What I Don’t Like About Life in Post-9/11 America

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Life in a post-9/11 America increasingly feels like an endless free fall down a rabbit hole into a terrifying, dystopian alternative reality in which the citizenry has no rights, the government is no friend to freedom, and everything we ever knew and loved about the values and principles that once made this country great has been turned on its head.

We’ve walked a strange and harrowing road since September 11, 2001, littered with the debris of our once-vaunted liberties.

We have gone from a nation that took great pride in being a model of a representative democracy to being a model of how to persuade the citizenry to march in lockstep with a police state.

Osama Bin Laden right warned that “freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people in — and the West in general — into an unbearable hell and a choking life.”

These past 17 years have proven Bin Laden right in his prediction.

What began with the passage of the USA Patriot Act in October 2001 has snowballed into the eradication of every vital safeguard against government overreach, corruption and abuse.

The citizenry’s unquestioning acquiescence to anything the government wants to do in exchange for the phantom promise of safety and security has resulted in a society where the nation is being locked down into a militarized, mechanized, hypersensitive, legalistic, self-righteous, goose-stepping antithesis of every principle upon which this nation was founded.

This is not freedom.

This is a jail cell.

Set against a backdrop of government surveillance, militarized police, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, eminent domain, overcriminalization, armed surveillance drones, whole body scanners, stop and frisk searches, roving VIPR raids and the like—all of which have been sanctioned by Congress, the White House and the courts—our constitutional freedoms have been steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded.

Our losses are mounting with every passing day.

Free speech, the right to protest, the right to challenge government wrongdoing, due process, a presumption of innocence, the right to self-defense, accountability and transparency in government, privacy, press, sovereignty, assembly, bodily integrity, representative government: all of these and more have become casualties in the government’s war on the American people, a war that has grown more pronounced since 9/11.

Since the towers fell on 9/11, the American people have been treated like enemy combatants, to be spied on, tracked, scanned, frisked, searched, subjected to all manner of intrusions, intimidated, invaded, raided, manhandled, censored, silenced, shot at, locked up, and denied due process.

In allowing ourselves to be distracted by terror drills, foreign wars, color-coded warnings, underwear bombers and other carefully constructed exercises in propaganda, sleight of hand, and obfuscation, we failed to recognize that the true enemy to freedom was lurking among us all the while.

The U.S. government now poses a greater threat to our freedoms than any terrorist, extremist or foreign entity ever could.

While nearly 3,000 people died in the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government and its agents have easily killed at least ten times that number of civilians in the U.S. and abroad since 9/11 through its police shootings, SWAT team raids, drone strikes and profit-driven efforts to police the globe, sell weapons to foreign nations, and foment civil unrest in order to keep the military industrial complex gainfully employed.

No, the U.S. government is not the citizenry’s friend, nor is it our protector, and life in the United States of America post-9/11 is no picnic.

In the interest of full disclosure, here are some of the things I don’t like about life in a post-9/11 America:

I don’t like being treated as if my only value to the government is as a source of labor and funds.

I don’t like being viewed as a consumer and bits of data.

I don’t like being spied on and treated as if I have no right to privacy, especially in my own home.

I don’t like government officials who lobby for my vote only to ignore me once elected. I don’t like having representatives incapable of andunwilling to represent me. I don’t like taxation without representation.

I don’t like being bullied by government bureaucrats, vigilantes masquerading as cops, or faceless technicians.

I don’t like being railroaded into financing government programs whose only purpose is to increase the power and wealth of the corporate elite.

I don’t like being forced to pay for wars abroad that serve no other purpose except to expand the reach of the military industrial complex.

I don’t like being subjected to scans, searches, pat downs and other indignities by the TSA.

I don’t like VIPR raids on so-called “soft” targets like shopping malls and bus depots by black-clad, Darth Vader look-alikes.

I don’t like fusion centers, which represent the combined surveillance efforts of federal, state and local law enforcement.

I don’t like being treated like an underling by government agents who are supposed to be working for me. I don’t like being threatened, intimidated, bribed, beaten and robbed by individuals entrusted with safeguarding my rights. I don’t like being silenced, censored and marginalized. I don’t like my movements being tracked, my conversations being recorded, and my transactions being catalogued.

I don’t like free speech zones, roving bubble zones and trespass laws that restrict Americans’ First Amendment rights.

I don’t like laws that criminalize Americans for otherwise lawful activities such as holding religious studies at home, growing vegetables in their yard, and collecting rainwater.

I don’t like the NDAA, which allows the president and the military to arrest and detain American citizens indefinitely.

I don’t like the Patriot Act, which opened the door to all manner of government abuses and intrusions on our privacy.

I don’t like the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which has become America’s standing army in direct opposition to the dire warnings of those who founded our country.

I don’t like military weapons such as armored vehicles, sound cannons and the like being used against the American citizens.

I don’t like government agencies such as the DHS, Post Office, Social Security Administration and Wildlife stocking up on hollow-point bullets. And I definitely don’t like the implications of detention centers being built that could house American citizens.

I don’t like the fact that police departments across the country “have received tens of thousands of machine guns; nearly 200,000 ammunition magazines; thousands of pieces of camouflage and night-vision equipment; and hundreds of silencers, armored cars and aircraft.”

I don’t like America’s infatuation with locking people up for life for non-violent crimes. There are thousands of people in America serving life sentences for non-violent crimes, including theft of a jacket, siphoning gasoline from a truck, stealing tools, and attempting to cash a stolen check.

I don’t like paying roughly $29,000 a year per inmate just to keep these nonviolent offenders in prison.

I don’t like having my hard-earned taxpayer dollars used against me.

I don’t like the partisan nature of politics today, which has so polarized Americans that they are incapable of standing in unity against the government’s abuses.

I don’t like the entertainment drivel that passes for news coverage today.

I don’t like the fact that those within a 25-mile range of the border are getting a front row seat to the American police state, as Border Patrol agents are now allowed to search people’s homes, intimately probe their bodies, and rifle through their belongings, all without a warrant.

I don’t like public schools that treat students as if they were prison inmates. I don’t like zero tolerance laws that criminalize childish behavior. I don’t like a public educational system that emphasizes rote memorization and test-taking over learning, synthesizing and critical thinking.

I don’t like police precincts whose primary purpose—whether through the use of asset forfeiture laws, speed traps, or red light cameras—is making a profit at the expense of those they have sworn to protect. I don’t like militarized police and their onerous SWAT team raids.

I don’t like Department of Defense and DHS programs that transfer surplus military hardware to local and state police. I don’t like local police dressing and acting as if they were the military while viewing me as an enemy combatant.

I don’t like government programs that reward cops for raiding homes and terrorizing homeowners.

I don’t like being treated as if I have no rights.

