The American Revolution was against the Crown; against George III; against England, but not against the English tradition.

Thomas Jefferson would not recognize the “collective mentality of contemporary Americans” as being “in any meaningful way” what he thought of as “American”.

So writes the Libertarian columnist Ilana Mercer at Townhall. She goes on to say:

The Jeffersonian mind was that of an avowed Whig — an American Whig whose roots were in the English Whig political philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Come to think of it, Jefferson would not recognize [contemporary] England as the home of the Whigs in whose writings colonial Americans were steeped — John Locke, Algernon Sidney, Paul Rapin, Thomas Gordon and others.

The essence of this “pattern of ideas and attitudes,” almost completely lost today, explains David N. Mayer in The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson, was a view of government as an inherent threat to liberty and the necessity for eternal vigilance.

Indeed, especially adamant was Jefferson about the imperative “to be watchful of those in power”,  a watchfulness another Whig philosopher explained thus: “Considering what sort of Creature Man is, it is scarce possible to put him under too many Restraints, when he is possessed of great Power.”

“As Jefferson saw it,” expounds Mayer, “the Whig, zealously guarding liberty, was suspicious of the use of government power,” and assumed “not only that government power was inherently dangerous to individual liberty but also that, as Jefferson put it, ‘the natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground’.”

For this reason, the philosophy of government articulated by Jefferson in the Declaration radically shifted sovereignty from parliament to the people.

“Equality” did not mean to Jefferson what it means to the mind of most  American political leaders now:

By “all men are created equal,” moreover, Jefferson, who also wrote in praise of a “Natural Aristocracy”, was certainly not implying that all men were similarly endowed. Or, that they were naturally entitled to healthcare, education, a decent wage, amnesty, or entry into the country he and the Constitution makers bequeathed.

Rather, Jefferson was affirming the natural right of “all men” to be secure in their enjoyment of their “life, liberty and possessions”.

But Jefferson’s muse for the “American Mind” is even older.

Notwithstanding the claims of the “multicultural noise machine”, the Whig tradition is undeniably Anglo-Saxon.

Our Founding Fathers’ political philosophy originated with their Saxon forefathers …

With the Declaration, Jefferson told Henry Lee in 1825, he was also protesting England’s violation of her own ancient tradition of natural rights.

As Jefferson saw it, the Colonies were upholding a tradition the Crown had abrogated.

Philosophical purist that he was, moreover, Jefferson considered the Norman Conquest to have tainted this English tradition with the taint of feudalism. “To the Whig historian,” writes Mayer, “the whole of English constitutional history since the Conquest was the story of a perpetual claim kept up by the English nation for a restoration of Saxon laws and the ancient rights guaranteed by those laws.”

If Jefferson begrudged the malign influence of the Normans on the natural law he so cherished, imagine how he’d view America’s contemporary cultural and political conquistadors — be they from Latin America, the Arabian Peninsula, and beyond — whose customs preclude natural rights and natural reason!

Naturally, Jefferson never entertained the folly that he was of immigrant stock. He considered the English settlers of America courageous conquerors, much like his Saxon forebears, to whom he compared them. To Jefferson, early Americans were the contemporary carriers of the Anglo-Saxon project.

The settlers spilt their own blood “in acquiring lands for their settlement”, he wrote with pride in A Summary View of the Rights of British America. “For themselves they fought, for themselves they conquered, and for themselves alone they have right to hold.” Thus, they were “entitled to govern those lands and themselves”.

Like it or not, Thomas Jefferson, author of The Declaration, was sired and inspired by the Anglo-Saxon tradition.

We wish all lovers of liberty a jubilant Independence Day!

The greater part of the news media has become a united power dedicated to promoting the Left’s agenda and discrediting opposition to it.

Truthful reports, widely disseminated, of events that affect us all are absolutely necessary to a properly functioning republic.

Comment on them should be free. If free, it will be diverse.

But the left-wing media are claiming a monopoly of comment, as this article by Daniel Greenfield at Front Page explains and deplores:

The media finally found its hero.

