The four main cultural achievements of our progressive rulers over the past two decades have been to rehabilitate abortion as something to be proud of, to make child genital mutilation fashionable again (two thousand years after the demise of the cult of Cybele), to repeal the ancient and innate rights of freedom of speech and religion, and to revive the political show trial. We have since then lived in a society whose citizens risk professional de-certification, job dismissal, fines, or incarceration for observing that there are two genders, for failing to affirm their sons’ treatable mental disorders and transient desires to follow in the footsteps of Attis, for dissenting from the canonical COVID narrative, or—a legal first, courtesy of Trump’s prosecutors—for paying off their creditors on time and in full. In their enforcement of woke ideological orthodoxy, the supposedly independent judicial branch (the DOJ, FBI, CIA, and police), has reduced itself to the palace guard of the Democrat Party. All of which, as it happens, is transcendently beyond the demented and criminal imaginations of Robespierre, Lenin, or Mao.
Have you noticed that a new neologism—sorry, but the redundancy is unavoidable—is now making the rounds on Fox and other “right-wing-extremist” media? “Lawfare” is an apt oxymoron to describe the Democrats’ revival of the sometimes brutal, always dishonest, and supposedly discredited modalities by which the banana republics of Latin America, the fascist movements of the twentieth century, and the totalitarian dictatorships of international communism did away with the inconvenience of political opposition—i.e., through the direct expedient of making it illegal. Elections are difficult to win from inside jail cells.
The most recent example, as everyone now knows, was the successful prosecution of Trump by a D.A. who campaigned on the promise to put him behind bars, adjudicated by a jury in a district that voted 85% for Trump’s opponent, in a show trial presided over by a judge who is a contributor to the Biden re-election machine, and whose star witness was a disbarred lawyer convicted for multiple crimes including tax evasion and lying to Congress. The pretext was a salacious mole hill on which the legal Everest was erected: Trump’s paying of “hush money,” which in itself is completely legal, of course; (besides, when the Republicans objected to Bill Clinton’s sexual indiscretions, they were admonished that they had nothing to do with his ability to govern, notwithstanding that they took place in the Oval Office, and were accused besides of being Victorian prudes). Magically, the prosecution converted Stormy Daniel’s venality into a charge against Trump of “falsifying business records” (a misdemeanor for which the statute of limitation had run out), which then magically ramified into 34 criminal felonies having some non-specified relation to “election interference.”
All in all, you have to hand it to Alvin Bragg, who pulled off a legal miracle on par with the multiplication of the loaves and the fishes. But then, it’s hard to keep count of the number of indictments Trump is currently under, without the aid, that is, of something like the situation-room pin-up boards one sees in British TV detective dramas for tracking the time-lines and locations of the depredations of a serial killer, on the assumption that he will inevitably strike again. And Trump will assuredly strike again; his next “crime” has already been foreseen by his political enemies. I’m guessing that it will be “discovered” in October.
As for “election interference,” how else could you describe the timing of Trump’s recent indictments? How can you improve upon the Steele dossier (compiled with the help of an ex-KGB agent—Russian collusion, anyone?) or the intelligence community’s discrediting, and the mainstream media’s suppression, of Hunter’s emails as a “Russian plant,” just before the last election? “Election denial”? Hillary is still to this day dismissing Trump’s 2016 election victory as “illegitimate.” Indeed, in a classic example of projecting one’s own crimes on the enemy, “election interference” (in the form of incessant legal harassment) has been the modus operandi of the Democrats for the past eight years. Trump is now, and has been since 2016, in a Herculean agon against a legal Hydra’s head.
The judicial double standards (the disparate treatment of Trump and Biden in the classified documents cases; the non-prosecution and immediate release of the BLM rioters, the smash-and grab Antifa kleptomaniacs, the “migrants” at the southern border, and blue-state criminals in general—as opposed, say, to the extra-judicial molestation of the January 6 “insurrectionists”) are now also impossible to keep track of, unless you have the memory of a gender studies professor who can reel off the 70-plus sexual identities of his student body.
