Special Counsel Must Choose: Risk A Russia Hoaxer’s Second Acquittal Or Expose More Deep-State Dirt

Will John Durham highlight the complicity of the deep state in the Russia-collusion hoax? If not, it might cost him.

Margot Cleveland reporting for The Federalist

Crossfire Hurricane agents never intended to drop their investigation of Donald Trump, and therefore any lies he told the FBI did not affect their decision-making, Igor Danchenko argued in a motion filed on Friday seeking dismissal of the criminal charges pending against him in a Virginia federal court. With the trial set to start next month, Special Counsel John Durham must now decide whether to acknowledge the deep state’s complicity or risk a second acquittal.

Durham charged Danchenko last year with five counts of making false statements to the FBI related to Danchenko’s role as Christopher Steele’s primary sub-source in the fake dossier the Hillary Clinton team peddled to the FBI and the media. According to the indictment, Danchenko lied extensively when he provided Steele with supposed intel, and then later made false representations to the FBI during a series of interviews. 

One count of the indictment concerned Danchenko’s denial during an FBI interview on June 15, 2017, of having spoken with “PR Executive-1” about any material contained in the Steele dossier. According to Durham’s team, “PR Executive-1,” who has since been identified as the Clinton and DNC-connected Charles Dolan, Jr., told Danchenko that a “GOP friend” had told him Paul Manafort had been forced to resign from the Trump campaign because of allegations connecting Manafort to Ukraine.

“While Dolan later admitted to the FBI that he had no such ‘GOP friend’ and that he had instead gleaned this information from press reports, Dolan’s fabrication appeared in the Steele dossier.” But according to the indictment, when the FBI asked Danchenko whether he had talked with Dolan about that and other details included in Steele’s reports, Danchenko lied and said he hadn’t. 

The four remaining counts of the indictment concerned Danchenko’s alleged lies during questioning by the FBI on March 16, May 18, October 24, and November 16, 2017, concerning conversations he supposedly had with Sergei Millian, who was the then-president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce. According to the indictment, Danchenko told FBI agents during those interviews that he believed Millian had provided him information during an anonymous phone call, including “intel” later included in the Steele dossier that there was “a well-developed ‘conspiracy of cooperation’ between the Trump Campaign and Russian officials.” However, no such call ever occurred, Durham’s team charged. 

In seeking dismissal of these five counts, Danchenko’s attorneys argued in the motion to dismiss they filed on Friday that the government’s false statement charges failed as a matter of law because ambiguity in the FBI’s questions and in his own answers make it impossible to show he knowingly lied to the government. What proved more intriguing, however, was Danchenko’s second argument based on “materiality.” Here, in essence, Danchenko argued that his statements, even if knowingly false, could not create criminal liability because they were immaterial to the FBI’s investigation. 

To support this argument, Danchenko notes that the FBI was already investigating Millian’s “potential involvement with Russian interference efforts long before it had ever interviewed or even identified Mr. Danchenko,” apparently based on Steele’s claim that Millian served “as the source of relevant information.” Accordingly, Danchenko maintains his supposed lies were not the reason the FBI targeted Millian.

Danchenko further emphasizes in his brief that Steele had falsely told the FBI that “Danchenko had reported meeting with [Millian] in person on multiple occasions.” Danchenko exposed Steele’s own lies by telling the FBI he had never met with Millian “and could not be sure he ever spoke to him,” Danchenko’s attorneys stress in their motion to dismiss, thus calling Steele’s “statements, and portions of the Company Reports, into question.” Yet, even after learning of Steele’s apparent lies, the FBI did not alter the course of the investigation and, in fact, continued to rely on Steele’s reporting to seek renewals of the FISA surveillance orders, Danchenko’s brief underscores to argue that nothing Danchenko said during his interviews really mattered to the FBI.

Because Danchenko’s statements failed to change the trajectory of the government’s investigation into Millian and more broadly Trump and his associates, Danchenko posits that “it is difficult to fathom how the government would have made any decision other than to continue investigating [Millian] … regardless of what Mr. Danchenko told them.” In other words, Danchenko’s alleged lies were immaterial.

As a matter of law, Millian’s materiality argument is weak, but as a matter of defense-attorney rhetoric, it holds the potential to score Danchenko an acquittal. 

Potential for Acquittal

The legal standard for materiality requires a false statement to have “a natural tendency to influence, or [be] capable of influencing, either a discrete decision or any other function of the agency to which it is addressed.” Further, “the falsehood need not actually influence the agency’s decision-making process, but merely needs to be ‘capable’ of doing so.” Thus, legally speaking, that the Crossfire Hurricane team, and later Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office, seemed unconcerned with what Danchenko said, as shown by their continued reliance on Steele and his dossier, is irrelevant. The question is whether the lie was capable of influencing how a hypothetically “objective” government official would have acted had they known the truth.

While Durham’s team will argue to the jury — assuming the district court denies Danchenko’s motion to dismiss the indictment — that the alleged lies were capable of influencing several decisions of the FBI agents, the reality is that the jurors will have a hard time buying that proposition unless Durham exposes the malfeasance of the Crossfire Hurricane agents and the members of Mueller’s team. In short, Durham needs to tell the jury that Danchenko’s alleged lies did not actually influence the government’s investigation because the agents were out to get Trump.

