It is 70 years since the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was established.

Theodore Roosevelt Malloch writes at American Greatness:

Only nine of its 29 member states pay their agreed dues—up from five last year, thanks to President Trump’s pestering. Not that he gets any credit for it.

Nevertheless, that is $130 billion more for NATO’s collective defense! Which is both more money than one can fathom, and simultaneously a pitiful fraction (around 20 percent) of America’s defense spending.

NATO’s membership is paying more thanks to constant hammering by President Trump. But many [more than two-thirds of the member states] have not yet reached the treaty’s required 2 percent threshold, including the richest countries, like Germany. So long as Angela Merkel remains in power with the votes of left-wing socialists (called the “Grand Coalition”) in the Bundestag, the chance is near zilch of this issue being dealt with. For her part, Merkel has promised Germany will hit the 2 percent target sometime in the “early 2030s”. …

By which time Germany will be a Muslim ruled country, a fate from which its only salvation might be Russian conquest.

That Russian domination could be considered by indigenous Germans preferable to Islamic subjugation is in itself a vivid indication of just how horrible the outlook is for Europe.

But Trump is turning [NATO] round. Give him credit.

The world has changed a great deal in the 70 years since the Washington Treaty was first signed and the North Atlantic Charter was put into force. American soldiers held the line on the free side of the Iron Curtain long enough for Moscow to trip on its own contradictions.

But 1989 was 30 years ago and the triumph that was the 50th anniversary celebrations (1999) is a distant memory. Today NATO is fully benefiting from nostalgia for the 1990s, despite the Balkan wars awkwardly underscoring the limitations of collective security in the new world order.

This week’s NATO summit is less of a celebration of the military achievements and the collapse of the Soviet empire than it is a day of reckoning.

Does NATO have a future or is it, as French President Emmanuel Macron recently called it, “brain dead”? Merkel herself famously criticized NATO in the months after President Trump’s inauguration in 2017 and backed Macron’s version of a European army, widely seen as a threat to the alliance.

Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the enfant terrible of the alliance (whose rough neighborhood includes long borders with Iran, Syria, Iraq, all unstable war zones) has also come out swinging, this time against Macron. It is Macron who’s brain dead, the Turkish president said. His ambassador in Paris was called in for a stern dressing down.

Turkey has been not just an uncooperative member of NATO; it has been positively obstructive, in the past and again now.

The question has arisen whether Turkey could be expelled from NATO.

At [the 70th] anniversary summit of its members, President Trump, who has long thought the collective security arrangement “obsolete” … reiterated his demand that Europe pay more (South Korea, Saudi Arabia and Japan, as well) for their defense.

He suggested NATO should refocus on terrorism, Syria, cybersecurity, and most critically, China, the number one adversary NATO countries face. …

Can NATO adapt fast enough?

Can NATO adapt?

The Russians are in no state [at present] to take over Ukraine, much less Germany. …

The organization has certainly proven to be resilient—but is it relevant any longer?

Is it an alliance any longer?

Witness the differences in implementing nuclear sanctions on Iran—Europe has set up INSTEX, a sanctions-dodging mechanism for blockade-running. Iran’s regime, currently wracked by the worst protests in 40 years, when the mullahs came to power, is being thrown a lifeline by Paris, Brussels, and Berlin.

Why?

As the strongest and most successful military alliance in history—at least it is according to its own secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg of Norway—the crux of the matter on this birthday is, does NATO have an ability to change significantly? He certainly thinks so.

In our new book Trump’s World, Felipe J. Cuello and I argue that the “dog fight” over NATO is in a critical stage and the disruptor-in-chief, Geo Deus Donald Trump, may give it a second breath—but only if the alliance pays and it shifts.

GEO DEUS DONALD TRUMP.

 

 

An earthly Deus even we can believe in. Thank you Theodore Roosevelt Malloch and Felipe J. Cuello for that!

In his America First paradigm, but not alone, there is a new taskmaster in town and he plays by new rules not old ways and ideologies of globalism. NATO survives and grows in strength thanks to one Donald J. Trump.

That is to say, if it survives and grows in strength it will be thanks to Geo Deus Donald J. Trump.

Perhaps a new type of “alliance” is needed. States that want to be protected by the mightiest military in the world pay America directly; put their own forces – those few who have them in working order – under the command of the president of the United States; their ordnance, warships and aircraft, technological facilities, satellites, and foreign offices (yes, those too!) at his disposal. At least for as long as Donald J. Trump or successors approved by him are in power.

Would the world not then be a safer, more peaceful, more prosperous place? Could be. It’s at least a possibility.

Sweden, much admired by Bernie Sanders and others on the Left as a model “democratic socialist” country, is not socialist like Venezuela. It tried socialism, found it didn’t work, “turned sharply back toward capitalism” round the middle of the 1990s, and regained prosperity. It is still a highly taxed welfare state.

The Swedes were happy with that, and decided in Christian spirit to share their happiness with tens of thousands of aliens from the Third World. They came from the hot lands of Africa and Asia to the north of Europe, with its long cold winter nights.

Judith Bergman writes at Gatestone about what happened to Sweden when it welcomed a “large influx of people [read Muslims] who do not have the educational or language skills to work in the Swedish economy”.

The small Swedish city of Filipstad exemplifies a place where the influx of non-Western migrants, some of them illiterate, with little or no education, has meant that the unemployment rate in that group is at 80%: they depend for their livelihoods on the municipality’s social welfare program.

In 2015, during the European migration crisis, nearly 163,000 migrants arrived in Sweden seeking asylum – primarily from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq …  60,000 received a residence permit. In the group of people over the age of 15, made up of 40,019 people, only 4,574 get their livelihood from employment … 18,405 people from the cohort live on welfare handed out by municipalities and 9,970 people receive funds for studying.

Many municipalities … need to make budget cuts. In Ystad, in the south of Sweden, the municipality, as part of the services of the welfare state, [has been helping] the elderly with hot meals and cleaning services. Now, to save money, the municipality will no longer serve hot meals to the elderly and cleaning services will be limited to once every three weeks. The elderly will instead have to get ready-made meals from the supermarket. …

Motala municipality … announced that it would lower the heat in buildings managed by the city, including old age homes, to save money. “We will take care of the elderly; they will not be freezing, they can have blankets,” the message went.

The criticism of the proposed savings on care for the elderly in Motala, however, was so massive that the municipality had to back down. …

Meanwhile, in June, the Swedish parliament voted in favor of a law that is likely to increase immigration to Sweden based on family reunification.

 Alert capitalists will be buying shares in the blanket industry.

