Democrats to Define Trump

IM:  Today’s New York Times First Draft reports that a Democrat research group by the name, American Bridge, is compiling volumes of dirt on Donald Trump.  The authors openly admit, “Their hope is to have Mr. Trump defined before he ever gets to reintroduce himself to the general election voters.”

AM:  The authors also indicate that American Bridge was founded by a close Hillary Clinton ally.

Old Gadfly:    Do you recall Obama’s response to reporters who asked why he had performed so poorly against Romney in their first presidential debate?

IM:  He laughed and said, “That was not the real Romney.”

AM:  Exactly.  The people were not to evaluate the candidate for who he really was.  The caricature of Romney was how Democrats defined him.  For those of us who actually believe in the 10 commandments—amazingly, there are only 10--one involves not bearing false witness against a neighbor.  But Democrats want the people to buy into what their own Party Pharisees preach, whether it is true or not.

IM:   We are observing full-throated propaganda.  Just today, I reviewed background on the Watergate scandal in terms of the circumstances about covering up illegal activity, refusing to comply with a Congressional investigation, and all the indictments and convictions related to the case.  No one was killed.  But there was accountability for the politically-motivated activities.  On the other hand, the Executive branch has obstructed a congressional investigation into Benghazi (not to mention Fast and Furious, the IRS, and other scandals) and intentionally destroyed evidence.  Four Americans were killed.  Immediately after the Committee released its 800-page report, major news networks headlined their belief that there was nothing new and that it was time to move on.  Why is this disturbing to me?  When Hitler and the Nazi Party assumed control of Germany, they could count on a complicit media.  Here is a list of 20 pro-Nazi newspapers or magazines.  I could not find a similar list for anti-Nazi newspapers.  American-born, William Joyce, known as Lord Haw-Haw, even participated in pro-Nazi radio broadcasts.

Worse, I checked on major themes for Nazi propaganda, and here is what I found:

·         Denounce enemies of their ideology, to include capitalists (this closely aligns with Democrat defined enemies such as the top 1%, white males because of white privilege, and any others that question progressive values as racist, misogynist, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamaphobic, etc.)

·         Punish those who oppose their ideology (Dinesh D’Souza can vouch for this because of a $30,000 indirect campaign contribution; yet, George Soros can contribute over $7 million to the Hillary Clinton campaign while other Wall Street investment firms contributed even more.)

·         Champion eugenics (here the Nazi’s watched developments within America for the moral foundations for cleansing the human race from imperfections, to include Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood)

·         Maintain a cult of personality around the ideology’s leader (for progressives in America this is now Obama, soon to be Hillary Clinton)

·         Tolerate religious practices only if they do not interfere with the state (the Little Sisters of the Poor faced millions in fines for not complying with birth control and abortifacient mandates)

·         The media was more than happy to amplify the Nazi values (we see similar complicity with our own main stream media)

·         Employ propaganda, consistent with Hitler’s own vision for manipulating the masses.  Here are Hitler’s own words in his book, Mein Kampf:

The art of propaganda consists precisely in being able to awaken the imagination of the public through an appeal to their feelings, in finding the appropriate psychological form that will arrest the attention and appeal to the hearts of the national masses [this is why Democrats aggressively define the opponent; see also here]. The broad masses of the people are not made up of diplomats or professors of public jurisprudence nor simply of persons who are able to form reasoned judgment in given cases, but a vacillating crowd of human children who are constantly wavering between one idea and another. (...) The great majority of a nation is so feminine in its character and outlook that its thought and conduct are ruled by sentiment rather than by sober reasoning. This sentiment, however, is not complex, but simple and consistent. It is not highly differentiated, but has only the negative and positive notions of love and hatred, right and wrong, truth and falsehood.

