‘Exactly When Did You Think America Was Great?’ Says Eric Holder. Here Is the Answer

‘Exactly When Did You Think America Was Great?’ Says Eric Holder. Here Is the Answer

Jarrett Stepman / @JarrettStepman / March 29, 2019 

Former Attorney General Eric Holder questioned American greatness in response to a rally for President Donald Trump.(Photo: Toya Sarno Jordan/Stringer/Getty Images)

Commentary By

Jarrett Stepman @JarrettStepman

Jarrett Stepman is an editor and commentary writer for The Daily Signal and co-host of "The Right Side of History" podcast. Send an email to Jarrett.

There’s no doubt that one of the flashpoints of the modern culture war in America is the debate over our nation’s history.
On one side, there are Americans who believe that the United States is a unique country, a shining city upon a hill that while flawed, has been exceptional from the beginning.
On the other side is a growing bloc of Americans who believe America was rotten from its conception, its history worthy of both figuratively and now literally destroying, and that its only hope is in some kind of fundamental transformation to purge it of its past sins and injustices.
In simpler terms, it’s a battle of gratitude vs. grievance.

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Few perhaps represent the grievance side better than former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder, who took the opportunity on Wednesday to scoff at the concept of “Make America Great Again.”
“Exactly when did you think America was great?” Holder said on an MSNBC panel in response to supporters of President Donald Trump.
“It certainly wasn’t when people were enslaved. It certainly wasn’t when women didn’t have the right to vote. It certainly wasn’t when the LGBT community was denied the rights to which it was entitled,” Holder said.
Apparently, greatness is entirely dependent on the norms of 2019.
This is absurd.
Perhaps one of the most profound rebukes to Holder and those who share his view are the words of Frederick Douglass.
Douglass had been born a slave in Maryland. Having received cruel treatment from several masters, he later escaped.
He had more reason than any American today to hate his country and the Founding Fathers.
Douglass delivered his famed speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” at a time when slavery not only existed in America, but was spreading. Yet in that speech he said that America and the men who founded it were truly “great.”
Douglass pulled no punches when it came to slavery, which he considered a great hypocrisy in light of the Founders’ statement that all men are created equal. Yet this great sin did not convince Douglass that America’s foundations were hopelessly flawed.
Far from it.
“I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic,” Douglass said. “The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men too—great enough to give fame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men.”
Douglass insisted that the Founding generation was worth celebrating for all time.
“With them, nothing was ‘settled’ that was not right. With them, justice, liberty and humanity were ‘final;’ not slavery and oppression. You may well cherish the memory of such men. They were great in their day and generation.”
America, in the eyes of Douglass, had always been great. To say otherwise was nonsense.
Douglass understood the difference between his country’s timeless ideals and its failure to live up to them. He only demanded that Americans, if they wished to remain in an exceptional country, uphold the sacred principles that their ancestors had bravely fought for.
It’s through this kind of patriotic criticism that Douglass convinced many of the need to extinguish the evil of slavery, or the promise of their nation would fade and crumble.
Later, when slavery was defeated, Douglass looked back not with contempt, but with gratitude for the country and fellow citizens who made such an achievement possible.
He hoped that this sentiment of thankfulness would “never die while the republic lives.”
So Americans today, who will never feel the sting of slavery, who all have the monumental privilege of living under the Constitution and the stars and stripes, should be thankful and cherish our founding ideals and the advancements we’ve made to live up to them.
Surely, America was great when a handful of Pilgrims arrived on our shores and through toil, hardship, and prayer planted the seeds of liberty in the New World.
America was great when a few colonists at the edge of the world pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to the cause of independence, based on the timeless concepts of inalienable, God-given rights and the notion that “all men are created equal.”
America was great when more than half a million of our countrymen gave their lives in a civil war so that others could be free and their nation might remain one.
America was great when, miraculously, it climbed out of the wreckage of a civil war that would have destroyed most other peoples, and rebuilt itself, ultimately becoming stronger and freer than it had ever been.
America was great when it harnessed free enterprise and the rule of law to produce the most explosive and dynamic economy known to man, allowing the common man to rise up into success, drawing millions from around the world desperately seeking a better life.
America was great when it stood in World War II as the prime bulwark of freedom and unleashed the arsenal of democracy against Axis powers, which would have plunged the world into darkness and barbarity.
America was great when it engaged in the long twilight struggle against communist powers, and showed the world an alternative to the despair of godless collectivism—and won.
If that nation is not great, then no nation has even been great.
Yes, there have been injustices in our history, and there have been moments we aren’t proud of, but that in no way outweighs the profound accomplishments of this country or what it ultimately stands for.
America has not been, nor will ever be, a perfect country. If that is the standard by which our greatness is measured, then it will surely always fail.
We live in a fallen world, after all.
Worse, if we don’t accept that we will never be perfect, we risk being paralyzed by the grievance and self-loathing that already plagues a growing number of our fellow citizens.
In loathing the past, we darken our future, and cloud the genuine triumphs that have helped create the present.
So Americans have a choice.
We can decide to build on the incomparable successes of our past, celebrate what made us who we are, and firmly fix our gaze on an even greater future, as all generations of Americans have done.
Or, we can plunge ourselves into bitterness like Holder, who, despite having been given so much by this country, remains contemptuous of the fact that America never met his standard of perfection.
If America is to be great and remain great, the former ethos must triumph over the latter.
This is the simple but profound crossroads our nation faces.

