RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Obama Justice Department dismissed the IRS political targeting scandal as no big deal, and the Trump Administration hasn’t been any better. At least the judiciary is still trying to hold someone to account for this government abuse.

In a little noticed decision last week, federal Judge Reggie Walton ordered the IRS to answer a series of questions by Oct. 16. Notably, the tax agency must finally explain the specific reasons for the specific delays in approving each of dozens of conservative nonprofit applications—delays that stifled free speech during a midterm and presidential election. Judge Walton is also requiring the IRS to name the specific individuals that it holds responsible for the targeting.

These are basic questions of political accountability, even if the IRS has stonewalled since 2013. President Obama continued to spin that the targeting was the result of some “boneheaded” IRS line officers in Cincinnati who didn’t understand tax law. Yet Congressional investigations have uncovered clear evidence that the targeting was ordered and directed out of Washington.

Former director of Exempt Organizations Lois Lerner was at the center of that Washington effort, but the IRS allowed her to retire with benefits. She invoked the Fifth Amendment before Congress. One of her principal deputies, Holly Paz, has submitted to a deposition in separate litigation, but the judge has sealed her testimony after she claimed she faced threats. The Acting Commissioner of the IRS at the time, Stephen Miller, stepped down in the wake of the scandal, but as far as anyone outside the IRS knows, no other IRS employee has been held to account. Even if the culprits were “rogue employees,” as the IRS claims, the public deserves to know what happened.

Judge Walton’s ruling means that “the IRS must finally acknowledge its wrongdoing (and the reasons for it) in the context of a judicial proceeding in which the agency may be held legally accountable for its misconduct,” Carly Gammill told Powerlineblog.com. Ms. Gammill is an attorney at the American Center for Law & Justice who represents tea-party groups in the litigation.

President Trump has been fighting a one-man war against political correctness. He could use some help. The Confederate monuments are as good a place as any to start

The tearing down of Confederate monuments was sure to be a divisive issue. Why raise it now, when the people of the United States are as divided as they have been at any time since—the Civil War? The question answers itself. It was raised now precisely because it would be divisive. But to say this is to call into question the motives of those who have raised the issue. Indeed.

Those who advocate tearing down the monuments accuse their opponents of racism. It’s an easy accusation to make, and not an easy one to refute. It places the moral onus on those who would defend the monuments to justify their actions, while deflecting moral scrutiny from their accusers.

Surely those who oppose the monuments do so because the Confederacy was an affront to the individual liberty of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. It is one thing to oppose slavery and racism, but it makes all the difference what one advocates in their place. And there’s the rub.

Consider Black Lives Matter. They are not a radical fringe group. Barack Obama welcomed them into the White House, where he praised their success as community organizers. They have enjoyed sympathetic nationwide media coverage, thanks in no small part to Colin Kaepernick and the entire cast of announcers at ESPN. They even have their own exhibit at the Smithsonian Exhibition.

Black Lives Matter has been at the very center of leftwing agitation against white “oppression” for the last year and a half. It is largely because of the success of BLM and their allies that the Left now feel emboldened to go after the monuments.

What exactly do Black Lives Matter advocate? According to their website, they are “committed to disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another….” If this sounds like a turning away from Western-style individualism toward African-style tribalism, that’s because it is.

Consider their view of capitalism, which is the economic system based on private property, the foundation of individual rights. On their website, BLM described capitalism as an economic system “which deforms the spirit and fuels interpersonal violence.”

In a 2016 interview for the website Essence.com, BLM co-founder Alicia Garza was asked if she thought “revolution is the answer”. “[W]e have to be clear a revolution is a process,” said Miss Garza. In other words, yes, the current system of government in the United States does need to be torn down and replaced.

If there is any doubt about Black Lives Matter’s revolutionary inclinations, consider these words from Miss Garza on the BLM website: “When I use Assata’s powerful demand in my organizing work, I always begin by sharing where it comes from, sharing about Assata’s significance to the Black Liberation Movement, what its political purpose and message is, and why it’s important in our context.” “Assata” is JoAnne Chesimard, a former soldier in the Black Liberation Army convicted in the 1973 murder of New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster. Mrs. Chesimard escaped from prison in 1979 and fled to Cuba.

To understand that the effort to remove the monuments grows out of the same soil that Black Lives Matter has been tilling for the last year and a half is to understand that if every single Confederate monument in the country were torn down tomorrow, it would settle nothing. It would simply be one more victory on the way to deconstructing the culture of individualism to which men like John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington gave political form. The Confederate monuments are just low-hanging fruit for the deconstructionists; who but racists would dare defend them?

