On The Ballot In 2020: Identity Politics

Now that the Democrats have taken back the House, and Minnesota Republicans have been destroyed, likely reduced to a permanent minority party as the state slides toward becoming a cold California (which weirdly didn’t stop them from congratulating themselves), the upcoming presidential election in 2020 looms over everything. Certain issues will be addressed on their own merits, surely, but the overall political prism will refract much of what happens through the reelection campaign of Donald Trump.

For some time the Democrats have willingly abandoned not just the white working class vote but much of the white vote altogether. They anticipate the demographic changes that come from flooding America with low skilled, uneducated Third World laborers to form rote voting blocks for those who promise them government handouts, will tip the balance of power to them, possibly forever given the unasked for rate of change and deformation of America.

Identity politics is the phrase given to the behavior where only one’s immutable characteristics are relevant to elected office or even, really, the ability to address public policy issues. This started off glibly enough years ago: only women were said to be entitled to a view on abortion. The premise was madness but madness is upon us in full force, in ways we could never have anticipated back when that shibboleth was first unleashed.

This isn’t about shape shifting either. The Left used to call themselves liberals until that label proved politically fatal given their political and economic incompetence. Now they’re progressives although they seem to offer programs that only take us backward: the slaughterhouses of Chicago and Detroit, the poverty stricken, Third World state of California with its open sewer of San Francisco, government taxation and overreach without end.

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The hacks at Politico recently generated a story setting out the Democrats desire to double down on identity politics. What I thought was interesting about the reporting was not that the author thought identity politics was a bad idea per se--it is--but whether now was the time to adhere to it so strongly given that the Regressive Left hasn’t sufficiently reduced whites to strangers in their own land.

The story quoted Pocahontas: “Let’s just start with the hard truth about our criminal justice system: It’s racist.” Well of course: look at the OJ Simpson verdict. Only that isn’t what she was referring to. No, in a sweeping condemnation without substantiation, Warren slanders not just those working at all levels of criminal justice, but America itself. This is the new normal and conservatives had best wake up to it stat.

Breitbart revealed the progress of this systematic slander recently when it reported on a poll that showed more than half of young Americans believe this country is the most racist on earth. In their defense, young people are this stupid because Conservatism, Inc. neglected the Regressive Left’s long march through our educational institutions. No less than Charles Murray declared they have conserved nothing since 1988. Beliefs like this are the logical outcome of an organized conservatism that navel gazed, applauded itself and urged subscribers to their various rags to join them on cruises while America slipped away. It was all about making a living, as someone observed.

Lady MacBeth has gotten in the on the act as well (everything the Clintons do is an act). Hillary recently announced a contest to win attending a Broadway show with her (is “No Exit” playing? Or “Waiting For Godot” perhaps?). Hillary added that it would include chardonnay because of course. She’s doing this in support of Onward Together, a far Left progressive group run by women, primarily POC (people of color). You see how the game is played. Like many Democrats, the Clintons will use identity politics to their advantage. If they get power, no doubt people without qualifications necessary to the position will be promoted because they are of the right skin color. If you object to this style of governance, guess what you are?

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As practiced, only white people get in trouble in engaging in identity politics. Only then is a group “racist,” despite the fact that blacks in America vote 20 to 1 for a black candidate. When was the last time you saw an Hispanic person get in trouble for voting for a member of their tribe? In fact, minorities who vote for conservatives or Republicans are excoriated for doing so. The tribe mind is strong and the abuse routinely doled out to whites for engaging similarly is relentless.

The problem with the poison known as identity politics is that if one group gets to play it, everyone does, even though only whites will be singled out for shame, name calling and general derision. The hope of the Regressive Left is that with enough shaming they can fundamentally transform America into something other than as founded before white Americans can object sufficiently to prevent it. This requires reducing the number of white people here while praising all sorts of marginal newcomers with nothing to add except for the fact of their not being white or holding barbaric religious beliefs from the seventh century. Ilhan Omar comes to mind.

When Tucker Carlson questioned the banality that “diversity is our strength,” he was furiously attacked by the Left. When President Trump rationally suggested ending birthright citizenship, the hysteria by the same people was enormous. They tell us what the stakes are and how they plan to effect a demographic coup but when you merely point that out, you become the bigot. Weird.

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Emphasizing race, exploiting it thoroughly and viciously, will be the clear approach to whatever untalented politician the Democrats decide to run against President Trump in 2020. This is terrible for the country but the Regressive Left doesn’t care for the country, only power and it has shown that it will do anything for it. Anything. Brett Kavanaugh ring a bell?

Similarly, governor elect Tim Walz ran on a campaign motto of “One Minnesota.” This is top shelf gaslighting as the DFL is identity politics incarnate. Just look at the freak show that passes for the Minneapolis City Council, with, alas, Saint Paul’s trying hard to catch up. The Left doesn’t like America as founded nor most especially as currently constituted. This means subordinating white people and their interests to a polyglot melange of various hues and backwards religions without concern for what should be done and who should be doing it. Identity is all, their alpha and their omega.

Conservatives need to fully appreciate the dangers of identity politics and fight against it. I’m not optimistic because a college level sense of “more civics will do the trick” pervades their stale thinking. Different circumstances require different actions.

Let’s put it this way: the poll reported on by Breitbart revealed that six out of ten people under 37 (!) could not name any president on Mount Rushmore. When the country is this far gone, clucking about how people should carry pocket Constitutions with them will hardly do the trick of stemming the tide of transforming America into a Third World hellhole.

If it requires, and it does without question, whites practicing identity politics as strongly and as effectively as any other group, well, count me in.

