3 I Knew They’d Never Allow me to be President.- Hillary November 9, 2016
Who exactly is they though? As we will document in this book a lot of people. We can start with the Republican party and the FBI though to say this is redundant as it suggests there’s actual daylight between the Republican party and the FBI. Certainly the “rogue” agents at the FBI-scare quotes added as from what James Comey has said it seems as if Hillary Derangement Syndrome was the mainstream position at Trumpland in 2016.
Indeed, seeing as the FBI has still never had a Democrat as FBI Director in 116 years, in reality, of course, every FBI Director in history has been Republican-Wray is nominally an independent but then again Wray was Chris Christie’s Bridgegate lawyer so..-you can quite accurately refer to the FBI as GOPland. The FBI was so determined to defeat Hillary Clinton by any means necessary Circa 2016 you had scores of “rogue” agents in October threatening to leak Huma’s emails to Wikileaks.
Yet Trump’s apologists-on both the Trump Deplorable Right and the anti anti Trump Bernie or Bust tankie left-insist that the “Deep State” has just been mean, so very mean to poor illegitimate Trump.
Max Blumenthal among many others on the Right and Left has, if you can believe it, claimed the FBI is anti Trump-uh, it elected him. It also failed to prevent January 6 despite plenty of prior knowledge-considering that AOC and Ihan Omar saw J6 coming it doesn’t pass the laugh test to suggest that it was a surprise to the FBI who had bountiful intel of what was coming. Then, after the fact in 2021 there were news stories that many FBI offices across the country simply refused to investigate J6, indeed, expressed great sympathy for the J6 insurrectionists. And we haven’t even gotten to the Secret Service who alleges it just happened to schedule a mass deletion of texts for January 7 and no one thought the 1/6 texts would be important.
FN: Katie Halper video see also Blumenthal video on Russell Brand on America Rising
The dirty little secret is that the Deep State is actually Republican-this is what made both the Reagan-Bush collusion with the Iranian Ayatollah and the 2016 Emailgate-which had the support of both the Russians and the FBI-possible.
Beyond this another point of Hillary’s “they” were the Savvy mainstream pundits who had Clinton Derangement Syndrome since the 1990s. Paul Waldman had actually predicted this in May 2015-that the media was likely to become yet another primary opponent for her-as they still bore a grudge since the 1990s, they had the feeling that somehow the Clintons had ‘gotten away with something.’
It seems to me the “something” was the frustration that mainstream reporters like Maureen Dowd and Mike Isikoff had gone all in on Whitewater but at the end of the day the public could clearly see there was no there there. It was as if they wanted to finally catch HRC on something to retroactively validate all the absurdity of the Whitewater boondoggle, Vince Foster Trutherism, etc as not just a total rabbit hole.
Then you have the Bernie Bros, the Bernie or Busters a la HA Goodman-who infamously wrote a post in Salon by the title Bernie or Bust.
HA-who in 2020 what else? endorsed Donald Trump-had argued that allowing Donald Trump to appoint three more Far Right conservative Supreme Court Justices was a small preventing THAT WOMAN from achieving her lifelong dream of being the first female US President. I know-I’d vote for a woman just not that woman.
Texas woman speaks out for first time since getting abortion | khou.com
Meanwhile Katie Cox says hi. After having to flee Texas which is preventing her from having an abortion even though her pregnancy poises a serious health risk to her. As do the Ohio teenage rape victims who have less right than their rapists. But who cares about consequences right? Certainly not the Far Left which as Caleb Maupin demonstrably illustrates are pro authoritarian both in America and abroad.
But of course that’s basically the entire Far Left.
Back to 2016 there were a few takes that would prove eerily predictive. One was Walman’s take I discussed above.
FN: Unfortunately I’ve been unable to locate the link to that 2015 article but I do remember it. ]
Another believe it or not was Scott Sumner:
“I almost always predict presidential elections correctly—I think I have gotten every one right since I was a teenager (but I’m a bit fuzzy on what I predicted in 1976). But I can’t figure this one out at all. It’s definitely Trump’s year. Right wing xenophobic nationalism is sweeping the globe, and that’s his thing. He’s caught the zeitgeist. And Hillary is a horrible candidate. Trump should win easily. But then there’s Trump himself.
