Christianity vs. Churchianity - From ZWT Reprints, page 533, September, 1883, by A. A. Phelps.

We are living in an age of shames and counterfeits. Satan seems to have abandoned the hope of crushing out the Christian Church by a process of undisguised hostility, and now seeks to destroy her efficiency by stealthily draining off her vitality, and robbing her of every supernatural element. He "transforms himself into an angel of light", and often assumes to be the special friend and guardian of the Church. Craftily he infuses his deadly virus and inculcates his plausible philosophy, until the moral perception is obscured, the conscience is distorted, and policy runs nearly the whole ecclesiastical machinery. Thus a popularized religion -- which costs nothing and is worth nothing -- is readily accepted, while the old religion of the cross is utterly discarded. The consequence is, that there is religion enough, and Churchianity enough, but a great famine for real Christianity. We meet with thousands all over the land who, if catechized in regard to their spiritual condition, reply with much self- assurance that they are members of such a Church. They assume that the Church is an ark of safety; and, once ensconced within her enclosures, all further anxiety ends. Let us try to unmask this dreadful delusion of the devil.

There is a difference, we may premise, between the real and the nominal Church of Christ; The former is composed of all true Christians. Its boundaries are therefore invisible, as no man can tell exactly where to draw the lines. The latter is composed of those who assume the Christian name and practice the ordinances of God's house. It is commonly called the visibleChurch, because its boundary lines are known. The epithet may apply to a single local society of a given denomination, or to the aggregate of local societies of all denominations. We use the term, in this paper, to designate the outward or visible Church.

1. Christ and the Church are not identical.

There may be ten thousand Churches, but there is only one Christ. Nor can all those Churches supply the place of our one, blessed all-sufficient Savior. A man may be saved without the Church, but he cannot be saved without Christ. A man may be in the Church and not be saved; but he cannot be in Christ without salvation. Sinners sometimes become members of the Church; but only saints are members of Christ. A person may live in the Church for years, with the old heart of carnality and selfishness; but "if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature". The requirements of the Church are often wrong and ruinous; but the claims of Christ are always reasonable and right. The Church may become a sink of pollution; but Christ is ever the perfection of purity. The Church may be rent with divisions; but Jesus Christ is not divided. The Church may become terribly entangled in mysticism and error; but Christ is always the embodiment of light and truth. The Church may change her name and her nature; but Christ is "the same yesterday, today, and forever". The Church may be a crutch to walk with, but she is a poor Christ to trust in for salvation and eternal life.

2. Christian worship and Church worship are not identical.

Vast multitudes cling to some Church establishment as a drowning man would cling to a life-boat. They bow obsequiously to her priestly and official mandates, and imagine that the blind servility which they tender to the Church will be accounted acceptable service offered to Christ. The simplicity of the Gospel is lost in the imposing forms and glittering accompaniments of modern churchism. Splendid church edifices attract the eye. Splendid music charms the ear. Splendid prayers are addressed to the CONGREGATION. Splendid sermons please the fancy, and leave deluded sinners to slumber on. Church rivalry has achieved a glorious success, if success thundering organs, ostentatious dressing, theatrical singing, pointless praying, rhetorical preaching, careless hearing, and unscriptural practicing!

Much of the current worship is done by proxy. Lazy religionists surrender their sacred rights to others. They take it for granted that the preacher is on the right track, and readily swallow whatever may be doled out from the pulpit, without using their own brains in searching for the hidden treasures of truth. Thus religious ideas are transmitted from generation to generation, until tradition exerts a more powerful influence than the Bible in molding the sentiments of men. There comes to be a fashionable faith, as well as a fashionable dress. To embrace a certain stereotyped circle of doctrinal views entitles a man to the claim of "orthodoxy"; but let him not venture one step out of the beaten track, if he would not be denounced as a deluded heretic! But few have the moral courage to question the decisions of the Church, much less to discard what she has labeled as "orthodox". The verdict of a few leading denominations has thus grown up into a threatening tyranny; and the multitude cannot think of stemming the mighty tide. So they bow down in their narrow enslavement and worship this curiously- fashioned but pious-looking idol - the Church! Since all idolatry is an abomination to God, we have no more right to worship a church than we have to worship a golden calf! We rob the Lord of His rightful honor, and ourselves of the highest bliss of Christianity, by looking to the Church too much, and "looking unto Jesus" too little. What can be done to deal a staggering blow to this cruel church- worship of the day, and at the same time give us more exalted and ravishing views of Jesus Christ? There is a grand failure to carry out the ultimate design, when the appliances of the Gospel result only in the production of Churchianity. Our perception, our prayers, our faith and our adoration must overleap the narrow precincts of the outward Church, and rise up to the eternal throne! "Worship God!"

3. Christian fellowship and Church fellowship are not identical.

The followers of Christ are called upon to "love one another with a pure heart fervently". Indeed, this is one of the Scriptural tests of discipleship. "We know that we have passed from death unto life because we love the brethren". All Christians constitute one family, and love is the golden tie designed to bind their hearts together around the common cross. But love is a tender plant that needs to be reared with a hand. Hence the many exhortations of Scripture to "consider one another" -- to "be kindly affectioned one to another" -- to esteem others better than ourselves -- to "bear one another's burdens" -- to exercise a forgiving spirit -- to "let brotherly love continue" -- to "endeavor to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bonds of peace". All such injunctions point out the danger of alienated feelings and poisoned affections, and show the importance of making a special effort to promote Christian unity and love. How disastrous are the results of not regarding these Gospel precepts!

