Why the Kavanaugh Smears Validate Trumpian Politics

Why the Kavanaugh Smears Validate Trumpian Politics
Rich Lowry, National Review

The Trump phenomenon is impossible to gainsay.

The attempted political assassination of Brett Kavanaugh is bad for the country, but good for a Trumpian attitude toward American politics.

The last-minute ambush validates key assumptions of Donald Trump’s supporters that fueled his rise and buttress him in office, no matter how rocky the ride has been or will become. At least three premises have been underlined by the tawdry events of the past couple of weeks.

First, that good character is no defense. If you are John McCain, who genuinely tried to do the right thing and carefully cultivated a relationship with the media over decades, they will still call you a racist when you run against Barack Obama.

If you are Mitt Romney, an exceptionally earnest and decent man, they will make you into a heartless and despicable vulture capitalist, also for the offense of campaigning against Obama.

If you are Brett Kavanaugh, a respected member of the legal establishment who doesn’t have a flyspeck on his record across decades of public service in Washington, they will come up with dubious accusations of wrongdoing from decades ago when you were a teenager.

Second, that the media is an unremitting political and cultural adversary. In the Kavanaugh controversy, the press has been wholly on the other side, presuming his guilt and valorizing his accusers and their supporters, including Hawaii senator Mazie Hirono, whose most famous contribution to the debate was telling men to “shut up.” The advocacy isn’t limited to cable networks or the Twitter feeds of journalists. It reaches all the way up the food chain.

The New Yorker — which imagines itself an upholder of the finest standards of American journalism; which sports a refined monocle-wearing dandy as its mascot; which was once edited by that famous paragon of editorial care, William Shawn — happily published a new accusation against Kavanaugh even though the accuser herself had doubts about it (she only became convinced of it after days of consideration and talks with her lawyer).

The New York Times passed on the story when it couldn’t find any firsthand corroboration of it. The New Yorker didn’t allow that to become an obstacle.

Third, that politics isn’t just rough-and-tumble; it’s red in tooth and claw. Process and norms are nice, but they go out the window as soon as something important is at stake, like a potential fifth vote on the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Senate Democrats may delicately talk about the importance of norms and civility on Sunday shows, but watch how they act. They sat on an accusation throughout an extensive process of vetting and questioning a nominee, then declared it dispositive evidence against his confirmation when it leaked at the eleventh hour. They delayed a hearing with Christine Blasey Ford long enough to allow time for the second accuser to be persuaded to come forward.

All of this plays into Trump’s support. Surely, a reason that the president appealed to many Republicans in the first place, despite his extravagant personal failings, was that they had decided that virtuous men would get smeared and chewed up by the opposition’s meat grinder, so why be a stickler for standards?

If Trump’s attacks against the media are over-the-top and sometimes disgraceful, at least he understands the score.

He may not be a constitutionalist, but he will be faithful to his own side, and fiercely battle it out with his political opponents.

The logic of this dynamic is risky. It can be self-defeating, and lead down the road of supporting, say, a Roy Moore, a kooky candidate doomed even in red Alabama. It can be corrupting, if character and standards are no longer considered important. But the dark view of our politics that has driven the Trump phenomenon for three years now is impossible to gainsay. Who can watch the frenzied assault on Brett Kavanaugh and say that it’s wrong?

The air has seeped out of the Russia/collusion balloon

Samespanning, Africaner for collusion

The air has seeped out of the Russia/collusion balloon
by Michael Barone, Washington Examiner

“ I did not, and of course I looked for it, looked for it hard.”

That was Bob Woodward, promoting his book on the Trump White House, Fear, replying to talk radio host and columnist Hugh Hewitt’s question, “Did you, Bob Woodward, hear anything in your research, in your interviews, that sounded like espionage or collusion?”

“You’ve seen no collusion?” Hewitt followed up. “I have not,” Woodward replied. Can we take this as definitive evidence that there’s nothing to the theory, widely bruited these past two years by top intelligence and FBI officials, and by numerous Democrats, that Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russians?

Not necessarily. As Woodward added, there’s always the possibility special prosecutor Robert Mueller or others know something we don’t.

