RUTHFULLY YOURS

Freedom of Assembly is the first and most important right of the Bill of Rights. Today it is being denied in cities like Berkeley and Portland where local left-wing governments have contrived to deny rally permits while giving the masked thugs of their leftist Antifa allies a blank check to assault those whose views they oppose.

In Berkley, Boston and San Francisco, the First Amendment doesn’t exist anymore.

The threat of violence that shut down the Patriot Prayer demonstration in San Francisco, an event scheduled to feature African American, Samoan and Latino speakers, is a case of fascism justifying itself by flying the false flag of “anti-fascism.” And it is the third such case this week – the others being Boston and Berkeley. The founder of Patriot Prayer, Joey Gibson, is a Japanese American who regards himself as a “person of color” and who had made it very clear that he opposes Neo-Nazis and white supremacists, and who has publicly stated that his goal is to promote “love” not hate.

This time the violence and hate were coming from one side, and one side only.

Gibson’s attempt to hold a demonstration to end hate was torpedoed by Nancy Pelosi and Mayor David Lee who falsely claimed that it was a proposed gathering of “white supremacists.” Pelosi insisted that Patriot Prayer should not be allowed a permit for Crissy Field in San Francisco. “The Constitution does not say that a person can yell ‘wolf’ in a crowded theater,” she insisted. But the only people crying wolf were Pelosi and the leftist thugs who caused it to be shut down.

In Berkeley, authorities denied free speech advocates a permit, and did little to prevent the leftist violence that broke out against a handful of individuals who showed up after the organizers had called it off.

James Queally, the crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times, tweeted, “There is a complete mob mentality here. People are randomly accusing random people of being Nazis.” Another Tweet added, “The moderate counter protesters are livid with the violence. ‘We need to get Antifa out of here.’ said man who helped break up fight.’”

The authorities are not going to do it. The choice is simple. Either we have a First Amendment. Or we don’t. If mobs of violent leftists with the complicity of leftist authorities can shut down any protest or speaker they don’t like, then we no longer have a Bill of Rights. All that’s left is leftist tyranny.

In the sixties, Governor Reagan sent in the National Guard to stop the violence at Berkeley. Governor Brown won’t do it. It’s up to President Trump to act.

And there’s precedent.

Mob rule will not be tolerated.

That was the message that President Eisenhower delivered to Americans in the fall of ’57 when he returned to the White House and ordered the deployment of the 101st Airborne to Little Rock, Arkansas.

The Governor of Arkansas, a progressive Democrat who was a product of the radical leftist Commonwealth College, had allowed a racist mob to rampage at Central High School in Little Rock.

Eisenhower warned that “disorderly mobs” operating “under the leadership of demagogic extremists” would not be allowed to terrorize citizens with the complicity of local authorities. He showed that the President of the United States was willing to protect civil rights with armed force.

“The only assurance I can give you is that the Federal Constitution will be upheld by me by every legal means at my command,” Eisenhower vowed.

And that’s what he did.

California, under Democrat rule, has become a rogue state ruled by leftist mobs and their political godfathers, where there are a million regulations, but no rule of law, where there is a code for everything, but where the Constitution no longer operates.

Antifa is a criminal terrorist organization. Its masked thugs know they are criminals which is why they hide their identities. The first responsibility of government is the safety of its citizens. When violent thugs shut down free assemblies, government is not doing its job.

Reagan and Eisenhower made it clear that mob violence would not be tolerated. And they were willing to back up the Constitution and our political freedoms with force.

That’s what must be done to restore First Amendment rights in Berkeley everywhere Antifa mobs seek to shut down the free speech of those they disagree with. If leftist governors and mayors won’t protect the rights and safety of their citizens, then it’s up to the federal government to step in and do it for them.

Friday marked Sebastian Gorka’s last day at the White House. Democrats, progressives, and even many Republicans cheered. The Federalist published his resignation letter, although anonymous White House officials told the New York Times and Washington Post that he had been fired. The truth might lie in the middle: Chief of Staff John Kelly’s reported decision to withdraw Gorka’s clearance led Gorka to resign. Alas, few if any reporters were self-aware enough to recognize the cognitive dissonance: How could they have reported for months that Gorka lacked a clearance when, indeed, he had one all along?

