Woke Fascism

Woke Fascism
Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel, Daily Caller

How do you know if you’re living in a free society? Here’s a quick test: Are you allowed to say obviously true things in public? Or are you forced to lie? As George Orwell put it in “1984”: “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” But what if that freedom isn’t granted? What if you’re required to repeat things that you know aren’t true? What if everyone who hears you knows perfectly well that you’re lying, but they can’t say so out loud? What if everyone is required to nod along in mock sincerity as if it’s all completely real? That’s what a pep rally in a police state looks like: “Thanks to the dear leader for a bountiful potato harvest!” they chant, even as they starve to death. You get the same feeling as you watch the current race for the Democratic nomination.

Pete Buttigieg is in that race. A few years ago, back when he was best known for being mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Buttigieg made the point that “all lives matter.” He said it because it’s true. All lives do matter, no matter what they look like. Every life has value — period. That’s the message of Christianity and the civilization that it spawned in the West. But in the modern Democratic Party, it can no longer be acknowledged. So Buttigieg recently apologized for his wrongthink.

Beto O’Rourke was asked recently about a harmless joke he once told about his wife staying home to raise their kids. O’Rourke fell apart completely. He groveled and whimpered and abased himself. He even expanded the self-criticism and apologized for how he was born.

This is what Maoist tribunals looked liked during the Cultural Revolution. By summer, you can imagine O’Rourke wearing a paper dunce cap with “white privilege” scrawled across it as a warning to other would-be counterrevolutionaries. Pretty much everyone running for president as a Democrat this year has had to face inquisitions like this. They write their confessions of guilt, bowing before their accusers on Twitter and begging for forgiveness. Kirsten Gillibrand read her confession on live television. Years ago, when she was running for a different office, Gillibrand once expressed sympathy for the idea of a closed border. Looking back, she is deeply ashamed. She can hardly believe she ever thought something so immoral. 

There’s nothing liberal about this, obviously. It’s purely authoritarian: “woke” fascism. Power over ideas. In place of thinking, obedience. In return for dissent, punishment. Lying as official policy — and not just conventional lying, the ordinary truth-shading of everyday life, but terrifying full-inversion lies. The exact opposite of the truth. The kind of lies that regimes that seek total control must tell in order to maintain their power.

The latest of these lies is that low-grade mafia figure Al Sharpton is, in fact, a legitimate civil rights leader. The Democratic candidates claim to believe that now. They recently trooped over to his tax-exempt organization to pretend he’s the new MLK.

Where were these people in the mid-1990s when Al Sharpton was denouncing a Jewish landlord in Harlem as a “white interloper” shortly before his store was firebombed and eight people were killed? O’Rourke was still a manny then. Gillibrand was a lawyer working for the cigarette companies. None of them were woke yet. They are now. They went to Sharpton to clamor for an idea that not  even 20% of the population supports: race-based reparations. Sharpton asked each candidate if they would pledge to support Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee’s bill to form a commission to study how to do reparations. Every single candidate at the event expressed complete support.

The question isn’t whether we get reparations. The question is whether you want to live in a country where such people have political power, where humor and dissent are criminal acts, where lying is the currency of public life, where authorities whose names you don’t know can destroy you for thinking the wrong things. You’ve seen that world before. It’s called Twitter. Imagine if it had control of the U.S. military.

Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel co-founded The Daily Caller, one of America’s fastest growing online news outlets, which regularly breaks news and distributes it to over 15 million monthly readers. Carlson and Patel also co-founded The Daily Caller News Foundation, a nonprofit news company that trains journalists, produces fact-checks and conducts longer-term investigative reporting. The Daily Caller News Foundation licenses its content free of charge to over 300 news outlets, reaching potentially hundreds of millions of people per month.

COPYRIGHT 2019 CREATORS.COM

Understanding Iran

Understanding Iran

Mike Walker, Col USMC, retired

All,

Fundamentals in understanding the Islamic Republic of Iran:

(1) Iran is a revolutionary state.

 It will remain so until the generation that participated in the revolution pass away, in other words, not for decades...

...or if they fall from power, a highly unlikely outcome since the Green Movement was crushed in 2009.

(2) Iran is a theocracy with everything that implies.

Its theocratic underpinning imbues the Iranian regime with the immensely strong (and dangerous) conviction that they are doing Allah's will.

That is why the mullahs call the United States "the Great Satan."

(3) Taken together that means several important things:

The Islamic Republic wants no part of the current world order.

Its goal remains revolutionary: To destroy the current world order...

... and that means from its first day of existence the United States has been its intractable enemy -- like it or not.

The mullahs do everything in their power to bring the war to America and act against America's interests globally.

The Islamic Republic will never cease the aggressive and often violent exportation of its revolution.

It will not stop its militant and violent acts in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Yemen and everywhere in the world where it can gain a foothold.

(4) Iran sees itself at war and is desperate not to lose. Most of the world does not recognize this reality.