But we also know none of Mueller’s indictments and guilty pleas point toward confirmation. And the prosecutors’ questions to Trump, quoted to Woodward, go to his motives for clearly constitutional acts, like firing FBI Director James Comey.

So, as I wrote in my Wall Street Journal review of Fear, “Those anticipating Mr. Trump’s downfall for collusion with Russia will be disappointed by Fear.” Trump repeats his statement, made after Comey informed the president-elect of the lurid allegations in the dossier prepared by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, that the dossier was “a garbage document” which “never should have been part of an intelligence briefing.”

But that’s just about all that partisans like House Intelligence Committee ranking Democrat Adam Schiff refer to when they say that there’s plenty of evidence of Russian collusion already on the table?

Intelligence leaders like former CIA Director John Brennan and law enforcement officials at Comey’s FBI may have been prompted to investigate Trump’s Russian ties by the candidates bizarre statements praising Vladimir Putin, calling for accommodation with Russia and calling on Russia to release emails they may have obtained from Hillary Clinton's illegal server.

But now, two years later, it’s apparent that Trump’s foreign policy is less friendly to Russia than his predecessor’s.

And it’s also clear, thanks to my Washington Examiner colleague Byron York’s reporting, that that Russia platform plank that was supposedly watered down at the Republican National Convention was actually toughened up. 
Mainstream media, as is so often the case, simply got that story wrong, in an apparent attempt to make Trump look bad. Recent examples: the Washington Post’s story on passport denials that “withheld, distorted key facts” according to the Huffington Post, and the New York Times hit piece on Nikki Haley that blamed her for overspending on curtains ordered in October 2016. Animus gone wild is the only explanation for such blunders in attacking a target-rich environment like the Trump administration.

Before 2016, I presumed that no serious person disagreed with the proposition that, as a general matter, it is undesirable to have law enforcement and intelligence agencies investigating political campaigns, particularly those of the party in opposition to the president. The potential for stifling free political debate and partisan competition is obvious.

I was open to the argument that in some circumstances, in some small number of cases, there might be exceptions to this general rule, going even beyond enforcement of campaign finance laws and regulations: the Manchurian Candidate exception. This appears to be what our intelligence and law enforcement leaders thought they were invoking when they launched their probes into and surveillance of the Trump campaign.

Now it appears that, beyond a generalized suspicion, they’ve been acting on nothing more than the Steele dossier. A document unverified, as Steele himself has admitted in a British court — a document made up entirely of hearsay from unknown and unavailable witnesses, a document bought and paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign.

So, it’s unsurprising to read that the intelligence and law enforcement agencies are resisting or slow-walking a promised presidential order to declassify their documents and deliberations. And that congressional Democratic leaders are insisting that the agencies submit such declassified material to them before making it public. They don’t want people to know that intelligence and law enforcement agencies have been violating the general rule that they should not interfere in electoral politics.

“The entire inquiry,” Bob Woodward quotes Trump’s ex-lawyer John Dowd, “appears to be the product of a conspiracy by the DNC [Democratic National Committee], Fusion GPS — which did the Steele dossier — and senior FBI intelligence officials to undermine the Trump presidency.”

Does Woodward disagree?

Reading the FISA Redactions

Reading the FISA Redactions
Andrew McCarthy, National Review


Some of them could be consequential, but most surely are not.

Maybe this week . . . maybe next week. We’re led to believe President Trump is on the verge of revealing more of the currently redacted information from the Carter Page FISA-warrant papers.

This would be a welcome development. When it comes to the supposed factual basis on which the FBI and Justice Department sought a national-security eavesdropping warrant — alleging that Page was an agent of the Kremlin and that the Trump campaign was complicit in Russia’s hacking conspiracy — the more transparency the better.

Page has never been charged with any crime, much less with espionage. That is a salient fact because to get a FISA warrant on an American citizen, the FBI is required to show that the citizen’s activities on behalf of a foreign power violate federal criminal law. The FBI and Justice Department went to the FISA court four times over nine months, from October 2016 through June 2017, claiming to have grounds that Page was involved in heinous clandestine activity. Why isn’t he in handcuffs?

