How Buckley and Trump Mainstreamed Conservatism

American  Thinker 

William F. Buckley Jr.’s authorized biography recently appeared, a disappointment from an adversarial biographer. Buckley selected the wrong biographer. Barton Swain, writing in the Wall Street Journal, described biographer Sam Tanenhaus’s effort as “the book conservatives feared it would be.” Previous biographies are laudatory.

Wall Street Journal film critic Kyle Smith’s review provides an antidote, describing Tanenhaus as a “New York Times liberal.” Charlie Rose and The Atlantic couldn’t wait to interview this Obama fanboy after his Buckley biography appeared. In 2009, after Obama’s election, Tanenhaus excitedly published The Death of Conservatism. He wished. Less than a month after Obama’s inauguration, the Tea Party movement began, eventually absorbed into MAGA. Conservatism’s reinvigoration was only beginning.

Smith managed to distill Buckley’s essence and appeal to the Common Man in his brief review. Tanenhaus required 27 years to produce 1,040 pages, about three a month. Tanenhaus absurdly described Buckley as “a conversationalist, not a thinker and still less a theorist.” National Review editor Rich Lowrypraised the book’s detail but said it “feels like a rush job.”

Buckley’s political footprint remains massive. How many other public intellectuals are recognized by a three-letter acronym, WFB? What other intellectuals spawned enduring political movements, including Nixon’s Silent Majority, Reaganism, and Trumpism? For 33 years, until 1999, a third of a century, he hosted PBS’s “Firing Line,” debating ideas and individuals. It was television’s longest-running public affairs program hosted by a single individual. Buckley pioneered televised political debate.

Buckley’s political epitaph reads: Make Conservatism Fun Again. Reagan and Trump got it. Nixon didn’t, but that didn’t stop him and Reagan from being reelected in 49-state landslides. Buckley began as a scion of Texas oil wealth, determined to have fun. Optimism and fun go hand-in-hand. So does the incessant pessimism and gloom the Left emits. The Left appeals to malcontents. They incessantly foster chaos to feed this pathology.

The remarkable thing about Buckley was his appeal to the Common Man, something manifested during his 1965 NYC mayoral campaign, running as the Conservative Party candidate. In liberalism’s temple, he polled as high as 33% at one point. His platform emphasized law-and-order and opposed liberal policies such as welfare spending. When asked what his first act would be if he won, Buckley replied, “Demand a recount!” His Republican and Democrat opponents were described as a tall liberal and a short liberal, respectively.

Among Buckley’s favorite TV shows was “All in the Family.” Carroll O’Connor played Archie Bunker, a conservative everyman resisting 1970s liberalism. Buckley was peeved one Saturday evening when he missed the show to attend a dinner at Nelson Rockefeller’s. To his delight, he wound up seated next to O’Connor.

George Will, a protégé of Buckley, observed, "Without Bill Buckley, no National Review. Without National Review, no Goldwater nomination. Without the Goldwater nomination, no conservative takeover of the Republican Party. Without that, no Reagan. Without Reagan, no victory in the Cold War. Therefore, Bill Buckley won the Cold War." Without Buckley, no Golden Dome, implementing Reagan’s SDI.

Buckley, who died in 2008, was no Trump fan. He dismissed Trump as a narcissist, declaring, “When he looks at a glass, he is mesmerized by its reflection. If Donald Trump were shaped a little differently, he would compete for Miss America.” Many of us felt similarly before Trump descended the escalator, failing to grasp his marketing genius: I’m rich, and I intend to make America rich. And keep America safe. What did Hillary Clinton offer in 2016? Who knows? Trump promised prosperity and safety.

If Buckley were alive, he would support MAGAism. The pre-political Trump cultivated branding and publicity. Unlike Buckley, he concealed a deeply intellectual core, evidenced in videos recorded in 1980, 1988, and 1991. “The Apprentice,” pro wrestling, beauty pageants, and casinos represented populist marketing. Prior to the branding makeover, Nixon recognized Trump's potential, writing him in 1987, “I did not see the [TV] program, but Mrs. Nixon told me that you were great. As you can imagine, she is an expert on politics and she predicts whenever you decide to run for office you will be a winner.” According to Trump, Nixon urged him to enter politics. Trump wrote him in 1982, “One of my great ambitions is to have the Nixons as residents in Trump Tower.” This was when Nixon was persona non grata in New York society and failed to gain co-op board approval to purchase an exclusive Madison Avenue apartment. Trump recognized Nixon enjoyed broad populist appeal and could enhance his building.

