RUTHFULLY YOURS

Unprecedented social and political conflict was laid bare in 2017, the likes of which have seldom been seen before. Our American social fabric is in tatters. We are looking less enlightened and more divided than at any time since the Civil War. Progressives on both seaboards are in a battle for political supremacy over old-school thinkers. Boundaries are analogous to a resurrection of the Mason-Dixon line, except it’s now the East and West Coasts versus the rest of America. Comparing more recent history, we look even less unified than we did in the 1960s – which says something painful about our current political climate. What’s it all about?

It’s about cognitive dissonance and the hatred of one prominent man: our courageous president, Donald Trump. Because of a startling election victory and the president’s penchant for keeping promises, hideous lies, innuendo, and insults fly from liberal and conservative mouths alike. Mainly powered by vitriolic progressive henchmen, this election was largely misunderstood by the over-privileged and their cronies. Zero tolerance for opposing opinions has been widespread. Meanwhile, the world laughs at the comedic chasing down of an imaginary Russian menace.

As parents, we have sacrificed to put our young people through college and graduate school only to have them emerge with damaged attitudes and socialist beliefs. Some poorly advised students unwisely shouldered huge college loans. When they failed to make good on their promissory notes in a fashion commensurate with their earning power, they believed that society should rescue them from their irresponsible choices. Bernie lost the primary, their socialist ideals crumbled, and they turned to his opponent for consolation.

In the previous century, American citizens would have graciously accepted the election results and moved on with their lives. Instead of raucous protest, they went back to raising their children and quietly making positive changes within their communities. Generally, only a few kooks dove off the deep end to lead marches against the establishment. In bygone days, none acted out like the maniacal banshees currently screaming at the heavens over their lost election. This achieves nothing, but it demonstrates how foolishly self-involved they are in their attempts to derail this president.

A new spin-off from the #MeToo Movement, which brought awareness to sexual harassment allegations in the workplace, reveals once again how feminism today isn’t pro-woman or pro-justice; it’s anti-man at the core and seeks power, not equality under the law.

The “Time’s Up” campaign was created by Hollywood actresses who want to expand their fight against “systemic sexual harassment” in the entertainment industry to “blue-collar workplaces nationwide.”

Thousands of actresses and industry insiders have been meeting since the fall to promote solidarity among women and bring about change in the workforce through the following initiatives, as reported in The New York Times:

— A legal defense fund, backed by $13 million in donations, to help less privileged women — like janitors, nurses and workers at farms, factories, restaurants and hotels — protect themselves from sexual misconduct and the fallout from reporting it.

— Legislation to penalize companies that tolerate persistent harassment, and to discourage the use of nondisclosure agreements to silence victims.

— A drive to reach gender parity at studios and talent agencies that has already begun making headway.

— And a request that women walking the red carpet at the Golden Globes speak out and raise awareness by wearing black.

“Now, unlike ever before, our access to the media and to important decision makers has the potential of leading to real accountability and consequences,” the Time’s Up campaign states. “We want all survivors of sexual harassment, everywhere, to be heard, to be believed, and to know that accountability is possible.”

To every woman employed in agriculture who has had to fend off unwanted sexual advances from her boss, every housekeeper who has tried to escape an assaultive guest, every janitor trapped nightly in a building with a predatory supervisor, every waitress grabbed by a customer and expected to take it with a smile, every garment and factory worker forced to trade sexual acts for more shifts, every domestic worker or home health aide forcibly touched by a client, every immigrant woman silenced by the threat of her undocumented status being reported in retaliation for speaking up and to women in every industry who are subjected to indignities and offensive behavior that they are expected to tolerate in order to make a living: We stand with you. We support you.

Acceptance has morphed into transphilia: the culture is pushing it as cool or trendy.
A recent study of adolescents in the state of California by researchers at UCLA found that an eyebrow-raising percentage now identify as “nongender conforming.”

“We found that 27 percent of youths age 12 to 17 in California, or about 796,000, are GNC,” the study stated.

The study grouped the kids into three definitions: “gender conforming,” “androgynous,” or “highly nongender conforming.” They found that 20.8 percent were categorized as “androgynous,” and an additional 6.2 percent as “highly nongender conforming.”

This is a huge number that does not align with any prior studies, such as the 4.1 percent of the population of the country that Gallup found identify as LGBT — and only a fraction of that 4.1 percent were “T.”

How could the UCLA researchers possibly come up with such a result? Could one state have such a disproportionate percentage of the nongender conforming population? Further, could a massive percentage of that population happen to be kids aged 12-17?

