Has the Kavanaugh affair united the Republican Party behind President Trump?

And if so, will it now defeat the ever more berserk Left?

Of the Republican reaction to the tactics of the Democrats opposing the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court, Gavin Wax writes at Western Journal:

The silver lining in this disgusting spectacle is a unified GOP moving forward with the singular goal of crushing the left. The line in the sand has been drawn, and there is no turning back. Even the most stubborn Trump haters of the right see that now. The Kavanaugh hearing will be a seminal movement in this fractured era of politics, and if the GOP can muster the courage to get ferocious with their contemptible enemies, it can be the turning point toward Making America Great Again.

He sees the affair as a vindication of President Trump’s leadership. It’s not only the Kavanaugh victory that proves the Trumpian way is the right way, but it provides the moment for full realization:

Anyone watching intently during the Obama years could see what was forming on the left, but it has reached critical mass due to Trump’s meteoric success. People who do not closely follow politics are seeing what the left is really all about aside from that flowery veneer of tolerance and diversity. The average blue-collar supporter of Trump has their eyes wide open, never to be closed again. This is a once-in-a-lifetime moment that we have to capitalize upon while there is still time.

“No turning back” for the GOP?  Never again will the average blue-collar worker believe the Democratic Party serves his interests?  Never again will the Republicans allow the Left an inch if by any means they can be stopped?

Well, it still depends on whether Republicans can “muster the courage to get ferocious”.

The writer hopes that “the most stubborn Trump haters of the right” see now how good is President Trump’s leadership is.

He hopes that certain Republican commentators who were against Donald Trump’s presidency have been brought by the Kavanaugh affair to see the light. They ought to have been, but he is not certain that they were:

Commentators like Erick Erickson, David French and John Podhoretz have to be realizing that Trump’s approach is vindicated. They can bemoan Trump for swatting the hornet’s nest and stirring up the left, but the communist threat is coming to destroy the lives of anyone who is to the right of Karl Marx. If you are white, Christian, conservative or a male (just one of these attributes is enough), they will target you and your family with a heinous smear campaign, and that will just be the beginning. Trumpism is currently the only viable alternative to the Orwellian machinations of the left.

How many  Congressional Republicans formerly antagonistic to, or unenthusiastic about, Donald Trump have come round to his side because of the Kavanaugh affair?

A new eclectic coalition of surprising allies has coalesced around the president.

The most vociferous defender of Kavanaugh during Thursday’s hearings was arguably South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham. Graham ran for president in 2016 largely as a wet blanket attempting to cool the Trump revolution but has come around in years since. Trump has also been able to hatch out solid working relationships with Mitch McConnell, Orrin Hatch, Rand Paul, Tom Cotton, and Mark Meadows — an interesting cross-section of political leaders. …. A coalition that seemed inconceivable just last year.

Some have been left behind — like now deceased former Sen. John McCain whose vendetta with Trump became personal, soon-to-be-gone Sens. Bob Corker and Jeff Flake who staked their careers on opposing Trump’s rise in the GOP, and Reps. Justin Amash and Walter Jones who went from constitutional heroes to pariahs over their stubborn opposition to the president — but the overwhelming consensus of the Republican Party is firmly behind Trump. Kavanaugh’s railroading has only strengthened Trump’s power over his constituency, and this party unity will be needed for what is to come.

If Kavanaugh’s confirmation was the convincing achievement, still it must be noted that Kavanaugh was not himself unwanted by Never Trumpers. The victory was not exactly a victory for Trumpism as such. Kavanaugh was “an establishment supported candidate”. 

In what may have been a fortuitous coincidence or was perhaps another example of 4-D chess, Trump picked an establishment supported candidate in Brett Kavanaugh as his second proposed Supreme Court nominee.

In fact, some Trump supporters did not consider Kavanaugh conservative enough:

Although some of Trump’s die-hard supporters were tepid on the pick at first, the attacks from the left quickly solidified him into a hero.

But –

He had the full-fledged support of the NeverTrump right from the outset because of his closeness to President George W. Bush …

So let’s enquire: what do Never Trumpers on the Right themselves have to say about warming to the president’s leadership?

What is the National Review saying?

The editor-in-chief of National Review, Rich Lowry, does not count himself a Never Trumper; but his colleagues, Ramesh Ponnuru, Jonah Goldberg, Bill Kristol and Stephen Hayes, firmly and sternly do.

Or have done.

Until now? Until the victory of President Trump, the Senate Republicans, and the new Supreme Court Justice himself, won the fierce and prolonged battle to get Justice Kavanaugh’s appointment confirmed?

It seems there has been a change of mind.

Significantly, the authorship of this National Review article is attributed to “The Editors”:

After one of the most intense political fights of the last two decades, Judge Brett Kavanaugh of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has become Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh of the United States Supreme Court. This is a good thing for the integrity of our Constitution, for elementary American norms, and for the long-term health of our political institutions.

Justice Kavanaugh has demonstrated throughout his career a firm adherence to a constitutionalist jurisprudence; indeed, that was the root of the opposition to him. He will undoubtedly stay true to this approach, which has guided him during his years on the D.C. Circuit and is evident in black-and-white in his hundreds of opinions. All of this was pushed to the side, though, in the final frenzy to destroy and defeat him. …

Judge Kavanaugh was not “on trial” in a formal sense. But that fact in no way undermines the practices and norms that mark formal trials. Presumption of innocence and an insistence on corroborating evidence are integral parts of our system because they work. Had the Democratic party prevailed in its attempt to set them aside, the precedent would have been disastrous. …

Throughout this saga, the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee maintained that their job was to investigate credible charges of wrongdoing and to determine whether they could be verified. Shamefully, their counterparts exhibited no such interest. It was unclear whether Judge Kavanaugh’s record was being examined for rape or for rudeness, for drinking or for defensiveness, for temperament or for truth. At times the lack of focus took on a Stalinist quality: “He did it,” Kavanaugh’s accusers insisted day in, day out, “but even if he didn’t, the vehemence with which he denied it is itself disqualifying.”

It is a testament to the fortitude of the Republican party that these conceits were rejected in the end. Donald Trump had the good sense to pick Kavanaugh, and then the determination to stick by him. …

In America we do not sacrifice individuals on the altar of collective guilt, and we do not entertain that illiberal alchemy by which “nobody can corroborate this” becomes “he did it and must pay”. When the Senate met yesterday to put a bow on this squalid affair, there remained as much evidence for Judge Kavanaugh’s unfitness as there had been on the day was nominated: none. To have rejected him despite this, [Senator Susan] Collins observed, would be to have abandoned “fundamental legal principles”.

