Rage Makes You Stupid

Rage Makes You Stupid
Kevin D. Williamson, National Review

People have the strongest feelings about the things they know the least about.

What are we supposed to think about political rage?

Before and after the arrest of Cesar Sayoc, the suspect in the recent string of bombs sent to prominent Democrats and media figures, we were treated to any number of homilies about “rage” and its origins in “toxic” political rhetoric. Many of these homilies were pointed directly or indirectly at President Donald Trump and his immoderate Twitter habits. That political rage is necessarily linked to political violence was assumed, and sometimes asserted, but rarely argued.

Five minutes before that, rage was all the rage. Rebecca Traister, an editor for New York magazine, has just published a book celebrating the “revolutionary power” of anger, which was celebrated at The Atlantic on 4 October under a headline noting the “seismic power” of “rage.” On 21 September, the Washington Post affirmed that “rage is healthy, rational, and necessary for America.” On Friday, NBC news praised a television show for depicting “anger as righteous and necessary.” Before that, it ran a segment encouraging certain political partisans to “embrace their rage.”

Earlier in the year, Leslie Jamison wrote a very interesting and intelligent essay for The New York Times Magazine exploring anger as a “tool to be used, part of a well-stocked arsenal.” Right as the bombing suspect was being arrested in Florida, Rewire shared “All the Rage That’s Fit To Print,” its assessment of four books on “fury.”

I’ve omitted the word “women” in several instances above, on the theory that we’re all adults here, and that we would recognize the obvious hypocrisy and illogic of any “my rage good, your rage bad, bad, bad,” construct.
Except . . .

On 28 September, the admirable Max Boot published a lamentation of “Republican rage” in the Washington Post, arguing that Howard Beale, Network’s embodiment of outrage, “would feel right at home in the Republican party.” On the same day, The Week, which may be the least intelligent non-pornographic publication in these United States, was also in a the mood for lamentation, anguished over “the rage of Brett Kavanaugh.” The day before, Esquire moaned that “This Was the Hour of White Male Rage.” On Thursday, the Washington Post tied incendiary devices to “incendiary rhetoric,” while Philippe Reines, who used to work for that weird lady who recently disavowed civility in quite specific terms, went on MSNBC to insist that “Donald Trump’s Rhetoric Can’t Be Ignored in Wake of Bombs.” Eugene Robinson encouraged Democrats to “get mad” and “get even” — “harness your rage,” as the headline in the Chicago Tribune put it — even though he blasted Brett Kavanaugh for being “rage-filled.” Ta-Nehisi Coates has written “in defense of political anger,” and Darryl Pinckney, writing in The New York Review of Books, gave readers 4,000 words on “The Anger of Ta-Nehisi Coates.”

And then there are the Subarus, legions of them with bumper-stickers reading: “If You Aren’t Outraged, You Aren’t Paying Attention.”

The signals, then, are decidedly mixed.

Put me in the anti-rage camp. Rage makes you stupid.

(Rage and Wild Turkey . . . . Well, enough said.)

I’m sometimes described as an angry writer, which always surprises me. I am much, much more frequently bored by American politics than outraged by it. (More than one cable-news producer has suggested to me that I should present with more outrage.) Senator Feinstein does not fill me with rage; she has the exact aspect of a woman who is very, very sad that the bingo game didn’t break her way this time, and it is difficult to be angry at that. I do not think she should be in the Senate, but I do hope that wherever she ends up, there’s someone there to make her a nice cup of hot tea.

Our politics is full of performative outrage, histrionics that are designed to imbue unserious people with an air moral seriousness and to keep the rubes emotionally invested long enough to get them to a commercial break. It almost inevitably is the case that people have the strongest feelings about the things they know the least about; people who actually know about any subject of genuine interest understand that such subjects tend to be complicated, and that expressions of outrage, however cathartic, do not render them any less recondite. Compare Paul Krugman on economics to Paul Krugman on politics and you’ll see what I mean.