Minnesota Business Partnership: The Unbearable Lightness Of Charlie Weaver

"It was all a game, or a way of making a living."
Joseph Sobran on the Conservative Movement

Below is the column I submitted to Alpha News, where I have a regular Sunday column. It was rejected on the title alone. I'm publishing it here because I write for myself and always will. 

The Minnesota Business Partnership is perhaps the premier business lobbyist outfit in Minnesota. Yes, the Chamber of Commerce is another group but the MBP is unique in that its membership is comprised solely of CEO’s and senior executives of Minnesota’s largest companies. The great unwashed have the Chamber, the business elites have the Partnership.

Charlie Weaver is the executive director of the Partnership and is paid handsomely, reportedly $700,000 or more, to shill for their interests which they pretend are yours. They are not. Weaver was Gov. Pawlenty’s chief of staff when he took the job he’s held for the last fifteen years. One feature of the Uniparty--or ruling class, take your pick--is its seamlessness.

A friend sent me a recent interview of Weaver by Liz Fedor of Twin Cities Business magazine. My friend knows me well because the interview is both appalling in its myopic corporate agenda and nakedly honest in its disregard for the concerns of the working class and middle class in Minnesota. Weaver’s ideology, for that’s what it is, has contributed to the hollowing out of America, the decimation of our manufacturing base and the continued stagnation of wages across many occupations.

This ideology is dressed in the rags of Conservatism, Inc., possessing the dulled patina of “free trade” and other nostrums that have benefitted corporations at the expense of average Americans. Until recently, you were expected to go along with the decline in your and your children’s life without noticing and, if you did, then without complaining.

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In Fedor’s interview of Weaver, she touched on a number of subjects: business challenges, immigration and the fake labor shortage in Minnesota, President Trump & trade, education, transportation, taxes, preemption and the laughable “worker retraining.” What stood out among them all was Weaver’s single minded focus on cheap labor.

Big business' favorite fake mantra is that there is a worker shortage. The reality is they don’t want to pay higher wages. Their solution? Open borders and a flood of low skilled, low educated immigrants.

Weaver is explicit: “We also need immigrants in this state to successfully compete and provide talent for our companies to continue to prosper here.” What is meant by this is that wages can continue to stagnate or decline in order to keep corporate profits healthy.

He goes on: “We do need open borders. We need immigrants in this state. It’s all across the spectrum. It’s the doctors who come in and work at the Mayo Clinic to the person who is working in a slaughterhouse for Hormel to the construction workers for Mortenson and Ryan. An immigration policy that promotes legal immigration and getting to a place where those who are here illegally can get to legal status is really important.”

Weaver never deals with the quality of current immigrants, which on balance is low because chain migration is the mechanism by which they get here. Why should future Americans be imported simply because they have a relative already here? No serious discussion of the issue will be found in this interview of Weaver.

He does get points, though, for sheer brass. Open borders means the extinguishment of nations. As long as people exist who can be moved like so many pieces on the corporate playing board, all is well.

A nation’s culture? Its traditions and unique history? None of this matters to Weaver and those whose interests he shills for. One homogenized mass of people working for substandard wages is what the globalist, corporatist task masters demand and he’s in Minnesota doing his bit to bring it about.

On trade, Weaver is laughably unserious. He says “open and free economies across borders to trade goods is vitally important” and goes on to claim that Trump refusing to join TPP as well as renegotiating NAFTA is “troubling,” adding “[u]ltimately it hurts Minnesotans and it results in fewer jobs.”

Plainly put, this is a lie. Poor trade deals are not free trade and have hollowed out America. Weaver thinks this is just fine because cheap labor above all other social good is his core principle.

President Trump’s forays into trade have already met with remarkable results, despite clucking and bleating from the usual swamp creatures. South Korea is opening its markets more to of our cars, China blinked and is reducing tariffs on our goods, as well as promising to reduce its enormous theft of our intellectual property and NAFTA seems to be on the verge of being renegotiated to the betterment of America. This is what winning looks like.

Weaver returns to unfettered immigration because bad trade deals go hand in hand with it. “Given the challenge of increasing our workforce from within Minnesota, we need immigrants. We need their talent, skill, brainpower and hard work. So anything that would limit that, whether it is building a wall or just arbitrarily kicking them out of the country, would be devastating to Minnesota’s economy.”

Again, this is false and the data do not support this rosy approach. It’s bad for the average American to have low skilled immigrants compete for jobs on the lower rung of the economic ladder. But they aren’t Weaver’s concerns and never will be. "The presence of foreign-born workers in the local labor force is correlated with a higher likelihood of native-born less-educated workers dropping out of the labor force or moving across state lines." This, from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.

Weaver knows all this, he simply is advancing a narrative in the service of his paymasters. The veneer of non or bipartisanship should fool no one. Of course there is unanimity among the ruling class.

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Every year we’re treated to an annual dinner of the Minnesota Business Partnership. As kabuki, it’s surely of a higher grade than the embarrassing parade of paid D-list celebrities trotted out to praise L. Bill Austin at Starkey Hearing’s annual “gala.” But it remains just as manufactured and inauthentic. Local republicans tend to preen & clap, their forte really, over both the speaker and the execution of the dinner. As to the substance and whether the MBP’s agenda helps average Minnesotans, there is silence.

Minnesota big business has every right to band together and advocate for their agenda. The problem comes with Minnesotans believing, mistakenly, that they do so on behalf of their economic and cultural interests.

Reduced to his essentials, Charlie Weaver is Minnesota’s George Soros.




Photo credit: Twin Cities Business magazine