The GOP Congress hasn’t gotten much done this year.
In order to move any major piece of controversial legislation, 60 votes are needed in the Senate to break the filibuster. The only way to get around this legislative obstacle is through the budget reconciliation process which is what Obama used to pass Obamacare and the GOP used to pass the tax cuts.
While everyone was sleeping last night, Rand Paul and House Democrats caused a second government shutdown which went unnoticed because Congress passed the two year budget deal and President Trump signed it this morning. This means the GOP has all but given up on using the budget reconciliation process to pass anything of significance in 2018 and 2019. This is probably a good thing because they would have used the power do something like entitlement reform anyway.
What then is the point of the GOP Congress? It passes bills like the Charlottesville resolution, creating Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Park and now it is renaming the St. Louis Arch which is officially the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial:
“WASHINGTON • The Gateway Arch National Park is about to become official.
The U.S. House of Representatives has passed legislation, which was approved by the Senate in December, that renames what is now officially known as the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial. The bill passed the House by voice vote on Wednesday.
The legislation was sponsored in the Senate by Sens. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., and Claire McCaskill, D-Mo.; and in the House by Reps. William Lacy Clay, D-St. Louis, and Ann Wagner, R-Ballwin.
Blunt said that “renaming the park will better highlight its central feature and make it more immediately recognizable to the millions of people who visit St. Louis every year.”
McCaskill said that “as the memorial grounds reopen this summer, it’s the perfect time to bring our majestic park together under a new name that highlights this remarkable symbol.” …
I will probably get some more angry emails about this. It is a “blackpill” to point out that the GOP is using power to do politically correct shit like taking Thomas Jefferson’s name off the St. Louis Arch. This is what is actually being done in Washington with the mandate of the 2016 election.
Since it is a “blackpill” to note that the GOP has GIVEN UP on using budget reconciliation in the Senate for two years and therefore doing ANYTHING that Democrats object to, this fact will likely go unmentioned outside of the OD audience. The same people will be tuning into podcasts and reading newsfeeds patiently waiting for the next two years for Trump to move his agenda forward beyond the tax cuts that were passed with budget reconciliation in December.
The thing is, the cake is baked now with this budget agreement. There isn’t going to be anything else of significance EXCEPT those tax cuts and now this huge increase in military spending. In the end, we’re going to get conservative judges, the tax cuts, deregulation and an increase in military spending out of the first term of the Trump presidency. In addition to that, we might get a few things that a key number of Democrats don’t object to like banking reform and possibly an infrastructure bill.
I got a $1,000 raise from the tax cuts you deride so casually. $1,000 is a lot of money for some of us. Nancy Pelosi had the same kind of contempt for those of us who really need these “crumbs”.
BS.
Trumpaholic Volkstaadt doesn’t make enough money to pay taxes in the first place. As to
(((Pelosi))), of course it has contempt for “us”: it’s a
sephardic Jew.
I deride it because this is what the GOP has always done with political power. At least since Reagan the agenda has been neoliberal tax cuts, deregulation, entitlement cuts, foreign policy interventionism and massive increases in military spending.
Nothing has changed in the slightest under ‘America First’ Donald Trump except that the country has become more polarized so nothing gets done without 60 votes to get past the filibuster. Trump has done tax cuts, deregulation, military spending, foreign policy interventionism and is now doing entitlement cuts.
For a conservative, the stock market is THE index of our national well being and economy, so as long as people at the top of the system are raking in their dividends and watching the their assets appreciate everything is fine.
It is a myth that conservatives never conserve anything. They’ve been very successful in conserving and expanding tax cuts, free trade, deregulation and our military footprint abroad. We say conservatives never conserve anything because they never do anything about the issues we care about.
See Trump who like Reagan, George HW Bush and George W. Bush has spent the last month working on an illegal alien amnesty. These are the things conservatives really care about.
All the other stuff is just bait to gather up enough swing voters to put them in power to advance this agenda. That’s why all these social issues they run on in election years vanish and never end up seeing the light of day in terms of policy changes. They don’t mean any of it and keep those people satisfied with dog whistles and token gestures.
