RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Leftist progressive movement has adopted the binary victim/oppressor social structure of cultural Marxism. White males are the identified oppressors and everyone else is their victim. Classical Marxism identifies the oppressors as the bourgeoisie (owners of production) who exploit the proletariat (the workers). The metric of classical Marxism is economics. Cultural Marxism is a departure because it relabels the players in the drama and defines culture as the metric of exploitation.

Cultural Marxism dominates the Leftist Democrat Party and explains their radical political platform that is taking aim at the established Judeo-Christian values which define American culture. The family, the Church, patriotism, traditional definitions of race, gender, and sexual identity are oppressive and must be dismantled and replaced with romanticized notions of one globalized world without political borders, country borders, sexual borders, or any other defined boundary.

Here is the problem. Classical Marxism and cultural Marxism both seek to replace an existing order with collectivism – they are selling their own idealized form of secular heaven on earth. The naive social justice warriors who sign onto this Leftist fantasy are too childish to examine the reality of the offer. They believe the fantasy of a Marxist paradise but the reality they are embracing is the state of powerless infancy – complete dependence in a world without boundaries and borders.

Critical thinking is the objective analysis of facts to form a judgment and is the foundation of rational thought. Critical thinking is dependent upon accurate information – it relies upon objective reality. The ability to remain in objective reality is threatened when fiction/fantasy (subjective reality) is presented as fact. It is impossible to make an informed decision without an accurate source of information.

Truth in lending laws exist to provide consumers with informed consent. Surgical consent forms and pharmaceutical labels equip patients with information to make informed decisions about their health. Product labeling, food labeling, Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS), are all attempts to provide consumers with accurate information to make informed decisions. Laws and labels acknowledge the existence of conflicts of interest and are attempts to level the playing field. What about conflicts of interest in politics? News? Social media?

Let’s consider the current reporting of the horrific jihadi attack in NYC on 10.31.17. Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, an Uzbeki national admitted into the United States through the deadly “diversity” visa program, rented a truck and drove down the Hudson River bike path deliberately murdering and maiming innocent Americans. He murdered eight people injured dozens more then exited his vehicle shouting “Allah Akhbar!”

Predictably leftist Mayor Bill de Blasio (a cultural Marxist) refused to use the words Islamic terrorism or jihad and instead disingenuously called the attack a “cowardly act of terrorism.” “We know this action was intended to break our spirit. Our spirit will never be moved by an act of violence and an act meant … to intimidate us.” Similarly leftist cultural Marxist Governor Andrew Cuomo told the nation that this was the action of a “lone wolf,” and that “there is no evidence to suggest a wider plot or wider scheme.” REALLY? These two Leftist political responses are prime examples of the subjective reality that the Left is selling to America.

There is no such thing as a lone wolf. The term lone wolf is a misleading political misnomer – jihadists do NOT act alone – they are part of a worldwide Islamic ideological war against the West that seeks to destroy Western culture and replace it with Islam and sharia law. Politicians who are unable or unwilling to accept this unpleasant reality are unfit to serve. Americans need leaders with the ability to identify and act upon the threat. America needs objective reality. Saying you are safe and being safe are not the same thing. America needs leaders without a political conflict of interest.

In our digital age, we need a new word to describe the person we have unequivocally witnessed committing mass murder. To call Sayfullo Saipo a “suspect” is misleading – only one person was in the driver’s seat of the truck that sped down the west side highway, running over cyclists and pedestrians, ultimately killing eight and wounding at least eleven. He is seen on video exiting the truck after crashing it into a schoolbus, waving weapons and getting shot. Or, to be consistent, must we call the policeman the “suspected shooter”, compounding the lunacy of not spelling out what our eyes have seen. The only thing that remains unknown is under which category of slaughter Saipov will eventually be found guilty, but reading and hearing all the reporters continually refer to him as “the suspect” is a dishonor to the victims and their loved ones.

The other phrase we need to lose is “or the terrorists will win.” When multiple people die and are maimed in a savage attack, terrorists have won. Celebrating at a parade will not diminish the sorrow and agony of the victims’ survivors nor should it relieve any of us of whatever guilt we accrue by turning a blind eye to the obvious. Our police department prides itself on its outreach program to truck rental companies in the tri-state area, alerting them to the need for background checks on possible terrorists who want to turn trucks into murder weapons. This modus operandi has succeeded in killing 130 people and injuring close to 200 since 2016. Well, an immigrant from Uzbekistan walks into Home Depot in New Jersey with a swarthy complexion, a full bushy beard, a Muslim name of Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, requesting a short term rental of a truck – what was missing from this profile that dissuaded the dispatcher from informing the counter-terrorism division that had done the outreach? Either John Miller, head of this division, has over-estimated its efficacy or we have been so brainwashed by the media that legitimate suspicion and profiling are considered Islamophobic. Perhaps the person who handled the rental was more anxious about his being called that than about the chance of a terrorist incident. That possibility should make us all ashamed that we have abandoned logic in favor of what began as an Islamic public-relations campaign after 9/11.