I don’t like cash-strapped states cutting deals with private corporations to run the prisons in exchange for maintaining 90% occupancy rates for at least 20 years. I don’t like the fact that American prisons have become the source of cheap labor for Corporate America.

I don’t like answering to an imperial president who operates above the law.

I don’t like the injustice that passes for justice in the courts.

I don’t like prosecutors so hell bent on winning that they allow innocent people to suffer for crimes they didn’t commit.

I don’t like the double standards that allow government officials to break laws with immunity, while average Americans get the book thrown at them.

I don’t like cops who shoot first and ask questions later.

I don’t like police dogs being treated with more respect and afforded more rights than American citizens.

I don’t like living in a suspect society.

I don’t like Americans being assumed guilty until they prove their innocence.

I don’t like technology being used as a double-edged sword against us.

Most of all, I don’t like feeling as if there’s no hope for turning things around.

Now there are those who would suggest that if I don’t like things about this country, I should leave and go elsewhere. Certainly, there are those among my fellow citizens who are leaving for friendlier shores.

However, I’m not giving up on this country without a fight.

I plan to keep fighting, writing, speaking up, speaking out, shouting if necessary, filing lawsuits, challenging the status quo, writing letters to the editor, holding my representatives accountable, thinking nationally but acting locally, and generally raising a ruckus anytime the government attempts to undermine the Constitution and ride roughshod over the rights of the citizenry.

Our country may be in deep trouble, but all is not yet lost.

The first step begins with you.

1. Get educated. Know your rights. Take time to read the Constitution. Study and understand history because the tales of those who seek power and those who resist them is an age-old one. The Declaration of Independence is a testament to this struggle and the revolutionary spirit that overcame tyranny. Understand the vital issues of the day so that you can be cognizant of the threats to freedom. Stay informed about current events and legislation.

2. Get involved. Become actively involved in local community affairs, politics and legal battles. As the adage goes, “Think nationally, act locally.” America was meant to be primarily a system of local governments, which is a far cry from the colossal federal bureaucracy we have today. Yet if our freedoms are to be restored, understanding what is transpiring practically in your own backyard—in one’s home, neighborhood, school district, town council—and taking action at that local level must be the starting point. Responding to unmet local needs and reacting to injustices is what grassroots activism is all about. Getting involved in local politics is one way to bring about change.

3. Get organized. Understand your strengths and weaknesses and tap into your resources. Play to your strengths and assets. Conduct strategy sessions to develop both the methods and ways to attack the problem. Prioritize your issues and battles. Don’t limit yourself to protests and paper petitions. Think outside the box. Time is short, and resources are limited, so use your resources in the way they count the most.

4. Be creative. Be bold and imaginative, for this is guerilla warfare—not to be fought with tanks and guns but through creative methods of dissent and resistance. Creatively responding to circumstances will often be one of your few resources if you are to be an effective agent of change. Every creative effort, no matter how small, is significant.

5. Use the media. Effective use of the media is essential. Attracting media coverage not only enhances and magnifies your efforts, it is also a valuable education tool. It publicizes your message to a much wider audience.

6. Start brushfires for freedom. Take heart that you are not alone. You come from a long, historic line of individuals who have put their beliefs and lives on the line to keep freedom alive. Engage those around you in discussions about issues of importance. Challenge them to be part of a national dialogue. As I have often said, one person at a city planning meeting with a protest sign is an irritant. Three individuals at the same meeting with the same sign are a movement. You will find that those in power fear and respect numbers. This is not to say that lone crusaders are not important. There are times when you will find yourself totally alone in the stand you take. However, there is power in numbers. Politicians understand this. So get out there and start drumming up support for your cause.

7. Take action. Be prepared to mobilize at a moment’s notice. It doesn’t matter who you are, where you’re located or what resources are at your disposal. What matters is that you recognize the problems and care enough to do something about them. Whether you’re 8, 28 or 88 years old, you have something unique to contribute. You don’t have to be a hero. You just have to show up and be ready to take action.

8. Be forward-looking. Beware of being so “in the moment” that you neglect to think of the bigger picture. Develop a vision for the future. Is what you’re hoping to achieve enduring? Have you developed a plan to continue to educate others about the problems you’re hoping to tackle and ensure that others will continue in your stead? Take the time to impart the value of freedom to younger generations, for they will be at the vanguard of these battles someday.

9. Develop fortitude. What is it that led to the successful protest movements of the past headed by people such as Martin Luther King Jr.? Resolve. King refused to be put off. And when the time came, he was willing to take to the streets for what he believed and even go to jail if necessary. King risked having an arrest record by committing acts of nonviolent civil disobedience. A caveat is appropriate here. Before resorting to nonviolent civil disobedience, all reasonable alternatives should be exhausted. If there is an opportunity to alter the course of events through normal channels (for example, negotiation, legal action or legislation), they should be attempted.

10. Be selfless and sacrificial. Freedom is not free—there is always a price to be paid and a sacrifice to be made. If any movement is to be truly successful, it must be manned by individuals who seek a greater good and do not waver from their purposes. It will take boldness, courage and great sacrifice. Rarely will fame, power and riches be found at the end of this particular road. Those who travel it inevitably find the way marked by hardship, persecution and strife. Yet there is no easy way.

11. Remain optimistic and keep hope alive. Although our rights are increasingly coming under attack, we still have certain freedoms. As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we can still fight back. We have the right to dissent, to protest and even to vigorously criticize or oppose the government and its laws. The Constitution guarantees us these rights. In a country such as the United States, a citizen armed with a knowledge of the Bill of Rights and the fortitude to stand and fight can still be a force to be reckoned with, but it will mean speaking out when others are silent.

Practice persistence, along with perseverance, and the possibilities are endless. You can be the voice of reason. Use your voice to encourage others. Much can be accomplished by merely speaking out. Oftentimes, all it takes is one lone voice to get things started. So if you really care and you’re serious and want to help change things for the better, dust off your First Amendment tools and take a stand—even if it means being ostracized by those who would otherwise support you.

It won’t be easy, but take heart. And don’t give up. (This post originally appeared HERE)

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Believe in Something, but Only If It’s True

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I was startled to learn that Nike is making former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick the face of its next marketing campaign. Kaepernick, you may recall, was riding the San Francisco 49ers bench two years ago, not only during the national anthem but during the games, due to inferior play.

Nike and Kaepernick’s supporters are attempting to revise history at this point, claiming that he sacrificed his career on a matter of principle. “Believe in something,” the Nike Kaepernick ad urges, “even if it means sacrificing everything.”

But Kaepernick’s career as a starting quarterback was already over before he started disrespecting the flag and the national anthem. By the time he was benched, he was rated 28th out of 28 starting NFL quarterbacks. NFL defenses had cracked the code, and his brief honeymoon in the league came to a bone-jarring halt.