The principal vocation of the mainstream press has now become to occult the legal double standard by which the outmoded judicial principle of equality before the law has been completely supplanted. Did you know that the Trump campaign’s charges of election fraud were “unsubstantiated”; that there was simply “no evidence” to back them up? You surely ought to know it by now, since that’s been the liturgical formula, repeated by the mainstream media (including Fox News) at least a thousand times since 2020. By the way, there is “no evidence” of Hunter Biden’s emails either (another Russian disinformation operation); “no evidence” of the Biden crime family’s influence-peddling enrichment scheme; hell, there’s no evidence that Hunter Biden even exists.
The professional media, which ludicrously applauds itself for its “hard-hitting investigative journalism” and its dedication to “speaking truth to power,” has merely re-purposed itself as the propaganda wing of the Democrat Party. It is evidently as dumbstruck as the hapless victims of the Gorgon Medusa whenever the truth is inconvenient to the acquisition or preservation of power by the Left. When the newly-elected President asserted 8 years ago that he was being “spied on” by the Clinton-Obama police apparatus, the press dismissed it as another habitual Trumpian stretcher; and even after all the banana-republic machinations of the Democrat coup attempt had been exposed and proven, they continued to stick to their story (notwithstanding that there really was “no evidence” for the four-year-long investigation into “Russia collusion”). On the other hand, there was apparently lots of evidence that Brett Kavanaugh was at a party some month, some year, and at some geographical locus somewhere within the continental United States around, oh, approximately, give or take, 30 years ago.
The agnosticism of the mainstream media in the face of blatant leftist criminality (e.g., the description of the BLM riots as “peaceful” by “reporters” even as the video of burning cities appeared over their shoulders) is by now an ancient tradition, going back to Walter Duranty’s repeated declarations in The New York Times that there was apodictically “no evidence” of dissidents’ being sent to the Gulag during Comrade Stalin’s paradisal reign. If CNN and The New York Times had been around in Roman antiquity, they would have found no evidence of the Catiline Conspiracy, the persecution of Christians under Diocletian, or Herod’s Massacre of the Innocents.
But the evidence is overwhelming that leftist ideology is inherently malignant, inasmuch it is grounded in the monstrous arrogance according to which the progressive State, which invariably means the few who have wrested control of the government and its monopoly of force, knows better than you or I how to live our lives and how our societies should be organized; and that it is justified in using the full might at its disposal to compel its subjects to accept its superior wisdom.
What I am describing here is not merely the superannuated totalitarian despotisms of the past century (the Soviet Union, Maoist China, the Khmer Rouge, etc.). I am describing a perennially corrupt moral disposition—the antiquated terms “vainglory” and “lust for power” still seem apposite—, an attitude of such pathological presumption that it deems it not only excusable, but ethically imperative, to use all means necessary, legal or illegal, in order to effect and enforce its enlightened revolutionary vision.
Have we not seen enough of the poisoned fruits of that attitude at work since the turn of the millennium? The suborning by the Obama administration and its loyalists of putatively independent agencies of government to overthrow a duly elected President because his views, as judged by the inquisitors of progressive orthodoxy, are retrograde and “deplorable.” The systematic suppression of heterodox thought, by means of the Maoist shaming, dismissal, and ostracism of nonconformist thinkers. The riots in Democrat-controlled cities, condoned by Democrat legislators and indeed incited by Democrat rhetoric, in which defenceless residents and business owners (many of them black and Latino) were fire-bombed, maimed, and killed, and had their livelihoods destroyed—atrocities that were exhorted and celebrated as heroic acts in the cause of “racial justice.” The threats of violence or financial ruin that successfully intimidated otherwise sane and rational citizens and corporations to excuse and support the above. The morally and psychologically toxic cult of victimhood, which has long been the fundamental plank in the Democrats’ platform, though it foments only hatred, self-exculpation, dependency, and the resultant panoply of socio-pathologies that have inevitably wrecked the lives of their client victim-groups. The murder of babies under the auspices of feminist abstractions. The presumption of guilt of men falsely charged with rape or sexual harassment by Believe-the-Women feminist witch-hunters. The modern-day persecution of Christians by the LGBTQ Ministries of Truth.
One could go on, of course. In any case, honesty demands that we no longer shrink from the obvious conclusion that an ideology that has inflicted such wholesale carnage upon the ancient principles of law and justice—all for the sake of power and under the vainglorious illusion that it knows best—is evil, full stop, and those who impose it on the rest of us can hardly, at this stage in that ideology’s ruinous career, continue to pretend that its slogans of “tolerance,” “fairness,” “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion” are anything other than the rankest of Orwellisms.