If the Special Counsel’s office does not take this tack, what the jury will hear is the story Danchenko previewed in his motion to dismiss: 

“During the course of its investigation into the [Steele dossier], the FBI determined that the defendant, Igor Danchenko, was a potential source of information contained in the [dossier]. In order to assist the FBI in its investigation of the accuracy and sources of the information in the [dossier], Mr. Danchenko agreed to numerous voluntary interviews with the FBI from in or about January 2017 through November 2017. He answered every question he was asked to the best of his ability and recollection. As part of the 2017 interviews, FBI agents asked Mr. Danchenko to review portions of the [dossier] and describe where he believed the relevant information had derived from and to explain how any information he had provided to [Steele] may have been overstated or misrepresented in the [dossier].”

Danchenko did as the FBI asked, his defense will argue to the jury, before stressing that even after Danchenko highlighted Steele’s lies to the bureau, agents continued to investigate Millian. This fact will serve as a lynchpin for Danchenko to argue that his statements, even if false, were immaterial.

A Likely Argument

In his motion to dismiss, Danchenko previewed another argument likely to be repeated at trial, namely that no one thought Danchenko lied until the appointment of a second special counsel. “The Special Counsel’s office closed its entire investigation into possible Trump/Russia collusion in March 2019,” Danchenko noted in his motion, stressing that while “approximately thirty-four individuals were charged by Mueller’s office, including several for providing false statements to investigators. Mr. Danchenko was not among them. To the contrary, not only did investigators and government officials repeatedly represent that Mr. Danchenko had been honest and forthcoming in his interviews, but also resolved discrepancies between his recollection of events and that of others in Mr. Danchenko’s favor.”

While these arguments are currently aimed at the court, a repeat will surely follow during next month’s trial, and unless Durham provides the jury with an explanation for the FBI and Mueller’s lack of concern over Danchenko’s statements to investigators, an acquittal seems likely.

Durham’s Strategy

We won’t have to wait until the start of the trial to learn Durham’s likely strategy, however, as the government’s response to Danchenko’s motion to dismiss will likely provide some strong hints, especially given some of the assertions included in Danchenko’s brief. For instance, in his summary of the facts, Danchenko claimed, based on the DOJ’s inspector general report, that there was an “articulable factual basis” to launch Crossfire Hurricane based on “information received from a Friendly Foreign Government.” The “information received from a Friendly Foreign Government” refers to then-Australian diplomat Alexander Downer’s claim that Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos made suggestions that the Russians could assist the Trump campaign with the release of damaging information about Clinton. 

Those well-versed in the Russia-collusion hoax will remember that Durham has already publicly pushed back against the Inspector General’s claim that Downer’s tip prompted the launching of Crossfire Hurricane. Durham released a statement following the publication of the IG report contradicting the IG’s assertion and revealing that “based on the evidence collected to date,” his team had “advised the Inspector General that we do not agree with some of the report’s conclusions as to predication and how the FBI case was opened.”

Another passage in Danchenko’s brief could similarly prompt pushback by Durham. Relying again on the inspector general’s report on FISA abuse, Danchenko asserts that there is “no evidence the [Steele] election reporting was known to or used by FBI officials involved in the decision to open the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.” 

Two years have passed since the IG issued its report, however, and during that time Durham has been continuing to investigate the claimed predication of Crossfire Hurricane. If his team found evidence that Steele’s reporting prompted the launch of Crossfire Hurricane, Danchenko’s motion provides a perfect opportunity for Durham to publicly reveal that evidence.

Whether Durham will reveal these details and others remains to be seen. And while the special counsel’s office used pretrial court filings in the criminal case against former Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann to pepper the public with new revelations about the Russia-collusion hoax, the lead prosecutor in that case, Andrew DeFilippis, is no longer prosecuting the case against Danchenko. We should know soon whether Durham, who is now personally involved in the Danchenko prosecution, will use the case to expose more details about SpyGate. 

Durham has already filed his first motion in limine, or a pretrial request for the court to rule on the admissibility of evidence, in the Danchenko case. That motion, however, concerns classified information and was thus sealed. The special counsel will likely be filing several more motions in limine in the weeks to come, with the court last week entering an order encouraging the parties to file those motions “as early as possible,” but no later than October 3, 2022, absent good cause. 

Those motions, as well as Durham’s response to Danchenko’s motion to dismiss, will provide some insight into the special counsel’s planned strategy in the Danchenko case and specifically whether the special counsel will highlight the complicity of the deep state in the Russia-collusion hoax. If Durham doesn’t, it might cost his team a second loss.

Article by Kurt Schlichter in Townhall

Maybe We Want Things to Get Even Worse

Could it be better for freedom if things in America got even worse? More economic hardship, increased crime, further humiliations of America at the hands of seventh century savages – you know, business usual under President Gumby. Should we patriots try to save these idiots from themselves and give them an out, or let the natural consequences of their failures build into a critical mass that brings on a backlash that brings us the power we need to destroy all their Marxy dreams? Perhaps we should root for our garbage ruling class to hit bottom and start digging. Actually, digging deeper – these incompetent corruptocrats are already tossing shovelfuls of dirt out of the hole.