I would suggest that we make a concerted effort to abolish cheap outrage from our political discourse, but that proposal would be stillborn: There’s just too much money in outrage. Instead, I would suggest taking a different attitude toward those histrionics, understanding that what people such as Sean Hannity and Chris Hayes are engaged in is not really political discourse at all, but something much more like sports commentary or The Real Housewives of Wherever: The emotional frisson is the point, and the political content is just a McGuffin, the ball in this cynical game of for-profit fetch.

At the very least, we do ourselves the favor of understanding that political rhetoric, however rage-filled or — dread cliché — “toxic,” belongs to an entirely separate category of human endeavor than sending people bombs in the mail, that exhortations to vote are a different thing from exhortations to violence, that Ann Coulter speaking on a college campus is a different thing from firebombing the building in which she is scheduled to speak. There are many voices in our politics that do in fact countenance violence, from Slavoj Žižek (“for the oppressed, violence is always legitimate”) to every dimwit who has promised to “Punch a Nazi.”

Sorting all that out sometimes requires careful thinking, which is difficult to manage when you are high on rage.

The caravan is an attack on America -- Stop the caravan now

Peace at the Mexican/Guatamala border...

The caravan is an attack on America -- Stop the caravan now
Newt Gingrich, Fox News

The caravan of about 4,000 migrants from Central America seeking to enter Mexico and then the United States illegally is attempting to invade and attack the U.S.

This assertion will almost certainly be denounced by the usual sources as being hateful or offensive, but it is long past time we stop letting the left prevent us from using words that clearly communicate reality.

The fact is: Thousands of people have openly stated their intention to break American law and invade our country. Other people, some of them Americans, are funding this deliberate effort to invade America.

If you think “invade” is too strong a word, watch this video of the caravan tearing down fences separating Guatemala and Mexico while waving the Honduran flag (the country these people no doubt plan to claim asylum from). How is this not an invasion?

We cannot allow ourselves to be intimidated by the heart-wrenching pictures and misleading words the left-wing media will doubtlessly manufacture if this caravan arrives at our border.

We also must reclaim our narrative from those on the left. We cannot allow them to demonize us and distort what we stand for and what we are trying to do.
Let me be clear about where I stand.

I strongly favor legal immigration. I am happy that America remains the most welcoming country in the world for legal immigrants.

According to Pew Research, in 2015 there were a little more than 30 million legal immigrants in the U.S. This is higher than the population of Texas – our second-most populous state. I think this is a great thing that makes America stronger. It is simply a lie to say I oppose immigration.

Furthermore, I have worked very hard to get sound, responsible immigration reform for decades.
In October 1986, when I served in the House, I voted for the Simpson-Mazzoli Immigration Reform Act, which granted amnesty to about 3 million people (originally estimated to be 300,000). I voted for the bill in return for two commitments: to control the border and to establish a guest worker program.

Similarly, President Reagan wrote in his diary that he would reluctantly sign the bill. “It’s high time we regained control of our borders and (Simpson’s) bill will do this,” the president wrote.

The harsh lesson of 1986 was that liberals took the amnesty for 3 million illegal immigrants and then broke their word on controlling the border and creating an effective guest worker program.
Finally, on a personal level, I spent much of my childhood living in foreign countries (my dad spent 27 years in the infantry, and I now live part-time in Rome, Italy).

I outline my record to make clear that I don’t fit any of the nasty stereotypes with which the left smears those who threaten them (see “the Kavanaugh effect”). And neither do the vast majority of Americans who want a functional immigration system that reflects American values.

The very idea that thousands of people believe (or are being told) they have a right to invade America and demand that we take care of them tells you how sick the system has become.
The time to draw the line and fight for an honest immigration and border control policy is now.
The caravan is the perfect symbol of the arrogance – the organized effort to destroy the rule of law – and the contempt for the American system that the left exhibits every day.

We have been so conditioned by a half-century of political correctness doctrine (developed and sustained by the liberal news media, college professors, and left-wing politicians) that we have forgotten how to tell the truth about illegal immigration.

The truth is: Illegal immigration has substantially increased the risk for Americans.