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Kids Aren’t Born Transgender, So Don’t Let Advocates Bamboozle You

Kids Aren’t Born Transgender, So Don’t Let Advocates Bamboozle You

Walt Heyer / March 29, 2019 

The American Psychological Association and the weight of historical evidence both challenge society’s affirmation of cross-sex identities. Pictured: Transgender individuals and their supporters rally in Los Angeles on Nov. 2, 2018, to protest the Trump administration. (Photo: Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images)

 

 

Walt Heyer

Walt Heyer is an author and public speaker. Through his website, SexChangeRegret.com, and his blog, WaltHeyer.com, Heyer raises public awareness about those who regret gender change and the tragic consequences suffered as a result.

People who pursue a cross-sex identity aren’t born that way, and children should not be encouraged to “transition” to the opposite sex, according to a reference work endorsed by the American Psychological Association.
Yet every day I hear from another parent who tells me that a child’s therapist, after an appointment or two, strongly recommends that the parent allow the child to change his or her name and personal pronouns, live as the opposite sex, and get on the track toward irreversible medical interventions.
Laura Haynes, a licensed psychologist in California, recently reviewed the APA Handbook of Sexuality and Psychology and highlighted its research findings about transgender children.
 Among those findings, cited on page 744 of Volume 1:

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—“In no more than about one in four children does gender dysphoria persist from childhood to adolescence or adulthood,” with the majority of affected boys later identifying as gay, not transgender, and up to half of affected girls identifying as lesbian, not transgender.
—“Early social transition (i.e., change of gender role, such as registering a birth-assigned boy in school as a girl) should be approached with caution to avoid foreclosing this stage of gender identity development.”
—“Early social transition may be necessary for some; however, the stress associated with possible reversal of this decision has been shown to be substantial.”
Yet we all have been bamboozled by distorted claims to the contrary from sex-change advocates, who insist the science is settled.
They say people who identify as the opposite sex will never change their mind, the cross-sex identity is fixed and the earlier the child, teen, or adult is affirmed as the opposite sex and makes the transition, the better off he or she will be.
In fact, however, the American Psychological Association and the weight of historical evidence both challenge society’s affirmation of cross-sex identities.
The preface to the APA Handbook of Sexuality and Psychology, published in 2014, says it is endorsed and approved by the American Psychological Association, which describes itself as “the largest scientific and professional organization representing psychology in the United States and the largest association of psychologists in the world.”
I underwent my own “sex change” in April 1983. I had no idea then that I would be here today talking about the subject, or that the evidence against “born that way” had started oozing out as early as 1979, four years before I was mutilated.

In 1979 an endocrinologist, Dr. Charles L. Ihlenfeld, sounded a warning on using hormones and surgery on the transgender population in remarks to a group of clinicians. Ihlenfeld had administered hormone therapy for six years to a large sample of 500 trans-identified adults.
Ihlenfeld, who is gay, told the clinicians that “80 percent of the people who want to change their sex shouldn’t do it.” Desires to change sex, he said, “most likely stem from powerful psychological factors—likely from the experiences of the first 18 months of life.”
Ihlenfeld’s comments 40 years ago foreshadowed the evidence provided in the APA Handbook, where page 743 of Volume 1 says that identifying as the opposite sex is “most likely the result of a complex interaction between biological and environmental factors.”
“Research on the influence of family of origin dynamics,” it adds, “has found some support for separation anxiety among gender-nonconforming boys and psychopathology among mothers.”
Ihlenfeld and the APA, generations apart in time, came to a similar conclusion: The desire to change sex most likely stems from early life experiences and psychological factors.
As to the wisdom and effectiveness of using cross-sex hormones and sex-change surgery to treat gender dysphoria, the evidence does not exist.
>>> Above:  The author, Walt Heyer, takes part in a related panel discussion at The Heritage Foundation. His remarks begin at 47:30 in the video.
In the United Kingdom, the University of Birmingham’s Aggressive Research Intelligence Facility conducted a review in 2004 of 100 international medical studies of “post-operative transsexuals.” It found “no conclusive evidence [that] sex-change operations improve the lives of transsexuals.” 
Additionally, the evidence showed that the transsexual person, after undergoing reassignment surgery, “remains severely distressed to the point of suicide.”
A professor at Oxford University, Carl Heneghan, is one recent voice questioning cross-sex hormone use in children and adolescents. Heneghan is editor-in-chief of a respected British medical journal, BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine.
On Feb. 25, Heneghan and a fellow researcher reported significant problems with how evidence is collected and analyzed, concluding:

Treatments for under 18 gender dysphoric children and adolescents remain largely experimental. There are a large number of unanswered questions that include the age at start, reversibility, adverse events, long-term effects on mental health, quality of life, bone mineral density, osteoporosis in later life and cognition.