It’s a cautionary tale that will be taken no notice of by Our Betters Who Rule Over Us (OBWROUs).

A true story. This is what happened (roughly – details have yet to be clarified):

Usman Khan, a Muslim jihadi terrorist, was sentenced to 16 years in prison for plotting to blow up places and people in London. In prison he said he wanted “to know more about Islam” so he could “become a better British [!] citizen”. The OBWROUs thought that was a jolly good idea and a sure sign that he really, really wanted to reform – and what could help him do that better than plunging himself deep into the teachings of “The Religion of Peace”? (Whose commandments he had in fact been trying to carry out with his plans for murderous attacks in London.) So under their approving eyes he brooded over the Koran that still insisted he should kill the infidel.

Then a bunch of people who think everyone is fundamentally good and who feel sorry for prisoners – “beautiful spirits” who had formed a do-gooding organization at Cambridge University called Learning Together – and who apparently heed the advice of Jesus to “resist not evil”, to forgive, and to love their enemies …

Excuse us a moment while we overcome our nausea! …

… visited him in prison and soon announced that he was reformed.

Now he wanted nothing so much as to be a model for others who had not yet studied the Koran deeply enough or felt the love of the beautiful spirits. He would help them reach those others. So he was let out of prison.

The OBWROUs did instruct him not to go to London, though it no doubt hurt their tender consciences to do so.

The Learning Together beautiful spirits of Cambridge University organized a “rehabilitation” event in the grand Fishmongers’ Hall at one end of London Bridge. There, on Friday November 29, 2019, they would introduce their great success, the reformed Muslim jihadi terrorist. The OBWROUs smilingly gave their consent to lift the London ban for that one day. Such a good cause! Such a splendid example of what love, forgiveness, and resisting not evil could accomplish!

So Usman Khan went to London.

He entered Fishmongers’ Hall, was warmly welcomed by the chief beautiful spirit, Jack Merritt, and a student named Saskia Jones. In return, Khan drew out a big sharp knife and stabbed them to death. He turned and ran out on to London Bridge.

A few people in the hall, fortunately less beautiful of spirit than their hosts, chased him, one with a fire extinguisher as a weapon. The Polish cook employed at the hall, having seen what happened, seized a long sharp whale’s tooth from among the decorations on the wall, ran out after Allah’s soldier and with it kept him pinned to the railing at the side of the bridge. Another man also more brave than beautiful of spirit wrestled the knife from Khan’s hand. Then the police arrived and shot Khan dead.

Will the brave men and the police officers who brought revenge upon Khan face charges of Islamophobia? That would be serious. They’d spend a long time in prison if found guilty. No parole for them. The OBWROUs will see to that.

 

Additional:

What the Cambridge group Learning Together says they are all about:

“Learning Together brings together people in criminal justice [prison] and higher education institutions [Cambridge University] to study alongside each other in inclusive and transformative learning communities.”

Some persons from the group went on a sponsored 10 mile run to raise funds to buy Usman Khan a computer while he was in prison.

He wrote them a poem to thank them. 

Have they now learned something?

The Superpimp, the pleasure-host of the world’s globalist elite, of the nomenklatura of all the nations, of the Whole World Community Organizers, of the priests of catastrophic climate change, was Jeffrey Epstein.

Cliff Kincaid explains in some detail at Canada Free Press:

The late billionaire Jeffrey Epstein’s pedophilia is what has interested the media. But his own blog, which is still active even after his death, suggests what he and his fellow elites were really interested in. He called it “cutting edge science”. It is how the global elites intend to manage our lives. They already claim credit for “rewriting our global culture”.

“Jeffrey Epstein is a former member of the Mind, Brain and Behavior Committee at Harvard, the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, the New York Academy of Science and a former Rockefeller University Board Member,” his website proclaimed. “Mr. Epstein is also an active member of the Edge Organization.”

You can’t get higher-up than Epstein. This is the crème de la crème of the American establishment. But as Patrick Wood, Editor of Technocracy News & Trends, notes, “He had no visible or logical means of creating wealth, although he spent a fortune on various pet projects.”

Wood comments that Epstein was definitely NOT like “the typical member” of the Trilateral Commission (TC) or Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). “He had no compelling outward qualifications as far as I can tell, but if you think about the TC and CFR as being potentially useful for nefarious purposes, then Epstein was the blackmailer and his secret and real profession was sex trafficking and pedophilia,” Wood adds, “It has been alleged that every room in his mansions had hidden cameras that filmed everything and everyone, and that the videos taken were stored offsite in a still-undisclosed location. These will never be released because they implicate so many of the global elite.”

Actually, there have been no published examples of Epstein having sexual relations with children. With young women who were under the age of consent in most US states, yes, and that is inaccurately called “pedophilia”. And sure the girls were young enough to be considered victims. But they were old enough to know what they were doing and have their own reasons for doing it. Such as, to make money. A respectable motive in itself.

So it could be argued that his “pedophilia” is not the worst thing about the man. Then in what did his worst villainy lie? Was it that he stole his starter millions (which Kincaid does not mention)?

Or was it simply that he kept and presided over Concupiscence Castle – the Grand Central Brothel – where Our Betters could meet and feast and copulate with young whores and plot to turn the whole world into China, ruled by them? Did all the Great and the Powerful fear the exposure of what Epstein knew about them? Did the Superpimp live high, as Kincaid suggests, on blackmail?

These are serious concerns, and there is no guilt by association. But Epstein’s mysterious death, at this juncture in history, is extremely significant. Blaming two federal prison guards for his “suicide” cannot be accepted at face value. …

A quick look into one of Epstein’s affiliated groups, the Edge organization, reveals a “Billionaires’ Dinner” with photos of Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon and the Washington Post; Jeffrey Epstein; and many others. “Guests have included the leading third culture intellectuals of our time, dining and conversing with the founders of Amazon, AOL, eBay, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, PayPal, Space X, Skype, Twitter,” says the website. “It is a remarkable gathering of outstanding minds—the people that are rewriting our global culture.”

This new global order is based on Scientism, a philosophy attractive to the global elites which holds that a small group of powerful people will manage the future through technocracy. Some of these people believe in “transhumanism,” the use of science and technology to enhance human mental and physical characteristics, creating a virtual super-race of humans.

Epstein, for example, “planned on using his own semen to impregnate the chosen ones and thus improve the human race,” notes Wood. “Epstein also planned to cryonically freeze his head and his penis, so that future science could bring him back to life to live forever.”

That organ must have served him well. Reliably. He wouldn’t want to risk having an untested substitute.

In this way, Epstein believed that he would, personally, be resurrected and experience a form of eternal life.