Many Americans will find it fantastical to think that the removing of the Confederate monuments could possibly be just a step on the way to razing the Jefferson Memorial and the Washington Monument, much less to the extinguishing of our republican form of government. They should ponder this additional item from the Black Lives Matter website: “We are committed to … doing the work required to dismantle cis-gender privilege ….” “Cis-gender” is newspeak for people whose “sexual identity” corresponds with their anatomy.

On Sunday, Jeh Johnson, former secretary of Homeland Security under President Obama, said that removing Confederate monuments is a matter of homeland security.

“That’s not a matter of political correctness, that’s a matter of public safety and homeland security, and doing what’s right,” Johnson told ABC News in an interview.

“What alarms so many of us, from a security perspective, is that so many of the statues — the Confederate monuments — are now, modern day, becoming symbols and rallying points for white nationalism, for neo-Nazis, for the KKK,” the former DHS secretary explained.

“We fought a World War against Nazism. The KKK rained terror on African-Americans for generations,” Johnson said. “I support those in cities and states who are taking down a lot of these monuments for reasons of public safety and security.”

Cities, states, and private entities do not argue they are removing the statues for “public safety and security,” however. The University of Texas, which removed Confederate statues in the wee hours of Monday morning, explained that these monuments were “symbols of modern white supremacy and neo-Nazism.”

In April, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu — whom Jeh Johnson praised in his interview — said, “The removal of these statues sends a clear and unequivocal message to the people of New Orleans and the nation: New Orleans celebrates our diversity, inclusion, and tolerance.” The city removed its four statues in April and May.

Anna Lope Brosche, president of the Jacksonville City Council in Florida, announced a plan of action to take an inventory of Confederate symbols and relocate them to museums. In her statement, Bosche noted that the monuments evoke “some really negative emotions, and pain and hurt.”

Some have mentioned safety — the safety of vandals who might try to remove the monuments. North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper said he must “protect North Carolinians and keep them safe,” citing “the likelihood of protesters being injured or worse as they may try to topple” the monuments, in addition to the threat of violence in rallies like Charlottesville.

Removing monuments might not guarantee safety or that white supremacists won’t rally in locations which used to have monuments, however.

Furthermore, the Left’s rush to defend vandals, to protect feelings, and to champion Antifa on the grounds that it is fighting Nazis suggests that this is an issue of political correctness more than one of homeland security.

The Humanitarian Hoax is a deliberate and deceitful tactic of presenting a destructive policy as altruistic. The humanitarian huckster presents himself as a compassionate advocate when in fact he is the disguised enemy.

Obama, the humanitarian huckster-in-chief, weakened the United States for eight years presenting his deceitful policies featuring victimhood as altruistic when in fact they were designed for destruction. His legacy, the Leftist Democrat Party with its “resistance” movement, is the party of the Humanitarian Hoax attempting to destroy American democracy and replace it with socialism.
The three basic tenets of left-wing liberal progressivism are political correctness, moral relativism, and historical revisionism. Leftist progressivism is an extremely regressive political structure that emphasizes victimhood and encourages childlike dependence on the government in its march toward socialism. Progressivism is an Orwellian doublespeak word designed to dupe the participant into believing he is moving society forward when in fact progressivism and progressive policies support regression backwards toward childhood dependence.
Historical records presents the humanitarian huckster with a conundrum. The history of our American democracy is one of immense growth, development, and achievement. American history contradicts the negative message of the humanitarian huckster attempting to transform America into socialism. Destroying historical records, historical facts, and historical icons does not erase history – it simply leaves history open to historical revisionism. Obama’s revisionist anti-American pro-Muslim Common Core re-education curriculum was a start, smashing historical statues is an escalation, violent anarchy is the ultimate Leftist strategy to destroy American democracy.