So the negative findings stack up, and alarms are raised about the lack of proof concerning effectiveness and safety. But administering unnecessary hormones and rearranging healthy body parts with sex-change surgeries continue undaunted by a deaf medical community.
I feel like I’m standing alongside the road shouting to warn approaching drivers: “The bridge is out! The bridge is out!”
Because I know—I drove off that cliff, and I’m still affected 35 years later.
The APA Handbook of Sexuality and Psychology, again, says that transgender people are not born that way, that cross-sex identification can change, and that the majority of children grow out of a desire to change sex if they don’t engage in social transition.
Strangely, the medical and psychological community doesn’t follow its own evidence and seems oblivious to the experiment they’re conducting on real lives, especially those of children.
The sex-change cheerleaders falsely claim, “Affirmation is the only solution.” They use distorted doctrine to lobby for laws that punish counselors and parents who say otherwise, laws that take away the rights of patients to choose their own therapy goals.
Organizations such as The Trevor Project are lobbying in all 50 states to outlaw any therapy that suggests interest in cross-sex transition can change.
Meanwhile, accounts such as these of families and lives being ripped to shreds by sex change appear in my inbox daily. I have compiled 30 of the stories I’ve received, along with recent research, in my own book “Trans Life Survivors.”
We must wake up and use the evidence provided in the APA Handbook to counter those who say transgender people are born that way.
Instead, we must fight loudly for the rights of patients to choose their counseling goals and against laws that legislate affirmation as the only therapy allowed.


>>> Related: My ‘Sex Change’ Was a Myth. Why Trying to Change One’s Sex Will Always Fail.

The national popular vote is national popular insanity

The national popular vote is national popular insanity

by Kelly Sloan

 | March 27, 2019 08:00 AM

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The Electoral College has taken its place as the latest institution toward which the Left has turned its wrathful gaze.
Earlier this year Colorado’s Democratic legislature approved, and their Democratic governor signed, a “National Popular Vote” measure. Essentially, it commits Colorado (my home state) to an interstate pact, which comes into effect once enough states jump on board to total 270 electoral votes, consigning each state’s electoral franchise to whomever wins the popular vote nationally, regardless of whom the majority of the state’s citizens vote for, rendering the current system entirely irrelevant.
Shortly thereafter, Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., propelled the issue to national prominence by doing away with the subterfuge and embracing the Electoral College’s outright abolition.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Abandonment of the Electoral College in favor of the popular vote has become a cause du jour among the Left, ostensibly for reasons of democratic purity. To be fair, Democrats eponymously maintain a rather fanatical affection for untrammeled suffrage (though, as others have pointed out, the popular vote would seldom, if ever, actually result in a president elected by a majority, but rather by a plurality of voters). In any case, one suspects a more strictly political catalyst: Would the Democrats' enthusiasm for the popular vote be as strong had the 2016 election turned out differently?
Probably not. But purely tactical motivations aside, the drive does fit a pattern of liberal disdain

The Electoral College has taken its place as the latest institution toward which the Left has turned its wrathful gaze.
Earlier this year Colorado’s Democratic legislature approved, and their Democratic governor signed, a “National Popular Vote” measure. Essentially, it commits Colorado (my home state) to an interstate pact, which comes into effect once enough states jump on board to total 270 electoral votes, consigning each state’s electoral franchise to whomever wins the popular vote nationally, regardless of whom the majority of the state’s citizens vote for, rendering the current system entirely irrelevant.
Shortly thereafter, Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., propelled the issue to national prominence by doing away with the subterfuge and embracing the Electoral College’s outright abolition.

AD 00:01 / 00:30

Abandonment of the Electoral College in favor of the popular vote has become a cause du jour among the Left, ostensibly for reasons of democratic purity. To be fair, Democrats eponymously maintain a rather fanatical affection for untrammeled suffrage (though, as others have pointed out, the popular vote would seldom, if ever, actually result in a president elected by a majority, but rather by a plurality of voters). In any case, one suspects a more strictly political catalyst: Would the Democrats' enthusiasm for the popular vote be as strong had the 2016 election turned out differently?

Probably not. But purely tactical motivations aside, the drive does fit a pattern of liberal disdain for institutions unconducive to their social ambitions. A judicial branch which merely interprets the law, for instance, does little to advance the march of progress. But one staffed with activist justices in the mold of Thurgood Marshall and Ruth Bader Ginsburg can do wonders.
The institution that perhaps most frustrates liberal designs is the state. Accordingly, the principle of federalism has been under assault in one form or another for about a century. The erosion of the 10th Amendment to virtual irrelevance and the federal pre-emption of the majority of both tax dollars and governing duties has steadily atrophied the states in favor of centralization. The Electoral College remains one of the final bulwarks reminding us that states are, well, independent states, and not mere provinces or subdivisions of the federal government.
It’s an important distinction, one which makes the founders' efforts all the more impressive. The system for electing the president that was eventually agreed upon — each state receiving a number of electoral votes equaling their two senators and however many representatives their population grants them — is sheer constitutional genius, placing each state on initially equal footing while not entirely disenfranchising the major population centers.
Absent the Electoral College, smaller states (basically all but New York, California, Texas, and Florida, which together make up about a third of the nation’s population) lose pretty much any sway they might have over a presidential contest. Enabling the states to elect the union’s chief executive, via the Electoral College, serves as a check on political dominance by the unbridled popular whim of major urban concentrations. The despotic excesses of the French Revolution convinced the architects of the American republic that even democracy needed restraint.
There is yet hope. A growing number in Colorado recognize the political and systemic danger of diluting their vote in the national popular pool. Rose Pugliese, the impressive and talented Mesa County commissioner, and the mayor of the Town of Monument, Don Wilson, are spearheading an effort to put the question to Colorado’s voters on next year’s ballot, as to the wisdom of ceding the state’s electoral votes to the national plurality.
It is, yes, somewhat ironic that democratic action is required to protect a check on absolutist democracy; but the startling momentum Pugliese’s effort is generating indicates that people might just still retain a sense of the uniqueness and inspired brilliance of the system their founders vouchsafed them.

