The revolution is bigger than Trump …

The American public is even angrier now than before.  

I’m not talking about the people who dominate the news – like the NFL players taking a knee, the Black Lives Matter activists, or the illegal immigrants demanding amnesty. For all their bluster and high media profile, they are a tiny, somewhat irrelevant part of the public. 

No, I’m talking about ordinary working-class Americans: those who have always worked for a living, tried to do the right thing, and taken care of themselves and their families.

You know, the middle-class folk politicians always promise they will help, but are conveniently ignored after every election. They have every right to be angry. And they are.     

They see the rich getting richer, the poor living a comfortable lifestyle with essentially free healthcare and food stamps, and the most vocal complainers being rewarded. At the same time, their own lives are getting harder: healthcare premiums are soaring, their deductibles are so high as to make insurance practically unusable, and the costs to feed their families are rising faster than their paychecks. If they complain about the fairness of this, they are labeled heartless bigots and racists. 

To add insult to injury, just about everything they’ve always believed in – family, faith, personal responsibility, love of country, honor, and respect for others – is routinely ridiculed.   

They blame both parties – the Democrats for continuing to focus on meaningless symbolism over substance; the Republicans for accomplishing absolutely nothing with their majorities in Congress and a sort-of Republican in the White House.  

All they see is non-stop bickering and name-calling from elected politicians on both sides of the aisle. They also sense a government bureaucracy increasingly out of control, playing favorites, leaking classified material to wound adversaries, and acting in its own self-interest. They don’t trust the media. They don’t trust our own intelligence agencies. They don’t trust our lower courts. 

Antifa activists are beating people with whom they disagree. Public universities are shutting down free speech. Cities are passing laws to make it illegal for their police to enforce Federal immigration laws.  It’s against the law now in many jurisdictions just to ask if someone is a citizen. Statues and monuments are being vandalized. Cities are removing other statues because someone might be offended. Public schools, roads, and parks are being renamed to spare the feelings of some groups aggrieved by the actions of somebody more than a century or more ago.

Movie actors, entertainers, and other celebrities are openly calling for the assassination of a sitting President, as are some elected officials, to cheers.  Professional athletes – and some team owners – are refusing to stand for our national anthem at games. And the media love all that.  

In the public’s mind, it’s a complete breakdown of order. It’s chaos.

And chaos inevitably leads to revolution. 

It’s been years in the making and it’s here. Now. 

That’s how Trump got elected, folks. That, and because Hillary represented everything the public hated about the political establishment and its mismanagement of the country. 

I can’t understand why so many people still don’t get it.  Particularly the Republican establishment.  You would think they would.  An unqualified outsider with no political experience beat not only the ultimate establishment Democrat, but every single other Republican primary candidate supported by the Republican establishment.  

If that didn’t send a message, I don’t know what will.     

Then there’s the election of Roy Moore over incumbent Luther Strange in the Alabama runoff. Bible-thumping, 10-Commandment-quoting, gun-toting Moore trounced Strange – the darling of the Republican establishment that spent $9 million supporting him. The Republican establishment even persuaded Trump to fly down and do a get-out-the-vote-for-Strange event. 

It didn’t make any difference.  Strange lost to Moore by 9-10 points.

That’s a message. When even Trump can’t stop the onslaught against a nominal incumbent, you have to realize the Republican primaries leading up to 2018 are going to be a bloodbath for establishment Republicans.  Frankly, I don’t think the Democrat incumbents are going to have it any easier, either – they have their own revolution underway from the far left of their party.

We’re already seeing some “moderate” Republicans in the Senate announce they’re retiring at the end of their terms. Expect more to do the same. They see the writing on the wall: they know they would face tough primaries from anti-establishment challengers and could very well lose. 

The sentiment of voters is decidedly against incumbents from either party.    

Most of this is because the American public now sees chaos in virtually every aspect of our society. Whether it’s attacks on fundamental rights such as free speech, attacks on religious liberty, physical attacks on police just trying to do their jobs, and attacks on American symbols such as the flag and our national anthem, it’s too much for many ordinary Americans.

It’s not that they want to return to the 1950s – Hell, most of them don’t even know what life was like in the 1950s. It’s simply that they want some sense of order and direction. 

They aren’t getting either from establishment politicians. 

They see elected politicians continue to skirt the issues the public actually cares about, like putting an end to the chaos, in favor of grandstanding over meaningless crap, day after day. The public increasingly realizes that our government no longer works for the people as a whole, but instead for special-interest groups, big-money donors, and itself above all. The public also has determined that our mainstream media no longer objectively report actual news, but only what – true or not – will thrill their most polarized viewers; it’s become yellow journalism at its worst. 

Against this backdrop, ordinary working-class Americans are genuinely confused, and angry. And they are taking out their frustrations on politicians and the media alike.  

The pendulum started to swing some time ago; it's about to swing even further in 2018.

And when it does, it will swing very hard. 

I expect a lot of new faces in Congress after that.  That’s okay. 

More change is needed, and those in Congress and the government now are clearly unwilling to execute any changes.  So it's long past time for them to go. 

Please, just go away …

I concede I’ve never liked Hillary Clinton. 

I didn’t like her when she was First Lady, and Bill Clinton said we’d gotten “two for the price of one.” I didn’t like the idea of electing our own version of Juan and Eva Perón. 

