January 30, 2018
MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey
Russiagate: A Summary of the Attempt to Overthrow the President, the
Connivance of the GOP, and Trump’s Immigration Gambit
Friends,
Several
friends have inquired why I have not commented recently, that is, within the
past couple of weeks, on the “Russians Did It!” canard and the Mueller
investigation, and all the recent details that have seeped out of the grimy hothouses
of the Deep State into public view. There is a reason for that: as those of you
who’ve been reading my columns know, I spent an inordinate amount of time
during 2017 on that topic, long before Fox or even Rush Limbaugh really got
into the deep weeds of the matter. I still have dozens of stories and files on
the subject, but by far, many of the facts and views that I wrote about have
now become rather current. New details are now not just confined to obscure, fearless
web sites and intrepid reporters.
About
this topic, in summary, here is what we do know:
We
do know now that we’ve been witnessing a very real, attempted coup d’etat, an
attempted revolutionary putsch against the American presidency unheard of in
American history.
We
do know that not just under Obama, but also under Republican presidents as well
(G. W. Bush), our intelligence agencies, most notably the FBI, but also the CIA
and the NSA, had become in their highest levels completely politicized and
weaponized cabals of the New World Order, and now dedicated to destroying the
president and his agenda.
We
do know that the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National
Committee, working hand-and-glove with Obama and his underlings, attempted to,
first, compromise and undermine the 2016 Trump campaign, using surveillance
(acquired via a fake “Steele Dossier,” paid for by the Clinton campaign via the
firm FusionGPS), submitted to a FISA
secret court judge; and then, using the same fake material, continuing the
operation after Trump’s election to engineer the creation of an Office of
Special Counsel, with virtually unlimited powers, to investigate the
non-existent “Russian collusion” between Trump and the Russians (and now the
possibility of obstruction of justice).
We
do know that almost immediately after the Clinton defeat the leaders of her
campaign, working with operatives in the
FBI and Obama administration, decided to employ the “Steele Dossier” (with its
fake data) as one aspect of a multifaceted effort to “get” the new president,
hopefully force his impeachment, or at the very least, impair his ability to
govern, thus enabling the Washington DC establishment Deep State to continue on
its merry way of ruling and dispensing goodies to its chosen ones (and damning
those who would oppose it).
We
do know that the investigation, the whole Robert Mueller operation, is based on
a fraud, on fraudulent and largely made up “data,” created by that rogue
British intel agent, who was on the DNC payroll.
We
do know that much of the GOP establishment have gone along with this charade,
especially embraced by such culture traitor Republican Deep State denizens as
Senators Lindsey Graham, John McCain and Jeff Flake.
And
on a more general level:
We
do know that the Washington DC establishment Republican Party is just as mired
and enmeshed in the Deep State fetid detritus as the Democrats, but perhaps
more insidiously as it makes pretense to be our defender and champion. Yet its leaders act as brazen enablers of
nearly every piece of Progressivist legislation, from Obamacare to same sex
marriage to pushing for new wars in every country, every desert oasis or jungle
in the world (of course, with thousands of dead Americans as the result). And
its so-called “ideological brain trust”—those Neocon pundits and scribblers at The Weekly Standard and National Review who churn out piles of putrid screed that reads
like leftover Leftist sloganeering from a few years back—only compound the
disaster in their attempts to give such views intellectual respectability.
We
do know that these GOP establishmentarians and some of the Neocons (the ones
still not resolutely “#NeverTrump) have attempted to surround President Trump
and fill his administration with their serpent-like advisors and office
holders, and that, to a degree, they have had some success. Indeed, it was
inevitable after November 2016, given the dearth of real America First
candidates then ready for the Washington bureaucracy…and given the admitted
naivete’ of the president, himself, regarding the various and deeply-defining
philosophical varieties on what is called “the political Right.”
Where
does that leave us?
Despite
some serious failings and bad decisions (e.g., Syria) and the naming of some
administration officials who do their damnedest to undo the America First
agenda, I continue to believe that the president’s instincts, his intuition, may
be his saving grace.
Like
many others, I was appalled that he would offer as part of a compromise, “a
pathway to citizenship” to the “Dreamers.” This, at first glance, appeared to
be a reneging on a—if not the—fundamental
cornerstone of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. As such it was and is completely unacceptable.
Yet, I am also cognizant that in presenting his proposal, the president (with
the assistance of his hardcore anti-illegal immigration advisor Stephen Miller)
may have calculated that while his proposal seemed to give the Dems everything they
ever wanted about the Dreamers, it also contained provisions (i.e., real money
for a border wall, limits on chain migration, increased ICE funding, cutting legal
immigration, an end to the visa lottery system) that the Congressional Democrats
(as well as GOPers like Lindsey Graham and Jeff Flake, and John McCain—if he is
still alive!) could not accept, for abject fear of their looney Leftist base,
who will accept nothing less than complete open borders and eventual population
replacement as fundamental elements
of their cultural Marxist program to transform and remake America.
