To a conservative who lived in a Western country through the decades of the Cold War, the current fashion for Socialism in America is likely to be shocking and terrifying. To those who lived under the iron heel of Soviet Socialism in Eastern Europe, or any other Marxist regime, it must be many times worse.

(Throughout this article, “Socialism” and “Communism” are used interchangeably – as was customary in the USSR.)

Some dangerously under-informed American women entering the political arena seem really to think that it is a pretty thing, Socialism.

Here’s one of them – Democrat Cynthia Nixon, who fortunately lost her challenge to the Democrat Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo by a difference of 30% of the votes – smilingly, in all the self-deceiving self-confidence of ignorance, urging Socialism on New York voters:

And here’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who won the Democratic primary in New York’s 14th congressional district – demonstrating how innocent she is of Economics:

Another fan of Socialism, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, wants to be the Democratic nominee for the presidency in 2020.

Lloyd Billingsley writes at Front Page on Cory Booker’s claim to be Spartacus: a hero of resistance to ancient Roman tyranny re-canonized by Communists in the 1950s. Booker founded his claim on the extreme daring he showed in rising against the Left-alleged tyranny of President Trump – by making public certain documents, in relation to the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, that were in fact already public.

As Billingsley says, “Booker’s gambit was something of a bust.”

He goes on to tell us how one Communist, the author of the novel Sparticus, lost his faith.

The movie Booker cited is based on the 1951 novel Spartacus by Howard Fast, a Communist pisseur d’encre whom Time magazine had dubbed “Big Brother’s U.S. pen pal.” In 1953, Fast won the Stalin Peace Prize, the only American to win the award other than Paul Robeson, a black American Communist who spent his life defending all-white Soviet dictatorships.

Stalin died in 1953 and three years later, Soviet boss Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s crimes and mass atrocities to the Soviet Communist Party’s 20th Congress. The revelation devastated many American Communists and motivated Howard Fast to write The Naked God: The Writer and the Communist Party, released in 1957.

Khrushchev’s revelations, Fast wrote, “itemizes a record of barbarism and paranoiac bloodlust that will be a lasting and shameful memory to civilized man”.  Communism is not social science but “naked terror, awful brutality and frightening ignorance“.  Fast denounced “Stalin and the collection of hangmen and murderers around him” and charged that the Communist Party is “based on pseudo-religious cant, cemented with neurotic fear and parading ritualistic magic as a substitute for reason”.  And the Spartacus scribe wasn’t done.

The only people who resisted the revelation of Stalin’s crimes, Fast wrote, were “the mental revolutionaries, the parlor pinks, the living-room warriors, the mink coated allies of the working class”. These were “Sick people who had seen no death [other] than a painted corpse in a funeral parlor, no other violence than an auto crash – these people lusted for an Armageddon their mad dreams had promised them.” …

The Spartacus screenwriter was Dalton Trumbo, who joined the Communist Party during the Stalin-Hitler Pact, when many others left, and remained in the Party after the Khrushchev revelations. Trumbo hated Fast’s Naked God but he wasn’t going to pass up a big payday. And since Trumbo had been one of the famed Hollywood Ten, Spartacus remains a classic on the big screen of the left, which duly consigned The Naked God to the forbidden list.

While some fled the Communist Party after 1956 many others remained and the Soviets continued to run candidates in American elections. In 1976 their candidate for president was Gus Hall, an old-line Stalinist, with Jarvis Tyner for vice president. College student John Brennan voted for Gus Hall and incredibly enough, only four years later in 1980 Brennan gained employment at the CIA, which he headed under POTUS 44.

One of those Americans who remained faithful to Communism and the Soviet Union was Angela Davis. In 1979 Davis won the Lenin Peace Prize, her primary for the Communist ticket in 1980, with Davis for vice president under Hall. The same duo lost to Reagan and Bush in 1984, and thereafter the Communist Party USA declined to run candidates and urged their supporters to vote for the Democratic Party.

In 1988, American Bernie Sanders spent his honeymoon in the Soviet Union, where the gulags were still functioning and Soviet bosses torturing political prisoners in psychiatric hospitals. If Hillary Clinton had not rigged the primaries, Sanders would have been the Democrats’ candidate in 2016.

Cory Booker wants to be the candidate in 2020, and his bid for a  “Spartacus moment” suggests that he knows the Old Left back story. For their part, Democrats such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cynthia Nixon and Andrew Gillum [Florida’s Democratic Gubernatorial nominee. also advocating Socialism without perhaps fully realizing that he is], like their media supporters, show little if any familiarity with The Naked God, The God That Failed, and The Road to Serfdom.

Right. They show no familiarity whatsoever with the theory or practice of the Socialism that charms them so. If Cory Booker knows, and yet desires to impose the horror that is Socialism on his fellow Americans, he is a lot worse than they are.  

On every hand they rise crying “I am socialist!” thereby confirming ignorance of the actual record. Howard Fast, who died in 2003, knew what socialism was all about. So did Milan Kundera, who wrote, “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”.

Candidates can’t recall what they never knew in the first place.

