Once upon a time the Southern Poverty Law Centre was a great organisation. They fought the KKK and white supremacist groups.

However they have lost their way as they have now starting labeling individuals who criticise a religion as members of hate groups – showing an inability to distinguish between legitimate criticism and hate speech.

Lee Smith writes at Tablet Mag:

Late last week, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which became deservedly famous in the 1980s for combating violent white-power hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis, published a list of 15 individuals it labels as particularly threatening anti-Muslim extremists. It is sad but telling that the SPLC’s so-called field guide to Muslim-haters is not a list of violent extremists—who certainly do exist—but is instead a blacklist of prominent writers whose opinions on a range of cultural and political issues are offensive to the SPLC. The SPLC blacklist list contains practicing Muslims like Maajid Nawaz, ex-Muslims like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, foreign-policy think-tankers like Frank Gaffney and Daniel Pipes, and right-wing firebrands like David Horowitz—none of whom could be reasonably described as anti-Muslim bigots.

I spoke to Nawaz on the phone in London to ask for his reaction. “A bunch of first-world, comfortable liberal Americans who are not Muslims have decided from their comfortable perch to label me, an activist who is working within his Muslim community to push back against extremism, an anti-Muslim extremist.”

Yes they have called a Muslim who preaches tolerance and non-extremism an anti-Muslim extremist.

It seems the SPLC are the ones becoming the extremists. A pity as they have done much good in the past.

The Herald reports:

The Green Party’s newest recruitment Chloe Swarbrick says she was approached by several political parties before she picked the Greens.

The failed mayoral candidate won’t say which other parties tried to win her over, though Labour leader Andrew Little has previously expressed an interest in meeting with her.

“I have always voted Greens,” the 22-year-old said after confirming her candidacy this morning.

“I just affiliate with what they do and I’m on board with their policies and their values.”

At a time when UK and US politics was becoming increasingly bitter, she wanted to be “part of a positive change”.

The party already has five Auckland-based MPs and several more high-ranking candidates based in the city.

However, it is understood that at least one of the party’s MPs will leave Parliament at the next election.

Their Auckland MPs are Genter, Clendon, Roche, Davidson and Coates.

Not sure who is standing down but Clendon is very low impact so that would be my guess.

Swarbrick got almost 30,000 votes for Mayor. If she can attract even two thirds of that to the Greens that is worth an extra 1% for them. However maybe they were voters who already vote Greens?

David Leonhardt writes in the NY Times:

Many charter schools fail to live up to their promise, but one type has repeatedly shown impressive results.

Hannah Larkin, the principal at Match, refers to such schools as “high expectations, high support” schools. They devote more of their resources to classroom teaching and less to almost everything else. They keep students in class for more hours. They set high standards for students and try to instill confidence in them. They focus on giving teachers feedback about their craft and helping them get better.

And how have these schools done?

The latest batch of evidence about this approach is among the most rigorous. Professors at M.I.T., Columbia, Michigan and Berkeley have tracked thousands of charter-school applicants, through high school and beyond, in Boston, where most charters fit the “high expectations, high support” model.

Crucially, the researchers took several steps to make sure the findings were real. They compared lottery winners with losers, controlling for the fact that families who applied for the lotteries were different from families who didn’t. They also counted as charter students all those who enrolled, including any who later left.

This is quite crucial. Some here claim that kids are doing better at charter schools because the sort of parents motivated to apply are parents more interested in their kids education. But these researchers took this into account by comparing outcomes of those who applied and got in with those who applied and did not.

When you talk to the professors about their findings, you hear a degree of excitement that’s uncommon for academic researchers. “Relative to other things that social scientists and education policy people have tried to boost performance — class sizes, tracking, new buildings — these schools are producing spectacular gains,” said Joshua Angrist, an M.I.T. professor.

Students who go to Boston’s charter schools learn reading and math better and faster than students elsewhere. They are more likely to take A.P. tests and to do well on them. Their SAT scores are higher than for similar students elsewhere — an average of 51 points higher on the math SAT. Many more students attend a four-year college, suggesting that the benefits don’t disappear over time.

Yet Labour, Greens, NZ First and the unions are determined to close down every charter school in NZ.

The gains are large enough that some of Boston’s charters, despite enrolling mostly lower-income students, have test scores that resemble those of upper-middle-class public schools. The seventh graders at the Brooke Charter schools in East Boston and Roslindale fare as well on a state math test as students at the prestigious Boston Latin school, the country’s oldest public school and a school with an admissions exam.

Not only do they close the gaps between poor and well off students, the story cited has graphs showing they almost entirely close the gap between white and black students.

A frequent criticism of charters is that they skim off the best students, but that’s not the case in Boston. Many groups that struggle academically — boys, African-Americans, Latinos, special-education students like Alanna — are among the biggest beneficiaries. On average, notes Parag Pathak, also of M.I.T., Boston’s charters eliminate between one-third and one-half of the white-black test-score gap in a single year.

The left should be embracing charter schools, not trying to close them down.

Two recent analyses of multiple studies concluded that charters do not hurt outcomes at other schools — and may even help improve them, by creating competition.

A dirty word to some – competition.

For anyone who sees some merit on both sides, I’d encourage listening to Susan Dynarski, one of the researchers who conducted the Boston study.

A University of Michigan professor (and Times contributor), Dynarski is a proudly progressive former union organizer. She told me that she had agonized over being on the opposite side of an issue as some of her friends and usual allies. …

“The gains to children in Massachusetts charters are enormous. They are larger than any I have seen in my career,” Dynarski wrote. “To me, it is immoral to deny children a better education because charters don’t meet some voters’ ideal of what a public school should be. Children don’t live in the long term. They need us to deliver now.”

A very good article.

538 report:

The streak is over. For the first time in its 148 years of existence, Elliott County, Kentucky, failed to vote for the Democratic candidate in a presidential election. Based on current vote counts, Trump will finish with 70 percent of the vote, a huge swing from the 47 percent that Romney received in a narrow 2012 loss.

If it has voted democratic for 148 years then that is the longest stretch of the 3,143 counties in America.

They had almost 5,000 registered Democrats and just 227 Republicans. Yet Trump got 70% of the vote.

Hope everyone is okay. Some huge rattles. Can’t recall a quake this scary hitting Wellington before in recent years.

Must have been especially scary for those in Canterbury.

Have lost count of the number of after shocks.