If I were looking for somebody to represent the Nike slogan to “believe in something even if it means sacrificing everything,” I’d probably lean toward Barronelle Stutzman, owner of Arlene’s Flowers in Richland, Washington. Mrs. Stutzman, 73, has served and employed gay people all her life, but that wasn’t good enough for Washington state’s grandstanding attorney general, who joined with the American Civil Liberties Union to sue the Christian lady because she refused to design floral art for a longtime customer’s homosexual wedding.

Or Jack Phillips, co-owner (with his wife) of Masterpiece Cake Shop in Lakewood, Colorado. The state ordered him to design cakes celebrating homosexual marriage, or get out of the business. He took them to court instead. After several years, he won a 7-2 Supreme Court decision this summer. The state has already trumped up another case against him. Phillips says that when he gets vulgar, threatening phone calls from gay allies, he takes it as an opportunity to reach out, and to pray for them.

Or Kim Davis, county clerk at Rowan County, Kentucky, who went to jail rather than comply with a federal judge’s order that she issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

But Nike has a business to run, and their ads need to appeal to the demographic that is obsessed with shoe brands, in some extreme cases to the point of homicide. And so Colin Kaepernick it is – a narcissist who used to be known for kissing his tattoos after touchdowns. His photograph in the ad looks like a mug shot: cold, malignant eyes and a prim, disapproving mouth.

You can bet that Nike did its due diligence calculations before this decision. They knew some of us would vow never to buy from them again. But they also know who their future buyers are. They’re marketing to a demographic with an average IQ of 85 or less, and a chip on its collective shoulder. Criminal subculture “street cred” is golden marketing. Cop-killing is not a deal-killer in this market. Nike stock has spiked since the decision.

At first, Kaepernick just remained seated on the bench during the anthem. I thought maybe he just wanted to make sure he got a good spot, because he was going to spend the rest of the game there. But when a reporter questioned him about it, he mumbled something about police shootings of Black men.

Kaepernick has displayed socks depicting police as pigs, and has donated $25 thousand to a Chicago-based organization – Assata’s Daughters – that honored cop-killer Joanne Chesimard. Joanne took a revolutionary name, Assata Shakur. She was convicted of first-degree murder in the shooting death of New Jersey State Trooper Werner Forester, but later escaped from prison and is living in Cuba under the protection of Raoul Castro.

Kaepernick has worn Che Guevara shirts. It’s no hyperbole to say that he hates police, and he hates America. But former teammate Eric Reid was more publicity-savvy than the sullen, inarticulate Kaepernick. He convinced Kaepernick to join him in kneeling during the anthem instead of sitting on the bench. Reid said kneeling is the equivalent of flying the flag at half staff to acknowledge a tragedy.

And kneeling did catch the imagination of NFL players, mostly but not exclusively Black, and their media chroniclers. They wanted to have it both ways: they wanted to protest during the national anthem, but they insisted they were as patriotic as people who honor the flag and the anthem. It’s an absurd claim.

It’s certainly possible to protest and still be a patriot. In fact, love of country sometimes demands that you protest. And it’s an explicit Constitutional right. But when you protest during the national anthem, you’re showing contempt for what holds us together, what makes us care about people who are otherwise unconnected to us. It’s disrespectful, not persuasive, to make a spectacle of your complaints during the national anthem. We care less – not more – about your grievances if you think you owe our mutual national identity no loyalty.

Sherry Graham-Potter, the widow of an Arizona deputy sheriff killed in the line of duty, wrote an open letter to Nike after they announced their decision to line America’s highways with billboards of the cop-hating Kaepernick’s dead glare. She raised the objections that you would expect from a fallen police officer’s widow, but she also returned to a point that is rarely mentioned anymore: the cop-haters’ central accusation “has been proven false time and time again, in study after study.”

Does the truth matter to Kaepernick or Reid or Nike shareholders? It’s simply not true that unarmed Black men are disproportionately shot down by police.

Liberal college professors and the liberal Washington Post have dug into the data on this subject, and have admitted in the end that there is no statistical support for the claim that police shoot unarmed Black men more than they shoot unarmed white or Hispanic men. In one recent year, police officers were 18 times more likely to be killed by Black men than unarmed Black men were to be killed by police officers. It’s shameful to accuse somebody of homicidal racism if it’s not true. Just stop.

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Afghanistan Is Un-Winnable

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Carl von Clausewitz, 19th century military theorist, stressed the importance of knowing your enemy: “The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish … the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature.”

For 17 years, we wrongly applied counterinsurgency doctrine to a proxy war waged by Pakistan against the United States and Afghanistan. That approach was never a winning strategy as long as Pakistan controlled the supply of our troops in landlocked Afghanistan and regulated the operational tempo through its proxy army, the Taliban, who has maintained an extensive recruiting, training and financial support infrastructure inside Pakistan and immune to attack.

An American withdrawal will only be a humiliating defeat if the United States is forced into strategic retreat from South Asia because we do not have a plan in place to address the changing regional conditions in a post-U.S. Afghanistan.

I have written and spoken extensively about China orchestrating a strategic shift in South Asia working closely with Pakistan, Russia and Iran.

That geopolitical plan cannot succeed without the removal of the U.S. forces and influence from Afghanistan. China’s plan is for the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to become the dominant economic driver in South Asia through the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). The Shanghai Cooperation Organization will be the controlling regional alliance led by China.

Although not stated, Chinese militarization of the region will follow to ensure “security.” In many cases, expect that militarization to occur initially disguised as civilian construction projects.

Nowhere has Chinese ambitions been more clearly and publicly articulated than in a June 2018 China Daily article by former Pakistani diplomat, Zamir Ahmed Awan, who works for the Beijing-controlled Center for China and Globalization:

New [Chinese] initiatives for peace in Afghanistan are welcome, and may change the scenario in the whole region.

I believe American think tanks and leadership, especially military leadership, [have] already realized that this war cannot be won. The only option is withdrawal, the sooner the better.

Pakistan can play a vital role in a sustainable solution to the Afghan conflict [controlling Afghanistan as a client state]. Complete withdrawal and an Afghan-led [Taliban-led] solution is the only permanent way out. Pakistan can facilitate an honorable and safe passage for U.S. withdrawal.

Peace in Afghanistan will allow economic activity between Central Asia, Russia, China and the Arabian Sea…It can change the fate of the whole region. Chinese projects like the Belt and Road Initiative and the objectives of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization [SCO] … At the recent SCO summit, the Afghanistan president was invited as a guest and observer. Hopefully, the country will soon join SCO. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor may also be extended to benefit Afghanistan in the near future if there is peace.

Since that article was published, China has offered to extend CPEC to Afghanistan; China will build a military facility in and deploy Chinese troops to Afghanistan; Afghan military personnel will be trained in China; and members of the Afghan Parliament have recommended that the Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA) between the U.S. and Afghanistan be cancelled, presumably to be replaced by China.