Soon after, she lived down to my expectations.  It started with her secret meetings – against government rules – to plot her version of healthcare reform. It was as if she fully expected to continue the legacy of Clinton corruption and secret deals in Arkansas to Washington.  Like when, in 1978 as a novice investor with $1,000, she was able to amass $100,000 in about a year. 

She morphed into a full-blown weasel everyone could see when the Whitewater scandal broke. She hid or destroyed billing documents from her Rose Law Firm days during the Whitewater investigation.  The originals were never found.  Then a version of those miraculously reappeared in the White House, “discovered” by an aide in a storage area. Potential witnesses against her and Bill related to Whitewater disappeared, mysteriously died, or chose prison over testifying.

When a long line of women came forward to say Bill Clinton had sexually assaulted them, including one who claimed he brutally raped her, she dismissed them as bimbos, sluts and whores, saying “these women are trash, who will believe them.” She followed that by claiming reports of Bill’s well-documented history as a sexual predator and rapist – stretching back to his days as governor of Arkansas – were merely the result of a “vast right-wing conspiracy.”

She took a personal role in trying to destroy Bill’s victims, calling Gennifer Flowers, Bill’s one-time mistress, “trailer trash.” Even after Bill had to pay $850,000 to settle a suit against him from one of his victims, Paula Jones, she never let up.

She also took a personal role in firing the White House travel staff so she could give the business to a friend.  She helped her brother’s “pardon for money” scheme in the waning days of the Bill Clinton presidency that resulted in the pardon of known swindler Marc Rich. 

After leaving the White House, she said that she and Bill left “dead broke” because of all the legal expenses incurred during the investigation of Bill’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. She described Lewinsky as a “looney-tune narcissist.” Curiously, despite being “dead broke,” she and Bill soon bought a multimillion-dollar house in Chappaqua, NY.   

But she wasn’t done.  Not by a long shot. 

She sought and won a U.S. Senate seat in New York.  In the Senate, she accomplished absolutely nothing. However, she was able to start gathering more political allies. 

Meanwhile, the William J. Clinton Foundation – started by Bill in 2001 – began raking in money by the millions.  Which, apparently, the Clintons needed being so “dead broke.” It was also a great place to park the Clintons’ political cronies, pay them well, and keep them nearby. 

And also, of course, to fund Hillary’s next escapade – running for President. 

You’ll remember, she lost the nomination to Barack Obama.

That should have been the end, but nooooo … 

Obama appointed her Secretary of State. That was the golden ticket for Hillary.  She and Bill now had the means to rake in millions more by trading her approval of questionable deals for contributions to the Foundation. Contributions, I might add, from some of the most repressive regimes in the world.  She even approved the sale of a big chunk of our own uranium reserves to the Russians in exchange for a big contribution to the Foundation.   

Hillary turned the State Department into the same pay-to-play circus she and Bill had enjoyed in their halcyon days running Arkansas like an ATM. The money kept rolling in. Not just from foreign governments seeking influence – in violation of U.S. laws – but also from corporations who knew Hillary’s next move was to run for President. 

In fact, it’s been estimated that since the Foundation started, the Clintons raised more than $2 billion – that’s right, billion with a “b” – from corporations, largely as a combination of lavish (think $250,000 and up per event) speaker fees and direct contributions.

This fueled an amazing lifestyle for the once “dead broke” Clintons, and for their political allies, as well as financing Chelsea’s wedding to the son of a convicted felon.   

In Obama’s final term, Hillary predictably decided it was “her turn” to be President. She was “owed” it by Obama and the Democrat establishment, after all. She’d patiently waited her turn, was sitting on a huge pile of cash.  And she was a woman.   

She had her allies rig the rules to ensure she got the nomination, which she did. 

And then she proceeded to run perhaps the worst campaign in American history.  She had no plan. She had no policy. She had no message – except that her opponent was a sexist pig. 

And she was a woman. Standing up for women. And against sexism.  

The irony of that messaging was clearly lost on her. 

During her campaign, she also publicly dismissed roughly half the population – Trump supporters – as a “basket of deplorables.” “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that.” You could cut the arrogance with a knife. 

In the end, despite blowing off voters in the states she should have won, insulting traditional Democrat working-class voters, making light of the fact that she used an unsecured private server while she was Secretary of State – in violation of State Department policy, intentionally destroying thousands of subpoenaed e-mails, and wasting almost a billion dollars on ads that emphasized identity politics over substance, she was stunned she lost.

According to reports from those claiming to have been there on the night of the election, when she learned she lost she went to pieces, sobbing uncontrollably.  What is known for certain is that she didn’t even come out do a concession speech until the next day. 

In truth, she was such a flawed candidate – ethically and morally, and with such obvious disdain for most working-class Americans – almost anyone could have beaten her.

Even Trump with all HIS character flaws.  And he did. 

I thought, finally, that’s it.  No more Hillary. After such an embarrassing loss, she’s done.

Wrong again.   

Now she has a new book – “What happened?” The cover only has that title and her name. As one critic said, it’s the first book with both the question and answer on the cover. 

Of course, she’s blaming everyone but herself for the loss. That didn’t surprise me. 

Recently, in an NPR interview, she said she’d be open to a legal challenge to the results of the last election.  She knows, as a lawyer, there’s absolutely no way under our Constitution to overturn the results of a Presidential election. Still, she cited Kenya, where its supreme court just overturned the results of its most recent election, as precedent.

Kenya, really?  As a valid legal precedent for us to follow?  How nuts is she? 