Stuff reports:

Kiwisaver should be made compulsory and there needs to be a gradual lift to the retirement age, former finance minister Sir Michael Cullen says.

This, as well as lifting contribution levels, will help the country avoid making a “very, very dangerous bet” on income taxes paying for superannuation in the future.

Cullen, who was behind Kiwisaver’s introduction nine years ago, spoke at the Workplace Savings New Zealand conference in Auckland on Monday.

Cullen said in those nine years Kiwisaver had grown to just over $35 billion and 2.7 million members.

But while he thought it had been a success, a couple of key changes needed to be made to make it an even bigger success.

This included the “controversial” choice to make the scheme compulsory, but also relied on a gradual lift in the retirement age, which he said would help grow Kiwisaver to a $100b industry.

I support increasing the retirement age but am wary about making KiwiSaver compulsory – that removes choice from people as to how best to save for their retirement. Some might want to invest in a business. Others might want to invest in property. Dictating a compulsory method of savings imposes one size fits all.

He said a compulsory scheme offered a “third pillar” to monetary and fiscal policy, both of which had side effects.

The Government could lower or raise somebody’s contribution rate to help stimulate the economy, he said.

“The foregone income remains the property of the individual, that’s its beautiful advantage compared with interest rates.

“You’re not redistributing from people trying to pay their mortgage to people who are elderly and have large surpluses with a bank.”

I like the idea of increasing or decreasing contribution rates as an additional monetary policy tool. Cullen makes a good case for it.

However you don’t need to have it compulsory for this to still be an effective tool.

Contributions should be raised from the “inadequate” 3 per cent to closer to 6 per cent over the next six years or so, which was more in line with Australia.

I’m contributing at 8% but again it is not one size fits all. Not all employees could afford a 6% employee contribution. Also if the intention was to have the Government match that, the fiscal cost would be large.

538 reports:

Every state that elected a Republican candidate for Senate voted for Trump, and every state that elected a Democratic Senate candidate voted for Clinton.

The 2016 Senate elections were the most nationalized ever.

This is unique.

Indeed, this is the first time that all the states (with Senate races on the ballot) have voted for the same party in both the presidential and Senate races. Senators were first popularly elected in 1914, and the next presidential election took place two years later, in 1916. So that’s 100 years and 26 presidential election cycles in all.

And this happened despite such a non traditional Republican candidate.

If you want to know how a state will vote in a Senate race, looking to how it voted in the previous two presidential elections tells you almost everything you need to know. And this phenomenon is relatively new and coming on very strongly.

If this pattern continues in the next couple of election cycles, it’ll be very bad news for Democrats. Every state has the same number of senators regardless of population, and there are more Republican-leaning states than Democratic-leaning states in presidential elections right now. Trump won 30 states, even as he lost the popular vote.

So if Republican can hold those 30 states then they end up with a permanent filibuster proof Senate.

Given that politics is mostly cyclical (i.e., the national electorate favors Democrats and Republicans equally over time), the current makeup of the parties’ coalitions means that over the long term, Republicans are in a far better position to win Senate seats than Democrats are. For Democrats’ position to improve, they need to change their coalition, or voters need to start splitting their presidential and Senate tickets again. Otherwise, the Democrats will need to get used to being locked out of power.

Too early too know if the correlation was a one off.

Radio NZ reports:

One of the women who was jailed for her part in the death of Rotorua toddler, Nia Glassie, has had another child removed from her care by Child, Youth and Family (CYF).

Oriwa Kemp was jailed for three years and four months for the assault and wilful ill-treatment of the three-year-old, who died in 2007 after prolonged abuse.

She has given birth to at least three children since serving her sentence – all have now been taken by CYF.

So how do you stop this sort of sterilisation? I don’t advocate that, as too harsh a power for the state. But surely something can be done?

Doesn’t CYF have the power to get a court order stating that any children born to a parent will automatically be taken into state care, with the idea being this will be a deterrent. Was this done in this case?

Claire Trevett writes:

But today Labour will have moved on to bigger battles.

The United States elections reportedly prompted a 141 per cent increase in Americans searching New Zealand property listings on realestate.co.nz.

Labour’s team will be calculating likelihood ratios on a list of American-sounding surnames for phase two in its campaign to save the New Zealand first-home buyer.

Heh.

The Herald reports:

Auckland council bureaucrats have spent $500,000 on a new city slogan, which has already been condemned as “outrageous” by some councillors and does not have the support of new mayor Phil Goff.

The city’s proposed new global brand – The Place Desired by Many – was worked on by 115 council staff over two years.

You are effing kidding me.

Last night, Auckland councillor Dick Quax blasted the move as “outrageous raping of the ratepayer” and councillor Chris Fletcher said it was “a complete waste of money”.

Bureaucrats gone mad.

The Washington Post finds 13 things in the exit polls:

1. Trump won the white vote by a record margin – but only 1% more than Romney
2. There was no surge of female voters – fewer women voted
3. There was no surge of Latino voters – Trump did better than Romney
4. Education level mattered hugely in your vote choice
5. Trump did better with white evangelicals than Romney – despite being on his third marriage
6. Trump didn’t bring lots of new voters to the process
7. The economy was the big issue — and Clinton won it
8. This was a change election. And Trump was the change candidate.
9. Obamacare was a wind beneath Trump’s wings – the 25% increase in premiums helped Trump
10. Trump’s personal image was and is horrible – still only 38% favourable rating
11. Clinton’s email hurt her – 63% of Americans said it was a significant issue yet Democrats tried to claim no one cared
12. This was a deeply pessimistic electorate
13. People didn’t think Trump lost the debates as badly as I did

The Washington Post looks at the winners and losers of the US election:

Winners

• Donald Trump, 45th President
• Reince Priebus, RNC Chair – for staying loyal
• Senator Roger Wicker, Chair Republican Senate Committee – kept the Senate
• Kellyanne Conway, Trump Campaign Manager – managed Trump
• Allan Lichtman – called the election for Trump – perfect record since 1984
• Michelle Obama – the star of the campaign

Losers

• Hillary Clinton
• President Obama – legacy destroyed
• Organisation/Money/TV Ads – Trump won with few of them
• The media – did not understand the electorate
• Evan Bayh – massively failed to win his old seat of Indiana
• Chuck Schumer – will not be Senate Majority Leader

The Herald reports:

Members of Parliament have been given a 2.49 per cent pay rise, meaning the Prime Minister receives an extra $11,170 a year and backbench MPs get a $3890 bump.