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http://www.auburn.edu/~allenkc/chrichur.html

Valerie Jarrett was our First Female President - By Daniel John Sobieski

Hillary Clinton has become the first female nominated for President of the United States but, should she win the election, she will not be the first female to occupy and control the Oval Office (insert Monica Lewinsky joke here). That honor arguably goes to Valerie Jarrett, currently Senior Adviser to President Obama.

Jarrett, born in Iran to American parents, has been with the Obamas since her days as Deputy Chief of Staff in the office of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, the elder. She hired Michelle Obama, them Michelle Robinson to fill an opening in the mayor’s office. As Wiikileaks describes the beginning of a long relationship:

In 1991, as deputy chief of staff to Mayor Richard Daley, Jarrett interviewed Michelle Robinson for an opening in the mayor's office, after which she immediately offered Robinson the job. [33] Michelle Robinson asked for time to think and also asked Jarrett to meet Robinson's fiancé, Barack Obama. The three ended up meeting for dinner. After the dinner, Michelle took the job with the mayor's office, and Valerie Jarrett reportedly took the couple under her wing and "introduced them to a wealthier and better-connected Chicago than their own." Jarrett later took Michelle with her when Jarrett left the mayor's office to head Chicago's Department of Planning and Development.

The rest, as they say, is history. Not only did Valerie Jarrett  become a mentor to the young Barack Obama, she soon became what Investor’s Business Daily called Obama’s Rasputin, someone who had more security than our personnel did in Benghazi:

She receives more protection than our Libyan ambassador, calls the president by his first name, dines and vacations with the First Family and had the power to call off three strikes against Osama bin Laden.

Ambassador Chris Stevens did not have a Marine detail in Benghazi, Libya. But White House senior adviser and Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett reportedly had a full Secret Service detail on vacation in Martha's Vineyard.

"Jarrett seems to have a 24-hour, around-the-clock detail, with five or six agents full time," Democratic pollster Pat Caddell said in an interview recently with Breitbart news. If Stevens had a similar escort, he'd probably be alive today. Such protection isn't usually available to senior advisers, but Jarrett is no ordinary adviser…

Indeed she is not. She arguably has more influence over Obama than anyone with the possible exception of Michelle Obama herselkf. As IBD notes:

Her influence is shown by an account in Richard Miniter's book "Leading From Behind: The Reluctant President and the Advisors Who Decide for Him."

It relates that at the urging of Jarrett, Obama canceled the operation to kill Osama bin Laden on three occasions before finally approving the May 2, 2011, Navy SEAL mission. Seems she was concerned about the possible political harm to Obama if the mission failed.

Miniter writes that the president canceled the kill mission in January 2011, again in February and a third time in March, in each instance at the urging of Jarrett.

Miniter cites a source within the Joint Special Operations Command who had direct knowledge of the operation and its planning.

Edward Klein, author of the best-selling book about Obama, "The Amateur," once asked Obama if he ran every decision by Jarrett, and the president responded, "Absolutely." A former foreign editor of Newsweek and editor of the New York Times Magazine, Klein describes Jarrett as "ground zero in the Obama operation, the first couple's friend and consigliere."

Her power and influence extends to staffing by the White House to a virtual veto power over foreign policy decisions. Valerie Jarrett undoubtedly had significant input into President Obama’s Munich-like deal with Iran, which kicks the nuclear can down the road to assured detonation over Israel, which Iran continues to threaten to wipe off the map when it is not wishing “death to America”. Her influence over President Obama is legendary:

The Iranian-born Jarrett (her parents were American-born expatriates) is the only staff member who regularly follows the president home from the West Wing to the residence and one of the few people allowed to call the president by his first name.

Noam Scheiber, writing in the November 9, 2014, New Republic, called Jarrett “The Obama Whisperer”, noting her power and influence and the fear she instilled in other staffers:

Even at this late date in the Obama presidency, there is no surer way to elicit paranoid whispers or armchair psychoanalysis from Democrats than to mention the name Valerie Jarrett. Party operatives, administration officials -- they are shocked by her sheer longevity and marvel at her influence. When I asked a longtime source who left the Obama White House years ago for his impressions of Jarrett, he confessed that he was too fearful to speak with me, even off the record.

This is not as irrational as it sounds. Obama has said he consults Jarrett on every major decision, something current and former aides corroborate. “Her role since she has been at the White House is one of the broadest and most expansive roles that I think has ever existed in the West Wing,” says Anita Dunn, Obama’s former communications director. Broader, even, than the role of running the West Wing. This summer, the call to send Attorney General Eric Holder on a risky visit to Ferguson, Missouri, was made by exactly three people: Holder himself, the president, and Jarrett, who were vacationing together on Martha’s Vineyard. When I asked Holder if Denis McDonough, the chief of staff, was part of the conversation, he thought for a moment and said, “He was not there.” (Holder hastened to add that “someone had spoken to him.”

Jarrett holds a key vote on Cabinet picks (she opposed Larry Summers at Treasury and was among the first Obama aides to come around on Hillary Clinton at State) and has an outsize say on ambassadorships and judgeships. She helps determine who gets invited to the First Lady’s Box for the State of the Union, who attends state dinners and bill-signing ceremonies, and who sits where at any of the above. She has placed friends and former employees in important positions across the administration -- “you can be my person over there,” is a common refrain.

And Jarrett has been known to enjoy the perks of high office herself. When administration aides plan “bilats,” the term of art for meetings of two countries’ top officials, they realize that whatever size meeting they negotiate -- nine by nine, eight by eight, etc. -- our side will typically include one less foreign policy hand, because Jarrett has a standing seat at any table that includes the president.

