RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/267063/trump-slayer-ossoff-flames-out-matthew-vadum

Republican Karen Handel easily beat back Democrat boy wonder Jon Ossoff in yesterday’s special election in Georgia’s 6th congressional district, touted as the most costly congressional race in American history.

Handel becomes the first female Republican elected to Congress from Georgia as Democrats’ effort to throw a wrench in President Trump’s already slow-moving legislative agenda fails rather spectacularly.

“Thanks to everyone who breathlessly and snarkily proclaimed #GA06 as a “referendum on POTUS @realDonaldTrump,” Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway tweeted. “You were right. #winning[.]”

President Trump tweeted his congratulations to Handel “on her big win in Georgia 6th. Fantastic job, we are all very proud of you!”

He added, “Well, the Special Elections are over and those that want to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN are 5 and O! All the Fake News, all the money spent = 0[.]”

The defeat of 30-year-old Ossoff in suburban Atlanta was a crushing blow to Democrat hopes of taking back the longtime Republican seat and thereby giving the Trump Resistance movement a major psychological boost as the Russian electoral collusion conspiracy theory investigation against President Trump fails to gain any new traction. President Trump bested Hillary Clinton by only one percentage point in the district this past November, leading some pundits to describe Georgia-6 as an establishment Republican district.

Ossoff’s campaign spent $22.5 million, compared to Handel’s $3.2 million, according to reports. That is a ratio of 7 to 1 in favor of the Democrat. Despite not being a resident of his district, a fact Handel ably capitalized on, Ossoff took in almost nine times more donations from California than from Georgia. One media analysis indicated a mere 3.5 percent of Ossoff’s donations from late March to the end of May came from within the state. Celebrity endorsements from entertainers Samuel L. Jackson, Chelsea Handler, Alyssa Milano, and John Leguizamo couldn’t save Ossoff. Nor could donations from traitor Jane Fonda, and actors Sam Waterston, Kristen Bell, Connie Britton, Jessica Lange, Lynda Carter, Rhea Perlman, or Jon Cryer get Ossoff across the finish line.

Although it wasn’t the kind of double-digit blowout Republicans are accustomed to in a district that until a few months ago had been represented by Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, it still wasn’t even close.

Handel defeated Ossoff by about 52 percent to 48 percent in the runoff election. Ossoff’s percentage last night was roughly the same as the 48.12 percent he earned in the 18-way “jungle primary” contest on April 18, suggesting a huge money advantage and favorable saturation media coverage are not decisive factors in electoral politics in the Trump era.

Only the mainstream media treated the special election in the reliably Republican district as a hotly contested race that could go either way. In the end, it was all hype. The countless polls showing Ossoff ahead as Democrats struggled to turn the race into a kind of national referendum on President Trump were worthless, just like the polls that showed Hillary Clinton would defeat Trump last November.

After all, the 6th congressional district of Georgia has been Republican since Newt Gingrich took it in the 1978 election. The district garners a rating of R+8 on the Cook Partisan Voting Index, also called PVI. The PVI measures how strongly a district or state leans Republican or Democratic compared to the nation as a whole by comparing the district’s average Republican or Democratic share of the two-party presidential vote in the preceding two presidential elections to the nation’s average share of the same. So R+8 means the district is 8 percentage points more Republican than the nation as a whole.

Despite their oft-repeated claim that the public is fed up with President Trump and strongly anti-GOP, Democrats haven’t succeeding in flipping any congressional seats in the five special elections held so far this year. Not even one. If there is a powerful undercurrent threatening to deprive Republicans of control of both chambers of Congress in the 2018 midterms it has yet to surface.

As expected, Jimmy Gomez (D) won the June 6 election in California’s 34th congressional district after Xavier Becerra (D) left to before the state’s attorney general. In the Kansas 4th, Ron Estes (R) won the April 11 election after Mike Pompeo (R) resigned to become CIA director. On May 25, Greg Gianforte (R) won Montana’s at-large seat after Ryan Zinke left to become secretary of the interior.