MS-13, the vicious El Salvadoran gang, killed 17 people on Long Island in New York in a 17-month period in 2016. The gang has an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 members in the United States.
Fentanyl and opioids also come across the uncontrolled southern border. Last year, more than 72,000 Americans died from drug overdoses – more than the number of Americans killed during the eight years of the Vietnam War.

There is a substantial safety impact of uncontrolled borders and the routine breaking of the law by illegal immigrants.

If America is to survive, we must win some key arguments about facts and prove that much of what left-wing politicians say – and what the liberal news media report – is simply wrong.
If America is to survive, we must heed George Orwell’s warning in his great essay “Politics and the English Language” that “political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible."
Nothing could more accurately characterize the left’s speech about political correctness and the unending effort of the left to shut down language that exposes the hypocrisy and falsehood of its members’ positions – especially when it comes to their animus toward American sovereignty and defending the border.

As I wrote in my New York Times best-seller “Trump’s America: The Truth About Our Nation’s Great Comeback,” the liberal media have actively participated in creating propaganda designed to manufacture sympathy for the lawbreakers and delegitimize those who would defend American sovereignty and the rule of law.

When House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., says to Harvard Kennedy School students that Democrats are for controlling our borders, she is simply lying. When she goes on to say, “we do need to guard our borders, and we do need to have immigration reform,” you have to wonder how stupid she thinks we are.

There is no evidence of any Democrat-backed program that would be effective in controlling illegal immigration. The Democrats oppose the border wall in any form. They would hobble or abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE).

Democrats favor so-called sanctuary cities and states in order to shield illegal immigrants from the legal immigration process.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., has introduced an open borders bill, which every Democratic Senate incumbent has co-sponsored.

The national vice chair of the Democratic Party campaigns in a T-shirt that says in Spanish “I don’t believe in borders.”

Democrats only ever favor complicated, impossible-to-implement legal systems, which create opportunities for people to enter and stay in America illegally.

Not only do Democrats oppose controlling the border and stopping illegal immigration, they welcome illegal immigrants as an offset to legal American voters.

Consider what Pelosi said in El Paso to immigration rights activists: “We believe that we will have leverage when we win in November. And why is that important? Because it gives leverage to every family” who came to America illegally.

Stacey Abrams, the Democratic candidate for governor in Georgia, is even clearer in her commitment to illegal immigrants. In a recent speech, she said the blue wave is comprised of “those who are documented and undocumented.” There could not be a clearer indication of the Democrats’ belief that illegal immigrants are an integral part of their coalition.

The San Francisco Democrats have even adopted a new regulation to allow illegal immigrants to vote in city elections.

The caravan invasion is a useful starting point to insist on an honest debate about our future as a country.

Every Democrat should be forced to answer these six questions before the election:

1. Do you think 4,000 or more people should be allowed to invade the United States whenever they want to, and, if so, how big and how frequent do you think the next caravans will be?  
2. Who do you think is paying for these efforts to undermine American sovereignty, break American laws, and impose foreign will on the United States?  
3. When you are told it is only a small number of people in this first caravan, how do you respond to the fact that we already have an estimated illegal immigrant population of 1.8 million Central Americans, 650,000 South Americans, and 425,000 immigrants from the Caribbean. Does that change the scale of the problem? If caravans are accepted the numbers will grow dramatically in a very short period.  
4. When you learn that the Gallup World Poll estimates that 29 percent of people in Latin America and the Caribbean (that would be about 197 million people) want to migrate – and 29 percent of those people (about 57 million) want to come to the United States – does this change your concern about controlling the border?  
5. When you learn that beyond our hemisphere, the Gallup World Poll estimates that millions more would come to the United States if they could, does that increase your interest in controlling the border?  
6. If you do not think this caravan should be allowed to illegally enter the United States as an invasion of our sovereign border, what would you do to stop it?

If Democrats really wanted to control the border, how do we have an estimated 11 million-plus illegal immigrants currently in the United States – and a system that can be gamed so easily that people have continued to brazenly and openly break the law?