That means US military strikes on the Iranian homeland will be hard to contain. Iran likely will see it as the opening of a broader war.

(5) Iran traditionally sees itself as an immensely powerful nation -- far beyond any reasoned measure.

Iranian history is replete with examples of overreach based on false assumptions of strength.

The penchant of its leaders for disastrous miscalculation is stunning.

It will be the mullahs last mistake. If the United States is sufficiently provoked then it will crush the rulers of the Islamic Republic.

Tragically, the cost for everyone -- especially Iran -- will far exceed the expectations.

Dun, dun, dun, dun...

When Normality Became Abnormal

When Normality Became Abnormal
By Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness 

Donald Trump is many things. But one thing he is not is a defender of the 2009-2016 status quo and accepted progressive convention. Since 2017, everything has been in flux. Lots of past conventional assumptions of the Obama-Clinton-Romney-Bush generation were as unquestioned as they were suspect. No longer.

Everyone knew the Iran deal was a way for the mullahs to buy time and hoard their oil profits, to purchase or steal nuclear technology, to feign moderation, and to trade some hostages for millions in terrorist-seeding cash, and then in a few years spring an announcement that it had the bomb.

No one wished to say that. Trump did. He canceled the flawed deal without a second thought.

Iran is furious, but in a far weaker—and eroding—strategic position with no serious means of escaping devastating sanctions, general impoverishment, and social unrest. So a desperate Tehran knows that it must make some show of defiance. Yet it accepts that if it were to launch a missile at a U.S. ship, hijack an American boat, or shoot down an American plane, the ensuing tit-for-tat retaliation might target the point of Iranian origin (the port that launched the ship, the airbase from which the plane took off, the silo from which the missile was launched) rather than the mere point of contact—and signal a serial stand-off 10-1 disproportionate response to every Iranian attack without ever causing a Persian Gulf war.

Everyone realized the Paris Climate Accord was a way for elites to virtual signal their green bona fides while making no adjustments in their global managerial lifestyles—at best. At worst, it was a shake-down both to transfer assets from the industrialized West to the “developing world” and to dull Western competitiveness with ascending rivals like India and China. Not now. Trump withdrew from the agreement, met or exceeded the carbon emissions reductions of the deal anyway, and has never looked back at the flawed convention. The remaining signatories have little response to the U.S. departure, and none at all to de facto American compliance to their own targeted goals.

Rich NATO allies either could not or would not pay their promised defense commitments to the alliance. To embarrass them into doing so was seen as heretical. No more.

Trump jawboned and ranted about the asymmetries. And more nations are increasing rather than decreasing their defense budgets. The private consensus is that the NATO allies knew all along that they were exactly what Barack Obama once called “free riders” and justified that subsidization by ankle-biting the foreign policies of the United States—as if an uncouth America was lucky to underwrite such principled members. Again, no more fantasies.

China was fated to rule the world. Period. Whining about its systematic commercial cheating was supposedly merely delaying the inevitable or would have bad repercussions later on. Progressives knew the Communists put tens of thousands of people in camps, rounded up Muslims, and destroyed civil liberties, and yet in “woke” fashion tip-toed around criticizing the Other. Trump then destroyed the mirage of China as a Westernizing aspirant to the family of nations. In a protracted tariff struggle, there are lots of countries in Asia that could produce cheap goods as readily as China, but far fewer countries like the United States that have money to be siphoned off in mercantilist trade deals, or the technology to steal, or the preferred homes and universities in which to invest.

The Palestinians were canonized as permanent refugees. The U.S. embassy could never safely move to the Israeli capital in Jerusalem. The Golan Heights were Syrian. Only a two-state solution requiring Israel to give back all the strategic border land it inherited when its defeated enemies sought to destroy it in five prior losing wars would bring peace. Not now.

The Palestinians for the last 50 years were always about as much refugees as the East Prussian Germans or the Egyptian Jews and Greeks that were cleansed from their ancestral homelands in the Middle East in the same period of turbulence as the birth of Israel. “Occupied” land more likely conjures up Tibet and Cyprus not the West Bank, and persecuted Muslims are not found in Israel, but in China.

Suddenly Redeemable

An aging population, the veritable end to U.S. manufacturing and heavy industry, and an opioid epidemic meant that America needed to get used to stagnant 1 percent growth, a declining standard of living, a permanent large pool of the unemployed, an annual increasing labor non-participation rate, and a lasting rust belt of deplorables, irredeemables, clingers and “crazies” who needed to be analyzed by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. At best, a middle-aged deplorable was supposed to learn to code or relocate to the Texas fracking fields. Perhaps not now.