The Senate refused to do so. The Justice prevailed, and so did justice.

The praise of Donald Trump for his “good sense” in picking Brett Kavanaugh, and his “determination” in sticking to his choice, does imply that “The Editors” of National Review, as a body, now approve of the president.

What then lies ahead?

Back to Gavin Wax who writes that “Trumpism is the only way forward”:

What is left of the Buckleyites thought that they and the “sane voices in the room” on the left could sweep this Trump embarrassment under the rug and head back to the politics of the past. That delusion is no longer tenable. The inmates run the asylum on the left, and every denizen must submit to every ridiculous trope regarding gender, sex, race, etc. or face the social consequences. Because groupthink is their default preset, nobody can speak up against this institutional insanity without getting cannibalized by the jackals. …

But –

The left is never going to capitulate. They have gone too far to stop now. They will only escalate things drastically from this point forward. They will repeat any lie — no matter how absurd, cruel or disgusting it may be — to stop Trump and his supporters. Anyone who believes in the Constitution, the rule of law, due process, and the presumption of innocence is a racist Nazi guilty of sexual assault. This is the future that we will live in if the left is successful, and it is probably worse than what Orwell envisioned in “1984″.

Remember, the left has many institutional advantages that are difficult to overcome. The demographic realities are on their side. The cultural downslide has already reached epidemic proportions. We cannot expect another Trump to come along and move things forward if he is ultimately stopped. This may be our final stand, and we have to move ever more boldly as a result. Trump has taught us that we have to be willing to fight as ruthlessly as the left in order to win.

If the Republican Party now fully accepts President Trump’s leadership; if Republicans at last have the stomach for a fight, or better still an appetite for it; if they engage the fight and if they win it, then the Kavanaugh hearing will have been “a seminal movement in this fractured era of politics” and a turning-point.

Now for the ferocious battle.

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”.

It is no secret that the Obama administration sought to downplay the threat of Islamism, and even to co-opt some Islamist movements to promote its agenda. In its foreign policy, the administration expressed support for Mohamed Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt, while domestically, the White House invited Islamists to design the government’s Countering Violent Extremism program. It is difficult to argue that these efforts were the product of anything but great naïveté and political dogma. Is it possible that this combination extended to deliberately funding an al-Qaeda affiliate?

Sam Westrop, whose investigative research was used for the video, is the director of Islamist Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.

He writes (in part, but the whole article is well worth reading for more detail) at National Review:

The Middle East Forum has discovered that the Obama administration approved a grant of $200,000 of taxpayer money to an al-Qaeda affiliate in Sudan — a decade after the U.S. Treasury designated it as a terrorist-financing organization. More stunningly, government officials specifically authorized the release of at least $115,000 of this grant even after learning that it was a designated terror organization.

The story began in October 2004, when the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated the Khartoum-based Islamic Relief Agency (ISRA), also known as the Islamic African Relief Agency (IARA), as a terror-financing organization. It did so because of ISRA’s links to Osama bin Laden and his organization Maktab al-Khidamat (MK), the precursor of al-Qaeda.

According to the U.S. Treasury, in 1997 ISRA established formal cooperation with MK. By 2000, ISRA had raised $5 million for bin Laden’s group. The Treasury Department notes that ISRA officials even sought to help “relocate [bin Laden] to secure safe harbor for him”. It further reports that ISRA raised funds in 2003 in Western Europe specifically earmarked for Hamas suicide bombings. …

Despite this well-documented history, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in July 2014 awarded $723,405 to World Vision Inc., an international evangelical charity, to “improve water, sanitation and hygiene and to increase food security in Sudan’s Blue Nile state.” Of these funds, $200,000 was to be directed to a sub-grantee: ISRA. …

Mark Smith, World Vision’s senior director of humanitarian and emergency affairs, wrote to USAID, stating that the Islamic Relief Agency “had performed excellent work” for World Vision in the past, and that “putting contractual relationships in limbo for such a long period is putting a significant strain” on World Vision’s relationship with the Sudanese regime. Smith also revealed that World Vision had submitted a notice to OFAC indicating its “intention to restart work with [ISRA] and to transact with [ISRA]” if OFAC did not respond within a week. …

Then, incredibly, on May 7, 2015 — after “close collaboration and consultations with the Department of State” — OFAC issued a license to a World Vision affiliate, World Vision International, authorizing “a one-time transfer of approximately $125,000 to ISRA,” of which “$115,000 was for services performed under the sub-award with USAID” and $10,000 was “for an unrelated funding arrangement between Irish Aid and World Vision.” …

Obama-administration officials knowingly approved the transfer of taxpayer dollars to an al-Qaeda affiliate, and not an obscure one but an enormous international network that was often in the headlines. …

Now we know that the [Obama] government deliberately chose to transfer at least $115,000 to ISRA after confirming that it was on the terror-designation list. In other words, an al-Qaeda front received taxpayers’ money with the apparent complicity of public officials. 

US Diplomacy explains: The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is an independent agency of the U.S. Government that works closely with the State Department and receives overall foreign policy guidance from the Secretary of State.

Obama’s State Department apparently shared his view that the US needed to be humbled and Islam exalted. Hence his government’s promotion of the Muslim Brotherhood followed by its even more outrageous submission to the demands of the Iranian theocracy. Both policies were enthusiastically implemented by former Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and John Kerry. And no doubt there are “deep state” operatives still inside the Department who even now, with (Trump-loyal) Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State, remain faithful to the Obama sentiment.

We wish all our readers, wherever they are, a Very Happy American Independence Day! 

The creation of the United States of America has been good for the whole world.

Twice in the 20th. century, America saved Europe and the world from conquest by evil men obsessed with evil ideas.

The excellent Bruce Bawer writing about this, concludes his article with these passages, in which he recognizes that once again America – not by arms this time but by inspiration – is a source of salvation to Europeans who are threatened again with conquest by evil men with evil ideas: the followers of Muhammad, the warring tribes of Islam.