While this kind of approach sounds fantastic, the fact is that Epstein, a college dropout, was highly regarded by such elite organizations such as the Trilateral Commission and Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and Harvard University.  As reported by the Harvard Crimson, “He cultivated cozy friendships with top Harvard administrators including a former University president” and pledged a $30 million donation to Harvard to fund the University’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. “Our work is about understanding the past, managing the present, and helping to build the future,” it says.

Epstein was accepted into the “Chairman’s Circle” of the CFR’s top donors but the group’s president, Richard Haass, has tried to distance himself from Epstein after his death. However, the Trilateral Commission, whose membership is by invitation only, has not said anything publicly about his involvement with the organization.

Research into the agenda of these organizations is as important as finding out those who were rubbing elbows (or other body parts) with Epstein or the young girls in his harem.  How could someone with enormous wealth, obtained through mysterious circumstances, reach the pinnacle of power. Was it because of his keen intellect?   

The Trilateral Commission’s goal has always been the “deeper integration and greater globalization” of the world’s economies but asserts that such a process has been jeopardized by “populism and nationalism”.

It has! And that’s very good news. We have President Trump to thank for it.

That’s a reference to the election of Donald J. Trump as U.S. President and the Brexit process of leaving the European Union in Britain. In the words of the Trilateral Commission, the future of humanity is threatened.

By which the Trilateral Commission means that its plan, to bring humanity under world Communist government by Those Who Know Best, is threatened.

The Trilateral Commission Summer 2019 report, Democracies Under Stress, reflects the current political thinking of the global elite who invited Epstein  to join their “prestigious” organizations and attend their “dinners”. It states, “All of this [stress] is occurring at a time when Beijing is offering the world what many see as a viable alternative to democracy.”

The “many” is not defined. But speaking for themselves, in terms of the “many,” these global elites apparently see the U.S. experiment in constitutional self-government as less efficient than China’s rule by the communist elite. 

This report from the Trilateral Commission features two pictures of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, a prominent member of the North American Group. One shows Kissinger with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who fooled the West with Glasnost and Perestroika while pursuing the goal of world communism with the support of “socialists” and environmentalists in the West. Former top Jimmy Carter adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski also “played an important role in the formation” of the Trilateral Commission and served as its first director from 1973 to 1976. By the way, his daughter is Mika Brzezinski, a host on the Trump-hating MSNBC cable channel. She is married to co-host Joe Scarborough. Both are members of the CFR.

Media organizations represented by Trilateral Commission members include NBC News, Bloomberg, the Washington Post, Time Magazine, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. Clearly, they, too, play a major role in shaping the culture. 

What, no George Soros? He too is a TC member.

The heavy media presence in the organization explains why commission meetings and reports are not examined critically or even covered. Hence, we can assume one is invited to join such an organization, “by invitation only,” and stay involved, based on favorable coverage, or non-coverage, of what this organization actually does. That virtually guarantees that “whistleblowers” will never come forward with inside information about their plans.

But Patrick Wood, who co-authored the book, Trilaterals Over Washington, has watched the activities of the organization for many years and says there is no doubt that China has always been the key to the plans of the TC. He notes that Kissinger started the relationship with China under President Nixon and then Brzezinski completed most of the communist country’s integration into the global economy under President Carter. The goal has been to develop an elaborate scheme of social engineering, a technocracy, which will be used to bring into being an anticipated new worldwide utopian system.

*

A note about the Trilateral Commission’s aims:

Cliff Kincaid’s assertion that a “worldwide utopian system” is the ultimate goal of the Trilateral Commission seems to be denied by the Commission itself in Democracies Under Stress. There are such assertions as: “ A shift in the mindset of traditional elites [is needed] from lamenting the decline of democracy to taking action to defend it”; “[The TC can give] inspiration and reassurance to those who have traditionally looked to the United States and its allies as democratic models by underscoring the continued commitment of its member states to democracy, the rule of law, and free and open markets”.

And then there is this:

The democracies of North America, Europe, and Asia must be revitalized in order to ensure that they—not the authoritarian regimes gaining confidence and establishing themselves more firmly on the global stage [by which they mean chiefly the Trump administration] – are the ones that offer workable solutions to the dilemmas of our rapidly changing world [they mean chiefly China]. Unlike at other times, many of the governments of the advanced democracies—the original architects of the international system underpinning decades of relative peace and prosperity [?] —are no longer the best safeguards of their own democratic workings, nor ardent advocates of the ability of democracies to tackle global ills collectively. The Trilateral Commission is well-poised to play a vital role in this revitalization effort, and seeks to once again become an analytical home for assessing the stresses on the advanced democracies, offering solutions for dealing with them, and catalyzing cooperation among these countries on global economic, political, and security matters.

Ah, now! Plainly to the undeceived reader’s eye, the TC has one chief purpose, and it stresses that purpose throughout the article. It is writ so large that it could easily be missed. Its reason for existence is to advance internationalism of a kind and in a manner that the UN was not designed and could not be used to achieve: the establishment of unchallengeable central global power by a cabal of the like-minded elite. One hint that the plan involves redistribution of wealth – despite the claimed support for free markets – lies in the recurring phrase “climate change”.

Examples:

Prospects for … adequately addressing climate change are slim as long as advanced democracies are compromised by internal divisions and governed by institutions that are no longer well-suited to the realities of the day.

The Commission has three groups: one for North America, one for Europe, and one for Asia (expanded … to include South Korea, Singapore, India, Indonesia, Australia, China and others)… [T]he trilateral structure is essential to catalyze cooperation to meet pressing global problems—from nuclear proliferation to climate change to pandemics to growing protectionism.

“Climate change” is a chosen problem because it seems obviously to need an international solution. “Advanced democracies” cannot deal with it because of clashes of policy and opinion  which make for changing governments (so that nationalist and populist governments can and do get elected), and their institutions (such as multiple competing parties and branches of government with separated powers) are “no longer well suited to the realities of the day”.

The UN has tried and failed to scare the nations into yielding up autonomy in the interest of saving the planet from freezing or burning or becoming a globe of salt water, but these saviors of democracy … of “democracy”, Communist style, not of the separate autonomous genuine democracies … could have better luck, they hope, in bringing off the trick without rousing suspicion of the real  motive feebly disguised in ambiguity.

Yesterday (November 28, 2019), Douglas Carswell ex-MP delivered – very engagingly – an invigorating lecture in London titled Cheer Up! Why The World is Getting Better. 

It was the second Jillian Becker Annual Lecture under the auspices of The Freedom Association. (The first was given in 2018 by the writer Theodore Dalrymple.)