This caravan attack is the right place to draw the line and say “no more.”

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., is right. Congress should come back and pass the laws that would enable Americans to re-establish the rule of law at the border and protect our country with dignity and authority.

President Trump is right. Stop the caravan now.

If you want to defend America, let your House member and senators know how you feel.

Who Will Save Democrats from Their Leaders?

Who Will Save Democrats from Their Leaders?
Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review

In a better time, we would be talking not about Eric Holder but about real Democratic leaders.

‘When they go low” . . . that’s where they are sure to find Eric Holder.

Sometimes, the former attorney general is excusing hard-Left, unrepentant, anti-American FALN separatists by helping a Democratic president spring them from imprisonment for their terrorist crimes.

Sometimes, he is helping a Democratic president commute the sentences of hard-Left terrorists whose only regret was their failure to shoot it out against police who interrupted another bombing spree in their war against the United States.

Sometimes, he is volunteering his legal services and his status as a former top Justice Department official to file a “friend of the court” brief on behalf of the al Qaeda jihadist who was apprehended while plotting a second wave of 9/11 mass-murder attacks.

Sometimes, he is defying congressional committees investigating his Justice Department’s reckless, politically driven “gun-walking” scheme gone awry — the Fast and Furious “investigation” that armed murderous Mexican drug gangs and got a border-patrol officer killed.

Sometimes, he is sharing a podium with his friend Al Sharpton, who is threatening to incite mayhem — as Sharpton is wont to do — if police fail to trump up a racially charged case rather than let the evidence determine whether to indict.

Sometimes, he is trying to keep his story straight about that time when, as a Columbia undergrad, he proudly joined other campus radicals in occupying a building and the dean’s office — forcible intimidation to extort political concessions.

And sometimes, Holder is just engaged in old-fashioned political corruption: helping a Democratic president circumvent the Justice Department in carrying out the pay-to-play pardon of a notorious fugitive.

But if there is anyone who knows about “going low,” it is Mr. Holder. He is, after all, the first attorney general in American history to be held in contempt of Congress.

And low is exactly where Holder — along with Hillary “No Civility Unless We Win” Clinton and the rest of the social-justice arriére-garde — has taken a once-great political party.

In a better time, we would not be talking about Eric Holder. He would be dismissed as a fringe radical who endorses forcible, extortionist tactics against political adversaries (and then, in familiar Holder fashion, spends the next day pretending he didn’t say what he said). In a better time, we would be asking why anyone would care what Eric Holder says, about anything.

But today, Holder is important. Today, he is a mainstream Democratic leader. Today, his antics illustrate two things we fail to bear in mind at our peril.

First, the high-minded airs put on by the hard left are a fraud, and a dangerous one.

Note that the wind-up for Holder’s dimwitted pitch that Democrats must “kick” their Republican rivals was his invocation of Michelle Obama’s precious summons: “When they go low, we go high.” But that’s been a con job from the moment she said it.

Mrs. Obama rode into the White House on her husband’s admonition, “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.” That would be the same Barack Obama whose political coming-out party was held in the living room of his good friends, the “small ‘c’ communist,” unrepentant former terrorists Bernardine Dohrn (“The Weathermen dig Charles Manson”) and Bill Ayers (on his bomb for the Pentagon: “Everything was absolutely ideal. . . . The sky was blue. The birds were singing. And the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them”).

That would also be the same Barack Obama who rationalized leveraging political advocacy with extortion — what “community organizers” like to call “direct action.” Here’s an excerpt from Obama’s 1990 encomium to radical icon Saul Alinksy:

The debate as to how black and other dispossessed people can forward their lot in America is not new. From W.E.B. DuBois to Booker T. Washington to Marcus Garvey to Malcolm X to Martin Luther King, this internal debate has raged between integration and nationalism, between accommodation and militancy, between sit-down strikes and boardroom negotiations. The lines between these strategies have never been simply drawn, and the most successful black leadership has recognized the need to bridge these seemingly divergent approaches.