America may once again help save the Old World. But there’s another contribution that America is clearly making on that front. In President Donald Trump, millions of Western Europeans see a leader who, to a greater extent than the overwhelming majority of politicians on either side of the pond, says it like it is, keeps his promises, and puts his own nation’s citizens first.

Almost every major country in Western Europe is run by Hillary types – establishment hacks who don’t mean a thing they say, who view ordinary citizens as deplorables, and who think that those deplorables should keep their opinions to themselves. Look, for example, at Merkel’s pathological effort to play guardian angel to armies of Muslim thugs – and her utter indifference to the impact of her actions on her own people. Look at the British political class’s appallingly tepid response to grooming gangs – and their obsessive hatred of Tommy Robinson. Look at the cynical attempts by Dutch courts, which mollycoddle Muslim malefactors, to destroy Geert Wilders. Look at the leaders of Finland and Ireland who, apparently more eager to please their EU masters than serve their own people, call for increased Muslim immigration and insist, quite insanely, that it “enriches our cultures and societies”.  

After only a year and a half in power, Donald Trump has already done a great deal for America. But he has also done something crucially significant for Europe: he has opened the eyes of Western Europeans to the possibility of giving their mediocre, pusillanimous, appeasement-happy leaders the bum’s rush and replacing them with strong, smart, genuinely patriotic men and women who might still manage to deliver their continent from evil. Yes, America First, by all means – but that very slogan, that very sentiment, is emboldening people all over Western Europe to raise their own voices to say “France First!” “Germany First!” “Sweden First!” We may yet hope that Western Europe’s salvation is at hand – and if it is, the people of these devastated countries may once again have America to thank for it. 

We heartily concur.

The Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy’s chief persecutor of President Trump has sent him a list of questions, of the when-did-you-last-beat-your-wife type, in the hope of tricking him  into saying something for which they could have the House of Representatives impeach him, if that assembly should come to be dominated by the Democratic Party while President Trump is in office.

Here are questions that urgently need answers from the leaders of the Left-Wing Conspirators themselves.

From Front Page, by Lloyd Billingsley, questions for Chief Persecutor Robert Mueller:

Investigations normally pursue a crime. What crime, exactly, are you investigating? Given the time and money you have put in, the people have a right to know.

Special Counsel Mueller, if you operate in search of collusion, what statute, exactly, would you use to prosecute collusion? Please supply the numbers in the U.S. code.

Special Counsel Mueller, you have been called a man of great integrity. Why did you front-load your investigative team with highly partisan supporters of Hillary Clinton? Were independent, non-partisan lawyers not available?

If your target is Russian influence in general, Special Counsel Mueller, why are you not investigating the Clinton Foundation and its dealings with Russia? Have you consulted the book Clinton Cash?

Special Counsel Mueller, what is your understanding of Fanny Ohr? She is the Russia expert, wife of demoted DOJ official Bruce Ohr, who worked for Fusion GPS on the Steele dossier. In your expert opinion, why might Fanny Ohr have acquired a short-wave radio license about that time? Was it to communicate with Russian contacts and avoid detection? Did the FBI monitor any of Ohr’s communications?

As you know, Peter Strzok was formerly FBI counterintelligence boss, a very important position. Why was agent Strzok unable to detect the work of the Democrats’ IT man Imran Awan, who had no security clearance but gained repeated unauthorized access to computers of the House Intelligence and Foreign Affairs Committees? Was that because agent Strzok was busy exonerating presidential candidate Hillary Clinton for her destruction of evidence, including more than 30,000 emails?

Agent Strzok changed “gross negligence,” which was a crime, to “extremely careless,” which was not, and FBI boss James Comey repeated that change. What is your take on that? Did you ever exonerate a suspect before you even talked to them?

In your view, former FBI Director Mueller, what was all that business with Loretta Lynch and Bill Clinton out on the tarmac? Was it just to exchange pleasantries? Given the time and money you have put in, the public has a right to know.

As you know, Special Counsel Mueller, the FBI sought to identify and discipline the agent who made public the Lynch-Clinton meeting. Who is that person and what is he or she doing now? As you know, agent Strzok still has his badge, his gun and his security clearance.

As you also know, the Communist Party USA was created and sustained by Soviet Russia. In the 1980 and 1984 elections, their candidates were Gus Hall for president and Angela Davis for vice president. Former FBI Director Mueller, how much did Russia spend on those elections? Or did the FBI not bother with Russian intervention in those days?

Former CIA boss John Brennan is claiming that Donald Trump will be relegated to the dustbin of history. In 1976, Brennan voted for the Stalinist Gus Hall for president. In your opinion, former FBI Director Mueller, should that have disqualified Brennan from working for the CIA? And would you have hired him at the FBI? If so, in what capacity?

As you know, Special Counsel Mueller, the FBI failed to stop Omar Mateen’s attack in Florida, and despite warnings failed to stop the Tsarnaev brothers from bombing the Boston Marathon. Why did the powerful agency you once headed fail to stop those acts of terrorism that claimed so many innocent lives?

The FBI was aware of Major Nidal Hasan’s emails to terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki but failed to stop him from murdering 13 unarmed American soldiers at Fort Hood. Sen. Joseph Lieberman sought to make the Hasan-Awlaki emails public but the FBI blocked their release.

Former FBI Director Mueller, when reporters asked you if the FBI had dropped the ball by failing to act, you said, “No. I think, given the context of the discussions and the situation that the agents and the analysts were looking at, they took appropriate steps.” Any second thoughts on that? At the time you expressed no regret over Hasan’s victims, but maybe you have some now?

Given that massive and deadly failure on your watch, why should the people have any confidence in your current probe? Given the time and money you have put in, your team of Clinton cronies, and the absence of any crime or collusion, the people have a right to know. Meanwhile, please indulge a final question

As Paul Kengor showed in The Communist, the FBI had an extensive file on African American Stalinist Frank Marshall Davis, who was in fact a Soviet agent. Were you aware that Frank Marshall Davis was the man known only as “Frank” in the Dreams from My Father book by POTUS 44? Did that ever come up in your time as FBI Director from 2001-2013? The people would sure like to know.

From American Greatness, by Victor Davis Hanson, questions for Barack Obama:

What did you mean when you were heard, by accident, on a hot mic, providing the following assurances to outgoing Russian Prime Minister Medvedev: “On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved, but it’s important for him to give me space . . . This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility”?