In the last 30 months, the question of the Rust Belt has been reframed to why, with a great workforce, cheap energy, good administrative talent, and a business-friendly administration, cannot the United States make more of what it needs? Why, if trade deficits are irrelevant, do Germany, China, Japan, and Mexico find them so unpleasant? If unfettered trade is so essential, why do so many of our enemies and friends insist that we almost alone trade “fairly,” while they trade freely and unfairly? Why do not Germany and China argue that their vast global account surpluses are largely irrelevant?

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) assured us that the world would be suffocating under greenhouse gases within 12 years. Doom-and-gloom prophecies of “peak” oil warned us that our oil reserves would dry up by the early 21st century. Former Vice President Al Gore warned us that our port cities would soon be underwater. Economists claimed Saudi Arabia or Russia would one day control the world by opening and closing their oil spigots. Not now.
Three million more barrels of American oil are being produced per day just since Trump took office. New pipelines will ensure that the United States is not just the world’s greatest producer of natural gas but perhaps its largest exporter as well.

Trump blew up those prognostications and replaced them with an optimistic agenda that the working- and middle classes deserve affordable energy, that the United States could produce fossil fuels more cleanly, wisely, and efficiently than the Middle East, and that ensuring increased energy could revive places in the United States that were supposedly fossilized and irrelevant. Normal is utilizing to the fullest extent a resource that can discourage military adventurism in the Middle East, provide jobs to the unemployed, and reduce the cost of living for the middle class; abnormal is listening to the progressive elite for whom spiking gasoline and power bills were a very minor nuisance.

Changing Roles
Open borders were our unspoken future. The best of the Chamber of Commerce Republicans felt that millions of illegal aliens might eventually break faith with the progressive party of entitlements; the worst of the open borders lot argued that cheap labor was more important than sovereignty and certainly more in their interests than any worry over the poor working classes of their own country. And so Republicans for the last 40 years joined progressives in ensuring that illegal immigration was mostly not measured, meritocratic, diverse, or lawful, but instead a means to serve a number of political agendas.

Most Americans demurred, but kept silent given the barrage of “racist,” “xenophobe,” and “nativist” cries that met any measured objection. Not so much now. Few any longer claim that the southern border is not being overrun, much less that allowing a non-diverse million illegal aliens in six months to flood into the United States without audit is proof that “diversity is our strength.”

The Republican Party’s prior role was to slow down the inevitable trajectory to European socialism, the end of American exceptionalism, and homogenized globalized culture. Losing nobly in national elections was one way of keeping one’s dignity, weepy wounded-fawn style, while the progressive historical arc kept bending to our collective future. Rolling one’s eyes on Sunday talk shows as a progressive outlined the next unhinged agenda was proof of tough resistance.

Like it or not, now lines are drawn. Trump so unhinged the Left that it finally tore off its occasional veneer of moderation, and showed us what progressives had in store for America.

On one side in 2020 is socialism, “Medicare for All,” wealth taxes, top income tax rates of 70 or 80 or 90 percent, a desire for a Supreme Court of full of “wise Latinas” like Sonia Sotomayor, insidious curtailment of the First and Second Amendments, open borders, blanket amnesties, reparations, judges as progressive legislators, permissible infanticide, abolition of student debt, elimination of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau and the Electoral College, voting rights for 16-year-olds and felons, and free college tuition.

On the other side is free-market capitalism but within a framework of fair rather than unfettered international trade, a smaller administrative state, less taxation and regulation, constitutionalist  judges, more gas and oil, record low unemployment, 3-4 percent economic growth, and pressure on colleges to honor the Bill of Rights.

The New, New Normal
The choices are at least starker now. The strategy is not, as in 2008 and 2012, to offer a moderate slow-down of progressivism, but rather a complete repudiation of it.

One way is to see this as a collision between Trump, the proverbial bull, and the administrative state as a targeted precious china shop—with all the inevitable nihilistic mix-up of horns, hooves, and flying porcelain shards. But quite another is to conclude that what we recently used to think was abjectly abnormal twenty years ago had become not just “normal,” but so orthodoxly normal that even suggesting it was not was judged to be heretical and deserving of censure and worse.

The current normal correctives were denounced as abnormal—as if living in a sovereign state with secure borders, assuming that the law was enforced equally among all Americans, demanding that citizenship was something more than mere residence, and remembering that successful Americans, not their government, built their own businesses and lives is now somehow aberrant or perverse.

Trump’s political problem, then, may be that the accelerating aberration of 2009-2016 was of such magnitude that normalcy is now seen as sacrilege.

Weaponizing the IRS, unleashing the FBI to spy on political enemies and to plot the removal of an elected president, politicizing the CIA to help to warp U.S. politics, allying the Justice Department with the Democratic National Committee, and reducing FISA courts to rubber stamps for pursuing administration enemies became the new normal. Calling all that a near coup was abnormal.

Let us hope that most Americans still prefer the abnormal remedy to the normal pathology.

Welcome to Garcetti’s L.A.: Heaps of trash, hordes of rats and very little leadership

From The LA Times, go figure?