As
such, measuring consistent polling, the president would have placed the
Democrats in an untenable position, politically, and gained the proverbial “high
ground.” And that deal, once it fell apart for lack of support, would bring us
back to square one: the president could then say: “Well, look, I tried, I gave
you what you wanted, and only asked that you accept items that most American
citizens also want. You rejected it, so now…the fact that the Dreamers no
longer have legal status, that is your problem.”
This
may well read too much into White House strategy, and I admit that this view is
precariously perched atop a slender thread of hope. Yet, the president’s
promises from 2016 are consistent and quite clear. And we know he is “the
master of the deal.” I am not happy with what I see; I continue to be nervous
about such a high stakes poker game. But I am also willing to see this round a
bit further.
Tonight
we’ll see and hear the State of the Union address, and perhaps more information
will come forth, more clarity.
In
the meantime, I share the view of my friend Peter Brimelow, whose essay on this
topic from his excellent VDare.com web site is a superb analysis. We must be vigilant, yes. But like my ancestor who
served in the North Carolina legislature in 1861, I am not prepared to support
secession until Abe Lincoln calls for troops to suppress my brothers in South
Carolina. Then, with conviction and certitude, I, too, will go to war….
Here
is Peter’s excellent essay:
____________________________________________________________________________
Contemplating Charlottesville: Why I Still Think (OK, Hope) That Trump’s DACA Dalliance Will Self-Destruct
Peter Brimelow January 28, 2018, 4:59 am
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the
American Left believes its own propaganda. That’s a major
reason the #SchumerShutdown was
routed—it tuned out, despite Main Stream Media mewling and pervasive pollaganda, that Americans really didn’t want their
government paralyzed in order to Amnesty a bunch of undocumented Democrats. But
the most dramatic recent example: the extraordinary success of Michael Wolff’s book Fire And Fury, purportedly
an expose of the Trump White House after it trustingly (and inexplicably)
granted him access. With blatant calculation, Wolff tells the Left, and
America’s entire Ruling Class, exactly what it wants to hear about Trump—that
he’s a moron, buffoon, ignoramus, etc. An accident! Go back to sleep! (Similarly, my old
friend David Frum has ensured
that he and his social-climbing wife will continue to be invited to Georgetown
dinner parties, despite being nominal Republicans, by dismissing, in his
just-released Trumpocracy, Trump’s 2016
triumph as an “Electoral College fluke.”)
Still, although Wolff’s slick novelistic style deliberately makes
it hard to say where fact ends and fiction begins, I do think his account of
Trump’s reaction to the scandalous Democrat repression of the
Charlottesville Unite The Right rally “rings true” (as the saying goes). And
it’s one reason I continue to be (guardedly) hopeful that Trump’s
latest DACA dalliance could end well.
But first, a
couple of caveats.
·
Wolff professes to be shocked! SHOCKED! by Trump’s hyperactive
management style—not reading memos, emotional reactions to personalities,
over-influenced by the last person he spoke to, etc. etc.
My reaction: I’m
sure this is persuasive to readers who (unlike Wolff) have not worked closely
with men at the apex of their professions. But it’s actually very common.
It’s how they tend to respond to stress, impossible multitasking demands,
intense time pressure, clashing aggressive subordinates, incessant deadlines etc.
etc.
In fact, Wolff’s description of Trump in action reminds me very
much of my time with a
specimen from a very different American—Mormon—subculture: Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah).Precisely because
Orrin could not be relied upon/ did not have time to read memos, aides had to
spend a great of time trying to lobby him on the hoof while he galloped down
the echoing Senate Office Building corridors—and then onto the train, Senators have
an underground train to the Capitol! —on his way to a
vote. (It’s a weird system).
One exceptionally able Hatch aide spent a great deal of time
lobbying to get an assistant simply because she knew Senators’ offices have two
doors, one permitting the Senator to leave though the anteroom and
another directly into the corridor—and both had to be covered if you wanted to
grab him.
Once, probably to persuade him to become President by opposing
Affirmative Action, I went out to his McMansion in McLean VA and drove him into
to Capitol Hill. It obviously didn’t work, but I remember him saying, as we
passed though DuPont Circle, “This is
where all the HOMOsexuals live.” When
I admitted I lived there, there was a short silence, after which he said: “We
have to get you married.”
As I say, America
has subcultures.
I did subsequently
marry, and was a little sorry (foolishly, see above) that he did not think to
wow my Canadian in-laws by sending congratulations. But he did later tell me
(sincerely): “Your wife in a beautiful woman.”