Propaganda must not investigate the truth objectively and, in so far as it is favourable to the other side, present it according to the theoretical rules of justice [i.e., the emphasis on social justice, fair share, etc.]; yet it must present only that aspect of the truth which is favourable to its own side [similar to progressive George Lakoff’s axiom that it is the frame that matters, and facts are only relevant if they fit the frame]. (...) The receptive powers of the masses are very restricted, and their understanding is feeble. On the other hand, they quickly forget. Such being the case, all effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare essentials and those must be expressed as far as possible in stereotyped formulas [e.g., racist, bigot, white privilege, misogynist, homophobe, Islamaphobe, etc.  Just the other day, Hillary argued that Trump followers fit into one or more of the standard progressive stereotypes.]. These slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea that has been put forward. (...) Every change that is made in the subject of a propagandist message must always emphasize the same conclusion. The leading slogan must of course be illustrated in many ways and from several angles, but in the end one must always return to the assertion of the same formula.[1] (Text in bold, italics added)

AM:  Joseph Stalin engaged in similar tactics.  In 1991, the formerly classified footage of Stalin and his mind control evidence was released to the public.  A comprehensive sampling can be found here.  Under Hitler and the Nazi regime, some of the first to be sent to German concentration camps were communists.  Ironically, the fascists and communists were brutal ideological opponents within the same socialist camp.  The Nazis were opposed to Marxist materialism and capitalism.  Yet, to this day, scholars and the general public have bought the myth that fascism, and its Nazi manifestation, is far right on the political spectrum.  Communism and fascism are far left manifestations of left-wing socialism.

Old Gadfly:  As we were having this conversation, I received the personal thoughts of a pastor who plans to support Trump, not because he is a saint, but because he firmly believes Trump is a modern biblical Cyrus.  This pastor also reminded us that Winston Churchill was known to be bombastic and was similarly caricatured as Trump has been.

IM:  The thought has occurred to me that recent progressive efforts to punish Christian bakers for not wanting to participate in same sex weddings, to force public schools to accommodate transgenders, to celebrate black lives matter, to perpetuate gender pay gaps, to criticize opponents of lax immigration policies, to refuse to use terms like jihad or radical Islam, and so forth, are specifically designed to tee up opportunities to use stereotype labels such as racist, misogynist, homophobe, xenophobe, Islamaphobe, and so forth.

AM:    Your observation, IM, represents a swarming effect using several Saul Alinsky rules:  rule 5, ridicule is man’s most potent weapon; rule 8, keep the pressure on; rule 12, the price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative (here the example is the attempt to foil Trump’s evolving views on various issues by suggesting he is flip flopping); and rule 13, pick the target, freeze it, and polarize it.[2]  Obviously, Hillary Clinton has an opportunity to seize upon Alinsky’s tactics; after all, her Wellesley College senior thesis extolled his virtues.  And the American Bridge will be the instrument to lead these tactics.

Old Gadfly:  So, based on all these facts and circumstances, who is the most dangerous opponent to Democrats:  Donald Trump or ISIS?  Trump opposes the Democrat progressive ideology.  ISIS opposes American values in general.  Since Trump appears to be the most existential threat to Democrats, Democrats have indirectly aligned themselves with a threat against America itself.  But then again, Obama, who symbolizes progressivism, vowed to fundamentally transform America.  Therefore, while Trump wants to make America great again, Democrats are actually anti-America.  I know this sounds bold.  But as I mentioned to a good friend yesterday, when one is confronted with telling a mother her baby is ugly, one typically capitulates to dishonesty to avoid getting slapped. 

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[1] Mein Kampf citations are from the Project Gutenberg-hosted 1939 English translation by James Murphy

[2] Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals:  A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals, (New York, NY:  Vintage Books, 1972).

Obama's High Horse and Fuzzy History

Old Gadfly:  Since the Orlando shooting incident, do we now see Obama using a bully pulpit or simply riding a high horse?  He accuses Trump of violating American values by wanting to ban Muslim immigration to America and that using the term, “radical Islam,” serves no purpose.  Obama seems to have created a meme that Trump is anti-Muslim and anti-immigration by extension—you know, one of those leftist labels called xenophobia.  With a complicit media, he expects others will imitate the meme. 

