RUTHFULLY YOURS

Now the top story on the Drudge Report, the top Must-Read on Lucianne.com and listed on Real Clear Politics: my latest column for the New York Post regarding the ridiculous stories in the New York Times about “Russian collusion.”

The news was delivered by the New York Times in the breathless tones that might announce a cure for cancer or the discovery of life on Mars: “President Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., was promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton before agreeing to meet with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer during the 2016 campaign, according to three advisers to the White House briefed on the meeting and two others with knowledge of it.”

To which a rational response is … who wouldn’t? And also: So what? A third response is unprintable.

As I said on the Dennis Prager radio show an hour ago: think David Mamet.

Just as the “Russian collusion” fantasy — a resentful smear cooked up in the immediate aftermath of Clinton’s stunning defeat last fall — was finally fading from the fever swamps of the “resistance” and its media mouthpieces, along comes the Times with a pair of journalistic nothingburgers.

They first reported that Trump Jr., along with Paul Manafort (then the campaign manager) and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, met with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer “linked to” the Kremlin, back in June, shortly after Trump had clinched the Republican nomination. The second claimed she’d promised dirt on Clinton and the Democrats in order to entice Trump Jr. and the others.

According to the younger Trump, the Clinton angle was just a ruse: “Her statements were vague, ambiguous and made no sense. No details or supporting information was provided or even offered,” he told the Times.

The real reason, it seems, was that Veselnitskaya wanted to lobby for the repeal of the Magnitsky Act, an Obama-era law that allows the US to deny visas to Russians thought guilty of human rights violations. In retaliation, the Russians promptly ended the adoption of Russian orphans by Americans.

Honestly, where does this end? Having had their two big scoops instantly blasted back into their faces, the Left has now moved on to claiming that Donald Jr. “lied” about the meeting with a Russian lawyer nobody ever heard of. This is the baleful legacy of the Mike Flynn affair, where it was not the “crime” of meeting with Russians (is that against the law?) but the “coverup” of a non-existent transgression.

But this is where we are now: once the instruments of the state roll into action, the slightest discrepancy or memory loss can now be twisted into a felony: just ask Martha Stewart or Scooter Libby.

And that’s what all the fuss is about? No campaign in its right mind would turn down an offer of information on their opponent. That is what opposition research is all about. You can bet Hillary wouldn’t have hung up on the person who claimed to have dirt on The Donald. After all, the Clinton campaign lobbied the comedian Tom Arnold two days before the election to release potentially embarrassing footage from Trump’s TV show, “The Apprentice.” Arnold declined.

To grasp the distortion James Comey makes of his February 14 meeting with President Trump, first review the meeting of January 27.

In a previous article, I showed how the version of the February 14 Flynn conversation leaked to the New York Times in May was tailored by James Comey to create the misleading impression that President Trump asked Comey to shut down part of the FBI investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Comey knew this was false at the time. In his sworn testimony, he indicated Trump’s comments about Flynn were much more narrowly focused. But since Comey’s purpose was to prompt the appointment of a special counsel, the former FBI director needed to suggest that the president had sought to impede the broader Russian investigation, and he did so by leaking truncated quotations that omitted qualifications the president had actually uttered.

Comey also knew—or at least had compelling reason to know—that Trump’s comments about Flynn were not a request or direction of any sort. Here is how we can tell.

Before February 14

According to Comey’s written testimony, he and Trump had met for discussion on two occasions prior to their February 14 meeting.

The first time was on January 6 at Trump Tower. After leaders of the Intelligence Community briefed the president-elect and his security team on their assessment of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, Comey and Trump met alone for a special briefing on the “Steele dossier” and what the incoming president should do in case an effort was made to compromise him. From Comey’s description of the meeting, the FBI director came with much information and expertise to convey, while Trump knew little. Comey did most of the talking while the president-elect listened to his information and advice.