Welcome to Garcetti’s L.A.: Heaps of trash, hordes of rats and very little leadership

Steve Lopez, LA Times 

Whewww, what a week.

I could give you a hundred breakdowns of what happened and what it all means, but it comes down to this:

We’re in troubled waters on a ship without a captain, and though there might be a few pretenders on the bridge, nobody trusts them.

We found out on Tuesday that although the city and county spent $600 million last year to chip away at the number of homeless people, the total increased by 16% to nearly 60,000.

That same day, voters said absolutely, positively no way to a parcel tax that would have raised money for struggling L.A. Unified schools, and the vote reflected a resounding lack of faith in school administrators to spend the money wisely. A shame, in my opinion. Whatever the sins of the past, shorting 600,000 mostly poor kids at a time when poverty has spilled onto our streets is not the smartest plan.

But this comes back to the leadership problem. Judging by my reader responses, it did not help that one of the parcel tax advocates was L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti. That would be the guy who has presided over the astounding spread of homeless encampments and trash-strewn streets after persuading voters to reverse the trends by taxing themselves.

Garcetti had a worse week than that heavyweight champ who got clobbered by an unknown contender from Imperial County. And nobody else in the local political class looked much better. L.A. County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas said local leaders were “pretty well stunned by this data” on the increase in homelessness.

I slapped myself and read it again. Yep, he said that.

Los Angeles looks as if it’s digging out from a hurricane, with hordes on the streets, tents everywhere and armies of rodents on the march, inciting fears of disease. We learned from Dakota Smith and David Zahniser in last week’s avalanche of Mad Max news that the rat circus at City Hall was tied to homeless people using the grates around the building as bathrooms. And my colleagues Emily Alpert-Reyes, Doug Smith and Ben Oreskes reported that the number of 311 calls for help shot up 167% between 2016 and 2018.

I’m offering here and now to put any “stunned” politicians on an email loop, so I can help educate them. I naively invited readers last week to email me photos of trash heaps and encampments in their neighborhoods, and my inbox is about to explode. I’ve got photos of half-clothed people passed out on pavement, sidewalks blocked by tents, bulky items, piles of poop and enough trash to fill the Grand Canyon.

“Much of the street trash you saw gets swept into our waterways and virtually straight into our oceans and onto our beaches!” wrote Craig Herring, who sent me a set of disgusting photos to prove his point.

In my column last Sunday, I wrote about areas near downtown where it appeared that merchants were treating streets as a landfill, with some of them paying homeless people to do their hauling.
“Our streets are not dumpsters,” Garcetti said a few days later at a photo-op where he announced a crackdown on illegal dumping, as if it were a new phenomenon.

Nice to know he reads the paper, but where’s he been? And why do public officials seem so timid about pointing out that a lot of the trash is from the ever-growing numbers of homeless people they haven’t been able to help, whether they’re physically or mentally disabled, addicted, bomb-rattled from combat or evicted from the shrinking number of available rentals?

Like I’ve said, homelessness is tied in part to economic forces and state and federal policy failures that aren’t easy to fix at the local level. Seattle, Portland, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, Central Valley cities and San Diego struggle with homelessness, and so do communities in other states.
L.A. is ground zero, though, because of a history of flat wages and soaring housing costs, and because local officials let matters get so out of control, it’s hard to play catch-up. Garcetti means well, I think, and is at least more out front than slumbering City Council President Herb Wesson, but it’s like watching a kitten try to do the job of a lion.

We have more homeless people than Palm Springs has residents, some of them are literally dying, and I’ve been hearing from dozens of citizen-photographers who are out there documenting the fall of the Angeleno Empire.

More than ever, the job calls for someone bold, maybe even a little reckless, the kind of leader who rewards friends and punishes enemies, knocks heads, detests blue ribbon panels, leads caravans of triage workers to every encampment, and takes a blowtorch to red tape.
And what could such a leader do?

With political will and community buy-in, Santa Barbara — in the face of its homeless crisis — managed years ago to make more than 20 parking lots available for the safe overnight parking of people who live in their vehicles. The program has helped many of them transition into permanent housing.

A similar program in Los Angeles has been stuck in first gear for years. In a city with 50 times as many residents as Santa Barbara, we have seven or eight overnight parking spots in operation, even though dozens of under-used school and city properties are available.

How’s your blood pressure now?

Former L.A. city and county official Miguel Santana, one of the brighter minds on homeless policy, said the city of Pomona did a great job of clearing encampments near its civic center. It was a smaller challenge than L.A. faces, he said, but a shelter was constructed, services provided, and “downtown changed almost overnight.”

Why can’t L.A. do that?

We did house 20,000 people last year, but their replacements kept falling in behind them. Santana said we need a faster, bigger bang for funds from voter-approved Measure HHH, whose citizen oversight committee he chairs. The typical cost per unit is about $500,000, said Santana, who thinks pre-fab modular units might be one cheaper alternative if the bureaucratic hurdles can be jumped.