IM:  My understanding is that Trump is against illegal immigration (he’s married to a legal immigrant after all) and especially concerned about not being able to vet a swarm of Muslim refugees into America from an Islamic region that is far from peaceful.  This is a completely different mental frame than “anti-Muslim.”  I would say that Trump strikes me as an individual who believes that a just society is based on a system of laws and that America welcomes immigrants of all backgrounds through a legal process.

AM:  Obama’s message is crystal clear.  He believes his angry oration via a bully pulpit, where he, the self-righteous preacher with good public approval ratings (thanks to a horrific media slant and spineless Republicans who seem to have lost a grip on reality), rebukes the presumptive Republican presidential candidate for sinfully warning the public that there was a radical Islamist connection to the shooting.  Obama counts on an incredibly naïve public to swallow what he says on face value.  As we discussed in the last conversation, he has a colluding and fully complicit media to amplify the message.  Just this morning, I marveled at how George Stephanopoulos, on ABC Good Morning America, facilitated clips of Obama, Clinton, and Trump, shaping the message in favor of Obama and Clinton.  This is the same man who served as a senior advisor in the Clinton Administration, and then later donated $75,000 to the Clinton Foundation.  I’ll say more about connections later.

IM:  Sadly, at last year’s national prayer breakfast he sat on a high horse while accusing others of sitting on a high horse because an increasing number of Americans (and Europeans) are concerned about the increasing death toll stemming from radical Islam.  He lectured us about Christian violence in the name of Christ but refused to suggest there might be violence in the name of Muhammad.

Old Gadfly:  I remember he mentioned the Crusades.

IM:  He counts on fuzzy history.  Our progressive public education has done a great job in creating a mental frame that blames Christians for the Crusades.  A deeper look shows that the Crusades spawned in defense of Muslim aggression.  And when he sanctimoniously mentioned Jim Crow laws, he failed to mention that these were Democrat policies that are similar to much of the progressive inspired regulatory regime and rulings that pick winners and losers as we speak.

AM:  In the current Foreign Policy Magazine, Moscow-born Julia Ioffee wrote an article with this title:  “If Islam Is a Religion of Violence, So Is Christianity.”  Leftists are already pushing similar themes (see Dr. Paul Kengor’s excellent analysis here).  Let’s just stick to the current issue and I’ll ask, during high horse Obama’s reign, how many Christian-associated casualties have we recorded?  Aside from the thousands of casualties, to include many on American soil, and the millions of refugees stemming from radical-Islam, politically correct imitators like Ioffee want us to play make believe; just as George Lakoff advises all progressives, “if the facts don’t fit the frame, then they are irrelevant” (Read Lakoff’s Thinking Points, a Handbook for Progressives, here).  I think Mitt Romney may have received the Lakoff training based on his “trickle down racism” assertion the other day.  And, I’m sure Barry Goldwater would assure Trump to stay the course despite Mitt’s father, George Romney, going to great lengths to undermine Goldwater after his nomination by suggesting he was unfit to be president (jumping on the bandwagon of leftist efforts along these lines).  The major issue here was that Goldwater believed the issue of civil rights exceeded federal authority and belonged within the realm of the states.  George Romney, showing progressive colors, wanted the federal government to take on extraconstitutional authority. 

IM:  Back to Ioffee, politically correct imitators like Ioffee, who also wrote the GQ hit piece on Melania Trump, do not like their frame being challenged.

Old Gadfly:  Obama seems angry that the presumptive Republican nominee is personally challenging him on this topic.

IM:  God forbid anyone should challenge Obama because any such sacrilegious act would clearly be racist.  Ironic, isn’t it?  I remember a Democrat presidential nominee saying very derogatory things about his predecessor.  In fact, I recall that he did this to rally his political base, to get them angry and hungry for his special antidote of “hope and change.”

Old Gadfly:  So, what do you think he had in mind for change?

AM:  You mean more specifically than his vision to “fundamentally change America” ?  Wayne Allyn Root, a Columbia University classmate of Obama’s told us what the change was in 2010.  Here is an excerpt from an article he penned:

Rahm Emanuel cynically said, "You never want a crisis to go to waste." It is now becoming clear that the crisis he was referring to is Barack Obama's presidency.