Did you and the Russian government have any private agreements to readjust Russian-American relations during your own 2012 reelection campaign? Were there other such discussions similar to your comments to Prime Minister Medvedev?

If so, do you believe such Russian collusion had any influence on the outcome of the 2012 election?

Did your subsequent reported suspension of, or reduction in, some planned missile defense programs, especially in Eastern Europe, have anything to do with the assurances that you gave to the Russian Prime Minister?

Did the subsequent Russian quietude during your 2012 reelection campaign have anything to do with your assurances of promised changes in U.S. foreign policy?

Did you adjudicate U.S. responses to Russian behavior on the basis of your own campaign re-election concerns?

More specifically, what exactly did you mean when you asked the Russian Prime Minister for “space”? And further what did you intend by suggesting that after your 2012 election you would have more “flexibility” with the Russian government?

Would you please define “flexibility” in this context?

What do you think Prime Minister Medvedev meant when he replied to your request for space, and your promise for flexibility after the election, with: “Yeah, I understand. I understand your message about space. Space for you . . . I understand . . . I will transmit this information to Vladimir?”

Did you hear subsequently from the Russians that Prime Medvedev had delivered the message that you had intended for Vladimir Putin?

Subsequently, did Vladimir Putin communicate with you about any such understanding that the U.S. government would modulate its foreign policy during your reelection campaign in exchange for “space”?

Did any such arrangement in 2012 have anything to do with the later absence of a strong U.S. response to subsequent cyber-attacks by Russian operatives, or to the later 2014 Russian invasions of both Eastern Ukraine and the Crimea?

During the email controversies over the illegal use of a private email account and server by your secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, you stated publicly that you first became aware of her improper use of a private server through press accounts. Yet records show that you yourself communicated with Secretary Clinton over her unauthorized email account. How do you reconcile your public statements with your private actions?

Did you ever at any time improperly transmit classified information over Secretary of State Clinton’s email server under a pseudonymous email account?

Do you feel that you violated federal law by communicating with your secretary of state over an unsecured email server?

Did you discuss in any fashion with your own Department of Justice the ongoing FBI investigation of Secretary of Clinton’s email server and account? Do you know anything about a September 2016, election-cycle communication in which FBI investigator Lisa Page texted to fellow FBI investigator Peter Strzok that “potus wants to know everything we’re doing?” What did you wish to know from the FBI about the email investigation?

When in August 2016 you declared on Fox News that then candidate Hillary Clinton had not endangered national security by the use of an unsecured email server (“I can tell that you this is not a situation in which America’s national security was endangered . . .  she has not jeopardized America’s national security”), on what basis did you offer such a blanket exoneration? Had the FBI confirmed to you such a conclusion?

Do you have any knowledge of the contents of any of the 30,000 emails that were deleted by Secretary Clinton?

Were you aware at any time — before, during, or after — of a clandestine meeting between Attorney General Loretta Lynch and former president Bill Clinton on an airport tarmac in Phoenix, Arizona before their meeting became public?

If so, what immediate actions did you take to ensure the integrity of the ongoing investigation of Secretary Clinton’s email account?

Were you briefed at any time on the contents of the Fusion GPS so-called Steele dossier? If so, when and by whom, and what actions did you take in response to such knowledge?

Were you aware that members of your Justice Department and the FBI had relied on the purchased Steele dossier to obtain FISA warrants to surveille member(s) of the Trump campaign staff during the 2016 election?

Were you aware at any time that FISA court judges were not informed of the fact that the author of the dossier has been hired by the Clinton campaign, or had been fired from a cooperative relationship with the FBI, or that the dossier itself was unverified by the FBI or that news accounts about it that were presented to the court as verification of its contents, were in fact, based on selective leaks of its contents to media sources?

If you were aware of any of the above, what action did you take?

Have you ever discussed the Fusion GPS/Steele dossier with Loretta Lynch, James Comey, Bruce Ohr, Glenn Simpson, Rod Rosenstein, or Hillary Clinton? If so when and under what circumstances?

Were you aware that transcripts of such subsequent FISA surveillance were made available to members of you own staff and administration, including, for example, Samantha Power, Ben Rhodes, and Susan Rice?

At any time during the 2016 campaign were you briefed on the contents of the Steele dossier by either your CIA director John Brennan, or Director of National Intelligence James Clapper?

Did you speak at any time with former Senator Harry Reid about the contents of the Steele dossier?

Were you aware at any time that members of your administration had viewed classified transcripts of such surveillance, requested that redacted names of the surveilled were to be unmasked, and then leaked those names to the press?

Did you ever approve or know of direct surveillance of the Trump campaign or transition?

If so, what actions did you take either to reprimand such actions or to prevent their recurrence?

At what time where you briefed by either FBI Director Robert Mueller, or Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on the progress of the so-called Uranium One investigation?

Did Attorney General Loretta Lynch discuss with you the nature of that investigation?

Were you at any time worried about the compromised status of U.S. uranium sources, and if so what did you do about such concerns?

Did you at any time talk with members of the Russian government or those with ties with the Russian government about the Uranium One sale?

Were you aware at any time of massive gifting from Russian-related operatives to the Clinton Foundation?

Were you aware that Bill Clinton in June 2010 had received a $500,000 honorarium for a speech in Moscow from business interests with ties to the Russian government?

Did you at any time discuss with Secretary Clinton either President Clinton’s speech or her own violations of supposed promises and agreements with your office — specifically that both the Clinton Foundation and Bill Clinton would not have commercial relations or receive gifts/honoraria from any interests seeking commercial agreements or exemptions from the State Department?

Were you aware that Secretary Clinton’s personal aide, Huma Abedin, was as a private consultant conducting business with foreign entities, while still employed by the Clinton State Department?

How and when did you first become aware of the hacking of the email accounts at the Democratic National Committee?

Did your administration have any discussions with John Podesta, Donna Brazile or any members of the DNC concerning such data breaches?

Were you aware that DNC Chairman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, did not offer DNC computers to FBI investigators for examination after they were compromised?

Were you told by any member of your administration why this was so?

Were you aware at any time, prior to James Clapper’s false testimony in a congressional hearing, that the National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies had illegally surveilled American citizens?

Were you aware at any time, prior to John Brennan’s false testimony in a congressional hearing, that U.S. drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan had inadvertently killed noncombatant civilians?