In L.A., that’s a big if.

Last week, I visited an apartment complex made from shipping containers in South L.A. (as reported last year by Doug Smith). Thirty-two formerly homeless tenants under the care of the People Concern live four to a unit in a development by Flyaway Homes. The cost was just over $100,000 per unit, and the money was from private investors.

Margarita Salas, who moved in a month ago, told me that after she lost her job as a motel housekeeper, home was a tent in a Lincoln Heights park.

“The police told me to get out,” said Salas, 72. “I told them I had nowhere to go.”

Now she does.

Flyaway chief Michael Parks says his goal is to house thousands of homeless people at a third of the cost of the going rate and complete projects in a third of the customary time.

Here’s another blood pressure alert:

A proposed project just like the one I visited has gotten jammed up at City Hall, where it awaits a building permit. Parks said the apartments could have been completed by this summer. Instead, early next year is the best hope.
“They’ve known for two years that they’ve had to build affordable housing fast,” said Gary Foster, a People Concern board member who can’t believe public officials are moving at a snail’s pace in an emergency, even when private citizens raise a hand to help.

I’ve known Foster since 2005, when I began writing about skid row and he produced a movie based on my book, and he’s had his sleeves rolled up ever since. Like me, he’s spent 14 years hoping things would get better but watching them get worse.

And what of the local corporate titans, Foster asked, as darkness falls on a city of gold?

“Disney, Northrop Grumman, Health Net, Occidental Petroleum … the companies that have the most presence in Los Angeles,” Foster said. “Where are they? That’s my challenge. You live here and you’re making billions of dollars, so help us out.”

That, too, requires political savvy, and leaders who are feared, respected or both.

That tank is empty, and the streets are teeming.

Why Conservatives Should Stop Giving To Arts Organizations

Why Conservatives Should Stop Giving To Arts Organizations

 David Marcus, The federalist

Progressive hegemony in American arts and culture is a direct result of not-for-profit funding models. Conservatives should stop supporting them.

It’s no big secret that arts organizations in the United States skew incredibly leftist in comparison with the general citizenry’s ideas and attitudes. It is almost axiomatic that our theater companies and museums are operated by and support the art of people with left-leaning politics and social views. It is something we just take for granted, as if artists by their very nature will always tend to be leftists.

But leftist hegemony over the arts is not merely the product of some genetic feature of artistic types that makes them prefer Democrats to Republicans. Another significant reason for this is the not-for-profit funding model used by the majority of country’s arts organizations. In most cases the successful arts organization is not the one that reaches out to audiences and generates the most earned income, but the ones that can keep the free donated money rolling in.

There are a number of reasons why a not-for-profit model will tend to make organizations leftist. The first is that the very nature of asking for money, rather than simply selling tickets, suggests some higher purpose for the arts than mere entertainment. At one point in time, this higher purpose was viewed to be the edification of citizens, providing them with a well-rounded understanding of culture. But increasingly that higher purpose has come to be activism, especially leftist activism. That leads conservative donors to a question: Should they be funding the arts?

Let’s take the example of Jubilee 2020, a project originally organized within the theater commons Howlround. The original concept behind the Jubilee was that for one year all of the theater produced on American stages would be written by women, people of color, the disabled, LGBT — well, it’s easier just to say anybody except straight, white, non-trans men.

The current website is a bit more coy about what exactly is intended, likely a result of accurate complaints that the Jubilee is engaging in discrimination, but the original intent still shines through. The essay defining the Jubilee has this polite little section telling white dudes to shut up: “This is also a time for straight, white men to rejoice, to witness, to listen, and to be fed for one year by the stories they’ve also been denied.”

Thus far, about 80 theater companies nationwide as well as some universities and even secondary schools have signed the pledge to produce only works written by the supposedly marginalized. Among these theaters are some of the nation’s best-known and most important, including HERE arts center in New York City, The Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble in Pennsylvania, Arena Stage in Washington DC, and the Marin Shakespeare Company in California. These are not outliers. In fact, they are a fairly representative cross-section of the not-for-profit arts world. That is to say, this level of political correctness is fairly uniform across the arts.

In addition to direct government grants to these companies, which is a whole other story, as 501(c)3 corporations they receive millions of dollars in tax-deductible donations. Now if one is a conservative who believes that people should be treated as individuals, not representatives of their race, sex, or any other identity, if one believes in equal opportunity rather than redistributed opportunity, if one believes that human beings ought not be defined by their demographic proximity to historical oppression, but rather by their unique experiences and abilities, then how can one give money to organizations dedicated to the exact opposite?

Now, I know the receptions are nice. And celebrities come out and you get to mingle with them. They tolerate you for a few minutes to help the theater company or arts space they are shilling for. That’s fun, and nice. You get photos to put on Instagram. I get it. But maybe you should stop. Because every dollar you give them feeds a fecund and fierce hatred of basic American values.