Perhaps you can point to all of Trump’s wonderful accomplishments. Don’t waste our time by recycling 4D Chess arguments. Point to the last year he has been in office and show us his record or shut up about it.
“Nothing has changed in the slightest under America First’ Donald Trump”
This is why I have become so vocally critical of you brother. I won’t call this statement straight up dishonesty it’s more of a radical twisting of the truth to support your pre selected narrative. Anyone living in America knows that Trumpism has at the very least created the conditions for a MASSIVE change in the direction of culture in the US. We have antisemites on CNN calling out the holohoax for God’s sake. But you insist on measuring everything in terms of beltway politics. It’s why your posts follow the MSM news cycle like a lost puppy. You’re just chasing the headlines that validate your pre selected judgements and ignoring anything that contradicts them. It’s majorly disappointing.
Tell me specifically what has changed under Donald Trump.
I track the Trump presidency every single day. I see and chronicle everything he has done. He isn’t any different than his Republican predecessors. We can go into the weeds of policy if you would like. If I am omitting things that Trump is doing, which is not the case, then feel free to cite those things. Instead, it is the “white pillers” who don’t mention things like, say, the US military killing 100 people in Syria or the stock market crashing by several thousand points.
What is this cultural change? We’ve given Trump credit for chiming in on the NFL controversy which was started by Colin Kaepernick and for delegitimizing the media. Both of these trends existed before Trump was elected president though. As for the Jewish Question, Trump is hands down the most Zionist president who has ever been in the White House. Also, he is going through the motions of the presidency and hewing to the usual multicultural calendar in his symbolic pronouncements.
You don’t “track” the Trump presidency. You harp and obsess about it like a jilted ex who’s been dumped and what’s more its all only aimed at the most extremely superficial level of everything. And stop talking about pills for God’s sake. Reducing everything to white pills and black pills is a substitute for thinking.
What has Trump done? Good question. He’s given white people permission to be white again. Why you depreciate this so entirely is beyond me. I know you’re disappointed that Trump is not literally /ourguy/ but you know what? Thats YOUR fault. Most of us never held the kind of illusory view of Trump that you apparently did. Most of us knee exactly what he was and thats why we’re not all surpised and heartbroken that he’s not quite the madman he postured as.
1.) Sure I do. I track policy changes, major actions and statements. Then I post them here.
2.) I don’t think in terms of “pills.” This is how many in the Alt-Right think though. They get angry when the news isn’t filtered and spun to push pro-Trump narratives. Nothing angers them more than posting things Trump is doing that doesn’t fit that narrative.
3.) Really? We have permission to be White now? If that is the case, why are worse off today than we were two years ago when Obama was president? We’ve been blacklisted on crowdfunding sites and kicked off social media. Free speech is on the ropes. More Confederate monuments have come down.
4.) Bullshit. I never once argued that Trump was one of us. I did expect him to stand behind his own stated MAGA agenda. He hasn’t even done that. Instead, he has reverted back to mainstream conservatism in office.
Having a vital institution like OD track policy changes, major actions and statements could be a really valuable service to this movement, no question. Doing those things *for their own sake* would be great. But it seems to me that you just use these as convenient points of departure to justify a pointless rending of garments. No deeper analysis is ever offered, only a pro forma assumption that the worst possible interpretation must obviously be the correct one and anyone who doesn’t see it is just a brainless Trumptard.
Let’s dispose once and for all of this idea that I am a Trump cheerleader. That’s not it at all and I could write a book about why that’s ridiculous but the details of my personal opinions on Trump are irrelevant. Suffice it to say that I have to *appear* as a Trump cheerleader here because the rhetoric at OD lately has created a cognitive environment where anything other than full acceptance-on-faith of Trump’s absolute malevolence is seen as sycophancy toward muh ZOG emperor.
