Update: Matt Bruenig explains what happened this weekend. 

Michael Tracey raises an interesting question. 

Keith Ellison’s loss is noteworthy for a number of reasons, many of them unrelated to the fact that his victorious opponent will be the first self-identifying Hispanic to preside over the Democratic National Committee. Yes, ethnicity/race did play a pivotal role in this intra-party election, but not in the way that the mainstream media and Democratic shills would have you believe. Perez’s victory is not so much a case of Democrats implicitly rebuking President Trump and his purportedly anti-latino immigration policies as Barack Obama’s man on the inside once again stepping on the Bernie Bros.

The party hatchet-man who did so much to pave the way for Hillary Clinton’s disastrous candidacy, crafting the message which social justice warriors and feminists gleefully vomited at Bernie Sanders and his backers in the Democratic primary, is now in a position to run the Democratic Party. The former President who has done so much to divide his own party, which continues to be riven by the parallel political institutions he created, now has his own Machiavelli steering the course of the DNC.

This is not only a ratification of the open borders, corporatist, elitist vision which animated the Hillary Clinton campaign-progressives be damned-it is yet another slap in the face of African-Americans, i.e. the foundation of the contemporary Democratic Party. How do woke individuals continue to reconcile their support for Barack Obama with the concrete policies and decisions made by a man who, beyond empty gestural politics, has done absolutely nothing for the black community? To the contrary, the legacy of the 44th President is one of neglect and indifference towards the people most responsible for helping him make history.

We have just witnessed an elite cross-section of Democrats from around the country reject someone who is literally a black Muslim in favor of a Brown alum who’s whiter than Steve Bannon, and whose campaign manager would fit in perfectly at a Huffington Post editorial meeting. Don’t expect national Democrats to curtail their moral preening and sanctimony as we enter the Perez  Era. Just as we’re forced to endure lectures attacking this country from a smarmy talking head for The Reconquista whose fame and fortune were given to him by Americans, we will now experience four years of privileged leftists telling us why white people need to check their privilege. Apparently, the new head of the Dems seems to agree that white people are entitled to fewer rights based upon their skin color.

I can’t wait until 2020.

Just to give you a rough summary of what I thought of the first debate, here are a few rather lengthy observations:

Donald Trump dominated the first 20 minutes to half hour of the encounter. Focusing primarily upon trade, the one public policy he’s immersed himself in-and has a mastery of-played to his strong suit. It also highlighted the stunning hypocrisy at the core of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Trumpeting her opposition to CAFTA merely served to emphasize her political opportunism, as this stance was crafted expressly with the purpose of securing her left flank in any future Democratic contest. Supporting one of President Bush’s signature foreign policies would have made her path to victory in 2008 that much more difficult. We should recall that Barack Obama was not on her political radar at the time.

Likewise, her opposition to TTP-a pact she enthusiastically promoted as Secretary of State-was born of political opportunism, not genuine conviction. Even without the surprisingly successful Sanders campaign, endorsing a plan which was almost universally opposed by organized labor-the backbone of the Democratic Party even in its current corporatized, Clintonian shell-could have proved fatal to her presidential ambitions. Her labored attempt at triangulation, combined with Trump’s implicit appeal to disenchanted supporters of her primary opponent, was unquestionably the highlight of the debate from his perspective.

Unfortunately, the discipline and preparation Trump exhibited during the beginning of this debate was squandered over the course of the next hour. We needn’t rehash the explicitly stacked nature of this event, which might as well have been hosted by a Democratic partisan and has been explored in detail throughout the conservative blogosphere over the past 2 days. We all knew beforehand-as Trump should have known-that Lester Holt is not an impartial referee so much as an active participant in the media’s universal quest to install Hillary Clinton in the Oval Office-even as they attempt to delegitimize this self-evident fact.