Egyptian Media: Barack Obama is a Member of the Muslim Brotherhood - DC Dirty Laundry

Egyptian Media: Barack Obama is a Member of the Muslim Brotherhood 

Egyptian Media: Barack Obama is a Member of the Muslim Brotherhood

By

Dean Garrison

-

March 28, 2019

From the archives. Originally published September 3, 2013.
Well it seems like the secret that the Egyptians have been promising has been revealed. The question is… Will America listen?
We have been expecting this information, we just did not know the exact nature of it.
Trending: Bombshell Lawsuit Claims FBI Knowingly Hid Evidence from Congress of Explosives Used on 9/11
Here is a short blog post that Pamela Geller put on Atlas Shrugs yesterday:

“EGYPTIAN MEDIA SAYS OBAMA IS A MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD MEMBER”

The Muslim Brotherhood terror TV network, Al Jazeera is reporting that Egyptian media is outing Barack Hussein Obama. I don’t know if he is a card carrying member but he is clearly a huge supporter of these vicious jihadists.

Egyptian media says Obama is a Muslim Brotherhood member Al Jazeera, September 2, 2013

Director of Research at the Brookings Doha Center, Shadi Hamid, tweets out about the Egyptian media depicting Obama as a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.

###End of Atlas Article###
On August 14th we reported that Saad Al-Shater claimed to have information that could put Obama in prison.

In an interview with the News Agency Anatolia in Turkey, Saad Al-Shater, the son of imprisoned Muslim Brotherhood leader Khairat Al-Shater, said his father “had in his hand” evidence that will put Obama in prison.
In a thinly veiled threat, Saad Al-Shater said a U.S. delegation was sent to Cairo by Obama to press for the release of the imprisoned Muslim Brotherhood leaders, including his father to prevent the release of explosive information.

Then on August 20th we revealed that a second source had come forward:

Speaking yesterday on Bitna al-Kibir, a live TV show, Tahani al-Gebali, Vice President of the Supreme Constitutional Court in Egypt, said the time was nearing when all the conspiracies against Egypt would be exposed—conspiracies explaining why the Obama administration is so vehemently supportive of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose terrorism has, among other atrocities, caused the destruction of some 80 Christian churches in less than one week.
Al-Gebali referred to “documents and proofs” which Egypt’s intelligence agencies possess and how “the time for them to come out into the open has come.” In the course of her discussion on how these documents record massive financial exchanges between international bodies and the Muslim Brotherhood, she said: “Obama’s brother is one of the architects of investment for the international organization of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

Anyone who reads The D.C. Clothesline will not be overly surprised by the revelation that Barack Obama is a member of The Muslim Brotherhood. We have all suspected it for a long time.
However, it feels good when someone finally acknowledges it. I don’t know what to do with this information to be honest. A few conservative blogs have already shared it and some of the right wing sites will probably pick it up. But this story is huge.
How can we wake people up?
We do have to remain vigilant in the search for the truth. This is just one source and we can’t independently verify the claims. With that said… No matter what Americans think of Al Jazeera, it is respected around the world. Evidently they think that this Egyptian newspaper story could prove to be credible.
We, potentially, just had the biggest bombshell of Obama’s presidency dropped in our laps and the American mainstream media will do nothing with it.
YOU are the media. If you want this information out then you must spread it my friends. Don’t expect to see this on the major networks

America’s 233-Year-Old Shock at Jihad

America’s 233-Year-Old Shock at Jihad

By Raymond Ibrahim

Exactly 233 years ago this week, two of America’s founding fathers documented their first exposure to Islamic jihad in a letter to Congress; like many Americans today, they too were shocked at what they learned. 
Context: in 1785, Muslim pirates from North Africa, or “Barbary,” had captured two American ships, the Maria and Dauphin, and enslaved their crews. In an effort to ransom the enslaved Americans and establish peaceful relations, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams -- then ambassadors to France and England respectively -- met with Tripoli’s ambassador to Britain, Abdul Rahman Adja. Following this diplomatic exchange, they laid out the source of the Barbary States’ hitherto inexplicable animosity to American vessels in a letter to Congress dated March 28, 1786:

We took the liberty to make some inquiries concerning the grounds of their [Barbary’s] pretentions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury, and observed that we considered all mankind as our friends who had done us no wrong, nor had given us any provocation. The ambassador answered us that it was founded on the laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise

One need not conjecture what the American ambassadors -- who years earlier had asserted that all men were “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights” -- thought of their Muslim counterpart’s answer.  Suffice to say, because the ransom demanded was over fifteen times greater than what Congress had approved, little came of the meeting.
It should be noted that centuries before setting their sights on American vessels, the Barbary States of Muslim North Africa -- specifically Tripoli, Algiers, Tunis -- had been thriving on the slave trade of Christians abducted from virtually every corner of coastal Europe -- including Britain, Ireland, Denmark, and Iceland.  These raids were so successful that, “between 1530 and 1780 there were almost certainly a million and quite possibly as many as a million and a quarter white, European Christians enslaved by the Muslims of the Barbary Coast,” to quote American historian Robert Davis.
The treatment of these European slaves was exacerbated by the fact that they were Christian “infidels.”  As Robert Playfair (b.1828), who served for years as a consul in Barbary, explained, “In almost every case they [European slaves] were hated on account of their religion.”  Three centuries earlier, John Foxe had written in his Book of Martyrs that, “In no part of the globe are Christians so hated, or treated with such severity, as at Algiers.”
The punishments these European slaves received for real or imagined offenses beggared description: “If they speak against Mahomet [blasphemy], they must become Mahometans, or be impaled alive. If they profess Christianity again, after having changed to the Mahometan persuasion, they are roasted alive [as apostates], or thrown from the city walls, and caught upon large sharp hooks, on which they hang till they expire.”
As such, when Captain O’Brien of the Dauphin wrote to Jefferson saying that “our sufferings are beyond our expression or your conception,” he was clearly not exaggerating.
After Barbary’s ability to abduct coastal Europeans had waned in the mid-eighteenth century, its energy was spent on raiding infidel merchant vessels. Instead of responding by collectively confronting and neutralizing Barbary, European powers, always busy quarrelling among themselves, opted to buy peace through tribute (or, according to Muslim rationale, jizya). 
Fresh meat appeared on the horizon once the newly-born United States broke free of Great Britain (and was therefore no longer protected by the latter’s jizya payments).
Some American congressmen agreed with Jefferson that “it will be more easy to raise ships and men to fight these pirates into reason, than money to bribe them” -- including General George Washington: “In such an enlightened, in such a liberal age, how is it possible that the great maritime powers of Europe should submit to pay an annual tribute to the little piratical States of Barbary?” he wrote to a friend. “Would to Heaven we had a navy able to reform those enemies to mankind, or crush them into nonexistence.”  
But the majority of Congress agreed with John Adams: “We ought not to fight them at all unless we determine to fight them forever.” Considering the perpetual, existential nature of Islamic hostility, Adams may have been more right than he knew.
Congress settled on emulating the Europeans and paying off the terrorists, though it would take years to raise the demanded ransom.
When Muslim pirates from Algiers captured eleven more American merchant vessels in 1794, the Naval Act was passed and a permanent U.S. naval force established. But because the first war vessels would not be ready until 1800, American jizya payments -- which took up 16 percent of the federal budget -- began to be made to Algeria in 1795. In return, over 100 American sailors were released -- how many died or disappeared is unclear -- and the Islamic sea raids formally ceased. American payments and “gifts” over the following years caused the increasingly emboldened Muslim pirates to respond with increasingly capricious demands.
One of the more ignoble instances occurred in 1800, when Captain William Bainbridge of the George Washington sailed to the pirate-leader of Algiers, with what the latter deemed insufficient tribute. Referring to the Americans as “my slaves,” Dey Mustapha ordered them to transport hundreds of black slaves to Istanbul (Constantinople).  Adding insult to insult, he commanded the American crew to take down the U.S. flag and hoist the Islamic flag -- one not unlike ISIS’ notorious black flag -- in its place.  And, no matter how rough the seas might be during the long voyage, Bainbridge was required to make sure the George Washington faced Mecca five times a day to accommodate the prayers of Muslims onboard.
That Bainbridge condescended to becoming Barbary’s delivery boy seems only to have further whetted the terrorists’ appetite.  In 1801, Tripoli demanded an instant payment of $225,000, followed by annual payments of $25,000 -- respectively equivalent to $3.5 million and $425,000 today.  Concluding that “nothing will stop the eternal increase of demand from these pirates but the presence of an armed force,” America’s third president, Jefferson, refused the ultimatum. (He may have recalled Captain O’Brien’s observation concerning his Barbary masters: “Money is their God and Mahomet their prophet.”)
Denied jizya from the infidels, Tripoli proclaimed jihad on the United States on May 10, 1801. But by now, America had six war vessels, which Jefferson deployed to the Barbary Coast.  For the next five years, the U.S. Navy warred with the Muslim pirates, making little headway and suffering some setbacks -- the most humiliating being when the Philadelphia and its crew were captured in 1803.
Desperate measures were needed: enter William Eaton. As U.S. consul to Tunis (1797–1803), he had lived among and understood the region’s Muslims well. He knew that “the more you give the more the Turks will ask for,” and despised that old sense of Islamic superiority: “It grates me mortally,” he wrote, “when I see a lazy Turk [generic for Muslim] reclining at his ease upon an embroidered sofa, with one Christian slave to hold his pipe, another to hold his coffee, and a third to fan away the flies.” Seeing that the newborn American navy was making little headway against the seasoned pirates, he devised a daring plan: to sponsor the claim of Mustafa’s brother, exiled in Alexandria; and then to march the latter’s supporters and mercenaries through five hundred miles of desert, from Alexandria onto Tripoli.
The trek was arduous -- not least because of the Muslim mercenaries themselves. Eaton had repeatedly tried to win them over: “I touched upon the affinity of principle between the Islam and Americans [sic] religion.” But despite these all too familiar ecumenical overtures, “We find it almost impossible to inspire these wild bigots with confidence in us,” he lamented in his diary, “or to persuade them that, being Christians, we can be otherwise than enemies to Mussulmen. We have a difficult undertaking!” (For all his experience with Muslims, Eaton was apparently unaware of the finer points of their (Sharia) law, namely, al-wala’ wa’l bara’, or “loyalty and enmity.”)
Eaton eventually managed to reach and conquer Tripoli’s coastal town of Derne on April 27, 1805.  Less than two months later, on June 10, a peace treaty was signed between the U.S. and Tripoli, formally ending hostilities.
Thus and despite the (rather ignorant) question that became popular after 9/11, “Why do they hate us?” -- a question that was answered to Jefferson and Adams 233 years ago today -- the United States’ first war and victory as a nation was against Muslims, and the latter had initiated hostilities on the same rationale Muslims had used to initiate hostilities against non-Muslims for the preceding 1,200 years.

