https://soundcloud.com/user-762000146/2kevins-with-grace-steel-ep-35

Episode 35 of my podcast with Kevin Steel is now posted here (with copious links). Part 1 begins with a hearty gloat. On January 18, two weeks before the Iowa caucus, we declared Donald Trump the presumptive winner of the Republican nomination. I listed six reasons why Trump had won, and I stand by them today. You will note I ascribe his triumph far more to what he says than how he says it.

1. The National Question, AKA America First. This is self-explanatory to VDARE readers.
2. Hunter S. Thompson, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” Any one of Trump’s establishment rivals could have delivered a milder version of his platform. But our elite is so out of touch as to demand defenestration.
3. The Media: Doncha just hate ’em? Trump knows what Nixon and Agnew (and Pat Buchanan) knew. And a half-century later, the media no longer even pretends to understand, let alone care about, Middle America.
4. The GOPe squandered its last chance. After its blow-out victory in 2014, the Republican leadership ran to Barack Obama and begged, “How may we serve you?”
5. Donald Trump is not a conservative. The “conservative movement” has long been a Potemkin Village. Its members continued to drone on about marginal tax cuts, eminent domain and the Export-Import Bank long after the voters stopped listening. It lost every battle of the Culture War so convincingly, it gave pro forma a bad name. With a single bulldozer and a few dozen Twitter trolls, Trump has swept it away.
6. Thomas Szasz: “In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined.” Winners choose their own agenda and their own battlegrounds. Donald Trump is a winner.

We then discuss Trump’s April 27 speech to the Center for the National Interest. My co-host accused me of going spare in my praise for this address, but I am more convinced than ever of its historic importance. Trump is the first post-war American leader. And by “war,” I mean Cold War. A quarter-century after the collapse of Western communism (which rendered conservatism irrelevant), politics have returned. And just in time to save the nation-state from globalism, free trade and Third-World immigration. I never imagined hearing an American leader say this:

The direction I will outline today will also return us to a timeless principle. My foreign policy will always put the interests of the American people, and American security, above all else. That will be the foundation of every decision that I will make.

America First will be the major and overriding theme of my administration.

But now it has been said, and it is so obvious, so true and so beautiful. A prediction: Donald Trump will be to the world of the 21^st century what George Washington was to the 19^th. If America is to be freed to seek its best interests, then so is the rest of the West. The arrogant pretensions of “the world’s sole hyperpower” have been abandoned. Trump has given the rest of us permission to be patriots again.

In Part 2, we examine the infrastructure crisis. Our population is overwhelming our resources, and our physical plant is falling apart. What’s to blame? SCALE (Size, Complexity, Atomization, Liberalization and Elitism) and the destruction of community wrought by immigration. Decadence is inevitable when we no longer even speak the same language, let alone share the same values. To paraphrase H.G. Wells, “Civilization is in a race between unity and catastrophe.”