President Trump, Explain to the American People That Survival of the Republic Is at Stake

 

Commentary

The republic had been failing for nearly half a century. The great capital city was riven by factions. Graft and corruption were rife. Political opponents were subjected to violence in the streets. Elections were decided by intimidation and bribed electors.

The traditions that held the country together for centuries hung by a thread. Dynasties see-sawed.

Finally, two mighty opposing forces faced each other across a river.

And then Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon.

“Alea iacta est,” he said—the die is cast—and the fate of the Roman Republic was suddenly hanging in the balance.

Karl Marx, the avatar of modern evil, liked to say that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. As another cliché has it, history doesn’t repeat but it sometimes rhymes. But there is nothing farcical about the American political situation at the moment, nor anything particularly lyrical.

President Donald Trump and the forces of real change in contemporary politics are now locked in a death struggle with the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party, the unholy alliance of radical Democrats and milquetoast Republicans who have profited mightily from the business-as-usual of Washington practically since Eisenhower left office in 1961.

All Americans who care about the Constitution should wish him well, even if they cannot wish him success.

Political Crisis

Trump’s media-asserted defeat three weeks ago, and his adamant conviction that the election was stolen from him by a perfect storm of unnecessarily liberalized changes to voting laws, traditional big-city Democrat political operations, finagled voting machines, statistical improbabilities, ballots of uncertain provenance, and actual vote-changing—all alleged at this point and not yet proven—have caused one of the biggest political crises in U.S. history.

The president’s refusal to back down and concede defeat while adhering to the only norms that count—his rights under our constitutional, republican form of government—has brought him nothing but criticism from the PBFP, which was stung by his surprise victory in 2016 and has spent the past four years trying to ensure a black swan event like that will never happen again—by any means necessary.

Why don’t you just play nice, accept the verdict, and give up? they insist.

This is rich coming from those who refused to accept the outcome of 2016, proclaimed themselves the “resistance,” and have been waging guerrilla warfare against Trump and his voters ever since. Democrats and their partisans have concocted the “Russian collusion” hoax and the imaginary Ukrainian impeachment; some have resorted to violence, such as the armed attack on Republican solons in 2017 by a disaffected Democrat that left Rep. Steve Scalise seriously wounded.

As Caesar was as he returned to Italy, the president and his family have been constantly threatened with lawsuits both private and public, and have been subjected to other ruinous fantasies. And all in the name of a “higher loyalty.”

Beleaguered from the start in his own White House, it’s taken Trump the better part of his first term to wrap his arms around the magnitude of the task the American people assigned to him four years ago: draining the Swamp. Obama holdovers abounded; outright saboteurs such as James Comey weren’t cashiered quickly enough. Even ostensible allies, such as the hapless Attorney General Jeff Sessions, contributed to the misery. With friends like these …

Fight to the End

And so now, with time running out, Trump is fighting a rearguard battle to save, if not his presidency, then the country’s basic law. As president, he swears the most public oath imaginable to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution as he sees it. Whether by so doing serves his own immediate interests is beside the point.

What, exactly, is the Democrat-Media complex arguing? That electoral fraud never happens? That because it happens (as it has for more than 150 years) in the poorer precincts of the big cities, the reason must be their all-purpose bugbear, “racism”? That we shouldn’t care about electoral fraud at all?

So far, so predictable. But what are we to make of the lawyers who argue with a straight face and a legalistic mind that the remedy—in its most extreme form, throwing out the results of the popular vote in certain precincts or even states—must be weighed against whether the amount of provable fraud was dispositive? How much fraud are they willing to tolerate? Short-sighted to a fault, all they can see is trees, and never the forest.

That way, however, lies anarchy—and Trump must call his antagonists’ bluff. What Trump, like Caesar, understands is that he can’t back down from this fight, even should he wish to. During his long campaign in Gaul, Caesar made it a point never to retreat; on one occasion when even the famed 10th Legion temporarily broke ranks during a battle, the chagrined legionaries asked their commander to decimate their ranks for cowardice. (Caesar refused.)

Trump similarly grasps that to stand down now, even in the face of overwhelming opposition—some of it coming from within his own ranks—would spell an ignominious end to his presidency and demoralize his voting legions. To leave an open question of whether our porous and multifarious systems of voting are easily manipulated and therefore untrustworthy would be to do the nation a great disservice.