Even so, Trump seemed at a loss as to how to combat this two-headed attack during the actual debate. Lester Holt’s contrived attempt at connecting the irrelevant Birther issue to the parlous state of American race relations is a perfect example of how Trump failed to seize the initiative. The correct response to this tendentious line of attack was to refuse to play a hand with the stacked deck given to him by the moderator. He should have pointed out this is simply a Democratic talking point crafted with the purpose of arresting his growing popularity among black voters, which has absolutely no relevance to any domestic policy even tangentially connected to race.

While Trump deserves credit for highlighting the grim body count piling up in the city where President Obama made his political bones, as well as the threat posed to African-Americans by our government’s lax immigration policies, he gave more substance to this inane discussion than was necessary, reliving his own involvement in a completely irrelevant issue which has no purpose other than its use as a cudgel against the 1 candidate despised by the fourth estate. Trump could have used this opportunity to simultaneously highlight the bleak prospects of African-American males-who have been shortchanged by our first black President-and the insularity of our wretched journalistic establishment.

By contrast, Hillary Clinton had very few unforced errors. While she didn’t do anything to change her public image, i.e. that of a viscerally unlikable, overly scripted, opportunistic career politician, she didn’t step on any land mines either. She came across as a technocratic, seemingly competent liberal Democrat. She managed to persuasively advance the argument that Donald Trump, the anti-thesis of Bushism and country club Republican virtues, was simply a reincarnation of George W. Bush on tax policy. And that she, a woman desperately trying to attach herself to the Bush family, is somehow an agent of change. Trump rightly pointed out the economic stagnation of the past 8 years, which has nothing to do with the Bush clan, but dropped the ball by not explicitly pointing out that the Bush and Clinton families are part of the same circle of elites which have run this country into the ground over the past 3 decades.

More importantly from Clinton’s perspective, she avoided casting herself as the the candidate of social justice fanatics, despite pandering to them relentlessly throughout this campaign-going so far as to write an open letter to Ella Dawson, otherwise known as herpes girl. The only departures from this appeal to normality were an aside where she accused our country of engaging in systemic racism and her Jezebelesque complaint that Donald Trump likes attractive women. While I’m sure the latter played well with her base of feminist, baby boomer female voters, it also highlighted the fact that she’s alienated from the concerns of anyone who doesn’t belong to the coalition of the fringes, particularly working class white men.

The Alicia Machado exchange is illuminating for other reasons, including its almost perfect distillation of the central flaw in the reasoning of open borders propagandists. Namely, that we need the millions of people who have been imported from the third world over the past half-century. We are told repeatedly that these immigrants or illegal aliens are essential to our functioning as a republic, yet the men and women who serve as poster children for this policy are without exception terrible people. Or, at the very least, not vital cogs in the machinery of American democracy.

Although Machado might not have been involved in an assassination plot, she is a confirmed philanderess and egregious hypocrite. However, because she intends on casting a ballot for the Democratic presidential candidate, like millions of other immigrants from Latin America, she is by definition an asset to this country. While I can understand why leftists and Democrats would believe that importing men and women who’ll increase the size of the state is good for this country, I fail to see how this is a good thing from an objective, patriotic standpoint. Trump could have challenged the assumption that what’s good for Democrats is good for the country, but conspicuously failed to do so. He could have also pointed out that the woman across the stage had spent decades slandering the reputation of women who had been victims of sexual assault at the hands of her husband.

The cumulative impact of these lost opportunities is hard to quantify, but it can’t be dismissed out of hand. For those of you looking for positives to take away from this debate, Donald Trump’s closing remarks emphasized a key point which could become part of a winning message if articulated in a coherent manner to the American people. The United States should not be the policeman of the world. Even if we were to concede the good intentions of those advocating continuous intervention in countries across the globe, the fact remains that this posture is counterproductive to America’s strategic interests. Our government’s sclerotic invade the world, invite the world foreign policy has been a catastrophic failure and needs to be abandoned.

That should be Donald Trump’s message going forward. Ignore media-generated talking points about personal tax returns and obese former beauty queens. Focus on the central issues of our time and communicate your ideas to the American public. We need to be debating the future of our country, not the trivialities that dominated the Hofstra debate.