Its hero was Brian Karem … the correspondent for Playboy, who whined that Sarah Huckabee-Sanders, the Deputy White House Press Secretary, was “bullying” the abused media.

Vox dubbed Karem “heroic” for defending “CNN’s honor.” The media’s “honor” has fallen so low that it needs defending by the red light district. If the media’s honor gets any lower, its honor will need an assist from the Mafia, Mexican drug cartels, NAMBLA and the Toxic Waste Association of America. …

What got Karem’s goat (and the goats of the rest of the media herd) was that Sanders had given the first question to Breitbart. And conservative sites are not entitled to the protections of the First Amendment.

A free press is crucial. And when the White House fights for a free press by diversifying the press corps, it’s upholding the spirit of a free press that the media cartel is fighting to kill.

The entire “Fake News” outcry that Karem and the rest of his “honorable” colleagues in the media are whining about began with a media plot to censor conservative sites on social media for “Fake News”. …

“I don’t like the entire institution of the press and free speech being castigated,” Brian Karem wheedled. “The foundation of a free republic is a free press.”

The media has reached rock bottom when a porn magazine’s correspondent starts claiming to be foundation of a free republic. …

The foundation of a free republic is free people. Free people have the right to say what they please. They can do it on social media, at a political protest or in the pages of a newspaper. Freedom doesn’t begin and end with the media cartel. Even though the media cartel would like nothing better.

“We can’t take the bullying anymore. It’s undermining the fourth estate, it’s undermining the first amendment,” the Playboy correspondent whined elsewhere.

America isn’t supposed to have a Fourth Estate. That’s France. …

In France, the First Estate was the clergy, the Second Estate was the nobility, the Third Estate was the common people, the Fourth Estate was the press.

In the US now the press is not free:

It’s a cartel that leverages control over what was once the free press. Few conservatives are allowed into its ranks. Its partisan mission is to support the left and oppose the right. …

Karem’s tantrum was an outgrowth of that larger battle. Its push for “fact checks” is a cynical effort to embed censorship of conservative media outlets into Facebook and Google News. [The media cartel]  is the greatest enemy of a free press. And it should be treated that way.

It’s an unelected and illegitimate fourth branch of government backed by a handful of powerful interests that insists on setting the national agenda, determining who gets elected and impeaching them if the voters disagree. That is the coup that the fourth branch is busy trying to pull on President Trump. …

President Trump, Sarah Sanders Huckabee and others have called out the media as “Fake News”.  And that outrages the media cartel because it challenges its institutional authority. [Its]  institutional authority shouldn’t just be challenged, it must be broken. …

 A free press does not attempt to usurp democracy. That is the entire purpose of the media cartel. It manufactures an artificial consensus through mass communications propaganda.

The internet has made the media irrelevant. It also killed the very last of its ethics and journalistic integrity.  All that remains are a network of partisan left-wing sites trailed by dead tree paper and dead cable outlets integrated into one heaving mess that connects CNN to ESPN to Playboy to Teen Vogue.

The media cartel is a network of money and power. This illegitimate network intersects with other institutional left-wing networks in the non-profit sector, the political sector, the academic sector and many others. Each network is a thread in a spider web that is choking the life out of this nation. And at the center sit the radical spiders that pull all the strings.

The obscene efforts of the media cartel to wrap itself in the tattered shrouds of the First Amendment are as disgusting as a man who murdered his parents begging the court to have mercy on an orphan. [It] is waging a ruthless campaign to censor its opponents under the guise of “Fake News”. Yet it plays the victim when it is criticized (rather than censored) for the dishonest lies of its partisan agenda.

It has made war on the Constitution. It rejects some parts of the Bill of Rights entirely. It is now engaged in a gargantuan effort to reverse the results of a national election. And when it is called out for its abuses of power, it contends that to criticize it is to undermine the foundation of a free republic. …

Off-camera briefings should become off-media briefings. Media outlets that want to act like campus crybullies should be booted. Dot coms that clamor for Net Neutrality but then use media “fact checks” to censor conservative competitors should be called out for their partisan hypocrisy.