The only bargaining chip the United States has in peace negotiations is simply our presence in Afghanistan. According to the Voice of America, talks with the Taliban are stuck over the issue of the maintenance of U.S. military bases in the country. The United States wants to preserve two military facilities, Bagram Air Base and the Shorabak base in Helmand province.

The “presence” argument is tenuous at best. The United States should be identifying new forms of leverage, in the short term, to bolster our negotiating position, and, in the long term, as a basis of a new South Asian strategy.

The recently-announced effort to strengthen military ties with India is a step in that direction. The U.S. should also include measures to thwart Chinese plans for regional hegemony through BRI and its evitable military component. CPEC is the flagship of BRI, Balochistan is CPEC’s center of gravity and ethnic separatism is Pakistan’s major pain point. Both the Baloch and Pashtun resistance to Pakistani government oppression offer the opportunity to create greater leverage through the use of our own proxies.

The foundations of a new U.S. strategy in South Asia should be burden shifting and, when necessary, strategic disruption of our adversaries.

Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D. is a retired U.S. Army Reserve colonel, an IT command and control subject matter expert, trained in Arabic and Kurdish, and a veteran of Afghanistan, northern Iraq and a humanitarian mission to West Africa. He receives email at [email protected].

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What Election? Republicans Have Already Handed Congress to the Democrats

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We hear a lot of talk about Russians interfering with the 2016 election results, but really, Republicans did the job for them.

What if I had told you during the 2016 elections that Republicans would pass a short-term budget bill funding the government and all its vices in a way that is absolutely indistinguishable from a bill Democrats would pass, merge it with a long-term bill funding the worst aspects of immigration, abortion, everything we hate about the Department of Education and Obamacare, massively increase spending, and then pair it with a bill funding the troops? What if I had told you we were about to lose the next election as severely as the 1974 “Watergate” election because Republicans were busy accomplishing the other side’s goals?

It’s bad enough that the Senate passed a “minibus” funding the Departments of Health and Human Services (HHS), Labor, and Education, attached to defense spending. It’s bad enough that Republicans planned on passing a stopgap continuing resolution (CR) locking in last year’s spending increase through December 7 without addressing the border crisis. Now they have introduced a final bill merging the two.

With every budget bill, Republicans find a way to up the ante on their perfidy and give Democrats more than they could get when they were in control. In 2015, when Republicans didn’t even control the veto pen, Chuck Schumer expressed shock that the GOP Senate gave away the farm. “If you would’ve told me this year that we’d be standing here celebrating the passage of an omnibus bill, with no poison pill riders, at higher [spending] levels above sequesters than even the president requested, I wouldn’t have believed it, but here we are,” said the Democrat senator in December 2015. “Almost anything the Republican leadership in the Senate achieved this year, they achieved on Democratic terms. … Democrats had an amazingly good year.”

And here we are today, with Republicans in control of the White House as well, and spending is several hundred billion dollars more.

A Republican Party that was committed to its platform would have passed a stand-alone defense and homeland security bill long ago with conservative priorities. Instead, Republicans sabotaged conservatives by holding defense spending hostage for a Democrat bill that fully funds the asylum invasion but not border security.

The HHS-Labor-Education component appropriates $178 billion for fiscal year 2019, $10.7 billion more than Trump requested. HHS would receive a 2.6 percent increase over the current record levels I decried in the March bill for fiscal year 2018. The bill also contains $286 million for Title X abortion funding, as well as $100 million for Obama’s “teen pregnancy prevention program.” They also removed a provision from the House version allowing adoption agencies the discretion not to place children in homes without a father and mother.

Rather than barring HHS from settling phony “unaccompanied” minors fueling the MS-13 and drug crisis, the bill requires HHS to “develop a strategy” for “reunifying” the invaders who self-separate from their kids to empower the drug cartels and endanger our country. We now have a Congress of, by, and for foreign invaders. It’s surreal. Out of 25 ideas that I proposed to protect Americans from the emergency of illegal immigration and all its cascading effects – from gangs and drugs to identity theft, crime, and the strain on schools – not a single conservative provision was put into the bill.

The increase in spending was totally gratuitous, because agencies were already scrambling to binge-spend an extra $140 billion they never anticipated at the start of the last fiscal year. Republicans agreed to massively increase spending halfway through the fiscal year in February and March after agencies already budgeted for much less.

With just 11 months of data from this fiscal year, we now know the deficit is $900 billion, already $233 billion more than the 12 months of fiscal year 2017. And remember, last year, which was the first year of full GOP control, already saw a $128 billion increase in spending over Obama’s final year. You will hear the media blame the tax cuts for most of the deficit, but the reality is that, for August, revenues were down $7 billion compared to August 2017, while outlays were up $100 billion! Interest on the debt is soaring. This is simply astounding given the condition of the economy.

Think about this for a moment. Could you imagine going back to 1996, when even moderate Republicans thought government was too big and our social values were decrepit? We would now give anything to go back to those levels of spending and policy values on health care and education. The Department of Education now costs $71 billion in discretionary spending alone, compared to $24 billion in 1996. HHS was $33 billion compared to $90.3 billion today, in discretionary spending alone. Back in 1996, the total cost of HHS, including the entitlement and welfare programs, was $333 billion. Now it’s well over $1.2 trillion.

That was when the entire federal budget was $1.5 trillion; now it’s $4.2 trillion. That was when we passed welfare reform. That was when we passed a massive immigration enforcement bill. And yes, that was without controlling the White House.

Now we have all three branches, and yet the Republicans are light-years to the left of Democrats of the ’90s.

At its core, this is the mentality that GOP voters despised when they voted for Trump, yet he has signed every budget betrayal and has declined to threaten a veto of this bill every day, even though he promised he’d never get owned in another budget bill and saw this coming a mile away.

At some point, phony conservative organizations and commentators need to step out of the soap opera and ask the question: All this for what? Perhaps a Watergate-style loss in November – all so we can die on left-wing policy hills – is what it will take for conservatives in this industry to finally wake up and reassert control over this party or start and new one. American citizens or legal immigrants who aren’t on the dole, don’t plan on getting a sex change operation or abortion, just want a fair chance in a free market, and want safety from external threats just don’t matter to either party. Faced with the current disquiet and a lack of alternatives, many voters will simply choose the party that is currently out of power to lodge their protest, even though Democrats are really in power in all but name only. (For more from the author of “What Election? Republicans Have Already Handed Congress to the Democrats” please click HERE)

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The Trump Presidency – When Excellence Is Punished

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There was a girl in my high school who was excellence personified. She was tall, beautiful, modest, honest and a very nice person. She was a straight-A student and would help anyone in need. But she sat alone in the cafeteria, walked the halls alone, had no friends, was never invited to parties and never had a date.

When time came to vote for “Senior Queen,” a teacher who recognized the girl’s excellence nominated her as a candidate. She was everything a Senior Queen should be — but she only received five votes out of 900 students.

