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| Hail to the Donald! |
by Matt Parrott
From time to time, I set aside some time from my full-time career of advocating for identity and tradition to do some casual moonlighting as an analyst. I’m always open to feedback about my activism strategy, but one woefully repetitive angle relies on an appeal to authority that I’m supposedly some clueless maverick who would be doing things differently if I only understood marketing strategy, analytics, and samesuch nerd stuff. These types usually explain that our angle can “never work” because too many Americans are loyal to the Constitution, triggered by our symbolism, and in need of an especially polished angle.
Everything we’re doing is informed by analytics. I have generated hundreds of charts and reports over the years and what I feel that I’ve confirmed quantitatively is that the youth demographic we’re targeting simply isn’t going for soft angles, compromising language, and entryist “implicit whiteness” or “compassionate conservative” pablum. Millennials are starved for authenticity, masculinity, and full-throated radicalism…at least the ones which are plausibly accessible at this juncture.
You may be targeting different audiences for which paleoconservative language and symbolism work, but we are not. Your audience may be frightened by the Jewish Question, but ours demands absolute honesty or it instinctively tunes out. Our problem at this point is that we’re failing to successfully manage our rapid growth, falling behind on communication, fundraising inconsistently, and making other mistakes that catch up with organizations that aren’t prepared to scale as fast as they’re growing. Daily Stormer, TradYouth, and other projects which unabashedly and irreverently defy the movement’s conventional wisdom about what’s supposedly is going to play well are connecting with our target audiences and our performance metrics confirm that.
I feel that this phenomenon within our marginal political scene mirrors what’s happening right now in the macro with Donald Trump’s insurgent campaign. Admittedly, I’ve firmly underestimated how much strident realism is capable of playing with mainstream middle-aged audiences. Donald Trump is like Andrew Anglin for old people.
There are thousands and thousands of careerist political “experts” who’ve amassed a body of “wisdom” about how politics is supposed to work, and their very livelihoods depend on Trump flaming out. Back in July, they insisted that Trump’s campaign would flame out shortly. With each nonsensical “gotcha” scandal, they all confirmed in one voice that he’s toast.
Even now, as his likelihood of winning the Presidency firmly outstrips every other candidate’s, the “experts” are sticking their fingers in their ears and shouting, “Trump’s not happening! Trump’s not happening!”
Tom McCarthy explains how this is all supposed to work in his recent article, “Here’s why Donald Trump won’t Win.”
Quants are especially dangerous to listen to, as they’ve become our postmodern witch doctors, men who insist with little if any accountability or oversight that they can foretell future statistical trends from past statistical trends. The gift for grasping the overarching mechanism of trends and the gift for technical analysis are separate gifts, and they rarely converge on the same mind. These quants don’t grasp the mechanism, and are invariably caught with their pants down by an unanticipated black swan event which shifts their paradigms out from under them, leaving the investors and politicians holding the bag when their esoteric gambling schemes roll snake eyes.
Even a perfectly random trading algorithm is going to make you appear smart in a rising market, and even a perfectly asinine and formulaic political strategy is going to make you appear smart in a political arena where every other candidate is also relying on a perfectly asinine and formulaic political strategy. At the national political level, the hegemony of these “political analyst” hucksters is unchallenged. A brief review of the sixteen GOP candidates all flailing around and flopping in almost exactly the same way is a symptom of this disease, a disease which is analogous to the common stock crashes which are largely the product of massively distributed algorithmic miscalculations.
Yeah. And if you had empaneled them a couple months earlier, they would have put his odds of being where he’s at today in the negative digits. Why these wonky witch doctors retain their grip on the commentariat’s imaginations while hoisting themselves on their own petards of statistical validation is beyond me. Some meta-analysis of the analysts is in order, where we carefully evaluate how predictive these professional predictors have proven to be. In doomer circles, Gerald Celente and Sebastian Ronin seem to get unlimited do-overs on re-winding their doomsday clocks, and these mainstream quants enjoy unlimited do-overs from the press and the politicians who pay top dollar for their modern mythologizing.
As several doomsday prophets can attest, a miscalculated rapture or two or three is only a minor obstacle.
Yup.
Their first argument for why Trump can’t win is hilariously off-base. It relies on Rudy Giuliani’s early polling lead, implying the bogus conclusion that polling well at this stage is inversely correlated with victory. While even a truly dramatic lead at any point in time leading up to the election is no guarantee of victory, I think it can be safely stated, without cracking open Excel, that at absolutely every point in time leading up to the election, polling ahead of one’s opponents is positively correlated with victory.
This logic is perfectly upside-down. What candidacy in living memory has been ignored less than Trump’s candidacy at this early stage in the race? Everybody’s paying attention, to an absurd paradigm-shattering degree. Hell, the Republican Presidential Debate broke the cable viewership records!