Read more: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/03/americas_233yearold_shock_at_jihad.html#ixzz5ja9SWgld
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The Incalculable Damage of the Russia Hoax

The Incalculable Damage of the Russia Hoax

By Ed Timperlake

With powerful free press constitutional safe guards, Americans have empowered our media with an important mission in an informed democracy: reporting accurately with full transparency on important events.  Now with the Russia! Russia! Russia! Trump! Trump! Trump! Hoax, with its incredibly inaccurate and malicious reporting blown to hell and back, there is a significant lesson to be learned.
I have not seen anyone focus on both President Trump and President Putin winning;  one man for good the other for evil.
It is very simple.  There have been two individuals who entered the maelstrom of this fake news hurricane to emerge after the event and to have their positions made stronger on the world stage.  Both President Trump and President Putin knew the real truth of a fake narrative from the first moment the collusion issue was raised as a vehicle for a hide in plain sight what must acknowledged as political/media coup attempt.
President Trump was incredibly strong in standing firm, and his daughter Ivanka nailed it, in essence: the truth is the truth:
Russia’s historic goal of sowing dissent and weakening our democratic institutions was rapidly realized at first, as the Trump presidency was widely declared to be illegitimate on the Left and in the media. But the finding by the Mueller team of no collusion proved the wisdom of Lincoln and Ivanka. Trump Nation “deplorables” have become even more empowered during this time of historic testing and are emerging even stronger in their resolve to support President Trump’s leadership to Make America Great Again.

The Trump presidency has just reaped a global foreign policy and defense benefit:  No world leader would never, ever doubt how tough he is, having survived this attempted coup.
Tragically, in terms of world peace slipping away, the other winner was President Putin. He is perhaps the second-best global information warrior in a leadership position in the world today. (President Trump is an order of magnitude better, but faces a hostile media establishment that works against him, and by default helps Putin.
Not since Stalin and one of the original fake news reporters, Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist Walter Duranty, has a Russian leader scored such an important information warfare victory in the United States. pyrrhic victory been achieved by. Duranty spread propaganda denying Stalin’s starving of millions of Ukrainians, estimated at over 10 million.
It took more than half a century for the New York Times to publicly acknowledge the insidiousness of Duranty’s and its own role in Stalin’s information warfare victory:

On Christmas Day in 1933, Joseph Stalin conferred this orchid on his favorite Western journalist:
''You have done a good job in your reporting the U.S.S.R., though you are not a Marxist, because you try to tell the truth about our country... I might say that you bet on our horse to win when others thought it had no chance and I am sure you have not lost by it.''
The reporter was Walter Duranty, then The New York Times's Moscow correspondent, who is credited with coining the term ''Stalinism.'' He was fascinated, almost mesmerized by the harsh system he described. And having bet on Stalin's rise in the 1920's, Mr. Duranty remained loyally partial to his horse. The result was some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper. (snip)
The biggest Duranty lapse was his indifference to the catastrophic famine in 1930-31, when millions perished in the Ukraine on the heels of forced collectivization. He shrugged off the famine as ''mostly bunk,'' and in any case, as he admonished the squeamish, ''You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.''

Ironically, history shows Duranty knew he was writing BS. Just as I suspect a few ideologically driven reporters have, deep down, known over the last two years that they were also publishing their asserted opinions in the form of hard “breaking news.” Those and many others were useful dolts and will live in infamy.
The damage to America is they have shown to Putin the strengths and weakness of our First Amendment safeguards in real time. He has greatly benefited in seeing this American media suicide attempt.
While the U.S. media was focusing on Trump, Putin was enjoying a relatively free ride in making trouble -- from the Baltics in sending his planes out to threaten our Intel aircraft, to probing UK airspace, to continuing to move aggressively in Ukraine and Syria. Putin has gotten mostly a free ride, his aggressions escaping significant American media focus
President Putin has recently threatened a direct attack against the United States if we do not comply with his strategic approach to Europe and the rest of the world. And the Russian PR machine has really kicked in. Why are all his blustery nuclear threats, some real and others notional (fake) not being reported on?
Instead of attacking President Trump with now proven “fake news,” our media need to grow up and focus on the real danger of Putin’s capabilities and intentions.
Is President Putin diabolically smart or simply a psychopath?  Perhaps he is both, because by his direct action, the world is now a much more dangerous place as the former KGB officer creates a nuclear doomsday scenario backed by real Russian naval capabilities.
And the American media establishment has been his unwitting (we charitably assume) partner.

