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The Hit Squad
Do not make yourself a target for the Clintons. This has been a rule for as long as we’ve known them. If you get in their sights, bad things happen to you. The latest case in point is Scott Adams, writer of the Dilbert comic strip who has turned his thoughts to blogging about the Trump phenomenon. According to Adams, because he has been writing things favorable to Trump (something he would likely contest as he would claim that he was merely describing what he was seeing based on his own experience and training) he has seen his usual schedule of speaking engagements dropped. This is rather similar to the usual practice of late for universities to disinvite conservative speakers. Blogging on the election the way he has, has cost him financially.
As something of a semi-serious running joke, months ago Adams had endorsed Hillary for president for (as he put it) “my own personal safety” – this on the grounds that Hillary and the Democrats were painting Trump as a fascist while stirring race hatred, which all meant that if Trump did win there would be unprecedented post election violence. Endorsing Hillary would therefore both deflect some attacks now, and would hopefully shield him if she lost. Last week he changed his endorsement to Trump, in no small part for financial reasons:
The bottom line is that under Clinton’s plan, estate taxes would be higher for anyone with estates over $5 million(ish). I call this a confiscation tax because income taxes have already been paid on this money. In my case, a dollar I earn today will be taxed at about 50% by various government entities, collectively. With Clinton’s plan, my remaining 50 cents will be taxed again at 50% when I die. So the government would take 75% of my earnings from now on.
Yes, I can do clever things with trusts to avoid estate taxes. But that is just welfare for lawyers. If the impact of the estate tax is nothing but higher fees for my attorney, and hassle for me, that isn’t good news either.
You can argue whether an estate tax is fair or unfair, but fairness is an argument for idiots and children. Fairness isn’t an objective quality of the universe. I oppose the estate tax because I was born to modest means and worked 7-days a week for most of my life to be in my current position. (I’m working today, Sunday, as per usual.) And I don’t want to give 75% of my earnings to the government. (Would you?)
Things have changed for Adams since then. One of Adams’s consistent observations has been that while Clinton has portrayed Trump as a fascist and his supporters as violent racists, especially as there has been a notable trend of violence at the fringes of Trump rallies, the real violence has nearly always been perpetrated by Clinton supporters. Last week Adams asked his Twitter followers to send him examples of such violence, and that was when things escalated against Adams (emphasis mine):
This weekend I got “shadowbanned” on Twitter. It lasted until my followers noticed and protested. Shadowbanning prevents my followers from seeing my tweets and replies, but in a way that is not obvious until you do some digging.
Why did I get shadowbanned?
Beats me.
But it was probably because I asked people to tweet me examples of Clinton supporters being violent against peaceful Trump supporters in public. I got a lot of them. It was chilling.
Late last week my Twitter feed was invaded by an army of Clinton trolls (it’s a real thing) leaving sarcastic insults and not much else on my feed. There was an obvious similarity to them, meaning it was organized.
At around the same time, a bottom-feeder at Slate wrote a hit piece on me that had nothing to do with anything. Except obviously it was politically motivated. It was so lame that I retweeted it myself. The timing of the hit piece might be a coincidence, but I stopped believing in coincidences this year.
I get that Never Trump members here are unpersuaded by arguments against Hillary on things like the Supreme Court. What I do not understand, though, is why they are unpersuaded by the simple observation that the Clintons (and the Democrats) actually do target their critics and work to destroy their careers and their lives.
I see many arguments of one sort or another that argue that Trump must lose now so that Conservatism (a term at this point of which I am increasingly leery) can spend the next 4 years rebuilding, and that Hillary must be so obviously terrible a president that we should be guaranteed a win in 2020. Yet this fact remains – people who cross the Clintons often find their lives made suddenly very difficult. Why is there such confidence that we would be allowed to even make the case against her? Must we have an additional 4 years of an executive inflicting the IRS on political opponents? Must we have an additional 4 years of the administration orchestrating with political activists to smear writers? Why the confidence that in the next 4 years the Republicans will be allowed to rebuild without intimidation?
