The party of the Kennedy brothers and Daniel Patrick Moynihan is now the party of Valerie Jarrett and Terrence Bean

MSNBC host Chris Matthews and a panel of guests sneered at Appalachian whites last week on Matthews’s Hardball show

writes Benny Huang.

No one on Matthew’s panel betrayed the slightest self-consciousness when speaking in condescending tones about the white working class. It’s hard to imagine any of them speaking the same way about blacks with “attitude” living in urban areas.

“There is part of that white community that—they missed—they didn’t get to go to good colleges or college,” Matthews continued. “They feel like the Democrats have been focused on the elites and the minorities and they’ve been missed somehow.”

That’s because they have. Those working class whites Matthews speaks of, commonly known as “bitter clingers,” are making a slow but justifiable exit from the Democratic Party. When Democrats take a stand against coal, when they bring in boatloads of legal and illegal immigrants, when they make it difficult to exercise second amendment rights, when they support racial discrimination against whites (“affirmative action”), the message that the white working class hears is “not welcome.” And for good reason.

Liberals, who dominate the party and the media—two institutions that are often difficult to distinguish—have employed an effective pincer maneuver against the American majority. They launch their attack from above and below, appealing to the rich, but also to perpetual wards of the state, or what I call “the non-working class.” Liberals will never admit that such a class exists. Perpetual wards of the state are, in their estimation, still part of the working class…even though they don’t work.

It should be noted here that the white working class is not exclusively rural, Appalachian, or even southern. There are white working class people in all fifty states as well as in urban areas. The dwindling Irish Catholic population of South Boston is a good example of working class whites who are neither rural nor southern, though they have traditionally voted Democratic just the same.

… Even Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who refused to grant marriage licenses after the Supreme Court invented a right to same-sex marriage, was elected as a Democrat. Davis was falsely tagged as a Republican in a recent New York Times story. The reporters in this instance assumed that she was a Republican because New Yorkers can’t imagine a person like Davis voting Democrat. It’s weird, I know. In Kim Davis’s neck of the woods, “Democrat” is not synonymous with moonbat leftist. 

The party apparatus still wants the white working class’s support because a vote’s a vote and a win’s a win. Unfortunately, these working class whites tend to be more moderate which poses a problem for the urban elite who dominate the modern liberal establishment. They don’t want to tolerate a contingent within the party that might temper its platform.

The Democratic Party is consequently roiled by a quiet civil war that no one wants to acknowledge. Don’t be fooled for a moment, however, into thinking that the war is fought between the liberal elite and the white working class. The white working class doesn’t have enough clout in the party to stand as a belligerent in this conflict. It’s a war between those who still want to make a bid for the white working class vote and those who find them so embarrassing that they’d prefer to send them packing.

Hillary Clinton made a bid for the white working class vote in 2008 and she’s been paying for it ever since. The media are actually quite critical of Mrs. Clinton, treating her almost like a Republican. The Clinton email server saga has not been dismissed as a “phony scandal” as most Democratic scandals are. Why might that be? My theory is that Hillary made the fourth estate very angry in 2008 when she campaigned against their preferred candidate, Barack Obama, and she has not yet earned her way back into their good graces.

The Clinton campaign made an effort to appeal to more traditional Democrats—a category which includes, but is not limited to, the white working class—while the Obama campaign courted the youth vote, minorities, and unabashed progressives. It was a big gamble on Hillary’s part and she lost. There just weren’t enough traditional Democrats in the party in 2008 and there are even fewer today. The party of the Kennedy brothers and Daniel Patrick Moynihan is now the party of Valerie Jarrett and Terrence Bean.

 … In 2008, Hillary found out that she couldn’t ride to victory with Clintonian overtures to the white working class, either because they weren’t that enthused about her, or because the demographics of the party had shifted. Both factors were probably in play.

Hillary lost more than just the nomination. She lost the adoration of the liberal elite which she still hasn’t won back. They won’t forgive her for pandering to what they perceive to be the worst elements of the party—the Kim Davis wing, the Southie Irish wing, the bitter clingers.

The Democratic Party is suffering from something of an identity crisis. A vestigial constituency group truly embarrasses them to the point that they often can’t hide their disdain when speaking of them, yet they still need their vote. The party is sharply divided as to whether this demographic group, which is already halfway out the door, is worth keeping.

Instead of rushing to grant asylum to hundreds of thousands of nameless Syrian refugees, the Western world should seek solutions in the Middle East — and urge the vaunted Islamic “ummah” to take in its own refugees

It has become well-accepted in the West that Europe and the United States ought to welcome hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq

writes Ben Shapiro (shookhran to Luís Afonso).

 … this sounds wonderful when we consider the humanitarian crisis unfolding in the Middle East. Boosted by the absence of any Western leadership, ISIS has driven millions from Iraq and Syria, and Afghanistan continues to degrade into chaos. But before the West mainlines Muslim immigrants into its veins, it’s worthwhile to stop and ask two questions: First, why the media focus on the humanitarian crisis now? Second, who are these refugees?

Why The Focus Now? Europe’s refugee crisis has unfolded over the last year, but only now seems to have broken through into mainstream media coverage. That coverage sprang from a viral photo of a three-year-old Syrian boy’s corpse washed up on the beaches of Turkey. According to media coverage, the boy’s mother and brother drowned as well, while his father lived.