They need to be told, but their teachers have not told them, and will not tell them: Socialism is hungry, bleak, smelly, shabby, hopeless, poor, cold, painful and very frightening.

President Trump, being supremely sane and sensible, tore up (figuratively speaking) the evil “‘deal” that Obama wormed out of the tyrants of Iran. If the unsigned agreement can be said to have achieved anything at all, it was the tentative postponement of a nuclear armed Mullahcracy of Iran for a few years. That small relief cost an enormous amount of money – more than a hundred billion of it in dollar bills – and deep national abasement in a long process of groveling by Obama’s Secretary of State John Kerry at the feet of the demonic mullahs.

Obama probably saw the tenuous thing as his grand achievement in foreign policy, a real biggy in his presidential legacy. And then, “Poof!” – Trump blew it away.

Now Kerry has been in a huddle with the mullahs again, making a delusory – no, an insane – attempt to catch the pieces of the abstract document as they scatter on the winds and stick them together again. At Obama’s request, we imagine. Obama’s sobbing request. To his sometime, long time, lackey.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, whose implementation of President Trump’s foreign policy Kerry is trying to undermine, was questioned about it:

Scott Johnson comments cogently on Kerry’s private diplomacy in an article at Front Page, in which he displays this video.

In  another Front Page article he argues against a story by April Doss in the Weekly Standard in which the author denies the Obama administration’s misuse of FISA in pursuit of its plot against Donald Trump. The misuse was made. It involved the smearing of Carter Page. Scott Johnson writes:

Under Title I of FISA … it was the burden of the government to establish probable cause that Page was engaging in espionage, terrorism, or sabotage by or on behalf of a foreign power that involved a violation of a criminal statute. (Doss stated: “Although Page had left the campaign, the FBI feared Russia was using him for its own purposes. The application states that the FBI alleged there was probable cause to believe Page was an agent of a foreign power under a specific provision of FISA that involves knowingly aiding, abetting, or knowingly conspiring to assist a foreign power with clandestine intelligence gathering activities, engage in clandestine intelligence gathering at the behest of a foreign power, or participate in sabotage or international terrorism or planning or preparation therefor.”)

Carter Page did nothing of the kind. Not for himself, not for President Trump.

But John Kerry? Is he not “engaging in sabotage on behalf of a foreign power and so violating a criminal statute”?

Is he not “aiding, abetting”, and “knowingly conspiring to assist a foreign power” which is engaged in “international terrorism”?

He surely is, and he could be prosecuted under the Logan Act. But his penalty would be only a fine of $5,000.

He could be barred from holding any future public office. According to Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment:

No person shall … hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath … as an officer of the United States … to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have … given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.

There has been a rumor that Kerry will run for the presidency in 2020, and that could stop him.

But is there any need to be concerned about Kerry conspiring with the mullahs? What can he offer them? What can he bribe them with?

And what could he persuade them to do that would change President’s Trump’s policy of no nuclear “deal” with Iran and the increase and strict enforcement of sanctions against it?

Nothing short of their abdication.

Let Kerry plot with them. Let him give them words of comfort. Let him conspire to assist them, never regretting that the administration he served gave them the means to pursue international terrorism.

He is powerless. Obama is powerless. Oh joy! Freude!

And a little touch of Schadenfreude too, why not?

As all the world knows, Muslims attacked America on September 11, 2001. They killed 2,977 people and injured more than 6,000. 

A lot of Democrats failed to understand the meaning of 9/11.

Ben Smith reported at Politico in April 2011:

The University of Ohio yesterday shared with us the crosstabs of a 2006 poll they did with Scripps Howard that’s useful in that regard.

“How likely is it that people in the federal government either assisted in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to stop the attacks because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East?” the poll asked.

A full 22.6% of Democrats said it was “very likely.” Another 28.2% called it “somewhat likely.”

That is: More than half of Democrats, according to a neutral survey, said they believed Bush was complicit in the 9/11 terror attacks.

Democrats still do fail to understand 9/11. In July this year (2018), Nancy Pelosi, the erstwhile Democratic Speaker of the House, called it “an incident”.

President Trump understands it.

Bruce Bawer wrote at Front Page on 9/11 this year:

On September 11, 2001, New York – along with Washington, D.C. – was struck by mass death … . It shook the world. Mainstream European commentators attributed the terrorist attacks to legitimate Muslim grievances against America, and breezily dismissed suggestions that Europe might soon be struck as well.

Sweeping aside Osama bin Laden’s claims, President Bush asserted that the attacks had nothing to do with Islam, which he called a “religion of peace”.He then sent armed forces to “liberate” Afghanistan and Iraq, on the premise that the people of those countries, if allowed to vote in democratic elections, would choose a democratic path.