The Remuneration Authority has released its determination on MPs’ salaries, the second since a change to peg MPs’ salary increases to those in the wider public sector.

The increase takes Prime Minister John Key’s salary to $459,739 while Labour leader Andrew Little and Cabinet Ministers will get $288,900 – up $7020.

Backbench MPs without extra responsibilities will get $160,024, up from $156,136.

I’ve done my normal table showing the new salary for each position, plus the non salary components.

Asra Nomani writes in The Washington Post:

A lot is being said now about the “silent secret Trump supporters.”

This is my confession — and explanation: I — a 51-year-old, a Muslim, an immigrant woman “of color” — am one of those silent voters for Donald Trump. And I’m not a “bigot,” “racist,” “chauvinist” or “white supremacist,” as Trump voters are being called, nor part of some “whitelash.”

In the winter of 2008, as a lifelong liberal and proud daughter of West Virginia, a state born on the correct side of history on slavery, I moved to historically conservative Virginia only because the state had helped elect Barack Obama as the first African American president of the United States.

But, then, for much of this past year, I have kept my electoral preference secret: I was leaning toward Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.

So why?

I support the Democratic Party’s position on abortion, same-sex marriage and climate change.

But I am a single mother who can’t afford health insurance under Obamacare. The president’s mortgage-loan modification program, “HOPE NOW,” didn’t help me. Tuesday, I drove into Virginia from my hometown of Morgantown, W.Va., where I see rural America and ordinary Americans, like me, still struggling to make ends meet, after eight years of the Obama administration.

The media didn’t report very much the 25% increase in health premiums as a result of Obamacare. But that was a big issue for many.

Finally, as a liberal Muslim who has experienced, first-hand, Islamic extremism in this world, I have been opposed to the decision by President Obama and the Democratic Party to tap dance around the “Islam” in Islamic State. Of course, Trump’s rhetoric has been far more than indelicate and folks can have policy differences with his recommendations, but, to me, it has been exaggerated and demonized by the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, their media channels, such as Al Jazeera, and their proxies in the West, in a convenient distraction from the issue that most worries me as a human being on this earth: extremist Islam of the kind that has spilled blood from the hallways of the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai to the dance floor of the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla.

Bravo.

By mid-October, it was one Aug. 17, 2014, email from the WikiLeaks treasure trove of Clinton emails that poisoned the well for me. In it, Clinton told aide John Podesta: “We need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL,” the politically correct name for the Islamic State, “and other radical Sunni groups in the region.”

The revelations of multimillion-dollar donations to the Clinton Foundation from Qatar and Saudi Arabia killed my support for Clinton. Yes, I want equal pay. No, I reject Trump’s “locker room” banter, the idea of a “wall” between the United States and Mexico and a plan to “ban” Muslims. But I trust the United States and don’t buy the political hyperbole — agenda-driven identity politics of its own — that demonized Trump and his supporters.

And for the future:

Days before the election, a journalist from India emailed me, asking: What are your thoughts being a Muslim in “Trump’s America”?

I wrote that as a child of India, arriving in the United States at the age of 4 in the summer of 1969, I have absolutely no fears about being a Muslim in a “Trump America.” The checks and balances in America and our rich history of social justice and civil rights will never allow the fear-mongering that has been attached to candidate Trump’s rhetoric to come to fruition.

What worried me the most were my concerns about the influence of theocratic Muslim dictatorships, including Qatar and Saudi Arabia, in a Hillary Clinton America. These dictatorships are no shining examples of progressive society with their failure to offer fundamental human rights and pathways to citizenship to immigrants from India, refugees from Syria and the entire class of de facto slaves that live in those dictatorships.

We have to stand up with moral courage against not just hate against Muslims, but hate by Muslims, so that everyone can live with sukhun, or peace of mind, I finished in my reflections to the journalist in India.

Again, bravo.

Stuff reports:

Max Key has said he received “death threats twice a week” in a speech at this year’s NetSafe conference in Auckland today. 

The Prime Minister’s son was invited to speak on ‘the price of celebrity’, alongside Mike Puru, Kris Fox, Richie Hardcore, and Verity Johnson.

A tweet from Richie Hardcore wrote, “In your teenage years everyone is trying to find yourself…I was getting death threats twice a week’ Max Key #netsafecoht“.

Key said he wasn’t at today’s event looking for sympathy.

“I don’t want any sympathy for the bullying I get. I want to raise awareness for the kids, who are getting bullied, that don’t have people around to support them like I do.”

He has suffered ruthless messages and abuse from people on and offline in the past, many of them directed at his father. 

It’s sad that some people have so much hatred that they think threats of violence or worse is acceptable.

Richard Dawkins writes:

Dear New Zealand,

The two largest nations in the English-speaking world have just suffered catastrophes at the hands of voters—in both cases the uneducated, anti-intellectual portion of voters. Science in both countries will be hit extremely hard: In the one case, by the xenophobically inspired severing of painstakingly built-up relationships with European partners; in the other case by the election of an unqualified, narcissistic, misogynistic sick joke as president. In neither case is the disaster going to be short-lived: in America because of the nonretirement rule of the Supreme Court; in Britain because Brexit is irreversible.

There are top scientists in America and Britain—talented, creative people, desperate to escape the redneck bigotry of their home countries. Dear New Zealand, you are a deeply civilized small nation, with a low population in a pair of beautiful, spacious islands. You care about climate change, the future of the planet and other scientifically important issues. Why not write to all the Nobel Prize winners in Britain and America, write to the Fields medalists, Kyoto and Crafoord Prize and International Cosmos Prize winners, the Fellows of the Royal Society, the elite scientists in the National Academy of Sciences, the Fellows of the British Academy and similar bodies in America. Offer them citizenship. The contribution that creative intellectuals can make to the prosperity and cultural life of a nation is out of all proportion to their numbers. You could make New Zealand the Athens of the modern world.

Yes, dear New Zealand, I know it’s an unrealistic, surreal pipe dream. But on the day after U.S. election day, in the year of Brexit, the distinction between the surreal and the awfulness of the real seems to merge in a bad trip from which a pipe dream is the only refuge.

Yours,

Richard Dawkins, founder and board chairman, Richard Dawkins Foundation

Free citizenship to any Nobel Prize winner. Works for me.