Hillary won’t be the first female occupant of the White House to call the shots. She might not even be the second, for he has at her side one Huma Abedin, who is as much at her side as Jarrett is at Obama’s. Those who refuse to learn from history are condemned to repeat it. Valerie Jarrett’s hold over President Obama is as mysterious as it has proven dangerous. We do not need another Jarrett in the person of Huma Abedin, whose corruption and influence peddling may be surpassed only by the future president who would put her in a position of power.

Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.      

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/07/valerie_jarrett_was_our_first_female_president.html#ixzz4Fu3bWc6d
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Why the globalists hate Vladimir Putin and why they are terrified that Donald Trump will win the US election - by Costin Vlad Alamariu

The Pillaging of Russia

The accusation that Putin has a connection to Trump, so widely repeated now by the corporate media and the Democrats with whom they coordinate, is nothing new. It also came up in the primaries. Republican political operatives and the neoconservative intelligentsia, unable to understand the threat or accept the repudiation of their failed policies, claimed that Trump’s rise was somehow aided by Russia, and that his online supporters were “Kremlin-funded trolls.”

This last charge is repeated even now. And Hillary Clinton makes dark hints about “celebrations in the Kremlin” if Trump were to win. His prudence and restraint in wanting to avoid war with Russia are presented as “evidence” that he is “Putin’s agent” by the same reckless political and foreign-policy establishment that has brought one humiliation after another to the United States over the past three decades.

There’s more than just jingoistic hysteria behind the many accusations that Trump is “Putin’s agent.” In a poetic way, this is true. The international interests that financially wrecked Russia in the ’90s are doing the same to the United States now. Putin stopped them in Russia and Trump is promising to stop them in America. They recognize Trump as the enemy and slander in the only style they know—the paranoid style.

“The international interests that financially wrecked Russia in the ’90s are doing the same to the United States now.”

Trump was once blamed for praising Putin’s performance. But he was right. Pensions, salaries, GDP, and the value of gold reserves in Russia have risen greatly since 1999—in some cases tenfold or more. This was while both inflation and the debt-to-GDP ratio declined by orders of magnitude. The rise in living standard under Putin is reflected in longer life expectancy: It had dropped to a third-world level during the 1990s, to around 55–57, and has now risen back up to 70 by most measures. Birthrates have normalized and recently overtaken the United States. Visit Moscow and you will see infrastructure, buildings, and development that are more impressive than those found in any American city—though the same could be said, of course, for many other countries now.

By contrast, Russians remember the liberal and globalist experiment of the ’90s as a time of great suffering. The early death of literally millions of people from economic deprivation, the utter ruin of many of Russia’s formerly world-class industries: This is the legacy of economic liberalization in Russia. How did it happen?

In short, “entrepreneurs” would run fraudulently acquired businesses into the ground, fire-sale the assets internationally, and move abroad with the profits. This is globalism in its purest form, without the slogans and boosterism. American economists, academics, and businessmen played an important part in all of this. Marc Rich—a fugitive later pardoned by Bill Clinton—was, for example, “the largest trader of Russia’s oil and aluminum on a spot basis,” according to Steve Sailer, who has documented the “rape of Russia” in some detail. George Soros was a large investor in these ventures, which provided the international market with financial backing, and cover for the oligarchs’ robbery of their own people. This was done especially under Boris Jordan’s CS First Boston bank and later Renaissance Capital, Moscow “investment banks” staffed by Soros associates.

Even more important was a group of Harvard and MIT economists who advised and assisted the Russian government in the reforms. These are men still involved in public life in the United States: current vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Stanley Fischer, Jeffrey Sachs, Jonathan Hay, Andrei Shleifer, and Larry Summers, who was later Secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton. As late as 1998, months before Russia defaulted, Fischer claimed that the Yeltsin regime had to be praised for following the advice of this group. Using the rhetoric of liberalization and globalism, American academics and financiers played a key role in the pillaging of Russia.

Russian politics and media in the 1990s served only one purpose: to make room for this pillaging, and to prevent all popular or legal obstacles to its happening as fast as possible. Russian media was only “free” in the perverse sense that it served entirely the private interests of men like Boris Berezovsky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and Boris Jordan. They owned TV stations, newspapers, and magazines, and news was edited to facilitate and cover up their criminal enterprise and their control of puppet politicians, like the besotted Yeltsin. Many journalists during that time lost their lives when they tried to expose corruption. The Western journalists and politicians who cry crocodile tears now over Putin’s supposed crimes had nothing to say then.

This all sounds and feels familiar. If Putin really is responsible for the DNC leaks, he has done a great service to journalism and to America. The emails reveal what was widely known but previously dismissed as a “conspiracy theory”: The American political system as it now exists is rigged by party apparatchiks in thrall to corporate donors and lobbyists. These same few financiers own most of the media outlets, which coordinate with the marionette political class to promote an oligarch-approved narrative. The entire edifice of American government and media of our time serves here the same purpose that the controlled government and media of Russia served in the 1990s.

Several recent studies have documented the catastrophic decline in the life expectancy and living standard of the white working class in the United States. But this has exactly the same causes as the great suffering experienced by the Russians in the ’90s, and in many cases it is the same people and corporations who are profiting by it. The offshoring of America’s industries and jobs, the devastation of American manufacturing and most kinds of engineering, the massive national debt are, in their beginnings, the same process of national destruction that began in Russia in the 1990s, but to which Putin put a stop in the 2000s.