Buckley’s and Trump’s philosophies overlap. They valiantly resisted communist infiltration. Trump succeeded by packaging conservatism (actually centrism) in a populist vessel. Both opposed the neocon war lobby, especially regarding the Iraq war. Nixon shared a similar approach. He extracted us from the Democrats’ Vietnam, favoring detente with Russia and China, a realpolitik philosophy, rather than fruitlessly battling what only time could change. The Deep State engineered Nixon’s removal for such heresies. Trump was punished for the same sin.

Although benefiting from PBS’s public funding, Buckley opposed its government subsidy. He would applaud Trump defunding another liberal NGO. Trump’s contrived, coarse language conveys core American principles. Buckley wielded a rhetorical scalpel, while Trump swings a sledgehammer, conveying similar principles. Both battled leftism. Seven decades after Buckley founded National Review, Trump reverses leftism’s tide. Buckley herded conservatives during leftism’s ascendancy; Trump oversees liberalism’s downslope. Political gravity is taking over. Leftism required a century to accumulate political mass. Its descent is spectacularly rapid.

The country was always majority conservative. The Left, backed by foreign funding, captured cultural institutions and undermined core conservatism, convincing ordinary Americans to accept a false reality. Previous Republicans (except Reagan) never effectively marketed principles. If leftists have lost Snoop Dog, uncomfortable taking his grandsons to Disney movies, they’ve lost the center.

Buckley remade the GOP from a pro-business lobby to a libertarian/freedom-focused coalition. Trump does something similar, but broader. Buckley appealed from the cerebral stratosphere. Trump ascends from the political gutter, targeting the disaffected impoverished by Washington’s bipartisan, endemic corruption. Trump is an equal-opportunity political party destroyer, assembling a de facto third, majority party. Congressional Republicans now constitute window dressing, carefully avoiding Trump’s wrath.

Buckley was the right man for his times, declaring in 1955, “A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so.” Trump is the right man for our times, dismantling leftist insanities. While enjoying way too much fun: “Thank you for your attention to this matter.” The two bookended leftism’s ascent and descent.

Buckley gets the last laugh on September 9. A commemorative stamp will be issued, honoring his centennial. A perfect stamp for sending greetings to lefties. Buckley made conservatism fun and great again. Widely imitated, he was an American original.

Entertainment and politics thread for Sept 5

 

Been resting a lot from yesterday. (lol).

Trump's National Guard Deployment and the Art of the 80-20 Issue

posted Josh Hammer at Townhall 

Donald Trump's recent floated proposal to deploy the National Guard to crime-overrun blue cities like Chicago and Baltimore has been met with howls of outrage from the usual suspects. For many liberal talking heads and Democratic officials, this is simply the latest evidence of Trump's "authoritarianism." But such specious analysis and manufactured hysteria distract from what all parties ought to properly focus on: the well-being of the people who actually live in such crime-addled jurisdictions.

What's remarkable is not just the specific policy suggestion itself -- after all, federal force has been called in to assist state-level law enforcement plenty of times -- but rather how Trump is once again baiting his political opponents into defending the indefensible. He has a singular talent for making the Left clutch onto wildly unpopular positions and take the wrong side of clear 80-20 issues. It's political jiu-jitsu at its finest.

Crime in cities like Chicago and Baltimore isn't a right-wing fever dream. It's a persistent, documented crisis that continues to destroy communities and ruin lives. Chicago saw nearly 600 homicides in 2024 alone, "earning" it the dubious title of America's homicide capital for the 13th consecutive year. In Baltimore, despite a recent downtick, violent crime remains exponentially higher than national averages. Sustained, decadeslong Democratic leadership in both cities has failed, time and again, to secure even a minimum baseline level of safety for its residents -- many of whom are Black and working-class, the very communities Democrats purport to champion.

Trump sees that leadership and quality-of-life vacuum. And he's filling it with a popular message of law and order.