The White House’s battle against the media cartel is the best defense of the First Amendment.

Americans, from the government to the streets, must make it clear that there is no fourth branch of government. Only when the media cartel has been broken, can a free press rise once again.

Everything Dr. Jordan Peterson says in this video clip we heartily agree with:

Published today (June 30, 2017) is this video in which Mark Steyn discusses, inter alia, big government; how America (unfortunately) is not and never has been imperialist; the pointlessness of the war in Aghanistan; and terrorism.

He explains why “once government gets to a certain size, you cannot have conservative government”.

He debunks the idea that terrorism will not change us (the West). Muslim terrorism has changed our lives both in obvious ways – eg. the millions of bollards that keep terrorists from driving vehicles on to city side-walks in order to mow down pedestrians – and in deeper more subtle ways: “brainwashing” us, making us “feeble and passive”. That is the greater harm. That is the existential threat.

He talks – as always wittily, wisely, and knowledgeably – about political facts and ideas up to the 20 minutes mark. After that he discusses music.

[Continued from the post immediately below.]

Dr. Peterson says that it is the body of religious myths that carry the “transcendent values” that provide us with eternal guidance to moral rectitude.

So from time to time we will look at the myths themselves.

Today, the myth of the first Man and Woman in the Garden of Eden and their Sin, aka the myth of the Fall of Man.

The message of the myth of Eden presents itself as this: by becoming aware of good and evil, humankind lost its innocence. In a state of innocence, human beings could have lived forever; but  getting to know good and evil made them guilty. Their getting to know good and evil was their Sin. Because they were guilty of Sin, they had to die. Sin made them mortal.

Their discovery of morality made them mortal? Once they could tell right from wrong they deserved to die?  

Yes.

How did they discover morality?

They ate of the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. They did this despite being ordered by God their Maker not to eat the Fruit of that Tree. Why did they disregard God’s order ? Because they were  tempted to. The First Woman was tempted to eat the fruit by a Serpent who dwelt in the Tree. She succumbed to temptation. The First Man was tempted to eat the Fruit by the Woman who had already done so. He succumbed to temptation. Hence their Fall from Grace, their Loss of Innocence, their expulsion from the easy life of the fruitful Garden, their eventual Deaths.

It could be observed that the real Tempter was God who put the Tree there in the first place. (Also the snake.) No tree, no temptation, no fall.  So why did he put it there?

Religion does not encourage the asking of why. But it is asked, and the usual answer is that God put it there to test them. He gave them the capacity to choose – aka Free Will – and they chose wrong. Point is, they came to know Good and Evil. That’s how humanity came to know Good and Evil, and because our species came to know Good and Evil our lives must come to an end.

So the “transcendent value”, the precept, the moral in the myth by which everyone, consciously or unconsciously, is living by  – or failing to live by – today is … what?

Hard to see. Sure, the myth gives an explanation, if a rather puzzling one, to those who wonder why we must all die; why the God they are told is all-good, all-knowing, all-wise, all-powerful, condemns us all to death.

Our remote ancestors did something very wicked: they disobeyed God and ate something they shouldn’t have, so  that’s why?

Yes.

Okay, but is there an actual, useful, moral precept in all that? A do or a don’t for us to follow? After all, the Fruit cannot be un-eaten. No action can be taken by you or me now that will undo what the First Man and Woman did, make us immortal again, put us back in the ever-fruitful Garden, wipe  the knowledge of right and wrong clean out of our brains …

And come to think of it, why is it a sin to know the difference between right and wrong?

Sorry. Don’t know. That why does not seem to have been answered, even reluctantly, by interpreters of the myth!

Okay, well how about this for the moral message?: You must not disobey God. Obeying him now won’t save you from death, but it might keep you from getting him angry and condemning you to some awful punishment.

Mm-hmm. So how will I know what God wants me to do and not do?