There was also a less closely observed special election yesterday in the 5th congressional district of South Carolina to fill the seat vacated by Republican Mick Mulvaney, who became director of the Office of Management and Budget in February.

Republican Ralph Norman received 51.1 percent of the vote there, defeating Democrat Archie Parnell who received 47.9 percent of the vote.

President Trump tweeted, “Ralph Norman ran a fantastic race to win in the Great State of South Carolina’s 5th District. We are all honored by your success tonight!”

The South Carolina race, like the race in Georgia, wasn’t much of a contest at all. The district was rated R+9 by the Cook Partisan Voting Index though it hasn’t been a GOP stronghold for as long as Georgia-6.

In 2010, Mulvaney defeated incumbent John Spratt, a Democrat, becoming the first Republican to represent the district since freedman Robert Smalls in 1875. Smalls became a Civil War hero when he freed himself and his crew by commandeering a Confederate transport ship and surrendering it to federal forces.

Now that Karen Handel and Ralph Norman have slammed more doors in the faces of the Resistance, expect the Left to come up with new mischief in their efforts to neutralize Donald Trump as president.

For nine months in 1916, the French and German armies battled with insane ferocity over a small patch of land in Northern France, committing over two million soldiers, spending the lives of over 300,000 men (and more than that wounded) and at the epicenter of the battle, pouring millions of shells (literally over a ton of explosives) on an area covering about twelve square miles. The Battle of Verdun was about control of a modest piece of strategically useful territory, but it was really about a lot more: two national combatants testing their strength, resources, and resolve, stakes far more important than an individual town or ridge. Virtually every inch of land that was fought over was destroyed. The victors, the French, held nothing more than what they started the battle with, and their army was broken so badly it has not yet recovered a century later. The losers, the Germans, lost the war.

The residents of Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District can be forgiven for feeling like the villagers of Verdun after a special election that pulverized the district with ad spending and activists. Patrick Ruffini estimated on Twitter this morning that the two parties combined to spend more money in this House race ($50 million) than Ronald Reagan spent on his 1984 presidential re-election (even adjusting Reagan’s $28 million campaign for inflation). At this writing, given the projected outcome, the net result looks very much like Verdun: a costly and depressing victory for the Republicans, bled white defending their own turf, and a debacle for Democrats, who came home empty-handed and must be able to win districts like GA-06 if they are to take control of the House in 2018 and carry out their chief policy goal of impeaching President Trump.

GA-06 was always going to be a heavy lift for both sides. For Democrats, the obstacles were obvious: it’s a deeply conservative district, Newt Gingrich’s old district, that Mitt Romney won 61-38 in 2012, where then-Congressman Tom Price was regularly re-elected with ease. Their candidate, Jon Ossoff, is young and looks younger, had no real base of support in Georgia (the vast majority of his donors were out of state), and doesn’t even live in the district. His opponent, Karen Handel, was much better-known: she was first elected to office in the district fourteen years ago, previously won statewide office as Secretary of State, ran respectable races for Governor in 2010 and Senate in 2014, and won national notoriety in 2012 over her ultimately unsuccessful effort to separate a national cancer charity from Planned Parenthood.

For Republicans, the race was difficult because this is probably the least Trump-friendly Republican district in the country, an upscale, educated suburban district full of transplants from around the country who work for big multinational corporations headquartered in Atlanta. Trump won it by just a point, running double digits behind Romney, and his approval ratings are well lower now than even his dismal favorability numbers on Election Day. Trump lost just four counties in the state in the 2016 presidential primary, but three of those four (Fulton, Cobb, and DeKalb) make up GA-06, all of which went for Marco Rubio. Trump’s worst counties in Georgia in the primary:

DeKalb: Rubio 41, Trump 25
Fulton: Rubio 42, Trump 27
Clarke: Rubio 35, Trump 27
Cobb: Rubio 35, Trump 31

In November as well, Trump ran poorly in these counties compared to incumbent Senator Johnny Isakson – his worst counties in the state relative to Isakson:

Fulton: Isakson -23, Trump -41
Macon: Isakson -12, Trump -27

At the end of our interview last week, I asked Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson for an example of the outside-the-box thinking that served him so well in his prior career as a pioneering neurosurgeon.