Progressivism posits that objective reality does not exist – this in itself is an invitation for historical revisionism. For progressives there are only matters of opinion and all opinions are equal. This means that opinions of out of control screaming protesters at Evergreen college have the same status as the opinion of their professors. Progressives support subjective reality and deny objective reality in their self-serving need to preserve the fiction of their narrative. Here is the problem – saying something does not make it true. Objective reality exists whether the Left accepts it or not. Watching the Left is like watching a child insist he can fly. He is certain of it – but that does not make it true or a fact in objective reality.
George Orwell understood these dynamics seventy years ago when he created the dystopian society in his cautionary tale “1984.” American society under Obama has devolved into an Orwellian nightmare of Leftist political correctness, groupthink, and moral relativism designed to destroy the moral fabric of American society. The Left is convinced of its moral superiority because its narrative of moral relativism and politically correctness insists it is superior and its groupthink mentality validates itself.
A civil society requires consensus. Normative behavior is a matter of consensus that is codified into laws that govern society. Multiculturalism challenges consensus. If one individual thinks “honor” killing is acceptable and society considers it murder then there is a problem – whose norms will prevail if everyone’s opinions are equal? When Leftists insist that opposing points of view are intolerable hate speech they hypocritically deny freedom of speech and a free society. When everything is a matter of opinion and all opinions are equal there can be no consensus. Without consensus there are no accepted laws to abide – there is only anarchy and social chaos. But that is exactly the point – the Left wants anarchy and social chaos. Their leaders are fomenting racial violence and violent anarchy because social chaos is the prerequisite for seismic social change. Obama’s “resistance” movement is trying to destroy American democracy and replace it with socialism. The Leftist/Islamist axis is attacking Judeo-Christian norms and destabilizing society with the collaborating mainstream media. For the Left to embrace the barbaric tenets of Islamist sharia law requires political correctness, moral relativism, historical revisionism and the dreamscape of subjective reality where the stunning hypocrisy of their alliance is ignored and considered irrelevant by the media.

The Democratic Party Goon Squad chalked up another win last week when they got into a rumble with a fringe group of white racists who were protesting the removal of a statue of a famous Democrat from a park in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The Nazi/KKK racists hadn’t received this much attention since their march in Skokie, Illinois in 1978. Their last member of Congress, former KKK official and Democratic senator Robert Byrd, died in 2010, and their most famous living member, David Duke, hasn’t generated much news of late, so they probably missed the notoriety. Thus, they assembled in Charlottesville on the evening of August 11 and marched to save the statue of Civil War general Robert E. Lee. They carried tiki torches and chanted, “One people, one nation, end immigration” and “White lives matter” and other vile mottos, but they broke no laws.

Laws were broken the next day, however, when the Democrat Goon Squad showed up and a mêlée ensued. Both sides wielded fists and bats, and, in a pattern that has become familiar, the police stood down. By the end of the day, one young woman had been killed by a motorist, two officers who had been monitoring the events died in a helicopter crash, and 35 people were being treated for injuries.

A single voice of sanity commented on the events. On Saturday evening, President Donald Trump decried the hatred and violence on both sides. Then the country went nuts. Journalists and politicians expressed outrage that he hadn’t called out the Nazis and the Klan by name and that he had blamed both sides. They demanded retractions and apologies, and a few called on Trump to resign. One Democratic Missouri state senator hoped for his assassination.

But Trump was right. There were two sides in Charlottesville. One side was a fringe group whose views haven’t been taken seriously for at least 50 years and who don’t have sufficient members to elect a dogcatcher.

The other side were the “aggressively aggrieved left.” They’ve been around for decades, and, like many shady movements, they frequently change their name.

In 2011, they called themselves “the 99%” when they occupied and trashed Zuccotti Park near Wall Street.

Iconoclasm is generally defined as the destruction of sacred images, usually for religious or political motives. America is experiencing an epidemic of iconoclasm and it did not begin in Charlottesville. For several years there have been numerous incidents of vandalism of Confederate statues, fallen officer memorials, and veterans’ monuments. The widespread desecration of statues and memorials throughout the country directly corresponds to the increase in anarchist, socialist, communist, anti-police, anti-government and anti-Trump movements.

Throughout history and across cultures, regime change always begins and ends with the destruction and removal of symbols. Iconoclasm is one of the most powerful strategies for cultural revolution. From the French Revolution to the Bolshevik Revolution to the Islamic State, regime change has been accompanied by the destruction of statues, paintings, monuments, sacred objects and other symbols identified with the previous government.

The first wave of contemporary American iconoclasm began in June 2015 after the mass murder of nine parishioners at the historically black Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina. A widely circulated photo of the self-identified white supremacist, Dylann Roof, holding a gun and a confederate flag definitively linked confederate symbols to white supremacist violence. Subsequently any and all things Confederate were designated as undeniable symbols of racism. Black nationalist, socialist and communist groups began organizing campaigns against Confederate flags and statues that they perceive as symbols of slavery, injustice, racial oppression and white supremacy.