It’s not so much that you do things, it’s how you do them. We absolutely need to be putting pressure on Trump but Trump is neither the beginning nor end of anything. It’s a mistake to make him and the beltway the center of your attention (i.e., it’s *his* fault the statues are coming down; it’s *his* fault we’re deplatformed, etc.). Its an even bigger mistake to squander the opportunities that this presidency is offering. Politics are downstream of culture. Growing up hating the media my whole life how can I not cheer at least a little bit for a man who has driven them to a frenzy of self-immolation? I don’t need pro-Trump narratives. I just love the sweet salty taste of all these kike tears that have been raining down in a seemingly never-ending torrent since 2015.
But its more about tone than content. If I had to pick one word to describe the tone of OD in the last six months it would be “sneering.” No one I can promise you finds that appealing. Worst of all, the sneering is directed almost entirely *at your own side*. Taking every little opportunity to say, “See? SEE?!? Neener-neener-neener!” *even when it might conceivably be justified* is not noble behavior. It’s the opposite of magnanimous, which is what it would be if it was coming from place of self-assurance and good faith. But sneering always comes from a place of insecurity. A man secure in his person and his position never needs to sneer at anyone.
As to things getting worse before they get better, how do you imagine redemption happens? Is it supposed to be easy?
If you want to call Trump a “mainstream conservative” that’s fine. It probably makes a ton of sense in your own mind and in the ecosystem you’ve created here. But from the outside it appears maddeningly autistic. Or better yet I’ll use a word you can appreciate: positivistic. As in, judging a given matter exclusively by some formal (and usually arbitrary) standard while divorcing it from its inner essentialism. View the politics of America entirely through the prism of Trump’s reported media statements if you like, but it strikes me as a really shallow and murky pool to wallow in.
Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with Hunter.
@Volkstaat,
This movement is about the future of our people, not Trump.
Hunter is one of the only leaders in the movement who consistently remains grounded and free of bullshit.
The other leaders are so busy scheming behind the scenes to make shifting bullycide alliances, manipulating morale, managing optics or A/B testing the crowd, that it’s virtually impossible to get solid information from any of them.
Hunter tells it as it is, not as we wish it to be. That’s called integrity, one of the core “optics” that most middle Americans watch for, because it’s invaluable to making critical life decisions.
Hunter was as upbeat as anyone through the election, bit his tongue for the first year of Trump’s administration, and has been the ultimate team player to everyone in the Alt-Right.
And when it was his turn to step forward, you and your scheming anonymous trolls stabbed him in the back and threw him under the bus. Multiple instances. Via multiple forms of media. Over an extended period of time.
Because he didn’t do things your way.
And none of your smear campaigns have budged Hunter or his men one single inch. Because you can’t bullycide integrity. Which is why it’s the number one ingredient of good “optics.”
But we all saw what your people did. And we have long memories. And we will remember exactly who did what.
Because Hunter consistently demonstrates integrity, his credibility goes up, day after day.
The credibility of your people goes down, with every betrayal.
You make the decision to see “neener neener” in Hunter’s reporting about public affairs and a President whom none of us ever believed was /ourguy/.
We see in Hunter a leader who is fighting for his people and giving it to us straight.
Lastly @Volkstaat, the language you use in your attempt to emotionally manipulate Hunter and his readers is a joke. It’s weak as f*ck. It’s disgusting.
If you think I’m being hyperbolic, go back and re-read your comments for yourself. You will feel very ashamed at your pathetic attempt to get your way.
Stop menstruating all over the frigging internet because you can’t control how others perceive the world. There are better uses of your time. Right now someone in our movement is planning to do a public event wearing the wrong outfit.
The. Wrong. Outfit.
Bullyciding needs doing.
Get on that, stat.
I think you’re talking right past me here guy. You’re talking to some composite boogie man you’ve that you’ve invented. Who mentioned anything about optics? Not me, but it’s clearly on your mind. Sorry if you’ve felt bullycided by the other kids on the playground, but I don’t get involved with tedious optometry circlejerks. You’ve got me mixed up with someone else.
My smear campaigns? You mean my comments on OD expressing my honest opinions about a website I’ve been reading faithfully for years and will continue to read regardless of who ends up being right? Since when is a “letter to the editor” a smear campaign? You’re taking way too many liberties here and this is exactly what I was talking about in my comment. You have worked yourself up into such a froth you can’t even communicate meaningfully. But when you live in a ghetto, you develop a ghetto mindset.