According to this logic, Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee, both exceedingly well-known to Iowa voters, would be polling somewhere above frostbite. What else is there to know about Mike Huckabee? He’s also a media celebrity in his own right within the relevant circles, and if it weren’t for crickets, he’d have no buzz at all. If anything, Trump’s phenomenon is actually pulling in the other direction, with peoples’ early impression being that he’s a wealthy liberal reality television huckster who “can’t win.” Trump came in with stronger negatives than any other candidate, and is handily grappling over that obstacle to his electoral victory.
First off, there weren’t sixteen candidates splitting the vote back in 2012, so a guy can win with a dramatically smaller fraction of the vote. Accounting for this, Trump’s easily outperforming his rivals. The short answer to the question is that the seventeen unnecessary points can easily come from the marginal candidates whose campaigns are currently on life support. Rand has a senate seat to defend. Huckabee has a punditry career waiting on hold. Ben Carson’s got some brains out there which could benefit from his world-class surgical expertise. Carly Fiorina’s got some more multinational corporations to drive into the ground.
The more people learn about Trump, the more they’re liking him. This is borne out in polls. His poll numbers are steadily rising the more he talks and the more people learn about him, and his unfavorables are declining. What’s going on here is that the establishment has successfully pushed a myth early on that he’s an unsavory and unelectable buffoon. The thing about convincing people that a man’s an unelectable ass is that all those people who like Trump but are persuaded that he’s not a serious option will stampede to him as this illusion lifts.
Once again, this is the kind of error you run into when you’re dealing with quants. They can’t see the strategic reality for the analytical trees. The point being made here is that historically, strong support from the party elites has proven pivotal (if not decisive) in determining who can and cannot win. Donald Trump’s campaign comprises a black swan event for this statistical inference, as he’s a billionaire who doesn’t need (or even want) a nod from the billionaire oligarchs who pull the strings.
Donald Trump is a billionaire oligarch in his own right, who can nod at himself and pull his own strings.
Once again, Trump can’t be fed into this prefabricated political model, either. Trump and Pat may share some superficial similarities, but Trump’s neither a staunch conservative nor an intellectual. Trump absolutely can and absolutely will manage to pivot harder to the left if and when it’s appropriate for his campaign to do so. Pat neither could credibly pull off the kind of swift pivot to the center that Trump’s uniquely capable of, nor would he compromise his cherished intellectual principles.
Trump’s the penultimate strategist, and his staunch position on border control has absolutely nothing to do with conservative ideology and everything to do with managerial pragmatism. Contra what many in our circles are presuming and projecting, Donald Trump has no special love for White people. As an experienced manager of vast complex institutions, he sees our immigration situation for the objective managerial disaster that it is. I oppose both legal and illegal immigration out of identitarian concern for my people…White people. Both fellow identitarians and the liberal establishment assume falsely that Trump shares this motivation when there’s every indication that he’s coming at the illegal immigration problem from an entirely different perspective.
Illegal immigration has proven a great issue to make a splash with in the early stage of the Republican primary, but Trump can and will roll out other positions–and his pitch will prove persuasive–as his campaign approaches the general election. He’ll roll out proposals for infrastructure investment which will give paleolibertarians a stroke, social issue positions which will give Evangelicals the vapors, and outreach to minorities which will cause a good share of racial nationalists who currently favor him to destroy perfectly good laptops.
Personally, I’m still generally favorable toward his candidacy even as I foresee these betrayals, because sealing the border is of generational significance transcending all these disposable controversies like gay “marriage” and transgendered serviceman surgery, and because the Washington establishment, neocon hardliners, and Jewish commentariat are in a blind panic over his candidacy. I take a sadistic glee in inflicting Trump’s campaign on these oligarchs even if it doesn’t manage to prove beneficial for my own interest. At worst, a Trump victory will prove at least a Pyrrhic victory for my cause. It’s already done enough to shatter taboos relating to immigration issues to pay for itself.
Curiously, this confused disaster of an article entitled, “How Trump Can’t Win” concludes with a persuasive case for why he absolutely can win.
Everything we’re doing is informed by analytics. I have generated hundreds of charts and reports over the years and what I feel that I’ve confirmed quantitatively is that the youth demographic we’re targeting simply isn’t going for soft angles, compromising language, and entryist “implicit whiteness” or “compassionate conservative” pablum. Millennials are starved for authenticity, masculinity, and full-throated radicalism…at least the ones which are plausibly accessible at this juncture.