It all turned out to be spectacularly wrong. The European savants were shown up by the horrific attacks on Madrid, Beslan, London, and elsewhere. Their perpetrators put the lie to the “religion of peace” rhetoric, repeatedly announcing that they were committing jihad, a core Islamic concept. …

In Western Europe, this recklessness had an impact well beyond terrorism. Sharia enclaves. Violent crime. A financial burden that has forced welfare states to cut back on education, health care, elder care. While other immigrant groups integrated into European host cultures, Muslims demanded – with increasing success – that those cultures adapt to Islam. …

Bush had massaged the Muslim world with insipid rhetoric about our shared heritage as “people of faith”; Obama had spun outrageous fantasies about Islam, transforming, in his famous 2009 Cairo speech, fourteen centuries of primitive brutality into a glittering parade of moral, cultural, intellectual, and spiritual triumphs. …

Finally, in Donald Trump, America has a president, and the Free World has a top dog, who gets it.

Yes, Trump could go further, in both words and actions, on Islam. But he’s already gone light years beyond his predecessors. He’s certainly gone far enough to outrage bien pensant types everywhere. And he’s gone far enough so that Americans who get it know beyond question that he gets it – and that he’s on their side. And they’re behind him.

As his rock-star reception in Warsaw last year reflected, most Eastern Europeans – who, unlike the editorial board of the New York Times, recognize a champion of freedom and a totalitarian ideology when they see them – are behind him, too, and are giving the finger to EU leaders who demand that they let in a Trojan horse.

Meanwhile, in Western Europe, where the haut monde hates Trump as much as do their stateside counterparts, millions – including those in Germany, France, and elsewhere who are finally rising up in boisterous public protests against their own despised leaders (but, except in Italy, still not casting enough votes for alternative parties to effect meaningful change) – see Trump as a long-awaited truth-teller, a sign of hope, a hero.

His enemies call him a fascist. On the contrary, he’s the first U.S. president since 9/11 who genuinely seems to grasp that Islam is fascism. He’s as far from denial and fatalism as it’s possible to be. He talks sense, he talks tough, and he takes action that’s in America’s interests. He’s crushed ISIS, shown Islamic heads of state who’s boss, and (against the resistance of both major-party establishments and the legislative and judicial branches of the U.S. government) done his best to pull in the welcome mat. While, at this point, most of his counterparts in Western Europe seem to be all about repeating empty multiculturalist slogans and managing a transition to the unimaginable, Trump is manning the barricades.

We applaud him for all that too.

And we add this:

The 9/11 Muslim attack on America was a profoundly religious act.

Obama claims that the eight years of his presidency were free of scandal. In fact, the scandals were many and appalling.

Obama claims to have stopped Iran becoming a nuclear power. In fact, he entered into a deal that permitted Iran to become a nuclear power.

Obama claims to have improved race relations. In fact, he worsened them. 

Obama claims to have launched an economic boom. In fact, he never achieved even 3% GDP growth.

In sum, he was a weak and destructive president. The harm he did would not be easy to repair, and America is lucky to have found the man to succeed him who could not only mend what he had broken, and is doing so, but is going much further, turning the failure round and achieving success. Even some unprecedented successes. And all in record time.

Obama sees the repair as an undoing of the changes he wrought. As he puts it, “The status quo pushes back.”

The complaint comes from a speech he made at the University of Illinois in Urbana, Ill., on Sept. 7, 2018, when the university honored him with the Paul H. Douglas Award for Ethics in Government.

The speech he gave on the occasion of receiving the prize included these claims:

Each time we painstakingly pull ourselves closer to our founding ideals, that all of us are created equal, endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights; the ideals that say every child should have opportunity and every man and woman in this country who’s willing to work hard should be able to find a job and support a family and pursue their small piece of the American Dream; our ideals that say we have a collective responsibility to care for the sick and the infirm, and we have a responsibility to conserve the amazing bounty, the natural resources of this country and of this planet for future generations, each time we’ve gotten closer to those ideals, somebody somewhere has pushed back. The status quo pushes back. Sometimes the backlash comes from people who are genuinely, if wrongly, fearful of change. More often it’s manufactured by the powerful and the privileged who want to keep us divided and keep us angry and keep us cynical because that helps them maintain the status quo and keep their power and keep their privilege. …

To which political party does that last sentence most aptly apply? We say the Democratic Party? But then, the Left has a habit of accusing its opponents of the faults, failings, bad emotions, plots, conspiracies, evil intentions, underhand actions, and failures of which itself is guilty.

Most of you don’t remember a time before 9/11, when you didn’t have to take off your shoes at an airport.

Did he mention who was responsible for 9/11 and for us having to take off our shoes at an airport? No. Because he never did and never will blame Islam for its acts of terrorism.

Most of you don’t remember a time when America wasn’t at war, or when money and images and information could travel instantly around the globe, or when the climate wasn’t changing faster than our efforts to address it.

A strange combination of references. No one living remembers a time when America wasn’t at war, if the Cold War is counted. About the money and images he probably meant “remember a time when they could not …”  And then he throws in as a certainty that there was a time when climate was not changing fast, but it is now.

And this was all before a change. What change? Have the wars stopped?

The only change he almost got right was a change to faster communications than ever before.

He claims that all three factors together brought about this consequence:

This change has happened fast, faster than any time in human history. And it created a new economy that has unleashed incredible prosperity.

Only, of the three phenomena he mentioned, could the faster communications be said to have promoted prosperity.

Actually, he just gabbled nonsense. And all to get in a claim to an “unleashed incredible prosperity” – the prosperity he claims as his own achievement.