Sorry, I’m not buying that. So what gives? CONTINUE AT SITE

The Trump administration’s recently unveiled National Security Strategy is an excellent and overdue statement of intent. But unless it is ruthlessly prioritized, political and budgetary realities will make it little more than a wish list. And in regard to nuclear weapons, it hardly departs from the insufficient Obama -era policy of replacing old equipment rather than modifying each element of the nuclear triad to meet new challenges.

National survival depends on many factors: the economy, civil peace, constitutional fidelity, education, research, and military strength across the board. Each has a different timeline and resiliency. Nuclear forces, on the other hand, may have a catastrophically short timeline combined with by far the greatest immediate effect.

Alone of all crucial elements, the failure of America’s nuclear deterrent is capable of bringing instant destruction or unavoidable subjugation, as the deterrent’s unarrested decline will lead to either the opportunity for an enemy first strike or the surrender of the U.S. on every foreign front and eventually at home.

Believers in total nuclear abolition fail to recognize that if they are successful, covert possession of just a score of warheads could mean world mastery. And though they, like everyone else, are routinely deterred (from telling off the boss or driving against the flow of traffic), they fail to extend their understanding to nuclear deterrence. They seem as well not to grasp that whereas numerical reduction from tens of thousands of warheads would reduce the chances of accident, below a certain point it would tempt an aggressor by elevating the potential of a successful first strike. Nor do they allow that Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran—which have through their conduct of war and in suppressing their populations callously sacrificed more than 100 million of their own people—subscribe to permissive nuclear doctrines and thresholds radically different from our own.

The Obama administration understood nuclear rejuvenation to mean merely updating old systems rather than changing the architecture of the deterrent to match Russia’s and China’s programs, as well as advances in technology. Given that short of abject surrender the sole means of preventing nuclear war is maintaining the potential to inflict unacceptable damage upon an enemy and/or shield one’s country from such damage, what are our resources, and against what are they arrayed?

The “nuclear triad” commonly referred to is rather a pentad, its land, air, and sea legs joined by missile defense and the survivability of national infrastructure. America’s land leg comprises static, silo-based missiles, which (other than in the potentially catastrophic launch-on-warning posture) are vulnerable not only to nuclear strike, but, with soon-to-come millimeter accuracy, even to conventional warheads. Russia, China, and North Korea have road-mobile missiles (and Russia, additional rail-based ones), making their land legs more survivable and in the case of tunnel systems—of which we have none and China has 3,000 miles—unaddressable and uncountable.

The U.S. air leg consists of ancient bombers and outdated standoff cruise missiles, both vulnerable to Russian and Chinese air defense, along with only 20 penetrating bombers, the B-2. To boot, the planes are concentrated on only a handful of insufficiently hardened bases.

Our sea-based nuclear force, the least-vulnerable leg, for many years included 41 ballistic-missile submarines, SSBNs. These dwindled to 18, then 14, and, with the new Columbia class set to enter service beginning only in 2031, a planned 12. A maximum of six at sea at any one time will face 100 Russian and Chinese hunter-killer subs. At the same time, the oceans are surrendering their opacity to space surveillance and Russian nonacoustic tracking. Even a deeply running sub disturbs the chemical and sea-life balance in ways that via upwelling leave a track upon the surface.

Russia is moving to 13 SSBNs with high-capacity missiles that carry many maneuverable warheads; China, with 4 SSBNs, is only beginning to build. A possible new dimension is Russia’s announced, but as yet unseen, autonomous stealth undersea nuclear vehicle, capable of targeting the high percentage of U.S. population, industry, and infrastructure on the coasts. We have no such weapon and Russia presents no similar vulnerability.

American ballistic-missile defense is severely underdeveloped due to ideological opposition and the misunderstanding of its purpose, which is to protect population and infrastructure as much as possible but, because many warheads will get through, primarily to shield retaliatory capacity so as to make a successful enemy first strike impossible—thus increasing stability rather than decreasing it, as its critics wrongly believe. Starved of money and innovation, missile defense has been confined to midcourse interception, when boost-phase and terminal intercept are also needed. Merely intending this without sufficient funding is useless. As for national resilience, the U.S. long ago gave up any form of civil defense, while Russia and China have not. This reinforces their ideas of nuclear utility, weakens our deterrence, and makes the nuclear calculus that much more unstable. CONTINUE AT SITE

Let’s see. The Clinton campaign hires Fusion GPS, an opposition research firm, to investigate the Trump campaign. Fusion hires a former British spy, Christopher Steele, who produces a dossier based on Russian sources full of rumor, hearsay and an occasional fact to allege collusion between the Kremlin and Trump campaign. The dossier gets to the FBI, which uses it to justify opening a counterintelligence probe of the Trump campaign, perhaps including a judicial warrant to spy on Trump officials. Then Fusion has Mr. Steele privately brief select media reporters, ensuring that the dossier’s contents become public before the election.