“Sure. I started advocating cervicomedullary decompression for achondroplasia,” said Dr. Carson, before shooting me a sly grin and switching to English. Achondroplasia, he explained, is the most common form of dwarfism, and 40 years ago about 7% of people born with the condition died in infancy. “It’s because they had tight, abnormal bone formation at the base of their skull, and that was squeezing the brain stem. And they would just stop breathing. Surgeons would try to go in sometimes and fix it, but it was so tight that they frequently made it worse or killed the patient.”

When he first talked about using a different surgical procedure on children with achondroplasia, at a medical conference in Rome in the mid-1980s, many objected: “The geneticists said, ‘You surgeons. If you would just leave these people alone, only 7% of them would die. But you guys think you can do anything.’ ”

Back home at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, colleagues complained to the hospital president that “Carson’s a wild man. You’ve got to stop him.” But Dr. Carson didn’t stop. “Finally, I had done enough cases where I was able to reveal the data. None of [the patients] had died, and they were doing well. And even though I’d gotten all that pushback, now it’s a standard procedure.”

“I don’t get upset when people say horrible things,” the secretary told me. “I understand human nature. People don’t like change.” A disposition that serves him well these days, when taking cheap shots at Ben Carson is something of a sport among reporters and cable-news sages. Never mind that he grew up poor in inner-city Detroit, raised by a single mother with mental-health problems who worked as a housekeeper. Or that he blasted through racial barriers in his medical career. Or that he has used his fame and fortune to expand the educational opportunities of low-income minorities. After all, what could a person from that background possibly know about helping people in difficult circumstances?

In the press, however, the secretary is most often portrayed as a doctrinaire conservative who is out of his depth running an agency tasked with assisting the poor. After he told a town-hall audience in May that poverty is “in part a mindset” and “to a large extent also a state of mind,” commentators couldn’t stop snickering. But Mr. Carson stands by his words. “I don’t say that without evidence. I think of my own life. I think of the way I used to think when I was at the bottom of my class and going nowhere fast,” he told me. “A lot of it is . . . being told the system is against you or that you’re a victim.” Some individuals and organizations “want to convince people that somebody else is in charge of them, and that’s why they get angry at people like me who say it’s partly the way you think.”

Media portrayals notwithstanding, Secretary Carson told me he is not opposed to government assistance and safety nets. “We have an obligation to take care of people who can’t care for themselves—the elderly, the disabled, the mentally ill—and certainly at HUD we’re going to take care of those people.” A case in point, he added, is dealing more effectively with the homeless population. We’re doing a better job at sheltering them but not at diagnosing why they became homeless in the first place and then treating it. “If you don’t do two and three, then you’re wasting your time.”

Americans won’t be really good citizens until they read Timur Kuran and Cass Sunstein’s 1999 law review article about “availability cascades.”

Their launching point is the process by which we (i.e., human beings) decide to believe what others believe, and judge the truth of a proposition by how familiar it is. Such “availability cascades” drive government policy in good ways and bad, but usually bad. An example the authors analyze in detail is 1989’s fake “Alar” cancer scare that devastated U.S. apple growers.

Which brings us to today’s question: How did it become widely believed in the first half of 2017 that a U.S. president committed treason with Russia?

Consider what has passed for proof in the media. Tens of thousands of Americans have done business with Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union, not to mention before.

In 2009 President Obama made the first of his two trips to Russia with a gaggle of U.S. business leaders in tow.

Of these many thousands, four were associated with the Trump campaign, and now became evidence of Trump collusion with Russia.

Every president for 75 years has sought improved relations with Russia. That’s what those endless summits were about. Mr. Trump, in his typically bombastic way, also promoted improved relations with Russia. Now this was evidence of collusion.

Russian diplomats live in the U.S. and rub shoulders with countless Americans. Such shoulder-rubbing, if Trump associates were involved, now is proof of crime.

