Now that Hillary Clinton is running for the position of last white president — appropriating a populist southern accent against the backdrop of nationwide racial tension — it’s time to stop and think about how we actually got to this apocalyptic point. It’s time to think about what the modern progressive movement, which the Clintons started, is really all about.
We’re at this point because the progressivism practiced by the Clintons is three parts pro-bank, anti-working class corporatism and two parts lip-service racial agitation. Nobody — white or black — is able to move up and get at any of the remaining money. And it’s the fault of Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Since leaving the White House, Bill has become just another hipster, following pop culture, renting in Harlem, working for a nonprofit. It’s a cartoon version of the life that his presidency mandated for all of us white people. If he actually does move back to Washington, he’ll be moving back to a city rife with the income inequality and racial tension that he and his wife stoked.
Clintonian progressivism holds that social justice issues must be arbitrated in the lower classes while the top keeps them tethered, fiscally and with government force, to a system driven by profits.
The reason that white twentysomethings can only live indoors now if we apply to some disgusting group house run by people who tell you that you can’t live there if you have a “gender-normative” worldview or if you don’t have a trust fund to pay for all their weed? Clintons. The reason that the biggest news website is something called BuzzFeed, which prints left-wing agitprop about how racist white people are and then attacks Coca-Cola because it’s the competitor of its business partner Pepsi? Clintons.
My generation grew up in public schools during the Clinton administration going to all-day seminars on Martin Luther King Day to sing in unison about Raffi’s “green and growing family tree.” We listened to Dr. King envision a mountaintop of multi-racial hand-holding that we could all find together. But here’s the thing our teachers didn’t tell us: the diversity didn’t happen on some regal mountaintop. It was never supposed to. It happened down below in the valleys and the streets. And nobody is holding hands.
Let me explain….
The Clintons revived the progressive movement in 1992 as race riots burned L.A. and opposing interests battled over how to engage with the newly globalized post-Cold War economy. Pat Buchanan railed in the Republican primary against George Bush’s outsourcing while third-party challenger Ross Perot showed Americans pie charts on growing deficits and debt. Bill Clinton used the chaos to his advantage, winning 43 percent of the vote in a three-way race.
It was deja vu all over again. The progressive movement first came to power 80 years earlier in 1912, when Woodrow Wilson took down weak Republican incumbent William Howard Taft and third-party candidate Teddy Roosevelt with 41.8 percent of the vote. What did Wilson the progressive do in office? He wrested control of the economy away from the people, turned the military into a war machine, and distracted everybody with race. eThe Clintons took note.
Wilson created the Federal Reserve to act as America’s central bank and gave it the power to print as much money as it wanted, effectively taking America off the gold standard (a job Franklin Roosevelt finished in 1933). He led the country into World War I, which he funded by borrowing $37 billion from his new Federal Reserve. He lowered tariffs at the expense of the American factory-worker. Then he hit up that worker for money when he passed the federal income tax. What an agenda! A perpetual cycle of war and deficit? An all-knowing bank that can run up debt to justify taxing labor? How did southern-bred Wilson get away with all that and still come off as a populist? Easy. Racial identity politics. He got poor white voters angry by pitting them against poor blacks. He championed segregation and screened the pro-KKK movie “Birth of a Nation” at the White House. When race riots broke out in East St. Louis, just miles from Ferguson, it was white union members doing the rioting and beating up black people.
The Clintons shared Wilson’s progressive vision but played the racial politics in reverse. Trained on college campuses in the Sixties, they saw the value of tense and messy multiculturalism. They knew that for the Democratic Party to survive, racial conflict must be made permanent but minorities (gaining in numbers at a faster rate than whites) needed to be favored in empty symbolic ways. In Hillary’s 1969 Wellesley College thesis on left-wing organizer Saul Alinsky, she partially backed Alinsky’s tactic of engineering conflict to foment change, writing, “Alinsky’s conclusion that the ‘ventilation’ of hostilities is healthy in certain situations is valid, but across-the-board ‘social catharsis’ cannot be prescribed.”
So Bill Clinton went about solving the race problem without actually solving anything. He named Jesse Jackson his personal White House “spiritual adviser” but also put 100,000 new cops on the street. He got his picture taken with Nelson Mandela but sent 673,000 more people to prison. He told Americans to “clean our house of racism” after the O.J. verdict but he renewed harsher penalties for crack cocaine violators than for powder coke.
When Clinton repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, allowing for massive consolidation of Wall Street banks, he popped the cherry on the age of super wealth among the corporate/banker class and hyper-inequality across the board. Millionaires became billionaires. Billionaires became tens-of-billionaires. And all of these rich people were welcome to stay in the Lincoln Bedroom in return for a donation to good ol’ DNC chair Terry McAuliffe. The Clintons became so close to Goldman Sachs that when bailout guru Tim Geithner went to Bill Clinton and complained about how the public won’t get on board with rich people having all the money, Clinton brushed it off, saying, “You could take [Goldman CEO] Lloyd Blankfein into a dark alley and slit his throat, and it would satisfy them for about two days. Then the bloodlust would rise again.”
