Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton deleted confidential emails from the illegal server maintained at her private New York residence.
Former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger was caught smuggling stolen documents from the National Archives by stuffing them into his clothes.
President Joe Biden has been heavily implicated in the emails discovered on the laptop of his son Hunter, which laptop also included incontrovertible evidence of felonies committed by Hunter himself.
None of them had their homes ransacked.
The justification for the raid on Donald Trump’s home was that confidential papers in his possession were not being properly handled.
Those data points alone are enough to lead a reasonable person to infer that the American justice system is operating on a two-tiered system: one set of rules for citizens of whom the ruling class approves, and one for everyone else.
Those aren’t the only data points available to us.
The persecution of General Flynn for process crimes, the dramatic middle-of-the-night arrest of Roger Stone (with CNN tipped off in advance to be sure it made the news), the sordid partisan text messages exchanged between the adulterous FBI agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, the illegal means by which the the feds obtained warrants to tap the phones of Donald Trump and his campaign staff, the prosecution of Dinesh D’Souza for producing an anti-Hillary Clinton documentary, the prosecution of James O’Keefe whose undercover videos revealed (among other things) Planned Parenthood selling baby parts from aborted fetuses and a CNN producer bragging about the network’s commitment to crushing Donald Trump, the IRS’s deliberate targeting of Tea-Party groups under Obama appointee Lois Lerner, the Department of Justice’s attempt to label angry parents speaking up at PTA meetings as domestic terrorists… those are all off the top of my head. I could go on and on. You yourself have probably already made a mental catalog of at least half a dozen things I left out. These aren’t right-wing fever dreams: these are all a matter of public record. They’re things that happened.
And it’s amplified by the fact that the establishment media play up any Democratic accusations of malfeasance by Republicans and ignore, downplay, or suppress any Republican accusations of malfeasance by Democrats.
I was speaking of accusations made by partisans in the preceding paragraph, but where the malfeasance is real, there’s an empirical history of the media squashing such negative stories when they reflect badly on Democrats, and obsessing on them when they reflect badly on Republicans.
There were peaceful protesters and violent thugs participating in the months of demonstrations that followed the death of George Floyd, just as there were peaceful protesters and violent thugs in the single day of demonstrations on January 6. Dozens of people were killed and billions of dollars’ worth of property was damaged, most of it by arson, as a result of the former; one unarmed woman was killed by a security cop in the latter. I challenge anyone to contradict the factuality of those statements. But the predominant narrative is that the George Floyd demonstrations were largely a peaceful affair attended by some unfortunate (and apparently forgiveable) violence on the fringes, while the latter was an insurrection requiring an draconic crackdown on anyone remotely involved.
You don’t have to be politically minded to find all these disparaties… peculiar.
Strange the way that all the disparities seem to favor Democrats and hurt Republicans. A little too remarkable for coincidence, isn’t it? That federal law enforcement, intelligence, and other agencies should always be cracking down so hard on conservatives, and never on liberals or progressives?
Odd how Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube routinely suspend, cancel, and shadow ban Republicans and conservatives, but not progressives. Their fact checkers take a partisan approach to the news: they allow partisan leftwing spin to pass as legitimate news while partisan rightwing spin—and sometimes actual truth that just happens to be damaging to Democrats—is branded as misinformation when it isn’t suppressed completely.
All of this is true. It’s exactly what I’ve been chronicling on this blog for two years.
The American left doesn’t see the obvious imbalance because by and large American leftists don’t see themselves as political at all. They’re just good people, compassionate and intelligent, wanting what’s best for everyone.
They look at the way conservative politicians have been targeted by the law enforcement and intelligent communities and think, “Well, sure, conservatism is bad so of course conservative politicans are going to be targeted more frequently than leftist politicians. And thank God there are media like CNN and MSNBC and PBS and NPR and the New York Times and Washington Post to offset the heinous lies of Fox News! And the violence around the George Floyd protests was bad, but the protestors weren’t trying to overthrow the government, so you can’t even compare them to the attempted coup of January 6th! And the left doesn’t have to be censored as much as the right on social media because the left is being honest, and follows the science, and isn’t driven by hate.”
That’s an amalgam of things I’ve heard from dozens of leftists over the years.
And that’s the real problem.
The left has essentially been telling the right: “You are bad people full of stupid and dangerous ideas, so we have to drive you out of power, out of business, and out of polite company. We have to shield our children from your horrible lies and stupid conspiracy theories. None of us are safe until all of you have been effectively neutralized.”
Do you doubt that’s how they think? Watch an hour or two of CNN or MSNBC. Read a few columns by Robert Reich or Paul Krugman. Listen to the President of the United States, the Speaker of the House, the Senate Majority leader. They’re not shy about it. They’re enthusiastic.
This is the point where the objective observer has to make a choice.
The objective observer must decide, based on all available evidence, whether or not the American left is correct in all of the above.
And the objective observer can then ruminate over the following tenets of modern leftism:
- If a man decides to be a woman, he’s a woman. And a she. The same goes for women who decided to be men. And you will be punished for not respecting their own identity.
- Every society of the world is precious and unique, and any outsider who adopts their traditions, costumes, cuisine, literary style, or other expressions of culture is guilty of appropriation.
- Being a woman consists of feeling like a woman, which is something anyone can do (without appropriating womanhood).
- When students are made uncomfortable by a given text, it’s the text that’s the problem. Students have a right not to be offended!
- When students are made uncomfortable by the mere presence on their campus of someone with whom they disagree, it’s that person that’s the problem: students have a right to feel safe!
