RUTHFULLY YOURS

The term “alt-right,” which nobody had heard of until the unexpected emergence and rise of Donald Trump in the U.S. presidential election campaign, has become all the rage, literally and figuratively. Indeed, it is now the angry go-to explanation in every analysis of the Republican candidate’s ostensibly miraculous victory on November 8. And it is the key buzzword of the fever-pitched brouhaha surrounding Trump’s appointment of Breitbart executive chairman Steve Bannon as his chief strategist.

One the main arguments against Bannon — at times a self-described promoter of the alt-right message — is that he, like the neo-Nazi Trump-supporting trolls on Twitter, is an anti-Semite. Though this is patent nonsense, as the evidence raised to prove it is flimsy at best, it is one of those labels that enables both liberals and anti-Trump conservatives to kill two birds with one stone: Bannon and the man who elevated him to a highly important and coveted post.

The intellectual pitfall for mainstream conservatives here is plain. Whatever their position on Bannon, they are aware that Trump’s stunning victory not only in the race for the Oval Office, but in that of both houses of Congress — cannot be attributed to a fringe group of right-wingers with no formal homogeneous ideology. Within this loose category are white supremacists who hate Jews, blacks, gays and any member of the Right who has a nuanced view of everything from immigration to abortion. But these are a tiny minority in America as a whole, and played less of a role in the election of Trump than they and their detractors would love to imagine.

Others who are lumped into that label are people — like myself — who consider the decline of American power to be a danger both domestically and internationally, and desperately wanted the new style of Democrats — those who radicalized the party of Scoop Jackson into oblivion — out of office. We are right-wingers who believe in individual enterprise and ideological freedom. We believe that the federal government should not be dictating the rules of personal moral engagement or funding our choices. We want academia to be a place for the advanced study of humankind in all its facets and history — a space for the education and maturation of each new generation of young adults who will be faced with the often unpleasant task of making their way in the world with nothing but a set of tools in their satchel to give them a sense of their otherwise good fortune to be doing this in the United States, and not in Iran, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela or Mexico, to name but a few examples.

Contrary to the MSM pack’s pitch of the week, there is no “disarray” inside Donald Trump’s transition team, no “Stalinesque” purges, and most certainly no successful insinuation of “adults” (Deep State operatives) into the list of early major appointees. They are all excellent.
Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions as Trump’s attorney general, Kansas Rep. Mike Pompeo as his chief of the CIA, and retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn as the national security adviser will be loyal team players who share the incoming President’s vision of America’s future in general, and her true geostrategic interests in particular. The discredited MSM’s hysterics notwithstanding, the former two will be duly confirmed by the GOP controlled Senate. (Flynn needs no confirmation.)

Sessions (69)—the first Senator to support Trump last February—said he was honored to “enthusiastically embrace President-elect Trump’s vision for ‘one America,’ and his commitment to equal justice under law.” To Sessions this will mean no amnesty, no “dreamers,” no “sanctuaries,” and no exceptions. He knows that illegal aliens have no constitutional rights, and he will act upon that knowledge. After that Jihadist’s gay club slaughter in Orlando last June he pointed out—en passant—that more than 90% of recent Muslim immigrants are on food stamps and almost 70% on cash welfare. A good man. He has “sparked controversy” indeed, but only within the devastated ruins of the Duopoly. He will breezily sail through the nomination process (and forget his alleged “racist remarks”): Even Ted Cruz (a rumored rival for the post) called his nomination “great news for all of us who revere the Constitution and the rule of law.”

Mike Pompeo, top-of-the-class West Point valedictorian and a Harvard Law School graduate, was a beneficiary of the Tea Party 2010 midterm blitz. He is skeptical of the Iran nuclear deal (a minor flaw) who knows the score on the September 2011 Benghazi affair (a major insight into the Deep State’s self-defeating shenanigans). Pompeo will not fine-tune intelligence analysis to conform with the Beltway “foreign policy community” imperial consensus. He will let the pros do their job: Had they been able to do so in 2002-2003, there would have been no Iraq disaster. He is, of course, another “troubling” and “controversial” choice as far as the losers are concerned, but that does not matter any longer. He will be confirmed.

(JTA) — Eric Greitens, a former Navy SEAL whose seven military awards include the Bronze Star, has become the first Jewish governor of Missouri.

Greitens, 42, a Republican, also is a former Rhodes scholar and the founder of The Mission Continues, a nonprofit that helps veterans integrate themselves back into their communities through volunteer work.

On Tuesday, Greitens — who emphasized he would rid the state capital, Jefferson City, of “bad ethics” — defeated Democrat Chris Koster with 51 percent of the vote. His opponent, the state’s attorney general, received 45 percent.

“Tonight, we did more than win an election; we restored power to the people and we took our state back!” Greitens told supporters at a hotel in Chesterfield, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.

A former Democrat, Greitens positioned himself as a conservative who wasn’t a “career politician.” It was his first run for office.

“I became a conservative because I believe that caring for people means more than just spending taxpayer money; it means delivering results,” he wrote in an opinion piece for Fox News in July 2015.

Greitens, a Purple Heart recipient, served in Iraq from 2003 to 2007. His fourth book, “Resilience: Hard-Won Wisdom for Living a Better Life” — a collection of inspirational letters to a fellow Navy SEAL struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder — was published in March 2015.

Donald Trump’s election is above all else a rebellion of the voters against identity politics enforced by political correctness, and it opens the way to a new politics of moderate levels of immigration, patriotic assimilation, and, in foreign policy, the defense of U.S. sovereignty. In the past few months, Trump put together a winning electoral coalition that stressed the unity and common interests of all Americans across the full spectrum of policy, from immigration to diplomacy.