We can learn that from the myths of the Bible.

Can we?

We’ll try to find out by exploring more of them in the near future.

We much admire Dr. Jordan Peterson when he talks about politics. We agree with all we have heard him say on political issues.

We do not agree with him on the subject of morality as he discusses it here;

Our arguments against Dostoyevsky’s young villain-hero Raskolnikov are too numerous to set out here. Enough to say that one person’s need for something is not a reason why another person should give it to him.

But to come to why Dr. Peterson cites the novel:

He agrees with Dostoyevsky’s declaration (made in the novel by Raskolnikov) that “if there is no god then you can do whatever you want”. He is willing to substitute the word “higher value” or “transcendent value” for “god”.

To explain why he agrees, he asks: “What the hell is irrational about me getting exactly what I want from every one of you whenever I want it at every possible second?”

He adds:  “It’s as if the psychopathic tendency is irrational.”

He asks: “Why the hell not ‘every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost’?”

These are arguments very often put against atheism. They are not difficult for an atheist to answer.

He thinks that atheists such as Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins* do not realize that the ethics they take for granted are predicated on a long tradition of moral principles encapsulated in the myths of religion. The myths convey, down through the ages, the “higher”, the “transcendent” morality – which, he says, “can be personified in the idea of God”.  Those moral principles, he suggests, are not just divinely revealed, they can be said to define and constitute the Divine itself.

The implication is that at certain moments in ancient history, revelations of some “transcendent” moral truths were imparted to certain men. If not by a god at least from some source of divine wisdom. And because these come from that “higher” source, they are the right guides for human behavior.

He is referring of course to the “moral religions”. Most religions contain no moral precepts whatsoever, if the meaning of “moral behavior” is behaving well towards our fellow human beings.

So let’s examine the moral precepts of the moral religions. Convention has it that there are three of them: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. (Some oriental religions such as Buddhism and Jainism command your right behavior towards others, but to serve a different end: not in order to benefit them for their own sakes, but entirely in order to put a shine on your own soul.)

Islam may as well be excluded straightaway. It commands Muslims to be good to other Muslims, not to anyone who is not a Muslim. Dr. Peterson is unlikely to include that idea in his notion of transcendent values.

What does Judaism command? That you love (respect) your neighbor as yourself, and that includes even the stranger in your midst. That is sensible. Enlightened self-interest requires the same thing. Judaism is essentially a religion of law. Law is good. The Mosaic laws forbid murder, theft, false testimony, adultery, and covetousness. Divine revelation was not needed for law to forbid murder, theft, and  false testimony. They were forbidden in far more ancient secular codes of law, such as the Hammurabi Code which was written down some 600 years before the Mosaic law is alleged to have been revealed by Jehovah through Moses to the Children of Israel. As for adultery and covetousness, they are not punishable by law or despised by custom in our time. As to the rest of the Jewish religious laws, a reading of the “books of Moses” is very unlikely to support the view that they are of “transcendent” value, fixed stars in the moral firmament by which we may be rightly guided forever. They forbid homosexuality, for instance. Is that a transcendent value?

And then there is Christianity. It too forbids murder, theft, false testimony, adultery, covetousness and homosexuality. It commands you to love (love) your neighbor, to love everyone, to love all mankind however unlovable your neighbor, or your enemy might be. It commands you to forgive sinners, though you may condemn the sin. It demands, in other words, the impossible, and discards the genuinely and supremely moral idea of justice. It recommends self-abasement and self-denial. It asks human beings to act against human nature. Transcendent and eternal values?

No. The bodies of myth that compose the scriptures and moral commandments of certain religions do NOT set a guide to right behavior, or supply a bedrock of moral values.