Second caveat:
·
Wolff repeatedly claims that Trump’s associates view him as
“moron”—something Leftists are preternaturally eager to believe about all their
opponents.
Of course, this
requires us to accept that
1.
Trump’s career in the nightmare world of New York real estate
4.
His winning the Presidency, despite
being massively outspent and in the teeth of overwhelming MSM opposition
were all, in David
Frum’s words, a “fluke.”
Yeah.
VDARE.com had nothing
whatever to do with the August 12 Unite The Right rally in
defense of the Robert E. Lee statue in
Charlottesville—we were not invited and we did not (for no particular reason)
publicize it—but nevertheless we still lost our PayPal facility and
were cancelled out of a conference. Quite
obviously, this was a coordinated Leftist pogrom, very similar
to the Trayvon Martin hysteria
in 2012, although this
time directed against the Dissident Right in general rather than
that year’s Republican office-seekers in particular.
Wolff’s account of
this is characteristically dishonest:
[a]lmost no one paid attention to the
announcement by the Trump supporter and American neo-Nazi Richard Spencer that
he was organizing a protest at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville,
over the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. “Unite the Right,” the theme of
the rally called for Saturday, August 12, was explicitly designed to link
Trump’s politics with white nationalism.
In fact, Spencer, who has certainly never acknowledged that he is
a neo-Nazi, had by then long broken with Trump over
his tolerance of the Deep State’s
war in Syria, and was clearly continuing his campaign to build an
independent movement.
Wolff does admit
that
Opposing the demonstrators was a
hardened, militant left called to the barricades. You could hardly have better
set an end-times scene, no matter the limited numbers of protesters. Much of
the morning involved a series of charges and countercharges—a rocks-and-bottles
combat, with a seemingly hands-off police force standing by.
This is not, in fact, the worst description of Charlottesville
I’ve seen— David Frum emotes [Chapter 5 of Trumpocracy] that it was “Nazis and white supremacists
on the rampage”—but it does evade the fact that a demonstration that a federal judge had ruled
legal was suppressed by elected, uniformed, civilian
and paramilitary Democrats.
Subsequently, of course, the independent Heaphy Report has confirmed what VDARE.com reported at the time: that
Charlottesville police were complicit in Leftist violence.
The Orwellian Two-Minute Hate that followed Charlottesville was
extraordinary even to veterans of American Moral Panics. It represented the
most extraordinary inversion of reality by Fake News since the MSM/ Ruling
Class convinced of Americans that Iraq had anything to do with 9/11— a
deception, come to think of it, in which David Frum was deeply involved. A Joint
Resolution of Congress condemned—unanimously—“White
nationalists, White supremacists, the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, and other hate
groups” for “violence and domestic terrorist attack,” an action that might well have
serious legal import, even before the Heaphy Report had confirmed Leftist violence or,
for that matter, the actual trial of alleged car murderer James Alex Fields,
who might well turn out to be the next George Zimmerman.
Significantly, however, President Trump defied this Resolution in
a small way. He signed it, but attached a “signing statement,” a tool that
Presidents have increasingly used to place an interpretation on legislation
that might influence its implementation. Trump’s statement said that Americans
“oppose hatred, bigotry, and racism in all its forms,” but did not condemn a
specific group, obstinately sticking with his much-denounced contention that
there was blame on both sides [Faced with an up-or-down choice
on Charlottesville resolution, Trump chooses third option, by Gregory
Korte, USA
Today, September 15, 2017]
Why did Trump take
this extraordinarily contrarian step—in the teeth of overwhelming Establishment
opinion, outside and inside the White House? (Right, John Kelly’s visible
cringing at the press conference became a meme.) It wasn’t the
much-maligned Steve Bannon. Trump was at
his Bedminster golf club when Charlottesville blew and Bannon, apparently a
symptom of his weakening status, had not been invited. Wolff writes:
The main event in Bedminster that day
was the ceremonial signing of an act extending the funding of a program that
let veterans obtain medical care outside VA hospitals. The signing was held in
a big ballroom at the Clubhouse two hours after Alex Field’s attack.
During
the signing, Trump took a moment to condemn the “hatred, bigotry, and violence
on many sides” in Charlottesville. Almost immediately, the president came under
attack for the distinction he had appeared to refuse to draw between avowed
racists and the other side. As Richard Spencer had correctly understood, the
president’s sympathies were muddled. However easy and obvious it was to condemn
white racists—even self-styled neo-Nazis—he instinctively resisted. [Emphases
added].
(I must say that I don’t think Spencer cared one way or the other
about Trump, who had already denounced him and the Alt Right after Hailgate. But of course Spencer knew that his value to
the Main Stream Media was that they could use him to smear Trump).