While Pravda on the Potomac and its competitors in the DNC talking points echo chamber devote countless hours to contrived moral posturing over the latest Muslim makes good story, it’s worth remembering what implacably corrupt people Hillary and the future First Husband are.

Thankfully, Black Pigeon Speaks is here to remind us. Everyone who needs a refresher course on how diabolical the Clintons are needs to watch this video. It’s simply a coming attraction of things to come, should Hillary and her enablers in the media get their wish. This is a couple which views corruption as merely a public relations problem, not a parasite eating away at the fundamental properties of our republic.

Even as events conspire to make hash of the narrative contrived by Hillary Clinton and the national media, i.e. Vladimir Putin’s exposure of the awfulness of the Democratic Party is the true threat to American democracy, the politically correct variety show in Philadelphia proceeds apace. Before tonight is over you will have endured the entire spectrum of Democrat hideousness, from the not quite prime-time address by career limousine Marxist Bill de Blasio, to the condescending stylings of golf aficionado Michael Bloomberg, to the capstone of the evening, an address by the POTUS himself, Barack Obama.

No doubt we’ll be treated to more effusive praise of the ongoing dissolution of this country’s borders and erasure of our sovereignty. You can view the proceedings, a national examination of America’s decay, here.

It seems as if the alternative media has rallied around the flag, which in Hillary’s case was probably purchased by benefactors like Goldman Sachs and the Gulf Arab slave state of Qatar. After all, who can resist GIRL POWER, even if it’s marshaled on behalf of someone who’s spent much of her career destroying the reputations of Bill Clinton’s comfort women? To get a sense of the cognitive dissonance at work, it’s worth reading this week’s Village Voice, which all but admits its preferred candidate is an inveterate liar, albeit one who can answer that 3 A.M. call!

By the way, does anyone else recognize the absurdity of Clinton backers running a variation on an ad which was universally panned-from a race which she lost-in order to lambast the purported shortcomings of Donald Trump? If there are any calls being made to a Clinton White House after midnight, I’m almost certain they will be made at the behest of sleazy foreign donors who want a return on their investment. That is indeed the purpose of the single greatest legal money laundering scheme on the planet, one which would make even El Chapo green with envy.

With all her seemingly disqualifying character traits and extensive history of semi-criminal actions, not to mention, thralldom to corporate interests, you would expect sincere leftists to express some reservations about her candidacy. You would think that even those who believe her to be the best choice in a binary election have enough integrity to admit that she is a dreadful choice, one who cares not so much about being a progressive as the acquisition and retention of power. The problem is that that is what progressivism, at its core, has become. The Faustian bargain the left has made in this election involves sacrificing its purported principles, including its increasingly hypocritical rhetoric about the underclass, in order to achieve its immediate political aims, e.g. importing millions of immigrants from the third world, cauterizing the 1st and 2nd Amendment to the Constitution, and crushing any remaining opposition to the cultural domination of social progressivism.

Fortunately, there are a handful of leftists who have some degree of integrity, including Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, who was one of only public figures on the left to publicly admit that her Democratic opponent should have been indicted. Her honesty about the deficiencies of Hillary Clinton the candidate-as well as the human being-stand in stark contrast to the pathetic fealty liberal media outlets and talking heads have shown towards a woman who, were she a Republican, would probably be sitting in a federal penitentiary instead of seeking the most powerful office in the world.

Another voice remarkable for its clarity is incendiary cartoonist Ted Rall, who’s pointed out 3 of the biggest reasons why Hillary Clinton does not belong in the Oval Office. Although there are many, many more-including a capacity for deception that is boundless and a wholly repellent personality-the 3 enumerated by Rall should be of particular interest to liberals, who tout their intellectual superiority and routinely hector insufficiently feminist public actors. The fact that most are seemingly unconcerned with these very problematic issues makes one question their purported convictions.