To answer Dr. Petersons’ remaining arguments:

What is stopping you from getting anything you want (“forcibly” is implied) from everyone else whenever you want to, is the will of everyone else. Your self-interest is best served by taking into account that everyone else is necessarily serving his own self-interest just as you are, and your survival and the satisfying of your needs depends on taking this fact into consideration. Or, as we put it in our own Articles of Reason: My liberty should be limited by nothing except everyone else’s liberty. That is rational. Mankind would not long have survived if many people had not understood the selfish need to tolerate and co-operate with other people. Rational self-interest keeps most of us  from living by the maxim “every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost”, because if we did we would be likely to die by it.

Finally, to want to get what one wants from everyone else is, he suggests, a “psychopathic tendency”, and that, he says, is not irrational. But what does “psychopathic” mean if not a sickness of the mind – a breakdown of sanity, of the capacity to reason? If psychopaths are the example of what we should not be, who would disagree?

Our final answer: no god ever spoke to any man. No moral precepts come from a divine source.

All are man-made.

None are set in stone.

Every moral idea, like every other idea, needs to be examined by reason.

* In the case of Richard Dawkins, we would concede that his Leftist principles derive from Christianity. In our opinion they are not good.

The Left has been trying for a long time now to substitute their own version of what is happening in America and the world for what is actually happening. The Democrats, now a far left party, stepped up the attempt when Donald Trump was elected president. They had been so sure they would win the 2016 election that their failure seems to them to be impossible, a terrible mistake of the cosmos, a breakdown of the laws of the universe. They knew that one of their own – the corrupt Hillary Clinton – would be the next president, so their multitude of deceits would continue to be covered up and their devious plots implemented. Oh, what a shock they got when rude Reality brought Donald Trump to power!

They still refuse to accept the fact that Donald Trump is president. Something must be done to rectify the cosmic error. New fictions are required. So wild stories of Trump perfidies spring out of newspapers and TV screens.

But it is insane to believe that a false description of reality can replace the Real.

Reality goes on accruing its consequences, and sooner or later the truth bursts through the lies.

This week the devious plot – involving a total fiction without a trace of a fact to give it any credibility whatsoever – invented to frame President Trump as a traitor selling out his country to Russia, has been burst open.

From Investor’s Business Daily:

The past few days have seen several interesting developments on the supposed Trump/Russia scandal. But instead of causing further damage to President Trump, they’re making the entire story look like a multilayered smear campaign by Trump’s enemies.

Over the weekend, the New York Post reported that the firm behind the infamous Trump dossier — Fusion GPS — has been stonewalling the Senate Judiciary Committee, which has been trying to get information on who paid the firm to produce it and how it was used by government officials.

It has been publicly known since at least early January that Fusion GPS was behind the discredited dossier, which claimed that Russia had backmailable information on Trump, and that it was a notorious opposition research firm that was often enlisted to dig up dirt on Republicans, including a 2012 smear campaign against a donor to Mitt Romney’s campaign.

As the Post notes, one of the Fusion’s founders, Peter Fritsch, contributed “at least $1,000 to the Hillary Victory Fund and the Hillary for America campaign”.

The Post story has sparked renewed interest in this dossier, most of which has been discredited, but which appears to be serving as a “road map” to various investigations.

That was strike one against the anti-Trump conspiracy mongers.

Strike two happened Sunday [June 25, 2017] when an internal memo from CNN Money’s executive editor Rich Barbieri leaked. The memo told reporters: “No one should publish any content involving Russia without coming to me or (VP of Premium Content Video) Jason (Farkas) first. … No exception.”

That memo came after CNN was forced to retract a story it had posted on its website claiming that Trump advisor Anthony Scaramucci was under investigation for ties to Russia. Turns out the story — based on a single anonymous source — was false. CNN pulled the story and apologized to Scaramucci.

This wasn’t the first Russia-related story pushed by the mainstream press that turned out to be exaggerated or false, but it was the most embarrassing one to date. And it showcased what many suspected — that Trump-hating reporters and editors had dropped all pretense of journalistic professionalism in order to peddle [made up] dirt on Trump.

Here is Project Veritas’s video of a CNN producer confessing to the lie:

Was there no collusion at all by Somebody with Russia?

What does Reality say?