I believe it is because they never had a case. All they appear to have had were the 2013 attempt by Russian spies to recruit Page as an asset, and the Steele dossier. If I’m right about that, this would be problematic for the bureau, for two reasons.

First, Page seems to have cooperated in the FBI and DOJ’s prosecution of the Russian operatives, and — both back then and in the ensuing years — to have made himself available pretty much whenever the FBI wanted to interview him. Page has said lots of stupid things about the supposed virtues of appeasing Putin’s anti-American regime, but he is also an Annapolis grad and former U.S. naval intelligence officer. It is not a crime to be targeted for recruitment (by a spy who concluded Page was “an idiot”), to have invested in the Russian energy sector, or to have loopy political views.

Second, the Steele dossier is a compendium of foreign-supplied, rank-hearsay opposition research sponsored by the Clinton campaign. It was never corroborated by the FBI (even though there are guidelines forbidding the bureau from presenting unverified information to the FISA court), and several of its key allegations have been convincingly refuted. It is, furthermore, the subject of libel lawsuits, in defense against which the author — former British spy (and rabid anti-Trump partisan) Christopher Steele — has shrunk from claiming his allegations are true, describing them merely as “raw intelligence” that was “unverified” and needed to be investigated. (Now he tells us.)

The Smoking Gun Must Be in the Redactions . . . Right?
Nevertheless, defenders of the FBI’s investigation push back, claiming there is more to the investigation of Page, maybe much more, than we know about. This doesn’t just fly in the face of the lack of any “collusion” prosecutions. Congressional investigators tell us that the Steele-dossier allegations were central to the FISA-warrant applications. The FBI’s former deputy director, Andrew McCabe, acknowledged that without the dossier the FBI could not have claimed probable cause for the surveillance.

So, what are the defenders relying on? The redactions. Far from complaining about the lack of transparency, they imagine that under those thousands of blacked-out lines lies the motherlode. The FISA documents amount to 412 pages, and those black-outs make up the lion’s share. Therefore, the defenders reason, the FBI had more than just a failed recruitment episode and the Steele dossier against Page — probably a whole lot more.

I doubt it.

I will have you know, dear readers, that I have spent long hours scrutinizing the FISA documents so you don’t have to. The vast majority of what is blacked out has nothing to do with the probable-cause showing against Carter Page. In fact, while the probable-cause showing is the most significant part of a FISA application package, it is a comparatively small part.

I use the term “package” because a government submission to the FISA court is not just an application signed by the investigative agent. It also includes a lengthy certification by a top-ranking national-security official (here, the FBI’s director or deputy director), a short approval declaration by the Justice Department (here, by the deputy attorney general), and the proposed warrant itself to be signed by the judge. In congressional testimony, former FBI director James Comey claimed that FISA submissions are often thicker than his wrists. Besides being a bit of an exaggeration, this description failed to explain that most of the extensive documentation is unrelated to probable cause, thus conveying the misimpression that FISA applications are always supported by mountainous evidence.

To compare, the first Page submission was just 83 pages — Jim Comey is a big guy; that wouldn’t make it too far up his wrist. Let’s analyze those 83 pages in order to consider how much the redacted information may bear on probable cause.

Extensive Redactions Unrelated to Page

Instantly, we find we drop from 83 down to 54 pages. Turns out the package’s last 29 pages are not part of the warrant application at all. They consist of the afore-described FBI certification, the DOJ approval, and a proposed warrant for the judge to sign — nothing to do with establishing probable cause that Page is a Russian asset conspiring against the election.

These 29 pages are very heavily redacted. You’re probably wondering why, because you’ve been led to believe that redactions must involve damning evidence against Page. Well, no.

See, FISA documents are not classified solely because of alleged clandestine doings by foreign operatives. They also set forth the secret authorities the government is granted in order to carry out the surveillance, the manner in which the surveillance is to be conducted, the communications facilities the FBI is permitted to monitor, the methods by which the bureau is permitted to gain access to those facilities, the minimization instructions that must be followed to avoid unauthorized monitoring, and so on.