Finally, Doug Henwood has published a book, My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets The Presidency, which should be required reading for any leftist tempted to ignore the consequences of their alliance with the Clinton machine. It begins, appropriately enough, with an epigram by Brad DeLong describing Hillary’s most relevant Executive experience, i.e. her disastrous oversight of health care reform during the first year of the Clinton presidency. Although he has also been brought to heel, this is his description of HRC’s signature issue back then:

My two cents’ worth–and I think it is the two cents’ worth of everybody who worked for the Clinton Administration health care reform effort of 1993-1994–is that Hillary Rodham Clinton needs to be kept very far away from the White House for the rest of her life. Heading up health-care reform was the only major administrative job she has ever tried to do. And she was a complete flop at it. She had neither the grasp of policy substance, the managerial skills, nor the political smarts to do the job she was then given. And she wasn’t smart enough to realize that she was in over her head and had to get out of the Health Care Czar role quickly. 

“Hillary Rodham Clinton has already flopped as a senior administrative official in the executive branch–the equivalent of an Undersecretary. Perhaps she will make a good senator. But there is no reason to think that she would be anything but an abysmal president. 

To quote another former FLOTUS, Just Say No.

Update: The State Department has no records of a meeting with the father of the shahid. 

The killer’s slightly less insane father visited Congress and the State Department. So perhaps they are assimilating after all. 

A horror for one woman, via text. 

Despite her SIOA Facebook page being restored, Pamela Geller has been banned from Facebook for a month. Reddit also seems to be under the impression that if you don’t mention Islamic terrorism, its victims are still alive. 

An exceptional essay by Bruce Bawar on the hard truths our leaders categorically reject. 

John Schindler examines our country’s most pressing epidemic, Jihad Denial Syndrome.

Today it’s worth remembering those who were the first to expose the deep connections  Islamic immigrants living in central and southern Florida had to international jihadism. Adnan Shukrijumah was not the first, and unfortunately, Omar Mateen will probably not be the last.

A co-worker complained that the guy who just murdered 50 people had threatened to kill people. Sound familiar? It should. 

Obama’s America, isn’t it grand? 

As a bonus, Mateen’s firm provided security to federal buildings. 

The first victims have been identified. 

What’s Facebook’s response to a Muslim jihadist murdering 40 innocent people in a gay night club? Banning a page critical of Islam, natch! Looks like the Merkelization of the Internet has begun. 

Proud Afghan immigrant and Taliban supporter Seddique Mateen.

Watch the live press conference held by local officials. 

A word of caution from Rita Katz of the SITE Intelligence Group. 

Through the looking glass.

Heckuva job, FBI!

Mateen was a licensed security officer who claimed ties to international jihadist groups. Unsurprisingly, his wife was the victim of spousal abuse. 

Some of the mosques surrounding Pulse Orlando. I wonder how many vigils they’re going to hold in the week ahead? 

The official news wire of ISIS has taken credit for today’s jihadist attack. 

The perpetrator allegedly recited Islamic prayers during the attack. 

The Daily Beast has published an exclusive on  Omar Mateen, the son of Afghan immigrants-previously investigated by the FBI-who was responsible for the Orlando massacre earlier today. Read it in full.

Father Mir Mateen told NBC News that the sight of two men kissing angered his son.

“We are saying we are apologizing for the whole incident,” the father added. “We weren’t aware of any action he is taking. We are in shock like the whole country.”

The attack, he said, “has nothing to do with religion.”

A Twitter user raises an interesting point about how gay-friendly Orlando truly is, at least within its Islamic precincts.

Our old friend Michael Malice explores the absurdity of this election cycle, as well as investing your hopes in electoral politics, with contrarian historian Tom Woods. The anti-democracy essay referenced during this discussion is worth reading for those of you interested in understanding the mindset of over half the American public. Personally, whenever I hear someone wax poetic over a particular candidate or political party I flash on The Right Man, a falsely sentimental song from the off-Broadway satire of American democracy How To Steal An Election.