Jillian Becker is editor-in-chief of this website, and a long standing member of the council of the Freedom Association.

The annual lecture must always be about individual liberty or the importance of the nation-state, or both.

Here’s the half-hour lecture:

We think he makes a good case for human life having improved in quality not just over the millennia, which is obvious, but over a couple of centuries, and acceleratingly over the last few decades. He attributes the improvement largely to the spread of liberty, and the resultant prosperity and innovation, with which we heartily agree.

He argues that optimism is a force for improvement in itself; that with it, our lives will go on getting better. He mentions some of the grave threats to our liberty – and so to prosperity and innovation – that confront us now: “terror attacks, wars in the Middle East, migration crises …”. He moves on, however, without explaining why he does not consider at least some of them – notably for instance the migration of peoples who do not value individual freedom into the Western world, threatening to change the demographic composition of many countries permanently – strong impediments to the advance of liberty.

If you listen to the lecture, please tell us if you agree with him, and if so – wholly or partly? If only partly, with what in particular do you disagree?

On this as on every Thanksgiving Day

we thank

all our readers for their interest in what we have to say about the passing scene and the eternal questions

all our commenters

and especially our contributing commenters:

Liz, your invariably insightful and cogent comments sustain and encourage us. We could not keep going without you.

Jeanne and Chauncey, we depend on what we learn from you about America and Britain respectively.

Cogito, Jason P, Animal, Zerothruster, we know how lucky we are to have your attention.

Azgael, though we may not always enjoy your rigorous criticism, we appreciate your intention to correct us.

… and get indoctrinated with Leftist ideology.

The ways the Left thinks up to indoctrinate are many and devious.

And the employees of the people, civil servants, open their minds to the indoctrinators and let them pour in the poison.

The poison can be flavored with mysticism.

Here’s an account of how tax-payers are involuntarily funding civil servants’ mystic therapy supplied by a George Soros “activist”.

The federal government hosted a “Mindfulness & Resiliency Summit” in August [2019] where 450 employees from the IRS and other agencies spent two days receiving new-age wisdom, learning to meditate …

Participants sat through an hour of talks before taking a half-hour “stretch and self-care break”. Next, they heard a 90-minute talk from Gretchen Rohr, an activist working for George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, who presented [a talk] about “restorative justice” and overcoming “trauma” …

What does she mean by “restorative justice”? Reparations? Yes. What else could it mean? 

The two-day summit took up a combined 7,200 hours of federal employees’ time. …

Time for which tax-payers pay.

The second day was dominated by presentations from Michelle Reugebrink, who works full-time as the [federal] Forest Service’s “Mindfulness & Resiliency Program Manager with the Work Environment & Performance Office”, at a $102,000 salary, pay records show. …

In a profile on the Forest Service’s website, Reugebrink said:

I teach mindfulness and compassion practices that enable all of us to not just survive but also grow from exposure to stress. Mindfulness and compassion practices are core skills that foster high performance and promote diversity and inclusion. I do a lot of coaching and I am also passionate about bringing restorative justice practices to our work environment.

“Diversity and inclusion” is a fetish of the Left. It means employing and rewarding people according to quotas of their race and [self-designated] “gender” category.

… At another conference appearance, Reugebrink also revealed the government held a meditation conference at a luxury retreat in California where the “whole government” was planning on coming …

We started the Mindfulness Compassion Inclusivity Summit …  It was beautiful … we held it in January [2019], and we had big plans for the whole government, like, to come …

What? The whole of each of the three branches of government? Or just all civil servants? How many would that be? About 2 million. No, she could only mean as many as would fit into a “retreat in California”. She’s not very good at saying what she means – fortunately, perhaps.

Or did she really hope to have President Trump, Mike Pence, William Barr, Mike Pompeo sit and listen to her teaching them about “mindfulness and reparations”, “social justice, diversity and inclusion”?

 … and then we got furloughed. So I did it on my own.

They “got furloughed” because “it occurred during the longest government shutdown in history—a stalemate over federal funding in early 2019”.

So, undaunted, Ms. Reugebrink “did it on her own”. She doesn’t say who or how many attended. A video exists of a “United States Forest Service Summit” held in a “luxury retreat in the redwoods of Scotts Valley,” California, that took place Jan. 15 to 17, 2019.

Accommodation at the retreat costs $645 per night.

Trump voters, you paid for that.

Asked by Soren Gordhamer [“founder and host of Wisdom 2.0, and the author of Wisdom 2.0, one of the first books to explore living with mindfulness and wisdom”] who authorized these “meditation conferences”, Ms. Reugebrink replied, “The civil rights director and deputy, [and] the chief of the forest service, [and] I went and talked with Congressman Tim Ryan.”

She said she offers “monthly guided meditations and mindfulness webinars on a different theme”.

Last month is happiness, this month is self-compassion.

On her YouTube channel, she teaches about “20 minute sitting”, in which she invites federal workers and others to simply sit and stare blankly ahead for 20 minutes. They should not become “attached” to any thoughts, and concentrate on their breathing instead, she said.

She advises sitting “in a comfortable place”, as she sits on a rock.

A heated altercation is proceeding between two groups of American conservatives. Each group is claiming to be the true conservatives.

The one group calls itself “Alt-Right ” and “America Firsters”. All its members are white and proudly white-supremacist, convinced that the white race is superior to all others. They are also called “groypers”. What they want to conserve, they say, are what they consider to be the traditional cultural norms of the white race, laying particular stress on the Christian religion and heterosexual marriage. Their motto is “Faith, Family, Community”. They are fiercely – and at the same time facetiously – aggressive in word and deed.

The other, much bigger group in America, are the conservatives who (generally, but not invariably and not uncritically) vote Republican; are Christian, but want a separation of church and state; are nationalists and patriots, but not racists; are tolerant of homosexual marriage; and who loyally uphold the Constitution of the United States.

These two rival versions of conservatism are to be found in an article and a speech from which we select the most telling passages:

Matthew Boose defends the “Alt-Right” and attacks what he calls “Conservatism, Inc.” in an article at American Greatness. He refers to the “civil war” between representative of the two sides, and sums up the arguments as he understands them:

In the wake of the Donald Trump moment, conservatism is up for grabs: white identitarians, “Catholic integralists,” paleocons, and American nationalists all sense an opportunity for greater representation. But the bigger story is that the globalist, anti-nationalist, progressive “conservatism” that came before Trump isn’t yet quite dead, and it’s fighting for survival.

The degree to which this is true has become apparent over the past few weeks as a civil war within campus conservatism has raged on between Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA and paleoconservative activists who follow the nationalist podcaster Nicholas Fuentes.