Regardless, there was no shortage of criticism about Gorka. These centered on three broad themes:

Gorka was a right-wing extremist with ties to Neo-Nazi groups.

Gorka was not a real terrorism expert.

Gorka appeared on television too much.

Consider them in order:

First, the accusation that Gorka was a sympathizer with violent, fascist, Nazi-sympathizing groups in Hungary began when a left-wing blogger suggested that he wore a Vitezi Rend medal to the inaugural ball and that its display suggested ideological sympathy with neo-Nazis. Gorka responded to the accusation here. That the same blogger had earlier left the Center for American Progress under a cloud after Obama White House officials expressed concern at his and his colleagues’ use of anti-Semitic dog whistles in targeting Jewish policymakers, again, was an irony lost on those who seized upon the story uncritically.

The story grew when The Forward, a Jewish website and publication with socialist roots, purported to uncover a video affirming Gorka’s support for a Hungarian party subsequently accused of anti-Semitism. It subsequently emerged, however, that The Forward spliced the video to omit key portions in which Gorka warned against anti-Semitism or its flirting with anti-Semitic groups.

Here’s the key point: While many progressives and opponents of the regime accept with certainty that Gorka is a Nazi, a white nationalist, or an extremist, they have not been able to find a single statement or essay by Gorka or account of his speeches or comments supporting such positions. Given the volume of his previous writing, that should have been a red flag. The Nazi accusation is about as logical as concluding that a picture of Gorka absent his glasses represents a secret endorsement of the Khmer Rouge.

The situation gets worse: Three Democratic senators — Richard Blumenthal, Dick Durban, and Ben Cardin — have seized upon the calumny to suggest the Justice Department consider whether Gorka should have his citizenship revoked.

This sets a dangerous precedent. Politics in Washington are poisonous, with extremists on both sides of debates losing civility and seeking to criminalize policy debate. Donald Trump was guilty of that as a candidate, and Mike Flynn’s “lock her up” chants at the Republican National Convention were cringe-worthy, but threats to strip citizenship are a new low. Given the poison of dual loyalty accusations made by anti-Semites against Jews serving in public capacities, it is especially disturbing to hear Jewish-American senators seeming to use similar cards of insufficient loyalty to the United States against political opponents.

Second, what about the idea that Gorka was a non-expert? Long before Trump’s surprise rise to the presidency, I had the privilege of hearing Gorka lecture at the Marshall Center in Garmisch, Germany; to the FBI; at the U.S. Marine Corps University; and to U.S. Special Forces at Fort Bragg. To suggest that he was unknown is simply dishonest. Indeed, his lectures tended to receive rave reviews.

Here’s what many proponents of the ‘amateur’ argument miss: The same charges many critics level at Gorka could just as easily apply to any other counter-terror specialist. Daniel Benjamin, who served as counterterrorism coordinator at the State Department during the Obama administration and worked on counter-terrorism during the Clinton administration at the National Security Council, got his start as a Time Magazine reporter. Francis Townsend, whom Condoleezza Rice picked as her terrorism advisor, got her start as a prosecutor focusing on organized crime.

Many of the academics who criticized Gorka as out of his depth at certain academic conferences would have or have had their theories ridiculed by practitioners such as the FBI and U.S Special Forces as out of touch with reality. There is also a touch of jealousy: Gorka has a New York Times best-selling book; they did not.

Tu quoque is a classical Latin term for “you too.”

It is sometimes considered a logical fallacy: you do not defend your position, but instead point to someone else’s that is worse—in the fashion of a guilty child seeking to avoid parental discipline by claiming his unpunished brother “did it worse.”

But in truth tu quoque is a legitimate argument—if one both defends his position and also points out the hypocrisy of his inconsistent accuser.

Take Trump.

Over the last two weeks, Trump, the messenger, may have tweeted a few silly things (the recycled John J. Pershing pig-fat bullet tweet) and was considered slow in appreciating the political atmospherics of the rioting and violence in Virginia and North Carolina.

Are his supporters therefore supposed to abandon Trump as the hysterical media demands? Hardly. Here are six reasons why not.

1) Presidential Caring
Presidential morality is not quite an Old Testament open and shut case. In politics it is defined by paradox, irony, and unintended consequences.