And now Fusion GPS complains about being a victim? Only in Washington, folks.
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That’s the sob story spun by Fusion GPS founders Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch Wednesday in a New York Times op-ed that matches the Steele dossier for disinformation. The Fusion duo portray themselves as valiantly working to “highlight Mr. Trump’s Russia ties” by providing the FBI with “intelligence reports” that corroborated “credible allegations of collusion between the Trump camp and Russia.”

For exercising their “right under the First Amendment,” Fusion laments that it has been subject to Congressional harassment and a “succession of mendacious conspiracy theories,” including by us. Oh my.
Glenn R. Simpson, co-founder of the research firm Fusion GPS, arrives for a scheduled appearance before a closed House Intelligence Committee hearing on Capitol Hill, Nov. 14, 2017. Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Associated Press

Fusion is talented at producing dirt for hire, including for Russians to smear human-rights activist Bill Browder. The problem is the veracity of its work, and the cofounders don’t name a single example in their op-ed of something that proves the dossier’s claim of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Eighteen months after the dossier hit Washington, the FBI, special counsel Robert Mueller and Congress have also offered no public validation of its collusion allegations.

The Fusion boys pat themselves on the back for “having handed over our relevant bank records,” but the firm stonewalled Congressional committees for most of 2017, refusing to divulge the names of its clients (the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee) and even suing to prevent access to its bank records. In court documents, Fusion has also admitted to paying journalists during the election, though it refuses to disclose the names, amounts or purposes of the payments.

President Donald Trump’s public divorce from his former chief strategist Steve Bannon on Wednesday was everything one would expect from the demise of such a combustible duo: explosive, damning and suffused with intrigue.

After Bannon was quoted in a forthcoming book suggesting Trump’s family members and campaign chairman Paul Manafort acted in a “treasonous” or “unpatriotic” matter by holding a Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer during the campaign, the president fired back in an acerbic four-paragraph statement, saying Bannon had “lost his mind.”

The question now for the political provocateur who is Trump’s former campaign chairman and the current head of Breitbart News: Has he lost his clout?

“There are people who are ideological allies,” a White House staffer says when asked about Bannon’s future. “But in terms of actual allies, no. This was the final straw. Bannon just ended whatever was left of his relationship with the president.”

Bannon’s reputation was bruised following last month’s special Senate election in Alabama, in which he antagonized the Republican Party by doggedly backing Roy Moore despite disturbing accusations of sexual harassment and assault lodged against the candidate. Moore lost what was once considered an unloseable race to Democrat Doug Jones, who was sworn in Wednesday, capping an outcome Trump blamed on Bannon.

Despite his blatant miscalculation and the animosity he stirred among traditional Republicans, Bannon’s enduring influence was that he purportedly had a direct line to Trump – the White House confirmed they spoke by phone last month – and could help mold the president’s thoughts on policy and political strategy.

Now, that line appears lacerated.

My weekend column argued that the Democrats and the media are scrambling to pull together a new origination account of the Trump-Russia collusion narrative. The original origination account has become a political liability because it centered on Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser who featured prominently in the so-called Steele dossier. The dossier, a compilation of Russia-sourced reports authored by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, is now known to have been a Clinton campaign-funded opposition-research project. Though its key allegations seem never to have been verified by the FBI, the dossier was apparently used by the Obama Justice Department in applying to the FISA court for a surveillance warrant targeting Page as a Russian agent enmeshed in a corrupt plot against the 2016 election.

On cue, the Times has now published a defensive op-ed by the two founders of Fusion GPS, the research firm that produced the Steele dossier. What is most striking about this offering by Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch is what it studiously avoids addressing: the specific allegations in the dossier.

Simpson and Fritsch, former Wall Street Journal reporters, decry “the Republicans’ fake investigations” of the Obama Justice Department’s use of the dossier. Indeed, they lead with the obligatory Watergate comparison to Republicans seeking to protect Richard Nixon — notwithstanding that a more apt comparison would be to the Nixon administration’s efforts to use intelligence agencies to spy on political adversaries. Yet, while the authors attest to the sterling reputation of Steele, they elide any mention of his claims — i.e., of the sensational allegations of a traitorous conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin that Fusion GPS, while working for the Clinton campaign, generated and tried mightily to publicize through the Clinton-friendly media.

Instead, Simpson and Fritsch erect a strawman: What their work has really been about, they now say, is “decipher[ing] Mr. Trump’s complex business past.” This includes scrutinizing financial ties between Trump’s business conglomerate and Russian interests. It is from this effort that Republicans and other Obama administration critics are supposedly trying to deflect attention.