Hillary Clinton, like Jeb Bush, is not running for president. With the exception of Trump and maybe Sanders, all other candidates this year were running for the analogue of Yeltsin’s position in the Russia of the ’90s. That is, a puppet who will give a rubber stamp to a few oligarchs to extract as much wealth as possible in America’s hour of decline and prepare for themselves a refuge abroad. Mass immigration, reckless wars, and the various international trade deals proposed are the principal policies by which this is to be done. “Diversity,” “the global economy,” and other such platitudes are the rhetoric meant to hypnotize the people to their own dispossession. And the same international vampires who raped Russia and who hate Putin for stopping their schemes are now shaking with fear that an American can stop them at home.

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The Economist argues for openness, Hillary Clinton, and the corrupt anti-nationalist status quo: - Comments by Vox Day

In defense of globalism

The Economist argues for openness, Hillary Clinton, and the corrupt anti-nationalist status quo: 

Countering the wall-builders will require stronger rhetoric, bolder policies and smarter tactics. First, the rhetoric. Defenders of the open world order need to make their case more forthrightly. They must remind voters why NATO matters for America, why the EU matters for Europe, how free trade and openness to foreigners enrich societies, and why fighting terrorism effectively demands co-operation. Too many friends of globalisation are retreating, mumbling about “responsible nationalism”. Only a handful of politicians—Justin Trudeau in Canada, Emmanuel Macron in France—are brave enough to stand up for openness. Those who believe in it must fight for it.

They must also acknowledge, however, where globalisation needs work. Trade creates many losers, and rapid immigration can disrupt communities. But the best way to address these problems is not to throw up barriers. It is to devise bold policies that preserve the benefits of openness while alleviating its side-effects. Let goods and investment flow freely, but strengthen the social safety-net to offer support and new opportunities for those whose jobs are destroyed. To manage immigration flows better, invest in public infrastructure, ensure that immigrants work and allow for rules that limit surges of people (just as global trade rules allow countries to limit surges in imports). But don’t equate managing globalisation with abandoning it.

As for tactics, the question for pro-open types, who are found on both sides of the traditional left-right party divide, is how to win. The best approach will differ by country. In the Netherlands and Sweden, centrist parties have banded together to keep out nationalists. A similar alliance defeated the National Front’s Jean-Marie Le Pen in the run-off for France’s presidency in 2002, and may be needed again to beat his daughter in 2017. Britain may yet need a new party of the centre.

In America, where most is at stake, the answer must come from within the existing party structure. Republicans who are serious about resisting the anti-globalists should hold their noses and support Mrs Clinton. And Mrs Clinton herself, now that she has won the nomination, must champion openness clearly, rather than equivocating. Her choice of Tim Kaine, a Spanish-speaking globalist, as her running-mate is a good sign. But the polls are worryingly close. The future of the liberal world order depends on whether she succeeds.

The Economist correctly senses that the time for "the liberal world order" is rapidly running out. Notice how, like much of the conservative media and the cuckservative Republicans, the maintenance of the status quo is its only real principle and completely trumps all of their various ideologies. Everyone profiting from the current setup, from literal Socialist to small government Republican, is willing to stand shoulder-to-shoulder against anyone who would first stand for the benefit of his nation and his people.

The Economist is speaking with the voice of the transnational elite, who have no loyalty to any nation, who could not care less about Americans, or French, or British, or Chinese, or anyone else, so long as they are allowed to continue to prey upon them. It is not, as some would have it, an exclusively Jewish elite, but rather, an alliance of rapacious elites from every nation, who share an honor among thieves and defend each other at the expense of the various peoples they have been raping for at least four generations.

Globalism is an evil even greater than Communism, Socialism, Nazism, Fascism, or Feminism, because it is a trans-ideological meta-evil that can take advantage of any ideology except Nationalism. That is why Nationalism is the most effective response to it and that is why those who love either freedom or their own people should support the Nationalists of every nation and of every ideological stripe.

https://voxday.blogspot.com/2016/07/in-defense-of-globalism.html

The DNC vision for America - by Vox Day

Yeah, letting these third-world-loving cretins continue running the country seems like a totally wonderful idea, doesn't it. Do you still seriously doubt what the America 3: Darker and More Vibrant edition is going to be like?

1.    Stop all immigration.

2.    Replace the 1965 Immigration Act with a new Naturalization Act in line with the original one.

3.    Build the wall.

4.    Begin the mass deportations.

That's what is required just to start Making America Great Again. You may not like the program, you may find it brutal and cruel, but it is what happens when hideously destructive policies have been adopted and allowed to run amok for 50 years.

As hard as it may be to accept, it's a damned sight more civilized than either of the alternatives.

https://voxday.blogspot.com/2016/07/the-dnc-vision-for-america.html

US citizens - but not Americans! - by Vox Day

The self-serving revisionists

It's more than a little amusing to see these Republican immigrants, who are US citizens but are not Americans, attempting to present their self-serving revisionist histories as not only genuine, but deterministic: 

Avik Roy is a Republican’s Republican. A health care wonk and editor at Forbes, he has worked for three Republican presidential hopefuls — Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, and Marco Rubio. Much of his adult life has been dedicated to advancing the Republican Party and conservative ideals.

But when I caught up with Roy at a bar just outside the Republican convention, he said something I’ve never heard from an establishment conservative before: The Grand Old Party is going to die.

“I don’t think the Republican Party and the conservative movement are capable of reforming themselves in an incremental and gradual way,” he said. “There’s going to be a disruption.”

Roy isn’t happy about this: He believes it means the Democrats will dominate national American politics for some time. But he also believes the Republican Party has lost its right to govern, because it is driven by white nationalism rather than a true commitment to equality for all Americans.