Trump's proposal to deploy the National Guard -- if local leadership continues to abdicate their most basic governance duties -- isn't the flight of fancy of a would-be strongman. It's federalism functioning as the Founders intended: The federal government must step in, per Article IV of the Constitution, when local governance breaks down so catastrophically that the feds are needed to "guarantee ... a republican form of government." Even more specifically, the Insurrection Act of 1807 has long been available as a congressionally authorized tool for presidents to restore order when state unrest reaches truly intolerable levels. Presidents from Jefferson to Eisenhower to Bush 41 have invoked it.

Trump's critics would rather not have a conversation about bloody cities like Chicago -- or the long history of presidents deploying the National Guard when local circumstances require it. They'd rather scream "fascism" than explain why a grandmother in Englewood should have to dodge gang bullets on her way to church. They'd rather chant slogans about "abolishing the police" than face the hard fact that the communities most devastated by crime consistently clamor for more law enforcement -- not less.

This is where Trump's political instincts shine. He doesn't try to "win" the crime debate by splitting the difference with progressives. He doesn't offer a milquetoast promise to fund "violence interrupters" or expand toothless social programs. He goes right at the issue, knowing full well that the American people are with him.

Because they are. The public has consistently ranked crime and safety among their top concerns; last November, it was usually a top-five issue in general election exit polling. And polling consistently shows that overwhelming majorities -- often in the 70%-80% range -- support more police funding and oppose the Left's radical decarceration agenda. Democrats, ever in thrall to their activist far-left flank, are stuck defending policies with rhetoric that most voters correctly identify as both dangerous and absurd.

Trump knows that when he floats these proposals, Democrats and their corporate media allies won't respond with nuance. They'll respond with knee-jerk outrage -- just as they did in 2020, when Trump sent federal agents to Portland to stop violent anarchists from torching courthouses. The media framed it as martial law; sane Oregonians saw it as basic governance.

This dynamic plays out again and again. When Trump highlights the border crisis and the need to deport unsavory figures like Mahmoud Khalil and Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Democrats defend open borders. When Trump attacks gender ideology indoctrination in schools, Democrats double down on letting teachers hide children's "transitions" from their parents. When Trump condemns pro-Hamas rioters in American cities, Democrats can't bring themselves to say a word of support for Israel's war against a U.S. State Department-recognized foreign terrorist organization. When Trump signs an executive order seeking to partially recriminalize flag burning, Democrats defend flag burning.

On and on it goes. By now, it's a well-established pattern. And it's politically devastating for the Left. Moreover, the relevant history is on Trump's side. This sort of federal corrective goes back all the way to the republic's origins; those now freaking out might want to read up on George Washington's efforts to quash the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794.

Call it the art of the 80-20 issue. Along with his sheer sense of humor, Trump's instinctual knack for picking such winning battles is one of his greatest political assets. And this time, the winner won't just be Trump himself -- it will be Chicagoans and Baltimoreans as well.

The West is playing an international game of RISK with the Muslim world

American  Thinker 

In the board game RISK, the goal is world domination. You achieve that by battling other players within and across continents. The best strategy is to take and hold Australia. Once secured, you can build up your troops while defending the single point of access to keep your opponents at bay, then attack in a methodical style and slowly expand.

This strategy doesn’t always work, but the notion of finding an easily defendable base where you can husband resources and use it as a launching pad to attack others is sound.

We’re actually seeing that strategy play itself in real-life competition that is anything but a game. Of course, I’m talking about Islam.

Islam began in the second half of the 6th century in what is now Saudi Arabia. By the time Muhammad died in 632, the peninsula was largely Muslim. Over the next century, Islam would grow rapidly, sweeping across North Africa, through Spain, and into France.

In 732, Islam would meet its match in the person of Charles Martel, the de facto leader of the Franks. The Umayyad Caliphate had used its bases in North Africa and later Spain to advance into what is today France, behind the leadership of Abd Al-Rahman. Martel would appeal to the Pope for the funds necessary to defend Christendom.

When the forces met near Tours, the heavily outnumbered Frankish forces were victorious, and at the end of the day, the Muslim threat to Christendom was over.

While there would be other battles as the Caliphate retreated from France, Muslim control in Western Europe would be limited to Iberia for the next 800 years, where it would remain in slow decline until its final ouster from Granada in 1492.

Across the Mediterranean, at about that same time, the Ottomans conquered the unconquerable city, Constantinople, in 1453, and by 1653 would reach the gates of Vienna.