More to the point, why am I not surprised? 

I never liked her. But I’ve now moved beyond pitying her as a pathetic, out-of-touch, entitled whiner and weasel who simply refuses to accept personal responsibility for anything.

She’s dangerously delusional.  I just wish she’d go away. 

Guilt by association …

Hitler liked Beethoven’s music.  

So do I.  Does that make me a Nazi? 

Of course not. 

Yet when David Duke – a well-known racist nutjob – said he liked Trump’s stance on illegal immigration, many on the left and the media quickly reported that as proof that Trump was a white supremacist. And a racist, too. 

When the Family Research Council – opposed to gay marriage – came out in support of Trump, the left and the media used that as proof that Trump was homophobic.  That was probably a great surprise to Trump since he publicly supported gay marriage long before Obama did.    

Last night on Tucker Carlson’s show, some flake implied the “The Star-Spangled Banner” was a symbol of racism. Why? Because this person found that Confederate sympathizers in 1931 pushed for it to become our national anthem.  Forget for a moment that it was written in 1814, and has no lyrics related to race or in support of slavery.

That’s how insane it’s become. 

Because you agree with someone on certain things does not mean you agree with them on everything. Nor does it mean they agree with you on everything, either. 

I have a friend from college who many years later fell on hard times and committed a felony – embezzlement – for which he was convicted and did time in prison.  Yet he’s still my friend, we stay in touch, and I would still do anything for him.

But that doesn’t mean I endorse what he did.  Nor does that mean I am okay with embezzlement. 

You see, having a convicted felon as a dear friend doesn’t make you one. 

Just as having a racist agree with you that puppies are cute makes you a racist. Or having a friend who thinks all gay marriage is wrong means you agree with them. Or having a business relationship with someone who is a socialist makes you one. 

Guilt by association is the last resort of those have no actual proof of your own wrongdoing. 

We’ve been down that road before with Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Committee hearings in the 1950s searching for Communists and Communist sympathizers.  Careers and reputations were destroyed in the process.  Most often with little or no proof, except by some specious association.    

It’s one of the most shameful episodes in our post-war history. 

And here we are again.  The use of guilt by association is now a common tool of the left and the media to try to destroy anyone with whom they disagree. Specifically Trump. 

When Obama was long-time pals with Bill Ayers – a cofounder of the violent Weather Underground that bombed government buildings in the 1960s – no one on the left or the media thought that meant Obama supported blowing up government facilities. When Obama followed a racist Jeremiah Wright, there was no tagging Obama as a racist because of that. 

But let some crackpot bigot say he or she thinks Trump is doing a good job, and suddenly Trump must share their looney-tune beliefs in toto. 

It’s dishonest.  And our media that report this nonsense should be ashamed.   

Waiting for the hurricane …

It’s a lot different than waiting for a snowstorm. 

With snowstorms, you can expect to be shut in for a while. Your power might go off for a bit, but you can always bundle up until power comes back on, which usually is fairly soon. 

Snowstorms are mostly predictable, too. 

Forecasters can pretty much predict with fair accuracy where and how soon snow will start falling. They’re less certain about expected snow totals at times, but when you see the snowstorm pattern on the news, you can be somewhat certain it’s coming, and possibly coming your way.

So you stock up. If you have a fireplace you bring in some wood.  And, of course, you make a run to the store for bread, milk, eggs and toilet paper. 

Now, big snowstorms can be scary.  With enough snow, roofs can collapse.  Even with a little snow, driving can be dangerous, as too many people with a 4-wheel-drive SUVs think somehow they are suddenly professional stunt drivers in a Jeep commercial. 

In contrast, hurricanes, even smaller ones, can be downright terrifying. For good reason. 

Hurricanes are wildly unpredictable. A hurricane can start as a tropical storm somewhere off Africa, gather some energy over warm water, and jump overnight from a Cat 1 to a Cat 3, 4 or 5. Depending on fronts and the jet stream a hurricane can turn and move just about anywhere, and lose or gain speed and strength. At times it can make landfall in one place, lose some energy as it moves somewhere else, cross warmer water again and regain its energy, make a giant loop and pound the first landfall all over again. 

Most of the deaths during snowstorms come from heart attacks. Most deaths from hurricanes come from drowning.  A roof can collapse during a very heavy snow. Hurricanes rip roofs off, blow buildings apart, cause windows to pop out, and turn lawn ornaments into high-velocity projectiles capable of piercing concrete blocks. 

An exceptional blizzard may have snow driven by 50-60mph winds.  The lowest level of hurricane – a Cat 1 – has winds averaging at least 75mph.

Oh, and tornados often accompany hurricanes. 

But the biggest danger from a hurricane is from flooding, especially along the coasts. Hurricanes can easily drop a foot or more of rain everywhere along their path. The circular motion of a hurricane can also pile up water offshore and then push it forward resulting in a deadly storm surge at some point.  Imagine for a moment a wall of water perhaps 10-12 feet tall, or more, suddenly headed for a coastline that’s only a few feet above sea level. That would reach the second floor of most buildings, and the roofs of one-story houses. 

It took a storm surge of 4-5 feet to cause all the damage at the Jersey shore during “superstorm” Sandy. Now mentally double that, and think of the force, and weight, of all that water. And make no mistake, water is heavy – a cubic foot of water weighs more than 62 pounds. The force of a storm surge coming in and then going out is beyond comprehension.   