“Until the conservative movement can stand up and live by that principle, it will not have the moral authority to lead the country,” he told me.

This is a standard assessment among liberals, but it is frankly shocking to hear from a prominent conservative thinker. Our conversation had the air of a confessional: of Roy admitting that he and his intellectual comrades had gone wrong, had failed, had sinned.

His history of conservatism was a Greek tragedy. It begins with a fatal error in 1964, survived on the willful self-delusion of people like Roy himself, and ended with Donald Trump.

“I think the conservative movement is fundamentally broken,” Roy tells me. “Trump is not a random act. This election is not a random act.”

The conservative movement has something of a founding myth — Roy calls it an “origin story.”

In 1955, William F. Buckley created the intellectual architecture of modern conservatism by founding National Review, focusing on a free market, social conservatism, and a muscular foreign policy. Buckley’s ideals found purchase in the Republican Party in 1964, with the nomination of Barry Goldwater. While Goldwater lost the 1964 general election, his ideas eventually won out in the GOP, culminating in the Reagan Revolution of 1980.

Normally, Goldwater’s defeat is spun as a story of triumph: how the conservative movement eventually righted the ship of an unprincipled GOP. But according to Roy, it’s the first act of a tragedy.

“Goldwater’s nomination in 1964 was a historical disaster for the conservative movement,” Roy tells me, “because for the ensuing decades, it identified Democrats as the party of civil rights and Republicans as the party opposed to civil rights.”

Of course, white nationalism is, quite literally, the raison d'etre for the U.S. Constitution and was signed into law by George Washington in the Naturalization Act of 1790. This factual history offends Arik Roy, because he is not white and he is not an American national, therefore he has to revise history and transform it into something that allows him to redefine the definitions of "conservative", "Republican", and even "America".

I've yet to see any liberal or left-winger make a statement more unequivocally equalitarian than Roy:"Until the conservative movement can stand up and live by the principle of equality, it will not have the moral authority to lead the country."

Once more, we see that if you scratch a "conservative intellectual", you find an anti-American. It is equivalent to stating that there is no moral authority outside of a mindless devotion to equality.

This sort of revisionist nonsense is where intellectual defenses of the proposition nation concept inevitably lead. There is no alternative, because it has no basis in history, fact, or logic. The propositional equality of "Americans" is every bit as conceptual and delusional and nonexistent as the economic equality of socialists, the herd equality of unicorns, and the animal equality of Animal Farm.

Some pigs always somehow end up more equal than others.

That being said, both the conservative movement and the Republican Party in its previous form are going to die. They will be replaced by the American nationalist movement and the American Party, which will claim the moral authority to govern the nation on the basis of actually representing the nation.

https://voxday.blogspot.com/2016/07/the-self-serving-revisionist.html

Hillary Clinton: Class President of A Failed Generation - By David Stockman

I am in the throes of finishing a book on the upheaval represented by the Trump candidacy and movement. It is an exploration of how 30 years of Bubble Finance policies at the Fed, feckless interventions abroad and mushrooming Big government and debt at home have brought America to its current ruinous condition.

It also delves into the good and bad of the Trump campaign and platform and outlines a more consistent way forward based on free markets, fiscal rectitude, sound money, constitutional liberty, non-intervention abroad, minimalist government at home and decentralized political rule.

In order to complete the manuscript on a timely basis, I will not be doing daily posts for the next week or two. Instead, I will post excerpts from the book that crystallize its key themes and which also relate to the on-going gong show in the presidential campaigns and in the financial and economic arenas.  The third of these is included below.

I am also working with my partners at Agora Financial on a new version of Contra Corner. More information on that will be coming early next month.

TRUMPED!  A NATION ON THE BRINK OF RUIN…..AND HOW TO BRING IT BACK

                                             By David A. Stockman

Hillary Clinton: Class President of A Failed Generation:

Hillary Clinton has always been at the head of her class. That includes being among the leading edge of the 80-million strong baby boom generation that first started arriving in 1946-1947.

She did everything they did: Got out for Barry Goldwater in high school; got upwardly mobile to Wellesley and social liberation during college; got “Clean for Gene” and manned the anti-war barricades in the late 1960s; got to Washington to uplift the world in the 1970s; got down to the pursuit of power and position in the 1980s; joined the ruling class in the 1990’s; and has helped make a stupendous mess of things ever since.

The baby boom generation which started with so much promise when it came of age in the 1960s has ended up a colossal failure. It has turned America into a bloody imperial hegemon aboard and a bankrupt Spy State at home where financialization and the 1% thrive, half the population lives off the state and real main street prosperity has virtually disappeared from the land.

Quite a deplorable legacy, that. And all the while Hillary has been our class president. God help the world if she becomes our nation’s President. She has betrayed all that was right about the baby boomers in the 1960s and has embraced all the wrong they did during their subsequent years in power.

It starts during our defining moment when peace finally had a chance in the spring of 1968. We drove a sitting President from office, and, at that, one whose megalomaniacal will-to-power was terrifying.

We called bull on the cold war hysteria that had once put us under our desks at school and now claimed that peasants in far off rice paddies threatened our security. We stopped the Vietnam War cold, dented the Cold War deep and put the whole Warfare State apparatus on the run—–the Pentagon, CIA, the generals and admirals, the military-industrial complex. Within a few years, the warfare state budget was down by 40% in constant dollars.

So it was an epochal chance to break the deadly cycle of war that had started a half-century earlier in the bloody trenches of northern France during the Great War; that had been rebooted for a future reprise in the vengeful folly of Versailles; that had been made inexorable by the rise of nationalism, statism, autarky and militarism during the 1930s; and that had been unnecessarily and dangerously extended by the clash of military machines that both victors refused to demobilize after they won the peace in 1945, supplanting the silence of the German and Japanese war guns with the nuclear nightmare of the Cold War.

