of London was so safe that, when the clown Boris Johnson came along, loads of people voted for him because it's hilarious. They can go to work and say "Hey guys, I voted for Boris Johnson!" and laugh, and the sensible person remains in power. Except everyone did that and now they have a fucking idiot (and an out of touch one at that) there, making constant gaffes and generally being a twat. THE JOKE IS ON YOU, LONDON.

Ancient History, your post is meaningless and wrong and shitty, and I want those 15 seconds of my life back.

Koumei wrote:Is it possible that the Boris Johnson effect* is coming into play with Trump?

Nah, I have an easier explanation than that. Authoritarians love buffoons. To be sure, they love the solemn, fatherly Josef Stalin types as well. But they love the ranting, gesticulating Hitler types even more. Authoritarians, especially fascists*, have stunted intellectual and emotional development so they react most strongly to overt tribal gestures.

But even more than that, fascists have wicked persecution complexes and are innately suspicious. So, paradoxically, someone who signifies identification with the tribe at the cost of being rejected by all other parts of society is more trustworthy. It's sort of why serious professional criminals only trust criminals with really obvious tattoos and markers -- you'd think that it'd be a disadvantage because it reduces their opportunity to blend in and gain the trust of other subgroups, but it buys the criminal subculture's trust it's because they're signalling that they not only won't but can't leave the subculture.

* And I'm very comfortable calling Trump's followers fascists. A lot of people are only willing to throw around the 'f' word with Nazi-tier levels of persecution but Trump -- or at least the kind of campaign he's running -- fits most of the political bill for fascism so there you go.

Koumei wrote:Is it possible that the Boris Johnson effect* is coming into play with Trump?

Trump has genuine supporters. He's running anti-establishment in a sea of establishment contenders and he's spewing openly racist bullshit in a GOP that is trying to diversify its base. That earns him support from the Tea Party and Openly Racist Shitstain wings of the party, respectively. And that's really all there is to it. Yes, his boisterous, confrontational personality helps, but only because being loud and enthusiastic about his openly racist anti-establishment platform now is a way of telling voters he intends to stick with the platform into the general.

Modern Republican presidential contenders are, by necessity, two-faced. Running for nomination is nothing like running for election, and to some extent Republican voters are aware that their politicians change their platforms more often than they change their underwear. The anti-establishment sentiment behind the Tea Party is very real (sure, the Tea Party itself is a hilarious Orwellian construct intended to turn conservatives dissatisfied with the Republican party into a voting bloc which supports the Republican party, but that's a testament to the power of propaganda - the dissatisfaction is still very real).

Donald Trump is playing with all the levers that Fox News uses to keep the Republican party together, and it's hilarious. If we're very lucky, he'll break something.

DSMatticus wrote:And that's really all there is to it. Yes, his boisterous, confrontational personality helps, but only because being loud and enthusiastic about his openly racist anti-establishment platform now is a way of telling voters he intends to stick with the platform into the general.

Right now, the U.S. White electorate is at 70%. Trump's explicitly racist campaign puts a hard and low ceiling on his numbers -- and even Reagan and Romney never managed to top 65% of the white vote. However, there's the genuine question as to whether the American white working class is crazy and stupid enough these days to propel Trump into the White House.

If this was 1980 or even 1992 I would very strongly be considering running away to some English-speaking country, overstaying my Visa, and taking up some minimum-wage job there for the rest of my life. A raw and cynical demographic analysis says 'if Romney couldn't do it with almost 8% unemployment, Trump definitely can't do it short of a surprise Great Depression 2.0', even if Trump explicitly packed his campaign platform with populist sugar. But still, it really gets your anus clenching, don't you think?

Lago PARANOIA wrote:If this was 1980 or even 1992 I would very strongly be considering running away to some English-speaking country, overstaying my Visa, and taking up some minimum-wage job there for the rest of my life.

Why not just legally immigrate, become a resident alien, etc.