And it isn’t just identity politics. Non-profit arts organizations often create content in support of gun control and abortion. They create versions of Julius Caesar in which Donald Trump is stabbed to death on stage. Theatre Communications Group, the leading industry organization of non-profit theater companies, has as part of its mission “activism,” which it describes as a “fight for effective cultural and economic policies.”

Arts organizations do all of this based on the support of taxpayers and donors. When conservatives pull out their checkbooks, thinking, “My, how wonderful and important it is to support the arts,” they should think twice. Not only are they very likely giving to organizations that actively promote a political and cultural agenda they oppose, they are also funding the development of artists who will go on to write our television shows and movies, who will help to enact progressive cultural change without any significant input from the American people.

Some argue that without this funding the arts will simply disappear, that conservatives should hold their nose and give because no art is worse than art that supports a progressive agenda. But this is a stupid argument. Art is one of the oldest and most fundamentally human phenomenon that exists. There will never be a time when there is no art. Even when governments actively try to suppress art, people make art.

Would moving the arts to a free-market model change them? Yes, absolutely. It would look and feel different, but art is a living thing. It is meant to change. Would moving the arts to a free model help break up the leftist hegemony? Here again the answer is likely yes.

There is one art form we can look to that is relatively untouched by the non-profit movement. Stand-up comedy exists almost entirely in the free market, and it is more or less the only art form that dares to mock the leftist shibboleths of identity politics and political correctness. Comedians like Jerry Seinfeld and Dave Chappelle regularly challenge the taboos of the left. The universe of stand up has room for the “unfunny” woke comedy of a Hannah Gadsby, but it also has Bill Burr taking aim at progressives.

The rest of our art, our plays, operas, ballets, and museum exhibits should reflect the wide range of American political and social views that stand-up does. Right now that is not the case. The best thing that conservatives can do to fix it is to stop giving. Stop feeding a system that we can blatantly see is a breeding ground for leftist ideologies. Let a new system emerge to create art that better reflects what America truly is.

David Marcus is the Federalist's New York Correspondent and the Artistic Director of Blue Box World, a Brooklyn based theater project. Follow him on Twitter, @BlueBoxDave.

The Mueller Investigation Was Always an Impeachment Probe

The Mueller Investigation Was Always an Impeachment Probe

Andrew McCarthy, National Review 

The special counsel abdicated on obstruction to avoid a confrontation with the Justice Department and get his evidence to Congress.

Why mention the OLC guidance at all?

That is the question for Bob Mueller, left hanging by the statement his office jointly issued with Justice Department flacks on Wednesday, clarifying (as it were) remarks he had made hours earlier at his parting-shot press conference.

At issue is Mueller’s decision to punt on the question of whether President Trump should be indicted for obstruction of justice. In his startling remarks, Mueller sought to justify himself by citing instruction from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. The longstanding OLC opinion, an outgrowth of Nixon- and Clinton-era scandals, holds that a sitting president may not be indicted. The two press offices were struggling to reconcile (a) Mueller’s pointed reliance on this OLC guidance at the presser with (b) his prior disclaimers of such reliance.

According to Attorney General Bill Barr, in a meeting over two weeks before Mueller submitted his final report, the special counsel emphatically denied that his refusal to render a prosecutorial judgment on obstruction hinged on the OLC guidance. Naturally, in their continuing quest to frame Barr as the most diabolical villain since Lex Luthor, the media-Democrat complex insisted that the AG must be lying.

This is what derangement will do to you. I do not think Mueller’s contradictory assertions are that hard to figure out. But if you were inclined to blame sleight of hand, the culprit would be Mueller. You’ll notice that when we finally heard from him on Wednesday, he lauded Barr’s good faith, never claiming that the AG had misrepresented him. Moreover, the conversation between them on the OLC guidance was not a one-on-one affair. There were other people in the room when Mueller denied that the OLC guidance was his rationale for abdicating.

The unimpeached evidence is that Mueller said what Barr says he said.

Reading Between the Lines
Nevertheless, with the media howling that somebody — Barr — had to be fibbing, the press offices got busy. By early evening, DOJ and Mueller’s shuttering shop put out this joint statement:

The Attorney General has previously stated that the Special Counsel repeatedly affirmed that he was not saying that, but for the OLC opinion, he would have found the President obstructed justice. The Special Counsel’s report and his statement made clear that [his] office concluded it would not reach a determination — one way or the other — about whether the President committed a crime. There is no conflict between these statements.

Well, okay, that’s fine as far as it goes. If you (somewhat selectively) read the carefully crafted lines of Mueller’s report, he said he would not reach a determination on obstruction. And he did not reach one. Therefore, the reasoning goes, it cannot be said that the OLC guidance was determinative: Since Mueller technically did not make a recommendation one way or the other, the OLC guidance was never actually triggered.