The second meeting took place on January 27 at a dinner the recently inaugurated president and Comey shared together at the White House. Once again, the Steele dossier was a topic of discussion (probably the main topic, as I have explained here). In Comey’s June 8 written testimony he paraphrased that discussion as follows (emphasis added):

During the dinner, the President returned to the salacious material I had briefed him about on January 6….He said he was considering ordering me to investigate the alleged incident to prove it didn’t happen. I replied that he should give that careful thought because it might create a narrative that we were investigating him personally, which we weren’t, and because it was very difficult to prove a negative. He said he would think about it and asked me to think about it.

Here we see President Trump actually mentioning giving an order to the FBI director, with the qualification “considering.” As Comey realized, this is not an implied order, but rather an invitation for Comey to advise the president about his tentatively proposed plan. Not only does Comey give the president advice, he advises him to shelve his proposal, and the president agrees. Moreover the president indicates that he expects to exchange views with Comey again, and instructs the FBI director to prepare independent thoughts for sharing with him.

Thus, in both of Comey’s prior meetings with Trump, Comey used his expertise as FBI director to give him counsel. Trump apparently welcomed Comey’s knowledgeable input, since in the second meeting he elicited it, followed it, encouraged more of it, and also indicated that Comey should expect a further consultation.

February 14: Alone at Last

On February 14, Comey and five other officials with intelligence responsibilities presented the president and some other members of his administration with a scheduled counterintelligence briefing in the Oval Office. When the briefing concluded the president told those present that he wanted to speak with Comey alone. Comey’s testimony suggests that a meeting between only the president and the FBI director was something that he and possibly others considered odd and inappropriate. During his oral testimony, in response to a question from Sen. Mark Warner (D–Va.), Comey elaborated, explaining that when he was alone with the president, he thought, “Something big is about to happen. I need to remember every single word that is spoken.” This observation seems intended to spread an aura of abnormality and impropriety around whatever the president said.

Nevertheless after reviewing Comey’s testimony about his prior discussions with Trump, one wonders why Comey wouldn’t have been expecting the president to seek an opportunity to confer with him alone, since 18 days earlier the president had told him to think about his proposal to investigate the Steele dossier. Both of Comey’s discussions with Trump had concerned the Steele dossier, and both discussions had occurred without others present. When the president asked the gathering to leave him alone with Comey, the FBI director had good reason to expect the president to seek his input about the Steele dossier. Did Comey forget what the president told him? Someone should ask him.

Mayor de Blasio made a surprise departure from New York City yesterday—just one day after the assassination of NYPD officer Miosotis Familia while she guarded a violence-plagued Bronx corner—in order to attend anti-capitalist protests in Hamburg, site of the G-20 summit. A few hours after de Blasio’s plane departed, a train derailed in Penn Station, where extensive track work is scheduled to begin this weekend. It was the third derailment at Penn since March; the incidents have become so commonplace that New Jersey Transit commuters reportedly showed little surprise when their train car slid off the track.

The mayor has indulged his inflated sense of his own importance before: he loves to attend summits, conferences, rallies, and protests where he can pontificate about inequality. He particularly enjoys hobnobbing with international mayors. Soon after his inauguration, de Blasio met Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo and burbled about their common goals. “It’s absolutely amazing by the way, 3,000 miles apart, we have come up with such a similar vision of what our cities need,” said de Blasio. “What we want to do now is constantly communicate as we implement this vision and help each other figure out what’s working and what’s not.”

Last September, after an Afghan immigrant had perpetrated a series of bombings in New Jersey and New York City, de Blasio, Hidalgo, and newly elected London mayor Sadiq Khan penned a joint op-ed titled, “Our Immigrants, Our Strength.” The essay made the false claim that “militant violence is astonishingly rare” among immigrants; the line was stricken from later editions.