Everyone who lives where there are hurricanes knows all this. Certainly, some people will die here in a hurricane because of other reasons.  But the real reason so many people in this country die during hurricanes is typically because of their own arrogance and stupidity.

There will always be those who plan to hunker down and ignore evacuation orders. They refuse to go to emergency shelters, they think because they’ve survived other hurricanes they’ll do it again, or they want to prove how tough they are. 

But there are always fewer of them after each hurricane.  Because they are dead.   

The uncertainty over a hurricane makes waiting for one – especially here in Florida – way different than waiting for a snowstorm when we lived in Pennsylvania. Snowstorms are rarely life-threatening; hurricanes are always potentially deadly. With a hurricane, you really don’t have any idea what might happen. Nor when it will arrive. Nor how powerful it will be when it gets to you. Or even if it will get anywhere near you at all. 

So all you can do is prepare for the worst. Instead of stocking up on bread, milk, eggs, and toilet paper, here you stock up on water, canned goods, paper towels and batteries and make certain your car has a full tank of gas. You fill your bathtub with water as a backup to fill your toilet tanks if the power goes out.  You move all your lawn furniture inside, along with your grill, as well as anything that could be picked up and weaponized by the wind. 

You worry whether you’ve done enough to prepare, and worry what kind of damage your home might sustain, and how long your power might be out.  That’s a lot different than wondering if your office will be open tomorrow, or whether your kid’s school will be closed.     

Most of us here have been glued to our TVs for days on end watching the path of our most recent hurricane – Irma. You’ve probably watched the lines of traffic from South Florida heading north to escape Irma. Millions have already left South Florida.

When Irma was projected to go up the east coast, people there fled further inland and some went over to the west coast. Then the projections changed, and now the storm is projected to go up the west coast. I don’t know what those people will do.  I don’t know what the people who drove up to Georgia and Alabama will do, either, since both those areas are now in Irma’s path.   

That’s the nature of hurricanes. It’s the uncertainty.   

No matter how long you’ve lived here, or how many hurricanes you’ve survived in the past, it’s important to have a healthy respect for any hurricane – present or future.

People who don’t have a lower probability of survival. 

The myth of the extreme-right threat …

I heard an assertion the other day that stunned me.

Some talking head said that far-right extremist groups – such as the KKK, white supremacists, and neo-Nazis – experience their greatest growth when Republicans are in power.  They added that their numbers appear to decline when Democrats hold the reins of power.

Huh?

Now mind you, this was said with complete sincerity. The point they were trying to make was that far-right extremists feel more emboldened under Republicans.

So since we now have a Republican President, a Republican majority in Congress, and Republican domination of state governorships and legislatures, that’s supposed to explain why we’re seeing more violence from the extreme far right, more public displays of right-wing hatred and bigotry, and an increase in reported hate crimes against minorities.     

I have a different take. 

I think the perceived difference in the numbers of far-right extremist groups – and how their activities are described – under Republicans versus Democrats is largely the result of what our media choose to cover.  I also believe, and the numbers will likely bear me out, that there are not significantly more Klan members, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists in America now than ever before; if anything, there’s likely fewer. But they get more media coverage.

The question is why?       

When Democrats are in power, the media tend to dismiss the extreme right-wingers as tiny clusters of stupid, ill-informed clowns so far out of the mainstream they are a joke – which they are and have been for years. The media prefer pushing a narrative, bordering on propaganda, that the liberal progressive agenda supported by Democrats is wildly popular, here and abroad.

That narrative of how popular the progressive agenda is here and abroad is questioned if significant numbers of people show up to oppose it, as the Tea Party did and the Brexit movement in the UK did. When that happens, the media downplay the numbers of people involved and portray any opposition as from a miniscule number of angry, ill-informed, anti-progress nutjobs, as they did with the Tea Party and Brexit supporters.

Opposition becomes invisible by design.  In short, nothing to see here.       

Yet sometimes the media do too good a job of hiding the opposition. They start to believe their own propaganda that there’s really no substantial opposition to their beloved agenda. Their polls bear them out; mainly because people who distrust the media won’t answer truthfully if at all, which means others eager to be polled aren’t always representative of the whole.

Consequently, the pollsters get skewed data. And the media report that bad data as fact because it supports what they already want to believe. 

That’s a key reason why the media and Democrats were so stunned when Trump was elected over Hillary.  How could so many otherwise normal Americans – including traditional working-class Democrats – turn their backs on a clearly smarter and more enlightened Democrat?

Especially to elect an inarticulate, intellectually inferior buffoon such as Trump? 

There must have been something else, some evil force, at play. It’s not the first time they tried to find a culprit other than their own candidate’s failings. 

When G.W. Bush beat Al Gore and then John Kerry, Democrats blamed social conservatives, mainly rabid white evangelical and fundamentalist Christians.  Democrats and progressives never trust devout white Christians of any stripe, who they see as ignorant backwoods Bible thumpers opposed to “progress.” These white Christians, to Democrats and liberals, are small-minded and judgmental; they cling to such outdated concepts as “good and evil” and “right and wrong.” 

And “traditional values.” What a laugh. 

In the case of Trump, Democrats and the media believe that, in addition to the Russians – another unproven boogie man, it must have been angry, racist white men still incensed that we had elected a black President not once, but twice.