Did you take any action to reprimand John Brennan for lying to Congress on two occasions, concerning his false assertions that drones had not killed civilians, and that the CIA had not monitored U.S. Senate staffers’ computer communications?

Did you take any action to reprimand James Clapper for providing false testimony to the Congress concerning NSA surveillance?

Were you aware of the communications between your Justice Department and any local, state, or federal authorities concerning the jailing of Internet video maker, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula on suddenly discovered probation violations?

When and by whom were you first briefed that the Benghazi attacks were pre-planned terrorist attacks and not, as members of your administration had alleged, spontaneous riots resulting from an Internet video?

When and by whom were you briefed about Lois Lerner’s conduct at the IRS?

Did you discuss with anyone Lois Lerner’s decision to invoke her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination?

On what basis did you assert that neither Lois Lerner nor her associates were guilty of “even a smidgen of corruption”?

Was your public exoneration based on any evidence presented to you by internal IRS or FBI investigators? If so, when and by whom?

Why in the last days of your presidential tenure, did you suddenly vastly expand the number of agencies and intelligence analysts privy to classified NSA intelligence gathering?

On what grounds did you take such action, and did your decision have anything to do with your knowledge of the classified surveillance of Donald Trump, or his campaign, or information in the Steele dossier?

In the past, were you aware of the circumstances under which the sealed divorce records of both your 2004 Illinois primary and general election Senate opponents, Blair Hull and Jack Ryan respectively, were illegally leaked to the press? At any time, did you view such sealed records and, if so, when and by whom were you apprised that such records were leaked to the press?

From us, one self-answering question:

Why does the Democratic Party reek of corruption?

Splendid pageantry

What did President Trump say to Xi Jinping of China that persuaded Xi to say what to Kim Jong-un of North Korea who said what to Moon Jae-in of South Korea to bring about the reunification of Korea, the denuclearization of North Korea, talks between the US and North Korea … ?

It is a massive change, a huge development – an astonishing achievement. But whose?

We venture to say it is primarily President Donald Trump’s achievement.

From Breitbart:

The leaders of North and South Korea agreed Friday to pursue a permanent peace and the complete denuclearization of the divided peninsula, as they embraced after a historic summit laden with symbolism.

In a day of bonhomie including a highly symbolic handshake over the Military Demarcation Line that divides the two countries, the pair issued a declaration on “the common goal of realizing, through complete denuclearization, a nuclear-free Korean peninsula”.

Upon signing the document, the two leaders shared a warm embrace, the culmination of a summit filled with smiles and displays of friendship in front of the world’s media.

They also agreed that they would this year seek a permanent end to the Korean War, 65 years after the hostilities ended in an armistice rather than a peace treaty.

Moon would visit Pyongyang in “the fall”, the two leaders said, also agreeing to hold “regular meetings and direct telephone conversations”.

The so-called Panmunjom Declaration capped an extraordinary day unthinkable only months ago, as the nuclear-armed North carried out a series of missile launches and its sixth atomic blast.

Kim said he was “filled with emotion” after stepping over the concrete blocks into the South, making him the first North Korean leader to set foot there since the shooting stopped in the Korean War.

At Kim’s impromptu invitation the two men briefly crossed hand-in-hand into the North before walking to the Peace House building on the southern side of the truce village of Panmunjom for the summit — only the third of its kind since hostilities ceased in 1953.

“I came here determined to send a starting signal at the threshold of a new history,” said Kim.

After the summit, he pledged that the two Koreas will ensure they did not “repeat the unfortunate history in which past inter-Korea agreements … fizzled out after beginning”.

The two previous Korean summits in 2000 and 2007, both of them in Pyongyang, also ended with displays of affection and similar pledges, but the agreements ultimately came to naught.

With the North’s atomic arsenal high on the agenda, South Korean President Moon Jae-in responded that the North’s announced moratorium on nuclear testing and long-range missile launches was “very significant”.

It was the highest-level encounter yet in a whirlwind of nuclear diplomacy, and intended to pave the way for a much-anticipated encounter between Kim and US President Donald Trump. …

The White House said it hoped the summit would “achieve progress toward a future of peace and prosperity for the entire Korean Peninsula”.

Trump has demanded the North give up its weapons, and Washington is pressing for it to do so in a complete, verifiable and irreversible way. …

When Kim visited the North’s key backer Beijing last month in only his first foreign trip as leader, China’s state media cited him as saying that the issue could be resolved, as long as Seoul and Washington take “progressive and synchronous measures for the realization of peace”.

Our guess is that Xi summoned Kim to give him stern orders, but allowed the visit to seem simply a ceremonial state occasion, with smiling faces and displays of mutual respect. But Kim was given no choice.

Okay, it wasn’t just something President Trump said to Xi Jinping that prompted him to persuade Kim Jong-un to seek glory in promoting peace and reconciliation rather than threatening nuclear war.

President Trump was ably assisted by the laws of physics:

Also from Breitbart:

When North Korea performed its most recent nuclear weapon test on September 3 of last year at the Punggye-ri nuclear test site, seismologists outside North Korea detected an “earthquake” that followed the test itself. Concerns were expressed that the earthquake was actually a partial collapse of Mount Mantap, where the Punggye-ri site is located, and that nuclear radiation had been released. Unconfirmed reports later said that tunnel collapses had killed hundreds of North Korean workers. …

Chinese geologists [warned] North Korean nuclear scientists that further nuclear tests at Mount Mantap risked a nuclear catastrophe, if the mountain collapsed in an explosion, releasing large amounts of radiation that could contaminate large regions of North Korea and northeast China for decades to come.

Now, two groups of Chinese researchers – one from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in Hefei, and the second from the Jilin Earthquake Agency with the China Earthquake Administration in Changchun – have both reached similar conclusions: That Mount Mantap did in fact collapse after North Korea’s last nuclear weapons test on September 3 of last year.

Here’s the summary from China’s Earthquake Administration:

Seismology illuminates physical processes occurring during underground explosions, not all yet fully understood. The thus far strongest North Korean test of 3 September 2017 was followed by a moderate seismic event (mL 4.1) after 8.5 min. … North Korea detonated its strongest underground nuclear test in September 2017. It attracted the public interest worldwide not only due to its significant magnitude (6.3 mb) but also because it was followed 8.5 min later by a weaker event. Was the delayed shock a secondary explosion, an earthquake provoked by the shot, or something else? We answer these questions. … According to our model, the explosion created a cavity and a damaged “chimney” of rocks above it. The aftershock was neither a secondary explosion nor a triggered tectonic earthquake. It occurred due to a process comparable to a “mirror image” of the explosion, that is, a rock collapse, or compaction, for the first time documented in North Korea’s test site.