Jimmy Carter, despite his smugness, was a more classically moral man (marital fidelity, usually speaking the truth, financial incorruptibility) than was Bill Clinton—a rogue, liar, serial adulterer, grifter, and utterly corrupt. (By the same token, Herbert Hoover’s private life was saintly compared to FDR’s).

But one does not have to be a Clinton enabler or apologist to concede that Clinton’s sometimes centrist tenure did more good for the country than did Carter’s legacy of sanctimonious incompetence, naiveté, and self-righteous stupidity. Who then was the more ethical in helping more Americans?

We can accept that pious Mitt Romney was a more moral person than is Donald Trump. But Romney would likely by now have offered calibrated amnesty, stayed in the disastrous Paris climate accords, and not moved so swiftly against unfair trade, even as he spoke compassionately, soberly, and professionally.

Trump’s immigration reforms will eventually benefit the underclasses in a way a President John McCain would never have considered. Trump, for all his character flaws, cared about the lost middle classes in a manner his much more careful and judicious Republican primary rivals did not.

Trump’s third-way paradigm may seem like rank opportunism from a political chameleon, but its practical effects were a moral and ethical concern for those heretofore assumed to be losers of their own making, a struggle working class lacking the panache of the wealthy and romanticism of the distant poor.

2) The Coach is Not the Team
A president, it is true, is the iconic head of a nation. But it is his administration, not the chief executive per se, that changes the country. The nation did not just vote for Barack Obama alone, but—knowingly or not—also for the likes of Eric Holder, Ben Rhodes, Loretta Lynch, Samantha Power, John Brennan, James Clapper, Sonya Sotomayor, and Susan Rice. Obama’s picks were predictably progressive, Trump’s were unpredictably conservative and far more competent.

The administration and its agenda is not Donald J. Trump’s alone. It includes appointees such as Neil Gorsuch, Nikki Haley, John Kelly, James Mattis, H. R. McMaster, Rick Perry, Mike Pompeo, Tom Price, Scott Pruitt, Ryan Zinke, and dozens of others. While Trump tweets broadsides against his nemeses, the Trump Administration is undoing eight years of progressivism in a way it is hard to imagine other Republican presidents might have attempted.

In the first eight months of the Trump administration, the economy is improving, people are more confident about their economic futures, the country is becoming safer abroad with a renewed sense of deterrence, and the government is not seen as the enemy, but the enabler, of commerce. There is a certain moral quality in all that.

3) Progressives Are Not Democrats
The political opposition to Trump is not the Democratic Party of Harry Truman or JFK—or even that of George McGovern, Walter Mondale, or Bill Clinton.

Rather the alternative is now a harder-core, progressive movement led by Keith Ellison, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, Tom Perez, and Elizabeth Warren that cannot register even slight discomfort with the extremist rhetoric of kindred leftist Black Lives Matter or Antifa thuggery in the streets. In their view, the explanation for the past eight years of Obama’s economic stagnation, loss of deterrence abroad, and redistribution is that Obama did not go far left enough.

Thus under their progressive leadership, the transformation to European socialism would have been nearly completed. Think of an IRS of Lois Lerners, a Justice Department of Eric Holders and Loretta Lynches, an EPA of Al Gore clones, a Supreme Court of Sonya Sotomayors, and a State Department of John Kerrys—cubed.

To avoid that, millions of Americans are quite willing to “call balls and strikes”—the much caricatured tactic of supporting Trump’s agendas, but calling him out when his impulses, inexperience, and ego result in crudity or inanity. If it comes down to a war between those who smash statues of Columbus and those who object to such mob violence, the iconoclasts in the street and those who support them in the progressive party lose.

4) Bluestockings Cannot Win
The Republican Party was calcified intellectually and ethically. It had lost two consecutive elections to Barack Obama. Despite eventual control of Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court (due to grassroots activism and Tea Party exuberance), the government grew ever larger in the last decade, taxes rose, regulations increased, and political correctness engulfed even more of our lives from the universities to the ways we’re permitted to discuss political issues such as illegal immigration in public. Before Obama doubled the national debt, a Republican president had done the same.

Two rallies planned in San Francisco and Berkeley this weekend were cancelled after Antifa and other groups threatened rally participants.

In San Francisco, a free speech demonstration planned by the group Patriot Prayer was cancelled by organizer Joey Gibson because of threats demonstrators had received online and the attitude of the city’s Democratic politicians who, although allowing the demonstration to take place, walled off the park where it was to be held, thus preventing anyone from hearing what the group had to say.