Profiling is not an act of discrimination; it is the means by which law enforcement aims to anticipate and minimize future criminal acts. It is based on analysis of past acts and behavior and is analogous to what a smart doctor does when she takes a history of your family background. If you are black and have a higher risk of sickle cell anemia, you don’t call your doctor racist for factoring that into her diagnosis. If you are Jewish, you get tested for the brca gene for breast cancer as an act of precaution, not prejudice. If 3,000 New Yorkers were killed on 9/11 in the name of Allah, we can never be called Islamophobic for worrying that other jihadists abound with similar motives. Sadly, some of our movers and shakers have succeeded in shaming us for this understandable , appropriate anxiety.

Finally, why didn’t our governor and mayor initiate a somber few minutes of silence at the outset of the Halloween parade to acknowledge the tragedy that had occurred less than a mile away. Grandstanding that we need to carry on with our jollity or the terrorists will win ignores a more powerful message. The terrorists don’t win when we remember our humanity, exhibit grief at senseless violence and show our compassion for innocent victims in our own home town.

After months of getting themselves worked up about hearings featuring a hero once accused of rigging the election for Donald Trump and Don Jr.’s inability to sniff out Nigerian prince emails, spectators of the Russia game have finally gotten what they wanted: indictments.

Unfortunately, the indictments of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his business partner Richard Gates have nothing whatever to do with “collusion,” however broadly defined. Politically speaking, we have learned nothing except what we already knew: namely, that a shady businessman who briefly worked for the Trump campaign is, in fact, a very shady businessman indeed, one who has just pled not guilty to failing to register as a foreign agent on behalf of the Ukrainian puppet government and not declaring all of his income derived from his essentially pro-Kremlin lobbying.

Dot connectors will, of course, continue to connect dots. It could be that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is hoping to secure testimony from Manafort or Gates that will give him the dirt he needs to bring more appropriate charges. It could be that he already has that information and is just waiting for goodness knows what occasion. At the very least, obsessives will say, the hiring of Manafort indicates — these comments almost write themselves — a very serious lack of judgment on Trump’s part. You don’t say? The man whose idea of a feel-good national unity speech following an act of domestic terrorism was to suggest a degree of moral equivalence between the KKK and its opponents has horrible instincts, often fails to think things through, is a bad judge of character, etc.? Gosh.

Even George Papadopoulos’ guilty plea is no smoking gun. The former foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign admits that he lied about email exchanges with a shadowy figure known as “the professor” who had promised Russian “dirt” on Clinton. But as far as we can tell, his communications with Dr. Dirt went nowhere. Papadopoulos also made vague references in his emails to “meetings” with Russian officials that probably did not end up taking place, which seems important only if you ignore the fact that presidential candidates, especially after securing their parties’ nominations, routinely meet with foreign leaders, even heads of state.

The most significant thing about Monday’s Mueller bonanza is that it reminds us what is wrong with these hysterical wide-ranging special prosecutor investigations that take place in public. Whitewater went on for nearly a decade before it concluded in 2003. Does the fact that Bill Clinton lied about sleeping with Monica Lewinsky prove that he and Hillary and the McDougals broke the law in the course of their real-estate dealings in the late ’70s? If you ask enough people enough questions about enough topics, sooner or later you’re going to catch somebody in a lie. Monday’s revelations don’t in themselves mean anything other than that Jeff Sessions’ Justice Department is keeping Mueller on a very long leash.

It needs to be shortened. The purpose of the investigation is to determine whether the presidential campaign of Donald Trump knowingly colluded with the Russian government in the hope of altering the outcome of the 2016 election, not to see whether any person even loosely connected with the former could be found guilty of any crime, including perjury. The resignation of Tony Podesta from the prominent lobbying group he founded in the wake of Manafort’s indictment suggests that we are getting very far afield indeed.