Trump then did
call Bannon:
…Trump sought help making his case:
“Where does this all end? Are they going to take down the Washington Monument,
Mount Rushmore, Mount Vernon?” Bannon—still not receiving his summons to
Bedminster—urged this to be the line: the president should condemn violence and
misfits and also defend history (even with Trump’s weak grasp of it). Stressing
the literal issue of monuments would bedevil the left and comfort the right.
Note that Trump already knew his stand: Bannon was simply
advising him to move the debate into areas where he knew Trump had overwhelming
public support.
“In contrast, Jared and
Ivanka wanted Trump to issue a forceful censure of hate groups and racial
politics Bannon sensibly said that that this would backfire: It will be clear his heart’s
not in it.” (This is exactly what I said in the Wall Street Journal when
I was interviewed by Scott Calvert. [August 14, 2017] )
As [Trump] got back on Marine One to
head to Andrews Air Force Base and on to JFK and then into Manhattan and Trump
Tower, his mood was dark and I-told-you-so. Privately, he kept trying to
rationalize why someone would be a member of the KKK—that is, they might not
actually believe what the KKK believed, and the KKK probably does not believe
what it used to believe, and, anyway, who really knows what the KKK believes
now? In fact, he said, his own father was accused of being involved with the
KKK—not true. (In fact, yes, true.)
Putting aside the smear (as far as I know unproven, and anyway this
would have been the basically non-violent Second Klan), what this shows
is a Trump far more judicious and intellectually curious than the fundamentally
hysterical MSM/ Ruling Class. And of course, he was right: for example, Unite
The Right contained peaceful Southern heritage groups like the League of the South.
Wolff continues:
The next day, Tuesday, August 15, the
White House had a news conference scheduled at Trump Tower. Bannon urged Kelly
to cancel it. It was a nothing conference anyway. Its premise was about
infrastructure—about undoing an environmental regulation that could help get
projects started faster—but it was really just another effort to show that
Trump was working and not just on a holiday. So why bother? What’s more, Bannon
told Kelly, he could see the signs: the arrow on the Trump pressure cooker was
climbing, and before long he’d blow.
The news conference went ahead
anyway. Standing at the lectern in the lobby of Trump Tower, the president
stayed on script for mere minutes. Defensive and self-justifying, he staked out
a contrition-is-bunk, the-fault-lies-everywhere-else position and then dug in
deep. He went on without an evident ability to adjust his emotions to political
circumstance or, really, even to make an effort to save himself. It was yet one
more example, among his many now, of the comic-absurd, movielike politician who
just says whatever is on his mind. Unmediated. Crazylike.
“What about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say,
altright? Do they have any semblance of guilt? What about the fact they came
charging with clubs in their hands? As far as I’m concerned that was a horrible, horrible day….
I think there’s blame on both sides. I have no doubt about it, you don’t have
any doubt about it. If you reported it accurately, you would see.”
Steve
Bannon, still waiting in his temporary office in the EOB, thought, Oh my god, there he goes. I
told you so. (Emphasis added).
Wolff regards this
as proof that Trump is “without an evident ability to adjust his emotions to
political circumstance” because he is a conventional Leftist bigot who will not
look at the facts. Trump, in contrast, had actually seen the “Alt Left…charging
with clubs in their hands” when his campaign rallies in California and Chicago
were disrupted and cancelled. (The photo at
right was taken at Charlottesville.) He knew first-hand the “political
circumstance” that there is a Totalitarian Left in the U.S.
And in fact opinion polls found his stand was popular, although it caused an
elite opinion meltdown.
Of course, Trump’s reaction was not perfect. What he should have
done is denounce Virginia Democratic officials for abrogating
Unite The Rights’s First Amendment rights and cause the Justice Department to
bring charges of Civil Rights violations. This would, at a stroke, have
revolutionized the debate.
Nevertheless,
Trump’s raw instincts were remarkable. Clearly, he had absolutely no support in
the White House, let alone in the political class, and certainly not on cable
television upon which he is allegedly dependent. Somehow, he found the insight
and strength to defy them.
Which brings me
Trump’s latest DACA dalliance. For some reason, he has long apparently felt the
need to appear to propitiate elite opinion that the DACAns should be allowed to
keep the fruits of their parent’s crimes—unlike the children of burglars. And
of course his current offer to the Democrats is appalling.
But Trump has wobbled before on
immigration. He’s always come back. (See here, here, here). The instincts
that erupted in Sh*tholegate must still be seething below the
surface.
Peter Brimelow [Email him] is the editor of VDARE.com. His best-selling book, Alien Nation: Common Sense
About America’s Immigration Disaster, is now available in Kindle format. Follow Peter Brimelow on Twitter.