These angry white men also punished Democrats for nominating a woman – a woman, for God’s sake! – for President after Obama.  These narrow-minded white men already hated Obama’s decisions to allow in a flood of refugees from the Middle East, protect illegal immigrants already here, his push for gay marriage and gays in the military, his support for Planned Parenthood, and fostering his Justice Department’s obsession with siding with criminals over police.     

It was obvious to Democrats and their pals in the media that white male homophobic, xenophobic, sexist, racist, bigots put Trump in office. That’s the only way it could have happened.

Since Trump won, there must be a lot of them out there.  But where? And how could they be stopped before they influenced any more Americans?

They looked no further than the far right extremists.  The Klan. The neo-Nazis. The white “nationalists” and white supremacists. These are the hate-mongering enemies of progress.   

Suddenly, these extremists were everywhere.  Or so it seemed. 

But they really weren’t.

Nobody, save perhaps the Southern Poverty Law Center extortionists who make millions by manufacturing fake hate-group threats, honestly believes groups like the Klan, the neo-Nazis and white supremacists are growing in numbers.

You wouldn’t know that watching our media, however. When Trump was campaigning, the media breathlessly reported how hateful and racist his supporters were. Except they weren’t. The alleged hateful, racist signs held by Trump supporters turned out to be few and far between, and often plants by Democrat operatives. There was almost no violence at Trump rallies or assaults on minorities there either, unless you count the rare times when paid provocateurs from the left assaulted otherwise peaceful Trump supporters – and don’t be misled, that’s about the only time you saw Trump supporters fight back.

The same thing happened with the “surge” in “reported” hate crimes and racist vandalism once Trump was elected. The media were quick to blame far-right hate groups – who they claimed were Trump supporters – for the “dramatic increase” in assaults on minorities, defacing of mosques and synagogues, and other acts of bigotry and prejudice.

The media were less inclined to report the eventual truth: almost all of the reported “hate crimes” and vandalism that gained national notoriety proved bogus – done by Democrat and leftist operatives to make it appear that Trump’s words fostered attacks on minorities. The widely reported “attacks” and verbal assaults on hajib-wearing women on subways and college campuses, and on other Muslims, supposedly in the name of Trump, also were largely later debunked – most if not all never happened, but came from people seeking media attention.    

Charlottesville is the latest cause célèbre for the media and the left. There a protest against the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee spun out of control when neo-Nazis and white supremacists affiliated with the Klan clashed with counter protesters. Based on media coverage and selective video editing, one would think there were hundreds of right-wing extremists there.

The reality is that there were about 30 members of the Klan protesting, as reported by the New York Times, and perhaps a couple of dozen other right-wing extremists.  

The fighting didn’t start until the protesters against the removal of the statue peacefully concluded their rally and started to leave. That’s when the counter protesters – who did number in the hundreds, and by all accounts vastly outnumbered the motley crew of wannabe neo-Nazis, Klan folk, and white supremacists – started physically engaging with them. Violence broke out and culminated in one right-wing lunatic driving his car into a crowd, killing one of the counter protesters and injuring many others. 

That is actually what happened.  There weren’t hundreds of right-wing extremists there. It wasn’t an epic moment that showed the power and strength of the far-right extremists.   

If anything, it demonstrated once again how lame these right-wing extremists are, and how they can’t whip up more than a few dozen supporters for anything. They’re just a small number of small people who like to dress up and shout stupid things to piss off the rest of us. 

I’ve dealt with worse from the homeless beggars while going to work in Philly.    

So forget about the growing threat from right-wing extremists. It’s a media-manufactured myth. And don’t believe that “hate groups” are soaring to new highs under Trump.  They aren’t. 

Unless you want to believe the Southern Poverty Law Center – which now includes “patriot” groups opposed to illegal immigration, those who lobby for tighter border security, those in favor of maintaining the death penalty for certain crimes, and those who oppose abortion – as equivalent in hate-group status as the Ku Klux Klan or neo-Nazis.

That’s right, according to the SPLC, if you are opposed to illegal immigration, want tighter border security, believe in capital punishment for some crimes, or are pro-life, you, too, are a hate group. I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

Neither did the churches that made their list because they supported traditional marriage. 

When you include all of the above as "hate-groups" the numbers are bound to go up. But again, even with that data legerdemain, there still aren't more actual "hate groups" today.

It's a myth to scare you. And it's pure crapola.  

Our descent into madness …

That’s the only way to describe what’s happening. 

Antifa thugs physically attack innocent people coming out of a rally and are called “peaceful” protestors. Throwing rocks and bottles of urine at police, smashing windows and setting fire to cars is also called a “largely peaceful” protest.  Mayors are praised for ordering police to stand down while rioters loot and burn businesses; others for deciding they won’t comply with Federal immigration laws. 

Congress is being asked to outlaw “hate” speech – but only hate speech by some groups but not by others. The ACLU announced it will not defend free speech by some groups because it’s hate speech – this from the same ACLU that vigorously defended the Westboro Baptist bigots’ right to harass families burying sons and daughters who died while serving in our military. 

Social media networks are determining what is “hate speech” to be banned here, while also working with repressive regimes overseas to censor what can be viewed there.  Facebook and Twitter executives are deleting the accounts and postings of some “hate groups” but turn a blind eye to others and live-stream postings of beatings and even suicides, rapes and murders.  

We now have blacks at public universities demanding segregated, blacks-only dormitories and meeting spaces, and the right to exclude anyone who isn’t sufficiently black from those places. On one college campus, with that school’s administration’s blessing, black students and faculty had a day dedicated to excluding all whites from that campus.    