Obama is no fool. He is not incompetent. To the contrary, he is brilliant. He knows exactly what he's doing. He is purposely overwhelming the U.S. economy to create systemic failure, economic crisis and social chaos — thereby destroying capitalism and our country from within.

Barack Obama is my college classmate (Columbia University, class of '83). As Glenn Beck correctly predicted from day one, Obama is following the plan of Cloward & Piven, two professors at Columbia University. They outlined a plan to socialize America by overwhelming the system with government spending and entitlement demands. Add up the clues below. Taken individually they're alarming. Taken as a whole, it is a brilliant, Machiavellian game plan to turn the United States into a socialist/Marxist state with a permanent majority that desperately needs government for survival ... and can be counted on to always vote for bigger government. Why not? They have no responsibility to pay for it.

Old Gadfly:  I remember reading about this strategy in the 60s, going into Johnson’s Great Society agenda.  Later in graduate school, I read Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward’s book, Regulating the Poor:  The Functions of Public Welfare.  Notice the action described:  regulating; not elevating or empowering, or some other uplifting strategy.  The authors described the importance of “stabilizing” the masses as a function of the welfare state.  This is very consistent with the growing administrative state that we now have, where a powerful central government continues to expand a regulatory regime that is becoming more and more coercive, controlling the centers of wealth production and significantly chipping away at individual liberty.

AM:  Which brings us to motivations for “hope and change” and the connections I mentioned earlier.  First, let’s start with Obama’s connections:  besides his mentoring by communist Frank Marshall, Obama’s key advisors, Valerie Jarrett and David Axelrod have their own direct connections with communist mentors.  See, for example, the evidence provided by Dr. Paul Kengor.  In his recent book, Takedown:  From Communists to Progressives, How the Left Has Sabotaged Family and Marriage, Kengor explains (with powerful evidence) how important it was to destroy the traditional institutions of family and marriage to allow communism to flourish.  This is the fundamental change Obama had in store for America.

IM:  Just like V. I. Lenin, Obama knew that he needed to grow a Bolshevik-style grassroots to imitate his “vision” for a transformed America.  To achieve this, he instituted an initiative called “Organizing for America.”  Here is the video he released on January 15, 2009 announcing this grassroots initiative.  Today, his organizing machine is now named BarackObama.com.  At this renamed site, Obama imitators/followers can watch over 30,000 videos.

Old Gadfly:  In terms of “connections,” are there any concerns about Hillary Clinton?

AM:  Aside from the apparent corruption associated with the sleazy pay-to-play connections at the Clinton Foundation, a more sinister set of connections--especially in light of what happened in Orlando--begins with Huma Abedin, Hillary’s former aide at the State Department with access to Top Secret information and now vice-chair for her presidential campaign.  A recent expose’ by Roger Stone is very troubling!  According to Stone, Huma Abedin, a Muslim (ironically married to former, penis-texting Jewish Congressman Anthony Weiner), was the assistant editor for 12 years of the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, an academic journal published by the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs, a family business founded in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia with the patronage of Abdullah Omar Naseef of the Muslim World League.  Naseef’s connections go beyond this.  Naseef was involved in creating Rabita Trust in 1988.  Here is an important excerpt from Stone’s article:

Just a month after the 9/11 jihadist attack left thousands dead and brought down the World Trade Center, President George W. Bush’s Executive Order designated the Rabita Trust as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist Entity and the Treasury Department froze its assets on October 12, 2001.

Naseef founded the Rabita Trust and remains involved with it to this day.  A Treasury Department press release issued when Rabita Trust’s assets were frozen indicated that Rabita Trust is headed by Wa’el Hamza Jalaidan, one of the founders of al-Qaida with bin Laden.  He was the logistics chief of bin Laden’s organization and fought on bin Laden’s side in Afghanistan.  Jalaidan himself was branded a Specially Designated Global Terrorist Entity by the United States Treasury Department, and his assets have been frozen, as well.