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Psychology, Politics, and Science

Psychology, Politics, and Science

By Daniel G. Jones

Donald Trump is a sociopath. That’s not an opinion, that’s a fact. It’s been researched, peer-reviewed, and published by scientist John Gartner, a psychologist.
Here are some more astonishing facts, published in the scientific magazine Psychology Today: “Liberals are ‘bleeding hearts’ because they empathize so strongly with the sufferings of others… Conservatives see the world as a more threatening place because their brains predispose them to being fearful. They are also predisposed by brain biology to hating complexity and compromise.” 
You might not like hearing these things. I sure don’t, but maybe it’s high time that we faced reality. Liberals’ intuitions about us have been confirmed, scientifically.
Or have they? These “findings” sound an awful lot like left-wing wish fulfillment masquerading as science. Just how scientific is psychology?
At the dawn of the twentieth century, Sigmund Freud was the world’s most famous theorist of “the science of mind.” His most famous theory held that each of us suffers from the original sin of imaginary incest. As children starting about the age of three, we became sexually attracted to our opposite-sex parent (and, correspondingly, we became jealous of our same-sex parent). This unspeakable desire buried deeply within our unconscious, Freud claimed, can cause us to go crazy in adulthood.
Fortunately, Freud devised a way to effect forgiveness. His “talking cure” called psychoanalysis, a regimen of weekly conversations lasting many years, enabled the psychoanalyst to “excavate” our repressed memories, raise them into conscious awareness, and produce catharsis -- release.
Freud showed even more imagination in the telling of his theories. He peppered his abstracts with terms like Oedipus Complex, penis envy, castration complex, anal and phallic stages of psychosexual development, and death drives. Victorian audiences, who normally wouldn’t think twice about psychology, ate it up and Freud became famous.
But was it scientific? In his article “Why Freud was not a Scientist,” Ross Pomeroy writes, “…the primary reason why Freud's ideas are so ubiquitous is that they didn't transcend science; they bypassed them… We now know all of these ideas to be wrong, and frankly, a tad whacko.”
"His approach was not scientific,” adds Harriet Hall in Science-Based Medicine. “He never tested his ideas with experiments that might have falsified his beliefs, and he ignored facts that contradicted his beliefs."
Psychologist Hans Eysenck conceded that Freud was a genius, except “…not of science… but of literary art. His place is not, as he claimed, with Copernicus and Darwin but with Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm…"
By the 1920s, rebellion was afoot. Psychologist John Watson dismissed all this so-called “mind science.” He regarded the mind as a figment of the brain’s imagination: “It has never been seen, touched, smelled, tasted, or moved,” he wrote in the 1920s. “It is a plain assumption, just as unprovable as the old concept of the soul.”
Watson redefined psychology as “the science of behavior.” Behaviorism held that the newborn infant is a tabula rasa, a blank slate sans fear, sans instincts, sans anything that might constitute an innate nature. The script to be written upon this slate is experience. Hence, he who controls experience by shaping the environment can create the person. This led Watson to make one of the most outlandish brags in academic history.

“Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specialized world to bring them up in, and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select -- a doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant, chief, and yes, even a beggar-man, and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.”

Watson was generous with advice for other parents: “Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit in your lap,” he cautioned. “If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say good night.” Watson himself was a terrible parent, according to his granddaughter actress Mariette Hartley.
Behaviorists reasoned that insofar as we are born as blank slates, we enjoy little innate advantage over animal blank slates. Therefore, researchers should be able to learn much about us by studying animals. They spent much of their time experimenting with pigeons and rats. Critics called it “rat psychology.”
Since Freud and Watson, psychology has advanced little. Today it remains “the science of mind,” and “the science of there-is-no-such-thing-as-mind,” and nobody seems to notice the contradiction. It suffers from “multiple personality disorder,” and this has produced an intellectual vacuum wherein anything goes. Rorschach ink blots, somatotyping, Recovered-Memory Theory, Primal Therapy (scream your cares away), Rebirthing Therapy (experience your own big bang), Attention Deficit Disorder, Oppositional Defiant Disorder -- all esoteric, whacko, and all fitting comfortably within the invisible boundaries of contemporary psychology. There’s even a disorder for when you become fed up with your psychotherapist. That’s called Self-Defeating Personality Disorder.
Meanwhile, no one is paying attention to what ought to be the central purpose of psychology -- understanding human consciousness. Psychologists have become so caught up in esoterica, that they’ve lost sight of their true calling. Ask them to describe the “inner child,” or to talk about ways we can “get in touch with our emotions,” and they can drone on endlessly. But if you ask them What is an emotion? they are struck dumb.
So let’s find out what is an emotion is. From the Dictionary of Psychology by Professor Arthur S. Reber: “Historically this term has proven utterly refractory to definitional efforts; probably no other term in psychology shares its nondefinability with its frequency of use.” (pg. 246)
How about pleasure? Surely we know what makes fun, fun don’t we? Not according to Reber: “(Pleasure is) an emotional experience that many regard as fundamentally undefinable.” (pg. 576)
Now the most important question of all: Do we possess free will? Can we act as we wish, or are all our actions determined (caused) by forces outside of ourselves? Which is it, Professor Reber?
“Most contemporary social scientists (psychologists, sociologists, et al.)… take a position that can best be described as ‘uncomfortable pragmatism.’ That is, in their day-to-day work they treat their subjects as probabilistically determined, chalk up what they cannot predict accurately to as yet unknown factors of causation… and prefer to think of themselves as actually operating according to their own free choice independently of a crass determinism that diminishes their sense of their own humanity.” (pg. 203)
At last. Mind scientists and never-mind scientists can finally agree on something: Free will for me but not for thee. They regard themselves as being autonomous. They believe they have the freedom to act or think or speak as they choose. But you and me? We are automatons. We have no more power to decide what we shall do than, say, Mars can decide to change its orbit.
Faced with uncertainty about what it is they should be studying, or how to go about studying it, many psychologists have retreated to the comforting halls of academia, where their fellow social scientists study race theory and gender dysphoria, and where “doing science” means coming up with proofs for whatever they already know to be true. Many of those truths turn out to be liberal clichés. A 2015 study found that Democrats outnumbered Republicans eight to one among the ranks of social scientists.  Numbers were even worse in a survey of over 300 experimental psychologists: Only four admitted to having voted for Romney.
In an episode of The Bob Newhart Show, Bob, a practicing psychologist, comes to realize that he’s not actually helping any of his patients. He visits the wisest man he knows, his former college professor and mentor Albert, and asks him: “What’s it all about?”
“It’s a crock!” Albert replies.
So the next time you hear a psychologist announce that Trump is a sociopath and that conservatives lack empathy; or that gender is fluid, masculinity is toxic, and gun ownership is a social disease, you must remember this:
It’s all a crock.