The USTC study is awaiting publication, but a summary says, “The occurrence of the collapse should deem the underground infrastructure beneath mountain Mantap not be used for any future nuclear tests.”

A Beijing-based analyst points out that another nuclear test at the site would destabilize not only Mount Mantap but also Changbai Mountain, the site of an active volcano at the China-Korea border. …

[So] North Korea promised [China in the first instance, presumably – ed] to end all nuclear and missile tests and shut down Punggye-ri, North Korea’s nuclear test site.

Shutting down the nuclear test site was particularly hailed by the international media that North Korea’s child dictator Kim Jong-un was turning into a nice guy, willing to compromise and all that. Now the laughable news emerges that the nuclear test site is being shut down because another test would risk a nuclear catastrophe, according to Chinese scientists. …

The collapse of Mantap Mountain represents a collapse of a major part of North Korea’s negotiating position.

With the approach of the forthcoming meeting between Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump, Trump has said repeatedly that he was demanding denuclearization – that the North destroy all its nuclear weapons. Kim had the threat of reopening the nuclear test site and performing more tests. But now that threat is gone, and even though the North can do further nuclear development, they can never be sure that their developments will work unless they test them.

And again from Breitbart:

President Donald Trump indicated he believed North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un was sincere about pushing for peace and announcing his interest in denuclearizing the Korean peninsula.

“No. I don’t think he’s playing,” Trump said, praising the progress made in the North and South Korea peace process so far. …

Trump said he understood skepticism about Jong-un’s intentions, pointing to the history of American presidents failing to deliver lasting peace in the region.

“Yeah I agree, the United States has been played beautifully like a fiddle, because you’ve had a different kind of a leader,” he said. “We’re not going to be played O.K.? We’re going to hopefully make a deal, if we don’t that’s fine.”

Trump also praised China’s President Xi Jinping, calling him “extremely helpful to me” on the ongoing negations.

“This isn’t like past administrations – we don’t play games,” Trump said.

And that is why, if the reunification of Korea and the denuclearization of North Korea does come about, it is President Trump who will deserve the world’s gratitude.

Update:

South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha credits President Trump for the progress being made. “Clearly credit goes to President Trump. He’s been determined to come to grips with this from day one,” Kyung-wha said.

Hell has frozen over, and a flight of pigs unprecedented in number is crossing and recrossing the skies over America. CNN – that polluted source of fake news, plain lies (so shameless they could be called “hillaries”), and simmering insurrection against President Trump’s government – has actually declared the truth that President Donald Trump could justly be called a “great president”.  

Thursday on CNN’s Outfront, host Erin Burnett acknowledged in the wake of the announcement President Donald Trump would meet with North Korea dictator Kim Jong Un that if Trump were to defuse the North Korea nuclear situation, he would go down as a “great president”.

Her actual words:

Just an extraordinary evening and, of course, opening the door to the big question — if President Trump could truly solve this problem, that would be going down as a great president. There is no way around that. That is the reality here.

We have esteemed him as a great president for some time now. In the post we link to, we quote an article at American Thinker by Karin McQuillan, in which she writes:

Thanks to his fearless and clear-sighted character, we finally have a president who will not allow North Korea or Iran to have nuclear weapons.  Those of us who see that this is vital for national security are deeply grateful … 

It remains to be seen if North Korea can be “denuclearized”. North Korea has made many promises and broken them all.

If anyone can make it happen, President Trump can.

Yesterday we wrote about the corruption of the leadership of the CIA.

Now here’s a summary of just some of the instances when the FBI failed the nation in recent years – under corrupt leadership. (James Comey’s leadership is not discussed, but a good brief overview of his failures and deceptions can be found here.)

Many murders were committed because the Left in power favored Islam.

Lloyd Billingsley writes at Front Page:

After Nikolas Cruz gunned down 17 people at Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, FBI special agent Robert Lasky, head of the bureau’s Miami division, said he “truly regrets” the pain caused by the FBI’s failure to act on a tip about the shooter.

The FBI said it had no way to trace the tip …

An obvious lie …

… then FBI boss Christopher Wray said the message was never passed on to the FBI’s Miami field office, as official protocol required. Relatives of the victims might have noted the passive verb construction. In typical style, Wray failed to name the person who never passed on the tip, and offered no explanation why that person might have done so.

Wray did say “we deeply regret the additional pain this causes all those affected by this horrific tragedy”. In response to that admission Florida governor Rick Scott called for Wray to resign. Across the country Americans could make a case that Wray and many others in the FBI deserved much sterner measures.

In 2013 Omar Mateen lost his job as security guard at Florida’s St. Lucie County courthouse. Mateen had made “inflammatory comments about women, Jews and the mass shooting at Ft. Hood.” The FBI twice questioned Mateen after he touted ties to terrorists, but FBI special agent Ronald Hopper told reporters “we were unable to verify the substance of his comments and the investigation was closed.” On June 12, 2016, Mateen gunned down 49 people and wounded 58 others at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando.

Mateen was born in the United States of Afghan parents but the Tsarnaev brothers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar, [Sufi] Muslims from the Caucuses region, entered the United States on tourist visas then claimed asylum. Russian intelligence warned the FBI the Tsarnaev brothers were dangerous but the FBI’s investigation found no links to terrorism.  On April 15, 2013, the brothers planted bombs at the Boston Marathon that killed three people and wounded at least 264.

In 2008, the FBI had picked up emails between U.S. Army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Hasan and Islamist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, a terrorist with ties to the 9/11 hijackers. In these emails, Hasan was asking for religious sanction to kill American soldiers. The FBI failed to interview Hasan or even make a phone call to his superiors, and no government agency took any steps to stop him. On November 5, 2009, at Fort Hood Texas, Hasan gunned down 13 unarmed American soldiers, including private Francheska Velez, 21, who was pregnant, and wounded more than 30 others.

Senator Joseph Lieberman sought to make the Hasan-Awlaki emails public but the FBI blocked their release, and military prosecutors forbade their presentation in the trial.