Then, on Sunday, the Obama administration started to come under attack. That got started by, of all places, the Washington Post, which offered a detailed account of how the administration knew about Russia’s efforts to influence the election months before the polls opened, but did nothing about it.

Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told CNN over the weekend that “the Obama administration should have done more when it became clear that not only was Russia intervening, but it was being directed at the highest levels of the Kremlin”.

On Monday, Trump amped the story up, tweeting that Obama “colluded or obstructed” with the Clinton campaign by downplaying Russia because he assumed Clinton would win.

Time is bringing him his revenge.

Note what is missing from all these stories — any evidence that Trump had anything to do with Russia’s efforts. Given that this yearlong investigation has turned up nothing, we’d argue that it’s time for [“special counselor”] Robert Mueller and congressional investigators to start looking at whether the Obama administration broke any laws in its attempt to destroy the Trump presidency before it got started.

They asked for it. They begged for it. They strove for it. And they got it.

Now they are paying for it.

Our reaction? Schadenfreude is overwhelmed by sadness.

Sweden is just the first European country to cry out in its death throes. Wound in the coils of Islam, it is being squeezed to death.

The country’s top policemen despair and cry for help, we read in a report by Nicolai Sennels at Jihad Watch:

The number of lawless areas (commonly referred to as “no-go zones”) in Sweden now totals 61. That is up from 55 in just one year’s time. This increase includes not only the total number, but also the geographical size of these areas.

Sweden’s National Police Commissioner, Dan Eliasson, spoke on national television and pleaded for assistance: “Help us, help us!,” he said, while warning that Swedish police forces no longer can uphold the law and therefore must ask all good powers in the country to support them.

A research expert regarding destabilized countries and 2011 recipient of Sweden’s Order of the Seraphim medal, Johan Patrik Engellau, has been working with organizations such as the UN and others that operate in crisis areas. He warns:

I’m afraid it is the end for the well-organized, decent and egalitarian Sweden we have known up to now. Personally, I would not be surprised if a form of civil war occurs. In some places, the civil war has probably already begun.

10News recently reported how the Swedish state has lost large areas to armed, religious groups best described as Islamist militias.

Police chief Lars Alversjø says that,

There is lawlessness in parts of Stockholm [Sweden’s capital] now. The legal system, which is a pillar in every democratic society, is collapsing in Sweden.

Per Magnus Ranstorp, a researcher into terrorism and radicalization at the Swedish National Defense College, notes: 

In the worst areas, extremists have taken over. The whole sense of justice and peace is threatened by the fact that the police are breaking down and it’s only getting worse. Sweden is in a disastrous situation.

The Swedish Security Service (Säkerhetspolisen – abbreviated as Säpo), recently warned that the country is crawling with “thousands of Islamists” sharing Islamic State’s ideology. In many places, public servants (i.e., non-Islamic authorities) require police escort or protection.

The word that Swedish authorities and media use for the country’s “no-go zones” is utenforskap. The word means something like “excluded area”. In these areas, Swedish law has been replaced with a mixture of the law of the jungle and the Islamic legal code, sharia. Armed Muslim gangs and Islamic radicals are simply carving out big pieces of Sweden for themselves.

The only reason why it has not evolved into large-scale armed conflicts — in this formerly peaceful and safe country — probably relates to how Sweden’s feminist-liberal government is not putting up any real resistance against the Islamists.

Even if the Swedish feminist government chose to fight back tomorrow, Sweden has nothing close to the paramilitary capacity needed to reverse this situation. That 80 percent of the country’s law enforcement officers are considering quitting their jobs is a clear sign of a police force that is completely demoralized. The military in this traditionally pacifist country is cut down to almost nothing, and there is no money to fix it.

As Johan Patrik Engellau puts it: 

The government does not seem to understand that it has lost control. There is a point where you can no longer stop a situation’s development. I do not know if Sweden has reached this point when it comes to [the consequences of] immigration, but I fear we are drawing close. If we right here and now take clear and powerful action – including stopping immigration and the political promotion of multiculturalism – we might with some difficulty be able to save Sweden.