He goes on to say how he rescued the economy from wicked men.

[T]he reckless behavior of financial elites triggered a massive financial crisis, ten years ago this week, a crisis that resulted in the worst recession in any of our lifetimes and caused years of hardship for the American people, for many of your parents, for many of your families. Most of you weren’t old enough to fully focus on what was going on at the time, but when I came into office in 2009, we were losing 800,000 jobs a month. 800,000. Millions of people were losing their homes. Many were worried we were entering into a second Great Depression. So we worked hard to end that crisis, but also to break some of these longer term trends. And the actions we took during that crisis returned the economy to healthy growth and initiated the longest streak of job creation on record. And we covered another 20 million Americans with health insurance and we cut our deficits by more than half, partly by making sure that people like me, who have been given such amazing opportunities by this country, pay our fair share of taxes to help folks coming up behind me.

While it is true that employment rose before he left office, his claim that higher taxes (on “people like me”) were a formula for prosperity is false. President Trump’s tax cuts (for all tax payers) prove it. Furthermore, Obama heavily regulated business, and President Trump’s lifting of many Obama regulations has been a factor in creating the very real present economic boom.

And by the time I left office, household income was near its all-time high and the uninsured rate had hit an all-time low and wages were rising and poverty rates were falling. I mention all this just so when you hear how great the economy’s doing right now, let’s just remember when this recovery started. …

He came on then to his foreign policy.

Even though we took out bin Laden and wound down the wars in Iraq and our combat role in Afghanistan, and got Iran to halt its nuclear program, the world’s still full of threats and disorder. …

And even though your generation is the most diverse in history …

Nonsense! No generation is more “diverse” than any other.

… with a greater acceptance and celebration of our differences than ever before, those are the kinds of conditions that are ripe for exploitation by politicians who have no compunction and no shame about tapping into America’s dark history of racial and ethnic and religious division. …

[O]ver the past few decades, the politics of division, of resentment and paranoia has unfortunately found a home in the Republican Party.

Remember when a Republican Attorney General refused to prosecute a bunch of white people although they were breaking the law, on the grounds that he would not act against “his  people”? No. Neither do we. But we do recall Eric Holder- Obama’s black AG – saying something like that in a case of the Black Panthers …

This Congress has … embraced wild conspiracy theories, like those surrounding Benghazi, or my birth certificate.

The trick: he throws out, in passing, that the (factually accurate) report of his failure to send help to a US ambassador and three servicemen who were killed by Muslim terrorists in Benghazi was a “wild conspiracy theory’, and associates it with an unproved, unlikely, and petty story that he was not born in the United States. But the horrible events in Benghazi were proved and profoundly important.

He comes to his own party’s wild conspiracy theory:

[The Repulicans in power are] undermining our alliances, cozying up to Russia. What happened to the Republican Party? Its central organizing principle in foreign policy was the fight against Communism, and now they’re cozying up to the former head of the KGB, actively blocking legislation that would defend our elections from Russian attack.

And he calls the partial repeal of his unworkable health legislation “sabotage”:

Their sabotage of the Affordable Care Act has already cost more than three million Americans their health insurance. And if they’re still in power next fall, you’d better believe they’re coming at it again. …

He defends the media who gave him uncritical support in all he did, and never stp attacking President Trump. What is indefnsible in his eyes, is Trump hitting back at his media enemies. To do this, he lies again:

I complained plenty about Fox News – but you never heard me threaten to shut them down, or call them enemies of the people.

We did hear that his administration “spied on members of the media, illegally seizing the phone records of Associated Press journalists. Fox News reporter James Rosen called Obama ‘the greatest enemy of press freedom in a generation’ after being threatened with possible jail time for refusing to reveal one of his sources”. (See our quotations from Matt Margolis below.)

Next, he endorses the lie that President Trump sympathizes with Nazis:

We’re supposed to stand up to discrimination. And we’re sure as heck supposed to stand up, clearly and unequivocally, to Nazi sympathizers.

How hard can that be? Saying that Nazis are bad.

How hard can it be to say that Islamic terrorism is bad? That Communism is bad? Too hard for him, it appeared.

Then comes the most blatantly impudent accusation of them all:

And we won’t win people over by calling them names, or dismissing entire chunks of the country as racist, or sexist, or homophobic.

Who, every minute of every day, calls whom “racist, or sexist, or homophobic”? Or all three?

Matt Margolis comments at PJ Media:

Today we saw just how far academia is going to perpetuate the myth of Obama’s “scandal-free” administration when he was awarded the Paul H. Douglas Award for Ethics in Government by the University of Illinois. Not since the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize has Obama been so undeserving of an award. But, I submit that this award is even worse than the Nobel Peace Prize he didn’t deserve. In 2009, the Nobel committee was at least ignorant of what Obama’s record would turn out to be. There is simply no excuse in 2018 for Obama to be receiving an Ethics in Government award. … The Paul H. Douglas Award is now forever tainted.

What, exactly, did the committee at the University of Illinois think Obama did to earn an Ethics in Government award? The Obama years were plagued by scandal and defined by a hyper-partisan government.