As we’ve seen throughout the past four years, appeasement doesn’t work. No matter what the duly elected president of the United States did, there was no satisfying the rabid left and its media lackeys, short of Trump’s expulsion from office, however effected.

And so they mounted one of the strangest counter-campaigns in U.S. political history, rigging their nomination process to spit forth a superannuated, lifelong political hack rushing headlong into his embarrassing dotage and installing as his vice president the dangerous woman they really wanted to head their ticket, but who couldn’t garner any support during the primaries. It’s a breathtakingly cynical ploy, and a stain on American political history should it succeed.

So please, Mr. President, fight all the way to the end. Until these cases get to court—the big one, located right behind the Capitol—and your augments can be heard over the talking heads and the chattering classes, go on national television and explain to the American people what the stakes really are: not your political survival, but the survival of the Republic itself under a Constitution the left increasingly and openly despises.

Call it a Thanksgiving fireside chat. You still have the bully pulpit. Use it. And then let the evidence be seen and the judgments—both political and historical—rendered. Roll the dice.

Michael Walsh is the editor of The-Pipeline.org and the author of “The Devil’s Pleasure Palace” and “The Fiery Angel,” both published by Encounter Books. His latest book, “Last Stands,” a cultural study of military history from the Greeks to the Korean War, will be published in December by St. Martin’s Press.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

'Wingman' Eric Holder orchestrated 'Obamagate,' says successor attorney general

Opinion: Washington Secrets

by Paul Bedard

 | May 15, 2020 07:14 AM

Then-Attorney General Eric Holder acted as President Barack Obama’s “wingman,” creating a highly politicized Justice Department that would steer investigations away from Democratic allies, including Hillary Clinton, and onto GOP foes such as President Trump, according to a successor.

Matthew Whitaker, a former U.S. attorney who served as a Trump's acting attorney general between Jeff Sessions and William Barr, claimed in a new book that Holder “created an above-the-law culture” in the department that led to the bumbled investigations that the president has dubbed “Obamagate.”

In Above the Law, provided in advance of its release, Whitaker described a department that was more political under Obama than any department since President Richard Nixon’s, one that sought to promote the efforts of partisans such as FBI chief James Comey, who has since been fired by Trump.

“What Holder is advocating for,” he wrote, “is a government full of Jim Comeys: government officials determining on their own what the Constitution demands, deciding which laws to prosecute and which to ignore, selectively releasing information to the media about Americans under investigation, and held accountable neither to the chief executive nor to voters.”

And as Obama’s “wingman” at the department, added Whitaker, Holder built a team that would remain after he left and that would eventually shut down a probe into Hillary Clinton’s email scandal at the State Department and eagerly build up an investigation into alleged Russian collusion with the Trump campaign in the 2016 election.

“There’s no doubt that Russia tried to influence the 2016 presidential election,” he wrote in the book from Regnery Publishing.

“But the political meddling within our own government, within the Justice Department, and within the intelligence community poses a far greater threat to Americans than any Russian internet troll farm. Without the rule of law, without respect for the Constitution, without honest administration in the Justice Department, we don’t have a republic,” he added.

The book is an indictment by a true insider of the “deep state” of liberal bureaucrats trying to protect their own and ignore Trump’s election.

It also highlighted the double standard of Obama-era officials, especially on recusals from cases they had an interest in. One that jumped out was of the case and conviction of former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn.

The book noted that the judge who accepted Flynn’s guilty plea of lying to the FBI was a friend and neighbor of discredited FBI official Peter Strzok, who texted with his FBI lover about hoping Trump did not become president. Strzok did not recuse himself, and Judge Rudolph Contreras did only later.

In several passages, Whitaker wrote about how Holder and his successors refused to investigate Obama-era scandals, such as the IRS's targeting of conservatives and a case against the New Black Panther Party, and he recalled how Holder successor Loretta Lynch met with former President Bill Clinton before ending the department’s probe of the Hillary Clinton emails.

“As longtime professional staff of the Justice Department privately acknowledged to me, the arrogance characteristic of the Obama administration, personified by his first attorney general, Eric Holder, created an above-the-law culture inside the Justice Department,” wrote Whitaker.

Wokeness Drives Latino Student To Trump

By ROD DREHER • July 27, 2019, 6:19 PM

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Mexican-American student didn’t think he would be one of them — until he was hit upside the head with wokeness (mikeledray/Shutterstock)

A reader sent me this today. I know his real name and the institution where he studies. I agreed to very slightly fudge this text to protect his identity:

I know that you occasionally collect (or at least like reading) stories about how excessive wokeness red-pills otherwise normal people. As an aside, doesn’t it capture our culture perfectly that the right and the left describe the same phenomenon–waking up to what is really going on–with different words? I want to share something that happened to me a couple of weeks ago.