Long time readers of Kiwiblog may recall my incorrect predictions before the 2008 and 2012 Presidential Elections. This time around, aside from a few posts in the primary season, I decided to refrain from writing and predicting. This was partly due to current busyness but also because the race was so volatile and unpredictable that I felt that meaningful prognosticating was next to impossible. When asked, I told people that Clinton was highly likely to win but that with Trump, anything was possible given the numerous times he managed to utterly defy conventional wisdom. As stated in earlier posts, I was a Rubio supporter who voted for Cruz in the primary as Rubio had by then dropped out of the race. I voted for Trump only to stop Hillary and not because I like him or some of his policies. Here are 11 reasons why I feel Trump won:

1 – Clinton’s failings were more consequential than Trump’s failings

Trump’s failings have been the subject so much media scrutiny that it is fair to categorise some of the coverage as overkill such as his:

• racist attack on the judge in the Trump University case;
• mocking of a disabled reporter;
• criticism of Gold Star parents’ the Khans;
• mocking the weight of a Miss Universe contestant ;
• vile comments about his sexual exploits (real or imagined) to Billy Bush;
• overly aggressive and inappropriate advances to women;
• aggressive use of eminent domain to get his developments completed;
• supposed stiffing of contractors;
• numerous corporate bankruptcies;
• relentless and often personal attacks on almost all his opponents;
• being the subject of various lawsuits.

These are indicative of Trump’s numerous character flaws but frankly come as no surprise. Some of this sadly comes with the territory of a mega rich billionaire. Most mega wealthy people in the US are dogged by lawsuits; most are frivolous attempts at out of court settlements. Most of the rude outbursts were manifestations of Trump’s political naiveté (e.g. attacking the Khans who were definitely Clinton operatives and deeply involved in abuse of the business visa programme BUT who’s loss of their son in Iraq made them politically untouchable). Trump’s misogyny is sadly typical as well – it doesn’t make it right but it does not disqualify him from office, especially when one considers the peccadillos of many prior Presidents Republican and Democrat.

Let’s look at Clinton’s negatives and see how they stack up:

• Hillary got a child rapist off a serious sentence and bragged about how she roughed up the child victim in court to do it.
• Hillary handled Bill’s numerous ‘bimbo eruptions’ with concerted campaigns of intimidation and attempts to silence these women. This included aggressive use of private detectives, filing of counter claims, intense harassment and threats of financial ruin from libel suits. There was no ‘let the victim speak’ like her claimed support of women victims of sexual and other violence.
• Her ethical lapses over the Rose Law billing scandal, the Whitewater investment and the White House travel office scandal are well known. Hillary used subterfuge, lies and obfuscation to cover her tracks in a pattern that has become her standard modus operandi.
• Clinton’s time as Secretary of State is littered with abject policy failures. Her famous Russian reset emboldened Putin to invade Crimea and back nationalist Russian insurgents to undermine the central Ukraine. Her fingers were all over Obama’s disastrous Syrian policy and his inaction that has fueled the civil war and the massive refugee crisis and vastly increased Russian influence in the region. She was supportive of the awful Iranian nuclear deal and is singularly unable to point to any substantive achievement in office or her driving of any key Senate legislation.
• Clinton’s inaction and incompetence was most evident in her appallingly bad judgement over Libya. Gaddafi had been well contained and had given up all attempts to obtain nukes and yet she pushed for regime change with no viable replacement opening Libya up to violent chaos as rival factions soon dominated by ISIS (and all the extreme Muslim fundamentalist violence that accompanies them) filled the vacuum. Add to this her deaf ear to the many requests for a security upgrade at the US Consulate in Benghazi, the untimely death of Ambassador Stevens and three other US security personnel represents a failure of her basic duties as SoS. Her (and the entire Obama Administration) blaming the incident on some obscure internet video (when documents show she knew from the get-go it was a terrorist related attack) and lying to the families of the deceased, was a low point in the conduct of any senior Administration official.
• Bill and Hillary Clinton set about to leverage off her influence as SoS by employing aggressive shake down pay-for-play tactics via the Clinton Foundation. The sheer level of greed, graft and corruption evident in the nefarious actions of the Clinton Foundation make Trump’s eminent domain and Trump U excesses look like tiny pin pricks. Peter Schweitzer’s Clinton Cash movie (viewable for free here https://youtu.be/7LYRUOd_QoM ) details the cleverly worked corruption on a grand scale enriching the Clintons to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars and ensuring lavish private jet and luxury hotel accommodation for the Clintons and their entourage of hangers on.
• Clinton’s blatant use of a non-secure and non authorised external email server was conceived precisely to enable her to evade normal Congressional scrutiny over her actions whilst in office concerning the Clinton Foundation. She has repeatedly, consistently and blatantly lied about this server (and the emails sent from it) since it was discovered in March 2016. She and her staff engaged in systematic attempts to destroy key evidence after given notice of Congressional interest in seeing her emails constituting clear cut examples of obstruction of justice. Her cavalier attitude towards classified material (including the sending of emails given the very highest levels of security classification) from her insecure server is such that would earn any lessor mortal a spell in a Federal penitentiary. Various experts have weighed in (including senior FBI sources) that at least five foreign powers hostile to the US likely penetrated her server and obtained highly classified top secret information including the names and addresses of intelligence assets located inside the security intelligence agencies of potentially hostile nations such as Pakistan jeopardising operational secrecy and even agents’ lives.

Clinton’s failings were (and are) far more consequential. They have led to foreign policy disasters. They have emboldened Putin and allowed Russia to emerge as a regional power. They have endangered national security and her incompetence has led to the death of four US embassy staff and she lied to cover up what happened. Everywhere you turn with the Clintons you see graft, greed, incompetence, lies, cover ups, attempts to blame others and them taking donations from vile dictators and totalitarian regimes whilst betraying allies such as Poland, the Czech Republic and Israel. I’m sorry but insulting a fat beauty queen and talking about grabbing pussy doesn’t come close to the corrupt mess that is Hillary Clinton and everything she touches. Despite the MSM blowing up Trump’s negatives in an endless drumbeat of revelations and downplaying the Clinton’s multitudinous scandals, voters could assign the correct weight to the seriousness of each candidate’s deficiencies and opted for Trump’s antics that, whilst very unpleasant in a frat boy kind of way, did not jeopardize national security, lead to a loss of independence of Crimea or to the avoidable death of embassy staff.