Kaelik wrote:Ancient History, your post is meaningless and wrong and shitty, and I want those 15 seconds of my life back.

The fact that you only spent 15 seconds reading it probably explains why you disagree with it. Lee Atwater's basic suggestion, that republicans use dog whistle bigotry to get the more bigoted voters on their side, is obviously true. The suggestion that everyone is a little bit racist is less obvious, but no less true. Tribalism is huge, not just in American Politics, but in the human psyche in general. All we can do there is reign it in to greater or lesser degrees.

Grek wrote:

Kaelik wrote:Ancient History, your post is meaningless and wrong and shitty, and I want those 15 seconds of my life back.

The fact that you only spent 15 seconds reading it probably explains why you disagree with it. Lee Atwater's basic suggestion, that republicans use dog whistle bigotry to get the more bigoted voters on their side, is obviously true. The suggestion that everyone is a little bit racist is less obvious, but no less true. Tribalism is huge, not just in American Politics, but in the human psyche in general. All we can do there is reign it in to greater or lesser degrees.

I'm not sure how you read his post for longer than 15 seconds without getting to the end of second paragraph "where we're different is that by and large society knows this is bad, and it's become an issue we can (and do!) discuss and even try to address. Bigotry and race is part of the national discourse in America in a way that it isn't in, say, Japan - probably because the US myth of homogeneity is a frayed and threadbare thing at this point." Or the entire third paragraph.

Meikle641 wrote:

Lago PARANOIA wrote:If this was 1980 or even 1992 I would very strongly be considering running away to some English-speaking country, overstaying my Visa, and taking up some minimum-wage job there for the rest of my life.

Why not just legally immigrate, become a resident alien, etc.

The problem with that is any place where you would want to live has pretty strict immigration laws. I believe Lago has more education than I do (my college career came to a grinding halt after a 2 year associate's degree), but I looked into leaving the country a while back and pretty much any place I would want to live wouldn't take me. It's not really an option for most Americans.

Trump makes very sexist comments about Megyn Kelly, gets cut from CNN's debate

Then Trump's senior advisor leaves him, while Trump insists he fired the man.

In other news: The rest of the GOP candidate hit their knees and say a sincere prayer of thanks that Trump managed to shoot himself in the foot, and is now trying to say that it was intentional and doesn't hurt a bit and he can run the race just fine, thanks, because he can't admit he's wrong.

Count Arioch the 28th wrote:

Meikle641 wrote:

Lago PARANOIA wrote:If this was 1980 or even 1992 I would very strongly be considering running away to some English-speaking country, overstaying my Visa, and taking up some minimum-wage job there for the rest of my life.

Why not just legally immigrate, become a resident alien, etc.

The problem with that is any place where you would want to live has pretty strict immigration laws. I believe Lago has more education than I do (my college career came to a grinding halt after a 2 year associate's degree), but I looked into leaving the country a while back and pretty much any place I would want to live wouldn't take me. It's not really an option for most Americans.

Right. It's a heck of a lot easier just to get a tourist visa and live in the catacombs beneath Euro Disney.

Maxus wrote:Trump makes very sexist comments about Megyn Kelly, gets cut from CNN's debate

Then Trump's senior advisor leaves him, while Trump insists he fired the man.

In other news: The rest of the GOP candidate hit their knees and say a sincere prayer of thanks that Trump managed to shoot himself in the foot, and is now trying to say that it was intentional and doesn't hurt a bit and he can run the race just fine, thanks, because he can't admit he's wrong.

Wrong.

Trump is still totally on for the CNN debate. He has been cut from Erick Erickson's "Red State Forum" in Atlanta Georgia. This is like how the Kochapalooza in Orange County California wouldn't let Trump attend (and gave their straw poll vote of confidence and funding to Walker despite his dead-last debate performance). It's just a party apparatchik condemning Trump and finding a flimsy excuse to do so.