Following President Trump’s election, de Blasio became particularly besotted with the potential of mayors to change the world. In this new era, de Blasio told the U.S. Conference of Mayors convention last January, “the role of mayors will be amplified. It’s a time where actual, tangible work is going to be more important than ever.” A few days later, at a protest on the night before Trump’s inauguration, de Blasio announced that “mayors are gathering from all over the country in a common cause . . . Mayors all over the country are signing this pledge for common action—that the next 100 days will be days of action together.” He then introduced a “dynamic, progressive leader from the heartland,” Minneapolis mayor Betsy Hodges, who echoed de Blasio’s grandiose rhetoric, asserting that President-elect Trump “will have to get through all the mayors in all the cities in this country if he wants to get to our beloved communities. When he comes for our artists, who are going to be more important now than ever with their voices of dissent, he’s going to have to get through me!” This inspiring vision of mayors as bulwarks against tyranny has no basis in history or law.

De Blasio’s meaningless and absurd promise to ensure that New York City adheres to the Paris Climate Accords underscores a fundamental truth about his mayoralty: he has no interest in what his job actually entails. Mayors do important work: they administer streets, schools, and police, and they manage a municipal budget. De Blasio has little interest in such banalities; he imagines that mayors are the true rulers of the world, because, as he told the Conference of Mayors, they “represent the majority of Americans.”

Based on “interviews with officials familiar with the documents,” The Hill is reporting that more than half of the memoranda former FBI director James Comey made regarding his conversations with president-elect and then President Trump contain classified information. The FBI, moreover, has determined that all of the memos are government documents.

This will come as a surprise to no one who has been following this story on National Review. In a column on Comey’s memos a month ago, I explained that there was no doubt the memos were government documents (regardless of the former director’s suggestion that they were his personal property, memorializing his “recollection recorded” of his conversations with the president). I further explained that, while Comey’s judgment that the memos were not classified was entitled to considerable weight, we could not make a conclusive judgment on this because (a) we had not seen them and (b) they had not yet been subjected to “a classification review . . . by the White House or the Justice Department.”

I was inclined to give Comey the benefit of the doubt on the classification question. If The Hill’s report is accurate, however, a classification review has now happened, and it has been determined that more than half of the memos contain classified information.

Comey has stated in congressional testimony that he made seven memos of the nine conversations he recalls having with Trump.

In another intemperate tweet this morning, President Trump asserted, “James Comey leaked CLASSIFIED INFORMATION to the media. That is so illegal!” In reality, we do not yet know whether this is the case. For starters, The Hill’s report is based on leaks (which, I’d note, the president is not complaining about this time). The government has not taken a formal public position on the memos yet.

Second, even if we assume the report is accurate (as I am inclined to do), it indicates that at least four of the seven memos contain classified information — not that all of them do.

Comey testified that he gave at least one memo to an intermediary, a law professor at Columbia. (Full disclosure: The professor is a friend and former colleague of mine. I have not discussed the Comey memos with him.) The intermediary disclosed at least a portion of the memo to the New York Times. Thus, we do not know whether Comey gave all, some, or just one of the memos to the intermediary; we do not know whether the one memo we can be sure the intermediary got contained classified information; and we do not know whether the portion the intermediary shared with the Times was classified.

It is certainly possible that classified information was transmitted to persons not authorized to have it. But at this point, that has not been established.

There will be much to say about all this going forward. For now, I’ll stick to two precedents: Hillary Clinton and David Petraeus.

Claims about the classification status of Comey’s memos bring us right back to Hillary Clinton’s claims that her emails were not “marked classified,” and therefore that she lacked knowledge that they were classified when she stored and transmitted them. Ironically, as I recounted in the aforementioned column, it was Comey, then the FBI’s director, who debunked this theory (in his July 2016 press conference):

It is important to say something about the marking of classified information. Only a very small number of the e-mails containing classified information bore markings indicating the presence of classified information. But even if information is not marked “classified” in an e-mail, participants who know or should know that the subject matter is classified are still obligated to protect it.