2 – Power of the MSM and the elite political class has been permanently shattered

Never in my living memory has media coverage of a major political campaign been so incredibly lopsided in favour of one candidate. It is well known that the US mainstream media tilt to the left and reliably support Democrat candidates. But MSM support for Clinton was on a scale that was unprecedented. Trump’s every gaffe however minor was relentlessly and repeatedly reported. The anti woman material received blanket, wall to wall coverage day after day. Collusion between the Clinton campaign and key media, often suspected, was fully confirmed in various of the WikiLeaks releases and were never refuted. The DNC Chair Donna Brazile, a CNN contributor, gave the campaign a couple of CNN debates questions in advance. Campaign talking points featured often in the line of questioning undertaken by MSM moderators. Lester Holt from NBC was caught rehearsing his line of questioning before the NBC debate with Clinton’s people and the campaign gave talking points on Trump to prominent liberal Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank that he duly published. And these are the incidents we know about.

But it was the attitude of political elites from the Republican Party that led to a circumstance unheard of in any Presidential election campaign – that of the old elite of the party of the nominee actively opposing the nominee. At the nadir of the campaign, Trump had to endure countless attacks from within his own party from the Bushes, Mitt Romney and a line of ‘Never Trump’ prominent conservative commentators such as Bill Kristol, Fred Barnes, Eric Erikson and virtually the entire editorial board and contributors of National Review such as Jonah Goldberg. At the peak of the Billy Bush tape furor, even prominent and highly regarded conservative talk show host Hugh Hewitt abandoned Trump and called for him to stand down.

Trump took none of this lying down and repeatedly and forcefully struck back. His stump speeches were littered with attacks on the media to the roar of approval from his huge crowds. He was scathing in his denunciations of those on the right who attacked him and at several junctures in the campaign seemed to be spending more time arguing with Republicans than fighting Clinton. A parade of Congressional Republicans, especially those in vulnerable Senate seats, denounced Trump and tried to create distance from him.

In the end, the chattering classes (including those in NZ on the right like Matthew Hooton) and their media fellow travelers entirely misread Trump’s audience. Via social media (like Facebook and Twitter) and his large number of huge rallies across the nation and direct email, Trump went over the heads of the elites and got his message out. He astutely used new media such as less hostile conservative bloggers and a raft of supporting talk back radio hosts. Once the primaries were over and the MSM turned on him, he stuck mostly to interviews on Fox News and increasingly only with his biggest fan boy, TV and radio commentator Sean Hannity. Whilst Hannity was pilloried by many conservatives for his almost sycophantic support of Trump, his ratings climbed as there was a thirst from middle America to see and hear Trump unfiltered by hostile MSM attitudes and attempts to ignore him. Just as was the case with the governing media elites in Britain who castigated supporters of Brexit, average voters saw through the bias and could make judgements about Trump that were far more balanced and nuanced seeing a net positive in his bombastic style of populism. Audiences and readership for the network TV channels, left leaning cable channels and the old print media giants had been declining before 2016. This election cycle has signaled the death knell of any residual influence the mainstream media once had, so blatant was their bias for Clinton and so pernicious were their tactics used to assist her.

3 – This election was partially a referendum on Obama’s performance and Trump pounded Obama’s weaknesses

Notwithstanding Obama’s relatively good personal approval ratings this far into his second term, Trump seized on Obama’s two most controversial legacies: the Iran nuclear deal and Obamacare. The tawdry sight of hundreds of millions of cash in dollars, euros and Swiss francs seen being loaded onto pallets just prior to the release of US hostages, gave every impression of a cash for hostages deal further underscoring how weak and ineffectual the Obama Administration looked in their dealings with the Iranians.

As for Obamacare, Obama’s signature domestic achievement is in tatters. Special co-ops set up to provide cheap insurance have mostly gone under, many of the state insurance exchanges (online marketplaces) have been rendered worthless by so many insurance providers in various states pulling out. But by far the biggest and electorally damaging aspect of Obamacare’s failings has been the relentless march of massive premium hikes in the 5 years since the legislation has been operative. This has been coupled with reduced doctor choice and big leaps in aggregate deductibles and copays. Whilst federal subsidies have taken some of the sting out of these increases, the embattled middle class who earn too much for subsidies, have been forced to absorb these huge premium hikes and policy provision constraints when Obama told them the Affordable Care Act would reduce costs whilst they could keep their plan and their doctor. All these promises were dramatically broken. One week before the election, voters got their 2017 Obamacare renewals and were stunned with sticker shock at some of the premium hikes (on the back of 4 previous years of hikes). Trump pounded on Obamacare at every opportunity promising a full repeal in his first 100 days in office.

4 – Clinton could not replicate Obama’s winning coalition from 2008 and 2012

Obama won because of the record turnout (and vote for him) from Blacks, Hispanics and Millennials. The comparison between 2016 and 2012 saw Clinton underperforming compared to Obama in all three key demographic groups:

• Blacks went 93 Obama and 6 Romney in 2012 but only 88 Clinton and 8 Trump in 2016 or a 7-point swing.
• Hispanics went 71 Obama and 27 Romney in 2012 but only 65 Clinton and 29 Trump in 2016 or an 8-point swing.
• Millennials went 60 Obama and 37 Romney in 2012 but only 55 Clinton and 37 Trump in 2016 or a 5-point swing.

In each instance Clinton underperformed Obama and for Blacks and Hispanics, despite all the criticism Trump endured over his harsher immigration stance, he overperformed compared to Romney!

5 – Polls were wrong …. again!

Underestimating support for centre right parties and candidates has become a feature of various elections over the last two years. The following elections all saw centre right parties outperform their polling in various jurisdictions: the 2014 US Midterms, the 2015 Israeli Knesset election, the 2015 UK General Election and the most dramatic of all (until now), the June 2016 Brexit vote where poll aggregates the day before had Remain up by 2% only for Brexit to win by 4% or a 6% miss.

Commentators have speculated about the role of the so-called shy Tory voter and pollsters in the US seem to be unable to find a way to identify shy Trump voters. So toxic had Trump’s political brand become in the media, social media and the public square that Trump supporters and voters (like me) disguised their intentions in public discussion due to the stigma attached to, and opprobrium directed toward, support for Trump. This time around, the failure of pollsters to identify hidden Trump voters (and to assume the 2012 Obama coalition would turn out for Hillary) was spectacular. The vaunted Real Clear Politics (RCP) average had Clinton up 3.2% in the raft of polls issued on Monday November 7^th whereas Clinton won the popular vote by 0.2%.