Nicholas Fuentes is a Holocaust-denying anti-Semite.

As Kirk and his allies see it, the Fuentes fans, who call themselves “groypers,” have been trying to “hijack” campus conservatism by injecting “white nationalism” into the debate. But this so-called sabotage has been accomplished with extraordinary simplicity. The groypers have been showing up to Kirk’s events to air their grievances about the failures of mainstream conservatism and its wholesale embrace of the LGBT+ agenda and mass migration.

Rather than talk to these activists in good faith, though, the gatekeepers have decided their ideas are not worth debating. They have instead pursued a campaign of denigration and suppression. Leaving aside personalities, they have dismissed candid, important questions about demographics and the liberalization of the conservative movement as “bigoted” and “racist.” …

Kirk acknowledges that the demographic shifts … are real and that leftists are celebrating those changes. But Kirk ends up backing the leftist premise that such demographic shifts are inevitable and that the Republican Party’s only hope is to embrace this growing and diverse reality.

Kirk rejects without explanation putting a moratorium on immigration. Rather than restrict immigration to reverse the trend, Kirk [says that] … Republicans must reject “anti-immigrant” stances and instead do more to reach minority demographics. Only then can the GOP remain viable in a majority-minority future.

The premise is based on an obvious double-standard, one which is becoming more and more difficult to simply ignore. … If we’re talking about the interests of “natural Republicans” from El Salvador and “MAGA drag queens,” then Kirk and Conservatism, Inc. have no issue with appealing to demographics. But when it comes to talking about the interests of white Christians it’s a different story altogether. That’s “racist”. …

The leaders of the conservative movement must be able to answer these questions: why are white Christians, and only white Christians, prohibited from acting in their rational self-interest? Why must Republicans, given the prospect of a dim future in which it can only survive by pandering to the Left, respond by pandering to the Left now, just to win over people who hate and want to persecute them anyway?

In the end, this “strategy” is nothing more than a capitulation to the Left, the same surrender that has laid the country, and the party, so low for decades. By all means, the Republican Party must never waver in its support of the traditional family, of life, and of the Constitution. But it’s also not clear how exactly, or why, appealing to minority groups, and only minority groups, is the best way to do that.

It is disingenuous, not to say illogical, to say that the Republican Party must, for some unexplained reason, not think in terms of demographics when it comes to its most reliable voters—and join the Left in attacking any of those voters who may feel besieged by our liberal monoculture—and instead seek to recruit and celebrate other, reliably liberal groups, such as gays and Latino immigrants. With the exception of evangelicals and Cubans, Latino voters as a group are reliably Democrat, and they have been for decades. They support gun control, the welfare state, and even gay marriage by some margins. Their mythic social conservatism is not as solid as some Republicans would like to think. What does Conservatism, Inc. imagine it can do to change that in short order?

While the TPUSA controversy has focused on demographics, another core grievance of the “groypers” is the conservative movement’s inability to conserve the morals and traditions that made America great, especially traditional marriage. The conscious embrace of leftist identity politics, particularly LGBT rights, by Kirk and other Conservatism, Inc. figures justifies the impression that this is by unconscious design, if not conscious choice.

They pander to every identity group under the sun while at the same time feeling very free to attack white Americans who are troubled by the prospect of becoming a minority in their own country. Such people are denounced as “racists” just for feeling that way. It’s hard to see what’s conservative about this, or how it will help Republicans win elections in a deeply uncertain future.

It is no accident that some liberals have encouraged their Republican adversaries to embrace the “diversify” strategy Kirk advocates, as it advances the Left’s own goals and commitments. The gatekeepers in Conservatism, Inc. embrace the same ideas, the same methods, and even the same rhetoric as the Left to advance a globalist, anti-nationalist agenda. Their smears of outspoken America Firsters are indistinguishable from the Left’s familiar drive-by attacks on even the most unobjectionable conservatives.

The “conservatism” of groups like TPUSA isn’t conserving anything—nothing, that is, but liberalism itself. It does not offer young people anything they cannot already find in the ethos of consumerism and vacuous personal “liberation” so pervasive in our liberal culture and advanced relentlessly by the globalist Left.

For conservatives to embrace gay marriage is not an intuitive position by any means, but Kirk and his boosters have done exactly that, denouncing those with questions about this development as “homophobes”. Especially at a time when leftists scheme in the open about taxing churches that don’t recognize gay marriage, it’s hardly a logical position for a conservative to take.

The “conservatism” of Conservatism, Inc. isn’t conservatism, but a species of libertarianism. Like many in the libertarian camp, Kirk takes the view that matters of marriage and morals should be left to private contracts between individuals and what they do in the so-called privacy of their own lives; never mind that the Left has already invaded the public square and has made persecuting Christians and conservatives a moral mission. To the libertarians of Conservatism, Inc., moral authority appears not to rest with a higher power, but is arrogated instead to individuals. All that matters is the “free market” and securing the freedom to legitimize a deeper and deeper backslide into barbarism.

I’m not going to question Kirk’s faith, but the morality he advocates has more in common with the Left than with Christian principles. In an interview … Kirk described himself as a “conservatarian” and expresses the view that there is no contradiction between the libertarian non-aggression principle and his religious views: “you should be able to make your choices as you see fit, as long as you’re not harming someone else.”

This is the classic formulation of liberalism: the idea that society should be arranged to make people as free as possible to pursue their own adventures. But there is nothing obviously conservative about this mentality. By following it, Kirk has embraced a very recent cultural shift that repudiates centuries upon centuries of tradition on marriage and the family.

This libertarian ethos of personal liberation justifies the damage done to the social fabric by leftism, while inviting further degeneration down the road. It has no cohesive social vision beyond securing the “blessings of liberty” to invite drag queens into libraries to read stories to schoolchildren. It has neither the desire nor the conviction to resist America’s free-fall into social anomie and moral decay, and it has no plan for repairing the destruction of the past decades of experimentation. America is imagined not even to be a concrete place at all, but rather a collation of hoary abstractions coined by the Founding Fathers, who surely fought and died so that future generations of Americans would embrace state-sanctioned gender reassignment surgery for 7-year-olds.

Coupled with this moral indifference is a worship of the “free market” and its miraculous power to distribute goods, resources, and labor as efficiently as possible. It’s not by mistake that conservatives of Kirk’s stripe talk more about markets than morals. If all that matters is the free market and “doing whatever you want,” then it’s hard to justify restricting immigration or opposing gay marriage to preserve American jobs, values, and traditions.