I am a college student at a land grant university. I used to like and talk about politics, but now I run away as quickly as possible when the subject comes up lest I let slip some wrongspeak. Nowadays, I focus almost exclusively on economics, which I hope to study in graduate school next year. As of now, nobody is calling me a fascist for talking about monetary policy.

Allow me to give a bit more context. I am a libertarian with traditional leanings who is most comfortable reading econ blogs. But I read yours frequently for new ideas even if I often disagree with you and other AmCon writers about economics. I’m just not that radical anymore.

This summer, I received a grant to research monetary policy. The only catch is that one can only get the money if he (she/zhe/whatever) is multicultural (I’m part Mexican), so there was bound to be some issues with that if it came up. But money grants to multicultural students are a lot bigger and easier to get than standard research grants for undergraduates, so naturally I went with that. Sure, there’s a bit of gaming the system if I’m only part Mexican and culturally assimilated, but wouldn’t you rather have me get that money than some quack?

(The other people who got money really are quacks–one girl is doing research on how we should replace writing classes with learning how to tell stories through knitting because apparently indigenous people can’t express themselves through writing. No joke. In other words, the research is a propaganda program.)

One of the conditions for receiving the money is I have to occasionally meet with the other people who received funding and go to seminars on ridiculous crap. I usually don’t pay attention. But a couple of weeks ago we had to have a discussion circle about how students deal with mental health and what that might be like in graduate school. Sounds fairly innocuous and perhaps even useful, right? Wrong.

The moderator of my circle looks exactly like a model SJW. Not quite Trigglypuff, but pretty damn close. Sort of overweight woman, hairy arms (and face), a PhD candidate in some grievance studies field. Afflicted with all sorts of mental disorders and sure proud of it. That’s a bizarre thing, isn’t it? The people there went on and on about their various mental health issues as if they were badges to be put on girl scout sashes. One after the other, they one-upped each other. “You have depression and it sometimes affects your day? Well I have depression and I can’t even do my homework!” “Oh yeah, well I have to stay in bed for two weeks sometimes!” “Well I tried to kill myself once!” These are not trivial things and should be taken as seriously as physical injuries and treated as such. I used to have severe depression and anxiety issues, but I got through it because I realized it wasn’t a necessary condition of my existence.

Anyway, there were a few standard questions about what we do to take care of ourselves and I was feeling fine about everything. Then, on the fourth question, the moderator asked, “How do your intersecting identities affect your mental health?” A parade of rather predictable responses followed. “I’m black, so nobody expects me to succeed, which is why I fail so often.” “I’m a woman, so I often feel as if I am supposed to be in the kitchen instead of the study.” And so on. I was the last one.

I thought about it for a second and decided to take a stand (paraphrasing): “I don’t think about my intersecting identities. It simply isn’t useful. It’s more useful to think of myself as an individual and not subject myself to imaginary group pressures because that leads to pathology. I prefer to grant myself agency and allow that I have the power to determine my course regardless of these happenstance characteristics.”

The circle became visibly tense and the people next to me were physically repulsed. The moderator looked at me and sneered, “White male.” Seriously, she said that.

I was a bit taken aback. I smirked a bit (it is rather funny) and said something to the effect of, “There are words to describe people who make assumptions on the basis of skin color and gender, and they aren’t particularly nice. And I’m actually Mexican–” She interrupted me, saying, “Well, you have very light skin.” Can you imagine the nerve of this woman? Seriously, she said that.

Of course, I’m paraphrasing my own words here because I don’t remember exactly what I said. I responded, “That’s quite the observation. What you can’t tell by my skin color and gender [she assumed my gender! The nerve of some people] is that I am on the autism spectrum. What you can’t tell is that my parents divorced when I was very young, that my family lost everything in the Great Recession, that my grandparents grew up in boxcars, that my parents never finished college, that my parents were abused as children, that I have had many personal struggles. These aren’t the things you can get out of melanin and genitalia…” I went on for some time like that and we went back and forth a few more times, with other students jumping in to tell me how insensitive I was being.