Meanwhile, public schools, libraries and even streets are being renamed, and historic statues and monuments are vandalized and torn down, because they honor long-dead segregationists.

Some want the monument memorializing Confederate soldiers buried in Arlington national cemetery removed – along with any Confederate symbols on their graves.  

A bust of Abraham Lincoln was recently set on fire in Chicago. Someone else spray-painted part of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. Another doused a statue of Columbus with red paint. 

New York Mayor Di Blasio is seriously considering removing the Columbus statue from Columbus Circle in NYC because it offends some Native Americans and Caribbean blacks. He may also remove Grant’s Tomb because – despite defeating the slave-holding South in the Civil War, and later serving as a U.S. President – some think Grant himself was also anti-Semitic.

College and public university administrators support professors who spew hatred, including those calling for genocide on whites and murdering police. The same administrators allow violent protestors to silence conservative voices from being heard – for fear what those conservative speakers may say could incite violence.  Free-speech advocates on campuses are beaten by masked attackers who claim to be anti-fascists exercising their own right to “free speech.” 

Black Lives Matter activists and black entertainers promote killing cops – a popular BLM chant is: “What do we want? Dead Cops! When do we want them? Now!” A major movie star says he’d like to punch the President in the face.  A comedian poses with an ISIS-like picture of herself holding a bloody, severed head of Donald Trump and posts it online.

Elected officials call for the assassination of a sitting U.S. President. Celebrities get cheers for saying they‘ve thought seriously about blowing up the White House.  One gets cheers at an event for saying “When was the last time an actor assassinated a president?" – a clear reference to John Wilkes Booth.  And after a pause he added, "been a while, and maybe it's time."

I wish I was making this up but I’m not.

Some are quick to blame the events in Charlottesville for the sudden surge in violence and what can only be described as anarchy. The truth is it started long before Charlottesville; long before Trump was elected, in fact.  We’ve been heading down this maelstrom of madness for decades.

The far left and the left-leaning media have created a Frankenstein monster from a combination of myths, misinformation, manufactured outrage and outright lies. Now this monster stalks the land, apparently free of any moral compass or conscience.    

It’s frankly Orwellian, in many ways.

Free speech now doesn’t mean the right to express your views, no matter how hurtful or unpopular, but the right to stop others from expressing their views through violence and intimidation. There's long been a prohibition against inciting a riot or creating “imminent” danger like yelling “fire” in a crowded theater, under the guise of free speech.  Now, however, it’s perfectly acceptable to claim you’re expressing your right to free speech by inciting a riot, beating people and attacking police simply because you merely anticipate the possibility of speech and words you don’t want to hear.     

Freedom no longer means the Constitution will protect your right to believe what you want, worship or not as you wish, and live your life the way you want as long as you don’t harm others. Freedom is now subject to government approval alone: you can be forced by government edict to abandon your core beliefs, how you worship, how you live your life, or even how you run a business. All because your freedom may impinge on the freedom of someone else more politically favored.  

There’s no such thing as equality. Today, some are clearly “more equal” than others. Especially if you claim to be a victim. Being a self-described victim – or someone who asserts they are fighting to defend self-described victims – establishes a moral high ground in their mind that allows them to do whatever they want to whomever they choose with absolute impunity.   

Justice is no longer blind and even handed; instead of interpreting the laws or Executive Orders as written, some judges now divine motives behind laws or Orders to determine legitimacy. This reverses hundreds of years of legal tradition where the actual words, and the precise way they are written, were the only things that mattered. 

“Racism” and “racist” now cover more people and ideas than perhaps ever before in this country.  Unfairly, so, too.  Where once these were used almost exclusively to describe those who judged anyone and discriminated against them on the basis of their race alone, only whites – and especially conservative whites or Republicans of any race – are now automatically racists.

Anyone opposed to illegal immigration is racist as well.  Anyone who accurately describes our inner cities as urban hellholes – where minorities are killing each other in astonishingly high numbers, and poverty is higher than ever – is also automatically a racist.  Anyone who wants to improve education in our inner cities by closing failing public schools and giving poor parents the opportunity to send their kids to charter or magnet schools is also a racist.     

Curiously, those blacks who judge all whites based on their skin color are automatically not racist.  Blacks who judge all Asians based on their race alone are not racists. In fact, blacks can’t be racists at all, despite judging other groups based on race alone, because, well, they are black. 

Courts and Presidents and government regulators, not Congress, are creating de facto laws, in clear violation of the Constitution’s separation of powers.

And no one cares.  Unless, of course, it’s coming from a President and an administration with whom you disagree. When Obama and his administration did it, conservatives grumbled about executive overreach. But when Trump and people in his administration use the same tactics, the far left and media go berserk and fan the flames of violence in the streets. 

We are in a bizarre time in our nation’s history. 

There’s a collective blindness to what is actually happening, driven by a media that has devolved into a propaganda tool rather than a source of impartial news.  If one is to believe what our media are reporting, our country is awash in neo-Nazis and white supremacists, supported by Trump and fellow Republicans, who must be stopped – by any means necessary – or they will endanger Jews, gays, immigrants, and any people of color.     

The neo-Nazis and white supremacists in particular are the “oldest and darkest forces” Joe Biden decried recently in an op-ed.