By that point, the Ottomans had control over much of southeastern Europe, stretching from Greece up to central Hungary and east to what is now Ukraine. The Ottoman Empire very much employed the Australia strategy, bringing resources from across its well-defended Empire up through Istanbul and deploying them throughout the Balkans as they prepared to support the siege. Polish King John III Sobieski would thwart their efforts.

Much like the Battle of Tours, the assault on Vienna was seen as a threat to Christendom and would represent the high-water mark of Muslim incursion into Europe. The following centuries would see the Ottoman Empire slowly retreat until its ultimate demise in the early 20th century.

Not that the Muslim world was monolithic, because it wasn’t. There were often competing caliphates and competition within caliphates, but the Islamic world never experienced anything resembling the kind of balkanization that characterized Christian Europe for most of its post-Roman history. Nor was Europe the only area that Islam sought to conquer, for at times it controlled all of India and much of Western China, stretching south to Indonesia.

Today, we live in a different world where caliphates in the traditional sense no longer exist. Instead of having one or multiple caliphates controlling large empires of Muslim lands, today there are over 50 countries where Muslims rule.

But just because we live in a different world doesn’t mean we’re living in a different world. Just as Muhammad and his successors sought to expand Islam to the ends of the earth, today we have a similar push, albeit from a far more grassroots source.

The leaders of most Muslim countries today are simply trying to survive the chaos of their third-world dystopias rather than trying to conquer the world in the traditional sense. Sure, there are a few Muslim nations that have used the money from oil to climb into the relatively developed world, or create a Potemkin façade of such, but they’re a minority. No, most are like Pakistan or Mali and often have challenges just keeping the lights on and their populations fed.

There are, however, hundreds of Islamic groups and terrorist organizationsthat seek to conquer the world and bring the entire planet (particularly Western civilization) into a caliphate. As in the game RISK, they depend on Muslim countries for support and sending new recruits. They are achieving results that sultans could only have dreamed of as Western countries welcome millions of Muslims.

Traditionally, Western leaders spearheading mass immigration always promise citizens that immigrants will assimilate and become productive members of their new nations. With these Muslim immigrants, though, that hasn’t happened.

Muslims mostly congregate in Muslim areas, maintain their traditions, fly flags of their former countries, and rally to the cause of terrorist organizations. Indeed, many maintain allegiance to Islam rather than their adopted countries,and they commit a disproportionate amount of crime, too. Often, natives are pressured into changing their culture to accommodate the new arrivals.

What’s the difference between 732, 1653, and 2025? Simple. In the former eras, Christians understood they were in a battle for their very survival and were willing to fight to defend their way of life against powers that wanted to destroy it. They were more than just nominally Christian; they were actual Christians with faith, confidence, and a belief that the civilization built by Christianity deserved to be defended.

Today, none of those things apply. Western civilization is largely ruled by globalists who believe the West is uniquely stained by the evils of slavery and colonization. For them, contrition requires welcoming everyone, regardless of the country or culture from which they come.

What’s worse, they tax their citizens to pay to support these newly arrived immigrants. And citizens who complain because they liked their country the way it was are labeled far-right racists and fascists and sometimes jailed.

But perhaps the single biggest difference is that Western leftists and leaders today take for granted the world they were bequeathed. They assume that because they enjoy freedom, prosperity, electricity, running water, etc., that they will naturally be there forever. They have no understanding of history and have no interest in how successful civilizations are built, nor sustained.

The outcome of all of this will be that numerous Western nations, particularly Europe, will be majority Muslim within a century. But the reality is that the West will be part of the caliphate long before the end of this century. The reason the British could control India, a nation of 200 million people, with less than 100,000 troops (less than 1/10th of 1% of the population) was because of the cooperation of millions of Indians in the army and the bureaucracy.

Muslims already make up far more than that in Europe, and it doesn’t take much for the impact to be felt, particularly with pandering politicians.

Islam is not compatible with Western civilization. Freedom of speech, religion, and thought are core to Western civilization. Islam opposes all of them. But it doesn’t matter as long as the West’s globalist leaders act as if their constituents are cogs in a machine who can be replaced by anyone from anywhere, regardless of their culture. In RISK, as in life, it’s the last one standing who wins. Unless something changes, Western civilization will find itself swallowed up in a caliphate of its own making, and freedom, prosperity, and actual civilization will be but distant memories.