This information must remain concealed. The FBI and the Justice Department wanted these redactions not because they bear on Carter Page’s activities, but because they relate to intelligence methods. Exposing this information would compromise virtually all of the government’s FISA investigations. Rest assured that, even if President Trump orders the disclosure of some additional details about Page, all this other information about the authorities, procedures, and techniques germane to national-security surveillance will remain blacked out.

FISA-Warrant Application Traces FISA Statute

So let’s finally turn to the 54-page application. Yes, a great deal of it is blacked out. But that hardly means we are clueless about what most of the redacted information conveys.

Here is the code that you need to crack. The application has numbered paragraphs (with a lot of subparagraphs within them). For the most part, these numbered paragraphs correspond to the sections of the FISA statute that governs FISA applications, Section 1804 of Title 50, U.S. Code. Conforming the paragraphs to the statutory requirements makes it easier for the court to see that all necessary information is included. The requirements are set forth in nine subsections of §1804 — numbered (a)(1) through (a)(9). If you compare the Page warrant application with the statute, you see that paragraph 1 conforms to (a)(1), paragraph 2 to (a)(2), and so on.

Well guess what? Of these nine statutory requirements, only one involves the all-important probable-cause showing: (a)(3). In it, Congress directs the FBI to provide the court with “a statement of the facts and circumstances relied upon” to justify the bureau’s beliefs that (a) the proposed target is an agent of a foreign power and (b) the facilities or places the bureau wants to monitor are being used for the target’s clandestine activities.

None of the other eight sections bear on probable cause. They direct the government to supply: the identity of the applying officer and the target, a statement of the “minimization procedures” the FBI will use to avoid unauthorized monitoring, a description of the nature of the information sought (i.e., foreign intelligence), certifications by high-ranking national-security officials that the government is seeking foreign intelligence, an explanation of how the eavesdropping will be carried out, a recitation of any prior applications related to the target, and a statement of the proposed duration of the surveillance.

That is a lot of non-probable-cause information, and it is heavily redacted. In the first Page application it takes up about 21 of the 54 pages.

That means only 33 of the submission’s 83 pages deal with probable cause, beginning on page 2 and continuing into page 36. Bear in mind, by the way, that these pages often contain fewer than 20 double-spaced lines, with many lines consisting of a sub-heading or just a word or two of text. Contrary to what’s been suggested, we are not talking War and Peace here.

The Probable-Cause Showing Seems Thin

Now, what about those 33 pages? Well, a goodly chunk of them at the beginning does not address Carter Page at all. It’s all about Russia: The FBI explains that the regime in Moscow is a foreign power, that it has been messing with our elections since the Cold War, and that it meddled in them in 2016 by cyberespionage (with the help of WikiLeaks). We are eight pages into the factual recitation before we get to Page.

Plainly, the Page section rests on the two grounds that we have been told about: the Russian attempt to recruit him as a source in 2013, and the Steele dossier. The latter makes up the bulk of the probable-cause showing, pages 15–27. This includes the allegation that the FBI patently hung its hat on: Steele’s claim that, while in Russia in July 2016, Page met with two Putin-regime heavyweights, Igor Sechin and Igor Diveykin, discussing a corrupt quid pro quo arrangement involving sanctions relief for Moscow, as well as the possible transmission to the Trump campaign of “kompromat” (compromising information) about Mrs. Clinton that the Kremlin was purportedly holding. (Page denies knowing, let alone meeting, these men; there is no publicly known corroboration of Steele’s claim.)

Even parts of what the application labels the Page section have nothing to do with Page. There is, for example, the long, infamous footnote on Steele, a winding circumlocution in which the FBI and Justice Department strain to avoid telling the court that his work is sponsored by Clinton’s campaign and that he is passionately anti-Trump. There is also a discursion, based on media reports, about how Trump may be soft on Putin, how he may meekly accept the annexation of Crimea, and how the Trump campaign’s supposed intervention in Republican-platform-writing at the GOP convention weakened a plank on arming Ukraine (a claim that has been debunked by the Washington Examiner’s Byron York). Note that, even though the FBI had nine months to do its own independent investigation about these matters, the bureau and Justice Department instead regurgitated the same media reports in every FISA renewal application — and the FISA court apparently never questioned this peculiar “proof.”