Unfortunately, as usual, Joe is off base.  Neo-Nazis and white supremacists, as loathsome as they are, don’t really amount to much.  Their lunatic followers number in the hundreds, not thousands. Most often they have trouble getting a hundred supporters to show up, and even then they typically shout a few stupid things, wave a few dumbass signs, and go home. 

No, the real threat to Americans – the real “oldest and darkest forces” – are mobs fueled by emotion instead of reason. They don’t respect the rights of others, they want to rewrite history for their own purposes, and they prefer demagoguery to democracy to achieve their goals.     

It’s more than a tad ironic that so many of those using violence and destruction to oppose what they see as intolerance are themselves so intolerant of others.  With a mob at their back, they feel empowered to do disgraceful and despicable things they’d never do alone. 

When Trump noted after Charlottesville there was violence by both sides of the protests, he was widely criticized for implying a moral equivalency between the neo-Nazis and white supremacists and the counter protestors. He didn’t; he simply stated a fact borne out by video evidence.   

The "anti-fascist" mobs today, as in Charlottesville and elsewhere, use tactics startlingly similar to the Nazi Brownshirts of the 1930s. Yet they claim to abhor everything the Nazis stood for. They also claim to be fighting fascists, when they are in fact the modern incarnation of fascists.  

They have become what they abhor.  

That’s true madness. It can only end badly.    

The disloyal opposition …

I expect Democrats to oppose Trump at every turn. I expect them to be angry and frustrated they lost the last election even against such a flawed candidate as Trump. 

But I’ve never seen so many people and groups actively working night and day to overturn the results of a legitimate  Presidential election.

At times, it seems overwhelming. 

Virtually all Democrats, most of the mainstream media, and a great number of establishment Republicans are doing their damndest to force Trump from office.  Then there’s what’s known as the “deep state” – the entrenched bureaucracy in the intelligence community, the State Department, and elsewhere – actively sabotaging Trump at every turn with leaks designed to embarrass him and further the perception that he is uniquely unfit to be President. 

I’ve never seen anything like this. There’s an open insurrection against a legally and democratically elected President by an unholy alliance of Democrats, the media, unelected bureaucrats, and even people in his own party.

They are lined up against him, and using every legal option and often illegal means at their disposal, not because he’s done anything wrong or committed “high crimes and misdemeanors,” but simply because he’s not one of them. He’s an outsider; a barbarian in their view, who doesn’t respect how things have always worked in Washington. 

He’s a clear and present danger to the status quo. 

They’ve decided we need what is, in essence, a coup d’état – something that’s never happened here since the founding of this nation.

Some Democrats have called for Trump’s impeachment, although they can’t seem to come up with any hard evidence to warrant that.  The media have been trying since he won his party’s nomination, and are now near hysteria, to find something, anything, to disqualify him. Some far-left celebrities have even called for the military to seize control.

What they want is to thwart democracy and ignore the will of the millions of people who voted for Trump. That’s especially rich since they claim Trump himself is a threat to our democracy. So they think invalidating a democratic election will help preserve democracy. 

If that sounds crazy it’s because it is. 

Now, that’s not to say some people have had second thoughts after voting for Trump. With the incessant drumbeat of negative coverage of his every move and statement it’s understandable that would have an impact on his approval ratings. Yet he still has the overwhelming support of his base; it may have dipped a bit since inauguration but it’s still high.

That’s remarkable is some ways, not so much in others.

He is a polarizing figure, not because he wants to be, but because that’s how he’s painted by adversaries in the Democrat Party, the media, and among establishment Republicans.

He’s either a monster or someone sent to Washington to kick ass and overturn the political establishment as he would say “big time.” There’s no middle ground.

His supporters still love him for the same reasons his adversaries will always hate him. Trump is challenging and threatening to overturn everything self-serving establishment politicians and bureaucrats have built over the decades.  To Trump, nothing is off the table for review simply because that’s how it’s always been done before.  

All of this would just be political theatre except for one thing: in the process of trying to hurt Trump and force him from office, his adversaries are also hurting the United States, perhaps irreparably. The citizens of this nation, and our institutions, have become collateral damage. 

With the aid of passive-aggressive establishment Republicans like John McCain, Lindsey Graham. Linda Murkowski, Susan Collins, and others in Congress opposed to Trump, Democrats have effectively regained control of the legislative agenda. That’s despite Democrats being the minority in both houses.  Even if Republicans wanted to pull together, which they clearly don’t, Mitch McConnell will never do what Harry Reid did to change Senate rules so Republicans could use their majority to push forward legislation that Trump wants. 

It’s as if the last election had no consequences. 

So repealing and replacing ObamaCare – something millions voted for and Republicans ran on for years – remains mired in petty politics and shameless grandstanding often from the same Republicans who voted to repeal and replace it many times before. Yet when the votes really counted this time, many Republicans turned tail and let it continue. 

The rationale? It’s really a complicated issue, they say. No, it’s really not.

It wasn’t all those times in the past when Republicans voted to repeal it. Sure, they knew Obama would never sign those their bills.  But now that they have a Republican in the Oval Office – Trump – who is eager to sign repeal and replace bills they can’t come up with anything. 

And that’s because they don’t want to. Part of it is because they don’t want to take any risk that some voters – especially those benefitting from the out-of-control expansion of Medicaid, the subsidies for insurance policies, and the silly rule allowing adults up to 26 years old to stay on their parents’ insurance plans – might be upset if ObamaCare is killed. 