It's a cynical strategy, but this is a cynical time. There is a school of thought that says that the way to win the kind of macro-societal conflict we are in is to allow the enemy to crash and burn, to so thoroughly fail to perform adequately by any metric that they will discredit themselves for a generation – but only for a generation, since as long as there are stupid college students and stupider academics, there will be communists. This is like a conservative version of the Cloward-Piven strategy, where the left would burden the welfare state so heavily with deadbeats, bums, and shiftless losers that the only possible response would be a massive expansion of the welfare state ending, they hope, in full socialism. We win by letting them lose and lose and lose, despite the pain we’ll feel while they do it, until they are utterly spent. If it works, okay, but if it doesn’t, would we even have an America to save?

In today’s scenario, if it all worked out, we conservatives would let the Democrats screw up so badly that people would demand actual freedom and capitalism as the cure. And it’s not a totally wacky idea. We have had monumental backlashes before. In 1980, which I remember because I am old (but not President Crusty O’Kiddieshowers old), Jimmy Carter screwed up so deeply and comprehensively that even when the American people finally picked a Democrat again 12 years later in a three-way race with a Republican liar who asked them to read his lips and a populist spoiler-elf named Ross Perot, the Democrat talked about law and order and how the Era of Big Government was over. Of course, he did not mean it; his wife was not the only one in that relationship faking it.

So, the idea is that, like a drunk waking up in a different state wearing someone else’s pants and a strange wedding ring and sporting a fresh tramp-stamp of Ernest Borgnine riding a surfboard while wearing a thong, the ruling class and enough people are going to come to, look around, and think, “Gee, time to get into a national twelve-step.” But the strategy of letting them wreck the country until the voters come crawling back to beg us to come back into power has several problems, and like many problems these derive from uncertain premises.

One such uncertain premise is that there is a bottom for the left. But why would you think that? To have a bottom – a state of despair so complete that there really is no alternative but to change direction – you have to have certain objectives. In the case of the ruling caste, the objective has to be, at some level, to provide security and prosperity for the citizens. But what evidence have you seen that this is the establishment’s objective? What makes you think that is a motivating factor at all? Our trash alleged betters are very interested in their own power and position, but not so much in your safety or prosperity. Take California – please. It’s 2022 and the pinko Dems running the place can’t even keep the power on, much less keep hobos from defecating on our lawns. If the Dems cared about us, they would look at the darkness and the squatting derelicts and think, “Well, this is not working. Time to try something that’s not stupid.” But they will never do that. They don’t care about us. We’re not the point. That’s why there is no bottom. It can get a million times worse and they will be happy as long as they are in charge. 

It's the backlash that changes thing, that forces change on a sclerotic elite, not a course correction initiated by the same captains who steered us into the iceberg in the first place.

But another uncertain premise is that there will even be a backlash. Human nature would seem to dictate that people will only take so much guff for so long, but we Americans have taken a lot of guff – lockdowns, that senile idiot hectoring us, the stupid new Tolkien elf opera – and have still not gone full French Revolution on their asses. That’s does not build confidence. But then again, Virginians did vote red last year, terrifying mommy terrorists of terror did mob school boards, and Latinx Americans have said “Adios, pendejos Democraticos” in massive numbers. The November election looks good, but it’s all very genteel. So far, the backlash is more about going back than lashing, but if they keep up with nonsense like their pro-groomer agenda all bets are off.

Now, some on the left on social media, and bow-tied Conservative, Inc. sissies observing from their shame closets on pool cleaning day, will argue that this means we want things to get worse. What we want is not the issue. As of this moment, we have distinctly little ability to affect whether or not things get worse. But come November, we will have the chance. 

Do Republicans, assuming they don’t screw up what should be a sure thing election – never doubt the GOP’s capacity to fail – bail Grandpa Badfinger and his party of perverts and deadbeats out by taking the political heat for stopping them? Because there will be heat – the Republicans will be tossing granny off a cliff and putting folks back in chains by cutting budgets and holding up the climate scam and stopping debt giveaways for people who got their degrees in Pronoun Studies and the like. 

As tempting as it would be to just stand by and let the Dems ruin everything in the hopes that will help us save it, you don’t win by losing. We need to stop them where we can – California, you idiots, you made your waterbed and now you gotta lie in it – even though doing that is doing them a favor by saving them – and America – from themselves.

 

https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2022/09/12/maybe-we-want-things-to-get-even-worse-n2612858 

 

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America Delira ~ VDH

We went mad because we easily could. We could, not because we were poor and oppressed, but because we were rich and bored.

by Victor Davis Hanson for American Greatness

Travel abroad and or talk to pro-American foreigners here, and you will be surprised at what they say. It is not boilerplate anti-Americanism of the usual cheap Euro style. And their keen criticism is not just that we are $30 trillion in debt, dependent on China, with a corrupt elite, or have gone insane inventing the most lurid crimes to put away the supposedly predetermined guilty Donald Trump.