Is there really a right man, or woman? Is the problem simply too many ignorant voters? Sorry, David, but I don’t think it is. Democracy has a much more fundamental flaw which virtually none of the pearl-clutching political analysts will acknowledge-except, of course, Michael Malice and Tom Woods. And for that, we thank them.

As I’ve said before, there are many legitimate reasons to oppose Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy, although it takes a special kind of smugness, lust for pointless military interventions, and/or disdain for the intelligence of your fellow countrymen for an ostensible conservative or libertarian to endorse Hillary Clinton. Putting aside the subsidiary partisan reasons, we’re talking about a politician who rejects the very principles upon which our government is supposed to operate. The mental gymnastics required to embrace a woman who has loudly and repeatedly proclaimed her desire to eviscerate the Bill of Rights-including the 1st and 2nd Amendments to the Constitution-would impress Béla Károlyi.

However, even those Dump Trump dead-enders who oppose Hillary’s ascension to power are not completely without blame. Putting aside the willful delusion required to support its chief aim-which is rightly mocked even by gormless, repellent bloggers of the Gawker variety-the movement itself is a bizarre exercise in denial. By enlisting in the anti-Trump movement you’re asserting that the pre-Trump Republican Party, and by extension, the country itself, is doing just fine. Aside from being the antithesis of how the overwhelming majority of voters feel-and presumably, these are people whose support you seek-it’s simply not true.

You don’t have to believe that this nation is physically challenged in order to understand that it is not in a good way. 8 years of an Obama administration have delivered zero income growth. Only last month were American job-seekers in a better position than they were before the advent of the Great Recession. The savings rate-as well as the corresponding indebtedness-of America remains at a parlous level. This is occurring even as the fair-haired boy of the anti-Trump movement is conniving with the White House to burden taxpayers with a massive bailout of the now insolvent Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.

Even if these fiscal and economic disasters could be ignored, it defies reason to claim that Donald Trump, as a deeply flawed candidate, poses the single greatest threat to the future of our republic. The United States is in the process of being permanently effaced by a group of people who resent the purported values espoused by the anti-Trump movement, and who want to ensure that those values are not even part of our public discourse in the future. Even as we pursue a fruitless debate over who is or is not a true conservative, a true socialist is registering scores of non-citizens in the hope of electing a new people.

This is the crux of the issue. Americans who hold a traditional view of what this country means, both domestically and abroad, are being erased from the equation. To think that anti-Trump conservatives will be in a better bargaining position with prospective voters 4 or 8 years from now-after 10-20 million new citizens with antithetical values are minted-is simply delusional. It’s the same type of self-congratulatory, blinkered thought pattern that leads people to assert-to this day-that Pete Wilson, and not the wholesale demographic transformation of his state, is responsible for the Republican Party’s disappearance from the state of California. It’s a maladaptive coping mechanism used to avoid unpleasant truths.

You won’t grasp these truths by contriving implausible counterfactuals, although that seems to be the preferred strategy among anti-Trump dogmatists.  The reasons why Republican voters repeatedly and emphatically rejected the message of Dump Trump have been delineated over and over again, for those who are willing to open their eyes. As the conservative establishment is poised to exile one of the icons of modern conservatism in a fit of anti-Trump pique, the failure of Conservatism Inc. to engage in any sort of introspection is telling.

The idea that a fat-jowled actor portraying Alexander Hamilton writing the Constitution-as a stentorian narrator reels off a series of generic cliches-will be seen as anything but risible to normal American voters in the 21st century illustrates how detached most of these people are from reality. Whether or not they’ll ever recognize this deep disconnect remains to be seen, but judging by their post-primary reaction I’m not holding out much hope.