And make no mistake, this is a very flimsy excuse. First of all, Trump's characterization of Megyn Kelly as an angry lightweight who asked unfair questions is basically accurate, and him saying that she had blood coming out of her "eyes" and "wherever" is not a direct or especially dog whistlish reference to periods. Saying that someone has blood coming out of their eyes or that they are spitting blood or whatever the fuck is a hyperbolic description of someone being angry, not necessarily a sexist hormone thing. You could say literally exactly the same thing about a man and it would mean pretty much the same thing. Trump says worse and more sexist things all the time, and picking that quote to try to mount an attack against him is deserving of a lolwut pear.

But more importantly, we're talking about Erick Erickson, who has nothing to stand on to condemn sexism in general or to white knight for Megyn Kelly in particular. Remember, Erick Erickson is a sexist asshole who says horrible sexist things all the time. And remember also, Erick Erickson has already gotten in trouble for being sexist to Megyn Kelly. Yes, the same Megyn Kelly, and the same Erick Erickson.

Erick Erickson is literally saying that Trump's behavior has no place on Erick Erickson's stage, while citing behavior that is very specifically the same exact type but not as bad as stuff that Erick Erickson himself very blatantly does on his own stage. The hypocrisy is breath taking.

Trump may not be able to win a fight with Fox News. We will see. But there's no fucking way that Erick Erickson comes out of this fight looking like anything but Koch sucker and a quisling.

-Username17

hyzmarca wrote:

Count Arioch the 28th wrote:

Meikle641 wrote:
Why not just legally immigrate, become a resident alien, etc.

The problem with that is any place where you would want to live has pretty strict immigration laws. I believe Lago has more education than I do (my college career came to a grinding halt after a 2 year associate's degree), but I looked into leaving the country a while back and pretty much any place I would want to live wouldn't take me. It's not really an option for most Americans.

Right. It's a heck of a lot easier just to get a tourist visa and live in the catacombs beneath Euro Disney.

Dude, that sounds awesome...

Well that's what I get for not doing some due diligence.

Sorry about that.

So the first post-debate poll is in.



Plenty of time for mean reversion and the party apparatus will continue to put their thumb on the scales... but Priebus had to have thrown up in his mouth when he saw that. The number 1 and number 2 candidate are best known for putting their thumbs in the eye of the Republican establishment, and the only other guy to poll double digits is a fucking joke candidate who is pretending to run for president to sell books and collect speaking fees.

Jeb! and Walker didn't get into the top five, and their vote share wouldn't make them #2 if you added them together. It's going to take a lot of work to course correct to put out a candidate that they can get the media to pretend is a serious offering.

-Username17

This news is delightful from a "look at these idiots flail about" standpoint. And hey, maybe he can really stomp on that GOP fracture and split the base on a more longterm basis. It'll be weird if he ends up being the deathblow on them though.

I really don't want Trump to win but goddamn if he isn't making things more interesting with his presence...

As much as Fox News hates Trump, I'm surprised at how much attention they keep giving him. I mean, I guess he drives ratings, which gets them money, but even negative coverage tends to boost candidates. They give him more air time than any other candidate, and they wonder why their viewers are eating out of his hand.

It's their fault!


Edit: That being said, I don't think Trump will win the nomination. Despite his (relatively) high numbers, well over 50% of Republicans say that they won't vote for him.

What will probably happen is Trump will last a while into the primaries, but as some of the no-names drop out, their votes will go to other candidates that are closer aligned to themselves. So, Huckabee's and Santorum's votes will go to Cruz, but they won't go to Trump. Eventually, one to three candidates will start polling above Trump, and that will be the death of his campaign. What he will accomplish is that he might make some people who would have otherwise lasted longer drop out earlier, but I don't see him getting the nomination.

Now, what'd be super awesome is if he manages to do what Koumei said, and causes lasting damage to the party, and possibly a split.

I'm thinking his plan is to blackmail the Republican party into giving him a few billion dollars or something to not run as an independent and split the base.