Last month I cited six Obama scandals where a special counsel should have been appointed to investigate but was not. Unlike Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Obama’s attorneys general, Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, were partisan lackeys who did everything they could to protect Obama from being held accountable. Obama, Holder, and Lynch knew that if they left the investigating to Republicans in Congress they could write them off as partisan witch hunts and use any and all tactics possible to obstruct and stonewall those investigations, or in some cases, run their own sham investigation that cleared them of any wrongdoing.

I document thirty different scandals in my book The Scandalous Presidency of Barack Obama. Each scandal on its own makes the idea of Obama receiving an ethics award laughable. All of them together make this award blasphemous. From the moment Obama took office he was under a dark cloud of scandal, having been involved in illegal negotiations with [the condemned criminal] Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich to give him a cabinet position in exchange for Blagojevich nominating an Obama-preferred candidate to his vacated Senate seat … yet Obama just received an Ethics in Government award? What a joke!…

There are plenty of well-known scandals that the committee that decided to award Obama had to have been aware of but chose to ignore. There was the Fast and Furious scandal, which involved sending guns to Mexico in the hopes of tracking them to drug cartel leaders. Not only did they lose track of a large number of guns, but one gun was found to have been used in the murder of a U.S. Border Patrol agent. The Obama administration tried to cover it up, and they stonewalled a congressional investigation, resulting in Attorney General Eric Holder being held in contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over documents. Is this what constitutes “ethics in government” to the University of Illinois?

The Obama administration also abused the Espionage Act to target reporters and their sources. They even spied on members of the media, illegally seizing the phone records of Associated Press journalists. Fox News reporter James Rosen called Obama “the greatest enemy of press freedom in a generation” after being threatened with possible jail time for refusing to reveal one of his sources.  Is this what constitutes “ethics in government” to the University of Illinois? …

There were also –

The Solyndra scandal [see here], the Benghazi cover-up, Uranium One, the IRS targeting of conservative groups, the covering up of thousands of deaths of veterans waiting for care at VA hospitals, manipulating intelligence, paying ransom money to Iran, Project Cassandra [see here], spying on Donald Trump, the Hillary email scandal, which I should add, also implicated Obama, who communicated with Hillary via her private email address and used a pseudonym himself.

It’s bad enough when Obama claims he was scandal-free. But, when he receives an ethics in government award, it diminishes the meaning of ethics. It’s time to stop pretending Obama was scandal-free or ethical. … I’ve only scratched the surface of Obama’s scandalous and unethical presidency. 

The only reason why Barack Obama was elected president was that he was black. He had nothing else to offer. A sufficient number of white Americans voted for him to get him into the White House for no better reason than that they needed to feel good, to prove to themselves, and the country and the world, that they were not “racist“.

Barack Obama, for all his expensive education, was ill-informed and strangely ignorant – and he embraced ideologies inimical to America. He seemed not to know how many states there were in the country he governed. He thought Austrians spoke a language called Austrian. He did not know how to pronounce “corpsman”. And he was a follower of the Communist “community organizer” Saul Alinsky, and a lackey of the Muslim Brotherhood.

He lied and commanded others to lie. Under his leadership, his party worked an elaborate plot, which it still pursues, to destroy the candidacy and then the presidency of Donald Trump with false and slanderous allegations of treason.

If prizes were awarded for lying, Obama would deserve them all.

Among the most likely Democratic (Socialist) Party nominees for the 2020 presidential election, are Senators Kamala Harris and Cory Booker.

What sort of people they are was revealed under bright lights during the recent, days-long, televised interrogation of Brett Kavanaugh to confirm his appointment by President Trump to the Supreme Court.

So what sort of people are they? Well, they’re both black. That’s a chief qualification in the eyes of the racist Left. And one of them is a woman. Double points.

But what of their ideas, their competence, their characters?

Ken Blackwell writes at Townhall:

Despite the Senate Judiciary Committee’s being the most politically polarized committee in Congress, there’s still usually a sense of seriousness during a Supreme Court confirmation hearing. Not this time.

Over the four days of hearings – two of which Judge Kavanaugh went well into the night answering Senators’ questions – there were well over a hundred interruptions by protesters.

And when Democratic Senators did ask questions, they did their image no good whatsoever.

For his part, Kavanaugh was masterful in fielding every question, befitting a confident 12-year veteran of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals bench, the second most important court in the country. The American people saw a judge’s judge – he will fairly apply the law, he will honor the Constitution, he won’t make up law … or impose any kind of agenda from the bench. It’s clear, as with Neil Gorsuch, President Trump had hit another home run with a man who’ll be another great justice. …

Leading the [Democratic] parade were two committee members who’ve made it no secret they’re running for president in 2020. 

For Senators Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), the hearings were their own little “Kavanaugh Primary” within the primary contest for the Democratic nomination. They were expected to try and outdo each other in appealing to their party’s base, but what happened instead was a literal comedy of errors. 

During his first opportunity to question Kavanaugh, Booker tried to ambush the judge with emails from the time he served in the George W. Bush White House as an associate counsel and later as staff secretary. Kavanaugh calmly kept asking Booker if he could please see a copy of the emails to which the Senator was referring – so he could accurately answer his question. But they were not provided. 