One of the most frustrating aspects of news coverage of the latest jihadist massacre on French soil is its repetitive quality. Just as with the Charlie Hebdo assassinations and Porte de Vincennes siege, along with other Islamic blood-lettings within Europe, the multicultural messaging service has gone to extraordinary lengths to obscure the rather obvious reasons why this horrific act of war took place.  The Daily Beast is an archetypal example of this species of journalism, ascribing blame to the socio-economic difficulties faced by Muslim immigrants and questioning the efficacy of Belgian intelligence-gathering methods. The cognitive dissonance at work is exemplified by media outlets which have referred to the Muslim invaders who perpetrated this atrocity as Frenchmen, rather than more appropriate terminology, such as invaders. 

While the facts on the ground reporting is valuable-you can find a live blog of the Paris attacks and their aftermath by going to The Guardian website-the analysis of this unprecedented bloodshed by Islamic terrorists on French soil is woefully lacking. Even as milksop, Chamber of Commerce lackeys such as Rick Snyder recognize the inherent danger in welcoming thousands of unverified Syrians to the United States, the mainstream media refuses to acknowledge the elephant-or in this case, jackal-in the room. Just today, I’ve listened to no less than 3 reports lamenting the impact this latest jihadist massacre will have on Europe’s Muslim population, including a segment on what is arguably the most insipid NPR program in existence, The Takeaway, where the interviewee praised Germany’s Dr, Kevorkian, Angela Merkel, for her open door policy, vis-a-vis Middle Eastern and North African refugees.

There are, of course, rational appraisals of what’s currently happening overseas, but you have to scour the Internet in order to find these alternative voices. One of them is David P. Goldman, who accurately evaluates what France should expect-and how its government will respond-in light of these ruthless attacks on its citizens. Contrary to Prime Minister Hollande’s bold declarations in the wake of this unspeakable atrocity, Spengler believes that the ruling class in that country will not have the fortitude to do what is necessary to weed out what is now a domestic base of terror. Of course, there are many men and women in France who yearn to resist the tide of anti-civilization that has encroached upon their nation without their consent, and they are probably going to support Marie Le Pen in the upcoming election.

The fact that millions of voters are willing to defy the consensus of bien-pensant opinion in order to help preserve and maintain what remains of a culture that can only be destroyed but certainly not replicated by the parasites who are living upon its fruits demonstrates that the lights haven’t yet gone out in the West. It’s a welcome and hopeful sign of a future that isn’t shaped by the forces of darkness, where we do not have to repeat the mistakes of the past. A future where the City of Light is not extinguished.

Despite initial attempts to market his municipal ID program as a benign attempt to help New Yorkers from ostensibly marginalized communities, it’s hard for anyone-even those in the media whose job increasingly seems to be obfuscation rather than illumination-to credulously argue that these identification cards constitute anything other than a further deliberate erosion of the legal distinctions between American citizens and illegal aliens. The recent revelation that the city bureaucracy will destroy all information about illegal aliens it collects in connection with this program should a Republican be inaugurated President two years hence demonstrates the real intent behind these ID cards. It is, as Noah Rothman states in the article describing this plan, an obscenity. However, it’s not surprising in the least when you stop to consider the true purpose of this initiative, which is embedding illegal aliens further within our societal framework, in this case, by dispensing even more breeder documents for their eventual exploitation.

One of the delightful ironies of the unanticipated success of New York City’s new ID card is watching illegal alien activists who lobbied for this very program be forced to endure, horror of horrors, the prolonged wait that accompanies registration for any future appointment to obtain this document. I myself was able to snag an appointment in the middle of August, giving me the pleasure of contemplating travel that probably will not involve walking across five inch sheets of ice and snow. The fact that these individuals did not foresee any delays within a government bureaucracy-especially one as notoriously inept and inefficient as the one governing this city-attests to either the stupidity or naivete of those spearheading the drive to erase whatever remaining penalties or inhibitions attend to people living in this country unlawfully.

It’s also, however, a reminder that the assurances given that this program will not endanger the health or safety of ordinary New Yorkers-or those living elsewhere-are not based upon anything more substantive than the public relations spin of the open borders lobby. It’s something you would all be wise to consider the next time you watch a press conference given by Mayor Bill de Blasio or one of his underlings touting the success of New York’s new municipal IDs.