The Alar pesticide scare only took off when activists whom Messrs. Kuran and Sunstein label “availability entrepreneurs” peddled deceptive claims to a credulous “60 Minutes.” We would probably not be having this Russia discussion today if not for the so-called Trump dossier alleging improbable, lurid connections between Donald Trump and the Kremlin.

It had no provenance that anyone was bound to respect or rely upon. Its alleged author, a retired British agent named Christopher Steele, supposedly had Russian intelligence sources, but why would Russian intelligence blow the cover of their blackmail agent Mr. Trump whom they presumably so carefully and expensively cultivated? They wouldn’t.

Yet recall the litany of Rep. Adam Schiff, who declared in a House Intelligence Committee hearing: “Is it possible that all of these events and reports are completely unrelated and nothing more than an entirely unhappy coincidence?”

His litany actually consisted of innocuous, incidental and routine Trump associations interspersed with claims from the Trump dossier to make the innocuous, incidental and routine seem nefarious.

Maybe Mr. Schiff is a cynic, or maybe Harvard Law sent him back into the world with the same skull full of mush with which he arrived. But ever since, every faulty or incomplete recollection of a meeting with a Russian has been promoted in the media as proof of treason by Trump associates.

The president’s obvious irritation with being called a traitor is proof that he is a traitor.CONTINUE AT SITE

A report from the conservative/libertarian think tank Just Facts shows that up to 5.7 million people who cast their ballots in the 2008 presidential election were non-citizens. The group used data from a Harvard study as well as US Census Bureau data to arrive at that conclusion.

Just Facts also estimated that up to 3.6 million non-citizens cast their vote in 2012.

Washington Times:

Just Facts’ conclusions confront both sides in the illegal voting debate: those who say it happens a lot and those who say the problem nonexistent.

In one camp, there are groundbreaking studies by professors at Old Dominion University in Virginia who attempted to compile scientifically derived illegal voting numbers using the Harvard data, called the Cooperative Congressional Election Study.

On the other side are the professors who conducted the study and contended that “zero” noncitizens of about 18 million adults in the U.S. voted. The liberal mainstream media adopted this position and proclaimed the Old Dominion work was “debunked.”

The ODU professors, who stand by their work in the face of attacks from the left, concluded that in 2008 as few as 38,000 and as many as 2.8 million noncitizens voted.

Mr. Agresti’s analysis of the same polling data settled on much higher numbers. He estimated that as many as 7.9 million noncitizens were illegally registered that year and 594,000 to 5.7 million voted.

With voter ID laws in so many states, how did the non-citizens get away with it?

“The details are technical, but the figure I calculated is based on a more conservative margin of sampling error and a methodology that I consider to be more accurate,” Mr. Agresti told The Washington Times.

He believes the Harvard/YouGov researchers based their “zero” claim on two flawed assumptions. First, they assumed that people who said they voted and identified a candidate did not vote unless their names showed up in a database.

If you want to know who has privilege in a society and who doesn’t, follow the anger.

There are people in this country who can safely express their anger. And those who can’t. If you’re angry that Trump won, your anger is socially acceptable. If you were angry that Obama won, it wasn’t.

James Hodgkinson’s rage was socially acceptable. It continued to be socially acceptable until he crossed the line into murder. And he’s not alone. There’s Micah Xavier Johnson, the Black Lives Matter cop-killer in Dallas, and Gavin Long, the Black Lives Matter cop-killer in Baton Rouge. If you’re black and angry about the police, your anger is celebrated. If you’re white and angry about the Terror travel ban, the Paris Climate treaty, ObamaCare repeal or any leftist cause, you’re on the side of the angry angels.

But if you’re white and angry that your job is going to China or that you just missed being killed in a Muslim suicide bombing, your anger is unacceptable.

If you’re an angry leftist, your party leader, Tom Perez will scream and curse into a microphone, and your aspiring presidential candidate, Kirsten Gillibrand, will curse along, to channel the anger of the base. But if you’re an angry conservative, then Trump channeling your anger is “dangerous” because you aren’t allowed to be angry.