But the connections between Abedin’s Saudi benefactor, the Muslim World League, and al-Qaeda don’t end there.   (To read more, see here).

IM:  The Washington Post assigned 20 journalists to scrutinize Trump.  When do you think they might consider doing the same for Hillary Clinton?

Old Gadfly:  Not likely.  Fuzzy history is an asset for the left.  I realized this last year when a USAF Academy cadet admitted to me that he had no idea what communism is.  We need a modern Max Eastman to refresh people of real history. 

Eastman was a socialist activist in his early years and a close associate of John Reed, a fellow intellectual, Greenwich Village Bohemian who tried to bring socialism to America in the early 1900s.  You may have watched Warren Beatty’s movie, Reds.  Beatty wrote the screenplay and played the role of Reed in the movie.  I saw it when it was first released in the 80s and mostly treated it as fiction.  Then I watched it again last month.  After serving over 34 years defending America against the threat of communism, I truly understood the message of this biographical and historical movie this time.  In his book, The Road to Serfdom, F.A. Hayek relied heavily upon Max Eastman observations.  Here is Hayek’s opening paragraph in Chapter 11, “The End of Truth”:

The most effective way of making everybody serve the single system of ends toward which the social plan is directed is to make everybody believe in those ends.  To make a totalitarian system function efficiently, it is not enough that everybody should be forced to work for the same ends.  It is essential that the people should come to regard them as their own ends.  Although the beliefs must be chosen for the people and imposed upon them, they must become their beliefs, a generally accepted creed which makes the individuals as far as possible act spontaneously in the way the planner wants.  If the feeling of oppression in totalitarian countries is in general less acute than most people in liberal countries imagine, this is because the totalitarian governments succeed to a high degree in making people think as they want them to.

AM:  Obama, the planner, must be pleased because even Republicans are acting “spontaneously in the way the planner wants.”

Old Gadfly:  Yes.  About 35 years after Hayek’s warning, in the 1983 edition of George Orwell’s 1984, the venerable Walter Cronkite provided the Preface.  Here is an excerpt:

If not prophecy, what was 1984?  It was, as many have noticed, a warning:  a warning about the future of human freedom in a world where political organization and technology can manufacture power in dimensions that would have stunned the imaginations of earlier ages.

Orwell drew upon the technology (and perhaps some of the science fiction) of the day in drawing his picture of 1984.  But it was not a work of science fiction he was writing.  It was a novelistic essay on power, how it is acquired and maintained, how those who seek it or seek to keep it tend to sacrifice anything and everything in its name.

IM:  Pretty powerful observation from a respected journalist.

Old Gadfly:   Are there any living American journalists worthy of the title?  They seem to have lost their sense of duty and their soul.  And they have good company with imitating Democrats and spineless Republicans who lack the courage to support Trump, who clearly understand what Hayek and Cronkite warned us about.  Trump has a realistic understanding of history and is not on a high horse—he’s out front leading Americans who refuse to relinquish their God-given liberty.  

Guns or Megaphones

Old Gadfly:  Gentlemen, after the Orlando mass shooting, the President used this incident to emphasize that we should not make it so easy to purchase guns.

AM:  There is a lot to unpack in this particular tragedy, but I see that you want to focus on the role guns played in it.

Old Gadfly:  Yes.  For example, addressing the dilemma associated with the teachings of Islam and homosexuality is too complex and deserving of another conversation.  Nor do we want to get into the issue of tolerance based on natural law versus secular humanism and the absurdity in understanding consequences.

IM:  So, we want to understand the thinking behind gun control.

Old Gadfly:  Yes.

AM:  Well, obviously the logic suggests that without guns people will not get killed.

Old Gadfly:  Exactly:  As if to suggest guns have motivation and intent.  Yet, for an individual who wants to do harm, a gun is an instrument for doing harm.

AM:  How many guns were used on 9/11 or the Boston Marathon incident?

IM:  Of course, none.

Old Gadfly:  So, what really “killed” the victims on 9/11, in Boston, and Orlando?

AM:  Ideology.

Old Gadfly:  Correct.  Are there any other instruments that can kill targets?