The fact remains that Sweden’s political elite is nowhere near taking such decisive action, as it has not even started to openly speak out about these problems.

Therefore Sweden will very soon need help from abroad. Police chief Dan Eliasson’s prayer for help only included potential partners inside Sweden, but very soon the international community will have to intervene if a humanitarian catastrophe is to be avoided.

What?

We may be able to suppress Schadenfreude because the tragedy of Europe’s suicide is so great, but we cannot suppress laughter at the suggestion that some imaginary “international community” will materialize to save it.

The UN,  with which the researcher Johan Patrik Engellau – he who announced “the end” of the Sweden-that-was –  “has been working”, insisted that Western countries take in vast numbers of Muslims from the Third World.

All west European governments have been importing swarms of Muslims as fanatically as the feminist government of Sweden.

Every European who has dared to utter a warning about the inevitable result of such monstrous folly – the result Sweden is now experiencing – has been prosecuted, and most of them have been silenced.

The reaction of European leaders to President Trump’s sensible decision to halt Muslim immigration into the United States was condemnation, anger, scorn, accusations of “racism”, “bigotry”, “xenophobia”, “Islamophobia”.  Will Europe start crying now for America’s help?

There is nothing that can be done to save Europe. There is nothing it can do to save itself. It is too late.

Unless, perhaps, there is civil war.

The Strange Death of Europe is the title of a new book by Douglas Murray. In this video he defends the opinions he expresses in it. He shows how massive immigration of Third World peoples (mainly Muslim) with cultures entirely different from the culture of the West, and incompatible with the values of the West, is killing Europe.

Is the remedy he advocates – “Slow it down” – sufficient to save Europe?

We do not think so. Much as we generally admire Douglas Murray, and appreciate his description of the problem, we cannot see how killing Europe slowly makes its death any easier to contemplate, anything less than the most appalling of all the tragedies of history.

.

There is a civil war raging in America – a “cold civil war”.

The always interesting political analyst David P. Goldman, aka Spengler, writes at the Asia Times:

The distinguished political scientist Angelo Codevilla coined the ominous term “cold civil war” to describe America’s precarious condition, adding, “Statesmanship’s first task is to prevent it from turning hot.”

The attempted massacre this week of Republican Congressmen and their staff by a deranged partisan of Sen. Bernie Sanders turned up the heat a notch, but it would be mistaken to attribute much importance to this dreadful outburst of left-wing rage. The augury of American fracture will not be street violence, but a constitutional crisis implicating virtually the whole of America’s governing caste. The shock troops in the cold civil war are not gunmen but lawyers.

Here we interrupt an argument that we very largely agree with, to cavil: Lawyers acting as shock troops in this cold civil war, and the politicians who employ them, are themselves making “a dreadful outburst of left-wing rage”, albeit with words and not guns.

A considerable portion of America’s permanent bureaucracy, including elements of its intelligence community, is engaged in an illegal and unconstitutional mutiny against the elected commander-in-chief, President Donald Trump. Most of the Democratic Party and a fair sampling of the Republican Establishment want to force Trump out of office, and to this end undertook an entrapment scheme to entice the president and his staff into actions which might be construed after the fact as obstruction of justice.

By means yet undisclosed, the mutineers forced Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn from office and now seek to bring down the president for allegedly obstructing an investigation of Gen. Flynn that arose in the first place from the entrapment scheme. …

By no coincidence is Gen. Flynn the central character in this scenario. … The CIA really is out to get him:

Flynn’s Defense Intelligence Agency produced a now-notorious 2012 report warning that chaos in Syria’s civil war enabled the rise of a new Caliphate movement, namely ISIS. … Flynn humiliated the bungling CIA and exposed the incompetence and deception of the Obama administration, and got fired for it. …

The mainstream media makes no effort to disguise its hatred for Trump and insinuates in countless ways that the president fired former FBI director James Comey in order to protect Gen. Flynn from a legitimate investigation. I do not believe this to be the case; I think it more likely that Comey showed insufficient zeal in uncovering the pattern of press leaks and other sabotage which the mutineers employed against the president.

