Putting 2017 In Perspective

Victor Davis Hanson posted an article today at a website called American Greatness. It is an amazing article in that it lists all the activities of the anti-Trump people during President Trump’s first year in office. The article is appropriately named, “From Conspiracy Theories to Conspiracies.” As you read the article (I strongly suggest that you follow the link and read the entire article–my summary cannot do it justice), remember that the opposition to candidate (and later President) Trump came from Democrats and some Republicans.

My favorite part of the article states:

What better way to derail a presidency would there be than to allow a blank-check special counsel to search out alleged criminal activity on the part of the president? We have seen FBI Director James Comey confess that he deliberately leaked, likely illegally, confidential notes of a meeting with president Trump to the media, with the expressed intent of creating a “scandal” requiring a “special counsel”—a gambit that worked to perfection when Comey’s close friend, former FBI Director Robert Mueller was appointed.

To facilitate those efforts, the counsel would appoint to his team several attorneys who despised the very target of their investigation. In fact, many special investigators have given generously to the campaign of Trump’s past political opponent Hillary Clinton and in at least one case had worked previously for the Clinton Foundation. Note that after nearly a year, the Mueller investigation has not indicted anyone on collusion charges and is unlikely to. Rather, in special counsel trademark, low-bar fashion, it is seeking to indict and convict suspects for not telling the whole truth during interrogations, or violating other statutes. As Peter Strzok—once one of the FBI’s lead investigators in the Mueller investigation—concluded of the “collusion” allegation to his mistress Lisa Page: there was “no big there there.”

The FBI itself would have earlier trafficked in a fraudulent document funded by the Clinton campaign to “prove” Trump and his team were such dangers to the republic that they required surveillance under FISA court warrants and thus should surrender their constitutional rights of privacy. The ensuing surveillance, then, would be widely disseminated among Obama Administration officials, with the likely intent that names would be unmasked and leaked to the anti-Trump press—again, in efforts to discredit, first, the Trump campaign, and later the Trump transition and presidency. A top official of the prior Department of Justice would personally consult the authors of the smear dossier in efforts to ensure that its contents would become useful and known.

It is totally scary that this has happened.

The article concludes:

Subversion as Plain as Day
Key officials of the prior government would likewise weigh in constantly to oppose the subsequent Trump agenda and demonize their own president. Samantha Power, Susan Rice, and Ben Rhodes would warn the country of the threats posed by their successor, but fail to disclose that they had previously requested to view FISA surveillance of the Trump team and to unmask the names of U.S. citizens which predictably soon appeared in media reports. Former Secretary of State John Kerry, according to the Jerusalem Post, assured a prominent Palestinian government leader, “that he should stay strong in his spirit and play for time, that he will not break and will not yield to President Trump’s demands.” Kerry reportedly further assured the Palestinian representative that the president may not be in White House for much longer and would likely not complete his first term. In sum, the former American secretary of state all but advised a foreign government that his own president is illegitimate and thus to be ignored or resisted in the remaining time before he is removed.

If any of these efforts were undertaken in 2009 to subvert the presidency of Barack Obama popular outrage might well have led to criminal indictments. If Hollywood grandees had promised to do to Barack Obama what they boast doing to Donald Trump, the entire industry would have been discredited—or given the Obama investigatory treatment.

Indeed, in many cases between 2009-2017, U.S. citizens the Obama Administration found noncompliant with its agendas became targets of the IRS for their political activity or monitored by the Justice Department. The latter included reporters from the Associated Press and James Rosen of Fox News. Many a journalist’s sources were prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917.  In another case, a filmmaker had his parole revoked and was scapegoated and jailed to advance a false administration narrative about the death of four Americans in Benghazi. Still others were surveilled by using fraudulent documents to obtain FISA court orders.

Everyone should be keen to distinguish conspiracies from conspiracy theories. The above are real events, not the tales told by the paranoid.

In contrast, unhinged conspiracy theorists, for example, might obsess yet again over the machinations of multibillionaire and leftist globalist bogeyman George Soros, and float wild yarns that he would fly to Davos to assure the global elite that he considers Trump “a danger to the world,” while reassuring them that the American president was “a purely temporary phenomenon that will disappear in 2020—or even sooner.” . . . 

It is becoming very obvious that some of the people in high government positions belong in jail. The question is whether or not they will go there. If equal justice under the law is truly one of our founding principles, it needs to be practiced at all times–regardless of the political consequence.

Who Is Paying The Protestors?

Front Page Magazine is a website run by David Horowitz, a red-diaper baby from New York who was involved with the Black Panthers as a well-intentioned liberal before becoming a conservative. His change of heart was partly due to the fact that the Black Panthers were responsible for the death of a friend of his who had done their  bookkeeping. The story is told in his book, Radical Son. Because of his childhood and his personal experience with the Black Panthers, David Horowitz is very familiar with the tactics used by those who are working against the freedom and prosperity we have as Americans.

On Friday, Front Page Magazine posted an article about the origins of the funding being used to pay protestors around the country after the Trump victory on Tuesday.

The article reports:

From reading the various mainstream media accounts of these events, one comes away with the distinct impression that they are grassroots actions that began organically among ordinary, concerned, well-meaning citizens.

But alas, if one were to think that, one would be wrong.