Not all anger is created equal. Some anger is privileged rage.

Good anger gets you a gig as a CNN commentator. Bad anger gets you hounded out of your job. Good anger isn’t described as anger at all. Instead it’s linguistically whitewashed as “passionate” or “courageous”. Bad anger however is “worrying” or “dangerous”. Angry left-wing protesters “call out”, angry right-wing protesters “threaten”. Good anger is left-wing. Bad anger is right-wing.

Socially acceptable displays of anger, from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter riots to the anti-Trump marches to the furious campus protests, are invariably left-wing.

Left-wing anger over the elections of Bush and Trump was sanctified. Right-wing outrage over Obama’s victory was demonized. Now that left-wing anger led a Bernie Sanders volunteer to open fire at a Republican charity baseball practice outing. And the media reluctantly concedes that maybe both sides should moderate their rhetoric. Before listing examples that lean to the right like “Lock her up”.

Why were chants of “Lock her up” immoderate, but not Bush era cries of “Jail to the chief”? Why were Tea Party rallies “ominous” but the latest We Hate Trump march is “courageous”? Why is killing Trump on stage the hottest thing to hit Shakespeare while a rodeo clown who wore an Obama mask was hounded by everyone from the Lieutenant Governor of Missouri to the NAACP?

Not all anger is created equal. Anger, like everything else, is ideologically coded. Left-wing anger is good because its ideological foundations are good. Right-wing anger is bad because its ideology is bad.

It’s not the level of anger, its intensity or its threatening nature that makes it good or bad.

Hillary Clinton just doesn’t know how to lose gracefully. She does, however, have a knack for coming up with ever more inventive excuses for her loss to Donald Trump.

Just last month, she chalked it up to “voter suppression” in Wisconsin. This spurious claim was a reference to the Badger State’s common-sense voter-ID law, which has been upheld by the courts. It followed on the heels of a tweet from Wisconsin’s Democratic senator, Tammy Baldwin, claiming the law had reduced voter turnout by 200,000 statewide.

Both claims relied on a study commissioned by Priorities USA Action and conducted by CIVIS USA, two liberal groups that actively supported Clinton’s presidential bid. Unfortunately for Clinton and Baldwin, though, the study has been roundly debunked.

Politifact rated Baldwin’s claim as “Mostly False,” asserting that “experts . . . question the methodology of the report and say there is no way to put a number on how many people in Wisconsin didn’t vote because of the ID requirement.”

While it is true that 2016 saw Wisconsin’s turnout drop from 2012, it is also true that the state still experienced higher turnout than in 2008, before the voter-ID law was passed. Moreover, according to the U.S. Elections Project, Wisconsin had the fifth-highest turnout rate in the country, far higher than that of many states with no ID requirement. 69.4 percent of the state’s eligible voters showed up to the polls, far surpassing the national average of 59.3 percent and the 56.8 percent rate in Clinton’s home state of New York, where there is no voter-ID law.

Wisconsin’s turnout decrease from 2012 is just as likely, or more likely, attributable to a natural regression from its unusually high 2012 turnout rate. President Obama’s high-powered turnout operation, coupled with Wisconsin’s own Paul Ryan being on the GOP ticket, would easily explain the 2012 surge in statewide voter turnout. Hillary Clinton’s ineffective campaign, her decision not to visit the state, and the general leftward shift of the Democratic party may also have dampened enthusiasm for her candidacy.

Democrats have generally admitted that they failed to connect with blue-collar workers in 2016. In fact, their party chairman, Tom Perez, has organized a year-long outreach program to try to rectify the problem. Unfortunately for Democrats, these voters are highly concentrated in Rust Belt states, such as Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, Minnesota, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, that proved especially susceptible to Trump’s economic message. None of those states saw any increase in voter turnout, but it wasn’t because of voter-ID laws, which vary widely among them; it was because Clinton failed to rally their working-class voters to her side, convinced that she could rely on Obama’s winning coalition from 2008 and 2012 to put her over the top.