Faced with a mutiny fed by illegal actions (leaking classified information is a felony that carries a 10-year prison sentence), the president requires a Pitbull for a counterintelligence chief. Comey, who in 2005 earned $6 million as general counsel for the giant defense contractor Lockheed Martin, is more of a Pomeranian. …

If it is proven that Russian cyber-spies hacked the email account of Democratic National Committee Chairman John Podesta and handed embarrassing information to Wikileaks, we will know that Russia has done what all intelligence agencies have done for centuries: leak embarrassing political information to the press.

Western intelligence services leak information about Putin’s alleged personal fortune and personal life and skullduggery to the media, as well as information about the dodgy connections of Chinese officials and their offspring to business.

Podesta and his gang at the DNC used unethical and perhaps illegal means to sandbag the campaign of Sen. Sanders, leaks about which embarrassed Hillary Clinton. Sanders, knowing on which side his bread is buttered, declined to make an issue of the sandbagging, allowing Trump’s enemies to transform what should have been an investigation of corruption in the Democratic Party into a fairy-tale about Russian spies stealing an American election with implied collusion by the Trump campaign.

The Trump-Russia collusion story is nonsense, as its disseminators know better than anyone else. The object of the exercise is not to support the innuendo, but to launch an investigation which can provoke the White House into responses that might be construed as illegal.

The intelligence leaks involved in framing the story alone are probably sufficient grounds to put several dozen senior officials in federal prison for double-digit terms. That consideration gauges the scale of the problem: the mutineers have committed multiple felonies, and their downside should the mutiny go wrong is not ignominious retirement but hard time at Leavenworth.

Oh, may it be so! It is a consummation devoutly to be wished.

For the moment, the mutineers have the momentum. The Trump administration continues to run on a skeleton staff, with the vast majority of key positions still unoccupied. If my surmise is correct, it was unable to persuade the director of the FBI, the nation’s chief watchdog, to undertake vigorous countermeasures against the mutiny, for example, a comprehensive screening of electronic communications by the reporters who received leaks of classified materials. …

The White House and in particular the National Security Council … remain riddled with Obama Administration holdovers, forcing Trump to rely on a close circle of trusted advisers. That limits the president’s ability to reach out for allies against the mutineers.

The installation of former FBI director Robert Mueller as Special Counsel … also constrains the counterintelligence operations of the White House. If senior intelligence officials claim to be engaged in counterintelligence investigations against Russian interference in US elections, is it obstruction of justice to investigate their illegal contacts with the media?

The mutineers also can count on the support of Establishment worthies like Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), for whom Trump’s election was an intolerable humiliation. Trump ran against the Bush wing of the Republican Party as much as he ran against the Democrats. …

Trump’s one great advantage in all of this is that he has done nothing wrong. He did not obstruct justice because there is no crime. The mutineers’ only hope is to provoke him to take actions which might be construed as obstruction of justice in an investigation with no crime and no victim. Still, it is a moment of great danger for the American Republic.

The mutiny has burned its bridges on the beach, and its perpetrators will risk everything to make it succeed. Whatever the outcome, the legitimacy of a political system designed to be litigious and oppositional will be called into question, and the polarization of American opinion will become more rather than less extreme.

More physical violence cannot be ruled out. The mutineers must lose the cold civil war, if only after inflicting crippling damage on the country. Then they face long years in jail (with a bit of luck and impartial justice from Trump appointed judges). The chances they will then turn to – or at least encourage – violence, are surely high. The Left will not surrender easily. It worked too long, too hard for victory, got it, and thought it had secured power for ever. It cannot let go without a no-holds-barred fight. It is mostly screaming biting and scratching now, but will almost certainly use guns and knives and all the weapons of mutiny that it can before it is forcibly crushed.

(Hat-tip for the Spengler article to our contributing commenter, liz)