Early the next morning Booker pronounced he was releasing documents, including the emails to which he had referred the day before, in what he believed to be a brazen display of flouting Senate rules for the public good. He said he was releasing confidential documents that were being withheld by the committee so the public could see them, and he would accept the consequences. He even proclaimed: “This is the closest I’ll ever get in my life to an “I am Spartacus” moment.”

A brave leader of an uprising of the oppressed against a tyranny. Easy heroism. Booker was, figuratively speaking, banging his chest as he boasted that he was taking an enormous risk, but would accept any consequences fearlessly.

In harsh reality he was making a fool of himself.

But it turned out Senate Democrats had gotten clearance to release them [the emails] several hours prior.

Spartacus had lied to us.

A presidential candidate?

Let’s look at the other one.

Not to be outdone, Harris tried to ambush Judge Kavanaugh as well.

It was late Wednesday night, she was one of the last Senators to question Kavanaugh during what had been a long, grueling day. She glared at him, knowing the cameras were capturing every moment, and sprang her gotcha question: “Have you discussed [Special Counsel] Mueller or his investigation with anyone at Kasowitz Benson and Torres, the law firm founded by Marc Kasowitz, President Trump’s personal lawyer. … Be sure about your answer, sir.”

Kavanaugh couldn’t recall any such conversation but, as he told Harris, he was happy to have his memory refreshed if she was aware of anything. She played coy. Her staff told reporters throughout the night and into the next day of the hearings that she had it on good information such discussions had taken place.

“Good information”. How good?

Surely she had him, she had damning information about Kavanaugh inappropriately discussing the Mueller investigation with the president’s personal law firm, and he was the president’s pick for the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court could well hear arguments in the Mueller investigation. Game over, right?

Wrong.

When she asked him the same question directly the next night he flatly said, “no.”

And then she … moved on. It was all made up, nothing to see here. Fishing expedition comes up empty.

It’s a sobering thought that there are millions of people who might vote for Booker or Harris to be president.

Senator Ted Cruz makes it clear that the Democrats are doing everything they can to prevent Judge Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court being confirmed because they want to “re-litigate the 2016 presidential election”.

https://youtu.be/v4EWd_u1nc4 

Is the American Left totalitarian in its ideology, policies, inclination?

Victor Davis Hanson thinks it is. He writes (in part) at National Review:

A definition of totalitarianism might be the saturation of every facet of daily life by political agendas and social-justice messaging.

At the present rate, America will soon resemble the dystopias of novels such as 1984 and Brave New World in which all aspects of life are warped by an all-encompassing ideology of coerced sameness.

Or rather, the prevailing orthodoxy in America is the omnipresent attempt of an elite — exempt from the consequences of its own ideology thanks to its supposed superior virtue and intelligence — to mandate an equality of result.

We expect their 24/7 political messaging on cable-channel news networks, talk radio, or print and online media. And we concede that long ago an NPR, CNN, MSNBC, or New York Times ceased being journalistic entities as much as obsequious megaphones of the progressive itinerary.

But increasingly we cannot escape anywhere the lidless gaze of our progressive lords, all-seeing, all-knowing from high up in their dark towers.

When there is a Republican president, a Republican Congress, a Republican majority in the Supreme Court, and a majority of the states (33 of the 50) have Republican governors, does the Left have the power to inflict its “political agendas and social-justice messaging” on America?

The answer is yes. The faithful do it from inside government agencies.

The Peter Strzok–Lisa Page texts, along with the careers of former FBI director James Comey and his deputy Andrew McCabe, reveal a politicized and in some sense rotten FBI hierarchy, beholden far more to its own exalted sense of a progressive self than merely to investigating crimes against the people.

Lois Lerner was a clumsy reflection of how the IRS long ago became weaponized in service to auditing deplorables. Former CIA director John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper used their supposedly nonpartisan positions to further political agendas. That each in his own way is clownish does not mitigate their rank efforts to graft intelligence agencies onto political causes.

The same deterioration is true of many in the Department of Justice, who, along with the FBI, misled FISA-court justices, as if that were the only, or perhaps the easiest, way to obtain politically driven surveillance on U.S. citizens. Americans now are woke to the reality that straying too much into the forbidden zone guarantees that their communications can be monitored on the pretense that they’re colluding with some nefarious power. Yet if foreigners are the menace, why did our proverbial best and brightest traffic with a paid foreign spy at election time to sabotage a political campaign, then trump even the improper use of electronic surveillance with the insertion of paid informants?

They do it through the social media companies.

Google, Facebook, and Twitter are facing accusations of censoring social-media accounts and massaging Internet searches according to their progressive political agendas. The masters of the universe have given us the stereotype of 20- and 30-something social-warrior geeks, fiddling with their algorithms to virtue-signal their left-wing fides to a global audience. …

First-time congressional candidate Elizabeth Heng, a conservative from central California, found her video ad blocked on Facebook and Twitter. Apparently, her description of the Cambodian holocaust that her parents fled was too graphic or politically incorrect, or both. But then again, in California, everything is politicized, from plastic straws to single-user restrooms, in an Orwellian effort to distract us from the fact that we do not have enough water, usable roads, or workable public schools to remain a civilized state.