The warrant application also contains a lengthy (five-page) section — repeated in all the renewal applications — that is largely based on Michael Isikoff’s September 23, 2016, Yahoo News article about Page’s purported meetings with Sechin and Diveykin. The upshot is that Page vehemently denied that these meetings took place, and the Trump campaign distanced itself from Page. It is difficult to understand how this section advances the case that Page is an agent of Russia; perhaps the government’s theory is that Page and the campaign were making false exculpatory statements that show consciousness of guilt. From what we can read, it is certainly not obvious that they were lying . . . but, if we’re going to talk about false statements, we must note that the FBI told the court that Steele was not the source for Isikoff’s news article, which turns out not to be true.

This section involving Page’s insistence that he is not a Russian agent is followed by six pages that are completely redacted. Is there smoking-gun probable-cause information hidden under these blackouts? I’d be surprised if there were, but we simply don’t know. If it can be done without compromising vital intelligence sources, it would be useful if the president ordered these pages to be disclosed.

Why Are Page’s Purported Crimes Redacted?

After that, though, this probable-cause section does not even purport to add to the probable-cause showing.

The final seven of the factual recitation’s 33 pages consist of a “conclusion” that begins by merely asserting what the FBI argues the foregoing pages have established. It then moves on to what, apparently, is a description of the criminal statutes Page has allegedly violated. We have to say “apparently” because these pages are all blacked out.

Why redact Page’s alleged crimes? Is it because Page is still under the investigation and the FBI doesn’t want to tip him off about its suspicions? Is it because the “crime” allegations come from the Steele dossier and the FBI would rather not acknowledge that? Is it because the FBI, confident that no one would ever get to see this FISA-warrant application, made extravagant claims? Again, we don’t know. But what would be the harm to national security in disclosing to the public what crimes the FBI and Justice Department alleged that Page had committed? We already know they accused him of being a Russian agent complicit in an espionage conspiracy against the election. How much worse can it be?

Anyway, that’s it as far as probable cause goes in the first application. As one would expect, the three warrant-renewal applications grow progressively (but not significantly) longer than the initial 83-page package (98, 110, and 121 pages, respectively). They incorporate and attempt to build on the first surveillance. There are more redactions in the probable-cause section, at least some of which appear to relate to Page’s then-ongoing activities. Again, since Page has never been charged with a “collusion” offense (no one has), and since he has been very public in both denying sinister dealings with Russia and demanding an accounting from the FBI, it would be surprising if the redactions were earth-shattering.

The point, though, is that while some of the redactions could be consequential, most surely are not. Their importance has been inflated. The combined 412 pages of FISA packages are duplicative, with what largely appear to be the same redactions threading through all four application packages. For the most part, if we compare the redactions to the requirements of the FISA statute, we can figure out the types of information the government has concealed and why it has done so.

The vast majority of what’s been redacted has nothing to do with establishing probable cause that Carter Page was a Russian asset whose clandestine activities involved criminal violations. The suggestion that, hidden in the redactions, there is a trove of evidence, derived from neither the Steele dossier nor the Russian attempt to recruit Page about five years ago, seems highly unlikely.

Indoctrination Saturation

Indoctrination Saturation
Victor Davis Hanson, National Review


The all-seeing social-justice eye penetrates every aspect of our lives: sports, movies, public monuments, social media, funerals . . .

A definition of totalitarianism might be the saturation of every facet of daily life by political agendas and social-justice messaging.

At the present rate, America will soon resemble the dystopias of novels such as 1984 and Brave New World in which all aspects of life are warped by an all-encompassing ideology of coerced sameness. Or rather, the prevailing orthodoxy in America is the omnipresent attempt of an elite — exempt from the consequences of its own ideology thanks to its supposed superior virtue and intelligence — to mandate an equality of result.

We expect their 24/7 political messaging on cable-channel news networks, talk radio, or print and online media. And we concede that long ago an NPR, CNN, MSNBC, or New York Times ceased being journalistic entities as much as obsequious megaphones of the progressive itinerary.