The problem with that strategy was two-fold: (1) The voters of the Obama coalition make up disproportionately high percentages of state populations in already deep-blue states such as New York and California; and (2) they were not nearly as enthusiastic about Clinton as they had been about Obama. FiveThirtyEight’s David Wasserman warned last September that the demographic groups the Clinton campaign was targeting were concentrated in non-swing states. The Clinton campaign failed to heed that warning.

In fact, turnout data from 2012 and 2016 do not show any “voter suppression” because of ID requirements. Nine of the eleven states that have implemented so-called strict ID Laws either saw an increase in turnout or exceeded the national average in turnout in 2016. Two of them, Wisconsin and New Hampshire, finished in the top five nationally. Meanwhile only two of the 17 states plus Washington, D.C., that have no ID requirement finished among the top five.

The problem with the election of President Donald J. Trump was not just that he presented a roadblock to an ongoing progressive revolution. Instead, unlike recent Republican presidential nominees, he was indifferent to the cultural and political restraints on conservative pushback — ironic given how checkered Trump’s own prior conservative credentials are. Trump brawled in a way McCain or Romney did not. He certainly did not prefer losing nobly to winning ugly.

Even more ominously, Trump found a seam in the supposedly invincible new progressive electoral paradigm of Barack Obama. He then blew it apart — by showing the nation that Obama’s identity-politics voting bloc was not transferrable to most other Democratic candidates, while the downside of his polarization of the now proverbial clingers most assuredly was. To her regret, Hillary Clinton learned that paradox when the deplorables and irredeemables of the formerly blue-wall states rose up to cost her the presidency.

And now?

We are witnessing a desperate putsch to remove Trump before he can do any more damage to the Obama project. Political, journalistic, and cultural elites of a progressive coastal culture aim at destroying the Trump presidency before it can finish its full four-year term.

The branches of this insidious coup d’état are quite unlikely anything our generation has ever witnessed.

I. Political and Judicial

a. Warping the Electoral College. As soon as Trump was elected, progressives mobilized to overturn the very architecture of the Electoral College. They organized efforts to persuade delegated electors not to vote according to their own state results — as they were legally or informally pledged to do so. Had the effort succeeded, it would have destroyed the entire constitutional notion of an Electoral College.

b. Challenging the 2016 Vote. Simultaneously, we saw another failed insurrectionary effort, through the stalking horse of failed leftist candidate Jill Stein, to sue on false grounds of voting-machine fraud that would have required recounts in three swing states that Trump won.

c. Delaying, Stalling, and Accusing. Then Democrats in the Senate systematically delayed customary approval of dozens of key appointments of the newly inaugurated president. Obama holdovers such as Acting Attorney General Sally Yates sought to oppose Trump initiatives while political appointees such as Obama federal attorney Preet Bharara complained of inordinate pressures to step down. The normal assumption is that a new president appoints key federal officials of his own party; liberals abandoned this custom and depicted Trump’s staffing efforts as some sort of insurrectionary subversion of the federal government.

d. Recusal. Meanwhile, Democrats in Congress orchestrated false charges of “Russian collusion” against Trump himself, based on leaks of false information and fake-news stories, some of them originally orchestrated by Never Trump primary opponents and the Clinton campaign.

No evidence emerged of Trump’s culpability. But investigations were aimed at diverting attention from, and thereby stalling, the Trump legislative agenda. Again, the goal was driving his popularity ratings down to levels that would advance the cause of future impeachment should the Democrats ride the anti-Trump collusion hoaxes to midterm victory in the House.

An effective way to emasculate Trump was to demand recusals, supposedly due to some sort of hyper-partisanship on the part of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes. No sooner had each agreed to step aside from some limited aspects of their investigations than Democrats insisted that their magnanimous recusals were both proof of guilt and yet too narrow — as they pressed on to seek recusals from ever more Trump White house officials.

Winston Churchill repeatedly warned the British Nation of what would happen before that fateful act of appeasement towards Hitler and the Nazis by the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, took place at Munich. As Churchill feared, it inexorably led to the catastrophe of World War Two.