IM:  All sorts of instruments:  knives, hammers, bats, and all other sorts of instruments.

Old Gadfly:  How about megaphones?

AM:  What do you mean?

Old Gadfly:  On tonight’s news (at least with ABC), Trumps tweets were “controversial.”  Obama’s White House message and Hillary’s tweets were characterized as “in contrast” to Trump.  Simple words like this are amplified by the media megaphones in such a way as to “kill” a target.  Again, ideology kills.  Various instruments, whether guns or megaphones, serve the purpose.

AM:  One of the Presidential candidates seems to have identified this form of threat.

IM:  Yes.  Trump’s apparent resistance to “imitate” politically correct language and tone makes him an even bigger target. The fact that fellow Republicans have joined this megaphone bandwagon might be the real “vein of intolerance” Colin Powell cleverly, but incorrectly, pointed out during the first Obama election.  Powell implied a racist prejudice among Republicans, despite serious concerns about actual experience and what could not be learned about the candidate because of legal efforts to seal records. 

Old Gadfly:  F.A. Hayek observed that “mind is a product of cultural evolution that reflects more imitation than reason.”  So, the real contest in America may not be between Clinton and Trump.  It is between imitation and reason.  Until reason dominates imitation, killings, whether via guns or megaphone, will continue into the future.  

Saving the Soul

Old Gadfly:  Gentlemen, if my memory is correct, a few months ago, on one of the Sunday morning news analysis programs, the topic was the Republican Presidential campaign with 17 competitors.  Former Democrat Congresswoman Jane Harman suggested we are witnessing a struggle for the soul of the Republican Party.

AM:  I saw the same episode.  When I heard her say that, I thought, “at least the Republican Party had a soul!”

IM:   And by implication, then, the Democrat Party sold its soul to the devil, probably when Woodrow Wilson initiated his progressive agenda for America.  He and his fellow progressives, like John Dewey (the father of public education in America), Frank Goodnow (advocate for the same concept of collective liberty as that advanced by Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler), and Margaret Sanger (founder of Planned Parenthood), refused to acknowledge natural rights.  Instead, they believed all rights were conferred upon members of society by the government.  This allowed them to establish an administrative state that became the moral authority for all rights.  This now justifies, for example, why administrative law judges can avoid due process (no jury of peers; only the agency-paid judge, the plaintiff, and the defendant) punish bakers for not wanting to participate in same sex weddings.

Old Gadfly:  Let’s bring this back to today, where the Republican Party seems reluctant, even hostile, to accepting Trump as the presumptive nominee.

AM:  Don’t forget, early in the primary season, the Republican Party went to great lengths to get Trump to sign a pledge that, if he were not the Republican nominee, he would support the final nominee and not compete as an independent candidate.  He signed the pledge.

IM:  What the Republican establishment presumed was that Trump would not be the nominee.  Those that are now resisting his nomination and even talking about hijacking the nomination are hypocrites.  They insult the American people.

Old Gadfly:  The “fair and balanced” Fox Sunday with Chris Wallace aired a segment in March 2016 with the title:   “Can Donald Trump unify a Republican Party he fractured.”

AM:  Trump merely tapped into a fracture the Republican Party created on its own.

Old Gadfly:  Do you have any evidence?

AM:  Tons of evidence.  First, during the George W. Bush Presidency, when he committed armed forces to Iraq, based no less on a bipartisan joint resolution of Congress, he had nearly a 90% approval rating from the American public.  When democrats saw no political capital from this undertaking, they decided to derail the Bush momentum.  Democrats and the press were brutal—“wrong course,” “lies, lies, lies,” and so forth.  Instead of being good wingmen, Republican congressman slinked into the shadows.  This allowed Democrats to establish the conditions that led to a major political shift in both houses of Congress in 2006, and the political wolf pack momentum carried Obama into the White House.  During the last two years of the Bush Administration, the Democrat Congress pushed their progressive agenda while a morally defeated Bush capitulated to their demands. 