Her problem was she was too excellent, in every way, and the other girls hated her for it. She was better than any one of them in every way. This angered the other girls and they wanted to punish her for it. Not only did they shun her but warned every boy in the school that if any of them “cozied up” to her, they could forget about ever “getting lucky” with any girl in the school and it worked as intended.

President Donald Trump is very much like this girl. In a short period of time, he has shown the country he is better at getting things done and making the United States safer, more prosperous, more respected, happier, and more hopeful than it has been in a long time. He is much better at being president than any president in modern history, and maybe even before.

Trump is not afraid to undertake the difficult tasks that other presidents promised to do but never did. And he successfully solved them. He has succeeded in areas where other presidents failed. Most Americans love him, are happy for him, and pray for his continued success.

With all his accomplishments in making the United a far better place than he had found it, everyone should be happy. Why wouldn’t they be?

In what is clearly counterintuitive, almost half the country hates him.

If someone came to America right now, knowing nothing about it, he would look around and see that nearly everyone had a job, people are becoming more affluent, they feel safe from hostile foreign powers, they are proud of their country, and they are happy and hopeful.

If he were to ask, “Has it always been like this in America?” he would be told, “No, it has not always been this way.”

It would be explained to him that for quite a while things were actually very bad in the country.

People couldn’t find jobs or had to work several part-time jobs just to pay the bills. The country was viewed as weak in the world and other countries felt free to do as they pleased, regardless of the U.S. position. The past president would talk tough to other countries and warn them not to cross his line, then do nothing when they did. It had become embarrassing to be an American.

The stranger would likely respond that everyone must love the new president.

And the answer would be, “You would think so, but half the people — those known as “the left” — hate him.”

The stranger would be baffled and would likely say, “That makes no sense.”

And the people would simply shrug and shake their heads.

This stranger would eventually come to learn that the people who hate the current president have personally benefitted from his presidency in many ways, from increased 401Ks to better and cheaper health care.

Regardless, they still hate him because they were a member of the party that controlled the government before the new president. The new president took away their power and they hate him for it.

They want their party back in power — even if it meant all the good done for the country by the new president would vanish and the country would return to the terrible conditions of the previous presidency.

Just like, “all the other girls” in my high school, the left has warned other members of their party — that if they dare “cozy-up” to the new president, they will be made to regret it.

Just ask Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor who came to the new president’s defense when the left overreacted to Trump’s former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, claiming he and the president both violated a minor and murky campaign election law.

The left claimed this was “high crimes and misdemeanors” and clearly an impeachable offense while Dershowitz called their reaction “nonsense.”

Dershowitz had always been one of the left’s darlings and during his traditional summers at Martha’s Vineyard, he would be greeted with open arms, welcomed in every left-wing home, invited to all the left’s parties, and asked to be an honored speaker at their academic seminars.

As punishment for “cozying up” to Trump, instead of treating him as one of their darlings, the left shunned Dershowitz and he quickly went from a darling to a pariah.

All the members of the left took notice of this public shunning and even more than before carefully minded their political “P’s and Q’s” to avoid this same terrible fate.

My grandmother would have described this strange and ironic behavior of the left this way: “They’re cutting off their nose to spite their face.”

But such is the depth of the American political divide. The left would rather starve than take food from the hand of Donald Trump. It is eerily similar to those who set themselves on fire to protest what they hate.

Thus, as a nation, we have arrived at a place where almost half the country feels presidential success and excellence is worthy of nothing but scorn and punishment.

Not only is this bizarre, it is also sad and disheartening. (For more from the author of “The Trump Presidency – When Excellence Is Punished” please click HERE)

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Our Founders Never Thought the Courts Had the Final Say — and Neither Should We

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“Whenever a free people should give up in absolute submission to any department of government, retaining for themselves no appeal from it, their liberties were gone.” ~Abraham Lincoln, citing Thomas Jefferson

As a conservative who believes both in conservative policy outcomes and the authentic interpretation of the Constitution and the Fourteenth Amendment, I wish we had nine Clarence Thomases on the Supreme Court and like-minded judges on the lower courts. I wish every policy emanating from Congress or state legislatures that I felt violated my interpretation of the Constitution would immediately be placed in front of this eminent tribunal with life tenure so that it could be vetoed. Yet I recognize that this is a system more tyrannical than the one we fought in 1776. However, it is indeed the system we now face, except that the overwhelming majority of judges – both Republican and Democrat – do not interpret the Constitution but make it up as they go.

A republic or a dictatorship of the robes?

It is clear that Democrats believe the courts are the final say on every constitutional question – no matter how absurd their ruling is. They further believe that once a court uses this phantom “veto” power a single time on the progressive side of the question, even when that ruling is overturning 200 years of laws, political practices, customs, and prior court precedent, it is unassailable, not just by the other branches of government but even by a subsequent court.

Republicans disagree with the latter point, as they feel another court can overturn a previous court, but they fundamentally accept the premise that a court opinion in an individual case can set broad precedent that is self-executing and universally binding as the law on everyone and out of reach of the other two branches. As both Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, and Judge Kavanaugh indicated during questioning last week, the only recourse for Congress is to attempt to pass a constitutional amendment.

This is simply not true and is a threat to the very foundation of our system of government. It is true that there is a concept of res judicata – finality in judgement – for individual plaintiffs in civil and criminal cases. But if the courts in that process are going to engage in review of legislation and broad political issues affecting the entire country in order to resolve a case or controversy, there was never any understanding that we’d apply res judicata to judicial review.

The truth is that court opinions are not self-executing and universally binding as broad legal and political precedent on the other two branches. There are numerous tools at the disposal of Congress to prospectively and retrospectively check the judiciary through legislation, not by constitutional amendment, and the federal courts only have the jurisdiction vested in them by Congress.

Ultimately, each branch of government has a responsibility to interpret the Constitution as it relates to its respective powers, and each has tools and avenues through which to assert itself. The judiciary has the fewest and weakest, and the legislature has the strongest and most numerous. Judges can merely issue judgment in a case that has legitimate standing before a court of law. If the constitutional rationale used in a case in order to reach an opinion portends a specific precedent on a constitutional matter affecting the rest of the country and the other branches, it’s the right and responsibility of everyone to push back against that when they believe it is wrong.

That is the system of government we adopted in 1789, yet now the courts have sustained, enduring, and exclusive or final power to veto legislation or policies and can often even dictate new policies.

The question of who decides the Constitution was obvious to our Founders

From the beginning years of our republic until the 20th century, the question of who is the final arbiter of the Constitution was not an important question to answer. The disagreements over policy rarely spilled into disagreements over the Constitution, and in the few instances they did, they weren’t over broad and consequential issues. It wasn’t like today, when you have one side that believes what is antithetical to an inalienable right is a right and what is a right is not a right; what is a federal power belongs to the states and what belongs to the state is actually federal. You didn’t have people who believed that redefining marriage, life, human sexuality, and national borders is in the Constitution.