FN: Suffice it to say I disagree she’s “a horrible candidate” but let’s put that to one side for the moment. The media certainly long since created this “bad candidate” narrative and many people simply accept the conventional wisdom-if a bunch of people say it’s true, its, true according to the “conventional wisdom” talk about a contradiction in terms… You think of Edward Klein who literally wrote a book entitled “Hillary is Unlikeable” etc. At the end of the day it’s a subjective judgement so it’s kind of a tautological point-‘she must be a bad candidate, she lost…’
But I will note that her popularity numbers were very high prior to the start of the campaign where the tenure of the campaign revolved around “But Her Emails” etc which dropped her approval rating from 63% to as low as the mid 30s. But I digress-this is why Scott and I never got along when I used to comment on his website.
End FN
When I predict elections, I always try to picture the news media story after the election. That’s what I attribute my success to. Thus in 2012 I couldn’t picture a plausible story explaining the election of Romney. It would have been a rejection of Obama—but why? Obama won easily in 2008; why would so many voters have turned against him in 2012? The recession was blamed on Bush, and any foreign policy failures (“red line” in Syria) were inside the beltway stuff, which voters don’t care about. It was too soon to know how Obamacare would work out. I didn’t see a plausible news story for why Romney would win.
Now that the polls have tightened, I’m trying to imagine my November 9 NYT story
“In a year of unprecedented surprises, Trump pulled off a major upset victory. After gaining the GOP nomination, Trump ran consistently behind in the polls. He was widely viewed as having done poorly in the three debates, according to experts and public opinion polls. He continually antagonized the GOP with outlandish statements, earning one rebuke after another. Four of the past five GOP presidential candidates repudiated him. Many GOP Senators, Congress(wo)men and Governors did the same. The GOP went into the election badly divided. He was enmeshed in one scandal after another, involving bigotry and misogyny. He put little of his own vast fortune into the race, and did not match Hillary in the ground game. Despite a poor campaign, Trump appears to have best matched the mood of the country. The voters have spoken, and this is what they said: In an age when people are increasing upset with inequality—especially the power of the 1%, Trump ran on a platform of truly massive tax cuts for the elites, and tax increases for millions of working class Americans. So Trump’s victory is a sign that the GOP Congress will slash taxes on wealthy entrepreneurs to the 15% proposed by Trump. The estate tax will be abolished.”
And when I try to write the story, it just doesn’t seem to hang true. Maybe Trump will win. If so, the previous paragraph will be my election post-mortem. But I just don’t see why American voters would pick this year to slash taxes for the rich, abolish the inheritance tax, etc., etc. Is that really the mood of the country? And if Trump won then the GOP would probably control virtually all of American governance, from state legislatures to Congress to the Presidency. Does the current dysfunctional GOP seem like a party that the electorate is about to give near absolute power to?
I also believe that the only way Trump can win is with implicit support from blacks, Latinos and Bernie voters. If he can get millions of Hispanics to vote for him, despite his anti-Hispanic bigotry, and get million of blacks who voted for Obama to not vote at all, and if he can get millions of Bernie supporters to not vote for Hillary, then he can win. And oddly enough, he almost certainly can do all three of those things. Indeed I’d say all three are very likely to occur. Why? I’m not quite sure, ask the voters.”
TheMoneyIllusion » Springtime for Hitler?
Indeed, in retrospect the 2016 election was great example of Garry Wills point from years ago that campaign promises and rhetoric end up having little to no bearing on the future arc of government policy.
Confessions of a Conservative: Wills, Garry: 9780385089777: Amazon.com: Books
FN: In this vein, 2020 was an unusual election in that there was much more correspondence between what Biden said in both in the primary and the general and what he did in Office.
Then there was the Cold Open of Saturday Night Live the last Saturday before the 2016 election-this was just a few says after the Comey Letter.
SNL really did do a great thumbnail of the entire 2016 election. No matter what Trump did the media was just like ‘Ok so he pals around with KKKers but what about your emails, Secretary Clinton?”
Trump colluded with Russia? Ok but: what about your emails?
Grab them by the pussy? But what about your emails?
So the “they” was a pretty large coterie-the GOP Far Right, the MSM Savvy punditocracy, the Bernie Bro cum Tankie Far Left. And: misogynists of all stripes across various racial, ethnic, and ideological groups.
Indeed, in this book we will also look in great depth at the Tankie Far Left but what becomes clear very quickly is that it’s a profound mistake to think virulent hatred of women exists only on the Far Right. A reccuring narrative you heard a lot during the general election-starting with the Dem convention when Bernie Bros went to Philly to march arm in arm with the Trump Deplorables and chant LOCK HER UP! -from the Far Left was I’d vote for a woman just not that woman.
