Peter Brimelow At AMREN: "We Have A Totalitarian Left In This Country"
VDARE.com editor Peter Brimelow spoke at the American Renaissance conference recently, which went off largely without incident due to the willingness of the Tennessee Park Police to enforce the law. See video below:
I’ve been away from my cellphone for about two-three minutes coming up to the podium, so can someone tell me—what he done now? Has he invaded some enemy of Israel? Has he invaded a friend of Israel? Has he arrested Jerry Brown for trying to turn California into a Sanctuary State (which is a felony—aiding illegal aliens is a felony). Has he deported Kamala Harris? We told him to on VDARE.com!
He hasn’t done anything like that? Nobody knows? Well, the day isn’t over, give him some time!
[VDARE.com note: A whole thirty-six hours later, Trump fired communications directer Anthony Scaramucci!—see James Fulford’s Scaramucci Is Now FORMER Communications Director Because He Forgot The MSM Is A Deadly Enemy To Trump.]
I think the definitive word on Trump came from the blog Steve Sailer wrote back in April:
But—it did go on, for many years. And it was very successful.
That’s how Donald Trump likes it. He spent his life on building sites. He likes chaos. So we all have to get used to it.
Now, my subject today is “Grading Trump’s Performance,” especially from my own perspective and VDARE.com’s perspective— we’re single-issue voters on the immigration issue. And this chaos is certainly irritating; it makes grading difficult. You have to see through the chaos and focus on the big picture, the emerging building.
But I’ll end the suspense: Donald Trump gets an A—for one simple reason: he’s definitely not Hillary Clinton.
As a matter of fact, he’s definitely not Jeb Bush either! So let’s make that an A+!
Bush would have added insult to injury. Cuckservative Review, and all the Coyote News talking heads would be telling us about The Conservative Case for Bush’s Amnesty/Immigration Surge. It would have been unbearable
Because an Amnesty/ Immigration Surge is absolutely what we would have gotten from Clinton. And a complete collapse of enforcement at the borders, let alone in the interior. And a massive increase in refugees (i.e., expedited, subsidized, politically favored immigrants—not refugees in the classical sense at all). She would have gone the full Merkel.
I can’t overemphasize how important this is. The 2016 election was, as Mike Anton called it, “The Flight 93 Election.” It was a desperate attempt, like those people in the plane that went down in Pennsylvania on 9/11, to get control of the flight or die. That was what had to be done. There was just no alternative.
A little while ago, I was talking to a Beltway immigration patriot (they do exist) and she was grumping about Trump not doing this or that—or actually more to the point, as I will argue, not doing it fast enough. So I eventually said to her: “What if Hillary had been elected?” She instantly said: “We’d be in hell.”
We have a Totalitarian Left in this country. We saw them outside today. And they really believed that they were all on the brink of knocking out the Historic American Nation—the American Nation as it had evolved by the time the 1965 Immigration Act, which opened the floodgates after a 50-year pause. They were going to do this final surge of Third World immigration. They were going to import enough demographic change to make their election irreversible.
And then, of course, there’s a Supreme Court. You know, the more I think about it, I can’t overstate the significance of the gay marriage decision. Regardless of the merits of the issue, the question is how it was arrived at. For the courts to find a right to homosexual marriage in the Constitution—if they can do that, they can do anything. They can do anything.
They can decide that the First Amendment doesn’t protect hate speech. And you can see the Left have begun to deploy the arguments on this, that free speech causes stress for various minorities and so on.
They could decide that the Second Amendment doesn’t have to mean that citizen have guns. They’ll say that “militia” meant the Army or something.
And I think perhaps the most significant: they can decide that the Electoral College doesn’t comport with the principle of One Man, One Vote. Or, for that matter, that the election of U.S. senators doesn’t comport with the principle of One Man, One Vote, because there’s a senator from Delaware and a senator from California and these states are vastly different in size.