As such, when in the course of a case or controversy the courts opined on a constitutional question (which actually happened in the 1790s before Marbury), the other branches would usually (but not always) defer to the judiciary. The issues weren’t overly consequential, the opinions were often persuasive, and overall Congress was so powerful that it never feared, with the power to legislate and the power of the purse, that the courts would one day rule the country. Additionally, Congress regularly anchored everything it did to constitutional moorings and never dared outsource that to the Supreme Court. As the Congressional Research Service explains, “the early history of the United States is replete with examples of all three branches of the federal government playing a role in constitutional interpretation.”

There were some, especially Thomas Jefferson and the anti-federalists, who feared that judicial review would grow into into judicial exclusivity, but nobody ever thought the courts would be the final say, especially if they concocted revolutionary adulterations of the Constitution and the contours of fundamental rights.

Judicial supremacists as heirs to the Dred Scott legacy

Because the proponents of slavery viewed human beings as property, slavery was not only a political dispute but a constitutional one, as slaveholders asserted that the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which barred slavery in most of the new territories, denied them their property rights. The Supreme Court in Dred Scott v. Sandford ruled that the Missouri Compromise indeed violated the constitutional property rights of Mr. Sandford. This was the first moment when it became relevant to ask who is the final arbiter of the Constitution, especially when the court was so wrong and with such devastating consequences. That was the critical point of debate between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas in the 1858 Illinois Senate race. Lincoln was right, yet both parties of the political swamp, including most of the “conservative” legal profession today, have adopted the Douglas/Dred Scott view.

At the first debate in Ottawa, Illinois, Douglas accused Lincoln of waging “warfare” against the Supreme Court, “the highest judicial tribunal on earth” whose “decision becomes the law of the land, binding on you, on me, and on every other good citizen whether we like it or not.”

Lincoln showed Douglas’s hypocrisy: that he never propagated such a novel and tyrannical notion of governance until he needed it to promote slavery, and that his entire career stood against this proposition. He noted how the very same Douglas who felt the court’s opinion – that banning slavery was akin to banning property rights — was “the law of the land” claimed to support the individual territories themselves banning slavery if they so chose. But if the Supreme Court’s ruling that black slaves were property was a self-executing Constitutional proclamation binding on every branch of government and universally binding on non-parties, then how could Douglas’s popular sovereignty get off the ground? That was the trap Lincoln set for Douglas throughout the infamous debates.

According to Lincoln, where the high court fits into the structure of constitutional construction is very simple. The Constitution, not any one branch of government, is the law of the land. Thus, when a court renders an opinion, it is only binding on that party and only serves as precedent within the judicial branch of government.

Despite the Dred Scott decision, Lincoln as president signed laws prohibiting slavery in the territories, and, as head of the executive branch, he not only declined to treat black people as property, he treated them as citizens and issued them official government documents, such as passports. Those issues are within the province of the other branches of government, who must interpret the Constitution as they understand it.

Sadly, not only did Lincoln lose the 1858 Senate election to Douglas, he lost the fight over what would eventually become the most consequential political question of our time. Our current view of the judiciary is a legacy of the insidious plot to maintain slavery. (For more from the author of “Our Founders Never Thought the Courts Had the Final Say — and Neither Should We” please click HERE)

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Leftists Are Putting Us at Risk of Another 9/11

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The 19 Islamic terrorist hijackers didn’t just attack our Pentagon building, bring down the Twin Towers, crash all four planes and kill nearly 3,000 people in the process — they also stole from every man, woman and child in America some of the everyday freedoms we once took for granted prior to Sept. 11, 2001.

Long gone are the days when we could lightheartedly arrive at an airport to excitedly embark upon a much-anticipated trip without running the risk of being subjected to a full body scan and/or a pat down that could easily be viewed as a sexual assault if it wasn’t coming from trained TSA agents who are merely doing their job in the manner they must in order to keep us all safe from harm.

We will never again enjoy the simple pleasures of writing a silly email or making a playfully intimate phone call without the accompanying awareness that our communications are being electronically monitored by governmental agencies who are being entrusted to detect potential terrorists in our midst.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, the Fort Hood shooter, the Boston Marathon bombers, the Pulse night club shooter in Orlando, the San Bernardino husband-and-wife attackers; the car, truck, knife, and acid attacks; as well as the far too common sexual assaults against women, children and men have been a steady reminder that America’s slight loss of freedom is absolutely necessary in order to maintain even a modicum of personal security against this ongoing threat.

Our lives will never be the same again and it’s not just because of the ever-increasing Islamic terrorism that is taking place both in America and throughout the globe. It’s also significantly due to our nation’s liberal politicians and leftist judges who continue to push indefensible open-borders immigration policies and who refuse to acknowledge the grave risk that travelers can pose to America when they are allowed to fly into the United States without being subjected to an extreme vetting process beforehand.

That said, we shouldn’t single out primarily Muslim countries for extreme vetting and potential future travel bans. That’s a simple-minded solution that would be both completely unwarranted and highly ineffectual because the problem has now spread and has gone far deeper.

First, let’s acknowledge that there truly are many wonderful, kind, caring and loving people of the Islamic faith who should be able to travel into our country without any close scrutiny whatsoever. Just like there are also many American citizens who should be able to write an email, make a phone call or fly on an airplane without any close scrutiny whatsoever — but that’s just not the world we are currently living in.

Is it fair? No.

Is it necessary? Yes.

The reason we shouldn’t single out mostly Muslim countries for extreme vetting has to do with the fact that potential terrorists can come from anywhere around the world and could possibly belong to any faith, race or political belief system.

Even if our leaders ever did wish to institute a future Muslim travel ban, we would then need to also closely scrutinize the people coming into America from other Western countries, such as our good neighbor Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand, etc. Those countries’ questionably chosen immigration policies came with a wide variety of unintended consequences as they are now well aware — even if they do continue to publicly declare, “diversity is our strength.”

We need to positively know the identities of everyone seeking to enter our country along with their arrest records, potentially problematic affiliations and their actual likely purpose for desiring entry into the U.S.

Every single one of us needs to accept the fact we are going to be suffering these unfortunate indignities as long as there are potential terrorists and criminals from all faiths and countries who are plotting to travel or migrate into the United States to do us harm.

What we don’t need are liberal, bleeding-heart politicians and leftist, judicial-activist judges impeding our ability to keep us safe from those whom President George W. Bush once aptly described as “evil doers,” whose greatest desire is to destroy our country and to steal every last bit of freedom we are still able to enjoy.

Islamic terrorists succeeded in bringing down the Twin Towers, and in taking well over 3,000 lives in the United States since 9/11 — but the battle is ongoing and is far from over.