The photo certainly breaks your heart. But where were all the photos of gassed children from Bashar Assad’s Syria when President Obama drew a red line, and then promptly violated it? Where are all the photos of babies beheaded by ISIS? Why did this photo make the front pages?

The answer: the other photos would have driven more Middle East involvement from the West. The current photo does not. It merely demands that Europe accept more Muslims from the Middle East into its midst, without solving any of the underlying problems driving the refugee crisis in the first place. It pushes the notion that the West somehow owes membership to people who may very well reject the most basic tenets of the West.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper rightly pointed out this week that refugee policy will not solve the crisis in the Middle East. Canada, he said, must “fight the root cause of the problem and that is the violent campaign being waged against these people by ISIS.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed, explaining, “Because of the onslaught of militant Islam in the Middle East and in Africa, Europe is facing the waves, a tsunami of people tragically fleeing from the worst crimes that humanity has seen since the Holocaust.” But the media have no interest in fighting ISIS or Bashar Assad, so Harper’s and Netanyahu’s comments take a back seat to the moral posturing of various nations competing to see who can accept the most refugees.

Who Are These Refugees? That competition to accept refugees would be fine if we knew that the refugees plan on assimilating into Western notions of civilized society, and if we knew that they were indeed victims of radical Muslim atrocities. Unfortunately, we know neither. It is deeply suspicious that major Muslim countries that do not border Syria refuse to take in large numbers of refugees, except for Algeria and Egypt.

Turkey has taken in nearly two million refugees, according to the United Nations, and keeps the vast majority in refugee camps — a typical practice in a region that has kept Arab refugees from the 1948 war of Israeli independence in Arab-run camps for seven decades. Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq have taken in hundreds of thousands of refugees as well, but all border the chaotic, collapsing Syria, and thus have limited choice in the matter. Iran has taken in no refugees. Neither have Pakistan, Indonesia, or any of the other dozens of member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain all refused to take any refugees, and explicitly cited the risk of terrorists among the refugees, according to The Guardian (UK).

These fears are not without merit, as even Obama administration officials have acknowledged: back in February, director of the National Counterterrorism Center Nicholas Rasmussen called Syrian refugees “clearly a population of concern.” FBI Assistant Director Michael Steinbach explained, “Databases don’t [have] the information on those individuals, and that’s the concern. On Tuesday, State Department spokesman John Kirby told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that terrorist infiltration was “a possibility. I mean, you can’t, you can’t dismiss that out of hand.” He then added, “Obviously, if you look at those images though, it’s pretty clear that the great majority of these people are innocent families.”

Actually, images show a disproportionate number of young males in crowds of refugees. And those images reflect statistical reality: according to the United Nations Human Rights Commission, Mediterranean Sea refugees are overwhelmingly male: just 13 percent are women, and just 15 percent are children. The other 72 percent are men. Compare that population to the refugees in the Middle East from the same conflicts: 49.5 percent male, and 50.5 percent female, with 38.5 percent under the age of 12. Those are wildly different populations.

And they act in wildly different ways. According to The Daily Mail (UK), Syrian refugees have turned the Greek island of Lesbos into a “war zone,” and refugees in Hungary taunted police with Islamic chants of “Allahu Akbar.” Hungarian national television channel M1 reported on Tuesday that “Islamist terrorists, disguised as refugees, have shown up in Europe… Many who are now illegal immigrants fought alongside Islamic State before.”

 … Humanitarian concerns are deeply important. But so is maintaining the character of the West, and maintaining the security of its citizens. Instead of rushing to grant asylum to hundreds of thousands of nameless Syrian refugees, the Western world should seek solutions in the Middle East — and urge the vaunted Islamic “ummah” to take in its own refugees.

The First Rule of MSM News Coverage

Here is the first rule of “mainstream” news coverage in America

reports Andrew Klavan (thanks to Ed Driscoll):

Whenever the prejudices and illusions of left-wingers are confirmed by an individual incident, the incident is treated as representative; when those prejudices and illusions are contradicted, the incident is considered an aberration — and treating it as representative is deemed hateful.

It was by satirizing that rule that Breitbart’s mustache-twirling evil-doer Ben Shapiro once again got himself in hot water this week. The flagrantly brainy provocateur ran a headline describing the heart-shredding murder in Virginia of a local TV reporter and her cameraman: “Black, Gay Reporter Murders Straight, White Journalists — Media Blame the Gun.” The headline violated mainstream media protocol by being completely true while running counter to the leftist narrative. The two straight white people had in fact been killed by a mentally ill black gay Obama supporter who saw micro-aggressions everywhere and played the race card whenever he could.

 … When a police officer is forced to kill a street thug, he’s a white officer killing a black teen. When yet another Islamist murders an infidel or a fellow Muslim, he’s just some random guy. When a racist lunatic kills black people, the Confederate flag must come down. I’m still waiting for calls to ban the rainbow flag after the Virginia incident, or for a mainstream discussion on whether the whole idea of micro-aggressions is the chimeric imagining of spoiled, childish, over-indulged brats who wouldn’t know oppression if it beheaded them or…  no, wait, that’s actually the only option.

I’m not a Donald Trump supporter because I don’t think he represents my beliefs, but the success of his loud-mouthery should send a message to the mainstream news media. The message is this: You lie to us every day and we hate you for it. I’d like to add, Your dishonest narrative isn’t fooling anybody, but I’m sure it is. But not all the people, and not all of the time.

When Will ABC News Release the Full Vester Flanagan Manifesto?