They do it through the news media and the institutions of education. They do it through”newspeak” – the control of vocabulary.

Language is especially enlisted to disguise bothersome reality. During the Obama administration, no one would ever have known from “overseas contingency operations,” “man-caused disaster”, “workplace disasters”, and “holy struggles” that radical Islamic terrorists were seeking to kill Westerners from San Bernardino to Paris. As in the case of illegal aliens, undocumented aliens, illegal immigrants, undocumented immigrants, immigrants migrants, the progressive rationale is that anyone killed or harmed by a terrorist or migrant is usually a nobody and so an acceptable casualty in the greater war against incorrect speech and attitude.

When our public colleges now find that an increasing number of newly admitted students cannot do college-level work when they begin their courses, administrators drop the old idea of catch-up “remedial” classes or compensatory “remediation” courses. The new language conveys that students are now suddenly qualified, or at least it virtue-signals the university’s effort to be suitably sensitive to the fact that in California nearly half of those entering the CSU system cannot read or compute at what previously had been thought to be a college level.

And since the Left is now dedicated to the destruction of “white privilege” and the demotion of the white race, Whites on the Left announce from their dark towers that they are not white:

Our very names and identities have become politicized. Desperate to highlight their progressive purity (or to enhance careers), politicians sometimes reinvent their nomenclatures and ancestries to suggest solidarity with those deemed racially, ethnically, or economically oppressed. … [Is] their intent to pose as poorer, more victimized Americans without actually having to become poorer or more victimized?

Senator Elizabeth Warren claimed falsely — albeit not quite in the clumsy fashion of left-wing political activist and professor Ward Churchill — that she was part Native American. Socialist New York state senate candidate Julia Salazar recently and falsely rebranded herself as a virtual foreign-born immigrant. Was their intent to pose as poorer, more victimized Americans without actually having to become poorer or more victimized?

White-male aspirant for a Texas Senate seat Patrick Francis O’Rourke has used the Latino nickname “Beto,” probably on the assumption that “Beto O’Rourke” might ensure a little more street cred among Texas’s Latino voters. I suppose “Pat O’Lopez” would be too shameless? But then again, California Senate candidate Kevin de León has added both a “de” and an accent to remind voters that he is not just an Anglicized Kevin Leon who could be mistaken for a third-generation Portuguese American.

Americans have long accepted that Hollywood movies no longer seek just to entertain or inform, but to indoctrinate audiences by pushing progressive agendas. That commandment also demands that America be portrayed negatively — or better yet simply written out of history. Take the new film First Man, about the first moon landing. Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong became famous when he emerged from The Eagle, the two-man lunar module, and planted an American flag on the moon’s surface. Yet that iconic act disappears from the movie version. (At least Ryan Gosling, who plays Armstrong, does not walk out of the space capsule to string up a U.N. banner.)

Gosling claimed that the moon landing should not be seen as an American effort. Instead, he advised, it should be “widely regarded as a human achievement” — as if any nation’s efforts or the work of the United Nations in 1969 could have pulled off such an astounding and dangerous enterprise.  …

Julia Salazar, whom Hanson refers to, is a “Democratic Socialist” running for a Democratic Party seat in the New York State Senate. She claimed for unexplained reasons to be a Jewish immigrant from Colombia, though she was born to a Catholic family in Miami and is intensely anti-Semitic. When the Jewish periodical The Tablet exposed her lies, “the response from Salazar and her supporters was to accuse the Jewish community of racism”. They – 

” … insisted that as a ‘woman of color’, she was a victim of Jewish racism. The Democratic Socialists of America backed their candidate and repeated her anti-Jewish slurs.”

– So writes Daniel Greenfield at Front Page. 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, another “Democratic Socialist”, is a rich man’s daughter who pretends to be a low-waged resident of the Bronx, where she has won the Democratic primary and  will be elected to Congress in November.

So our betters who claim the moral high ground and know what’s best for us, are liars, slanderers, poseurs, hypocrites, illiterates, and subversives. 

And they are would-be totalitarians, those up there in the dark towers.

Many young voters, it seems, believe they really can have free education, free health care, free housing, and a guaranteed job at a sweet wage. “If that’s what Socialism will bring us, then let’s have it,” many of them are saying.

It is the responsibility of the conservative Right to impress on them that Socialism has never worked, that it cannot work, that under no circumstances and under no guiding hands can it ever possibly work. Far from landing them on rock-candy mountain with impressive degrees, strong bodies, neat houses, and a life of security and luxury, it will dump them in a bog of poverty, stagnation, sorrow, and serfdom.

Free goodies. That’s what the now-far-left Democratic Party is offering them. It is all the Democrats have to offer: a lie. And if the electorate is conned by it into putting them in power, its the steep way down to Venezuela for all of us.

If they are defeated in the November 2018 elections – ideally overwhelmingly defeated – a terrible fate will be avoided, and, in splendid addition, the Left may wither away and the advance of Islam may be stopped.