Another rally in Berkeley never got a permit but was going to be held anyway until more threats from Antifa forced its cancellation too.

The hysteria ginned up about white supremacists and Nazis resulted in Patriot Prayer being branded a “hate group” and Democratic politicians pretending that they were. This despite the Southern Poverty Law Center – not known for their tolerance of conservative and religious groups – stating on their website:

“At his most recent rally, in Seattle on Aug. 13, Gibson openly denounced white supremacism and neo-Nazis. In subsequent interviews, he has taken lengths to explain that he now works to actively exclude them. There were no visible signs of white-nationalist members at the Seattle rally.”

Earlier rallies organized by Gibson featured some uninvited guests – white supremacists and Nazis who started melees with counterprotesters. The inexperienced activist did not know how to exclude the extremists. He appears to be getting better at it, but that hardly mattered to the far left Democratic authorities in San Francisco.

ABC News:

“They’re definitely doing a great job of trying to make sure my message doesn’t come out,” Gibson said.

San Francisco officials closed the park where Gibson had planned a news conference after cancelling the rally at Crissy Field. City officials surrounded Alamo Square park with a fence and sent scores of police officers — some in riot gear — to keep people out. Mayor Ed Lee defended the city’s response.

“If people want to have the stage in San Francisco, they better have a message that contributes to people’s lives rather than find ways to hurt them,” Lee said. “That’s why certain voices found it very difficult to have their voices heard today.”

Gibson later spoke in suburban Pacifica with a handful of supporters that included African Americans, a Latino and a Samoan American. Several said they support President Donald Trump and want to join with moderates to promote understanding and free speech.

More than a thousand demonstrators against Patriot Prayer still turned out around Alamo Square park waving signs condemning white supremacists and chanting, “Whose streets? Our streets!” Hundreds of others took to the streets in the Castro neighborhood.

“San Francisco as a whole, we are a liberal city and this is not a place for hate or any sort of bigotry of any kind,” Bianca Harris said. “I think it’s a really powerful message that we’re sending to people who come here to try to spew messages of hate that it’s just not welcome in this city.”

Benjamin Sierra, who organized counter protesters, said the demonstration had become a “victory rally.”

BERKELEY, Calif.—A mass protest opposing a right-wing rally that had been planned here turned violent on Sunday, as black-clad activists clashed with a handful of conservative demonstrators.

The protest, which drew thousands of people chanting anti-fascist slogans and denouncing white supremacists, was the second major action in the Bay Area by left-wing groups this weekend.

Several thousand protesters also gathered in San Francisco on Saturday, in response to a conservative group’s plans to hold a rally there. Both right-wing rallies were ultimately canceled, with organizers citing fears of violence against their supporters.

While Saturday’s events were mostly peaceful, they turned violent Sunday, leading to several arrests in Berkeley.

Protesters dressed in black, some carrying shields, attacked Joey Gibson, organizer of the conservative group Patriot Prayer, on Sunday according to videos posted online. Mr. Gibson, who had canceled a Saturday event in San Francisco, appeared to have been arrested later Sunday, according to videos posted online.

The Berkeley police said 13 people were arrested on Sunday afternoon but the department couldn’t confirm the names of those arrested.

Mr. Gibson didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

The events echoed similar protests that turned violent in Berkeley on March 4 and April 15.

Police had braced for a potentially violent showdown in San Francisco this weekend between left- and right-wing activists, but any direct conflict was largely muted by the cancellation of several of the planned right-wing events. Several thousand protesters marched through streets in the city on Saturday.

Mr. Gibson had organized a “Freedom Rally” to take place in San Francisco’s Crissy Field, which is operated by the National Park Service. On Friday, Mr. Gibson canceled the event, citing fears of violence from left-wing protesters, and said he would instead hold an event in a San Francisco public park.

But police closed the park off entirely on Saturday morning. Left-wing protesters then took over a nearby block and marched through the streets with a police escort, aiming their ire at President Donald Trump as well as the right-wing groups.

“We’re going to deny space to Nazis,” said Mike Selden, a member of Democratic Socialists of America’s San Francisco chapter. “The idea is to get them to cancel. This is an ideal outcome. No one had to get violent, and we showed we’re not going to accept fascism.”