But of course it is individual states (and their electoral College votes) that determines who will be President and the polling failure at the state level was even more pronounced. Here is the ‘rogues’ gallery’ of how far wrong the polls were for most of the key battleground states (in alphabetical order). This is the margin between the actual Trump vote and his Monday November 7 RCP average:

Florida (+4.2%), Iowa (+6.4%), Michigan (+3.7%), Minnesota (a staggering +11.4%), North Carolina (+2.8%), Ohio (+5.1%), Pennsylvania (+3%) and Wisconsin (+7.5%). Only in New Hampshire, Arizona, Colorado and Virginia were polls close and only in Nevada did Clinton overperform from her RCP average.

The shy Tory syndrome is not going to go away. Mainstream median voters who lean to the right are rudely crowded off the public square by Orwellian attempts by angry leftists to ban anything they disagree with and label it as ‘hate speech’. Ordinary centre right voters will continue to lie or avoid pollsters to spare themselves the hassle of the dealing with SJWs and progressive activists and if pollsters will continue to skewer their samples in favour of left leaning candidates and parties then those on the left are going to continue to be shocked by results that don’t match the polls.

6 – WikiLeaks’ in October did more damage than Comey’s announcement

The steady drumbeat of revelations that were drip fed to the media and waiting people via social media throughout October revealed the inner workings of the Clinton campaign and threw up a series of ugly truths. Space does not permit their telling but they were beginning to sag Clinton’s numbers before Comey announced his bombshell on October 28^th. Faced with a potential revolt from dozens of senior FBI agents who threatened to resign en-mass and reveal the true reasons for Clinton’s lack of being indicted (the political interference of the Obama appointees in the Department of Justice) AND the fact that even more damning material was held on the Clintons by the New York Police Department who too had threatened to go public, it was not possible for Comey to hide from Congress the fact that the FBI had the Wiener laptop and that it contained possibly hitherto unknown (and destroyed) Clinton emails. That the FBI searched 650,000 emails in just over a week to declare Clinton again in the clear seems lost on her supporters who veered from praising Comey to damning him to praising him again. When all is said and done, the fault lies not with Comey but the Democrat Party for nominating a candidate who carried with her the baggage of a secret email hoard that was hidden from scrutiny many of which were destroyed when knowledge of their existence was unearthed. If you don’t want your candidate to be tainted with the threat of possible indictment for intelligence breaches, then perhaps you ought to have chosen someone else without a slow burning scandal hanging over them.

7 – Neglected working and middle class voters in the Rust Belt saw Trump as their only champion

If there is one policy issue on which I part company most clearly with Trump, it is the issue of free trade. I’m an ardent champion of free trade. But globalisation has consequences and a disproportionate number of those affected in the US are the workers in the Rust Belt states where traditional powerhouse US industries of coal, steel, shipbuilding, car manufacturing and other heavy industries have seen countless factories and millions of jobs lost to China, Asia and since NAFTA, Mexico and Canada. I don’t believe in protectionism and Trump promised the rust belt that he’d bring their jobs back with tariffs on goods made in China and Mexico. This has all the makings of a trade war and one would hope that the reality of governing will dawn on President Trump. That said, Trump owes his Presidency to the four mid-west states where his message of economic populism and protectionism resonated the most powerfully: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Ohio. In the case of the first three, they have not been won by a Republican in almost three decades. Trump won non-college educated whites by margins even more dramatically lopsided than Reagan did in his 1984 landslide. Clinton was an anathema to the working-class base that once was the bedrock of the Roosevelt coalition and she lost it to a New York billionaire!

 8 – Protecting the southern border and limiting immigration from countries that harbour Islamic terrorism was not racist

A common criticism of Trump is that he is racist and when asked why, his opponents cite the wall Trump proposes to build along the Mexican border. Trump won because middle America is fed up with the porous border on the South and the many failed promises by various Presidents to build a proper fence. Trump played on a range of fears associated with uncontrolled illegal Latino immigration: the imported criminals and the range of horrific murders and rapes committed by recidivist illegal felons, the loss of American jobs, the changing cultural shape of cities in border states and the seemingly uncontrollable flow of drugs coming from Mexico blighting young American lives. To many Americans, Trump’s promise to build a wall was not just common sense but music to their ears and accusations of bigotry and racism, implicitly directed at them by elites in their criticism of Trump, got their hackles up and further fueled anti media sentiment.

The same is true of Trump’s promise to pause immigration from Muslim terrorist hotspot countries until a much more rigorous screening process could be put in place. The attacks in San Bernardino, perpetrated by Islamic fanatics who both emigrated to the US under normal rules and yet whose radical tendencies were not picked up but yet were plain to see, drove home how US Federal law enforcement and screening has been weakened and hampered by political correctness and pro Muslim sentiment to the extent that the San Bernardino killers’ radical postings on Facebook were not allowed to be even be assessed by the Department of Homeland Security when their application for residency in the US was being processed. Liberals cried foul and Islamophobia when Trump called for a temporary halt to such applications until a tighter screening regime could be implemented. Middle America, tired of random attacks and seeing the results of untrammeled Muslim migration into Europe, agreed that such a policy was simply wise and ignored media criticism of Trump’s proposal.

9 – The Supreme Court balance kept many conservatives on board

I count myself in this camp. I was prepared to overlook Trump’s many manifest faults and flawed policy positions on this one issue alone. The death of Antonin Scalia was a shock to conservatives as he was the most reliable conservative voice on SCOTUS and he brought a ferocious and indominable intellect to his rulings. Clinton would’ve replaced him with a progressive liberal judge who would do the left’s bidding on all the big issues. With liberal Ruth Bader Ginsberg and squishy centrist Anthony Kennedy old enough to likely be retiring in the term of the 45^th President, the prospect of ideologically shaping the court for a generation was beckoning. To conservatives who watch the courts and know how liberals love to legislate for their agenda from the bench, the prospect of 25 years with a 6 to 3 (or even 7 to 2) liberal split raised the very real prospect of: permanent undermining of the 2^nd Amendment with a view to de facto gun control, the foisting of unions on thriving businesses where even workers voted against their presence, the legalising (and then federal funding of) late term abortion, the forcing of extremist trans-gender politics down the throats of the states with the threat of withdrawal of federal funding, the weakening of the 1^st Amendment by restricting conservative speech such as allowing the so-called Fairness Doctrine forcing conservative dominated talkback radio to balance their content and enlarging the scope of what constitutes hate speech, undermining States rights by chipping away at the 10^th Amendment and supporting unilateral Executive Orders like those used by Obama to bypass Congress. Stopping Hillary’s liberal judges and the progressive’s dream agenda (none of these issues would receive majority support at any ballot box) became Job 1 for many conservatives. When Trump named a list of 20 jurists from which he would choose his SCOTUS nominees, he received strong support for his choices from conservative legal and constitutional experts. That was a signal for many thinking folk on the centre-right to hold their noses and vote for Trump.