🎭 𝐖𝟑𝐏 𝓓𝓐𝓘𝓛𝓨 𝓗𝓾𝓶𝓸𝓻, 𝓜𝓾𝓼𝓲𝓬, 𝓐𝓻𝓽, 𝓞𝓟𝓔𝓝 𝓣𝓗𝓡𝓔𝓐𝓓

 

Welcome to 

The 𝐖𝟑𝐏 𝓓𝓐𝓘𝓛𝓨 𝓗𝓾𝓶𝓸𝓻, 𝓜𝓾𝓼𝓲𝓬, 𝓐𝓻𝓽, 𝓞𝓟𝓔𝓝 𝓣𝓗𝓡𝓔𝓐𝓓 

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Farage Warns U.K. Censorship ‘Sledgehammer’ Could Come For Americans Next

‘You can say what you like. I don’t care, because that’s what free speech is, isn’t it?’ Farage responded to rude Rep. Jamie Raskin.

The  Federalist 

Laws in other countries generally should not be felt in the United States, but Americans can’t ignore the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act, a 2023 measure that regulates internet speech, or the similar European Union Digital Services Act.

“It may have been designed … with the best of intentions, but it has turned out to be a sledgehammer that misses the nut. It does not protect and it is damaging,” U.K. Member of Parliament Nigel Farage testified Wednesday in a congressional hearing lasting over three hours, titled “Europe’s Threat to American Speech and Innovation,” hosted by the House Judiciary Committee.   

The hearing came on the heels of the outrageous arrest of Irish comedian Graham Linehan at Heathrow Airport. Linehan was arrested for social media posts he made on X months ago, while he was in the U.S.

“He’s not even a British citizen. He’s an Irish citizen. This could happen to any American man or woman that goes to Heathrow that has said things online that the British government and British police don’t like,” Farage said. “I’ve come today … to say to you, don’t allow piece by piece this to happen here in America.”

Barrister and Legal Counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom International Lorcán Price also testified and provided examples of shocking censorship in EU countries. Päivi Räsänen, former Finnish minister of the interior, is still in court after she was charged with “agitation against a minority group” in 2021— a charge under the Finnish criminal code titled “war crimes and crimes against humanity” — for posting a Bible verse on X in response to her church sponsoring a gay pride parade.

In Scotland, Rose Docherty, a then-74-year-old grandmother, silently held a sign on the sidewalk near a hospital where abortions are performed. The sign offered to talk with anyone who wished. She was arrested in February, but the prosecutor dropped the case in August.

In England, Adam Smith-Connor was found guilty of breaching the buffer zone of an abortion business while praying silently in 2022.

“German pensioners are having their homes raided and are being prosecuted for insulting politicians,” Price testified. “Indeed, one member of the Green Party in Germany has over 700 criminal complaints outstanding, for insult.”

Price called EU censorship policies a retreat from free speech and a sign that the “European political elite has lost control of the narrative, and the Digital Services Act is the response to that increasingly desperate attempt to suppress growing public discontent.”

“When the European Union is now negotiating trade deals, including with your neighbors to the north in Canada, they insist that the Digital Services Act is part of that. Very clearly a global intent. It means that the European Union will set the global standard when it comes to speech,” Price continued.

Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, shared an August 12, 2024 letter sent to Elon Musk from Thierry Breton, who was the commissioner in charge of enforcement of the Digital Services Act. The letter was sent in advance of the video discussion between Musk and then-candidate Donald Trump that was broadcast on X. Breton tells Musk, “measures need to be taken to combat disinformation,” and “We’re concerned about any illegal content you may have,” and, Jordan continues to quote from the letter, “He ends his letter by saying, ‘My services and I … will be extremely vigilant [for]any evidence that points to breaches of the Digital Services Act, and will not hesitate to make full use of our toolbox.”

Jordan noted that last Congress this same committee investigated censorship by the U.S. government during the Biden administration.

“Big government, Big Tech, big media, big academia, all working together to censor Americans,” Jordan said. “The Biden administration had established a disinformation governance board. That’s right, bunch of bureaucrats are going to get together and tell you what you can say, what you can tweet, what you can post, what you can read, what’s misinformation, what’s disinformation, and the new term they come up with, what’s mal-information?” The board has since been dismantled.

None of the Democrats on the committee took any warnings from their guests seriously. Predictably, they turned real evidence of censorship inside out and tried to malign Trump, saying he is the real threat to free speech.