You may be targeting different audiences for which paleoconservative language and symbolism work, but we are not. Your audience may be frightened by the Jewish Question, but ours demands absolute honesty or it instinctively tunes out. Our problem at this point is that we’re failing to successfully manage our rapid growth, falling behind on communication, fundraising inconsistently, and making other mistakes that catch up with organizations that aren’t prepared to scale as fast as they’re growing. Daily Stormer, TradYouth, and other projects which unabashedly and irreverently defy the movement’s conventional wisdom about what’s supposedly is going to play well are connecting with our target audiences and our performance metrics confirm that.
 |
| Has won the internet. |
There are thousands and thousands of careerist political “experts” who’ve amassed a body of “wisdom” about how politics is supposed to work, and their very livelihoods depend on Trump flaming out. Back in July, they insisted that Trump’s campaign would flame out shortly. With each nonsensical “gotcha” scandal, they all confirmed in one voice that he’s toast.
Even now, as his likelihood of winning the Presidency firmly outstrips every other candidate’s, the “experts” are sticking their fingers in their ears and shouting, “Trump’s not happening! Trump’s not happening!”
Tom McCarthy explains how this is all supposed to work in his recent article, “Here’s why Donald Trump won’t Win.”
But can Donald Trump really win the 2016 Republican presidential nomination?
Knowledgable people think he might. They include some journalists, some former Republican consultants and operatives, talk show host Bill Maher and a contestant from season three of NBC’s The Apprentice, who now is co-chairperson of Trump’s Iowa operation.
But more-knowledgable people think he won’t. They include the quants and geeks, some Republican consultants and operatives, and lots of political scientists.
Quants are especially dangerous to listen to, as they’ve become our postmodern witch doctors, men who insist with little if any accountability or oversight that they can foretell future statistical trends from past statistical trends. The gift for grasping the overarching mechanism of trends and the gift for technical analysis are separate gifts, and they rarely converge on the same mind. These quants don’t grasp the mechanism, and are invariably caught with their pants down by an unanticipated black swan event which shifts their paradigms out from under them, leaving the investors and politicians holding the bag when their esoteric gambling schemes roll snake eyes.
Even a perfectly random trading algorithm is going to make you appear smart in a rising market, and even a perfectly asinine and formulaic political strategy is going to make you appear smart in a political arena where every other candidate is also relying on a perfectly asinine and formulaic political strategy. At the national political level, the hegemony of these “political analyst” hucksters is unchallenged. A brief review of the sixteen GOP candidates all flailing around and flopping in almost exactly the same way is a symptom of this disease, a disease which is analogous to the common stock crashes which are largely the product of massively distributed algorithmic miscalculations.
A trio of political data experts empanelled by FiveThirtyEight for a podcast earlier this month estimated Trump’s chances of snagging the nomination at 2%, 0% and minus-10%, respectively.
Yeah. And if you had empaneled them a couple months earlier, they would have put his odds of being where he’s at today in the negative digits. Why these wonky witch doctors retain their grip on the commentariat’s imaginations while hoisting themselves on their own petards of statistical validation is beyond me. Some meta-analysis of the analysts is in order, where we carefully evaluate how predictive these professional predictors have proven to be. In doomer circles, Gerald Celente and Sebastian Ronin seem to get unlimited do-overs on re-winding their doomsday clocks, and these mainstream quants enjoy unlimited do-overs from the press and the politicians who pay top dollar for their modern mythologizing.
As several doomsday prophets can attest, a miscalculated rapture or two or three is only a minor obstacle.
“If Trump is nominated, then everything we think we know about presidential nominations is wrong,” Larry Sabato, head of the center for politics at the University of Virginia, wrote last week.
Yup.
Their first argument for why Trump can’t win is hilariously off-base. It relies on Rudy Giuliani’s early polling lead, implying the bogus conclusion that polling well at this stage is inversely correlated with victory. While even a truly dramatic lead at any point in time leading up to the election is no guarantee of victory, I think it can be safely stated, without cracking open Excel, that at absolutely every point in time leading up to the election, polling ahead of one’s opponents is positively correlated with victory.
What happened to Giuliani? He is said to have made tactical errors such as bad hires and ad buys. But the real explanation, many analysts think, is that Giuliani’s lead was a phantom lead. He was just ahead in the polls in a race most people were mostly ignoring.
This logic is perfectly upside-down. What candidacy in living memory has been ignored less than Trump’s candidacy at this early stage in the race? Everybody’s paying attention, to an absurd paradigm-shattering degree. Hell, the Republican Presidential Debate broke the cable viewership records!
“The other candidates [Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Ron Paul] were not that well known. Over the course of the campaign, voters got to know the others.”
According to this logic, Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee, both exceedingly well-known to Iowa voters, would be polling somewhere above frostbite. What else is there to know about Mike Huckabee? He’s also a media celebrity in his own right within the relevant circles, and if it weren’t for crickets, he’d have no buzz at all. If anything, Trump’s phenomenon is actually pulling in the other direction, with peoples’ early impression being that he’s a wealthy liberal reality television huckster who “can’t win.” Trump came in with stronger negatives than any other candidate, and is handily grappling over that obstacle to his electoral victory.