Bubba never cut taxes on the middle class as he promised and he did nothing about corporate tax havens. There’s $1.2 trillion in American currency out there and some fat Democrat gets to keep two percent of it for himself at some bank in the Cayman Islands guarded by Rastafarian gangsters. You’re welcome.
As a small group of bankers gained unprecedented control over American currency, Clinton sold out minorities and middle-class whites.
His Housing and Urban Development agency under Andrew Cuomo forced Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to start giving out risky subprime mortgage loans to minorities at a level sufficient to meet new quotas. What an idea. Housing credit to spur black and Hispanic homeownership! It was a big-government handout backed by nothing — and if those loans all went bust then the federal government would have to bail out Fannie and Freddie and the big banks, anyway. Of course those loans did go bust, the banks did get bailed out at taxpayer expense, people’s homes were foreclosed on, and now folks of all creeds and colors are renting.
As for working-class white people, they got outsourced. Clinton’s push to get China into the World Trade Organization led to the loss of 11.7 million U.S. manufacturing jobs in eight years. Clinton was giddy when that fuzzy “America Online” test signal went live and Google popped up in Menlo Park. The new frontier in humanity! You know how many people Google, the world’s most powerful corporation, now employs worldwide? 53,600. That’s half the number of people who go to Bonnaroo.
But at least we have wars to keep us all together! As Monica Lewinsky captured America’s hearts, Bill was shooting a load (excuse me) of bombs at Yugoslavia and Saddam Hussein, who he said probably had weapons of mass destruction. In 2001, Donald Rumsfeld circulated a list of seven Middle Eastern leaders that he wanted to overthrow, including Hussein and Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi (who almost plunged our petrodollar system into chaos by refusing to accept American currency for oil, thus pointing out that the dollar isn’t actually worth anything and revealing that one gown-wearing weirdo is capable of causing hyperinflation here in the states). Bush spent his term preoccupied fighting Saddam — with Hillary’s support — so Hillary as secretary of state finished off Gaddafi. When her intervention went to hell and her ambassador got killed, she relied on talking points about some YouTube video from her Lewinsky-era political hatchet man Sidney Blumenthal.
The rogressives took away your money and then pointed your rage in the direction of other poor people who look different than you.
This is the rogressive record of the Clintons. And as they left office to the dot-com bust they had the bright idea to keep their vision going with well-funded think tanks and advocacy groups. By 2004, MoveOn.org was hammering Bush, Clinton’s chief of staff (and head of Hillary’s 2016 campaign) John Podesta was running the Center for American Progress, and Clinton fanboy David Brock was running the George Soros-funded Media Matters for America.
I remember sitting in left-wing seminars during the middle of the Bush administration learning that Jon Stewart — a smug comedian who managed to combine propaganda with lame jokes — was basically Albert Einstein and Mahatma Gandhi rolled into one inspirational role model. I remember the dawn of social media and how Podesta’s progressive infrastructure filled it with youth-baiting lefty propaganda and censored anything that wasn’t politically correct. I remember the first time I ever heard the term “white male privilege.” I remember watching my generation of rich suburban kids being put to work as leaflet-passers for their own demise.
It’s powerful technology. For a brief moment in 2008, someone named Barack Obama managed to use it to convince college kids that Bill Clinton was a racist and temporarily stole the Democratic Party away from the Clintons. He spent his presidency passing one disastrous health care bill that the Clintons tried to pass 15 years earlier and then sitting around doing comedy bits and waiting for the Clintons to come back. Don’t be fooled: there’s no “progressive” alternative to Billary, be it Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders. The Clintons control their party, and they control their movement.
This is the modern race war. Blacks and whites will always have different skin colors and different interests. It’s a tale as old as time. But the constant race-baiting in our society today, aimed at white people who are mostly just as poor as everyone else? That’s a new trend.
It’s all just empty agitation to keep angry poor people — white and black — out of Hillary Clinton’s neighborhood. The Mexicans are fine so long as they use the service door.
So if you’re a broke-off-his-ass Daily Caller writer, maybe you stop into your old neighborhood bar — once enjoyed by whites and blacks alike — and you find that it’s been bought out by some company that has an innocuous tree logo on its overpriced menu. What’s going on, you say? But nobody can understand you. The servers are 21-year old Mexican guys and they’re playing Justin Timberlake music while small groups of white people look down, bored, at their phones.
Maybe you go to another bar and strike up a conversation with a beautiful 23-year-old black female graduate of an elite university who now works in the mainstream media. She confronts you, ever so politely, about your white male privilege.
“People in the black community can’t talk to their uncles and aunts the way I’m talking to YOU in this bar right now,” she says.
“But doesn’t Beyonce get praised more than me?” I rebut.
“Beyonce gets praised because she’s fetishized,” the girl replies. “YOU get praised in more subtle ways.”
“I do?” I ask, subtly plunking down my remaining one-dollar bills for a Pabst Blue Ribbon.
Welcome to Progressive America, kids. It sure is a privilege to be here.