But if that’s the case, then the obvious question — to go back to where we started — is: Why mention the OLC guidance at all?

Answer: Because Mueller’s brief speech on Wednesday was not a matter of reading the lines of his report; it was about reading between the lines.

Remember, Mueller’s report is 448 pages long. His press-conference remarks took less than ten minutes, and the substantive discussion of obstruction was but a fraction of that. In those fleeting moments, what were the precious few highlights from the report that Mueller wanted Americans to grasp? They were, first, that the OLC guidance dictated that the president could not be charged; and second, that if Mueller were convinced that the president had not committed a crime, he would have said so . . . but he did not say so — in Mueller’s constitutionally offensive, hyperpolitical articulation, he would not “exonerate” the president.

There is only one rational explanation for this performance. Mueller wants Congress and the public to presume that if it were not for the OLC guidance, it is very likely that he would have charged the president with obstruction — maybe not an absolute certainty, but nearly so.

And then, just in case we were too dense to understand the nods and winks, Mueller took pains to emphasize that, in our constitutional system, it is up to Congress, not federal prosecutors, to address alleged misconduct by a sitting president.

Simple as 1 + 1 + 1 = 3. Likely felony obstruction, plus inability of prosecutors to indict, plus duty of Congress to deal with presidential criminality, equals: Impeachment is the only remedy, unless congressional Democrats are saying that Donald Trump is above the law. (Good luck, Speaker Pelosi, trying to pipe down your AOC wing, to say nothing of the 2020 primary contestants, after that one.)

This should not be a surprise. We have been saying since shortly after Mueller was appointed that his investigation was not a collusion probe but an obstruction probe, and that this necessarily made it an impeachment probe.

Competing Views of Obstruction
As noted above, the apparent contradiction between Mueller and Barr is clarified by the timeline.

To grasp this, you must first understand that Mueller and his staff are completely result-oriented. If you’ve decided to act as counsel to a congressional impeachment inquiry rather than as a federal prosecutor, the objective is to get your evidence in front of Congress, with the patina of felony obstruction.

In the Nixon and Clinton situations, the rationale for impeachment was obstruction of justice. Significantly, the issue in impeachment cases is abuse of power, not courtroom guilt. Consequently, unlike a prosecutor, a counsel to a congressional impeachment committee does not need evidence strong enough to support a criminal indictment; just something reasonably close to that, enough to enable a president’s congressional opposition to find unfitness for high office.

Once you understand that, it is easy to see what happened here.

Mueller’s staff, chockablock with progressive activists, has conceptions of executive power and obstruction that are saliently different from Barr’s (and from those of conservative legal analysts who subscribe to Justice Scalia’s views on unitary executive power).

The attorney general believes that (a) obstruction charges may not be based on exercises of a president’s constitutional prerogatives — only on obviously corrupt acts (e.g., evidence destruction, bribing witnesses); (b) all executive power under the Constitution is reposed in the president; and thus, (c) when the chief executive takes actions the Constitution empowers him to take (e.g., firing or threatening to fire subordinates), it is not the place of an inferior executive officer, such as a federal prosecutor, to second-guess them as “corruptly motivated.” Recognizing how traumatic accusing a president of a crime is for the country, moreover, Barr thinks an obstruction offense would have to be crystal-clear and serious — you don’t tear the nation apart over something about which reasonable minds could differ.

By contrast, Mueller’s staff believes that (a) the executive bureaucracy is semi-autonomous in its areas of expertise, and thus Justice Department prosecutors are supreme, even over the president, in matters of law enforcement; (b) Congress had the constitutional power to, in effect, transfer executive authority from the president to prosecutors by enacting obstruction laws that may be enforced against the president; and therefore, (c) even if a presidential action is lawful in itself, a prosecutor may allege obstruction if the prosecutor believes the president’s motive was corrupt. Furthermore, little or no consideration should be given to whether a president’s allegedly obstructive act is especially clear or serious because the president (at least if the president is a Republican) must be treated like anyone else — otherwise, the president is placed above the law. (Democratic presidents, to the contrary, are the law — see, e.g., DACA, Obamacare decrees, IRS harassment of conservative groups, Fast and Furious stonewalling of Congress . . .)

Playing Out the Alternative Scenarios
This drastic divergence on what can constitute an obstruction offense had practical consequences here.

For most of his investigation, Mueller was “supervised” by acting AG Rod Rosenstein, who did not comply with special-counsel regulations in appointing him, and who promised Democrats that he would be effectively independent. As long as the studiously passive Rosenstein was at the helm, the staff-driven Mueller was free to investigate under his loose, envelope-pushing obstruction theory. Once Barr became AG, however, it was clear that Mueller’s theory was not going to fly.

So, let’s play out the alternative scenario.