As I elaborated:

To put a finer point on it, whether or not something is classified depends on the contents, not on whether some official with classification authority has deemed it, say, “top secret” and stamped it as such. As we pointed out during the Clinton e-mails hullaballoo, many government documents are “born classified.” That is, the contents of the documents fit the classification categories spelled out in the controlling executive order (EO 13526).

That brings us to the Petraeus precedent, which is relevant for two reasons.

First, as I explained in the column, the prosecution of former CIA director Petraeus — who pled guilty to misdemeanor mishandling of classified information — demonstrates that “the government regards many communications between national-security officials and the president as classified.” Petraeus’s journals are very similar in this regard to Comey’s memos because, among other sensitive documents, they contained notes of Petraeus’s conversations with the president of the United States (while Petraeus was a general commanding U.S. forces overseas).

Although Petreaus’s journals were not “marked classified,” he clearly knew that the journals were highly classified, based on his high-ranking national-security position and training in the handling of sensitive information. He thus never disputed this fact.

Second, Petraeus also did not dispute that the person with whom he shared the journals — his paramour and biographer — was not authorized to have access to them. On this score, it is noteworthy that the woman in question actually had a security clearance. Petraeus, nevertheless, did not attempt to claim this authorized the transmission of the journals to her. Again, in his high-ranking position, he knew that even having a security clearance did not qualify a person for access to all classified information. One must have a security clearance sufficiently high to warrant access to the material in question — and some classified information (including what was in Petraeus’s journals) is so closely held that even an official with a top-secret clearance must have a “need to know” and be “read into the program” to which the information relates.

Daniel Bonevac is professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin.https://amgreatness.com/2017/07/09/inside-chomsky-world/

Some 35 years ago I attended a party in honor of Noam Chomsky. A group of us stood around him, hearing his thoughts on the relevance of psychology to linguistic theory. Inevitably, conversation flagged—not least because he didn’t see much relevance in it—so I piped in. I had just seen an ad in Forbes featuring Chomsky, and I asked him how that had come about. What followed was an hour-long lecture on American Middle-East policy. The group dwindled as he went on. Soon I was the only one left listening. His account was multifaceted, intricate, and utterly brilliant. As far as I could tell, it touched on reality only lightly. But it was an intellectual tour de force of a sort.

That brings me to philosopher George Yancy’s interview with Chomsky the other day in the New York Times. To say that it touches on reality lightly would be far too kind.

So, why talk about it at all? Because some people are still listening. I have friends on the Left who think highly of this interview. They believe it captures something important. And I want to understand what they see in it. I’m interested in how people on the Left are thinking about our current political moment.

I used to understand liberals. We tended to share the same goals, though we might prioritize them differently. We disagreed about various empirical questions. But we could discuss them openly and rationally.

That rarely seems possible now. I no longer understand why many of my political opponents see the world as they do. Whatever they are, they aren’t liberals. I find it hard to find common ground. And that worries me.

Consider Yancy’s opening question: “Given our ‘post-truth’ political moment and the growing authoritarianism we are witnessing under President Trump . . . .”

Stop right there. What “growing authoritarianism”? Let’s see, it’s been five months. Has Trump sent stormtroopers to assault members of other parties? Has he jailed thousands of Democrats, including their political leaders, for thought crimes? Has he cajoled the Congress to grant all legislative power to his cabinet? Did he burn down the Capitol and blame it on the Democrats? Has he opened concentration camps for his political opponents? Have his followers roamed campuses burning books? No? Within five months of seizing power Hitler had done all that.

What are these people talking about?

Apparently, Chomsky’s answer reveals, climate change, “a truly existential threat to survival of organized human life.” That’s right. Climate change—and the North Carolina legislature and Trump administration declining to act on it.

If this seems out of proportion to authoritarianism rhetoric, that’s because it is.