Finally I often see the Never Trump members here use some variant on the argument “if Trump is the solution, then the Republic is already beyond repair.” It should be realized that in many respects our Republic is indeed damaged beyond repair. A party that organizes national smear campaigns to discredit, humiliate, and ruin the careers of private citizens who dare criticize their operations, that is aided and abetted by tech companies like Twitter, is a party that has already decided the Republic and its governmental limitations do not apply to themselves. Hillary’s embarrassing incompetence on national and international issues is bad enough (Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were also terrible), but the willingness to destroy the lives of critics and attempt to silence enemies should terrify us all. Hillary has attempted to brand Trump as a fascist, but it is Hillary and the Democrats who are organizing armies to smash windows, burn cities, and riot. It is they who are running the hit squads. It is they who are the fascists.
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Published in General
Given the outsized presence of Fox News on the right I’d say that right wing vindictiveness is pretty large, well organized and uses similar methods.
Why am I having flashbacks to the Paris newspaper cartoon? Do we even have a free press anymore, or real journalists who dig and scrape to find the truth, no matter what side it falls on? If you are ok with the Saul Alinsky view of life, the Clintons or Obama are perfect. Trump has issues, but either way, we are going to have problems. Don’t depend on government.
I wouldn’t say it or anything like it under ordinary circumstances.
If you read the comments beneath that video, the sort of bile that is on display there deserves that manner of condemnation. That Trump is unwilling or unable to say to his followers that the sort of rhetoric on display there is unacceptable says unfortunate things about him and his perception of politics.
Didn’t Jonah address this on one of the podcasts? I think the reason is much less due to malice than market. I think he said something to the effect that the news channels are trying to find people to pit Hillary supporters vs. Trump supporters. There was simply not much of a market these days for anti-Hillary/anti-Trump conservatives.
I’d hardly call responding to specific arguments of theirs (specifically the two points that Trump must lose to let the party rebuild, and if Trump is truly the answer then the Republic is already done for) as “taking shots”. If I presented those arguments unfairly then it would be one matter, but I’m simply saying I understand those arguments yet disagree.
Of course it’s not “organized” by the Clinton campaign, any more than Thomas Becket’s murder was organized by Henry II. Back during the first Clinton administration a lot of Democrats sacrificed their intelligence in order not to be able to understand this.
If everyone spent time condemning comments on the internet we’d be busy doing nothing else.
There’s a theory the guys at Penny Arcade call “John Gabriel’s Greater Internet [Commenter] Theory” (no relation to our own @exjon but I’d bet he agrees) about people on the internet that they published in 2004 – I’ve never seen anything to contradict it.
Would it be unkind of me to mention innuendo and supposition here?
He could have been being politic – given Ailes’s decamping Fox News after the scandal to the Trump administration (which doesn’t look good either) his being excluded from Fox News due to pro-Trump sentiment at the network makes sense to me.
You cannot be serious. Ok, there is Fox News. Although I would say that National Review, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, The Federalist etc…. also have a presence. I do notice Bill Kristol is still out there to expound his never Trump stance on Network television, so does George Will and Peggy Noonan (I like these people just pointing out the Never Trump stance is not as detrimental as you are trying to portray)
The left is a much bigger presence. From the majority of the media, Hollywood, Academia, the Government, Silicon Valley and all the George Soros backed entities. A few very nasty trolls on Twitter is not on the same scale, as the left
You beat me to it since I’m trying to be good.
That could be, but the Democrats have trillions of dollars and control of large portions of the economy in order to make it effective. Government workers can do this on government time, using government resources. They control most of the news media and the academy. The Democrats have a multi-trillion-dollar hate machine at their disposal. The right would struggle to put together a billion-dollar hate machine.
That Fox News has acted that was is fact. That it was directed by the Trump campaign would be supposition and innuendo – I never made such a claim.
To address these arguments directly, it’s not a matter of saying that Trump “must lose” in order for the party to rebuild – it’s that Trump can’t win. We, as a party, have made a colossal blunder in nominating him – “Starting a land war in Asia” colossal.
We are going to have to spend not just the next cycle but probably the next couple of cycles begging the American electorate to forgive us as a movement and as a party for having subjected them to this – not merely Trump, who will disappear as flatulence in the breeze, but for failing to produce an even marginally acceptable alternative and as a result, the default will be to elect this soulless lich-queen as President.
The people of this country will hold us in disdain for our failure in this regard for much longer than the imagined failures of budget crises and government shutdowns.
And they have affect Adams how? He lost one speech? Got shadowbanned by twitter Hardly the Leftist Barbarians massing at the gates of Rome.