These “conservatives” understand that the common good is most helped by inviting millions of foreign laborers to boost the GDP, that the Gospel preaches acceptance of whatever sexually permissive fashions the Left dreamed up yesterday, that America is just an idea in which all lifestyles, peoples, and cultures except those which define the historic American nation must be celebrated. …

Conservatism, Inc. can offer no assurances that Americans may expect to raise their children in a decent, moral society that cares about family, community, and faith. It does not seek to build a world where Americans may live free and prosperous lives without bearing false witness to the same idols that the Left, and the controlled opposition of Conservatism, Inc., worship. Americans are provided not the least guarantees of job security, or that America will even speak their native language in thirty years time. Neither are they provided the reprieve of knowing that they will be able to worship and raise their families in the faith of their upbringing and their ancestors without incurring ruinous financial and social consequences.

Kirk acknowledges that conservatives are besieged by a “far-left mainstream culture leading an assault on American values,” but whether he realizes it or not, Kirk and his defenders are part of enabling that mainstream. The entirety of Conservatism, Inc. is working towards the same ends as the progressive, globalist left. The irony is that they do this while styling themselves the “real conservatives” and attacking anyone with serious questions about the movement’s priorities.

Rather than answer challenging questions about the future of conservatism, the Beltway conservatives have responded with emotive attacks, threats of censorship and doxxing, and outright smears. Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) has warned that questioners who venture outside the gentle sandbox of Heritage Foundation good-think will regret showing their faces on camera. Ben Shapiro dedicated a 45-minute speech to obliquely attacking the groypers, but refused to engage with them directly. Coming from the guy who coined “facts don’t care about your feelings,” that’s just rich.

Conservatism, Inc. isn’t a movement but a corporate enterprise. Its self-styled “dissent” is all part of a shallow brand of rebellion that begins and ends with “triggering” blue-haired gender studies majors. Beyond these shallow displays of edginess, Conservatism, Inc. promotes the same agenda of social liberalism and open borders as the Left. They wear a mask of intellectualism and “free thought,” but the moment anyone questions the dogma, the gatekeepers fall back on exactly the kind of emotive attacks that they project onto the “triggered” Left.

Kirk says that the Right must resist “excommunicating” those with different opinions on important issues, but that is exactly what Kirk and his allies are trying to do to the America Firsters. He complains of being subjected to an ideological “purity test” by the America First crowd while simultaneously, and arbitrarily labeling them “fake conservatives,” “white nationalists” and “anti-Semites.” This is nonsense.

What Kirk calls a fake purity test is conservatives who are concerned about the direction of the Trump movement making sure that it actually remains committed to its priorities. Their concerns are legitimate. It doesn’t matter when and whether Kirk became a Trump supporter if his ideas don’t align with the agenda that propelled Trump to office.

The truth is that the groypers, however weird the “groyper” brand might be, are closer to the mainstream of how the American Right actually feels than the Beltway types who wear the conservative label while behaving exactly like leftists. They should be applauded for challenging Conservatism, Inc. and its bankrupt ideology. Their “trolling” is more effective activism than the totality of the establishment’s pathetic kowtowing to the gods of Diversity and Progress. …

Why don’t establishment conservatives like Kirk, who have also been smeared by the Left, ally with the conservative “trolls” who actually want to conserve something instead of pandering to the people who hate them? That they do not raises  two possibilities: that they are not sincere, or that they are sincere liberals.

Whatever they are, it isn’t “conservative”.

Ours is a conservative establishment that does nothing, and has done nothing, to conserve the traditions that made America great. This fact cries out for an accounting, and it is becoming impossible to ignore. If Conservatism, Inc. refuses to engage candidly with serious, legitimate questions about its priorities, then it deserves to be called out for its hypocrisy and emptiness.

It is an intensely emotional argument. It shows real fear that America is undergoing a demographic transformation that will make the whites a minority.

Ben Shapiro (who was not at first a supporter of President Trump, but seems to be now) defended the more common views of American conservatives and attacked the ‘”Alt-Right” in a speech he made at Stanford University (November 7, 2019):

I want to talk about the dangerous game being played by two particular nasty groups who feed off one another: I am speaking about the radical Left and the Alt-Right. …

The radical Left and the Alt-Right need each other. And they’re playing a game, in which the radical Left seeks to delegitimize anyone who isn’t radically Left by lumping them in with the despicable Alt-Right — and in which the Alt-Right seeks to make common cause with anyone “cancelled” by the radical Left, specifically with the supporters of President Trump who have been maligned falsely as evil by the radical Left, in order to artificially boost their numbers.

These two goals are mutually reinforcing. Here’s how this garbage works… Let’s say, for example, that you believe that ‘white civilization’ — a nonsensical term, since civilization is not defined by color but by history, culture, and philosophy — is under attack from multiracial hordes. Let’s say that you’re antipathetic toward Jews and enraged by the liberties guaranteed and protected by the Constitution of the United States. Let’s say you spend your days ranting about how American conservatives and traditional classical liberals — the sole protective force against the radical Left — haven’t “conserved” anything. You say America is not a propositional or creedal nation, even though the nation’s founding literally begins with the words, ‘We hold these truths to be self- evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights… Let’s say you cite Christianity as the basis of your values, but you’re more likely to quote Nietzsche than Christ. …

First, you declare your allegiance to President Trump, and declare that you aren’t really Alt-Right, even though you obviously are. You show up to lectures wearing a MAGA hat in order to get the media to cover it – and in order to demonstrate that you’re truly a representative of the 63 million Americans who voted for Trump. You call yourself “America First”, hijacking Trump’s slogan, but twisting it to mean “white Americans first”.  The media will eat it up, because the media love nothing better than suggesting that Trump is a white supremacist, despite the fact that he has repeatedly condemned white supremacism. …

You do so by simply lying about mainstream conservatives. You suggest that mainstream conservatives are insufficiently committed to social conservatism. You do this by asking questions like, “How does anal sex help us win the culture war?” [a reference to an Alt-Right heckler’s question at a TPUSA event]. “The purpose is to simultaneously pose as edgy and also preserve your ability to say you were just joking. …

What helps America win the culture war is freedom: freedom against a government encroaching on your activities that don’t harm anyone else. … As Edmund Burke put it, “Whatever each man can separately do, without trespassing upon others, he has a right to do for himself.” You know what else helps win the culture war? Engaging with your community, involving yourself in the social fabric. Not creating Pepe memes online and then jabbering about anal sex.

In fact, there’s great irony in watching alt-righters claim that they should use the commanding heights of government to cram down their viewpoints on others – while complaining that the Left uses the commanding heights of government to cram down their viewpoint on others. You can’t really whine about other people shutting down your viewpoint and activity that harms no one else while planning to shut down everybody else’s viewpoints.