Mr. Gibson blamed local and federal authorities for his decision to cancel the events. In a video posted on his Facebook account, he said the city’s actions “felt like a setup.” He said police told him they would allow about 50 of his supporters into the public park, while other supporters would remain outside, where they risked enduring violence from left-wing protesters and anarchists. CONTINUE AT SITE

On August 19th, Pamela Geller revealed the questions asked by Pro Publica’s Lauren Kirchner before Kirchner got Geller’s PayPal account terminated.

I am a reporter at ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative newsroom in New York. I am contacting you to let you know that we are including your website in a list of sites that have been designated as hate or extremist by the American Defamation League or the Southern Poverty Law Center. We have identified all the tech platforms that are supporting websites on the ADL and SPLC lists.

We would like to ask you a few questions:

1) Do you disagree with the designation of your website as hate or extremist? Why?

2) We identified several tech companies on your website: PayPal, Revcontent, Disqus, and Newsmax. Can you confirm that you receive funds from your relationship with those tech companies? How would the loss of those funds affect your operations, and how would you be able to replace them?

3) Have you been shut down by other tech companies for being an alleged hate or extremist web site? Which companies?

4) Many people opposed to sites like yours are currently pressuring tech companies to cease their relationships with them – what is your view of this campaign? Why?

Our deadline is 5pm EST today.

Thank you,

Lauren Kirchner

“She had asked me, ‘Have you been shut down by other tech companies for being a hate site?’ I mean, you have to love the assumption that I’m a hate site because I cover jihad terror-related news and sharia. That’s the focus of the website,” Geller said.

And these were loaded questions. When did you stop beating your wife? A question no modern prosecutor would dare ask a witness, especially not a Muslim.

Is the campaign to shut down sites that purportedly express “hate speech,” or “racism,” or the alleged defamation of Islam and Muslims, censorship for the sake of wielding censoring power, or is it to keep the public in the dark, to enforce ignorance, to create and sustain a dead silence? “Ignorance is Strength”? Whose strength? Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four worked in Minitru producing “fake news.” In the film and in the novel, a Party superior compliments Smith for his “elegant” rewriting of news in Newspeak (although how one can lend “elegance” to Newspeakis beyond my ken).

Is their purpose to make the electronic ether as barren of information as Mars is as barren of boxwoods and roses?

Dear Mr. President,
I am sending the current swamp report card for your review.
Most sincerely,
Linda Goudsmit
http://goudsmit.pundicity.com

Swamp Creature Report Card:

Navy Admiral James “Ace” Lyons shocked the nation with his candid remarks at the Center for Security Policy “Defeat Jihad Summit” held in January, 2015. Admiral Lyons calmly and plainly stated that Obama was deliberately and unilaterally disarming the military. The Admiral further warned that the Muslim Brotherhood has already penetrated every one of our national security security agencies including our intelligence agencies.

https://www.cnsnews.com/blog/michael-w-chapman/admiral-lyons-obama-s-strategy-it-s-anti-american-pro-islamic-it-s-pro

Instead of heeding this dire warning Mr. President, your government continues to be informed and advised by Obama legacy staffers who remain in government advancing Obama’s anti-American, pro-Islamic, pro-Iranian, and pro-Muslim Brotherhood agenda. Whether uninformed, misinformed, or disinformed the Obama leftovers threaten our national security with their skewed information because those are the people who are briefing you daily. Islam is not a religion like any other. Islam is a comprehensive socio-political ideology with military (jihadi), educational (mosques/cultural centers), and religious (imams) wings. Islam is an expansionist movement seeking world dominion. There is no separation of church and state in Islam. Islam is a comprehensive ideology governed by supremacist religious sharia law. Islam seeks conquest and submission. Islam is spread through population jihad, educational jihad, religious jihad, military jihad including terrorism, and stealth jihad that relies on taqiyyah – lying in the service of Islam.

Mr. President you were exactly correct when you said that open borders is a Trojan Horse – it is the vehicle for population jihad against the host country. Identifying your friends and identifying your enemies in your administration, the military, and among national security staffers is an urgent matter. It does not matter if they are uninformed, misinformed, or disinformed. Any advisor or staffer who refuses to utter the words radical Islamic terror does not belong in your administration. If staffers embrace sharia law, promote Islam, are apologists for Islam, are members of the Muslim Brotherhood or CAIR and support Obama’s purging of materials that implicate Islam, they are your enemies and must be removed. You are being surrounded by Obama leftovers who will continue to disinform you so that your decisions will tilt toward Obama’s failed globalist policies. Mr. President you are being dragged into the swamp you were elected to drain.