The iconoclasm campaign had its first big success in July 2015 when the Confederate flag on South Carolina’s statehouse grounds came down after 54 years at the Capitol. During the debates over its proposed removal dozens of confederate statues were vandalized. Walmart, Sears, Amazon and other companies removed Confederate merchandise from thousands of stores across the U.S. Organizers discovered the power of iconoclasm and began targeting statues, names and memorials. A counter movement ensued to preserve the Confederate statues and monuments as historical symbols of American history and Southern heritage. Supporters of Confederate symbols were placed in the untenable position of having to defend slavery.

The grievance for the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, VA was the proposed removal of the Robert Edward Lee Sculpture. Because the rally was organized by neo-Nazi, white nationalist and white supremacist groups who wore KKK regalia and proudly displayed Neo-Nazi symbols, the debate over Confederate symbols became intrinsically intertwined with fascism and white supremacy. Hundreds of counter protestors showed up resulting in violent clashes between demonstrators and the death of a counter protester. Subsequently, arguments and rallies in support of Confederate symbols were eclipsed by emotional visceral reactions to white hoods, swastikas, Nazi salutes and images of violence. Charlottesville ignited a second more virulent wave of iconoclasm.

Immediately after the Charlottesville rally, Confederate statues and plaques were removed from public parks, cemeteries, plazas and government buildings in cities across the country. Politicians are calling for the removal of all Confederate monuments from public spaces and legislation is being introduced to remove Confederate statues from the U.S. Capitol building. Other statues were vandalized and destroyed. In Durham, NC protesters toppled a bronze statue of a Confederate soldier outside the Old Durham County Courthouse. They did not just remove the statue. They lynched it. Video of the incident shows a woman climbing a ladder to the top of the statue and tying a rope around the soldier’s neck. Dozens of other activists participated in the lynching, pulling the statue to the ground, cheering and taking turns kicking, spitting and standing on the fallen soldier. This went beyond vandalism. It was a collective ritual execution. Historically, iconoclasm encompassed formally executing statues and effigies of people in their absence or long after they were already dead. People were posthumously declared enemies of the state and were sentenced to death. Statues were imprisoned, tried and sentenced. Then they were ritually punished by hanging, burning, defacing, dismembering and decapitating in staged public executions. Other historical acts of iconoclasm included ritually debasing, humiliating and physically assaulting statues.

One of the great gifts the British writer George Orwell gave us, in addition to his classics 1984 and Animal Farm, was a clear and uncompromising look at dangerous ideologies. In “Orwell and the British Left,” British writer Ian Williams recalls Orwell’s underlining of “the old, true and unpalatable conclusion that a Communist and a Fascist are somewhat nearer to one another than either is to a democrat.” Orwell’s well-observed conclusion nonetheless scandalized many on the left who rallied behind the Marxist phrase “no enemies on the left.”

Sadly, a quarter century after the fall of Communism, too many leftists are still ignoring Orwell and refusing to acknowledge the reality of left-wing brutality. In the wake of Charlottesville, eyewitnesses and reporters agreed that while the violence was instigated by neo-Nazis and white nationalists, it was countered with bloody counterattacks by left-wingers and black-shirted anarchists wearing masks. There was a clear asymmetric outcome to the violence: A white nationalist mowed down protestors with his car, killing a 32-year-old woman.

But that didn’t mean there were no victims of left-wing violence. Antifa — short for “anti-fascist” — protestors came armed with pepper spray, bricks, and clubs. Antifa members believe that racist speech is violence and that they must counter it physically, not just oppose it with rhetoric or better ideas.

As the New York Daily News reported, among antifa’s victims were journalists:

Taylor Lorenz of The Hill was punched in the face by an antifa for recording a fight between the two groups; she tweeted that her assaulter told her not to “snitch, media bitch.” A videographer from Richmond’s WTVR covering a counter-protest got a concussion from head blows with a stick.

In addition, Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times tweeted from Charlottesville:

The hard left seemed as hate-filled as alt-right. I saw club-wielding “antifa” beating white nationalists being led out of the park.

Nor is Charlottesville the only place that antifa activists have crossed the line. Peter Beinart has a piece in this month’s Atlantic magazine noting that rioting by antifa forces forced University of California at Berkeley officials to cancel speeches by Ann Coulter and Milo Yiannopolous earlier this year.

In April, threats by antifa supporters convinced the Portland, Ore., police department that they couldn’t guarantee security for the annual Rose Festival parade. The parade’s sin? Allowing the local Republican party to have Trump supporters march under the GOP banner in the parade. The parade was canceled, to the delight of many in the hob-nailed boot Left that makes Portland, well, such a special place.