Several Democrats hurled insults at Farage, including Ranking Member Jamie Raskin, D- Md., who called Farage, “a Putin-loving free speech imposter and Trump sycophant.”

His tone dripping with venom, Raskin seethed, “For a man who fashions himself kind of a free speech martyr, Mr. Farage seems most at home with the autocrats and dictators of the world who are crushing freedom on Earth.”

Later, when Farage had a chance to respond, he smiled at Raskin and thanked him for the “charming” and “delightful” testimony, which disarmed the room with laughs all around. He threw up his arms and used Raskin’s rudeness to make a point. “But hey, that’s fine. You can say what you like. I don’t care, because that’s what free speech is, isn’t it? This has all been going wrong now for a couple of decades. We’ve kind of forgotten the Voltairean principles that we’ll fight and defend to the death your right to say something that we fundamentally disagree with. That is the absolute foundation — if you think about it — of free speech, of democracy, of living in freedom. It’s kind of why we fought two world wars at massive, massive cost, to defend that very principle for ourselves and the many, many others around the country.”

After Attacking Trump For Criticizing Leftists’ Judicial Coup, Media Hype Rogue Judges’ Attacks On SCOTUS

Prepare for leftists who attacked Trump for criticizing rogue judges to celebrate rogue judges now attacking SCOTUS.

The  Federalist 

When President Trump criticizes rogue lower courts for issuing overreaching rulings, leftists treat it as an existential attack on the independence of the judiciary. But when these rogue lower court judges criticize the Supreme Court for refusing to uphold their overreaching rulings, it’s to be considered an undeniable act of bravery.

That was the case on Thursday, when NBC News published an “exclusive” story featuring temper tantrum-style criticisms from a dozen lower court federal judges against the Supreme Court. Speaking anonymously with the outlet’s Lawrence Hurley, many of these jurists specifically took aim at the justices’ openness to temporarily shutting down lower courts’ overreaching injunctions attempting to sabotage the Trump administration.

Since returning to office, President Trump has faced an onslaught of leftist-backed lawsuits aimed at grinding his agenda to a halt. This new rendition of anti-Trump lawfare has been warmly received by numerous (predominantly Democrat-appointed) lower court judges, who have issued expansive injunctions trying to block the administration from implementing the president’s policies.

This trend has prompted the Trump Justice Department to appeal many of these injunctions to SCOTUS, which has used its emergency docket to issue temporary stays on these orders while the merits of the cases make their way through the lower judiciary.

In addition to complaining that these Supreme Court orders often come with little or no explanation, 10 of the 12 anonymous lower court judges whined to Hurley that the high court’s actions may be “validating the Trump administration’s criticisms” of their and their fellow jurists’ egregious conduct.

“A short rebuttal from the Supreme Court, [the judges] argue, makes it seem like they did shoddy work and are biased against Trump,” Hurley wrote.

“It is inexcusable,” one judge reportedly said. “[The justices] don’t have our backs.”

Naturally, Hurley portrayed these judges as simple victims caught in the president’s crossfire. Writing warmly about how they “painstakingly research the law to reach their rulings,” he noted that “administration officials and allies criticize the judges in “harsh terms” “[w]hen they go against Trump.”

The NBC News writer also appeared to run interference for leftists’ weaponization of the courts against the executive branch.

While correctly acknowledging that “the increase in cases in hot-button nationwide disputes [has been] sparked in part by presidents of both parties relying more on executive orders than passing legislation via Congress,” Hurley went on to seemingly lay blame for the increased use of the Supreme Court’s emergency (or “shadow”) docket at Trump’s feet. He wrote, “The shadow docket has exploded in recent years, with the first Trump administration turbo-charging the trend by rushing to the Supreme Court when lower court rulings blocked nationwide policies” (emphasis added).

These judicial activists’ criticisms of SCOTUS (and specifically, Chief Justice John Roberts) will undoubtedly be met with glowing comments from Democrats and their media allies, all of whom have been engaged in a months-long meltdown about Trump and conservatives criticizing their party’s judicial coup.

In March, The New York Times editorial board penned a hyperbolic op-ed warning readers about what they laughingly claimed to be an “intimidation campaign against the legal system” by Trump and his allies. “The evident goal” of this made-up campaign, the clearly unstable board members wrote, “is to spread anxiety and fear among judges and keep them from fulfilling their constitutional duty to insist that the Trump administration follow the law.”