10 – Middle America is fed up with political correctness

David posted on this only a few hours ago. After decades of the progressive left controlling the media, Hollywood, academia, the bureaucracy, the unions, the schools and elite opinion, mainstream median voters had had enough. They see universities, once the bastion of free speech, shutting down conservative speakers and trying to protect young minds with trigger warnings, safe spaces on campus and labelling anything not approved by the progressive intelligentsia as ‘hate speech’ and cried foul. When the Obama Administration attempted to foist trans-gender toilet access on States with the threat of withholding of federal funds and when North Carolina legislated against such needless ideological intervention, people could see that the left’s agenda was forcing people to accept an 18-year-old man who identifies as a woman into a girl’s bathroom (like Target attempted to do until a massive boycott of customers forced a practical compromise), people said enough is enough. Trump is a massive antidote to all this political correctness and the more the media elites criticised him for his non-PC comments and attitudes, the more people fed up with rampant PC encrochments supported him.

11 – Trump’s unconventional campaign worked

The Clinton campaign outspent the Trump campaign 2:1. They had a superior ground game and had a tail wind of near universal media support. Trump aggressively used Twitter and Facebook to great effect. Trump also crisscrossed the country and spoke at over 100 rallies. Each of these rallies were massive affairs held in large arenas, stadiums and convention centres such was the large numbers who wished to hear him speak. More often than not, people would queue for hours in advance with cars banking up for miles and long lines awaiting to enter arenas. The crowds were reminiscent of the Obama rallies in 2008 in terms of passion and energy. Clinton held fewer events and all were in significantly smaller venues with less passionate crowds. As the campaign drew to its climax, she resorted to holding concerts with pop icons like Beyoncé and Bruce Springsteen to artificially pump numbers of attendees.

Yard signs were another telling marker of campaign enthusiasm. In key battleground states, such as Pennsylvania, Trump signs were ubiquitous and Clinton signs almost nonexistent even in towns and counties that had voted Democrat for decades. The media poo pooed these indications of campaign energy and intensity and were proven to be wrong. Clinton spent over $1.4 billion to Trump’s $700 million and yet no amount of dollars could compensate for a lousy candidate overshadowed by the stench of corruption.

Conclusion

I’ll leave the final word on Trump’s election to a most unlikely source – a scion of liberal Hollywood thinking, movie maker Michael Moore. Moore, after seeing Trump’s appeal up close in his home state of Michigan, made a pro-Clinton anti-Trump movie documentary. At a promotion event, he spoke of Trump’s appeal. Inadvertently he makes the most powerful case for Trump and he explains (in ways sometimes NSFW) why Trump would win https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lMp_363B2c . He was most prescient and accurate in his assessment. It is a MUST SEE clip.

Robby Soave writes at Reason:

Trump won because he convinced a great number of Americans that he would destroy political correctness.

I have tried to call attention to this issue for years. I have warned that political correctness actually is a problem on college campuses, where the far-left has gained institutional power and used it to punish people for saying or thinking the wrong thing. And ever since Donald Trump became a serious threat to win the GOP presidential primaries, I have warned that a lot of people, both on campus and off it, were furious about political-correctness-run-amok—so furious that they would give power to any man who stood in opposition to it.

I have watched this play out on campus after campus. I have watched dissident student groups invite Milo Yiannopoulos to speak—not because they particularly agree with his views, but because he denounces censorship and undermines political correctness. I have watched students cheer his theatrics, his insulting behavior, and his narcissism solely because the enforcers of campus goodthink are outraged by it. It’s not about his ideas, or policies. It’s not even about him. It’s about vengeance for social oppression.

Yep.

And no doubt because the author used the word oppression he will be condemned for using a word that only minorities can use.

He described Trump as “an icon of irreverent resistance to political correctness.” Correctly, I might add.

What is political correctness? It’s notoriously hard to define. I recently appeared on a panel with CNN’s Sally Kohn, who described political correctness as being polite and having good manners. That’s fine—it can mean different things to different people. I like manners. I like being polite. That’s not what I’m talking about.

The segment of the electorate who flocked to Trump because he positioned himself as “an icon of irreverent resistance to political correctness” think it means this: smug, entitled, elitist, privileged leftists jumping down the throats of ordinary folks who aren’t up-to-date on the latest requirements of progressive society.

Example: A lot of people think there are only two genders—boy and girl. Maybe they’re wrong. Maybe they should change that view. Maybe it’s insensitive to the trans community. Maybe it even flies in the face of modern social psychology. But people think it. Political correctness is the social force that holds them in contempt for that, or punishes them outright.

A great example. The outrage if you do not call Chelsea Manning Chelsea or a woman.

If you’re a leftist reading this, you probably think that’s stupid. You probably can’t understand why someone would get so bent out of shape about being told their words are hurtful. You probably think it’s not a big deal and these people need to get over themselves. Who’s the delicate snowflake now, huh? you’re probably thinking. I’m telling you: your failure to acknowledge this miscalculation and adjust your approach has delivered the country to Trump.

Is this why he gained 14% among non college whites? I think it is a part, not just the economic dislocation.

There’s a related problem: the boy-who-cried-wolf situation. I was happy to see a few liberals, like Bill Maher, owning up to it. Maher admitted during a recent show that he was wrong to treat George Bush, Mitt Romney, and John McCain like they were apocalyptic threats to the nation: it robbed him of the ability to treat Trump more seriously. The left said McCain was a racist supported by racists, it said Romney was a racist supported by racists, but when an actually racist Republican came along—and racists cheered him—it had lost its ability to credibly make that accusation.

Absolutely. I find what Trump said so awful I wouldn’t even wear the normal Republican elephant on election day lest anyone think I support him. But you know what, when Reagan was campaigning some on the left said it would be the end of days also – that he would lead the country into Armageddon.

The right have got used to all their candidates being called racists that it just became background noise.