In the first 13 Republican primary and caucus elections in 2012, the winner garnered an average of 41.8% of the vote. Trump is polling nationally at around 25%. Where do the extra 17 points come from?
First off, there weren’t sixteen candidates splitting the vote back in 2012, so a guy can win with a dramatically smaller fraction of the vote. Accounting for this, Trump’s easily outperforming his rivals. The short answer to the question is that the seventeen unnecessary points can easily come from the marginal candidates whose campaigns are currently on life support. Rand has a senate seat to defend. Huckabee has a punditry career waiting on hold. Ben Carson’s got some brains out there which could benefit from his world-class surgical expertise. Carly Fiorina’s got some more multinational corporations to drive into the ground.
Do you know anyone who is undecided about Donald Trump? Neither do most Americans. That’s because Trump is one of the most famous people in the country and is currently benefitting from grossly disproportionate media coverage. Everybody’s heard of Trump. Problematically for him, familiarity has not bred affection.
The more people learn about Trump, the more they’re liking him. This is borne out in polls. His poll numbers are steadily rising the more he talks and the more people learn about him, and his unfavorables are declining. What’s going on here is that the establishment has successfully pushed a myth early on that he’s an unsavory and unelectable buffoon. The thing about convincing people that a man’s an unelectable ass is that all those people who like Trump but are persuaded that he’s not a serious option will stampede to him as this illusion lifts.
Trump does not have the support he needs from the Republican party to win the Republican nomination.
Once again, this is the kind of error you run into when you’re dealing with quants. They can’t see the strategic reality for the analytical trees. The point being made here is that historically, strong support from the party elites has proven pivotal (if not decisive) in determining who can and cannot win. Donald Trump’s campaign comprises a black swan event for this statistical inference, as he’s a billionaire who doesn’t need (or even want) a nod from the billionaire oligarchs who pull the strings.
Donald Trump is a billionaire oligarch in his own right, who can nod at himself and pull his own strings.
Trump looks more like Pat Buchanan – a well-known, polarizing figure whose passionate backing in one wing of the GOP (the anti-immigrant wing, incidentally) failed to attract mainstream voters, much less establishment support.
[…]
[J]udging by how many people have an unfavorable view of Trump. As bad as his figures are among Republicans, they are much worse with the population as a whole. The recent Quinnipiac poll found Trump with minus-14 favorability rating in Florida, a minus-22 rating in Ohio and a minus-21 rating in Pennsylvania.
Once again, Trump can’t be fed into this prefabricated political model, either. Trump and Pat may share some superficial similarities, but Trump’s neither a staunch conservative nor an intellectual. Trump absolutely can and absolutely will manage to pivot harder to the left if and when it’s appropriate for his campaign to do so. Pat neither could credibly pull off the kind of swift pivot to the center that Trump’s uniquely capable of, nor would he compromise his cherished intellectual principles.
Trump’s the penultimate strategist, and his staunch position on border control has absolutely nothing to do with conservative ideology and everything to do with managerial pragmatism. Contra what many in our circles are presuming and projecting, Donald Trump has no special love for White people. As an experienced manager of vast complex institutions, he sees our immigration situation for the objective managerial disaster that it is. I oppose both legal and illegal immigration out of identitarian concern for my people…White people. Both fellow identitarians and the liberal establishment assume falsely that Trump shares this motivation when there’s every indication that he’s coming at the illegal immigration problem from an entirely different perspective.
 |
| Adept at reading wind direction. |
Personally, I’m still generally favorable toward his candidacy even as I foresee these betrayals, because sealing the border is of generational significance transcending all these disposable controversies like gay “marriage” and transgendered serviceman surgery, and because the Washington establishment, neocon hardliners, and Jewish commentariat are in a blind panic over his candidacy. I take a sadistic glee in inflicting Trump’s campaign on these oligarchs even if it doesn’t manage to prove beneficial for my own interest. At worst, a Trump victory will prove at least a Pyrrhic victory for my cause. It’s already done enough to shatter taboos relating to immigration issues to pay for itself.
Curiously, this confused disaster of an article entitled, “How Trump Can’t Win” concludes with a persuasive case for why he absolutely can win.
But Karol warned against writing Trump off.
“It’s hazardous to predict Trump’s trajectory,” Karol said. “He is unique. We’ve had candidates who could be compared to him in certain respects.
“There are other candidates who have been populist outsiders. There are other candidates who have been independently wealthy and able to self-finance. There are other candidates who have been very good at working the media. There’s been the businessman who enters into politics.
“There hasn’t been anybody, though, when you put it all together, who is quite like Trump.”