One way or another, we are entering a different world.

We select some passages from an article by Virgil at Breitbart about the passing of a man and an era:

Perhaps the most revealing moment in the week-long media extravaganza over John McCain’s death came on September 1, when Meghan McCain, daughter of the late senator, chose to use her “eulogy” to rip into Donald Trump.

Here’s how The Washington Post set the scene:

Trump was absent and his name never invoked, but the entire service was animated by a sustained rebellion against the president’s worldview and his singular brand of politics.

“We gather here to mourn the passing of American greatness,” she said, gritting her teeth through the tears. “The real thing, not cheap rhetoric from men who will never come near the sacrifice he gave so willingly, nor the opportunistic appropriation of those who lived lives of comfort and privilege while he suffered and served.”

Okay, we get it: Ms. McCain hates Trump so much that she has to grit her teeth when she talks about him.  Trump and his supporters already knew that, of course. …

She is an expert in telling the Establishment what it wants to hear — and the Establishment will hugely reward her for her “courage”. Once again, the Post, that reliable reflector of Beltway conventional wisdom, sets the scene:

When she fiercely declared that “the America of John McCain has no need to be made great again because America was always great,” the generals, senators, former presidents and other world leaders who filled the pews burst into applause.

We might linger over those last words: “burst into applause”.  It’s worth recalling that this was supposed to be a funeral service, and yet Ms. McCain turned it into a kind of political rally for the Establishment and for what it sees as the “good old days”.  Ah, for the good old days of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Mitt Romney, George W. Bush, and … John McCain.  The days when the Establishment, for sure, was great — or at least greatly in charge.

Yes, in the Establishment’s collective mentality, the good old days were the time when the U.S. border was open, when trade deals were easy, and foreign wars were being fought.

The Establishment, of course, never cared that, as a result, social chaos was increasing, wages were declining,  regions were de-industrializing, and young Heartlanders — not Establishmentarians, of course — were getting killed and maimed overseas.  So when Meghan McCain defined those days as “greatness”, well, that was what the Establishmentarians came to hear.   She was patting the big shots on the back, and they were glad for the pat.  And John McCain, of course, was the champion of that sort of Beltway bonhomie — and, especially, the bipartisan “fun” of foreign wars.

Except when he was running for re-election in Arizona, McCain made no apologies for any of his views, even as they ultimately drove down his approval rating, among Arizona Republicans, to just 20 percent — with a whopping 68 percent disapproving.  Indeed, according to another poll, McCain was the third-most unpopular Senator in the nation.

Yet to the Establishment, such unpopularity is a badge of honor; that is, if a political figure is willing to “stand up” to the dopey masses, well, that’s a good thing.  So it’s little wonder that John McCain received the John F. Kennedy “Profile in Courage” award, that annual liberal smug-fest.  And now, maybe Meghan McCain will win it, too.

Indeed, Ms. McCain won extra points with the Establishment by snubbing Sarah Palin. The former Alaska governor had been John McCain’s running mate in 2008, and had delivered what’s commonly regarded as the greatest vice presidential acceptance speech in modern memory. So if the McCain-Palin ticket lost in ’08, it certainly wasn’t her fault.

And yet to the Establishment — including the many McCain campaign staffers who now make their living on MSNBC — Palin was hopelessly deplorable. She was too much the populist and no kind of elitist. So by not inviting Palin to the service, the McCains made it clear that they wanted nothing to do with the Deplorables, now and forever. Thus we see that class warfare is alive and well within the Republican Party — assuming, that is, that the McCains still think of themselves as Republicans at all. …

The Establishment will cheer for Meghan McCain, and its handmaidens in the MSM were happy to make the whole of last week into a McCain Mediathon.  And yet at the same time, the Establishment is deathly afraid that it can’t put the old humpty-dumpty back together. … John McCain really is gone.

The American Establishment might know, down deep, that it has screwed up in its hubris — although, of course, that can never be admitted publicly. Can’t show weakness to the proles!

Nevertheless, the Establishment is visibly growing nervous. In its jitteriness, it is clapping wildly, and inappropriately, for those who still hold to the fading faith — such as the McCain family.

… The Establishment is raging against the dying of the light. … The elites know that this is their political twilight and that dusk is giving way to nightfall.

… Establishmentarians fear, most of all, that a new and different sun is rising.

Will it go on rising? Will it be a new day?

Or will the Left win and bring down a very long night?

Tucker Carlson of Fox News interviews Professor Jordan Peterson on the subject of “toxic masculinity” – an undefined term, as the professor points out.

He makes it plain: the ideology preaching that men have been oppressing women throughout the history of the human race is absurd and wrong – and tragically destructive.

One of the conclusions to the discussion: better that all schools close than that they continue to indoctrinate this ideology. 

https://youtu.be/aiu30ArraDc

Pat Condell talks about the intolerant religion of Marxism/Progressivism.

Many of our Pat Condell videos have been removed by YouTube.

We wait to see how long this one, in which the good, brave, atheist conservative praises the truly liberal values of the Enlightenment and condemns the intolerance of the now extremely illiberal Left, will be allowed to stay.