Because of Trump’s electoral success, this combination of policies rooted in the national interest and patriotism has suddenly begun to sound like common sense. That was not so only yesterday, when political correctness made it hard even to examine such ideas as “multiculturalism.” In February, David Gelernter stated that the “havoc” that political correctness “has wreaked for 40 years [has been made] worse by the flat refusal of most serious Republicans to confront it.” Indeed, he noted, “only Trump has the common sense to mention the elephant in the room. Naturally he is winning.” Defeating political correctness — or, in positive terms, expanding real freedom of speech — made it possible to raise other issues that worried the voters but that a bland bipartisan consensus pushed to the sidelines.

Once that happened, it became clear that the room was simply packed with elephants: multiculturalism, diversity, bilingualism, identity politics, political correctness itself, and much more, extending to the wilder shores of gender politics. All of these were involved in the progressive project of “fundamentally transforming” America. All of them acquired corporate and establishment support almost magically. But the major driver of this project was mass immigration without assimilation. Since the fight over the Gang of Eight immigration bill in 2013, patriotic and populist opposition to amnesty and to increases in low-skilled immigration has intensified. But Republicans in general, and presidential candidates in particular, were late to the party. Except for Senator Jeff Sessions, who led the fight in Congress, and Donald Trump, who did so in the primaries, professional Republicans at all levels — donors, consultants, candidates, and incumbents — were bullied away from raising the issue, for fear of being thought unrespectable. Even some conservatives felt the same.

And then Trump’s bold grasp of the immigration issue propelled him to the GOP’s presidential nomination. Though other issues are important here, no other single one explains his rise as clearly or as simply. So conservatives had (and have) to deal with it.

In its relatively brief life, American conservatism has been built on three groups: economic conservatives (fiscal restraint, limited government); social conservatives (faith, family values); and national conservatives (immigration, law and order, the social fabric — i.e., national cohesion as well as national security). All of these factions are the grandchildren of the early years of National Review: Hayekian libertarians, Kirkian traditionalists, and Burnhamite nationalists concerned at times with national strategy, at others with combating national decay. All are key to it.

While Hollywood celebrities, professional athletes, tenured professors, and fainthearted college students nationwide continue to react to Donald Trump’s presidential election with anger, bewilderment, bouts of weeping, and illiterate tweets, the core leaders of the political Left are already busy planning how they will seek to deligitimize and destroy Trump’s presidency before it even gets off the ground.

The first major effort in that direction occurred this week in Washington’s luxurious Mandarin Oriental Hotel, where a group of super-wealthy leftist funders known as the Democracy Alliance sponsored a three-day, closed-door meeting attended by the multi-billionaire George Soros, the leaders of many left-wing activist groups and labor unions, and Congressional luminaries like Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren, and Keith Ellison. Over the past decade, the Democracy Alliance has given at least $500 million to pro-Democrat and leftist causes. High on the list of priorities at its Washington conference was a discussion of how to derail Trump’s “100-day plan,” which the Alliance characterizes as “a terrifying assault on President Obama’s achievements — and our progressive vision for an equitable and just nation.”

In a recent email to his allies and donors, Democracy Alliance president Gara LaMarche offered a clear indication of where the Democrats plan to direct their attention and resources over the next few years. Specifically, he said that this week’s conference would focus on assessing “what steps we will take together to … take back power, beginning in the states in 2017 and 2018.” Raj Goyle, a Democratic activist who is also involved with the Democracy Alliance, concurred that “progressive donors and organizations need to immediately correct the lack of investment in state and local strategies.”

Let that sink in: State and local … State and local … State and local.

I’m beginning this commentary on the recent assaults on Steve Bannon by quoting my response to questions that a CNN-Digital reporter asked me concerning President-elect Trump’s friend and adviser:

There’s no indication that Steve Bannon, the Breitbart executive and Donald Trump adviser, who has been characterized as a white nationalist, is a racist or anti-Semite. Bannon is not a white identitarian or race realist. He comes from the world of Washington politics and journalism, not white identity politics. Although I don’t know the man, I doubt Bannon hangs out with people who burn crosses on other people’s lawns.

I expressed this view, more or less, not only to CNN-Digital. I also expressed it in a phone-call marathon to representatives of a Danish daily and the Jewish Forward and, in an hour and a half German conversation, with an editor of the German conservative weekly Junge Freiheit. In all these exchanges I had to answer the question of whether Steve Bannon was in fact an anti-Semite and racist, a judgment that was coming from, among others, such exemplary American “conservatives” as Glenn Beck, Jonah Goldberg, and writers for the Wall Street Journal. I was also asked whether as the co-inventor of the term “Alternative Right,” which has now been shortened to “Altright,” I could tell if Bannon, who likes the term in question, enjoys the company of “white nationalists.”

I tried to explain that the exceedingly elastic term “Altright” has been claimed by a number of groups that belong to the non-establishment Right. All those on the Right who are at war with the GOP establishment and neoconservative politics and who are combatting PC with particular ferocity have embraced the designation “Altright.” This is especially true of Millennials who scorn establishmentarian positions. But it’s not at all clear to me that those who write for Bannon’s website publication, some of whom are Orthodox Jews, have much to do with white identitarians who also use the term “Altright.” I would doubt that these writers go out to drink with the Philonazi blogger Matt Heimbach, who also claims the Altright moniker.