The Left everywhere in the Western world likes to condemn all conservatives as “far-Right white-supremacists, Nazis, fascists, racists, sexists, homophobes, xenophobes”. Shapiro stressed how the Left does this in America:

[The Left] will label anyone on the right Alt-Right, even if we say vocally and in no uncertain terms that the Alt-Right is pure, unbridled, vile garbage — even if members of the Alt-Right target those on the mainstream right. Even if Donald Trump condemns the worldview. …

So the Boston Globe will call my website, The Daily Wire, an “Alt-Right outpost” (we forced them to recant); the Economist will call me “the Alt-Right sage without the rage” (we’ll force them to recant). Students at Boston University are festooning my posters with a Hitler mustache. Students at this university will mob those trying to put up posters for this lecture …

The media will suggest that Trump is in league with the Alt-Right, even at this late date – they’ll neglect all Trump has done to purge his administration to those who were remotely friendly with the Alt-Right  and his forcible disavowal of white supremacism. They’ll simply overlook that Trump isn’t a white supremacist, and declare that the MAGA hat is equivalent to a Nazi swastika – and they’ll say that, by extension, anyone who wears a MAGA hat or votes for Trump is a secret Brownshirt.

[But] if someone believes that all men are created equal, … that every American should have equality before the law, in free market capitalism, in small government, in equal opportunity for all people of all races, that person is not on the Alt-Right. In fact, they despise the Alt-Right, and the Alt-Right despises them. But people on the Left know this, they just prefer the lie. Why? Because their goal is to delegitimize the entire Right.

“The only difference between the radical Left and the Alt-Right,” he pointed out, “is they reverse the victim hierarchy.”

Despite Boose’s protests, it is obvious that the “groypers”, the “America Firsters”, are homophobic, anti-Semitic, white-supremacist racists.

We are none of those things.

We have a lot in common with the conservatives who are defended by Shapiro – and who are not “globalist”, “anti-nationalist”, or “progressive”. But we do not share all their principles, values and views. We quote neither Nietzsche nor Christ to support our opinion.

So why do we call ourselves conservatives? What is it that we think needs to be conserved?

Christopher Roach, writing in the same issue of American Greatness Conservatism to defend Nicholas Fientes and Matthew Boose’s notion of conservatism, says, “Conservatism is not a checklist of particular positions, an ‘established dogma’ or set of ‘doctrine’. It is a disposition, a love of what already is, and is in danger of being lost.”

Certainly it is not a set of doctrines. But it is a set of values.

Our motto, inscribed on our Facebook page, declares those values to be “Freedom, Justice, Reason”.  We were endowed with them by the Enlightenment. They are interdependent, and essential to our civilization. They need to be conserved if our civilization is to survive.

Freedom is our highest value. We want personal freedom. All our other wants flow from that one; wants of systems, policies and institutions. (This, as Matthew Boose observes, is libertarian – but we share little else with Libertarians.)

Freedom needs the protection of the rule of law, a system of impartial justice which treats all sane adults equally, and which the nation state – and only the nation state – can administer. (Something which libertarians we have read and listened to seem not to be convinced of.)

As we are so fortunate as to live in such a nation state, we are patriotic nationalists. We are uninterested in the race, color, ethnic background of our fellow patriotic nationalists.

We want a strong military to defend us from foreign invasion (but not to force outcomes in other countries).

We want our government to be no more powerful than it needs to be to do its essential job of protecting freedom; never to become so big and strong as to be our master. (It is here that we are furthest from the Left.)

Capitalism is essential to prosperity, and prosperity sustains freedom. The free market is inseparable from a free society. The Alt-Right’s contempt for business, trade and profit is as stupid as it is hypocritical, arising from the absurd value placed on poverty by Christianity (and endorsed by socialism).

We part company with the majority of American conservatives over the issue of “faith”. We accept no “truths” that cannot survive critical examination in the bright light of reason.

Nothing else is essential to our conservatism.

We do, however, have preferences which we do not expect all atheist conservatives to share.

We are against the killing of people except as condign punishment for those who kill, so we are against the killing of unborn living children unless for compelling reasons. We are unconcerned about individual adults’ sexual choices as long as they do not involve the exploitation or corruption of children, although we continue to understand the meaning of “marriage” to be a solemn (not “sacred”) contract between a man and a woman primarily (not imperatively) for the begetting of children.

Where do we stand on immigration, the future demographic composition of the United States? That seems to be the biggest issue in the argument between the Alt-Right and the mainstream conservatives.

Matthew Boose writes:

The elephant in the room is demographics. Not even progressives any longer pretend that mass migration won’t, at the rate we’re going, transform America into a majority-minority nation within our lifetimes. The implications for the nation and the Republican Party because of this shift are profound, and any conservative movement that is not willing to engage with it seriously cannot be taken seriously.

The Alt-Right wants America to be a nation of European-descended, heterosexual, English-speaking, Christian whites.

Do we agree with them?

To the only official language being English, yes. To the bearing and raising of children by husband and wife as a general custom, yes.

To worshiping Jesus Christ, no.

And we are not against immigration. While we see the influx of large numbers of people from less civilized countries, bringing customs and systems of law which we abominate, to be bad for the economy and the quality of life, we do want immigrants bringing inventiveness, expertise, wealth, ability, talent to enrich the nation.

Keeping the country white? Why? European culture, above all Anglophone culture, owes its greatness partly to being eclectic, taking what it likes from other cultures.

We took the zero from brown-skinned India. We took our numerals from India too (though they are wrongly called Arabic).

Did not your Christian god come from the Jews? More beneficially in our view, mobile phones did too.

Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) has written a letter to House Republicans in which he makes it plain that President Trump has a principled and very strong hatred of corruption.

Here’s an extract from the letter (which needs to be read in full):

[President Trump] expressed strong reservations about supporting Ukraine. He made it crystal clear that he viewed Ukraine as a thoroughly corrupt country both generally and, specifically, regarding rumored meddling in the 2016 [American] election. …

I acknowledged that he was correct regarding endemic corruption. I said that we weren’t asking him to support oligarchs and politicians but to support the Ukrainian people who had given [the newly elected president] Zelensky a strong mandate to fight corruption. …

It was obvious that his [President Trump’s] viewpoint and reservations were strongly held, and that we would have a significant sales job ahead of us getting him to change his mind. I specifically asked him to keep his viewpoint and reservations private and not to express them publicly until he had a chance to meet Zelensky. He agreed not to, but he also added that he wanted Zelensky to know exactly how he felt about the corruption in Ukraine prior to any future meeting. …

I asked him about whether there was some kind of arrangement where Ukraine would take some action and the hold [on military aid] would be lifted. Without hesitation, President Trump immediately denied such an arrangement existed. … [He said] “No way. I would never do that. Who told you that?” I have accurately characterized his reaction as adamant, vehement and angry.