Instead, they express disbelief, worry, lamentation even, that the one solid referent in the world has gone, well, completely rabid. They are terrified after the Afghanistan debacle that their old ally or new homeland, the once constant America, is delirious, incompetent, and self-loathing, and now there is no plausible alternative to the old American deterrence. 

So, they wonder who will resist China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea—and are silently petrified to go it alone without the United States.

They seem staggered by the very ideas that now emanate from the United States: that nonexistent borders are desirable; that once rarified institutions like the FBI or CIA now function like the Stasi of old; that the very idea of meritocracy is considered racist; that one incorrect word can destroy a life-long career; that there are three or more sexes, not two; that biological men with male genitalia and physiology can compete, and destroy decades of advances, in women’s sports; that race is the sole mode of self-identification; and that half of America dislikes American customs, history—and the other 50 percent of the population—as much as do its enemies.

Onlookers no longer see American universities as free-wheeling bastions of unfettered research and expression. Rather they watch dreary (and sometimes scary) places where conformity to the old Soviet-style is enforced—or else. 

There is an apprehension that Russian hypersonic missiles are superior to America’s, that China could easily sink the Pacific fleet if it got too close to a blockade of Taiwan, that America is now reconciled to a nuclear Iranian theocracy, that North Korea will try something stupid soon—and that the American military is now somehow different, somehow less lethal. 

Dogma and Stalinist-like orthodoxy now plague our films, our fiction, our research, and even our scientific inquiry. Public policy discussion of real problems like long COVID can be as much about what race is affected the worst by it—and thus which diabolical actor or demographic is to blame—rather than a Marshall Plan rush to find a cure for everyone.  

A discussion of Homer’s Odyssey in college is likely to be a Sovietized melodrama of rooting out the sexists and racists in the preliterate bard’s cosmos, rather than why and how such an epic has enthralled audiences for over 2,700 years. The subtext is that we are growing poorer, weaker, and more ridiculous—an acceptable price if we can at least prove we are woke.

So, what made America unhinged? 

The Woke Plague

Wokeness is a large part of it. Properly understood, wokeness is simply the doctrine that all perceived inequality must be the result of culpability, not personal behavior or conduct. There is no role for chance, individual health, inheritance, or character that make us different. There are no cosmic forces like globalization that transcend race. 

What’s left instead is a nefariousness that divides the world into a collective binary of the noble victimized and their demonic oppressors. Thus, the duty of government and righteous egalitarian culture is to divide the country, in post-Marxist style, to identify the victims/oppressed, and to redistribute power, money, and influence to them. That allows the anointed to condemn the victimizers/oppressors collectively and to stigmatize, ostracize, and enfeeble them. 

 Every agency available—government, popular culture, science, history, literature, the arts, the university, the media, big tech, the corporate boardroom, and Wall Street—must be subordinated and recalibrated to spot supposed inequality so that they can fix it through reparatory discrimination. All being equal and poorer is preferable to all being richer, but with some richer than others.

Sometimes the effort manifests in reparatory commercials where 40 to 50 percent of the actors are black. Is that corporate America’s way of helping stop the carnage in Chicago—from a safe distance? Sometimes the effort is media-based and designed to ignore self-confessed racial motives in violent crime when the black perpetrators deliberately target white or Asian victims. And sometimes, there is a general exclusionary rule that media grandees can openly generalize and stereotype all whites as toxic—in language that would earn their firings if applied to any other groups. Is the theory that a white assembly-line worker without a college degree born in 1990 properly owes society for the purported sins of the long dead?  

Wokeness is also, at its most basic, a selfish creed. We still gladly use the very institutions and infrastructure we inherited from our ancestors—from Stanford University to the Hoover Dam—and then damn them as inferior to our standards. Left unsaid is that our generation can neither create a new major research university nor build a monumental dam.

The wealthiest and most deductively biased among us are the most likely to project their hatreds onto the middle classes that lack their prejudices. Generally, the immigrant poor and dispossessed who enter America know why they came and thus see it as their salvation. In contrast, the more elite and blessed the immigrants who thrive in America, the more likely they are to chomp the hand that fed them.

Woke must destroy its critics. And who are they? The age-old individualist. The traditional outspoken. The familiar maverick. The unbeliever. The apostate. Anyone who believes woke is really a familiar and ancient evil with a mere 21st-century face, our version of the Inquisition but supposedly redirected to noble justice, cruel Jacobinism now masked in enlightened racial clothes, or toxic Bolshevism with an iPhone.

Can you have wokeism without Twitter and Facebook, a cancel culture, censors, and an array of punishments? 

No more than you could have the witch trials without Reverend Samuel Parris’ mass hysteria, or the Reign of Terror without Robespierre and the guillotine of his “Committee of the Public Safety,” or the purges without Stalin and Beria, or the loyalty oaths without Joe McCarthy. 

So, cancel culture itself is always dangerous and led by rank opportunists and careerists disguised as social justice warriors—as we know from ancient scapegoating, ostracism, exile, and modern Trotskization. 

The Cowards and Bullies of Cyberspace

But the rise of the internet and social media empowered Orwellian cancellation in two dangerous ways. 