It’s also an article of quasi-religious faith rather than a rational conclusion. Yancy and Chomsky assume that science shows us that we face an existential threat. Neither is trained in environmental science. Has either read the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report—not the political summary, but the whole thing? Do they read scientific journals on the topic? Are they familiar with the arguments of critics such as Richard Lindzen and Roger Pielke? Do they read blogs by critics such as Watts Up with That? Can they discuss the differences between satellite data sets? The differences between those, oceanic measurements, and surface records? Are they familiar with the variation among existing models? Can they explain why some ought to be preferred to others? If so, no sign of it here. The issue isn’t up for debate.

Linda Sarsour bores me. She is the radical flavor-of-the-month. But she is a numbingly familiar type to longtime observers of sharia supremacists in the West: the forked tongue, the flag-draped anti-Americanism, the close partnership with the hard left, and so on. Eight years ago, I wrote a book called The Grand Jihad about this breed of Muslim Brotherhood-mold operative. Sarsour fits the pathology to a tee … but once you’re on to them, these people are a dime a dozen. Yawn.

She got my attention, though, with her call for “jihad” in executing the Islamist-Leftist “resistance” to Donald Trump. Naturally, this has led to a brouhaha about whether she was really calling for violence or using “jihad” in the revisionist non-violent sense of “an internal struggle for personal betterment.”

I have no doubt that Lee Smith (in Tablet) is correct: Sarsour is a provocateur who was trying to call attention to herself while laying the groundwork to play the victim when she was inevitably criticized. What I have found amusing, however, are the two premises urged by her apologists: (a) we should take the jihad revisionism seriously; and (b) she must have meant “non-violent” jihad because she introduced the term by referring to a hadith in which Mohammed, Islam’s prophet, explains that, rather than violence, “the best form of jihad” is to speak “a word of truth” before a tyrant.

On the first point, jihad is essentially a forcible struggle. As Lee Smith points out, the evidence of sense should tell us all we need to know about it: just look at what is happening “on the killing fields of the Middle East.” Still, we do not need to make a deduction because the meaning of the word is clear, and because non-violent connotations of jihad are understood to be in support of the same mission as forcible jihad: the implementation of sharia, Islam’s societal framework and legal code.

Derivatives of “jihad” are used numerous times in the Koran in the militaristic sense. As I explained in Willful Blindness, my memoir about prosecuting jihadist terrorists in the mid-nineties, Bernard Lewis, the West’s pre-eminent historian of Islam, observes that “some modern Muslim theologians” have attempted to interpret the term as “striving … in a spiritual and moral sense.” Yet, he counters, “The overwhelming majority of early authorities,… citing relevant passages in the Qur’an and in the tradition, discuss jihad in military terms.”

Furthermore, Thomas Patrick Hughes’s renowned A Dictionary of Islam (1895) defines jihad as follows:

A religious war with those who are unbelievers in the mission of Muhammad. It is an incumbent religious duty, established in the Qur’an and in the Traditions as a divine institution, and enjoined specially for the purpose of advancing Islam and of repelling evil from Muslims.

Note here that there is nothing contradictory in the concepts of (a) waging war to establish the reign of Islamic law, and (b) striving in other ways to advance Islam and repel evil from Muslims – which, Islam teaches, is also done by establishing sharia. Thus, the premise that the non-violent jihad negates violent jihad has always been nonsense. The varieties of jihad work together toward the same end. To take a prominent example, many American Islamists who claim to reject terrorist jihad nonetheless support Hamas; they rationalize this contradiction by claiming that Hamas’s jihad is “resistance” not “terrorism” – got it?

In any event, we should note that Sarsour gave her jihad speech at the annual convention of the Islamic Society of North America. ISNA was established by the Muslim Brotherhood to be a progression from the Muslim Students Association, the Brotherhood’s foundational building block in the West. In the Justice Department’s terrorism financing prosecution, the Holy Land Foundation case, ISNA was an unindicted co-conspirator because the evidence demonstrated that it participated in the movement of funds to Hamas.