True enough, the defeat and retreat of the American Imperium by the idealism and defiance of the baby boomers was interrupted by the Reagan defense and Cold War revival. But that historical error is what makes the Clintons all the more culpable…..

It was their job as the first baby boom co-Presidents to finish the work of 1968, and by the time they entered the White House it was a lay-up. The Soviet Union was no more and Mr. Deng had just declared that to get rich is glorious.

The Clintons’ job in 1993 was to have at least the vision of Warren G. Harding. After all, he did demobilize the US war machine completely, eschewed the imperial pretensions of Woodrow Wilson and actually launched a disarmament movement which resulted in the melting down of the world’s navies and the Kellogg-Briand treaty to outlaw war.

Yet the opportunity at the Cold War’s end was even more compelling. There was absolutely no military threat to American security anywhere in the world. The Clintons could have drastically reduced the defense budget by mothballing much of the navy and air force and demobilizing the army.

They should have canceled all new weapons programs and dismantled the military-industrial complex. They could have declared “mission accomplished” with respect to NATO and made good on Bush’s pledge to Gorbachev to not expand it “by an inch” by actually disbanding it. And, as legatees of 1968, they were positioned to lead a global disarmament movement and to end the arms export trade once and for all.

That was their job—-the unfinished business of peace. But they blew it in the name of political opportunism and failure to recognize that the American public was ready to end the century of war, too.

And you can’t let Hillary off the hook on the grounds that she had the health care file and Bill the bombs and planes. On becoming Senator, she did not miss a stride betraying the opening for peace that had first broken through in 1968.

She embraced Bush’s “shock and awe” campaign in Iraq and was thereby complicit in destroying the artificial nation created by Sykes-Picot in 1916. So doing, Clinton helped unleash the furies of Islamic sectarian conflict that eventually led to the mayhem and brutality of the Shiite militias and the rise of the ISIS butchers on the backs of the dispossessed Sunni tribes and the demobilized officer corps of Saddam.

Tellingly, Hillary Clinton made a beeline for the Senate Armed Services Committee, the domain of the Jackson war democrats, not the Foreign Affairs Committee, where Frank Church had exposed the folly of Vietnam and the treacherous deeds of the CIA. Undoubtedly, this was to burnish her commander-in-chief credentials, but it spoke volumes.

By the time Hillary got to the seat of power, the idealism and defiance of the warfare state that had animated her and the baby boomers of 1968 had dissipated entirety. For her and most of them, it was now all and only about getting and keeping power. In that respect, Hillary’s term at the State Department was a downright betrayal.

Whether by accident or not, Obama had actually been elected as the “peace candidate” by echoing the rhetoric of 1968 that he had apparently read in a book but had been too young to actually hear. What this untutored and inexperienced idealist needed to hear from his Secretary of State was a way forward for peace and the dismantlement of a war machine that had rained havoc on the world, left behind 4 million damaged and disabled veterans who had sacrificed for no good reason and a multi-trillion dollar war tab that had bloated the national debt.

What he got was Hillary The Hawk. When Obama took Bush’s already bloated $650 billion war budget (2005$) to a level that was almost 2Xthe level Eisenhower thought adequate at the peak of the cold war and upon his parting speech warning of the military-industrial complex, Hillary was completely on board. When Obama was bamboozled into a “surge” of forces in the godforsaken expanse of the Hindu Kush, Hillary busied herself rounding up NATO support.

When her neocon and R2P (responsibility to protect) advisers and Administration compatriots urged making peace by starting wars in Syria, Libya, and the Ukraine, Hillary lead the charge. All of them have been disasters for their citizens and a stain on America’s standing in the world.

When the Deep State began lining up the next enemy, Hillary joined the gumming brigade, warning about the China threat. My god, were the red capitalists of Beijing to actually bomb 4,000 Wal-Marts in America their system would collapse in six months and their heads would be hung from the rafters in the nearest empty Foxcon/Apple factory.

Here’s the thing. Hillary Clinton’s sell-out to the Warfare State is not just about war and peace—-even as it fosters the former and precludes the latter. It’s also about the nation’s busted fiscal accounts, its languishing main street economy and the runaway gambling den that has taken over Wall Street……

After all this time, however, Hillary doesn’t get any of this. She thinks war is peace; deficits don’t matter; the baby boom is entitled to the social insurance they didn’t earn; and that the Fed’s serial bubble machine is leading the nation back to prosperity.

Actually, it’s leading to the greatest financial bubble in human history. After 90 months of ZIRP and a decade of Wall Street coddling and subsidization by the Fed, the windfalls to the 1% have become unspeakable in their magnitude and illegitimacy.

Soon 10,000 people will own a preponderant share of the wealth; 10 million people will live grandly off the droppings; 150 million will live off the state; and the rest of America will be left high and dry waiting for the house of cards to collapse.

Hillary rose to fame delivering an idealistic commencement address at Wellesley at the beginning of her career. But like the generation she represents, she has betrayed those grand ideals over a lifetime of compromise, expediency, self-promotion and complacent acquisition of power, wealth and fame.