McMaster was recommended for the position of National Security Advisor (NSA) director by #2 swamp creature John McCain. Under McMaster’s leadership the people who have the courage to speak out and expose the existential danger of Islam are being purged from the military and from the national security staff. Those who have the courage to support the initiatives of your America-first candidacy are being eliminated while the Obama globalist leftovers remain.

Trump loyalists Michael Flynn, K.T. McFarland, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, Derek Harvey, Rich Higgins, Adam Lovinger, Steve Bannon, and Sebastian Gorka are all gone. Obama loyalists Dina Habib-Powell, Allison Hooker, Fernando Cutz, Andrea Hall, Rear Admiral David Kriete, Jessica Cox, Stephanie Morrison, Heather King, and Robert Wilson all remain. McMaster’s indefensible defense of Obama loyalist Susan Rice allowed her to retain her security clearance. McMaster claimed Rice did nothing wrong unmasking the identities of Trump transition aides and leaking the transcripts of Mr. Trump’s phone conversations with foreign leaders. REALLY?

McMaster being a member of International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) for eleven years 2006-2017 is problematic. IISS is an English think tank funded by profiteer George Soros that promotes globalism. In 2010 the Bahraini royal family began secretly donating funds to IISS – $31.6 million – approximately one third of its revenues. Huge sums of money are not donated without the expectation of influence. McMaster’s association for eleven years with IISS explains his globalism and opposition to your commitment to American sovereignty. McMaster should never have been chosen to serve in your administration because he is ideologically opposed to your vision even if he served with distinction in Afghanistan.

McMaster’s association with a think tank that publicly endorsed and defends the anti-American Iran deal is even more problematic. Iran is the single greatest fomenter of terrorism in the middle east and Obama’s deceitful Iran deal enriched and resupplied an ailing Iran that was suffering under Saudi pressure.

An attractive young woman sitting at an outdoor cafe appears on the screen. The camera pans left as a heavily accented French male voice-over seductively introduces America to Melanie. Melanie is French and her three lovers sitting together with her at the small cafe table are also French. We are told that Melanie’s lovers will wait for Melanie while she savors the taste of her French yogurt Oui because French girls take their time. The 30 second commercial ends with the Yoplait tagline “Say Oui (yes) to pleasure.” The unequivocal message in this yogurt commercial is Melanie says yes to sexual pleasure with three different men.
https://www.ispot.tv/ad/w6yJ/yoplait-oui-melanie#

So what exactly is Yoplait selling in this commercial? Promiscuity? Group sex? Yogurt? All three?

The advertising industry is notorious for using sex to sell products – but three lovers at one time? This vulgar commercial is a stunning assault on established American cultural norms. The psychological dynamics involved are extremely manipulative in two insidious ways. First, the advertisers are deliberately shocking American viewers to produce cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is a powerful tool of mass psychological social engineering deliberately used to confuse, manipulate, and destabilize an unsuspecting public.

Cognitive dissonance is the state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes, especially as relating to behavioral decisions and attitude change. The anxiety and tension created by having inconsistent thoughts is so disturbing that it mobilizes people to either change their thoughts or change their behavior in an attempt to regain equilibrium. Cognitive dissonance is being used by Yoplait to manipulate the American public and effect seismic shifts in public opinion. Television commercials and print ads in Teen Vogue associating promiscuity with healthy yogurt produce coercive cognitive dissonance that is deliberately designed to break down existing American cultural norms.

The second psychological dynamic exploited by Yoplait is that repetition and familiarity produce acceptability. Television (any screen) is the single greatest vehicle for mass social engineering ever invented. So, what is initially shocking becomes increasingly ordinary and accepted if it is repeated often enough. This manipulative yogurt commercial is telling young American women that sex with three different lovers is not only pleasurable – it is acceptable. Young American women are being told that there are no moral restrictions on young French women. The message is that Melanie is sophisticated, worldly, and free to have sex with three different men. Traditional American cultural norms defining promiscuity are being rebranded and marketed as feminist French freedom.