Militancy? Yeah, the mob — the Democrats’ front line of shock troops — is still sorting out “the need to bridge” that “seemingly divergent approach” to ordinary politics in a pluralistic, ideologically diverse republic. Of course, it’s only a problem if you take Michelle’s “go high” nostrum seriously. Democrats don’t, because they understand it’s a game: The pursuit of “social justice” (translation: getting their way by shredding your liberties) is always considered “going high,” regardless of how militant the tactic. Don’t take my word for it. Just ask Steve Scalise and Rand Paul.

That brings us to the second point Eric Holder’s incitements should clarify.
The latest regression to the 1970s “any means necessary” politics that today’s Democrats have reincarnated was triggered by Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. But don’t be confused. The fact that Kavanaugh was the occasion for Democratic anarchy does not mean he was the cause.

This was not about Brett Kavanaugh. This was about power. The character assassination heaped on Kavanaugh would have been used against any President Trump nominee poised to shift the Supreme Court rightward. Remarkably, Democrats now kick themselves for not attacking the nominee even more viciously. Doesn’t matter who the nominee was. The real objective was not to destroy Kavanaugh but to convey what Democrats have in store for any conservative who seeks high public office. If you don’t grasp that, you’re not paying attention.

Most conservatives see government as a necessary evil; they would like a limited United States government that reflects this suspicion and the Framers’ emphasis on liberty. Most Democrats see government as a desirable good; they would like an active United States government that rights wrongs and addresses the complex challenges of modern, globally interconnected society. Many brilliant, able people have been that kind of Democrat — the kind of patriot who loves America as it is but strives to improve it, not radically alter it. The country needs those Democrats to take their party back.

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

It's one left-wing riot after another, but leftist leaders have decided the problem is YOU

It's one left-wing riot after another, but leftist leaders have decided the problem is YOU

Tucker Carlson, Fox News  

The crack political team over at The Washington Post has uncovered a brand new species of fake news they think you need to know about: Imaginary left-wing mobs.

In a piece posted this week, The Post explained that in order to win the midterm elections, those Republicans have "cast the Trump resistance movement as an angry mob."

Now, “cast” is, of course, used here as a synonym for misrepresented. The Washington Post wants you to know that these mobs are not real. They're an illusion. 

That may surprise you, because you may have recently seen videos of prominent Republicans being chased out of restaurants by screaming progressives. You may have even read news accounts about how a Republican congressman named Steve Scalise was shot with a high-powered rifle by a Bernie Sanders supporter.

You may have seen college campuses descend into rioting simply because conservatives showed up to talk.

And just this past weekend, you may have watched transfixed as groups of hysterical young people yelled at Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill and then pounded in rage on the front doors of the Supreme Court.

All of this may have given you the mistaken impression that there is a threat of disorder and lawlessness from the left building in this country, some of it funded by a man that The Washington Post neutrally describes as “philanthropist” George Soros.

Well, rest easy, says The Post. In fact, all of this talk of left-wing mobs "taps grievances about the nation's fast-moving cultural and demographic shifts." In other words, this is racism, and it's designed says, The Post, "for the benefit of white voters, particularly men."

Wow, so the angry left-wing mobs you thought you had been watching on television turn out to be merely a hallucination. They're a fever dream concocted by those diabolical magicians over at Fox News.

Thank heaven, you can wake up now. None of it is real. -- It's 1996 again.

But wait, has anyone told the angry left-wing mobs about this? They seem to believe that they exist.

In Portland, Oregon, they're still blocking traffic and breaking things and screaming at old ladies in wheelchairs.  Apparently, they don't get The Washington Post in Oregon.

I guess you just can’t believe your lying eyes.

Some reports - and there haven't been many reports, but some - describe these protesters as ANTIFA, others say they're Black Lives Matter. It doesn't matter. What you're actually looking at is the youth wing of the Democratic Party. These are their shock troops.

“Go to the Hill today," Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., said recently. "Get up and please get up in the face of some Congress people.”

Added Rep. Maxine Waters: D-Calif.: “If you see anyone from that cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get up and you create a crowd and you push back on them, and you tell them they are not welcome.”