She doesn’t deserve another stint at the podium—-let alone the bully pulpit.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/07/david-stockman/nurse-ratchet-failed-generation/

Conservatism in ruins - Vox Day on article by Andrew Klavan

Andrew Klavan's first thoughts on rebuilding conservatism:

The conservative movement has collapsed and is in ruins. Its vehicle for political expression, the Republican Party, is now in the hands of an authoritarian nationalist who has never read the Constitution and does not believe in free expression, free trade or the separation of powers. Its central vehicle for expression in the news media is in disarray as Fox News becomes embroiled in scandal. Even its defenders on talk radio and in the blogosphere are severely at odds as they are forced to choose whether to defend Trump as the lesser of two evils or to stand fast with the founding fathers against both terrible sides.

The conservative movement has collapsed and lies in ruins. And it has done so due to the deceit and dishonesty of conservative commentators like Andrew Klavan, who apparently feel the need to make provably false statements about everyone from Donald Trump to the Founding Fathers.

Let's look at the three false statements in this one diagnostic paragraph alone:

1.    Donald Trump is not an authoritarian.

2.    Fox News has never been a central vehicle for expressing conservative views. It has, rather, pushed neoconnery as nominal conservatism while serving as a politically moderate alternative to the hard progressivism of the ABCNNBCBS cabal.

3.    The Founding Fathers believed in trade protectionism and a white America. Whether he gives a damn about the US Constitution or not, Donald Trump has as much or more in common with the Founding Fathers as the conservative movement does. The Constitution exists only to safeguard the unalienable rights of white Americans who are the posterity of the Founding Fathers, that is its sole purpose.

Now let's look at Klavan's proposal for rebuilding conservatism, which strangely enough, he provides without ever considering just why the movement is in ruins.

1. There is no substitute for victory. A political philosophy should be an outgrowth of moral values but it is not a moral value in itself. Its purpose is not to be good; its purpose is to be as good as it can be and still win power. A Christian may count it a victory when he is devoured by lions for his faith, but a conservative who is repeatedly devoured by the opposition in elections is just a self-satisfied schmuck. I am completely opposed to those — like Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam — who essentially argue  that conservatives must win by becoming watered-down liberals. But clearly, the methods by which we have been selling our philosophy to the voters have not just failed but failed utterly, and we should rethink them.

True enough, and yet Klavan observably knows so little about the history of conservatism in America that he doesn't understand that conservatives have never had a philosophy proper. He obviously hasn't read Russell Kirk, anyhow. That's why they can't sell conservatism to anyone anymore; it doesn't even exist as a coherent self-contained philosophy. Conservatives have never been much more than philosophical parasites on the Left. Klavan should read Cuckservative; if nothing else it would bring him up to speed on the intellectual inadequacies of conservatism.

2. Win what minority types we can with the truth. The opposition likes to point out that too many conservatives are white men. They're right — but only because blacks and women have been successfully sold a destructive bill of goods in leftist racialism and feminism. The facts are: black people are not oppressed by the police, women are not underpaid for the same work, white privilege is a destructive and racist myth, and true freedom means people you don't like are going to say things you disagree with in ways you find offensive. These are hard sayings but they need to be said, and they don't need to be said by conservatives to other conservatives, they need to be said by conservatives to blacks, women and sexual off-beats of all stripes. The Democrats have co-opted these people with destructive lies that make their lives worse. We can't win them back by jumping on that bandwagon. We need to proudly, unapologetically (and politely) tell it like it is — to them, in their neighborhoods and organizations. We won't win a lot of them. Not at first. But facts have a way of getting through over time — if you speak them courageously without being a jackass about it.

This is remarkable. And it's a tactic doomed to failure; conservatives like Klavan can't win anyone with the truth for the obvious reason that they don't know the truth. They religiously subscribe to the idiotic lie of the Proposition Nation and they attempt to win over minorities that will never, ever, be won over in significant percentages by the alien ideals of 18th century whites. Klavan can't explain historical anomalies that puncture his precious Ellis Island myth like the 1790 Naturalization Act, which means he can't tell it like it is because he doesn't actually know what it is.

The alternative is that he does know what it is and he is knowingly deceiving his fellow conservatives. But I will give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he is merely ignorant.

3. Fight the culture wars in the culture. The culture wars are problematical because too often conservatives come across as anti-freedom or bigoted. That makes victory tough. I feel passionately about some cultural issues and indifferent to others, but I believe all of them should be fought on a cultural and informational level rather than a political one. For instance, I believe that abortion is the taking of a human life and that government therefore has a right to forbid it. But just speaking bluntly and honestly, I don't think I can win that fight in the political arena right now. Happily, the truth may do what politics cannot. The truth is on my side and the more the truth gets out about what abortion looks like, how it's done, and who the people who support it are, the more the public will know that it is unacceptable. Then we can win politically. As for sex issues, I confess I care not at all about other people's sexuality (I'm so deeply immersed in my own), but I do care very deeply about religious liberty and the freedom not to participate in what you abhor. That's a fight we can win and we should argue it everywhere as a freedom issue.

Correct concept, inept execution. Winning the culture war is NOT getting the truth out. It is rhetorically convincing others what the truth is. This is why the arts are the most vitally important battleground in the cultural war.

4. Some class occasionally would be nice. Conservatives have been all but banned from universities, the news media and show business. In response, we formed our own media in blogs, talk radio and Fox. Those are great venues for informing our own, but we could use some outreach to open-minded Democrats. I've wasted too much breath trying to convince conservatives that art is good and can change the world over time. They just won't believe me. But could we maybe agree that screaming at people and calling them evil and talking like a belligerent loudmouth know-it-all is not always the best way to bring them over to your side? No, huh. Well, it was just a thought.

For fuck's sake. He's another hapless tone policeman. This is why the Alt Right is going to win; because we don't give a quantum of a damn about "class". Someone once told me the important thing was "to win with grace and style". No, the important thing is to win, even if you have to get bloody and dirty in the process.Klavan, like a good conservative, is far more interested in going down to noble defeat and surrendering while wearing a nice clean uniform than he is with winning.