Yoplait’s original yogurt is as different from the new Oui version of their product being promoted sexually on television as traditional morality is from promiscuity.

Consider the ingredients in Yoplait’s original strawberry yogurt: cultured pasteurized grade a low fat milk, sugar, strawberries, modified corn starch, nonfat milk, kosher gelatin, citric acid, tricalcium phosphate, colored with carmine, natural flavor, pectin, vitamin A acetate, vitamin D3.

According to the brand, Yoplait’s new French-style Oui yogurt features non-GMO ingredients such as whole milk, cane sugar, fruit, yogurt cultures, no artificial preservatives, no artificial flavors, and no colors from artificial sources.

By comparison the original Yoplait fruit yogurt is unhealthy and soaked with chemicals. So Oui, the healthy new French alternative intentionally identified with promiscuity in the commercial, is inferring that the promiscuous alternative is the healthy choice. The message is “Say Yes to promiscuous sex.” The cognitive dissonance this staggering inconsistency generates in America is deeply troubling because it overturns the existing American cultural norm that says promiscuous sex is dangerous and immoral.

From Congress to newsrooms to social media, a type of impeachment fever has taken hold. Various proposals have been put forward for removing Donald Trump from office, with reasons ranging from alleged “collusion” with Russians to the president’s response to Charlottesville. One poll shows support for impeachment at as much as 40 percent. Newsweek ran a headline proclaiming, “Trump Is Just Six Senate Votes Away From Impeachment,” and Slate has a running feature called “Today’s Impeach-O-Meter.”
While such talk may be therapeutic for those still suffering post-election stress disorder, it is a dangerous course that could fundamentally alter our constitutional and political systems. Even if one were to agree with the litany of complaints against Trump, the only thing worse than Trump continuing in office would be his removal from it.
There is a mechanism under which a head of government can be removed midterm. Parliamentary systems, like Great Britain’s, allow for “no confidence” motions to remove prime ministers. Parliament can pass a resolution stating “That this House has no confidence in Her Majesty’s Government.” But that’s not our system, and it’s doubtful that the members of Congress calling for Trump’s impeachment would relish a parliamentary approach: When such a vote succeeds, the prime minister isn’t necessarily the only politician to go. If the existing members of parliament can’t form a new government in 14 days, the entire legislative body is dissolved pending a general election. And that’s leaving aside the fact that Trump is still more popular than Congress as a whole: In the Real Clear Politics polling average, his job approval rating is under 40 percent while Congress’s wallows at around 15 percent.
The Constitution’s framers were certainly familiar with votes of no confidence, but despite their general aim to limit the authority of the presidency, they opted for a different course. They saw a danger in presidents being impeached due to shifts in political support and insulated presidents from removal by limiting the basis for impeachment and demanding a high vote threshold for removal. There would be no impulse-buy removals under the Constitution. Instead, the House of Representatives would have to impeach and the Senate convict (by two-thirds vote) based on “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes or Misdemeanors.”
The Framers were wise in this regard. Consider Rep. Steve Cohen’s (D-Tenn.) statement, in the wake of Charlottesville, explaining why he supports impeachment: “If the president can’t recognize the difference between these domestic terrorists and the people who oppose their anti-American attitudes, then he cannot defend us.” Cohen doesn’t articulate a high crime or misdemeanor, let alone prove one. He appears willing to impeach Trump because the president is viewed as insufficiently opposed to far-right or racist groups. If that were the standard, any member of an opposition party could cite unacceptable views as the basis for removal from office. Cohen’s reasoning is no better than that of former congressman Kerry Bentivolio (R-Mich.), who was quoted in 2013 telling a constituent that if he “could write a bill” to impeach then-President Barack Obama, “it would be a dream come true.”
[I’m an impeachment lawyer. I’m rooting for Trump’s new attorney. You should, too.]
Though clearly farcical, the suggestion by USA Today’s Jill Lawrence that “Trump is doing an excellent impression of a president who desperately wishes to be impeached” — that his comportment in office is some sort of thinly veiled cry for help — obscures the gravity of what’s at stake with impeachment. Lowering the standard would fundamentally alter the presidency, potentially setting up future presidents to face impeachment inquiries or even removal whenever the political winds shifted against them.