They’ve already done this with the states. At one stage, the several states used to have all kinds of balancing mechanisms internally. Some of them would have Senates or they would weight the rural districts differently to try to protect the various communities against being dominated by the big cities—which is what you now see in California and Illinois. Well, that was overthrown in the 1960s in a little-noticed decision by the Warren Court.
There’s no reason why they can’t apply this to the federal elections and just simply go to a unitary state. And they mean to do that.
This problem of judicial imperialism—judge-made law, judges legislating from the bench—been developing for many years. I would trace it back to Brown vs. Board in ‘54 with the segregation decision, but maybe Sam Dickson has other ideas.
But it’s getting worse and worse. I wrote a cover story about it in Forbes 30 years ago!—I pointed out that it was judge-made law that created the tort crisis. People are able to sue for all kind of things that about 30 or 40 years earlier they hadn’t been able to sue for, not because there had been a change in the law, but simply because judges decided that the law meant something different from what it was always thought to mean. This had the most profound economic consequences.
But judicial imperialism now completely out of control. We can see this in the decisions about Trump’s executive orders about the travel ban and getting control of the refugee inflow. In effect, various Leftist judges have simply tried to seize control of immigration policy. They are right on the point of deciding that foreigners absolutely, positively have a right to emigrate to the US and that the President doesn't have the right to change his mind on the recommended number of refugees for a given year, although it’s been done before. They are right on the point of wrestling immigration policy away from the democratic control and simply writing it into the Constitution.
Their success been mixed because the Supreme Court, to an extent, has stopped them—which is why the Supreme Court choice of Gorsuch was so important. If it had been up to Hillary, we would have had another wise Latina, like Sotomayor. You remember that she said that she could make better decisions because she was Hispanic. Funnily enough, when Donald Trump said the same thing, but in reverse, about that judge who was hearing the Trump University case, that he was prejudiced because he was Mexican, the whole world fell on his head—not for the first time or the last time.
But, of course, he’s right. There are judges who rule—who legislate—on the basis of their ethnic interests. So that’s what would have happened, which is why it really matter that Trump won. And it will go on mattering.
Now Jared didn’t go into this in his introduction—but I used to be a contender! I was involved in all these Main Stream Media operations, I used to write for Commentary Magazine, I used to know all these people quite well.
The long-time editor of Commentary, Norman Podhoretz, who is like the Godfather of the neoconservative movement, was at with me at a dinner club I used to attend around about the time of the first Gulf War. He was fanatically in favor, not just of the war, but of Bush Senior’s going up to Baghdad and overthrowing Saddam Hussein. And I was puzzled by this. It’s not so much that I’m against the use of American force (in fact I think the Americans should invade Mexico) but I wanted to know what was going to happen next—after they removed Saddam.
Norman told me: “It just doesn’t matter, it just doesn’t matter. The important thing is just to get him out.” Of course, Bush I didn’t do that but Bush II did do it, resulting in the smoking ruin that we see there today.
But for Noman, that smoking ruin was a feature, as people say, not a bug. He wanted to see chaos in the area; he didn’t want to see a strong government that might possibly threaten Israel.
That’s how I feel about the situation now. The White House may be a smoking ruin—but it’s better than having Clinton there. Anything is better than having Clinton there.
Well, that’s the negative case for Trump. I guess I have go on and to try to grade his actual performance in office.
Does anyone here speak Latin? [One—John Derbyshire]. Aegrotat. It’s a degree that you can get at Oxford if you are sick on examination day. In other words, they will let you pass the examination if they think you would have passed it anyway. They just don’t give you a grade. And that’s more or less what I would do with Trump.
It’s not that he’s sick. It quite puzzles me when people go around saying that Trump is mentally unbalanced when it’s quite clear that it’s Hillary Clinton is mentally unbalanced. She has what psychiatrists call “Narcissistic Entitlement Syndrome.”
If you read this new book Shattered, about the Clinton campaign, you see that repeatedly when she lost primaries and, above all, when she lost the election, she was consumed by “rage”—which strikes me as a strange reaction. Depression, sadness, I can see. But anger? What does she have to be angry about?