My liberal critics rolled their eyes when I complained about political correctness. I hope they see things a little more clearly now. The left sorted everyone into identity groups and then told the people in the poorly-educated-white-male identity group that that’s the only bad one. It mocked the members of this group mercilessly. It punished them for not being woke enough. It called them racists. It said their video games were sexist. It deployed Lena Dunham to tell them how horrible they were.

And what happened is that non college whites have now formed their own minority group, and started voting like a minority group – overwhelmingly one way. But they are a minority group that makes up 40% of the US.

And again no doubt someone will complain that the term minority was used about non college whites, because minority is about power, not size.

I warned that political-correctness-run-amok and liberal overreach would lead to a counter-revolution if unchecked. That counter-revolution just happened.

There is a cost to depriving people of the freedom (in both the legal and social senses) to speak their mind. The presidency just went to the guy whose main qualification, according to his supporters, is that he isn’t afraid to speak his.

This is not the only factor but I have no doubt it is a significant one.

The NZ Initiative has highlighted 21 major points from their research into inequality. Here’s a few of them:

• Increased housing costs are hitting those on low incomes hardest, and to a very severe degree. (Figure 28.) Getting more houses built is a critical issue, regardless of economic inequality.
• There is substantial material hardship in New Zealand households.  Specifically, around 4% of the population are “doing without” to a severe degree and 11% to a less severe degree.  For children the proportions are higher, at 8% and 18% respectively.  For the elderly they are lower, at 1% and 3% respectively. The overall proportions are similar to an average for a group of EU countries.
• Claims that quarter of a million of children or more (25%+) are living in poverty because they are in relatively low income households are gross exaggerations.
• Current income is a poor indicator of hardship. Specifically, only around 40-50% of those experiencing relatively low current incomes are also experiencing hardship, and some on higher incomes are experiencing hardship.One reason is that low income is a temporary situation for a considerable proportion of households, another is that the elderly can be asset rich but income poor.
• Contrary to what the public is continually told, disposable income inequality has not trended up since the mid-1990s on the most commonly cited measure (the Gini coefficient). Market income inequality has actually trended down. (Figures 4 and 5.) The paradox is that newspaper headlines featuring inequality have risen more than 8-fold in the last decade.
• One response to the call that the rich should be “asked” to pay more in tax is that they already do. Indeed, on Treasury numbers the top 40% of households by income are the only ones that pay any income or GST over and above what they receive in return through the welfare system and health and education benefits in kind.
• It is very important that market incomes are fairly earned and are seen to be fairly earned.  Anything else corrodes community trust and cohesiveness. There should be a strong presumption against corporate welfare, including bail-outs for bankers.

Well worth reading the full report.

Professor Jordan Peterson writes in the Toronto Sun:

In early October, I recorded a set of three videos about political correctness and posted them on my YouTube channel, Jordan Peterson Videos.

The first of these decried the latest legislative moves to make “gender identity” and “gender expression” protected categories under the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code.

This set off a firestorm online and in the traditional media, particularly after a free-speech rally, organized by students, met with counter-protesters who tried to shut it down with white noise, chanted cries of “shame” and, finally, assault and deceit.

Perhaps three million people have watched the cellphone videos of these events online.

Generation Snowflake seems unable to handle a professor who defends free speech.

I noted in the videos that the policy statements surrounding similar laws already in place in Ontario and several other provinces were dangerously vague and ill-formulated. I also indicated my refusal to apply what have become known as “preferred” pronouns to people who do not fit easily into traditional gender categories (although I am willing to call someone “he” or “she” in accordance with their manner of self-presentation).

So this isn’t about refusing to call someone by the gender pronoun they prefer, just that he won’t use gender neutral pronouns such as “zhe”. And for this he has been demonised.

I also objected to the requirement that I mouth words that have been produced by those pushing an ideology with which I strenuously and deeply disagree. I regard artificially formulated words such as the so-called “gender neutral” pronouns as part of the vanguard of a wave of political correctness which has historical roots that disturb me (the association with Marxism) and psychological motivations that I do not trust (based as they are on an excess of care best devoted to infants and grounded in an intense resentment of anyone who has become successful for any reason whatsoever).

Not unreasonable.

On Oct. 3, the University of Toronto sent me a letter warning me about the potential illegality of my actions, and reminding me of my obligations to students as detailed in its own recent equity-based policies.

On Oct. 18, U of T sent me another letter requesting that I stop talking about such things.

Another university that can’t handle free speech.

Civilized people present themselves in a manner that makes dealing with them simple. This is because each of us is only one person — but one person surrounded by a multitude of others. It is impossible for us to interact with that multitude, even one-on-one, without conventions that make each of us more straightforward than we are.

If I am interacting with a bank teller, for example, I do not want to know about his or her sexual proclivities, medical problems, financial issues, and past traumas. To do her job, she has to dress in a relatively innocuous manner, and present herself in way that enables particularized, efficient and relatively shallow interactions. That’s how society functions.

I might ask her, “How’s your day?” Depending on the genuineness of my request, she might share a bit of personal information. But there are strict implicit limits on how far she can (and should) go in revealing the person behind the persona.

It is simply not reasonable for a stranger — say, a student in one of my classes — to request that I learn, speak and remember a whole set of personal descriptors as a precondition for our interactions. It is certainly not reasonable to demand that I do so — and it is absolutely unreasonable for that demand to have been given the force of law. You don’t get to exercise control over my speech.

But they want to.

The demand for use of preferred pronouns is not an issue of equality, inclusion or respect for others. It’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It’s a purposeful assault on the structure of language. It’s a dangerous incursion into the domain of free speech. It’s narcissistic self-centeredness. It’s part and parcel of the PC madness that threatens to engulf our culture.

A line must be drawn somewhere, and this is a good place to draw it. We should, further, abolish the Ontario Human Rights Commission and its enforcement wing, the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal. We should reject Bill C-16, and we should repeal its sister legislation in those provinces where it has already been instantiated.

We should refuse, in no uncertain terms, the demands by the ideologically possessed that we speak their special language. Or we should await the consequences, and they won’t be pretty.

Very brave of him.

The Democrats have said one of their top priorities is to overturn the Supreme Court ruling on Citizens United as money has too much influence in politics.

They should be cheered by the election result.

Clinton spent $500 million to $250 million to Trump and lost.

And the evil Super PACs sent $190 million backing Clinton and only $60 million backing Trump – a 3:1 ratio and he won.

So they’ve proven that the impact of money on the outcome of elections is quite minor (which is different to zero).