The Sedition Hoax

Today's post is more or less a status update: Where are we, at this point, in the Prog war on America?

Conrad Black sets the stage with his article on HR1. I leave the details of HR1 to others. Black's title sums that up well enough:

H.R. 1 is Emblematic of the Crisis of American Democracy

There is no possibility that properly apprised of the contents of H.R. 1, the American people would approve of it.

HR1 is emblematic--but, bad as it is, it isn't the actual heart of the crisis. It would be bad if perpetrated by conservatives. But, as Progs hope to use it, its intent is to make their transformation of America irrevocable. The real crisis, however, is the hold that Prog ideology has gained over the spirit of America.

We all know that Trump's populist nationalism--a nationalism rooted in our traditional constitutional order and culture--was viewed as an existential threat not for simple partisan reasons, but for deeply held ideological reasons. Black captures this well, the reaction that Trump roused. In the wake of Election 2016, the entire Deep State and Establishment was galvanized to prevent Trump or anything remotely like Trump from ever happening again:

The bipartisan political establishment was so shattered by Trump’s victory, and by the subsequent failure to neutralize or remove him through a series of illegal activities, ..., that they confected an elaborate plan not only to dispose of Trump by whatever means were necessary, but to ensure that no reenactment of his horrifying emergence could be staged by an emulator. 

The "elaborate plan" was actually a succession of hoaxes--the Russia Hoax, the Ukraine Hoax leading to the first hoax impeachment, and finally the Covid Hoax. In fact, none of those hoaxes proved sufficient to stop the Trump juggernaut. It ultimately required internal sabotage (h/t Barr and Durham) and election fraud on an unprecedented scale--a virtual hoax election--to prevent a second Trump term. 

The results have proven so tenuous that the Establishment has been unable to simply brazen their coup through. Instead a continuing and highly orchestrated smear campaign against both Trump and the scores of millions of his supporters has been launched--beginning with the January 6 Event and continuing with the ongoing military occupation of the Imperial City on the Potomac. It's clear that the theme of "insurrection" and "sedition" was carefully prepared well before the events of January. 

What makes all this necessary is the fact, repeatedly confirmed by polling, that a good half of Americans believe that Election 2020 was probably not a valid election. Just as the Russia Hoax attempted to play off residual patriotism and revulsion toward our Cold War foe, so too the Sedition Hoax plays off residual patriotism with regard to symbols of the American Republican like the US Capitol--no matter that the Establishment is leading a determined assault against all that that residual patriotism holds dear in our constitutional order.

Lending urgency to all this is the fact that legal challenges to Election 2020 have not simply gone away. In actual fact, new developments in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona--and possibly other states as well--are tending to confirm Trump's claims of fraud and illegality. The Establishment cannot simply allow these challenges to play out--they must continue the attempt to cancel Trump, his presidency, and his supporters.

The continuing persecution of protesters who attended the January 6 Event is central to the effort to cancel Trump. Thus, last Sunday on 60 Minutes, we witnessed what must surely be the most outrageous abuse of prosecutorial office in our history:

DOJ Prosecutor Now Says Trump Could Be *Charged* for Capitol Riots

The spectacle of a US Attorney openly suggesting--based on the most transparently bogus "evidence imaginable--that a former POTUS could be charged with attempting to forcibly overthrow the US Government is pretty breathtaking:

A Department of Justice prosecutor believes that former President Donald Trump could be charged for his alleged role in the Capitol riots. The DOJ federal prosecutor, Michael Sherwin, made the bombshell assertion on 60 Minutes on Sunday.

“Has the role of former President Trump been part of your investigation?” Pelley asked.

“It’s unequivocal that Trump was the magnet that brought the people to D.C. on the 6th,” replied Sherwin, making a spurious argument.

So does that mean that Trump is “criminally culpable for everything that happened during the siege, during the breach?” Pelley asked.

Sherwin said that: “We have plenty of people– we have soccer moms from Ohio that were arrested saying, ‘Well, I did this because my president said I had to take back our house.’ That moves the needle towards that direction,” Sherwin argued.

“Maybe the president is culpable for those actions,” the prosecutor insinuated. “But also, you see in the public record too, militia members saying, ‘You know what? We did this because Trump just talks a big game. He’s just all talk. We did what he wouldn’t do.'”

“In short, you have investigators looking into the president’s role?” asked Pelley.

“We have people looking at everything, correct,” Sherwin replied. “Everything’s being looked at.”

This reckless tactic actually got support from Mitch McConnell--a strong indication of Establishment backing for this effort:

“President Trump is still liable for everything he did while in office,” he said. “He didn’t get away with anything yet. We have a criminal justice system in this country."