But she was angry and I think she really is unstable. Her performance since the election has been scandalous. You realize that something like 56% of all Democrats think the Russians actually got into the voting machines and fiddled with them. That’s what they think happened.
It's not surprising that that guy went and shot up Republican baseball team. They think it was literally stolen. She’s never been made to be responsible for that.
As I said, it’s not that Trump is ill—but the country is. It’s in crisis. Its institutions are buckling under the stress of this irrepressible conflict between the Historic American Nation on the one hand and what we call “Anti-America” at VDARE.com on the other. This is the Democratic coalition that is fundamentally made up of minorities and immigrants and is struggling to take control of the country. There are two nations warring in the bosom of one state and the institutions are buckling under the strain.
Plus, Trump really was a revolution. It was a hostile takeover of the party. He actually tried to placate the Establishment after he took over. That’s why he chose Pence as his vice president, which may prove to be a fatal mistake because it makes impeachment more attractive to them. That’s why he had Reince Priebus in there. But the GOP Establishment is not reconciled to him.
And, of course, above it’s a hostile takeover of the entire state, of the permanent government, which does not want to go in the direction that he’s talking about in any way. It wants to continue immigration. It wants to continue to intervene militarily. It wants to have free trade.
One thing about Trump: his campaign was a high concept campaign. There were lot of ideas in it, actually. They just weren’t ideas that the Main Stream Media and the ruling class liked.
And, finally, another reason why I think he deserves an aegrotat: the President of the United States is an extremely weak office. It’s not like you are the prime minister in a parliamentary system where, by definition, you control the legislative branch because you’ve got control of the executive branch. That’s how you get control of the executive branch, by controlling the legislative branch. He’s not like that at all. A president can’t just snap his fingers and order up bills.
I compared him last year, for those of you who were here, to King Kong in the old movie. You know, the curtain goes back and there’s King Kong on the stage in this huge iron frame, roaring.
But King Kong eventually did break free.
So we’re in the very early stages of judging what his performance is going to be. He’s not even staffed up yet. He’s remarkably slow at staffing up. This is actually good for us at VDARE.com because we have a number of writers who we thought would be in the Administration by now. (They’re all pseudonymous, by the way< for the benefit of the journalists here). But by and large, they are not in the Administration yet, although nobody else is either. It’s not like anyone else has been chosen; he hasn’t chosen anybody.
But eventually he will choose people and he’ll get the show on the road.
The bad news about Trump is that he’s not a professional politician. That’s why we see him put his foot in his mouth all the time. But that’s the good news, too, because no professional politician would ever have taken the right risks that he did.
You see this in his attacks on Jeff Sessions. From any normal politician, it would mean something if he was doing that. In his case, I think he’s just blowing off steam. He’s irritated by the situation, so he blows off steam. He roars. I think it is quite possible that Sessions is going to be Attorney General for the rest of the Administration.
I think!
But Trump has, I must admit, blown steam off about Sessions for a long time, and there’s a reason for this. This Russian hacking investigation is extremely serious.
You know, maybe Sessions shouldn’t have recused himself. On the other hand, maybe Trump shouldn’t have appointed this guy, Rosenstein as Deputy Attorney General. I can’t find anybody who understands how this happened. This guy was a career prosecutor, but he’s a career prosecutor in the Obama administration. There were very few people who were holdovers from the Bush administration to the Obama administration. He was held over in the Obama administration for a reason, which was that he was fulfilling their agenda in Baltimore. So there’s obviously something wrong with him. That’s the weak link. I don’t see why that was done.
However, I must say that I think we should step back from the partisan furor here. We have to admit that this Russian meddling in this election really did go beyond the pale.
There are somewhere between 12 to 20 million illegal Russian immigrants in the country. The Russians have a score of consulates supporting them. The Russian government has actually paid for a cell phone app to help these Russian illegals if they are picked up by ICE. Furthermore, Russia has changed its citizenship law. It’s openly calling on its legal immigrants here to be a Fifth Column acting in Russia’s interest. They can be both Russian citizens and American citizens. A Russian president, a few years ago, spoke to them and said, “You’re Russians who live the in US.”