During those proceedings, reporters asked Robert Mueller, FBI boss from 2001-2013, if the bureau had dropped the ball by failing to act. “No,” Mueller responded, “I think, given the context of the discussions and the situation that the agents and the analysts were looking at, they took appropriate steps.” No word about any “regrets,” deep or otherwise, about Hasan’s victims.

For POTUS 44 [Obama], the Fort Hood attack was not terrorism or even “gun violence”. The mass murder was “workplace violence” and Mueller had no problem with that. POTUS 44, who as Barry Soetoro attended a Muslim school in Indonesia, proclaimed that the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam. He also ordered that the FBI must not consider any links between Islam and terrorist attacks against the United States.

Mueller duly purged hundreds of counter-terrorism training materials of any hint that Islamic terrorists might pose a security problem. CAIR boss Nihad Awad thanked Mueller for his “pledge” to review FBI counterterrorism training.  So Mueller slavishly put political correctness above the safety of the American people, and that doubtless explains why the FBI looked the other way as the Tsarnaevs, Omar Mateen and others plotted their deadly actions.

Mueller’s politically correct compliance also explains why deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, who has problems of his own, tapped the former FBI boss to head up the Russia investigation. Mueller duly bulked up his team with big-time Clinton supporters but his probe has turned up no collusion with the Trump campaign, as the 2016 presidential loser and her media fan club charged.

If Mueller wants to show some integrity, he should shut down the probe immediately.

But where would he suddenly get integrity from?

The former FBI boss’s preference for politics over safety, abetted by incompetence, has trickled down into similar inaction against walking red flags such as Nikolas Cruz. After his mass shooting Christopher Wray admitted the FBI failed and expressed deep regrets. President Trump and Congress need to lean on this guy more than a little bit.

Peter Strzok worked three shifts exonerating Hillary Clinton and framing Donald Trump. That doesn’t sound much like the job description of the FBI’s chief of counterintelligence. So why is this partisan bigot still employed by the FBI in any capacity?

Who are the FBI agents, and their bosses, who looked the other way in the Fort Hood, Boston Marathon and Orlando terrorist attacks? What, exactly, are they doing now?

Answer: Continuing to work hard at undermining the Donald Trump presidency. Is there any reasonable doubt about it?

Q: How many of these statements are true?

1.You are Hispanic and in the US illegally, so you need protection from law-enforcement.

2.You are an American with black African ancestry, so you are oppressed, and you cannot compete academically or in business without special allowances being made for you.

3.You are Chinese or Japanese, so you are too smart academically and would get all the available places at the top universities if you were allowed to, so you need to be handicapped.

4.You are Jewish, so you are pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian, and deserve contempt and exclusion.

5.You are Muslim, so you need asylum and are subjected to irrational prejudice, and ignorantly held responsible for Muslim terrorists who misunderstand your religion.

6.You are a woman, so you are oppressed.

7.You are a white man, so you are an oppressor and the the arch-villain of history, and ought frequently and publicly to declare and demonstrate that you are ashamed of yourself for being both (a) white and (b) male.

8.You are LGBQT…, so you are oppressed.

9.You are rich and fail to deplore capitalism, so you are greedy, selfish, and have no heart.

10.You are a Leftist, so you believe all the above.

A:Only number 10.

Yes, we are putting it all too bluntly. Without “nuance”. But the Left is in no position to complain about that.

The ideologues of the Left would deal with you not as an individual but according to your “race”, “gender identity”, and political opinions. The Left is communist, so by definition collectivist,  against individualism. Their tediously repeated claim to be for “inclusion and diversity” is one of their many hypocrisies, their glib, orthodox, platitudinous lies.

They do their utmost to exclude opinions they don’t like from academic and public forums; they insist upon a uniformity of expressed opinion.

David Horowitz writes:

In January, when negotiations over the fate of 800,000 DACA recipients broke down, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) blamed the impasse on the alleged racism of President Trump and his senior advisers.

“Last night the president put forth a plan,” Pelosi told the U.S. Conference of Mayors. “Let me just say what I said last night, that plan is a campaign to make America white again.” This was not only an obvious lie, but a spectacularly brazen one, since Trump’s announced plan would provide a path to citizenship not only for the illegal aliens who had benefited from President Obama’s constitutionally suspect Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, all of whom are nonwhite, but for a million additional illegals, mainly from Latin America, who are also mainly nonwhite. Trump’s general immigration plan seeks to move to a merit-based system, which would give priority to immigrants who can contribute needed skills to the country and would have a reasonable chance of success once they arrived. Giving priority to English speakers would enhance the ability of new arrivals to assimilate and succeed. To oppose such a plan on the grounds Pelosi does, one would have to believe that nonwhite immigrants don’t have skills or don’t speak English. Anti-Trump reporter Jim Acosta made the latter insinuation on CNN. He said Trump wanted only immigrants from majority-white countries like “England and Australia”.  In fact, English is the official language in more than 57 countries, including such nonwhite countries as Zimbabwe, Uganda, and Botswana, as well as Caribbean nations like Jamaica and Guyana.

Pelosi’s malicious accusation was even more disconnected from reality, since Trump has never proposed excluding or expelling populations based on race, which would be the only way to “make America white again” (whatever that might mean). Yet this denial of obvious facts in order to gin up a racial indictment of what otherwise would be seen as patriotic policies has become the ever-present theme of the Democrats’ attacks on Trump’s presidency. These attacks began with his first statement on immigration during the opening presidential primary debate. At that time, speaking specifically of people crossing the border illegally, Trump said, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best . . . . They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with [them]. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

This warning, however factual its basis, was ineptly put by a novice politician …

We strongly agree with most of all that, but disagree here. How else ought it to be put?

… but its meaning was clear to any fair-minded listener. When millions of people invade a country in defiance of its laws and without passing through a vetting and citizenship process, that is a threat to the nation and its citizens — regardless of the color or origin of the perpetrators. Yet this otherwise reasonable concern was immediately turned by Trump’s opponents into an alleged attack on Mexicans for being Mexican, and more pointedly on “people of color” for being different — both blatant lies.