Obviously, any impartial application of the relevant laws would rule such prosecutorial schemes out of court, but these are no ordinary times:

..., a criminal case brought against Donald Trump based on “incitement” of an imminent unlawful act is bound to fail according to the time-honored Brandenburg test. The test is two-fold:

1. The speech is “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action,” AND
2. The speech is “likely to incite or produce such action.”

The only clear directive that Donald Trump gave at his January 6th speech to protest was contingent that the attendees do so “peacefully and patriotically.”

The speech that Donald Trump gave hinged on commoplace political rhetoric that he had given at dozens of spirited, but completely peaceful rallies. Indeed, the Trump legal defense team did an apt job exposing the Democrats’ own lack of standards about whether invoking the term “fight” was tantamount to a call to arms.

Of course, the failure of anything Trump said or did to meet recognized legal standards isn't exactly the point--his two "impeachments" demonstrate that pretty conclusively. The ultimate goal is cancellation by whatever means, fair or foul--whatever it takes to get the Dems past the Election 2022 hurdle. So this Sedition Hoax strategy will continue, with the hope of discrediting, i.e. canceling, all dissent from the Prog Establishment. We can also look forward to continued 24/7 hysteria over "White Supremacy" as well as continued efforts to keep Americans socially distanced from one another--and therefore divided. As always, MSM and Social Media will be doing their utmost to suppress dissenting voices.

The only real question is, Will Americans ever wake up to what's happening to their lives?

ADDENDUM: To go with the reflections above, I highly recommend a book review that appeared this morning:

A review of “The Dictatorship of Woke Capital: How Political Correctness Captured Big Business,” by Stephen R Soukup (Encounter Books, 208 pages, $25.99)

Woke Capitalism

How the woke captured even the financial services.

What this review article does is present the forces that have been pushing a "progressive" transformation of our constitutional order for well over a century. The basic idea is to replace a republican form of government with, basically, what we have now: an administrative state run by "expert" unelected bureaucrats. The current generation of progressives, educated in the 60s and 70s, is deeply influenced by Cultural Marxism--especially Herbert Marcuse--as filtered through contemporary critical racism and generalized PC wokeism. For example: 

Soukup offers surprising insights into the philosophical roots of woke business. Indeed, his third chapter, on “The Long March Through the Institutions,” is the best history of woke I’ve seen. It is much better than Cynical Theories, which was published a few months earlier, but whose historiography goes back only to France in the 1960s. Soukup goes from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 18th-century socialism, through the Frankfurt School of the 1920s, to its American popularizer Herbert Marcuse. The latter’s book, Eros and Civilization (1959) promoted unlimited sexual perversion, including with pre-adolescents, to overcome the supposed social constraints on our freedom.

...

Soukup presents startling historical insights too. The first progressive U.S. president, Woodrow Wilson, was bankrolled into an academic and political career. Friends in industry and finance pulled the strings that promoted him from a small liberal arts college to an Ivy League university, and eventually president of Princeton.

In 1907, financiers manipulated the “Bankers’ Panic” to agitate for a central bank that would serve the interests of investment bankers. Republican President William Howard Taft was unpersuaded, so they encouraged Theodore Roosevelt back into politics to challenge him for the Republican Party’s nomination. They also sponsored Wilson on the Democratic Party’s ticket in 1912, knowing that Roosevelt would split the Republican progressives. What was in it for them? Wilson would create a central bank (the Federal Reserve), and appoint some of them to serve on it.

The Federal Reserve was the first of the unelected centralized administrative institutions. Wilson had studied for his Ph.D. under Richard Ely, a political economist trained in Germany and employed at Johns Hopkins—a university founded in imitation of Victorian-era German progressive universities. Ely and Wilson founded the institutions and doctrine for the administrative state, that is, rule by unelected administrators. As Soukup sums up their thinking, “people are too ignorant and too selfish to vote for that which is in their own best interests, or the best interests of society as a whole.”

Problem? Unelected administrators aren't actually so different from ordiary people: too ignorant and selfish to be trusted with power but without real accountability. Yeah, that's pretty much where we are and where we have been for a long time. The difference is that those Marcuse disciples are now getting their turn at the levers of government, and it's looking pretty ugly.

Anyway, the review traces the progress of these progressives up to the present--through FDR, Clinton, Obama. He touches on the self serving financial bailouts, etc. The point is, these are the people who are bankrolling the anti-Trump forces. These are the forces we're up against, but immeasurably more influential now in this digital age of near total surveillance.