IM:  And while this will sound racist, the truth is, Obama was elected because he was black (to assuage the guilt of white privilege and previous racism in America) and because progressives were successful in blaming the 2008 financial crisis on Bush policies.   We discussed these false narratives previously (see here, here, here, and chapters 3, 4, and 5 here).

AM:  Obama’s resume had no qualifying experience for the position:  what might be learned from school records have been sealed; he was a Saul Alinsky trained community organizer and the author of two memoirs that had more to do with his socialistic worldview because there were no notable achievements to reflect upon; he did one-term touch and goes at the Illinois state legislature and the US Senate, with no legislative distinction except for being a leading critic of the Iraq war; but he has excellent oration skills that would make the ancient Sophists proud. 

IM:  The mess created during the past eight years was not because of Obama’s chosen race (his mother was white after all), but because he tried to fundamentally transform America from a constitutional republic into a socialistic administrative state (Woodrow Wilson would be pleased).  Then, in 2010 and 2012, when the Tea Party movement influenced a major swing back to Republicans in charge of both houses of Congress, the elected officials seemed to lose the courage to follow through on campaign promises.  Knowing there was no way Democrats would compromise; Republicans capitulated because Democrats could and did shut down the government and could blame it on Republicans because of a complicit media.  And the IRS successfully shut down the Tea Party voice between 2010 and 2012 (in time for a presidential reelection) with Democrats shielding Lois Lerner and others involved.  Thus, many Americans, while feeling under assault by internal socialist pressures by progressive Democrats, also felt betrayed by the Republican Party.  They feel orphaned by a lack of moral leaders that would and should do their duty to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

Old Gadfly:  What are the implications?

IM:  While the media ruminates about apparent racism and fraud in the Trump University civil suit, there is no media interest in $16.5 million paid to former President Bill Clinton to serve as honorary chancellor for Laureate International Universities.  In return, the university received $55 million from the US State Department while Hillary Clinton was the Secretary of State.  It took a liberal law professor from Georgetown University to alert the public about this (see here).  Is the media so biased as to be blind about what deserves scrutiny?  Ideology can be dangerous when it becomes moral orthodoxy.  This is why secular humanism, which partially defines American progressivism, is the new state religion.

          AM:  Trump has emerged as a signal from the American people.  This signal is to restore the constitutional republic that made America the leader of the world.

Old Gadfly:  How does this relate to the soul of the Republican Party?

AM:  The presidential campaign is a wake-up call.  This is an opportunity to seek forgiveness and redemption for betraying George W. Bush and the American people, and for the hypocrisy in insisting that Republicans support the Republican nominee assuming it would not be Trump.  The Party can do this by “helping” Trump to clarify positions on important issues, by ensuring the Party can restore a constitutional republic, and by repudiating the progressive ideology that seeks to substitute the ideals that made America great with their notion of utopia and human perfection.  This thinking was vividly portrayed by Margaret Sanger and her eugenics and neo-Malthusian cohort and carried on by the Planned Parenthood crusaders today.  Of course, the anthropomorphic cause of climate change (and corresponding political punishment for skeptics) conveniently dovetails into these notions of utopia and human perfection.

IM:  That is a big mountain to climb.  Let’s hope Trump’s exertions and the blessings of American liberty can overcome the progressive ambition so appropriately portrayed in the myth and fate of Sisyphus.  Here is an excerpt from a Wikipedia entry on Sisyphus: 

James Clement van Pelt, co-founder of Yale's Initiative in Religion, Science & Technology, suggests that Sisyphus also personifies humanity and its disastrous pursuit of perfection by any means necessary, in which the great rock repeatedly rushing down the mount symbolizes the accelerating pace of unsustainable civilization toward cataclysmic collapse and cultural oblivion that ends each historical age and restarts the sisyphean cycle.

Old Gadfly:  Trump’s and the Republican Party’s exertions require a healthy soul, inspired by the blessings of natural rights and the duty to preserve and protect them by a constitutional republic that guarantees a just society where all citizens and legal residents are equally protected and empowered by the rule of law.  Let’s pray that we can break the current Sisyphean cycle.