RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://fedsoc.org/commentary/publications/the-accidental-defender-of-the-constitutio

It is fair to say that Defender in Chief: Donald Trump’s Fight for Presidential Power is a book Yoo never thought he’d write. Fair because he says so himself, right up front: “If friends had told me on January 21, 2017, that I would write a book on Donald Trump as a defender of the Constitution, I would have questioned their sanity.”
A Review of Defender in Chief: Donald Trump’s Fight for Presidential Power, by John Yoo, https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250269577.

Decades from now, when historians assess Donald Trump’s presidency with sobriety and dispassion, the ironies are apt to stand out most. Donald Trump is the populist who lost the popular vote, owing his ascendancy to the Electoral College, an institution designed to temper popular excesses and which Trump himself, while pondering a presidential bid in 2012, rebuked as “a disaster for democracy.” Trump has been condemned as the Constitution’s scourge by progressives for whom the Constitution is mostly a nuisance to evolve beyond, framed by white racists in a time before Wokeness. Trump is the president who upheld the rule of law by firing the FBI director. He submitted to investigation by a special counsel whom he reviled but who nevertheless cleared him. Trump was impeached anyway by Democrats who were pushed into the exercise by partisans. But Democratic partisanship proved so devoid of appeal outside the activist Left that impeachment, though it happened just a few months earlier, rated nary a mention in the Democratic National Convention.

Is it any wonder that these four years have aged most of us tenfold?

We’re not through with the ironies, though. For present purposes, here is the most striking one: Through all of this, President Trump’s most compelling defender may be John Yoo, a brilliant conservative thinker who appeared to have both feet firmly planted in Camp Never Trump when the president took office in 2017.

John Yoo is the Emanuel Heller Professor of Law at the University of California’s Berkeley Law School, where it is not easy to be a conservative academic, but anti-Trumpers are welcome. Professor Yoo is a nonpareil scholar of the presidency—in particular, of executive power as conceived in the Constitution and practiced through more than two centuries. He is a prolific author, his grasp of his core concentration immeasurably enhanced by service as a high-ranking Justice Department official. He played a pivotal role in national security policy development in the post-9/11 era, when President George W. Bush grappled with the vexing challenges of international jihadism, often with ferocious partisan opposition in Congress.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/three-cheers-land-hope-bruce-bawer/

We are living through a year when the consequences of more than a generation of poor parenting and terrible education can be observed, in all their odiousness, in the streets of American cities. The young rioters, vandals, bullies, thugs, arsonists, and statue-topplers who pose as anti-fascists and racial-justice warriors do not just hate Confederate Civil War generals and certain specific institutions that, after sober and informed consideration, they have judged to be ethically inexcusable; they hate our country itself, and they hate its history, every bit of it, although they actually know next to nothing about either the country or its history.

As they take to, and take over, the streets – destroying where they are incapable of contributing, and harming and abusing many of those on whose behalf they claim to be protesting – these cruel, callow agitators are venting a rage that they themselves do not even understand and are targeting it at strangers who have done nothing whatsoever to harm them. Though they do not realize it, the people at whom this fury should properly be directed are, first, their overindulgent parents who refused to place the strictures upon them that most children desperately want and need, and, second, the ideologically driven teachers and professors who told them repeatedly over the years that America is irredeemably evil and that there is nothing they can do about that fact other than to tear the whole thing down.

To an extraordinary extent, the picture of America that exists inside these brats’ heads is the product of a single monumentally mendacious book – namely, The People’s History of the United States by the late Communist writer Howard Zinn, which has for years (thanks in part to some educators’ determination to indoctrinate and in part to the staggering neglect on the part of parents and politicians alike) been the default American history text in countless high-school and college classrooms.