Unsurprisingly, the NYT writers attempted to characterize Trump’s criticisms as being on “a different scale” than those of former Presidents Bush (43), Obama, and Biden — the latter of whom openly threatened Supreme Court justices to their faces at his 2024 State of the Union address over the court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade. More outlandishly, they even tried to paint Trump’s rhetoric as more egregious than a radical leftist attempting to assassinate Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh over the Dobbs ruling.

“Liberal critics of the Supreme Court have harassed justices at their homes, and in one extreme case, a man unhappy with the court’s approach to abortion planned to assassinate Justice Brett Kavanaugh,” the NYT board members wrote. “Yet Mr. Trump’s efforts at judicial intimidation are of a different scale. As president, he is encouraging a campaign of menace. In case after case, he argues that the only reasonable result is a victory for his side — and that he alone can determine what is legal and what is not. His allies then try to dehumanize the judges with whom they disagree and make them fear for their safety.”

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

The Atlantic, The Hill, Foreign Policy, and Newsweek are among the many outlets to run columns fomenting the unhinged conspiracy that Trump is the greatest threat to the judiciary in American history.

Why, Yes, The Point Of Lawfare Is To Overturn Any Elections Republicans Win

The Atlantic reports the avalanche of leftist lawsuits are cut-and-paste operations designed to overturn election results Democrats don’t like.

The  Federalist 

Democrat Party leaders invited an Atlantic reporter to tell the world their current political strategy is to use U.S. courts to reject the consequences of losing a presidential election. “The Anti-Trump Strategy That’s Actually Working,” say Michael Scherer’s Sept. 2 headline and subhed, is “Lawsuits, lawsuits, and more lawsuits.”

The vast majority of the nearly 400 lawsuits filed against the second Trump administration in its first seven months, Scherer reports, did not organically arise from American needs and on-the-ground realities. No, they were pre-planned in advance, and plaintiff cutouts recruited from Democrat constituencies including activist groups and labor unions. These lawsuits are cut-and-paste operations designed to deny American voters the results of electing a Republican president, using complicit blue-state judges who care nothing for the rule of law or Constitution.

“This backbone of the Trump resistance has as much in common with political organizing and investigative reporting as it does with legal theory,” Scherer writes, unashamedly describing the lawsuits as overt political operations created years in advance of Donald Trump’s second inauguration. “… Attorneys general would represent states, advocacy groups such as Public Citizen and the ACLU would focus on their areas of expertise, and the unions would gather stories from their members and identify plaintiffs who could show harm. Atop this infrastructure, new organizations took shape, bringing in tens of millions of dollars to pay for it all.”

This article recalls the infamous Time article by Molly Ball describing how a similar — and surely overlapping — constellation of well-funded leftist groups and politicians “fortifi[ed]” the 2020 election with lawsuits and other efforts pushing unreliable voting methods.

Courts Overturning Elections

The truth is, Democrats as a party no longer respect election results, a key component of self-government. They have moved on from respecting Americans’ individual sovereignty to dominating us by any means necessary.

Courts have thus become an essential component of Democrats’ election-denial political strategy, simply because hundreds are eagerly cooperating with this scheme. Why do the hard but fair political work of getting major measures through Congress when you can simply run your policy preferences through unelected courts willing to commandeer the entire nation at the flick of a computer keyboard?

As Scherer writes, this strategy has been extremely successful:

Since Inauguration Day, executive orders have been defanged or blocked, agency closures delayed, government-employee firings reversed. Deportation flights have been delayed, law firms have freed themselves from Trump’s retaliation, and foreign students have won the ability to continue studying at U.S. universities. Courts have forced the president to restore cut services and spending to AmeriCorps, the U.S. African Development Foundation, the CDC, and other agencies. They have upended an effort by the Office of Refugee Resettlement to make it more difficult to release unaccompanied minors from government custody and forced Trump to pay for foreign-aid bills he had hoped to stiff-arm. A federal appeals court ruled Friday that many of Trump’s tariffs were illegal, setting up a likely hearing by the Supreme Court.