In the light of that, the irony is painful that President Trump is being corruptly accused by corrupt Democrats of committing crimes of corruption – extortion, bribery, treason – for none of which they have evidence; and could not have, since it does not exist.  

As usual Democrats falsely and shamelessly accuse a Republican of committing the very crimes they themselves are guilty of. They know President Trump did not commit them. 

However, by his own admission, Obama’s Vice-President Joe Biden did commit crimes of corruption – most notably in his dealings with Ukraine: as for instance when he bribed the Ukrainian government, with US tax payers’ money, to fire a Ukrainian prosecutor. The official was investigating the corruption of the gas firm Burisma, from which Biden’s son received  a colossal “salary” – for being the American Vice-President’s son.

Will Joe Biden ever be brought to trial in a properly constituted court of law? Or is the justice system of the United States now so corrupted by the Democrats that only the innocent are punished? 

 

Update: The head of the Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma Holdings, Nikolai Zlochevsky, was indicted yesterday (Wednesday, 20 November, 2019) by the Ukrainian Prosecutor General.

A lie is a weak little thing pitted against boundless inexorable Reality.

Chief Inquisitor Adam Schiff has said he does not know who “the whistleblower” is in whose alleged (unpublished) report to him – of a phone call by President Trump to the president of Ukraine – he claims there is proof that President Trump committed an impeachable crime.

What crime might that be? Asking for something in return for aid – for a “quid pro quo” – perhaps? [Can that be called a crime? Isn’t diplomacy all about quid pro quo?] Or how about bribery? Or even treason perhaps?

Schiff would have it known that it was a surprise to him to receive the report. He continued to disclaim any knowledge of who had authored it. He learnt, however, by some untold means, that the man (whom he called “the whistleblower”) had not actually heard the phone call he was reporting so couldn’t vouch for its accuracy. In which case, since the report wasn’t all that Schiff wished it to be, he  could and did compose his own version, one in which President Trump demands “reciprocity” and asks  the government of Ukraine to “dig up dirt” [on his political enemies, is implied].

Strangely, he read his version of the phone call to the House Intelligence Committee – and the media – one day after President Trump released the true transcript of it. 

Schiff admitted that his version was a “parody”. But driven on by his intense irrational hatred of the President, he insisted there were still solid grounds for impeachment even with only the real transcript to go on – plus the testimony of many witnesses he would call. Among them, he said, would be “the whistleblower”. There was no doubt, he said over and over again in one way or another, that “the whistleblower” would have to be heard from in person.

So an impeachment inquiry was launched by the House Intelligence Committee chaired by Adam Schiff.

Then Schiff changed his mind about calling “the whistleblower”. Not only would he not be called to testify, his identity – which Schiff went on claiming he did not know – was to remain strictly hidden. He was not even to be mentioned. The (false) excuse given was that it was against the law for the name of a whistleblower to be revealed.

One of the witnesses on whose testimony Schiff built his hopes of framing the President of the United States, was Ukrainian-born Lt.-Col. Alexander Vindman, one of only three people who had actually been there when the phone call was made and had heard what was said.

Vindman was Schiff’s lucky find. He was most likely Schiff’s chief witness. And he was artfully played: not called the first day of the inquiry but only the second day, and then not on his own but in company with one of the other two who had been present when the phone call was made, an adviser to Vice President Pence whose testimony was of no help whatsoever to Schiff.  

Vindman came to the hearing in his full dress military uniform. It declared his loyalty to America. In his testimony he stressed how honest, how honorable, how obedient to the rules he was.

Virtuous fellow that he is, he was so disturbed by what the President had said in that phone call that he made his concern know to a few other people – though any suggestion that he was a leaker, he said, was “preposterous”.

He too had consistently maintained that he did not know who “the whistleblower” was.

He played his part faultlessly, and all went as Adam Schiff wanted it to go.

Until this happened: 

We refer especially to what is said between the marks of 4.00 and 5.36 minutes.

The mention of an intelligence officer, though he is not named, scares Adam Schiff into interrupting with a stern order that “the whistleblower” must not be “outed”. Rep. Jim Jordan, masterfully disingenuous, expresses surprise at that. Why bring up “the whistleblower”, he asks. Both Schiff and Vindman, he reminds them, had said they didn’t know who he was. (And he slips in – as it were in parenthesis – that no one believes Adam Schiff doesn’t know who “the whistleblower” is.)

Vindman is saved from having to explain his silence about the secret name by his lawyer’s instruction not to utter the name of anyone in the intelligence services. It is Adam Schiff who gives away his own secret – that that very intelligence officer mentioned by Vindman is “the whistleblower”.

Schiff shows signs of confusion when Jim Jordan wakes him up to the realization that his lie has been exposed.

So now we are certain that Schiff does know who “the whistleblower” is, and why he is trying to lock him away out of sight.

The story must be something close to this:

Vindman leaked his version of the phone call to Schiff (directly or indirectly). Schiff, reading what he liked into it, wanted to treat it as a whistleblower’s report. Vindman on no account would allow himself to be known as either a leaker or a whistleblower. Someone else must be found to play the whistleblower role. Vindman would admit that he had imparted the information, but  only to people with “proper clearance” who had a “need to know”. So the person who would play the part of the whistleblower must be someone with “proper clearance”. Who better than an intelligence officer? Such a man was known to Schiff. And to Joe Biden. He was a Democrat who had been put to use few times before and would do nicely now. Schiff claimed that he would come forward with his testimony.

But when the impeachment inquiry actually began, he could not be called – because in fact he knows nothing. He is not a whistleblower; he is a plant, a flunkey. He would agree to have his name revealed to Democratic leaders  – Nancy Pelosi for instance – who would insist on knowing it. But his identity must be kept from common knowledge.

Adam Schiff doesn’t seem to think his plans through very well. He didn’t anticipate that Republicans would demand to question the so-called whistleblower in an inquiry. To prevent that he ruled that the Republicans would not be permitted to call any witnesses, and that “the whistleblower” was not to be mentioned during the hearings. Now he seems not to be reckoning with the probability that if President Trump is impeached by the House and sent to trial by the Senate, the man would be called to testify and his identity would have to be revealed.

And what if under cross-examination he were to tell the truth?

That possibility really could put his career, and even his life, in danger. Not from his political enemies who already know his name, but from his political friends and masters who do not want it to come out that his enemies have nothing to fear from him.