One was instantaneous accusation, verdict, and punishment accomplished online in a nanosecond. Up popped the Covington High School kids standing face-to-face with the pathological liar and phony activist Nathan Phillips. 

A millisecond later, the Twitter lynch mob judged the teenagers—white, male, with MAGA hats, and unafraid—as victimizers, and the provocateur Phillips—the noble Native American—a victim. And that was that. The lives of the former were nearly ruined, the latter sanctified—all without any desire for facts, context, or the truth.  

The faker Jussie Smollett spun a preposterous lie about being attacked by the usual white cyclopses and hydras (again, with the de rigeur MAGA hats). Smollett spun “facts” that only proved he was a racist and an inveterate liar. And then we were off to the races. 

Everyone from Kamala Harris to Nancy Pelosi rushed to post first their condolences and outrage, in order to deify the faker Smollett and to demonize “them”—that is, the nonexistent “MAGA” assaulters. Lunatic condemnations arrived at electronic speed. Apologies for being a patsy, fool, a bully, and a racist never materialized.

We had learned nothing from the Duke Lacrosse hoax and so that is why we trump it now with the Duke volleyball ruse. The point in America now is not the truth, much less justice—but career and agenda-driven revenge for not quite getting the attention, the influence and the bounty that others are perceived to enjoy. 

One second a news flash blared that the FBI was at Mar-a-Lago. The next moment, “presidential historian” Michael Beschloss was out of his Twitter cave, comparing Trump to the guilty Rosenbergs who were executed in the 1950s for espionage. And a breath later, former CIA director Michael Hayden, chained to his keyboard, had tweeted his approval of an envisioned judge, jury, executioner sentence for the now guilty traitor Trump. Then a day or two storing or selling “nuclear secrets” went the way of “I have here in my hand a list of 205 . . . names.”

Anonymity of the cyberworld, of course, adds to the dramatic lynchings. The cowardly posters dream up silly pictures and fake names as their IDs. And then post hourly, assured that if they lie, they smear, they fabricate there are never consequences. The Twitter or Facebook bully is not like someone known, in person or in print, defaming openly. A Samuel Johnson definition of social media might be “instant character assassination of the innocent by the anonymous without consequences.” 

Masked And Isolated

There was a second accelerant to our collective cannibalism. Wokeism and the Internet predated COVID. But the decision to shut down the schools and selective businesses, to sequester hundreds of millions in their homes, to suspend human-to-human contact in everything from a child learning to read to a cancer victim getting a chemo dose—all that will finally be judged as the most deleterious public health decision in the nation’s history. 

Instantaneously, and for nearly two years, we destroyed human interaction. Our elite turned an entire population into recluses—dependent on electronic screens, whether televisions or computers, for their entire contact with the outside world. The nation became utterly dependent on a helot class, who were felt to be expendable, at least in the sense they would risk infection that others would not, and thus deliver food and necessities to the housebound.

In January 2020, a man with a mask entering a bank signaled alarms; for the next two years, who could fathom him when all the entrants were wearing masks? Under the same cloak of COVID shutdowns, we went from 70 percent of the country voting on Election Day to a mere 30 percent—even as the early and mail-in ballot rejection rate dived. Worries over voter integrity under such abnormal conditions rendered one a “racist,” “election denier,” or “insurrectionist.”

George Floyd’s death, and the 120 days of destruction, arson, riot, and death that followed, along with the radical recalibration of our institutions encapsulated the entire madness. A CNN hack, without evidence, could scream on screen to the sequestrated locked in their homes that the police habitually murder the young, black, and innocent. Who cared to check Department of Justice data showing that of the 11 million people arrested a year on average, unarmed blacks were not disproportionally killed by police compared to unarmed whites? 

For the housebound, soon George Floyd appeared with angelic wings and a halo on murals and posters from Washington to Kabul. All agreed that his death was preventable and due to police misconduct.

But it was deemed racist even to suggest that Floyd contributed mightily to his own predicament through ingesting fentanyl and, earlier, methamphetamines, through resisting arrest, through trying to pass counterfeit money, through a prior eight convictions, among which he had been imprisoned for a home invasion in which he put a gun to the stomach of a pregnant woman.

Do the haloed and winged stick firearms next to wombs?

In sum, the spontaneity and anonymity of hundreds of millions using social media proved frightening. So did the return of an ancient deadly totalitarian creed of forced egalitarianism, now masked with smiley-faced euphemisms and platitudes. 

Add to the ample kindling the igniter of two-year quarantines in which stir-crazy millions depended upon the rumors of a corrupt media, a mob-like social media, and a weaponized government for the information about the outside world that became as distant as the moon.

And presto, you have all the requisites needed for our collective madness. 

The Spoiled Affluent

But how did these pathologies take root in America so easily? 

It was not because of endemic poverty and the 14-hour drudgery of hard work to live one more day on a farm. But just the opposite. 

An affluent, bored, and leisured society had long decided that poverty was not an absolute but relative—to be gauged not by mass access to air conditioning, plentiful food, a car, and electronic entertainment—but to the degree all of that was not divided up proportionally. And thus, someone or something must be found culpable for the asymmetry in satisfying the appetites. Presto! Government, the media, the university, and the popular culture went after the culprits.