ISNA has a close collaborative relationship with the Brotherhood’s American think tank, the International Institute of Islamic Thought. IIIT provided an endorsement to Reliance of the Traveller, the English translation of an ancient sharia manual. The manual (sec. o9.0) relates this duality of jihad as a fundamentally military concept, in which forcible and non-forcible means are joined in the mission of implementing sharia:

Jihad means to war against non-Muslims, and is etymologically derived from the word mujahada, signifying warfare to establish the religion. And it is the lesser jihad. As for the greater jihad, it is the spiritual warfare against the lower self ( nafs), which is why the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said as he was returning from jihad, “We have returned from the lesser jihad to the greater jihad.”

On Friday, I spoke on Capitol Hill at the Federalist Society’s symposium “The Constitutional War Powers of the Executive and Legislative Branches.” This weekend’s column is adapted from those remarks.

As we gather here on Capitol Hill today, the United States armed forces are engaged in combat operations in several global hot spots. In Syria, we have not only conducted attacks against the regime without any congressional authorization; we are now occupying territory as well.

Ostensibly, we are there to fight not the regime or its Russian and Iranian allies but the Islamic State jihadist organization (also known as ISIS). But to the extent that is a legally “authorized” conflict, it is against an enemy that arguably did not exist when the relevant authorizations for the use of military force (AUMF) were debated and enacted about 15 years ago.

Now, you could say, as we have been saying, that ISIS is merely a breakaway faction of al-Qaeda — it began as the terror network’s Iraqi franchise. Consequently, it is covered under the existing AUMF. This, however, ignores the inconvenience that al-Qaeda, along with its allied Islamist factions, is also fighting ISIS and the Assad regime in Syria. Essentially, the enemy that we started out fighting after it attacked America in 2001, and that still regards the United States as its mortal enemy, is nevertheless fighting in Syria alongside the “rebel” elements that we support.

In that sense, the situation mirrors our misadventure in Libya. That was another recent conflict in which a president, without congressional authorization, launched an aggressive war against a foreign sovereign that not only posed no threat to the United States but was actually regarded as a key counterterrorism ally — precisely because, for all its many flaws, the Qaddafi regime was providing us with intelligence about militants in places like Benghazi and Derna, the Libyan support hubs for the jihad against the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan.

That is to say, in Libya, we initiated an unnecessary war without any debate among the people’s representatives, much less any congressional authorization, and the result was a catastrophe: the undoing of a counterterrorism ally in a dangerous neighborhood, the empowerment of our jihadist enemies, a failed state, and an administration reduced to absurd rationalizations about how its aerial bombing raids on regime targets were somehow not acts of war.

It is tempting on this record to draw the conclusion that modern practice has superseded the Constitution’s separation of war powers and division of war-making authorities between the commander-in-chief and the Congress. But when we get down to brass tacks, this simply is not true.

It is not true for a reason that is often forgotten in our debates about war powers, which are dominated by lawyers. They tend to take place under the auspices of legal academic institutions or organizations like our host today, my good friends and colleagues of the Federalist Society.

The reason is this: We are a body politic, not a legal community — at least, not in the main. For any free society to flourish, it must of course be undergirded by the rule of law. But the Constitution is basically a political document, not a legal one. It is the assignment and division of political authority among actors who compete and collude based on the attendant circumstances.

This is critical because war is a political exercise — “politics by other means,” as Carl von Clausewitz memorably put it. There are legal elements to it, but it is basically a political endeavor — the use of government power, in this instance force, against a foreign enemy in order to break the enemy’s will. Though you wouldn’t know it to listen to most war-powers discussions, there is a limit to how much war can be “judicialized” or subjected to antecedent legal rules and procedures.

A state of war, after all, is the antithesis of our domestic peacetime footing. It is the proud boast of our legal system that we would rather see the guilty go free than have a single person wrongly convicted. Thus, we presume against the government. The accused is presumed to be innocent and has no burden to prove anything. The government must meet weighty standards of proof to conduct a search, obtain a wiretap, make an arrest, or secure a conviction. Our bottom line, as former Bush-41 attorney general William Barr has observed, is that we would rather see the government lose — i.e., justice is not the conviction of the guilty; it is a government forced to meet its burden under strict due-process rules.