Well, they obeyed. The left always obeys. Obedience is the whole point of their program. And now, normal people across the country, nevertheless, are becoming concerned.

“So many frankly unhinged people and unstable people out there," said Kelley Paul, wife of Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, who was attacked by a deranged neighbor over the summer. "And when they hear someone on their side telling them ‘get up in their face,‘ they take that literally, and they think that that gives them a license to be very aggressive, be harassing."

The senator's wife now sleeps with a loaded gun by her bedside. That's what it has come to as Hillary Clinton says there's no being civil with Republicans, and top Democratic lawmakers urge angry citizens to harass people who simply don't share their worldview.

But if you read the Washington Post, you might believe it was all your fault - and all in your head. 

Adapted from Tucker Carlson's monologue on "Tucker Carlson Tonight," Oct. 9, 2018.

THE KAVANAUGH SMEAR AND THE FBI: A CONNECTION?

Do you smell that fetid swamp smell? BH

THE KAVANAUGH SMEAR AND THE FBI: A CONNECTION?
John Hinderacker, Powerline

James Kunstler is a liberal who has a site called Clusterf*** Nation. Although a liberal, he casts a cold, intelligent eye on the follies of our time. The linked post begins by questioning why anyone would believe Christine Ford. What follows is an explosive theme:

I believe that the Christine Blasey Ford gambit was an extension of the sinister activities underway since early 2016 in the Department of Justice and the FBI to un-do the last presidential election, and that the real and truthful story about these seditious monkeyshines is going to blow wide open.

Stunning if true.

It turns out that the Deep State is a small world. Did you know that the lawyer sitting next to Dr. Ford in the Senate hearings, one Michael Bromwich, is also an attorney for Andrew McCabe, the former FBI Deputy Director fired for lying to investigators from his own agency and currently singing to a grand jury? What a coincidence. Out of all the lawyers in the most lawyer-infested corner of the USA, she just happened to hook up with him. 

It’s a matter of record that Dr. Ford traveled to Rehobeth Beach Delaware on July 26, where her Best Friend Forever and former room-mate, Monica McLean, lives, and that she spent the next four days there before sending a letter July 30 to Senator Diane Feinstein that kicked off the “sexual assault” circus. Did you know that Monica McClean was a retired FBI special agent, and that she worked in the US Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York under Preet Bharara, who had earlier worked for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer? 

Could Dr. Ford have spent those four days in July helping Christine Blasey Ford compose her letter to Mrs. Feinstein? Did you know that Monica McClean’s lawyer, one David Laufman is a former DOJ top lawyer who assisted former FBI counter-intel chief Peter Strozk on both the Clinton and Russia investigations before resigning in February this year — in fact, he sat in on the notorious “unsworn” interview with Hillary in 2016. Wow! What a really small swamp Washington is!

Of all the gin joints lawyers in all the towns in all the world, she walks in with one from the FBI. Funny coincidence.

None of this is trivial and the matter can’t possibly rest there. Too much of it has been unraveled by what remains of the news media. And meanwhile, of course, there is at least one grand jury listening to testimony from the whole cast-of-characters behind the botched Hillary investigation and Robert Mueller’s ever more dubious-looking Russian collusion inquiry: the aforementioned Strozk, Lisa Page, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Bill Priestap, et. al. I have a feeling that these matters are now approaching critical mass with the parallel unraveling of the Christine Blasey Ford “story.” 

The Democratic Party has its fingerprints all over this, as it does with the shenanigans over the Russia investigation. Not only do I not believe Dr. Ford’s story; I also don’t believe she acted on her own in this shady business. What’s happening with all these FBI and DOJ associated lawyers is an obvious circling of the wagons. They’ve generated too much animus in the process and they’re going to get nailed. These matters are far from over and a major battle is looming in the countdown to the midterm elections.

The Democrats’ Russia hoax and their smearing of Judge Kavanaugh are two of the most appalling episodes in recent political history. Are they, in some fashion, related? I have no idea. Stay tuned.

Michael Ramirez

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.