Churchill’s words ring eerily true for all of us – be it in Britain, the United States or what is left of Western Europe – as we now face the rising peril of unbridled Islamo-Nazi supremacy and infiltration. His words most certainly rang unnervingly true as we witnessed and endured the appalling political correctness and appeasement towards Islam during the eight long years of the Barack Hussein Obama presidency.

It was desolating to witness the descent of the United States of America; a victorious nation that truly was – and is – a shining beacon in an often dark and frightening world but was fundamentally being changed for the worse by a foreboding presence in the White House.

But political correctness and the insanity of multiculturalism still continues, led by the European Union and by so many Western failed democracies as they act like dhimmies towards the barbaric Islamic scourge of jihad and terror that threatens to destroy all that is left of freedom and Judeo-Christian civilization.

We will soon mark the 16 year old anniversary of that other fateful day in September, 2001; the day when a horrific atrocity in the name of Allah was perpetrated against two of America’s icons: the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

The barbarity of 9/11 in which so many innocents died was an act of utter evil. But an enfeebled world, shackled by the unholy trinity of political correctness, multiculturalism and diversity, largely failed then as now to confront that evil, giving future historians much to contemplate.

So here are Churchill’s words that now can so sadly be applied to what is left of much of the United States, Britain and the West:

“I have watched this famous island descending incontinently, fecklessly, down the stairway which leads to a dark gulf. It is a fine broad stairway at the beginning, but after a bit the carpet ends.

“A little farther on there are only flagstones, and a little farther on still these break beneath your feet … if mortal catastrophe should overtake the British Nation, historians a thousand years hence will still be baffled by the mystery of our affairs.

“They will never understand how it was that a victorious nation, with everything in hand, suffered itself to be brought low, and cast away all that had been gained by measureless sacrifice and absolute victory – gone with the wind!”

Donald Trump is now the duly elected president, a principled man, an American patriot, who desires to return America to that shining beacon in a world gone mad. But he is confronted by a veritable and relentless campaign of hate to remove him from office through the machinations of an increasingly extreme leftwing Democrat party and a mainstream media that spews fake news ad nauseam.

The Supreme Court has done some of its best work in recent years on the First Amendment, and that continued with an 8-0 decision Monday protecting unpopular speech. The Justices ruled that an Asian-American rock band called The Slants can’t be denied a federal trademark because the government fears the name might offend someone.

Simon Tam, front man for The Slants, sought to register the name with the Patent and Trademark Office as a rebuke to those who use it as a pejorative. The government denied the trademark, citing a Lanham Act provision that bans trademarks that “may disparage . . . persons, living or dead, institutions, beliefs, or national symbols.” The Court ruled that this clause is unconstitutional (Matal v. Tam).

The idea that the government has an interest in suppressing viewpoints that offend “strikes at the heart of the First Amendment,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote. “Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express ‘the thought that we hate.’”

The government claimed trademark registration is a form of government free speech, but that was also dismissed by Justice Alito. “If a trademark qualifies as government speech,” he wrote, the government “is babbling prodigiously and incoherently,” endorsing competing products and making contradictory statements.

The effort to “cleanse” commercial speech of any offense is also a nonstarter since there are many kinds of merchandise that “disparages prominent figures or groups and the line between commercial and non-commercial speech is not always clear.” Think anti-Trump T-shirts.

Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote a concurrence making a useful point about how government could abuse such leverage over speech. “A law that can be directed against speech found offensive to some portion of the public can be turned against minority and dissenting views to the detriment of all,” Justice Kennedy wrote. “The First Amendment does not entrust that power to the government’s benevolence.”

In other good news, the Justices on Monday continued to police legal forum shopping. In Bristol-Myers Squibb v. Superior Court of California, the Justice ruled 8-1 that California courts don’t have jurisdiction to decide injury claims for some 592 out-of-state plaintiffs when the defendant company isn’t based there and the injuries didn’t occur there.