After Trump’s election, Democrats adopted the same strategy in their “resistance” to his presidential executive order temporarily suspending travel from six terrorist states. The express purpose of the order was to provide time for a proper vetting system to be put in place to protect American citizens. The Democrats’ unscrupulous campaign to frame this policy as “anti-Muslim” and “anti-minority” included suborning left-wing appeals courts to ignore the president’s clear constitutional authority, and instead invoke his off-the-cuff campaign remarks to make the case that the order was racially biased. …

There is no evidence that President Trump is “anti-minority”. We would wish him to be “anti-Muslim”. Not to discriminate against individuals, but to keep the appalling ideology of Islam – supremacist, totalitarian, homophobic, misogynist, murderous, aggressive, and savagely cruel – out of the United States as much as possible.

The inevitable consequence of using a blanket standard like race to evaluate immigration policy is to eliminate any possibility of designing a policy that is rational or that protects the nation’s sovereignty. It also eliminates the possibility of designing a policy that serves the national interest, since America is built on the idea of individual accountability and individual freedom.

Balkanizing its community into races and ethnicities renders individuals and their characteristics invisible or secondary at best. If race is the trump card, factors like the possession of skills, adherence to the law, economic viability, language compatibility, and allegiance to the constitutional founding, are rendered irrelevant in selecting new citizens, and thus in preserving the factors that have made America what is today.

The Democrats’ support for “sanctuary cities” and “sanctuary states” is the summary statement of this race-based attitude towards would-be citizens. It prevents consideration of even the most basic question of how large an influx of individuals the nation can absorb and support, while maintaining its culture of individual accountability and freedom. For progressives, the number of individuals coming into this country and their actual behaviors are irrelevant; all that matters is their ethnicity and race — and potential for voting left in future elections. These collectivities override the fundamental consideration of the law, and thus of the entire democratic enterprise.

The attacks by Democrats and leftists on federal law, on national borders, and on the idea of assimilation into an American culture can only be understood as attacks on the nation itself. Members of the Democrats’ “resistance” employ loaded phrases like “white supremacy” and “white nationalism” in referring to the White House and the supporters of secure borders and a rational immigration policy. The clear meaning of this abuse of language is that, in the eyes of the left, an American patriotism is illegitimate; American patriotism is equivalent to “white nationalism” and is racist.

The racial politics of the Left is part of a larger spectrum of “identity politics”, which has been embraced by the Democratic Party and is better understood as “cultural Marxism”. Cultural Marxists divide the population into racial, ethnic and gender groups and arrange them in a hierarchy of alleged oppression. This perverse and divisive view of American society was, in fact, the organizing principle of Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential campaign, which justified her candidacy as ending the alleged inequality of women and the mythical wage-gender pay gap. Her opponents, she said, belonged in a “basket of deplorables”,  which she identified as “racists, sexists, homophobes, Islamophobes, xenophobes — you name it”.

Following her defeat, her Democratic supporters formed #TheResistance to the incoming president, whom they denounced as a white nationalist, sexist, anti-Muslim racist. A “resistance” is hardly an appropriate posture for an opposition party in a democracy, where compromise and tolerance are foundational values. This war declared on the Trump presidency was launched with a Women’s March, billed as the largest protest ever, which presented itself as a movement to defend “oppressed” groups against the incoming “white supremacist” administration that Americans had just elected.

The Women’s March was headed by Linda Sarsour, an advocate of Islam’s misogynistic Sharia law and a vocal supporter of Islamist holy war … Sarsour told the assembled marchers, “I also remember that I live in a country that was founded on the extermination of indigenous people.” This was a declaration of hate for America, approved by the protesters and typical of their speakers. It was also a libel — the perfect expression of the Left’s oppressive chain of being, in which whites, males, heterosexuals and patriotic Americans are framed as genocidal enemies of “social justice” and human progress. It was a lie equal in brazenness to Pelosi’s claim that Trump’s agenda was to make America white again. There are, in fact, more “native Americans” alive today than there were when the first European settlers arrived. It never was, nor has been, the policy of the United States to exterminate indigenous people or any racial or ethnic group.

The ideological miasma that has overcome the Democratic Party and the Left, was crystallized in Hillary Clinton’s claim that “sexism” rather than her own incompetence, corrupt history, and inept campaign was responsible for her defeat. “Sexism” is a bastardized term that was coined by 1960s-era radicals in a calculated attempt to appropriate the moral authority of the civil rights movement through a false association with “racism”. Only a perverse reading of history and the social relations between the sexes could lead to this absurd attempt to link the treatment of African Americans and women. But for radicals, the conflation of the two is essential to their Marxist view of the world as a hierarchy of oppressors and oppressed, of America as the great Satan on the hierarchy’s crest. …

[This view] can criminalize merely boorish and inappropriate behaviors and invoke punishments that can be quite severe. In the hysterical atmosphere created by the #MeToo movement — a by-product of the Women’s March and the “movement” that produced it — mere accusations become tantamount to guilt with chilling results, and ominous implications for a country built on “due process,” and the defense of individual rights. …

This ideological framework — abstract and collectivist — eliminates individual nuance and distinction. … What is important is no longer the particulars of [individual] cases, or the character of the individuals involved, but their collective identity  — as white oppressor males — and the collective identity of their alleged victims, oppressed women. …

While democracy and individual freedoms still prevail in America, the injustices perpetrated by these totalitarian ideas, which have caused so much misery in modern times, will be limited. But the totalitarian march has already resulted in a kind of civil war in our political life, although such violence as exists has been mainly verbal. But consider what happened when there were no democratic restraints and these ideas became the reigning ideology of a Marxist state in 1917: “We are not carrying out war against individuals,” explained a member of Lenin’s secret police about his government’s campaign against the kulaks, or land-owning peasants. “We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. We are not looking for evidence or witnesses to reveal deeds or words against the Soviet power. The first question we ask is — to what class does he belong, what are his origins, upbringing, education or profession? These questions define the fate of the accused. This is the essence of the Red Terror.”

Similar questions have already defined the fate of the accused in our country, and the frequency of such incidents should be a warning. Thankfully, despite the disturbing influence of identity politics in our schools, in the Democratic Party, and among growing number of political actors, we are still far away from a Red Terror. But as Ronald Reagan famously warned:

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.

The erosion of individual freedom and individual rights, and of the idea of individual agency and accountability, is well advanced. The policies of the Democratic Party on immigration, race, women and a host of critical issues are now shaped by a collectivist, identity politics mentality. We cannot be certain where this will lead, and we should be alarmed that it has gotten so far.

The article is worth reading in full. It can be found here.