We went mad then because we easily could. And we could not because we were poor and oppressed, but because we were rich and bored.

What will end wokeness? The reversal of the leisure and affluence that were the bounties of 233 years of what birthed it—free-market capitalism, constitutional government, meritocracy, human rights, tolerance, and free expression. 

We are already destroying meritocracy. We are reverting to tribal racial branding. We are strangling energy and food production because of green superstition. 

We are unleashing the criminal upon the weak and innocent.

Destroy the bounty that produced and empowered the woke decadence, and we won’t have anything—the woke included. Wokeism is, for now, an affordable irrelevancy that rests on the wealth and lessons produced by those long dead and now much rebuked. But it won’t remain affordable.

Instead, we will learn what woke itself produces—barbarism, chaos, poverty, and civilization in reverse. 

That is precisely what we are now witnessing on a Saturday night in Chicago, a day on the southern border, a sidewalk of urine and feces in Los Angeles, with strapping athletes in the pool with male genitalia breaking women’s swim records, parking your unlocked car in San Francisco, a trip to the gas pump, blackouts and brownouts in California, jogging in Memphis—all with a dash of monkeypox, FBI hooliganism, and Twitter lynching.

 

Article by Tim Jones in The American Thinker

How the personal becoming political turned into a threat to the Republic

The left has made the personal political by politicizing everything.  With the political personal, feelings are now more important than facts.

What is so important about this is that the political left has pulled off a psychological trick that's had incredible implications.  What began as benign political correctness decades ago has evolved into the nefarious and dangerous wokeness and cancel culture of today.  By using the paradigm of the Civil Rights era, where historical wrongs of discrimination were thought to have been finally brought to an end, the left didn't stop there.  It continued its pursuit of more power and the creation a one-party state.

Leftists ingeniously used victimhood as a launching pad to manufacture large groups of voters by turning identity itself into a form of oppression and grievance.  Only the Democrats would be the ones to correct it, through the power of the government.

This has led to political pandering on a massive scale.

In the book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism and the Road to Sexual Revolution, author Carl Treuman describes in detail on how the left weaponized identity and psychology for political purposes to the point where hurt feelings have now become a form of oppressive power that takes priority over everything else. 

Treuman references early in his book another book called The Triumph of the Therapeutic by Philip Reiff, which describes how this all began, going back thousands of years.  It shows the broad evolution of humanity's identity from "political man" during the Greco-Roman era to the "religious man" during the medieval era to "economic man" of the early modern era, to where we are now, the "psychological man" of the late modern era, AKA postmodernism.

Postmodernism at its most basic is the triumph of feelings over facts because men and women have been thoroughly "psychologized." 

The following passage from The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self describes exactly how this happened once psychology took hold throughout the Western world following Freud and his revolutionary new definition of the individual, then later combined with the romanticism of Rousseau and Marx's idea that history is nothing but the story of oppression that must always require liberation.

To follow Rousseau is to make identity psychological. To follow Freud is to make psychology, and thus identity, sexual. To mesh this combination with Marx is to make identity, and therefore sex, political. And the politics that is produced thereby has a distinctive character precisely because the reality that it thinks it is addressing is at base a psychological one. To transform society politically, then, one must transform society sexually and psychologically, a point that places psychological categories at the heart of revolutionary political discourse. where once oppression was seen in terms of economic realities or legal categories, now the matter is more subtle because it relates to issues of psychology and self-consciousness. The political sphere is internalized and subjectivized. 

In the process of making the personal political, the left has successfully politicized everything.  It began simply and fairly enough with rectifying racial grievance, but then it shifted into the grievances of women, who also claimed discrimination and oppression.  AOC was in the news recently repeating her grievance about the pervasiveness of misogyny and that she will never become president because men hate women.  She is doing nothing less than echoing Carol Hanisch, a leading feminist in the late 1960s, who coined the term "the personal is political." 

Then there is the environment that now is requiring what the left calls "environmental justice."  The current radical environmentalism of Biden's administration can be traced directly back to this notion of oppression that now requires saving by the state.

Normalizing of homosexuality, culminating in legalizing gay "marriage" plus the transgender movement of today, is a direct result of making the personal political.  The most important reason for all of this is that the end result is that the government always ends up with more power.

Abortion too, is making a very personal situation political by going to the government for redress for ending unwanted pregnancies on demand.  It puts the government in the position of the permissive parent satisfying the wants of a child, that in turn gains the allegiance and vote from that person through political pandering.  The result is always more governmental power.

Why this is so dangerous is that it is leading down a road to criminalizing basic freedoms that were enshrined in the Constitution and those who have legitimate reasons for dissenting from policies the government and political establishment considers untouchable.  This is why nearly every department, from the IRS to the DOJ and FBI, has been politicized by the Democrats.  They have been going after President Trump before, during, and now after his administration because he represents a clear threat to big government power.  The Democrats are exploiting and abusing ambiguities in the law and the Constitution to frame everything they do as legal and protecting democracy, which in a way are strokes of evil genius because it allows them to label the person who disagrees with them as anti-democratic.