The experience has stuck in my mind for quite some time. This thing really matters. When I was growing up, it was absolutely not okay to talk to people like that in any setting. Now, in a conversation about mental health, it’s suddenly okay to condemn white males simply for being white males? One of my friends, a traditional Muslim from Somalia, told me he self-censored throughout the discussion simply because he didn’t want to be condemned. Needless to say, I’m the black sheep of the group now. And that’s basically fine with me. But there is something horribly wrong if it has become okay to behave like this.

The Left is insane. The Right has its issues, but at least I’m certain they don’t want me dead. When the Revolution comes, I don’t doubt for a second that my head will be on a pike next to yours and my capitalist father’s. I’m scared to death of these people. I have God and monetary policy, but all I can really talk about is the latter. I’m no fan of Donald Trump’s, but I will be voting for him without a moment’s hesitation in 2020. In no time at all, I went from a cosmopolitan libertarian who was in the good graces of the Left to one of the deplorables because of an instance of wrongthink.

It is very, very difficult for those who have not had to face Trigglypuffery in action to understand what it is, and why it’s so unnerving to be within institutions where people like her set the norms. What can this guy possibly do? He has already made himself a pariah in that group. One thing he can do is … vote for Trump, solely as a matter of self-defense. He’s a self-described Latino cosmopolitan libertarian, but because he doesn’t accept SJW ideology, he has been radically Othered. This academic is less afraid of Donald Trump than he is of SJWs in power.

I’m interested in more stories like this, from people who don’t care for Donald Trump, but feel that they have to vote for him out of self-defense. Tell me how and why you came to believe that.

Below, a funny remix someone made of Trigglypuff’s raging. She drops an f-bomb, so it’s NSFW:

White House Will Fight "Tooth and Nail" Against Media Coverage

JANUARY 23, 2017

TRUMP AND THE PRESS: So yesterday I was on the BBC talking about Trump, the press, and what’s going on. Here’s a bit of an expansion.
First, the thing to understand is that, as I’ve said before, one of the changes going on with Trump generally is the renegotiation of various post-World War II institutional arrangements. One of those is the institutional arrangement involving the press and the White House. For decades, the press got special status because it was seen as both powerful, and institutionally responsible. (And, of course, allied with the Democrats who were mostly in charge of setting up those postwar institutional arrangements). Now those things have changed. If the press were powerful, it would have beaten Trump. If it were responsible, it wouldn’t be running away with fake news whenever it sees a chance to run something damaging to Trump. And, of course, there’s no alliance between Trump and the media, as there was with Obama.
So things will change. The press’s “insider” status — which it cherishes — is going to fade. (This is producing waves of status anxiety, as are many other Trump-induced institutional changes). And, having abandoned, quite openly, any pretense of objectivity and neutrality in the election, the press is going to be treated as an enemy by the Trump Administration until further notice.
In fact, Trump’s basically gaslighting them. Knowing how much they hate him, he’s constantly provoking them to go over the top. Sean Spicer’s crowd-size remarks are all about making them seem petty and negative. (And, possibly, teeing up crowd-size comparisons at next week’s March For Life, which the press normally ignores but which Trump will probably force them to cover).
Trump knows that the press isn’t trusted very much, and that the less it’s trusted, the less it can hurt him. So he’s prodding reporters to do things that will make them less trusted, and they’re constantly taking the bait. They’re taking the bait because they think he’s dumb, and impulsive, and lacking self-control — but he’s the one causing them to act in ways that are dumb and impulsive, and demonstrate lack of self-control. As Richard Fernandez writes on Facebook, they think he’s dumb because they think he has lousy taste, but there are a lot of scarily competent guys out there in the world who like white and gold furniture. And, I should note, Trump has more media experience than probably 99% of the people covering him. (As Obama operative Ben Rhodes gloated with regard to selling a dishonest story on the Iran deal, the average reporter the Obama White House dealt with “is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns.” In Rhodes’ words, “they literally know nothing.”)
The counter-move for the press isn’t to double down on anti-Trump messaging. The counter-move is to bolster its own trustworthiness by acting more neutral and sober, and by being more trustworthy. If the news media actually focused on reporting facts accurately and straightforwardly, on leaving opinion to the pundits, and on giving Trump a clearly fair shake, then Trump’s tactics wouldn’t work, and any actual dirt they found on him would do actual damage. He’s betting on the press being insufficiently mature and self-controlled to manage that. So far, his bet is paying off.
That’s too bad. If we had a better press, we’d be much better off as a nation. But we don’t.