Let’s say that, having convinced himself he had a strong obstruction case, Mueller decided to recommend that the president be charged. That would have forced a confrontation over the issue that has been sidestepped: What are the correct standards for evaluating an obstruction allegation against a president? There would have been a brawl at Main Justice. The report would have been held up while the matter was debated.

More to the point, Mueller and such top staffers as Andrew Weissmann and Michael Dreeben, who have operated at the top echelon of the Justice Department, would have known that the attorney general would win such a battle ten times out of ten. That goes double for an AG such as Barr, a highly regarded legal thinker who, besides now being AG twice, ran the OLC in the Bush 41 administration. He was not going to be intimidated or bulldozed by Mueller’s staff.

Remember: Mueller’s staff is looking at this as if they were congressional impeachment counsel. Their objective is to get their evidence to Congress bearing something close to the stamp of an indictable felonies.

Consequently, direct confrontation with the AG was the last thing they wanted. It would have guaranteed failure. The Mueller report’s discussion of obstruction standards would not have gotten out the Main Justice door as an authoritative statement of the law. There would have been a revised articulation of obstruction law as it applies to the president. There would have been vigorous debate over the eleven instances of obstruction Mueller wanted to allege. The report would have been scrutinized carefully by Justice Department lawyers, especially where it plays fast and loose with the facts (see, e.g., my Papadopouolos column). It might never have been released. If it had been released, it would have been discredited or dramatically revised.

That would not have helped the impeachment cause.

So . . . Plan B: What if we decline to make any recommendation on obstruction?

Mueller’s staff calculated: If we don’t press the point of indicting the president, the AG and the Justice Department have no reason to dispute our findings, or even take on our analysis of obstruction law. They’ll be so relieved to avoid a fight over obstruction charges, they’ll be willing to let all that slide. And with Congress demanding the report, and the AG having promised maximum transparency in his confirmation hearings, we will achieve our objective: Congress will get our obstruction evidence, with an accompanying legal analysis that tends strongly in favor of finding felony obstruction. That will be the basis for any impeachment proceedings.

This, then, became the plan: Mueller would decide not to decide.

There was just one problem: Mueller would need a reason for not deciding. Barr was sure to ask. Mueller could not truthfully respond, “Well, we see ourselves as congressional impeachment counsel.” Barr has been quite clear (and quite right) that federal prosecutors exist to enforce the law, not to do Congress’s work — Congress has its own bloated staff for that.

Mueller’s staff would need to come up with something that would pass the laugh test. After all, there was no collusion case, so rendering a prosecutorial judgment on the obstruction question was the only thing for which a special counsel had arguably been needed. Now, Mueller was about to tell the AG he would be abdicating on that. He’d be asked to explain himself, and if he didn’t have a compelling answer, he’d need to stall.

It happened on March 5, during Barr’s first meeting with Mueller after being confirmed. Taken aback by Mueller’s announcement that he would not be deciding the obstruction question, Barr pressed him repeatedly: “Is it because of the OLC guidance?” Mueller insisted that it was not. When asked what, then, was the reason, Mueller meandered about how they were still formulating their rationale.

Get it? Result-oriented: Decision first, then we’ll cobble together the reasoning.

Why would Mueller do this? Again, play out the alternative scenario.

If the special counsel had told Barr that the OLC guidance was his rationale for not deciding, Barr would likely have told him, “Don’t worry about the OLC guidance, that’s not your job. The OLC guidance only says we can’t return an indictment now. We still need to know whether there is a prosecutable case. Just make a recommendation on that, one way or the other.”

If that had happened, Mueller would have been cornered. If he recommended in favor of indictment, he would have ended up in the confrontation with Barr over obstruction law that he was trying to avoid. If he recommended against an indictment, he would have undermined the impeachment effort.

So he punted. And it worked.

Mueller told Barr he was still formulating his rationale for not deciding the issue. Maybe the staff really was still trying to come up with a coherent explanation; or maybe in the back (or front) of their minds, they figured “we’re still formulating” was vague enough that they could ultimately rely on the OLC guidance, even if Mueller had said it was not his rationale.

Whatever the calculation was, two and a half weeks later, when Mueller delivered his final report to Barr on March 22, Mueller and his staff expressly invoked the OLC guidance.

Does that mean Mueller was being dishonest on March 5? Does it mean his thinking truly was still evolving?

What difference does it make?

What matters is that Mueller’s shrewd staffers accomplished exactly what they hoped to accomplish: Make sure the report was disclosed to Congress intact, with 200 pages of obstruction evidence, a legal analysis that tends toward a finding of obstruction, and an express assertion by the special counsel that if he had found Trump did not commit a crime, he would have said so.

And now, for good measure, Mueller took pains on Wednesday to stress that, in our system, it is Congress’s duty to address presidential misconduct.

For partisan lawyers who saw their special-counsel gig as an opportunity to play congressional impeachment counsel, it is Mission Accomplished.

ANDREW C. MCCARTHY is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and a contributing editor of National Review. @andrewcmccarthy