But most of this has been swiftly swept under the rug or underreported by liberals and much of the mainstream media. On Friday, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights held its monthly meeting in Washington. A liberal member introduced a stirring denunciation of the Nazi, KKK and white-nationalist participants in the Charlottesville rally.

But then Commission member Gail Heriot introduced an amendment that would have added the following:

Though we support peaceful protest and note that most of the counter-demonstrators were peaceful, we condemn violence by anyone, including violence by so-called antifa demonstrators.

Heriot, an independent, was supported in her amendment by Peter Kirsanow, a Republican appointee and African American from Cleveland. But they received no other support from the five commission members appointed by Democrats. Chairwoman Catherine Lhamon complained that Heriot’s amendment would “water down” the main resolution, when all it did was make clear that the commission wished to condemn violence of any kind.

They end up protesting free speech advocates instead.

Tens of thousands of left-wing activists converged on Boston Saturday to protest “white supremacism” during a “free speech” rally in which organizers disavowed white supremacism. The counter-protesters were under the impression that the free speech rally would be similar to the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last week that became violent and left a woman dead. But they were wrong. The rally was organized by a free speech group with no connection to white nationalists or Nazis. The protest on Saturday seemed to be either a result of mass hysteria fanned by a rabidly anti-Trump MSM, or a massive astroturf effort funded by the usual suspects on the organized left. Or a combination of the two.

An organizer for Boston Free Speech, the group behind the rally, told Boston.com that the group is not associated with the white supremacists and wrote in a Facebook post prior to the event that hate groups were not welcome.

John Medlar said his group is mostly comprised of Boston-area students in their mid-teens to mid-20s.

While Medlar defined Boston Free Speech as “intentionally neutral libertarians,” the Anti-Defamation League said in a blog post Monday that the rally “has been organized under the auspices of the alt lite,” also known as the New Right, a “loosely-connected movement whose adherents generally shun white supremacist thinking, but who are in step with the alt right in their hatred of feminists and [ illegal] immigrants, among others.”

Medlar disagreed with this characterization of the rally’s organizers and said he wished the league had reached out to his group directly instead of rushing to judgment.

“We are a grassroots coalition of local progressives, libertarians, and conservatives,” he wrote in an email to Boston.com. “… The topic of our event is free speech itself, and issues related to free speech. [Every] speaker at this event was invited to speak about issues related to free speech, not their other personal politics.”

Medlar, a 23-year-old Newton native, said Boston Free Speech is not associated with any of the groups from the Charlottesville rally, echoing statements put out by the group on Facebook Tuesday, Saturday, and June 17.

Medlar told Boston.com that most of the groups that are involved with his organization are currently “right wing” because they are the ones who “feel their free speech is mostly under threat.” In response to a report in the Boston Herald Friday alleging that members of the Massachusetts Ku Klux Klan were planning to attend the free speech rally, he said on Facebook that his group “reserves the right to dismiss anyone” at their event.

“If we are made aware, at any time, that hate groups are attending our rally we will ask them to exercise their free speech elsewhere,” the post said. CONTINUE AT SITE

The week before Charlottesville, Liz Warren, the newest and biggest fraud from the left, came out against a more centrist Democratic Party. The N.Y. Times op-ed page had actually allowed some Democrat moderates to publish a piece pleading for moderation on the left, and Liz instantly struck back. She thereby outsmarted Hillary, and a lot of what is happening today is a fight between left and lefter in the party.

Charlottesville followed a week later, and Liz earned Antifa brownie points for pushing back against moderation.

But the trouble with turning hard left too many times is that you end up in the same place you started, as in the classical French observation that “les extrêmes se touchent” – roughly, “the extremes meet each other.”

The left works hand in hand with the Ikhwan (the Muslim Brotherhood, which was founded in Hitler’s time), and it’s no surprise at all that CAIR (the U.S. front for the Brothers) immediately endorsed the leftist mob response to the murderous provocation battle in Charlottesville.

The Swastika is the perfect symbol for Antifa, because anyone with only a smidgen of history will recognize Antifa as another neurotic repetition of the worst moments in history. The people who pay for, recruit, and organize ruckus-makers teach radical street theater, and hey, if somebody gets killed, you just blame the innocent.

This is the whole purpose. Innocent people getting killed are a small price to pay for the glorious revolution, as Obama taught in his ACORN Alinsky trainings.