“But we all saw what your people did. And we have long memories. And we will remember exactly who did what.”
What mad posturing is this? What are you even talking about? Who are you talking about? The Iron City Guard? THOSE are my people – the only “we” I’m associated with – and if one of my people did something to someone you better damn well believe it will be dealt with. So what are you talking about? I’m going to assume you’re talking out of your ass because you think you’re talking some anonymous troll.
I might not pull any punches with Hunter, and I like to think he appreciates that, but everything I say is meant with respect and is motivated by nothing but a desire to start seeing people pull together again. If you don’t like it, fine – sperg at me (or your boogie man) in the comment section. But don’t throw around vague and baseless accusations. One day we might meet and I’d like us to be able to meet like brothers and be able to look each other in the eye. Stop trying to create these “sides”. No decent, honest person in the movement wants there to be “sides”. The internet makes it way too easy for people to posture and preen and the result is people say things they could never say honorably to a man’s face. THAT is the biggest problem facing this movement.
Fair enough.
As regards you, I retract any comments about your person. The other comments stand.
As regards the composite to whom the comment was directed, it all stands.
“The internet makes it way too easy for people to posture and preen and the result is people say things they could never say honorably to a man’s face. THAT is the biggest problem facing this movement.”
Couldn’t agree more, and addressing this was the thrust of my comment.
Glad to meet you brother Volkstaat.
Hail Victory
Hail Brother Harvest \o
What. The. Actual. F**k.
You guys are arguing over “tone”? Mr. Wallace is too negative for Mr. Volkstaat concerning Trump? And then Mr. H. Grain joins the fray to stick up for Mr. Wallace’s tone?
Even though both Mr. Wallace and Mr. Volkstaat are correct? This entire back-and-forth between you guys has been essentially about seeing some liquid in a glass and bickering with one another as to whether that glass is half-empty or half-full.
When the interesting question is whether we’re looking at something healthy to drink, worthless colored sugar-water, deadly poison, or , oh no not that… maybe water that’s been peed in?
Respect to all three of you gents, though.
End caca on day one.
On day 2, I knew we’d been screwed.
trump’s jew girl heave-anka and her new yuk values rule.
it’s difficult to know what amount of hope (if any) is the right amount of hope.
HW, you are doing a great job scrutinizing the GOP and Trump. Although there have been some encouraging developments it looks as if it’s going to be business as usual in the District of Criminals. Trump cultists should go to Gab, where they can post all the memes of Trump standing on tanks with American flags waving in the background and bald eagles flying overhead that they want.
Of course I shall be there waiting for them….
Unite means just what it is. Ur not going to always agree but can focus. We all have been shitted on. Makes u feel sad when things don’t always go ur way. To lose something u wish u haven’t. Dwelling is what it’s called. U stand on ur 2 feet as a child, then remember what u meant to stand for. Don’t let one snag bind u. Hence why we keep faith to what we know. Be kind n loving… U never know when u will need it the most. Hold ur shoulders up, look ahead never down. Talk to ur fellow white man. Don’t keep ur knowledge of what u preach to ur self. inform ur neighbor. If altright were a piece of stock, I’d buy into it.
What they will be really after is the statue of crusader king – St Louis IX king of France. St Louis, Mo has one of the world’s most beautiful statues of him.
http://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/WMAKC_Monarchs_King_Louis_IX_of_France
In the very same park where the UDC monument was taken down last year.
@Volkstaat –
You didn’t get a thousand dollar raise. Everyone who works and has offspring, even those not yet born, got hit with another grand of debt and the interest (usury) payments that go with it.
Who benefitted here? (((They))) who rule over us.
yeah Pelosi is a kike with an Italian moniker….a lot of these Christ killing baby dick slobberers.
I was in elementary school when this thing was built. It was called Gateway Arch back then. Sometime later Jefferson’s name got put on it, but most people know it as Gateway Arch. I’m not sure the congressional re-naming is an act of political correctness and hostility towards our white history.
Congress has denigrated white history plenty of times, but maybe not this time.