Contrary to media misrepresentations, many of the supposedly spontaneous, organic, anti-Trump protests we have witnessed in cities from coast to coast were in fact carefully planned and orchestrated, in advance, by a pro-Communist organization called the ANSWER Coalition, which draws its name from the acronym for “Act Now to Stop War and End Racism.” ANSWER was established in 2001 by Ramsey Clark’s International Action Center, a group staffed in large part by members of the Marxist-Leninist Workers World Party. In 2002, the libertarian author Stephen Suleyman Schwartz described ANSWER as an “ultra-Stalinist network” whose members served as “active propaganda agents for Serbia, Iraq, and North Korea, as well as Cuba, countries they repeatedly visit and acclaim.”

Since its inception, ANSWER has consistently depicted the United States as a racist, sexist, imperialistic, militaristic nation guilty of unspeakable crimes against humanity—in other words, a wellspring of pure evil. When ANSWER became a leading organizer of the massive post-9/11 demonstrations against the Patriot Act and the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, it formed alliances with other likeminded entities such as Not In Our Name (a project of the Revolutionary Communist Party) and United For Peace and Justice (a pro-Castro group devoted to smearing America as a cesspool of bigotry and oppression). 

Another key organizer of the current anti-Trump protests is a group called Socialist Alternative, which describes “the global capitalist system” as “the root cause of … poverty, discrimination, war, and environmental destruction.” Explaining that “the dictatorships that existed in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were [unfortunate] perversions of what socialism is really about,” this organization calls for a happy-faced “democratic socialism where ordinary people will have control over our daily lives.”

…The bottom line is this: The leaders and organizers of the anti-Trump protests that are currently making so much noise in cities across America, are faithfully following the blueprint of Hillary Clinton‘s famous mentor, Saul Alinsky, who urged radical activists to periodically stage loud, defiant, massive protest rallies expressing rage and discontent. Such demonstrations are designed to give onlookers the impression that a mass movement is preparing to shift into high gear, and that its present size is but a fraction of what it eventually will become. A “mass impression,” said Alinsky, can be lasting and intimidating: “Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have…. The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.”

And that is precisely what we are witnessing at the moment.

If you have never read Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky, now might be a really good time to take a look at it. Mr. Alinsky was one of Hillary Clinton’s heroes and was also admired by Barack Obama.

A Solution That Will Make Things Worse

This week there has been some rumbling about the integrity of American elections. Voter fraud is a problem, particularly in our large cities (for example–Chicago in the 1960 Presidential election). True the Vote in Houston found thousands of voters registered to one fictitious address in that city. In many states there is no proof of citizenship required to register to vote, and in California, a law has been passed allowing non-citizens to vote. I am not sure how the California law will play out, but I believe there is a constitutional problem there.

So where are we? There have been rumors of hacking into voting machines and voting machines that change votes. There have been accusations aimed at the Russians. There has been talk of Department of Homeland Security observers or even United Nations observers. Both of these are really bad ideas for one reason–either solution tens to federalize the election rather than letting local cities and communities police their elections.

One of the foundations of our representative republic is the integrity of our elections. If the Russians or other foreign entities wanted to undermine that, they wouldn’t have to do anything except cast doubt on the integrity of the election.That is something to keep in mind.

Meanwhile, the local control of elections helps protect their integrity. Local observers, judges, etc., are much more aware of the people in their communities. Not all local elections are computerized–making them impossible to hack.

Every year at midnight on election day, the voters of Dixville Notch, New Hampshire cast their ballots. In this years presidential primary, the nine votes were cast and counted quickly. It is almost impossible to interfere with a vote held on paper ballots.The fact that our elections are not federalized makes it more difficult to steal an election. Bringing in Homeland Security of the United Nations will federalize our elections and will make it easier–not harder–to compromise election integrity.

Expect To See More Cases Like This Before November

Voter fraud is a problem in America. As more states are becoming aware of voter fraud, they are beginning to take action against it–requiring voter identification or keeping a better watch on voter registration rolls.

The Blaze posted a story today about some recent action taken in Philadelphia:

The Indiana-based Public Interest Legal Foundation announced that it is suing the city of Philadelphia in federal court Monday for its failure to respond to information requests regarding possible non-citizen voters.

PILF filed the lawsuit Monday against the Philadelphia City Commissioners on behalf of the Virginia-based American Civil Rights Union election integrity group, according to the Washington Free Beacon. ACRU and PILF sought answers to their inquiries about Philadelphia’s surprisingly high number of registered voters in comparison with the number of citizens actually eligible to vote during elections. But when the city’s commissioners did not respond to the inquiries, PILF filed the lawsuit against them.

The article explains that the lawsuit states that because the county involved has more registered voters than eligible citizens living in the county. it is possible that they are mot properly monitoring their voter registration lists.

The article concludes:

But the city of Philadelphia did not respond to PILF’s requests for updated registration data, the number of voters ineligible for various reasons, the source agencies that provided this information, the records indicating citizenship or immigration statuses, and more, the Free Beacon noted.

“Corrupted voter rolls provide the perfect environment for voter fraud. Failure to clean the rolls aggravates longstanding problems of voter fraud in Philadelphia,” said J. Christian Adams, PILF’s president and general counsel, according to its website. “Philadelphia may not be using all the available tools to prevent non-citizens from registering and voting. Concealing list maintenance records from the public isn’t good government, and it violates Federal election law.”

It is much easier to commit voter fraud in a large city than a small town. Generally in a small town people know each other; in a large city, a poll worker might not know that someone had recently died and was not voting. In a national election, this is particularly relevant because one or two large cities in a state can determine who gets the electoral college votes of that state. Voter registration lists need to be purged on a regular basis to keep our elections honest.