There are many problems with the Mueller probe, not least its show-boating obsession with keeping its business in the newspapers, but the biggest one is that its parameters were never well defined. What would count as actual collusion? Idle language is thrown around about people having “ties” to Russia or being “Kremlin-connected.” How do you define “Kremlin-connected”? What would be the broad equivalent in the United States from Russia’s perspective? A former congressman? Anyone who does business on K Street having a meeting? Defense contractors? Given the country’s autocratic structure, there are very few living Russian nationals of any wealth or distinction who are not “Kremlin-connected.”

Progressive obsessions with race and class blur individual achievement. Those of the past instead are judged as one-dimensional players, either good or bad based on their perceived liberalism as interpreted by 2017 standards.

The humane General James Longstreet and the racist General Nathan Bedford Forrest are equally culpable because they fought for the Confederacy. It doesn’t matter that Teddy Roosevelt was an environmentalist and trust-buster when few others were — because his views of imperialism were uncouth by our standards.

In contrast, the racist eugenicist Margaret Sanger is spared progressive hell, because her pro-abortion advocacy helped found what became Planned Parenthood.

The scary thing about contemporary progressivism is this reduction of individuals to cardboard cutouts, whose sins and saintly works fade before cosmic concepts of race and gender.

Making the Necessary Allowances
Exemptions work in the present, too. Leftists think that state-mandated equality is of such critical importance that illiberal means are sometimes excusable to achieve it.

For example, Trump’s supposed collusion with Russia is declared a danger to the republic. So the Steele–Fusion GPS file of unverified smears about a presidential candidate, based on bought Russian fabrications, is renamed as mere “opposition research,” a means necessary to stop a threat such as Donald Trump.

Another example is the current campus tendency to suspend constitutionally protected due process when students are merely accused of sexual assault, or to deny free speech in order to shield students from views they find illiberal.

Exemption is more than just normal human hypocrisy. It takes such contradictions to a cosmic plane and is far more effective than pseudo-confessionals and apologies, individual contextualization, claims of victimization, and blame-gaming that humans seek refuge in when caught in hypocrisies.

As a corollary, liberals can escape the ramifications of their own ideologies. They may place their personal interests “in context” by public professions of caring. Recently, liberal journalists Mark Halperin and Leon Wieseltier were exposed as long-time serial sexual harassers — or worse — a fact that many of their associates must have long overlooked, given their support for feminist agendas.

Next to exemption is the closely related doctrine of secular penance (or the cessation of punishment through purchased indulgences). It usually follows when the currency of exemption is finally exhausted. Personal sins are then absolved by assertions of liberal orthodoxies. When desperate and in extremis, liberals find absolution by promising to do compensatory liberal good works — feminism, environmentalism, and identity politics become their feel-good version of hair shirts, ashes, and fasting.

Had Ted Kennedy not been heir to a liberal dynasty and later pronounced the progressive “Lion of the Senate,” he might have somewhere along his career path been charged with everything from involuntary manslaughter to sexual assault — and on the latter grounds ended his career in the fashion of a Senator Robert Packwood or Bill O’Reilly.

We have seen plenty examples of both exemption and penance recently.

Exemption
Take the Uranium One deal. Most liberals knew that after 2008 Hillary Clinton would run for president in 2016 and thus, they hoped, complete a 16-year Obama-Clinton progressive trajectory.

You never know what’s going to set people off.

In a Monday column on special prosecutor Bob Mueller’s indictment of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, I opined that the case seems to be “much ado about nothing,” and that some of the allegations that have been brought appear “shaky and overcharged.” Some commentators took this to mean that, being in the tank for Trump, I am pooh-poohing Mueller’s opening gambit.

Not so. Readers who follow these columns know that I am not knee-jerk pro- or anti-Trump. I’ve opined that “Paul Manafort is a sleazeball.” And, while I concededly have strong political views, I try to be coldly clinical about legal questions and prosecution theories. That is my professional training, and the skill of being a prosecutor involves recognizing weaknesses in the case — you never want the defense lawyers to spot them first.

Much Ado about Nothing
To be clear, I am not saying the case is unserious for Manafort and Richard Gates. I am saying it is “much ado about nothing” in the greater scheme of things — meaning: Mueller’s (highly elastic) mandate is to investigate Russian meddling in the 2016 election and any possible Trump-campaign collusion therein; yet the Manafort case is utterly unrelated to that. (Maybe I should have said the indictment is “nothing about much ado”!)

Moreover, when I said the case is “shaky and overcharged,” I qualified that with “at least in part.” That is because there are felonies of which Manafort and Gates appear to be guilty, which is a very consequential matter for them. Nevertheless, the indictment’s presentation of much of the case is overhyped.