We must never forget Sept. 11, 2001, and the many people who died that day. We must also continue to give our thanks and material support to our U.S. military personnel and also to the many volunteers who have subsequently lost their lives as a result of their brave and selfless efforts in helping to save others and to clear out the rubble and the debris left from the Twin Towers collapse.

Americans are winners by our very nature. We weren’t just handed our American privilege — it continues to be earned by every American soldier and by the American citizens who wake up each day committed to do their very best to create and perpetuate the beauty and dignity we have uniquely created throughout this portion of the Western world.

Despite our loathsome enemies’ best efforts, the United States of America remains as President Ronald Reagan once described it, “a shining city on the hill.”

Some things will never change. (For more from the author of “Leftists Are Putting Us at Risk of Another 9/11” please click HERE)

President Trump vs Traitors, Liars and Cowards: Who Will Win the Championship Rounds?

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When I was a college boxer, before the last two rounds my trainer would say to me, “Let’s go! Championship rounds — give me everything you got.”

My opponent and I would come out of our corners and give everything we had, throwing our hardest punches, desperately trying to take the other guy out.

We are now into the championship rounds of the fight between President Donald Trump and the Mueller coup. They will be throwing everything they have at the president for the next two months before the final bell sounds on Election Day.

For over a year the Mueller thugs have been pounding Trump’s body, trying to wear him out before the last two rounds. The coup has sent in a motley team of cowards, liars and traitors to deliver the low blows.

Traitor, liar and coward Robert Mueller: using illegal, false evidence to become special counsel, refusing to do the task for which he was appointed, launching an all-out attack on anyone connected to Trump who could be used to overthrow him, framing Trump associates with deceit and outright lies, conducting illegal searches of the president’s lawyers and using impermissible, seized evidence, grinding those he could use against the president by threats of additional charges and prison, bankruptcy, destruction of personal reputation, using the threats to force them into making false statement about Trump, coercing guilty pleas from innocent people and then forcing them to cooperate with the coup, illegally releasing grand jury testimony.

Traitor, liar and coward Rod Rosenstein: orchestrating the Russian investigation by using false documents, paid for by the Clinton machine, to deceive FISA judges into issuing illegal warrants against Trump associates, signing illegal FISA warrants for Trump associates, lying to Congress and to the president.

Traitor, liar and coward James Comey: lying to the president and Congress, creating elaborate schemes of lies and deceit to entrap Trump associates, using threats and plea bargains to coerce Trump associates into working against him, using ill-gotten evidence to create a secret FBI operation, using the secret operation to help the DOJ build a case for a special prosecutor, leaking the Russian dossier to the media to make sure a special prosecutor would be appointed.

Traitor, liar and coward Jeff Sessions: lying to the president to become attorney general, turning over the Russian investigation to a Trump-hating special counsel, announcing he will do the same with the Clinton felonies, hindering congressional investigations into the coup, refusing to resign, refusing to fire Rosenstein and Mueller, protecting all of the coup operatives, arresting two key Republican congressmen just before the midterm elections to put their seats in doubt.

There are other traitors, liars, and cowards who also slithered into the ring from time to time to deliver their venomous blows. Among these other malcontents: Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Bruce Ohr, James Clapper, Andrew McCabe, John Brennan.

Now come the potentially devastating head shots of the championship rounds. The coup is going for a knockout while Trump will try to effectively counter-punch to stay on his feet until the final bell on Election Day.

First into the ring for the coup is the liar and coward Bob Woodward.

The coup sent Woodard into the ring to throw the first big headshot at Trump — his book of blatant lies, “Fear: Trump in the White House.”

Among the lies contained in Woodward’s book are:

1. Former chief economic advisor, Gary Cohn, stole a draft letter from Trump’s desk that would have withdrawn the United States from a trade agreement with South Korea. Woodward quotes Cohn, “I stole it off his desk. I wouldn’t let him see it. He’s never going to see that document. Got to protect the country.”

2. Trump’s former defense attorney, John Dowd, put Trump through a mock interview with Robert Mueller. Dowd did this because he didn’t think Trump could tell the truth. Dowds said, after the mock interview, “Don’t testify. It’s either that or an orange jump suit.”

3. Trump’s Chief of Staff, John Kelly, said about Trump, “He’s an idiot. It’s pointless to try to convince him of anything. He’s gone off the rails. We’re in crazytown.”

4. Trump said about Jeff Sessions, “This guy is mentally retarded,” and, “a dumb Southerner,” then mocked the way he talks.

5. Trump became enraged when Fox News questioned his “course correction” to tamp down his original comments about the Charlottesville white nationalist rally. He later said to an aide, “This is the biggest f—ing mistake I’ve ever made. You never make these concessions. You never apologize. I didn’t do anything wrong in the first place. Why look weak?”

All these statements have been denied by those alleged to have said, or witnessed, them.

The next liar and coward sent in the ring has no name. The New York Times ran their first anonymous Op-Ed, written, they say, by a senior official in the Trump administration whose name would be readily recognized and whose job would be jeopardized by its disclosure.

They also say that doing this is was the only way they could deliver this important perspective to the public.

The title of the Op-Ed is, “I am a Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.”

It claims many senior officials in the Trump administration are diligently working to frustrate parts of the president’s agenda and his worst inclinations.

The writer says the members of Resistance are Trump appointees (and apparently not career government employees, which narrows down the list as to the writer’s identity.)

Speculation on who the writer is has reached a level of lunacy, even including Ivanka Trump and Kellyanne Conway.

The Op-Ed tears into Trump in a myriad of ways, clearly designed to do severe damage to him and his presidency. These members of the Resistance were, without a doubt, recruited by the coup.

According to the anonymous writer, the Resistance’s goal is to preserve the country’s democratic institutions and thwart Trump’s misguided impulses which are anti-trade and anti-democratic.

This is a hard and painful headshot landed on the president but, being the fighter he is, he immediately counterpunched this sniveling coward without a name.

These are the coup’s opening head shots in the championship rounds. There are many more coming, each with increasing intensity.

Look for the final, and hardest, shot to be thrown, moments before the final bell, to deny the president the opportunity to counterpunch before the decision is rendered.

After the final bell, the voters will announce the decision and raise the winner’s hand — possibly sealing the fate of the country for years to come. (For more from the author of “President Trump vs Traitors, Liars and Cowards: Who Will Win the Championship Rounds?” please click HERE)

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Obama Reminds Us Why Donald Trump Is President

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“How hard can that be? Saying that Nazis are bad,” former President Barack Obama asked a crowd in Illinois over the weekend. Well, probably no harder than saying the words “radical Islam,” I imagine. Or maybe it’s slightly less difficult than not sending billions of dollars to Holocaust-denying terror regimes that have both the means and intent to murder Jews—in 2018, not 1942. And it’s definitely a lot easier than not meeting, posing, then smiling for a picture with Louis Farrakhan. But thanks for the lecture.