But what we’ve seen repeatedly since 2016 is that every woman that has moved closer to the seat of power has been Hillary Clintoned-she too has become “unlikeable” just ‘a bad candidate.’ Implicit in the bad candidate narrative is the notion that all female candidates are-bad candidates.
Because since Hillary we’ve seen the same thing happen to both Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren in 2020-incidentally my own personal first and second choice in 2020. Kamala in some sense was able to at least get to the White House in the number 2 slot-thanks in part to the trail Hillary blazed. But she has been dogged by the same toxic news coverage HRC was dogged by over 25 years. Turns out Kamala is not that woman the True Progressives would vote for either-though she ran on a very progressive agenda, including support for monthly $2000 dollar checks until after the end of the pandemic.
To be sure Harris was never trusted by the Far Left-but Warren was always supposed to have been a True Progressive. But after she made it clear she wasn’t willing to simply run as Bernie’s VP choice the Bernie Bros turned on her too. Since then they’ve completely turned on AOC too. At this point if you’re scoring at home, apparently the only progressive in actual public office the True Progressives actually like is Bernie. Everyone else is evil.
However, it was interesting to see the difference between the 2016 and the 2020 Bernie campaign. It’s notable that in 2020 Bernie’s base of voters changed in significant ways.
Later in the book we’ll look at this Far Left in more detail but what stands out first and foremost is every woman once she gains any proximity to power whatsoever becomes THAT WOMAN. As a country clearly the US remain extremely ambivalent about women in politics. In 2016 not only did Bernie get the Democratic Left-those more leftist than the average Dem voter but those Dem voters more conservative than the average Dem voter. How could this be? Pretty obviously a significant base of socially conservative Democratic voters didn’t want to vote for a woman.
In 2020 Bernie lost those voters but OTOH he did considerably better with the Hispanic vote-certainly in Nevada. Still at the end of the day what finished Bernie in 2020 was the same as what finished him in 2016-the Black vote.
After things got away from him in March 2020-much like it had in March 2016-Bernie acted quite differently as Ryan Grim notes.
He got out much faster and endorsed Biden immediately while he dragged it out in 2016 until late June then refused to endorse HRC until just a few days before the convention. To be fair, you can argue there were a number of factors that were different-the threat of Trump was clear to everyone by then-though those who didn’t realize before were largely willfully ignorant. Then there was the fact of Covid where it wasn’t safe to be having all these public debates. At the end of the day Bernie was a team player to his credit. But why wasn’t he a team player in 2016? Even keeping in mind the factors mentioned above, a big part of it is he considered Biden a friend where it’s clear he never liked Clinton very much on a personal level. There was this mutual affection and respect between Biden and Bernie based on their mutual years in the Senate. While Bernie and HRC also spent some years together in the Senate they were never like that-but why was that? The central difference isn’t hard to guess.
In the book that follows we will look at the ongoing fight for the soul of American democracy and the rearguard fight against of it as fascists and authoritarians foreign-a la Putin-and domestic, the Far Right and Far Left-who, again, PACE Caleb Maupin, Jimmy Dore, and Max Blumenthal among many others are explicitly advocating an alliance between the two-Dore literally argues for the Left partnering up with Neo Nazis and KKKers just to advocate for a $15 MW-rather than, you know, just demanding an end to the filibuster as Adam Schiff’s Senate campaign calls for. Maupin explicitly advocates a kind of “Maga Marxism”-which we were kidding…
This book then looks at both the promise of America-multiracial democracy, a future worth fighting for-and its many enemies on both the Far Right and Far Left, as well as much of the shoddy MSM punditry that keeps folks ignorant and apathetic.
It looks at the FBI-aka GOPland-along with the rest of the GOP Deep State-the Secret Service, etc. It also naturally looks at Russia as the vanguard of the worldwide movement for authoritarianism. If during the Cold war, Russia-via the Soviet Union-was the leader of the Communist International, today it’s the head of the At Right International, it’s assault on free speech rights-revealing Edward Snowden to be not a free speech hero but quite the opposite at least in terms of his actual effect on freedom of speech, expression, etc.
Finally we’ll look at the promise of America, of how we still have the chance to do something, to become something very special, indeed unprecedented in the history of nations-a genuine multi racial democracy where citizenship is not about blood or religion but based on a common creed, a common idea. But again, to get to where we need to be going we have to figure out where we’ve been and what’s gone wrong.
In tracing the various enemies of US democracy we will start with the Savvy MSM and how their Clinton Derangement Syndrome and false equivalence in 2016 enabled the election of fascism in America.