But increasingly we cannot escape anywhere the lidless gaze of our progressive lords, all-seeing, all-knowing from high up in their dark towers.

The Peter Strzok–Lisa Page texts, along with the careers of former FBI director James Comey and his deputy Andrew McCabe, reveal a politicized and in some sense rotten FBI hierarchy, beholden far more to its own exalted sense of a progressive self than merely to investigating crimes against the people.

Lois Lerner was a clumsy reflection of how the IRS long ago became weaponized in service to auditing deplorables. Former CIA director John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper used their supposedly nonpartisan positions to further political agendas. That each in his own way is clownish does not mitigate their rank efforts to graft intelligence agencies onto political causes.

The same deterioration is true of many in the Department of Justice, who, along with the FBI, misled FISA-court justices, as if that were the only, or perhaps the easiest, way to obtain politically driven surveillance on U.S. citizens. Americans now are woke to the reality that straying too much into the forbidden zone guarantees that their communications can be monitored on the pretense that they’re colluding with some nefarious power. Yet if foreigners are the menace, why did our proverbial best and brightest traffic with a paid foreign spy at election time to sabotage a political campaign, then trump even the improper use of electronic surveillance with the insertion of paid informants?

Google, Facebook, and Twitter are facing accusations of censoring social-media accounts and massaging Internet searches according to their progressive political agendas. The masters of the universe have given us the stereotype of 20- and 30-something social-warrior geeks, fiddling with their algorithms to virtue-signal their left-wing fides to a global audience.

YouTube restricted more than 50 Prager University videos — often because either a human or computerized auditor did not approve of the videos’ presentation of America’s historical role as beneficent. Tie-dyed T-shirts, flip-flops, and faded jeans do not mask the reality that some $3 trillion in global capitalization is pledged to ensure that the nations’ computers, pads, and smartphones will not be polluted by traditionalist thinking.


First-time congressional candidate Elizabeth Heng, a conservative from central California, found her video ad blocked on Facebook and Twitter. Apparently, her description of the Cambodian holocaust that her parents fled was too graphic or politically incorrect, or both. But then again, in California, everything is politicized, from plastic straws to single-user restrooms, in an Orwellian effort to distract us from the fact that we do not have enough water, usable roads, or workable public schools to remain a civilized state.

Language is especially enlisted to disguise bothersome reality. During the Obama administration, no one would ever have known from “overseas contingency operations,” “man-caused disasters,” “workplace disasters,” and “holy struggles” that radical Islamic terrorists were seeking to kill Westerners from San Bernardino to Paris. As in the case of illegal aliens, undocumented aliens, illegal immigrants, undocumented immigrants, immigrants migrants, the progressive rationale is that anyone killed or harmed by a terrorist or migrant is usually a nobody and so an acceptable casualty in the greater war against incorrect speech and attitude.

When our public colleges now find that an increasing number of newly admitted students cannot do college-level work when they begin their courses, administrators drop the old idea of catch-up “remedial” classes or compensatory “remediation” courses. The new language conveys that students are now suddenly qualified, or at least it virtue-signals the university’s effort to be suitably sensitive to the fact that in California nearly half of those entering the CSU system cannot read or compute at what previously had been thought to be a college level.

Our very names and identities have become politicized. Desperate to highlight their progressive purity (or to enhance careers), politicians sometimes reinvent their nomenclatures and ancestries to suggest solidarity with those deemed racially, ethnically, or economically oppressed. Who now is who or what?

Senator Elizabeth Warren claimed falsely — albeit not quite in the clumsy fashion of left-wing political activist and professor Ward Churchill — that she was part Native American. Socialist New York state senate candidate Julia Salazar recently and falsely rebranded herself as a virtual foreign-born immigrant. Was their intent to pose as poorer, more victimized Americans without actually having to become poorer or more victimized?

White-male aspirant for a Texas Senate seat Patrick Francis O’Rourke has used the Latino nickname “Beto,” probably on the assumption that “Beto O’Rourke” might ensure a little more street cred among Texas’s Latino voters. I suppose “Pat O’Lopez” would be too shameless? But then again, California Senate candidate Kevin de León has added both a “de” and an accent to remind voters that he is not just an Anglicized Kevin Leon who could be mistaken for a third-generation Portuguese American.