But part of it is also to spite Trump. That’s what’s driving Senators McCain, Graham, Murkowski, Jeff Flake, Rob Portman and others who have been opposed to Trump since he ran for office.  They are determined to see Trump fail, regardless of the cost to the rest of us. 

Building the wall – another Trump campaign issue? Nope. Too many big businesses and agribusinesses here like cheap illegal immigrant labor. Cracking down on businesses that employ illegal immigrants?  Nope. See above.  Next?  

Tax reform? Again, the same rationale as healthcare: it’s really complicated. 

And again, no, it’s really not. 

As always, we won’t be getting substantive tax reform anytime soon because Republicans can’t agree on whose ox is to be gored. And real revenue-neutral tax reform means somebody’s will.  Nobody is willing to give up any of the ridiculous tax breaks they’ve enacted to help their deep-pocketed campaign contributors.  Or to scale back all the gratuitous credits and subsidies consumers receive to do what they should do anyway, or could easily afford without these. 

Trump wants to simplify the tax code.  He wants to close business loopholes. He wants to eliminate provisions that make it more advantageous, from a tax perspective, to send American jobs and profits overseas rather than keeping both here.  These were his campaign pledges. 

His supporters voted for that by electing him.  Here again, establishment Republicans in Congress will oppose him. Partly because they don’t want to change anything; partly because of Trump – they are working aggressively to keep him from fulfilling any of his campaign promises.  

They want him gone. They are sandbagging him so he fails.       

And since Republicans are in control of both the House and Senate, that means no meaningful legislation Trump has requested is getting to his desk to sign. Gridlock continues.   

It’s no wonder a majority of voters now would now prefer to see Democrats rather than Republicans in control of Congress. Why not? At this point, and considering what Republicans in Congress have done with their majorities, squandering opportunity after opportunity, would it really make a difference?  

In truth, many Americans and businesses are okay with gridlock in Congress. It works for them; they get to keep the subsidies, credits, and special treatment – no matter how senseless and expensive – they’ve won over the years from Senators and Representatives buying their votes and continued financial support with taxpayer dollars.   

To stop the gridlock and get spending and special-interest influence under control voters in the last election put more Republicans in Congress and a Republican into the Oval Office. 

Has it made a difference? That’s a big fat nope.  Not because Trump hasn’t been trying.  It’s because establishment Republicans despise everything he stands for – change. 

Some things have changed since Trump’s election.  Not for the better, however.

Democrat-appointed Federal judges have violated the Constitution’s separation of powers, as well as established law, to stop or at least delay the implementation of Trump’s lawful executive orders on restricting immigration. Even renowned liberal jurists like Alan Dershowitz – no fan of Trump by any stretch – have questioned the legal grounds for these rulings. 

When is the law not the same law for everyone? It now depends on which Federal judge you get.  That’s incredibly damaging to a nation, and a culture, that prides itself on impartial application of “the rule of law” rather than the arbitrary rule of man.  

Our intelligence community has also lost credibility by becoming more political. 

It’s hard to trust the FBI to be impartial when the then-director of the FBI – Jim Comey – admits he leaked government documents to the media to force the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate a sitting President.  Or when he admits he changed what to call an investigation to appease an Obama-appointed Attorney General.  Then there’s his refusal to bring charges against Hillary Clinton, after telling Congress she mishandled classified information in violation of State Department rules and didn’t tell the truth when questioned about her personal server and missing e-mails, because “no reasonable prosecutor” would either. 

Then there are the leaks from the intelligence community – often of classified information that threatens national security and the ability of any President to govern. These are intentional and belie the desire by some members of the intelligence community to take down Trump.

Leaks are also coming from within the Justice Department itself, prompting Attorney General Sessions to hold a press conference to warn that anyone, in any department, found to have leaked confidential government information will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. 

We’ll see.    

There are additional leaks from the Special Prosecutor’s office supposedly tasked with investigating alleged Russian tampering with the last election. But in reality – according to well-timed leaks – they are also investigating any financial dealings Trump or any of his campaign staff had over the past decade or more, whether or not these are in any way related to Russia.    

Trump is even under assault via leaks possibly coming from within his own administration. Some of these are the result of typical internecine battles in any administration.  But others, such as the release of full transcripts from his private calls with world leaders, which only a handful of people would have had access to, are far more troubling.   

Given what we now know of the intelligence community’s antipathy toward Trump, I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that some government agency, or some employee in the NSA or another alphabet intelligence agency, has bugged the Oval Office.  That’s scary. 

When I was much younger, in my college years, a lot of us didn’t trust the government. There were too many shadowy groups doing stuff the government tried to keep secret. Plus, the government routinely lied to the American public – whether about CIA-sponsored coups in other countries, Vietnam, political assassinations overseas, secret experiments on ordinary Americans, or where government money was going and to whom and for what. 

However, I must say that I am now even more concerned with efforts by members of Congress, faceless bureaucrats in the intelligence community, Federal judges, and the media, to delegitimize a lawfully elected President of the United States.

I may not always agree with what Trump says or does – in fact it’s increasingly rare that I do – but millions of people voted to put him in office.  And in our democracy, voters have the sole authority to decide who should be President, not other politicians, bureaucrats, pundits, or the media.

It’s long past time to stop worrying about Russian meddling in our elections. The real threat to our democracy is from our own political establishment and political elites. 

They clearly don’t trust us, the voters; they’ve proven we shouldn’t trust them