It very much looks to me right now as if Trump is going to lose this election on pure incompetence and mean spirit. That might actually make it easier for conservatives to regroup in the ruins of the Republican Party. If he wins, we may need a new party of our own. But whichever way things go, I think we need to open a discussion about how conservatives can not only remain conservative but also win elections in modern America.

Is he even watching the political conventions? This sort of wishful thinking is why no one should bother paying any attention to a cuckservative like Klavan now or in the future. Conservatism is dying. Its diseased remnants are flocking to the progressives, as we always knew they would. And we watch them go with dry eyes and a grim smile, because we don't need a bunch of useless cucks and moderates who were always happier shooting at their own side than the enemy.

I have never been a conservative. I will never be a conservative. I am delighted to see the conservative movement crumbling into dust. Conservatives conserve nothing, accomplish nothing, and stand for nothing. They will not defend the Church, they will not defend America, and they will not defend the West.

The Alt Right will. Join us, if you have the steel.

https://voxday.blogspot.com/2016/07/conservatism-in-ruins.html

State polls and date relevance - by Vox Day

DH has been resolutely predicting a Clinton win on the basis of the state polls, which correctly predicted Obama wins in the last two elections.

The state by state projections as of today including all most recent polling still indicate a Clinton win with around 312EV. Trump has not altered the road map at this point. Including polling changes that could happen between now and election day, Sec. Clinton is cruising towards victory. 

Although I respect DH's acumen and take him very seriously with regards to anything that involves data analysis, I am nevertheless predicting a Trumpslide, a win of even bigger proportions than 312 Electoral College votes for Trump. How is it possible for me to do that considering the supposedly reliable evidence of the most recent state polling that DH is citing?

The reason is pretty straightforward. While the state polls have been pretty good predictor of the election results, my suspicion was that this is only true of state polls taken in the last week prior to the election. Before that, they tend to bounce all over the place. Unlike the national polls, they don't always tend to favor the Democratic candidate, then fall more in line as the election approaches; the state polls appear to be less corrupt than the national ones.

Allow me to demonstrate. I looked at the results of the McCain-Obama race, since that one was more similar to the current race given that it also lacked an incumbent, in all seven of the states identified as key "battleground" states. In each case, I listed the following:

1.    The earliest date that any state poll got the correct result.

2.    The latest date that any state poll had either a) the wrong candidate winning or b) a tie

3.    The RCP average of the final state polls from the last week prior to the election

4.    The actual results.

PENNSYLVANIA
Rasmussen 2/14 - 2/14 Obama +10
FOX News/Rasmussen 9/14 - 9/14 TIE
RCP Average: Obama +7.3
Final Results: Obama +10.3

VIRGINIA
SurveyUSA 2/15 - 2/17 Obama +6
Mason-Dixon 9/29 - 10/1 McCain +3
RCP Average: Obama +4.4
Final Result: Obama +6.3

FLORIDA
PPP  9/27 - 9/28 Obama +3
FOX News/Rasmussen 11/2 - 11/2 McCain +1
RCP Average: Obama +1.8
Final Results: Obama +2.8

OHIO
Quinnipiac 9/5 - 9/9 Obama +5
Mason-Dixon 10/29 - 10/30 McCain +2
RCP Average: Obama +2.5
Final Results: Obama +4.6

COLORADO
SurveyUSA 2/26 - 2/28 Obama +9
Denver Post/Mason-Dixon 9/29 - 10/1 TIE
RCP Average: Obama +5.5
Final Results: Obama +9.0

NORTH CAROLINA
Rasmussen 10/8 - 10/8 Obama +1
Reuters/Zogby 10/31 - 11/3 McCain +1
RCP Average:  McCain +0.4
Final Results: Obama +0.3

NEVADA
Associated Press 10/22 - 10/26 Obama +12
Politico/InAdv 10/19 - 10/19 TIE
RCP Average:  Obama +6.5
Final Results:  Obama +12.5

So, as early as FEBRUARY there were three battleground polls that correctly predicted the result, but in four other battleground states, there was not a single poll among the dozens that were taken that correctly predicted the result until October, or in two cases, November. Since none of the three correct polls were performed by the same company, and since in one case, that same poll went on to incorrectly predict a result that was off by 10 points, it's pretty clear that these results were random and therefore unable to serve as the basis for a predictive 2016 model.

Not only that, but there are no February state polls comparing Trump to Clinton, because back in February, Scott Adams, Mike Cernovich, Helmut Norpoth and I were about the only individuals publicly going on the record and stating that Trump would be the Republican nominee.

Now let's look at the latest date that a state poll incorrectly predicted the winner. Even in a state that Obama won by 12.5 percentage points, there were polls in October indicating a dead heat. Mid-September is the earliest date of an incorrect poll; in North Carolina, which was close, even the RCP average had McCain winning right up until the election took place.

Taken in sum, this means that it makes no sense to pay much attention to the state polls until September. What we can before then, however, is the general trend from one candidate to the other; in many of these battleground states, the gradual shift from McCain to Obama, or from leaning Obama to strong Obama, is apparent.

And what do the state polls show in this regard? At the moment, they are too much in flux to clearly read a trend, but they appear to be gradually following the shift from Clinton to Trump already seen in the national polls. So, I see no reason to revise my prediction of a Trumpslide.

https://voxday.blogspot.com/2016/07/state-polls-and-date-relevance.html?showComment=1469545214831#c5374202132581226760