Americans have long accepted that Hollywood movies no longer seek just to entertain or inform, but to indoctrinate audiences by pushing progressive agendas. That commandment also demands that America be portrayed negatively — or better yet simply written out of history. Take the new film First Man, about the first moon landing. Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong became famous when he emerged from The Eagle, the two-man lunar module, and planted an American flag on the moon’s surface. Yet that iconic act disappears from the movie version. (At least Ryan Gosling, who plays Armstrong, does not walk out of the space capsule to string up a U.N. banner.)

Gosling claimed that the moon landing should not be seen as an American effort. Instead, he advised, it should be “widely regarded as a human achievement” — as if any nation’s efforts or the work of the United Nations in 1969 could have pulled off such an astounding and dangerous enterprise. I suppose we are to believe that Gosling’s Canada might just as well have built a Saturn V rocket.

Comic-book sales are static, purportedly because tired readers now find their make-believe heroes sermonizing, preachy, and predictable rather than one-dimensionally heroic. Social justice has entered the world of fantasy — and extends to science-fiction novels as well. Will 1984 have to be either banned or subjected to race/class/gender Bowdlerization?

Sports offers no relief. It is now no more a refuge from political indoctrination than is Hollywood. Yet it is about as difficult to find a jock who can pontificate about politics as it is to encounter a Ph.D. or politico who can pass or pitch.

The National Football League, the National Basketball Association, and sports channels are now politicalized in a variety of ways, from not standing up or saluting the flag during the National Anthem to pushing social-justice issues as part of televised sports analysis. What a strange sight to see tough sportsmen of our Roman-style gladiatorial arenas become delicate souls who wilt on seeing a dreaded hand across the heart during the playing of the National Anthem.

Even when we die, we do not escape politicization. At a recent eight-hour, televised funeral service for singer Aretha Franklin, politicos such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton went well beyond their homages into political harangues. Pericles or Lincoln they were not.

Activist professor Michael Eric Dyson laced his supposed eulogy with an adolescent rant against Donald Trump: “Your lugubrious leach, your dopey doppelgänger of deceit and deviance” — and all that alliterative gibberish that apparently follows from a Ph.D.

Politics likewise absorbed Senator John McCain’s funeral the next day. Sarah Palin —his persistently loyal 2008 running mate, who has never uttered an unkind word about him — was not invited. Apparently, her presence would now be seen as too politically incorrect; it might have polluted the observance with a deplorable odor or reminded us that she was once considered useful in appealing to the clinger/irredeemable/“crazies” vote.

Meghan McCain, Barack Obama, and former president George W. Bush all did their best to praise the deceased, but in passing could not resist deprecating the current president. We have forgotten that the ancillary to de mortuis nihil nisi bonum dicendum est (about the dead nothing but good should be said) is “in speaking of the dead, nothing but good should be said about the still living.” It is certainly not an admirable trait to deplore incivility by gratuitously attacking a sitting president at a funeral — especially when neither the presidential encomiasts, nor the object of their encomia, had always been particularly civil and polite to each another in the past.

Even the long-ago dead are fair game. Dark Age iconoclasm has returned to us with a fury.

Any statue at any time might be toppled — if it is deemed to represent an idea or belief from the distant past now considered racist, sexist, or somehow illiberal. Representations of Columbus, the Founding Fathers, and Confederate soldiers have all been defaced, knocked down, or removed. The images of mass murderers on the left are exempt, on the theory that good ends always allow a few excessive means. So are the images and names of robber barons and old bad white guys, whose venerable eponymous institutions offer valuable brands that can be monetized. At least so far, we are not rebranding Stanford and Yale with indigenous names.

This new politicized borg ferrets out every aspect of our lives. Nothing is safe, nothing sacred. Dead or alive, the relentless social-justice messaging continues. Like some sort of time machine, we go back in time to alter history as if a few corrections and adjustments will change and thus improve the entire present.

Progressive politics seeks to connect and energize us as millions of shared malignant cells inside a metastasizing tumor — or to destroy us in the attempt.