Using courts to effectively enact legislation is very similar to the timeworn leftist trick of using administrative agencies to do the same. Both venues can simply wait out the tenure of elected officials such as a president. Like agency rulemaking, court cases can easily take more than the four years a presidential term lasts to reach their terminus. So much for elected control of government! Court behavior like this makes elections a mere facade.

Running all major political decisions through courts and elected officials acquiescing to the un-American idea that courts must have the last word on every political question effectively neuters American self-rule. It’s the end of democracy, as usual pushed hardest by those claiming they’re democracy’s champions. 

Meet the Shadow Presidency: Unelected Judges

Some of these court cases are complicated, but most of them are not. Most are at core about prohibiting elected, civilian control of the U.S. government. For example, most of the lawsuits about immigration attempt to prohibit the president from actually following the law and deporting people ineligible for entering U.S. soil. And of course the president has obvious constitutionally granted direct power over executive agencies. Why call it the “executive branch” if it is not in fact controlled by the executive?

Many of these lawsuits are nothing more than attempts to insert Democrat-appointed judges into the office of the presidency to supercede the policies of the person voters chose to place there in the last election. It’s flatly un-American and un-democratic.

What’s the point of voting for a president if he’s just an ornamental figurehead? What’s the point of voting for members of Congress if they hardly ever pass any laws, or if when they do pass “laws” they are mostly vague delegations of lawmaking powers to unelected agencies that largely thwart the Constitution and the will of the people? What’s the point of voting for a president or Congress — or anyone at all — if the courts will just swoop in and rewrite any legislation they do pass at the behest of oligarch-funded lawfare?

“[Norm] Eisen, who has pursued more than 100 legal matters against Trump since his second inauguration, explained that he wanted to try the case in the court of law and the court of public opinion,” Scherer writes.

Look, the proper American venue for assessing public opinion on policy choices is elections. And the most recent election is over. Voters chose Donald Trump to be president. They have weighed in on what policies they want by electing him to the office that frivolous lawsuits in dictatorial courts are preventing him from using.

The appropriate time to consult voters is not in hundreds of courts they didn’t elect or via a poll of grossly biased Democrat mouthpieces who call themselves journalists, it’s at the next election season. And in between elections, elected officials have to have a chance to actually govern, or there is again no reason to have an election at all.

Astroturf Plaintiffs with Free High-Priced Lawyers

Scherer again reinforces that these lawfare efforts are a transparent election-influence operation, not an effort to defend plaintiffs whose cases arose organically: “the ultimate score will not be recorded on just the appellate docket or in the list of injunctions that are left to stand. Organizers are tracking Trump’s approval ratings, as well, anticipating the effect the legal efforts could have on the 2026 midterm elections.”

The entire effort is astroturf, from top to bottom. It’s the wealthy attempting to massage election outcomes through teams of high-priced lawyers, cultivated plaintiffs, media influence operations, and complicit judges rather than genuinely persuading Americans that a certain candidate will deliver on their priorities.

The Atlantic article openly shows Democrat strategists treating “reporters” as part of their in-house PR team. Scherer publicly discloses he was invited to join conference calls between Democrat strategists who clearly have no worries he might learn or disclose anything that damages their brand.

Given that corporate reporters might as well be on Democrat payrolls, it’s no surprise Democrats like their odds in cherry-picked court venues and the “court of public opinion” manipulated and misrepresented by a lying media class. But, again, those are thankfully not the institutions with lawful control over U.S. public policy.

The constitutional institutions for governing Americans are those populated with individuals we elect. Those are exactly the institutions this entire Democrat lawfare strategy seeks to sideline.

Neutering Elections To Save Democracy

Rather than show any shame at the public revelation of their massive, coordinated attempts to block and overturn election results, Democrats shamelessly trumpet their efforts to erase the power of elections as something Americans should celebrate. One of the reasons Democrats can be this brazen is the lack of rebuke and restraint from institutions that should defend their honor and the Constitution.

It shouldn’t just be Trump complaining about the use of courts to subvert elections, it should also be Congress and the Supreme Court taking decisive action to stop this. Courts lose legitimacy when they are correctly and increasingly seen as mere political instruments rather than trustworthy guardians of the American governance system that relies on elections to legitimize its power.

The extent to which federal courts continue to act as unelected superlegislatures is exactly the extent to which Americans will despise and increasingly disregard them. Refusing to check this lawfare decisively will only expand our current constitutional crisis rather than abating it.