What, then, is the objective observer to make of the fact that the American left has the gumption to define the American right—to judge them, find them wanting, and banish them to the wilderness (or worse)? Why is there no concern for how uncomfortable American conservatives are made by the incessant attacks from the left? How unsafe? You hear a lot from the left about the plight of “marginalized communities.” So why are they actively and even feverishly working to “marginalize” conservatives?
Interesting questions.
Keep them in mind.
The US is now boiling even more: “This. Here. Means. War.”
Mikkel Danielsen, Berlingske.dk, August 10
Donald Trump told the world that Mar-a-Lago had been ransacked.
That’s how Danielsen opens his article.
Not by saying, “Mar-a-Lago was ransacked by the FBI,” but by saying that Donald Trump told the world that it had been.
In other news, almost 21 years ago Rudy Giuliani told the world that New York had been attacked.
In the following hours, something remarkable happened on several of the most popular right-wing channels on social media.
“Tomorrow there is war. Sleep well,” conservative influencer Steven Crowder wrote to his approximately two million Twitter followers.
“This. Here. Means. War,” wrote the right-wing outlet The Gateway Pundit , and Steve Bannon immediately shared the message with all his followers on Telegram.
That same evening, Bannon broadcast another episode of his podcast, “The War Room”, where he had a visit from Joe Kent – a Republican congressional candidate from the state of Washington: “We are at war,” said the politician.
Okay. Three guys said things with the word “war” in them. One guy shared one of those guys messages and interviewed another one of them.
In the hours after Trump’s announcement, the word civil war appeared in ten times as many tweets as usual, according to the analysis house Dataminr.
The night passed, and of course civil war did not break out in the United States. It’s not even close.
But the rhetoric shows how the FBI’s search of Donald Trump’s home in Palm Beach is making an already heated United States boil.
Indeed.
The FBI officers took ten boxes of documents with them from Mar-a-Lago when they left the resort after Monday’s search, writes The Wall Street Journal.
We know that the search was part of the investigation to clarify whether the ex-president illegally took confidential documents out of the White House.
But the FBI has not said what the documents contain.
This has led the Republican Party, Fox News, and large parts of the conservative media universe to label the search as a politically motivated attack to put the most likely Republican presidential candidate in 2024 out of the running.
“Biden’s FBI searches potential 2024 opponent’s home,” read a graphic on Fox News Monday night.
The text of the Fox graphic is objectively true: it’s Biden’s FBI, they searched Trump’s home, and Trump is Biden’s most likely opponent in 2024.
It requires some very committed denial not to wonder whether politics played a role there.
Danielsen cites “the more moderate conservative” (his words) Wall Street Journal, disgraced former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, and failed 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang as expressing their concerns that the whole thing stinks so badly that they hope there was something more than a presidential records act violation behind it.
He also cites the execrable David Frum:
For all the Republican politicians who believe that Trump stands in the way of the party’s progress, the (FBI ransacking) could be “a perfect chance” to distance themselves a little, writes The Atlantic’s David Frum:
“Just say ‘no comment’ and let the legal system decide.”
That hasn’t happened at all.
Well, no. Because the suspicion here is “the legal system” is out of order. The suspicion is that it’s not operating not the way its supposed to, but as the kind of kabuki justice system we expect from banana republics.
Mike Pence, who has spent months distancing himself from Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the election, wrote on Twitter that he “shared the deepest concern with millions of Americans” about the search.
Ron DeSantis, who is probably the only one who can possibly beat Trump in 2024, wrote that the “regime” hunts down its political opponents.
I don’t believe DeSantis used scare quotes around regime. Why does Danielsen? Just curious.
The Republican Party believes they have a good case here shortly before the midterm elections:
There are whispers that the “deep state” in Washington, DC has gone on a politically motivated hunt for Donald Trump and the right wing.
Whispers? The fucking president of the United States has gone on a politically motivated hunt for Donald Trump and the right wing. He’s invented something called the “Ultra-MAGA movement” and described it as the most dangerous political ideology in American history. The Speaker of the House has said that American democracy may not survive a Republican Congressional majority. Chuck Schumer incited violence against conservative Supreme Court justices. That’s not scurrilous “deep state” stuff: it’s being said out loud by the most powerful elected officials in the country.
“It doesn’t stop with Trump. You are next,” writes the Republican Party of Texas on Twitter to its followers.
The words and actions of the Democratic leadership seem to support the same premise.
Several analysts believe that the search only increases the chances that Donald Trump will soon announce his 2024 candidacy:
It is easy to imagine Donald Trump running an effective campaign as the martyr hunted by the Democrats and the establishment.
Ya think?
And here’s how Danielsen wraps it all up:
On his social media site Truth Social, Donald Trump published a gloomy video about the state of the United States on Tuesday, which mostly looked like a well-produced election video.
It is indeed a gloomy video about the current state of the union, mostly because the state of the union is gloomy. The various ailments Trump ticks off in the course of the spot are all real, all true. America’s a hot mess right now. It’s also under the complete control of a Democratic president and Congress.
It’s not too hard to connect the dots.
The lede to the article says that “Confidence in the FBI is currently suffering a major crack in one half of the United States.”
That’s true.
But don’t worry: it’s the half whose opinions don’t matter.
The half who vote for all the wrong people.
The half whose political expressions are crimes.
The half whose beliefs are wrong and need to be corrected.
The half whom you can rest assured the powers-that-be in Washington, who love you and want you to be happy, will crush beneath the soles of their shoes.
And they really have to be crushed, darling, because just listen to how upset they get when we do the simplest thing in the world, like ransacking the private home of a former president! If they’re going to react like that to such a routine matter of law enforcement, imagine how they’d react to something serious!