Unquestionably, Mueller is not done with his investigation. I am more than a little surprised to be criticized by some for purportedly suggesting that this is the end, rather than the start, of the special counsel’s case. I have been saying since the summer that Mueller is trying to squeeze Manafort into becoming a cooperating witness. Necessarily, that means he plans to keep building his case.

More to the point, there is a glaring omission in the indictment, which suggests that Mueller is planning to supersede it with more charges.

The Missing Tax Charges
In my haste to cover what is in the indictment, I left out of the column what is not: There are no tax charges. The indictment not only mentions tax evasion in various places; the commission of tax crimes is a key element of the money-laundering conspiracy charged in Count Two. Yet despite detailing that Manafort and Gates submitted fraudulent tax returns, the indictment does not accuse them of tax-law felonies that the prosecutors would be required to prove beyond a reasonable doubt at trial.

This is curious, and I don’t know if the explanation is substantive or administrative.

By substantive, I mean that there could be legal and factual issues unknown to me that complicate the taxability of Manafort’s prodigious foreign earnings. As a former prosecutor, I try to stay mindful of something that gets harder to remember as my prosecutor days recede in the rear-view mirror: There were always things about my cases that struck outsiders as odd but would not have if they had known what I knew. The prosecutors know things about their evidence that we don’t. They may have a good reason that I haven’t figured out for eschewing tax counts.

The Halloween assault in Lower Manhattan was straight out of the ISIS playbook. Ever since October 2010, when al-Qaida published the second issue of its online magazine Inspire, jihadi leaders have been urging the faithful to turn ordinary cars and trucks into killing machines to “mow down the enemies of Allah.” On Tuesday in New York, Sayfullo Saipov, 29, a green-card holder from Uzbekistan in Central Asia and resident of Florida, who appears to have come to the United States through the so-called “Diversity Visa” lottery, responded to the call. He drove his rented Home Depot truck from West Houston Street onto a Hudson River Park bike path, one of New York’s most beloved amenities. Within ten minutes, eight people were killed and 15 were injured. A note found in the truck, law enforcement officials said, indicated that Saipov committed the attack out of devotion to ISIS.

At a news conference at 1 Police Plaza less than two hours after the deadly attack, John Miller, the New York Police Department’s chief of counterterrorism, cited the Islamic State’s updated guidance to jihadi aspirants contained in the third November 2016 issue of its own online journal, Rumiya (Rome), as the attacker’s probable inspiration. The article encouraged followers to attack “large outdoor conventions and celebrations, pedestrian-congested streets, outdoor markets, festivals, festivals, parades, [and] political rallies.” It even specified the ideal type, weight, and speed of a car needed for terror purposes, according to a translation provided by the Counter-Extremism Project.

It seems likely that the killer’s original target may have been the famous Greenwich Village Halloween parade, another beloved New York tradition that close to 1 million people typically attend. But the NYPD’s overwhelming security presence, and the numerous street closures adjacent to the parade, may have dashed his dreams of an even more memorable massacre.

While the attack investigation is ongoing and details of Saipov’s motives and plans are still being gathered, the vehicle assault bore the hallmarks of the attacks that ISIS and other militant jihadi groups have long been promoting. NYPD commissioner James O’Neill said that the terrorist emerged from his rental vehicle after crashing into a school bus screaming a statement that indicated terrorist intent. While the politically attuned O’Neill declined to identify what the attacker shouted, the language in which he was shouting, or his suspected nationality, numerous eye witnesses said that the man, dressed in dark clothing and carrying a pellet gun and a paint-ball gun, was screaming “Allahu Akhbar”—“God is Great” in Arabic.

Governor Cuomo pointed out another hallmark of a vehicle assault. The perp, he said, was one of those “lone wolves” who “meant to cause pain and harm and probably death and the resulting terror.”

But it takes a pack to raise a lone wolf. Even if Saipov acted alone, he was part of a growing ideological fraternity numbering in the tens of thousands who now inhabit every region of the globe. Those seeking eternal glory have staged similar attacks in at least a dozen other cities—from Nice to Paris to Barcelona to London to Jerusalem. Like the attacks in these cities, the Halloween attack in Lower Manhattan was aimed at inflicting maximum carnage. Schools in the area were letting out students shortly after three o’clock when Saipov drove his rented truck off West Houston Street onto the bike path. There was no shortage of targets. The streets between West Houston and Chambers were crowded with parents picking up their costumed children prepared for an evening of trick-or-treating. Pedestrians and bikers on the Hudson River bike path were stunned and helpless as Saipov careened his weapon through the crowd.