As for the twitter shadowbanning…well I know at least one man is skeptical:
I should also add:
If I didn’t want to debate with y’all about these things, I either wouldn’t have posted, or I’d have done some gauntlet flinging at the end, spiced with moral condemnation at NTers, all baked in a cake of smug pudding (with plenty of fat plumbs soaked in brandy). I disagree (strongly) with the NT position, I hope to argue them out of it, but I neither dispute the sincerity of their positions nor censure their personal morals for holding them.
I tried to delete the comment(haven’t figured out how to).
Since it got out there, I apologize to Majestyk, my comment was out of line.
More importantly (although I did not know it at the time) my comment was wrong: “Maj has gone on FoxNews, under his real name no less”
My bad!
I am merely pointing out that the scale of power to silence people is far bigger on the left then the right. Which is what you seemed to be arguing that the right is just as powerful. Unless I’m wrong, if I am please clarify.
Scott Adams is a big boy and expects people to react irrationally, I don’t think he’s upset about this. It likely just reinforces his postion that all people are irrational.
Well, to be fair that’s a slightly different argument than I usually encounter. Again, I disagree, this time on the grounds that the GOP had already done a fair job damaging itself over the last 20 years. It would have taken Hillary about 5 minutes to have turned (for instance) Cruz into a racist religious zealot just due to the GOP’s continued tone deafness on racial issues.
The point Austin is that the hands of many people who complain about Hillary Clinton’s online or media empire and their intimidation of ideological opponents are just as filthy.
Moreover, Trump’s effect hasn’t been to elevate the dialogue, it’s been to coarsen it – and to reduce the right to backbiting as a result.
In my opinion a large part of it is our consultants who are hapless or hopeless.
The idea that the candidates could win a fact-based, reasoned national campaign against a corrupt Democrat who spouts talking points, deflects any questions, has a terrible record on the issues and who’s been in the public eye for 30 years while damaging themselves every time they speak was disproven in the primary when they all lost to Trump.
Still unbelievable. If I woke up tomorrow and found out this was all a dream it would make more sense to me.
No argument from me, although I would protest lumping @skipsul in that group of complainers about Hillary’s online cohort.
Quote: I get that Never Trump members here are unpersuaded by arguments against Hillary on things like the Supreme Court. What I do not understand, though, is why they are unpersuaded by the simple observation that the Clintons (and the Democrats) actually do target their critics and work to destroy their careers and their lives.
Er, no. We are unpersuaded that the vote over whether we put in office a Narcissistic 4 year old who favors Putin actions and strategies and killing NATO so that buddy Putin has an easier time of it re-annexing Estonia, who uses the National Enquirer as his newspaper of record, and who accuses a prior president of active treason is fit for the office, ought to be based on whether the Clintons are mean to Adams, et al. Where is the surprise here? He knew what guns would be aimed at him if he opposed Hillary.
It is axiomatic that Clinton targets critics and endeavors to destroy their careers and lives (as Trump also does, albeit less successfully, probably because he does not think it through are actually have a, you know, workable strategy). Hillary and her cohorts should- please, lord of the universe- disappear. But the lefty Trump is as bad over all, SCOTUS notwithstanding- even if he actually took time off from pushing universal free day care to appoint a decent person.
We just need to get over this nightmare and tread water for 4 years regardless of who “wins”.
You’re right – but Cruz, for all of his caviling and calculating pretension is nonetheless a disciplined politician who would have skinned Hillary in that debate and would have continued the skinning in the upcoming two.
At least we would have enjoyed the fleeting benefits of having a natural politician in this role which means that for once we would have had the advantage on that front against the flat-footed and screechy Hillary.
How dare you! I resemble that remark!
“Many” need not include “Skipsul” who is my pal and I certainly wouldn’t tar him as a Hillary supporter.
I understand his reluctant Trump position and given that he lives in Ohio, do not envy the difficulty of his position.
It’s fine. No need to apologize. I don’t exactly try to get drinks in bars with my “fame,” if you know what I mean…
The stuff I do here is far more important than a 2-minute hit on Fox – and I’m far more proud of it in the final analysis.
He says that but if Marco had ended up winning the primaries you know Maj would have taken credit ;)
And he would have been going after the All Star panel. Screw Jonah.
The future is an undiscovered country, and I’ll be there staking my claim should it come to pass. :D