Hillary’s plan for college affordability is bunk

It’s hard to describe the feeling of paying off your student loans.

At a time when college loans exceed credit card debt, breaking free of the shackles of yet another monthly payment is wildly liberating.

Thanks to an inheritance, I’m days away from being rid of my university debt forever. No more being dunned by email. No more slips in my monthly budget. Just a hunkier wallet in my pocket and a spring to my step.

And wouldn’t you know it, just as I hit a high mark, that bitch Hillary is dragging me back down. The lapdog of Wall Street is out with a new affordable tuition plan that hammers my hard work into dust. Inspired by her rival, Senator Socialism, Clinton has introduced the “New College Compact,” which includes several proposals to make university free for middle-class plebes.

The initiative will end tuition at in-state public colleges for families earning less than $125,000 a year by 2021. It will also impose a three-month moratorium on loan repayments, and have the Department of Education work with borrowers to either forgive debt or lower payments based on income.

Clinton is not bending fully to the demand of Sanderistas and advocating for free public college for all. But her plan is a thinly-veiled buyout of degreed millennials who aren’t qualified to fetch bagels. She’s directly courting the pajama boys and purple-haired fembots who can’t keep a full-time gig because they screw around on Facebook and Tumblr all day. Call it bailouts for votes–a fine democratic tradition!

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Civil War 2.0 Will Be Livestreamed

The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised,
will not be televised, will not be televised.
The revolution will be no re-run brothers;
The revolution will be live.

The events of this summer are a taste of what’s to come in the fall, and even more so, November 9, 2016.

Someone is going to win the Presidential election, and regardless of whether it’s Trump or Clinton, the loser’s supporters are going to feel existential angst about America, and their place in it, far beyond the usual.

Pat Buchanan advises us to take a Chill Pill; “For when a real powder keg blew in the ’60s, I was there. And this is not it.” And yet…in “The ’60s” (and the early ’70s, which is when some of the worst SHTF) we had the evening TV news and the papers. The crazy spread slower then. This time, any and every incident is going to be magnified and extremely accelerated. (more…)

Being an unhappy warrior

To burn it down, or not burn it down–that is the question. And increasingly, against my better nature, I’m starting to think the answer is incendiarism.

Why my flirtation with unbridled anger? It’s simple, really: Elite contempt for the hoi polloi has reached a fever pitch. Consider events over the past few weeks.

After much hand-wringing, the Brexit vote failed to topple the world economy. But that hasn’t stopped the elites from expressing their disdain over the little people taking back their borders. In a scathing piece for Foreign Policy titled “It’s Time for the Elites to Rise Up Against the Ignorant Masses,” writer James Traub openly calls for the crushing of the working class. “One of the most brazen features of the Brexit vote was the utter repudiation of the bankers and economists and Western heads of state who warned voters against the dangers of a split with the European Union,” Traub, the son of the former chairman of Bloomingdale’s, says sorrowfully.

Emily Badger of The Washington Post concurs, writing “Brexit is a reminder that some things just shouldn’t be decided by referendum.” Columnists and opiners in a variety of publications have taken turns denouncing the small-minded Leave voters, each employing clever metaphors to say the same thing: The people are too stupid for politics.

The contempt is not dissimilar to the bitchfest that is Trump opposition. Not content to take potshots at Teflon Donald, some smug critics have taken to excoriating his pea-brained supporters. Jonathan Chait of New York magazine explained Trump phenomenology by surmising, “The Republican Party turns out to be filled with idiots. Far more of them than anybody expected.” National Review’s Kevin Williamson infamously referred to wage-class Trumpites as white trash so trashy it doesn’t deserve to be picked up. “The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible,” he pronounced, with the grace of a utilitarian Maoist.

And you wonder why middle-of-the-road Americans are so damn angry. In the face of such open mockery, why shouldn’t they be? The coastal high-earners take great pleasure in ridiculing Flyover country, which is largely comprised of red state Bible-believers.

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Johnson’s Rise and Imminent Fall

Gary Johnson is a dimwit and the Libertarian Party once again proved its uselessness by nominating him as its presidential nominee.

That’s the premise of my latest Takimag article. An excerpt:

Polls right now show that Johnson could potentially steal support from both Clinton and Trump. But we’re still six months away from the general election. Last go-around, Johnson was polling at the same place he is now. In the spring of 2012, the governor, when included on the list of preferred candidates, came in around 7%. How did he do that November? A measly 1.2% of the electorate picked Johnson over Mitt Romney and Barack Obama.

Not exactly a libertarian moment. And I’d bet a few slips of fiat currency that this fall will play out much in the same way. As the election nears and the stakes become more real, voters will make a choice between the two most viable options. The choice won’t be based on reason, compassion, or logic. It will be one of fear and disgust—the necessary ingredients of politics.

But supposing that America’s electoral system didn’t systematically make third parties irrelevant, the Johnson campaign would still be dead in the water. That’s because the candidate is a dopey ignoramus in a party full of punky agitators, drug users, cerebral loners, and just plain loons.

Read the whole thing here, and remember that only American-hating losers vote for the LP.

The socialist foreign policy tradition

The discussion about foreign policy of Bernie Sanders and the more broad socialist vision of international relations is the topic of my The National Interest piece today. An excerpt:

With the Democratic primaries coming to an end, the fate of Bernie Sanders is sealed. His insurgent campaign surprised everybody in advancing so far, and gave a good fight to a powerful establishment figure like Hillary Clinton. The question of whether he could have done better if he had focused on foreign policy is one that, while vital, hasn’t really been asked. The usual assumption is that Hillary is a hawk and that Bernie is to her left on foreign policy. That is a fairly honest answer, given their voting records; however, the fact that the first man to call himself a socialist in a Democratic primary has a foreign policy with not much difference from a mainstream liberal raises the question of whether there exists a socialist foreign policy in the U.S. context.

Read the whole thing here to know about the conflict between Bernie Sanders and historic socialist foreign policy tradition.

Future things II

(First)

  • There will be a television show called something like “Cocaine Debates” that’s a lot like debate shows nowadays, except everyone involved will be on cocaine. This will happen with or without drug legality in any given jurisdiction due to the internationalization and decentralization of broadcasting.
  • Tongue-in-cheek pressure groups and non-profits will become common. For example, I can see a group that exists with the half-ironic mission of fighting the influence of DreamWorks’ Minions in popular culture. People will donate money out of a mixture of a serious desire to further the cause and as a “this is hilarious and out there lol” gesture.
  • The Minions question will become a class issue approximating Donald Trump’s candidacy, but way more complicated. Elites in New York and Washington will pooh-pooh them, but this cultured disgust will be tempered by the fact that fashionable victim groups, like single mothers or something, will be strongly pro-minion.
  • Apps like Tinder will be the only legal way to approach a woman, due to clever tech lobbyists capitalizing on street harassment/”rape culture” hysteria. Mark Zuckerberg will probably be behind this.