Oh, wait a minute. I got that wrong.
It’s not Russia. it’s Israel!—I mean, Mexico!
Well, obviously, I don’t take this Russian stuff seriously. I think it’s quite increasingly obvious that most people don’t, even among Democrats.
But, I do take the Special Prosecutor seriously. The phenomena of a Special Prosecutor is like a Frankenstein monster. It’s not constrained by the usual checks and balances. It’s arguably unconstitutional. In fact, Antonin Scalia made a very powerful argument about it, saying that the Special Prosecutor phenomenon deprived of the president of exclusive control of the executive power; and he also warned that the law could be abused. He said: “I fear the Court has permanently encumbered the Republic with an institution that will do great harm." That’s what’s happening.
You know, we already have a prosecutorial abuse problem in this country. Americans are already in a situation where prosecutors can and do put anyone in jail if they really want to. If the federal government wants to you put in jail, it can. Paul Craig Roberts wrote a book about this nearly 20 years ago. Sam Dickson gave an excellent speech, I guess two years ago, about Martha Stewart, who was jailed not for insider trading, but because she “lied to a policeman.” In other words, she foolishly spoke to the investigators without a lawyer and answered questions that they could decide to show weren’t quite true.
The Special Prosecutor makes the situation much, much worse. He has a limitless ambit. He can go after anything he wants. He has a limitless budget. He can subpoena anybody he wants. It’s a walking perjury trap, as Ann Coulter called it.
You know, Bill Clinton certainly perjured himself over having sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky. But this was actually unearthed by a special prosecutor, Ken Starr, who had been appointed to look into a completely different scandal, the Whitewater real estate speculation, which actually they never found anything wrong in. But he was rooting around and eventually he was able to get Clinton under oath on this subject.
So the Mueller investigation is extremely dangerous for Trump. It’s like a parasite on the presidency, it’s like a tapeworm or something. Mueller can harass Trump and his family until he finds something or until he gets someone in a perjury trap. Or he just gets stuff that he then just leaks to the press, like Trump’s tax returns.
Pat Buchanan has a new book out on the Nixon presidency, which in many ways is extremely instructive if you’re thinking about the situation that Trump is in. I wrote a long article about it about a month ago. Pat said in his column this week: “Reports of Trump’s frustration and rage suggest that he knows he has been maneuvered, partly by his own mistakes, into a kill box from which there may be no bloodless exit.”
I gather Pat thinks there is no exit, which is quite depressing.
Trump has to get out of this. There’s a huge showdown coming. I don’t know how he’s going to do it, but he’s got to do it. So you can expect a real drama over that.
But it’s important to realize that whether or not Mueller’s fired, it’s always been the case that the Democrats were going to impeach Trump if they got control of the House. Our James Fulford wrote an article in April of last year recounting all of the various speculations of how Trump could be impeached that were going around in the Left wing media. This was before he’d even been nominated, let alone elected. They were planning to impeach him back them. They don’t need evidence for impeachment. It’s basically like a vote of no-confidence. It’s not a judicial proceeding. Otherwise Clinton would have been convicted, because he was guilty as hell of perjury. The Senate Democrats just decided to not pay attention to it.
And impeachment is not the end of the world. That’s what Clinton proved. In Nixon’s case, he was persuaded to resign before he was impeached, they broke his nerve. But, Clinton proved that wasn’t necessary. Nixon could be shamed; Clinton could not be shamed. I don’t think Donald Trump can be shamed either.
They need 60 votes in the Senate to convict him. So that’s what all this mau-mauing and yowling and hollering is about. They’re trying to break the GOP’s will. And, of course, the GOP is notoriously cowardly.
We think at VDare that demystifying impeachment is a great idea. There ought to be a lot more impeachments, not fewer impeachments. It’s a way for the democratic process to get control of the judicial branch, which has become intolerable.
I thought Obama should have been impeached for his two Executive Amnesties. We wrote a lot about that. And even some friends were worried about