What is more un-American than calling for the assassination of our legally elected POTUS Trump? Wanting to kill a political enemy is the very definition of all the tyrannical war cults in history. Now that liberals have found their inner Stalinist again, they have become what they claim to hate. Calling for a presidential assassination is an open confession of totalitarian murder fantasies, the same nightmare fantasies that drove actual assassins – against JFK, against Pope John Paul II, against Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and against Abraham Lincoln.

What we are seeing today is not just talk of assassination. It has already resulted in a near fatal assault on Republican congressmen. It drove that mad young man in Charlottesville to panic, and in due course, we will find out what actually happened, through the court system. Only fools jump to instant conclusions, but then we are governed and preached at by fools every single day. Republicans have happily jumped into the public dirt pool along with all the other fools. Just keep track of who said what at this critical moment, and dig it out at election time.

These are dark, very dark signs of bad trouble to come, and there is no reasonable doubt that our jihadist enemies are working hand in hand with the likes of Antifa.

The Muslim Brotherhood is a Nazi-time network of violence-prone Muslim radicals, also called Salafists. Barack Hussein Obama, Code Pink, and Bill Ayers provoked the so-called Arab Spring rebellions at the start of the Obama years, including the Ikhwan in Egypt, all of them in alliance with other bad characters, including child-killing terrorists like Hamas, Hezb’allah, ISIS, al-Qaeda, and the rest.

Obama’s Arab Spring fraud led to tens of thousands of deaths in Arab countries – a point very widely understood in places like Egypt. The methodology of the Arab Spring is identical to Antifa, because mob agitation is the same all over the world.

After the Arab Spring crashed into slaughter, Obama just laughed it up in his public appearances, but no sane observer doubts his lifelong links with the murderous left. He wrote about it in both autobiographies, and it will no doubt show up in his third autobiography that’s now coming up.

The American Thinker has long pointed out massive evidence for direct collusion between the left and Muslim terrorism, because it’s been plain for anybody with the guts to see it. We have not been the only ones to call them out, but you can easily search AT’s archives to verify that.

After helping to elect Donald Trump and pilot his White House through the turbulence of its first seven months, Stephen K. Bannon has left the administration and returned to Breitbart News, the conservative online news giant he captained before joining Trump a year ago.

What distinguishes Steve Bannon from other GOP operatives and conservative politicians are two things: vision and guts. The left in this country, the progressive and Democratic Party left is now organized around the anti-American creed of “identity politics.” This is the idea that “people of color” in America are oppressed by white supremacists – by people who are not “of color” and only a general purge of white racists and suppression of their free speech will rectify the injustice. This is the new racism, which serves as the principal weapon in Democrat attacks not only on the Trump White House but on all Republicans and patriots who oppose them.

“The longer they talk about identity politics, I got ’em,” Steve Bannon told the American Prospect. “I want them to talk about racism every day. If the Left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”

You can probably count on one hand the number of Republican office-holders who think clearly and strategically like that. Or maybe one finger.

It is because Bannon understands the civil war which has now engulfed the political life of this nation that the secessionist left has focused its most vicious attacks on him, calling him a white nationalist, a white supremacist and an anti-Semite. Such attacks are transparently false, but they are in line with the left’s attacks on all their opponents as racists and fascists. These are the verbal equivalents of a nuclear option in political warfare and they reflect the existential nature of the conflict that is upon us. It is existential because the left has aimed at nothing less than the foundations of our democracy.

This was not a battle that could be fully engaged from the White House itself because so many people including the mainstream of the Republican Party are not yet awake to the nature of the conflict. They are too eager to seek approval from progressives who hate them.

Some on the right are concerned that without Bannon’s White House presence, Trump will become a prisoner of the globalist tendencies inside the administration and the appeasement instincts of the Republican in Congress. But they are wrong. Trump will still be Trump. He is not going to abandon the agendas or bury the instincts that made him endure the most hate-filled campaign in the history of American politics because he loves this country and wants to restore its greatness.

Although conservatives may thrill to the president’s frequent street fights with the Left, a president cannot be a relentless rebel. He has to put together a non-ideological majority and pick his fights shrewdly. Trump has already expressed his appreciation for the asset Bannon will be to him outside the White House. “Steve Bannon will be a tough and smart new voice at @BreitbartNews…maybe even better than ever before,” Trump tweeted Saturday. “Fake News needs the competition!” Yet, it’s more than fake news organizations that better look out when Bannon gets going.