Donald Trump never hurt anyone financially or physically, but he may have hurt a lot of people's feelings, which is why many suburban white women didn't vote for him in 2020, possibly costing him the election.  College students began getting their own safe spaces years ago in order to protect their feelings whenever they didn't feel comfortable and were offended with words or ideas that didn't correspond to their own.  Conservative speakers on campus are getting hounded off stages where they're speaking, sometimes violently, which is what happened at Vermont's Middlebury College in March of 2017.  They were also shouted down earlier this year at Yale Law School, because students were outraged with the speakers' points of view that in their opinion they thought were wrong and hurtful, therefore didn't deserved to be heard. 

All of these attacks on free speech along with censorship of conservatives by Big Tech combined with the criminalization of political opponents and weaponization of government bureaucracy began by making the personal political.  It's not hard to see where all of this heading and why it's such a dangerous inflection point in American history.

 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/09/how_the_personal_becoming_political_turned_into_a_threat_to_the_republic.html 

 

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Plutocratic Socialism and War on the Middle Class

 

Barry Obama on the course

 

Article by Mark T. Mitchell in The American Conservative

Plutocratic Socialism and War on the Middle Class

The future of the republic depends on the middle class virtues that property ownership helps to cultivate.

 

It is becoming increasingly obvious something is amiss. One might be tempted to recall the words of a nineteenth-century revolutionary: “A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of Communism.” But the bloody history of the last century has demonstrated beyond question that Marx was no prophet. 

However, a specter is, indeed, haunting not just Europe but the entire world, and ground zero for this strange new spirit is the United States, a land where communism never gained a foothold. This rising spirit has no widely recognized name at present, but it has certain definitive characteristics that coalesce into a singular, grotesque reality. Call it Plutocratic Socialism. 

First, consider some facts. In a 2019 Gallup poll, 43 percent of Americans claimed that some form of socialism would be good for the country. When the same question was put to Americans in 1942, only 25 percent looked favorably on the socialist agenda. The same poll found that a majority of Democrats today have a positive view of socialism. The political agenda being pushed by Democrats in Congress and by the White House suggests, at the very least, a concerted effort to expand government programs, and in the process expand the lists of clients who find themselves increasingly dependent upon the largesse of the federal government. 

Public intellectuals give voice to rising concerns that capitalism is the root cause of some of our most persistent and seemingly intractable problems. Race-guru Ibram X. Kendi puts the matter succinctly and with his characteristic antipathy to nuance: “Capitalism is essentially racist; racism is essentially capitalist.” Climate journalist Paul Mason writes that “to save the planet, we have to end capitalism,” and unless we act swiftly, we face “global catastrophe.” The implications are clear. To end two of the greatest scourges of our day—racism and climate change—we must eradicate capitalism. The apparent alternative? Socialism. 

At the same time, the much-beleaguered middle class struggles. Many young people find that the relative independence that membership in that class promises is simply beyond reach. Consider these changes: A report published by the Economic Policy Institute found that between 1945 and 1973 “the top 1 percent captured just 4.9 percent of all income growth over that period.” However, between 1973 and 2007 the trend dramatically reversed: “58.7 percent of all income growth [was] concentrated in the hands of the top 1 percent of families.” 

According to the Pew Research Center, “the hollowing of the American middle-class has proceeded steadily for more than four decades.” In 1971, 61 percent—a clear majority—of Americans were in the middle-class. By 2015, 50 percent were middle-class, with growth occurring both at the upper and lower ends. Home-ownership, long considered a vital indicator of middle-class status, has become an increasingly elusive dream. Under-employment, student debt, inflation, and a general demoralization have led many to conclude that their standard of living, and happiness in general, will not approximate that of their parents. 

Almost as if in response to the frustration, the World Economic Forum launched an ad campaign that included eight predictions for 2030. The first: “You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy.” This was part of a larger initiative they called the “Great Reset.” The coronavirus pandemic provided a focal point and a sense of urgency. The looming “existential threat” of climate change made sweeping action necessary in order to prevent a catastrophe that would dwarf the carnage inflicted by the coronavirus. The killing of George Floyd in May 2020 touched off protests in the U.S. and around the globe raising awareness of racial injustice that seemed to require profound systemic changes. 

The common denominator: crisis. The common agent of change? Government power in partnership with many of the world’s largest multinational corporations. According to the WEF website, “The world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions. Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed. In short, we need a ‘Great Reset’ of capitalism.”

The Great Reset represents a sweeping vision for world-wide transformation that mirrors, on a larger scale, the ambitions of the Green New Deal here at home. The collaboration of national governments, international organizations, and transnational corporations suggests a consolidation of power unlike any other peace-time initiative in history. If every country “from the United States to China” joins forces with the world’s most powerful corporations, the ability to effect change will be almost irresistible. 

Consider, in this context, some of the “partner” corporations listed at the WEF website: Amazon, Apple, Barclays, Boing, China Construction Bank, Deutsche Bank, Discovery, European Investment Bank, Facebook, Goldman Sachs, IBM, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Kaiser Permanente, LinkedIn, Mastercard, Microsoft, Nasdaq, Netflix, The New York Times, PayPal, Pfizer, Tyson Foods, UPS, Visa, Walmart, Western Union, and dozens more. What is described here is a global plutocracy: rule by the wealthy.