Obama may well find the presence of a few hundred pathetic white supremacists more perilous than a deadly worldwide ideological movement with millions of adherents. But just as Obama’s sins do not excuse President Trump’s inexplicable answer to the Charlottesville riot, Trump’s words don’t excuse the most divisive modern president, a man whose unilateralism and contempt for the process and the Constitution helped create the environment America now find itself in.

While Obama’s self-reverential speech was crammed with revisionism, the most jaw-dropping contention from the former president was probably a defense of his record on free speech: “I complained plenty about Fox News,” the scandal-ridden Obama explained, “but you never heard me threaten to shut them down, or call them ‘enemies of the people.’”

That’s the thing. We often hear Trump’s hyperbolic, and sometimes destructive, attacks on the press. Thankfully, as of yet the president hasn’t applied the power of the state to inhibit anyone’s free expression. And this is no thanks to liberals’ eight-year efforts to empower the executive branch when that was useful to them.

It’s worth remembering that it was Obama who called out the Supreme Court during a State of the Union speech for defending the First Amendment in the Citizens United case, and his allies who still argue that state should be able to ban political documentaries — and, yes, books. Let’s also not forget Obama’s Internal Revenue Service admitted then apologized for cracking down on conservative political groups. It was the Obama administration that blamed the Benghazi attack on free speech, apologizing to tyrannies for the excesses of free expression, and then, for good measure, threw the amateurish videomaker behind “The Innocence of Muslims” into jail. (Read more from “Obama Reminds Us Why Donald Trump Is President” HERE)

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Veronika Kyrylenko: Playing the Victim – Russian Hacking Is the Left’s Favorite Piece of Propaganda

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The economy is booming, GDP is growing, the stock market is soaring, hitting historic high while unemployment rates hit historic lows. Job-stifling regulations are being eliminated. Homeland security is improved due to strict immigration policy and border protection. United States energy dominance and independence are boosted. Significant achievements are being made in the promotion of the international fair trade. The list of achievements of the Trump administration is long.

What should we do to this president, though? Impeach him, of course — according to Democrats. Because of Russia … or something.

Democrats say it was Russia who stole the elections in 2016 when they hacked the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s campaign emails and exposed their shortcomings. Well, apparently it was not only Russia that was “responsible” for the Democrat candidate’s defeat — it was also the FBI, the DNC, white men, women, Bernie supporters, independents, political journalists, WikiLeaks, President Obama, TV coverage of the campaign…

Now, on the eve of the midterm election, the Democrats are summoning the Russian boogeyman back to the political discourse.

Conspiracy Theories as a Part of the Left’s Mythology

The logic of the Democrats is quite predictable, and the creation of an “enemy” image and its evil plots have become a favorite technique of their propaganda. As the left does not have any rational counterarguments to the effectiveness of Trump’s policies, they use deception and try to scare people.

How does this method work? The growth of the social and emotional discomfort caused by the spread of fear of real or fictitious threats, allows, firstly, to consolidate consumers on a myth around a political leader of the party who promises protection against those threats.

Secondly, it diverts people’s attention from the other issues, including, for example, shortcomings of the Democrat’s policies, sex scandals, violence of the left, etc. Also, the “conspiratorial” mythology aims to diminish the achievements of the rival party in the eyes of the voters — if the Trump administration serves Russia, then everything that it does can’t benefit America.

The Truth of the Myth

While the conspiracy theory that claims Russian President Vladimir Putin owns Donald Trump is false and made-up, the myth about Russian hackers is not a sheer lie.

Every myth, to look trustworthy and believable, contains a grain of truth, but is usually grossly distorted and twisted, misinterpreted and aimed to deceive rather than inform.

Indeed, cyber threats from Russia, as well as other countries such as China and Iran, and from extremist groups and international criminals, is real and imminent. Rapid technological and informational development has its downside: its vulnerability to the malware that may potentially disrupt the work of industries and governments while consuming close to none of the material resources. Cyberspace has become one of the main battlefields today, and the United States — the world’s largest superpower — is naturally becoming a primal target of the cyberattacks.

The 2016 presidential election was a way too important and significant event for foreign governments not to try to interfere in it. There were proven cases of Russian cyberattacks exposed by the U.S. Intelligence Community. As the result, in March 2018, the Trump administration had imposed sanctions on Russian government hackers, including 19 people and 5 organizations, as well as Russian spy government departments — Federal Security Bureau (successor of the Soviet KGB) and GRU, or Main Intelligence Directorate, Russian military intelligence.

One year earlier, on May 11, 2017, Trump issued an executive order “Strengthening the Cybersecurity of Federal Networks and Critical Infrastructure” to “improve the Nation’s cyber posture and capabilities in the face of intensifying cybersecurity threats.” This EO focused Federal efforts on modernizing federal information technology infrastructure, working with state and local government and private sector partners to more fully secure critical infrastructure, and collaborating with foreign allies.

The Trump administration is fully aware of the threat and acts vigilantly on this matter.

Thus, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen on Sept. 5 said that the cyberweapons and sophisticated hacking pose a greater threat to the United States than the risk of physical attacks, and urged state elected officials to add more safeguards to their voting systems.

The Lie of the Myth

But that is not how the Democrats present the issue. They aim to create an impression that it is only them who are under attack.

Thus, by late August, four Democrat candidates running for Congress were cyberattacked. Although only one cyberattack has been tied to Russians, mainstream media outlets like Reuters, Rolling Stone, The Daily Beast and CNN, reported that the cyberattacks “pay resemblance” to the hacking done to Clinton’s campaign in 2016.

Anecdotally, at the same time, the DNC raved about the Russian cyberattack that aimed to steal millions of voter records. It eventually turned out to be a test attack conducted by the Michigan Democratic Party that it had failed to inform the DNC about.

What the Democrats usually do not mention is the attempted hacking of the U.S. political institutions and conservative think tanks such as The Hudson Institute that conducts in-depth research on Russian corruption, and the International Republican Institute, a nonprofit group that promotes democracy worldwide. Even when it is mentioned, it is always linked to the hackers’ attack on the DNC and Clinton’s campaign.

The repetitions of “Russian meddling” and “Russian interference” which are always connected to the specific case of hacking targeted against the Democrats in 2016 aims to create a stereotypical and subconscious belief that the Russian hackers play on the side of the Republicans and President Trump.

But the strength of the myth is that once it is rooted in one’s worldview, it is extremely hard to disprove, which is exactly why the Democrats appeal to emotions rather than intellect. Creating scarecrows in order to excuse own failures is so much easier than a self-reflection.

In the end, it is the Americans who cast their vote and thankfully most of them are not easily fooled. (For more from the author of “Veronika Kyrylenko: Playing the Victim – Russian Hacking Is the Left’s Favorite Piece of Propaganda” please click HERE)

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