War is entirely different. In war, we don’t want the government to lose, and we cannot give the enemy the presumption of innocence. In war, it is in the national interest that the government prevail. Yes, our troops are the world’s best trained and most disciplined, and we demand of them adherence to the laws and customs of civilized warfare. But the highest national interest is to defeat the enemy and to achieve the objective so vital that it was worth going to war over.

David Gerlenter writing in the Wall Street Journal says something self-evidently true. The Left seems to have won every single culture battle fought.

Although the right reads the left, the left rarely reads the right. Why should it, when the left owns American culture? Nearly every university, newspaper, TV network, Hollywood studio, publisher, education school and museum in the nation. The left wrapped up the culture war two generations ago. Throughout my own adult lifetime, the right has never made one significant move against the liberal culture machine.

The late Andrew Breitbart noticed the same thing. Observing that “politics is downstream from culture” he argued the Left has made us the villains of our own stories.

Our lives — indeed, our very species — has storytelling wound into our DNA. … Popular culture is delivered to us in the form of story via books, TV, film, music, video games, and new media. …

Thus we come to politics … the vast majority of those with the power of content creation are Liberals. … Liberals control story. …What is some of that messaging? Think about movies and TV. Corporations are evil — using unwitting poor Africans for pharmaceutical testing (Constant Gardener) or dumping toxic chemicals into nature (Erin Brockovich, A Civil Action) or responsible for the end of mankind (Rise of the Planet of the Apes). American soldiers are bloodthirsty lawbreaking maniacs (Any military film). The CIA conducts illegal, secret operations that have nothing to do with protecting America. Radical Muslim terrorists are never villains. Trial lawyers are crusading do-gooders. David Letterman and Saturday Night Live ridicule the Right 95% of the time. Jon Stewart pretends to be centrist, but in fact jumps all over the Right far more often than the Left.

Liberal political candidates are the embodiments of those Liberal tenets. The goal is to associate them in voter minds via the vehicle of popular culture.

Even before Breitbart’s warning there was Orwell who understood that the Left’s ultimate ability was to uproot the past and plant their chosen seed for the future. His famous dictum “he who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past” is an unsurpassed indictment of groupthink totalitarianism. There seemed no doubt they would succeed. Within its bubble the Left’s control of culture is so absolute they can watch 1984 without realizing it’s about them.

Yet the real mystery — one which even Orwell himself did not anticipate — is why, despite having won every culture battle, the Left has lost the war. Look around you. Every single country which adopted socialism as an economic system went bankrupt. The Soviet Union collapsed. Now the Western Gramscian project is self-immolating in the fires of its own absurdity. The current political crisis is the collective shudder of mortality passing through “every university, newspaper, TV network, Hollywood studio, publisher, education school and museum in the nation”. The left may have “wrapped up the culture war two generations ago” but it is rotting inside the wrapping.

The search is on for the regicide.

The only thing one can be sure of is that the Republican Party didn’t cause it; nor did their tame and feeble publications. In fact not even publications like Breitbart, valiant though their efforts were, can claim credit. Trump couldn’t have done it either, since the proud tower that Gerlenter describes would have been impervious to the mere touch of the orange-hued real estate mogul without some other factor in play.

Yet most of us know who did it, though we hesitate to name the obvious suspect. The Left even in its downfall has stilled our tongues. The word comes to the edge of our lips before we choke it back, fearful even now of the ridicule and abuse we will get should we blurt it. That word is God. God killed the Left. Of course one could legitimately use some other term. “Reality”, “consequences”, the “laws of nature”, “economics”, even “truth” will do. Through some process of increasing entropy, failed memory management or unanticipated side effects the status quo — the one dominated by the Left — is collapsing. CONTINUE AT SITE