The Great Reset makes explicit a dynamic that has been developing for some time. This new plutocracy is expanding its reach and concentrating its power. In the process, the lines between public and private money and power—between big business and big government—become increasingly blurred. 

Yet wealth is not sufficient for gaining access to the current plutocratic class. What is also necessary is a particular outlook, a plutocratic psychology, if you will. This illusory meritocracy is rooted in the false belief that wealth, or proximity to wealth, is an indication of special moral virtue. Not surprisingly, this belief manifests itself in a disposition of self-righteousness whereby those infected by it come to see themselves as superior to their fellow-citizens who are, alas, not wealthy or connected. They come to see themselves as above the law, for law is necessary for controlling the common citizen, but it is certainly not something that should limit those possessing the moral superiority that wealth would seem to denote. Thus, the plutocracy is characterized by both insolence and self-righteousness, and it is not conveniently confined to either the left or right.

A plutocratic class, if it is to survive in a democratic age, must placate insecure, propertyless citizens with state-sponsored benefits that provide the illusion of security. This welfare state will, in time, generate explicit calls for socialist policies and programs. Plutocratic Socialism, then, is a system built on a symbiotic relationship between two seemingly opposed classes: plutocrats and socialists. 

We are now witnessing this in America. Of course, the call for socialism today is energized by a woke agenda that takes matters far beyond the confines of economic theory. This woke socialism blames capitalism not only for economic injustices but for racism, climate change, and a host of other nefarious wrongs. This sets the stage for a radical economic, social, and political transformation. The language of revolution—even civil war—is in the air, and the pent-up energy is palpable.

It is important to appreciate the fundamental tension inherent in the union of plutocracy and woke socialism. Woke socialism is rooted in the claim that the world is sharply divided between two classes construed in various ways as the oppressors and the oppressed, the victimizers and the victims, the powerful and the weak. Plutocrats clearly hold the power and those deemed oppressed or marginalized—people of color, women, the poor, those identifying as LGBT, etc.—do not. 

It is at this point that things get dicey. Plutocrats must appear to make common cause with the oppressed lest they forfeit the perception of moral authority. To do so they must convince themselves that their special virtue and status provide them with the unique opportunity to do important work on behalf of the oppressed thereby legitimating their own relentless hold on wealth, status, and power.

How else can one explain the self-righteous arrogance of the plutocratic class? How else can one explain the full-on embrace of the Woke agenda by corporate leaders, the military, colleges and universities, the media and so on? How else can one understand the Davos set—comprised of political officials, corporate leaders, and prominent media figures—flying private jets to their annual confab in Switzerland to issue vehement condemnations of behavior that contributes to the “climate crisis.” Their sense of self-importance far exceeds their carbon footprints, which are, alas, far larger than average. They are not socialists, and they never intend to forfeit their wealth, power, and status in the name of equality (or even equity). 

This, in a curious fashion, brings us back to Marx. Plutocratic Socialism represents a strange alliance that would have stunned and dismayed the old fellow. It is as if the bourgeoisie and the proletariat decided to strike a secret pact and work together rather than allow their rancorous animosity to ignite a full-blown revolution. The leadership of both classes have much to gain by this seemingly bizarre arrangement. Plutocrats gain moral legitimacy, and socialist leaders gain wealth, status, and power. 

This hidden dynamic is one reason why socialist revolutions never come to a successful termination but instead remain stuck in a “transitional” phase where the plutocrats—and those fortunate individuals drawn into their orbit—secure the wealth, status, and power while the revolutionary energy of the masses is allowed to fester perpetually. The persistent frustration is kept from exploding by a steady trickle of goods and services that takes the edge off the despair while fostering a habit of dependence. The recent student-loan forgiveness initiative is a perfect example of this dynamic.

Although he was deadly wrong in so many ways, Marx did understand that democracy provided an opportunity for revolutionary change. He argued that the first step in the communist revolution was to “win the battle of democracy.” This battle will be won when a majority becomes convinced that the free market is unjust, that property owners have likely benefited from this unjust system, and that socialist policies are necessary and desirable. 

Plutocratic Socialism represents the real-life conclusion to the Marxist fantasy. The plutocratic class—working in tandem with socialist agitators in the streets, the educational institutions, and the media—is striving relentlessly toward this end, one where citizens are increasingly dependent and the power of their plutocratic masters is further entrenched. All that stands in the way of this revolutionary agenda are middle class citizens who disdain both the servility of socialism and the insolent power of the plutocracy. 

The American Founders understood that political freedom and broadly distributed private property stand or fall together. Anyone concerned about the future of freedom, and about the future of our republic, must work tirelessly to bolster and expand the middle class, middle class property, and the middle class virtues that property ownership helps to cultivate. The strength—indeed, the very survival—of our republic is fundamentally tied to the strength of our middle class.

 

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/plutocratic-socialism-and-war-on-the-middle-class/ 

 

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