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The True Neo-Nazis

The True Neo-Nazis

By Joseph D'Hippolito

Well before President Donald Trump's election the Democratic Party's self-proclaimed "democratic socialists" characterized anyone who opposes them as Nazis. The irony is that members of that contingent have more in common with Nazis than they would care to admit.
By embracing Islam as they promote "multiculturalism" and "tolerance," the democratic socialists and their enablers tolerate Islam's anti-Semitism. The House Democrats' feeble response to Rep. Ilhan Omar's anti-Semitic remarks -- a resolution that condemned bigotry but refused to mention either Omar or Islamist terrorism -- illustrates that misguided tolerance.
The Nazis understood the relationship between Islam and anti-Semitism so well that they tried to exploit it for their agenda of extermination. Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem who had been agitating against Jews for a quarter of a century, broadcast anti-Semitic messages from Berlin with Hitler's support from 1941 until the end of World War II. Al-Husseini -- a close ally of the Muslim Brotherhood's founder, Hassan al-Banna, who admired Hitler -- told Arabs in the British Mandate of Palestine to "kill the Jews wherever you find them."
The Waffen-SS also had a special Muslim division, the Handschar, named after the German word for scimitar. Comprised of Bosnian Muslims, the Handschar division performed atrocities against Jewish civilians. Notably, it was the only division in the Waffen-SS allowed to have chaplains, with one imam presiding over each battalion.
Today, Hitler's Mein Kampf circulates throughout the Arab world without opposition from Muslim clerics.
The Nazis' euthanasia program, Aktion T4, was personally initiated by Hitler in 1939. Promoted as mercy killing, the program targeted the chronically ill, the elderly, the disabled, and the mentally incapacitated -- whether adults or children.
During Aktion T4's two years of operation, nearly 70,000 died from starvation, dehydration, lethal injection, and gassing. The Nazis built six gas chambers designed as showers to fool the victims. Though public pressure forced the Nazis to discontinue the program in 1941, it provided the basis for the murderous methods used in death camps.
The utilitarianism governing the use of tissue from aborted fetuses for such experiments as creating humanized mice -- usage favored by Democrats -- also governed the Nazis' use of prisoners for experiments in concentration camps. In one instance, doctors infected children with tuberculosis, removed their lymph nodes to determine the disease's progress, then executed their subjects.
America’s democratic socialists mimic the rationale of the Nazi program. Last March, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown -- a Democrat whom Planned Parenthood endorsed for re-election -- signed legislation allowing mentally ill patients to be denied food and water unless the patient had issued an advance directive to the contrary before becoming incapacitated. Previously, only caregivers with power of attorney could so decide. The bill received unanimous support from the Democrats in the lower house of Oregon's legislature.
In January, Oregon's Democrats introduced another bill expanding the state's law on medically assisted suicide to include any patient with an incurable disease or intolerable pain. On March 7, Maryland's lower house approved medically assisted suicide. That bill passed 74-66, with 73 of the chamber's 99 Democrats supporting it. Within days, members of the Democratic-Farmer Labor Party sponsored similar legislation in Minnesota's legislature.
Both ideologies embrace junk genetics and demand laws reflecting that embrace. Just as the democratic socialists promote a multiplicity of genders and encourage transsexuality in children, Nazis promoted pseudo-scientific racialist theories that circulated decades before Hitler emerged.
Between 1853 and 1855, a French aristocrat named Arthur de Gobineau wrote “An Essay on the Inequality of Human Races” which proposed that race provided the foundation for civilization. Gobineau argued that intermingling between what he called the "white" race -- which he viewed as superior -- with the "black" and "yellow" races would cause cultural disintegration. In 1899, the English philosopher Houston Stewart Chamberlain wrote in The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century that Nordic and Teutonic peoples occupied the highest places among the ostensibly superior "Aryan" race, which found itself constantly at odds with Semites. Chamberlain even promoted anti-Semitic stereotypes in his work.
German anti-Semitism culminated intellectually with amateur anthropologist Hans Guenther, who divided Europeans into nine different races, with the "Nordics" first and "Negroes" last. Guenther also described Jews as "a thing of ferment and disturbance, a wedge driven by Asia into the European structure."

The democratic socialists and the Nazis even share the propensity to promote their agendas by fabricating incidents. Eight decades before Jussie Smollett's staged hate crime and the phony Steele dossier, the Nazis orchestrated an incident that plunged the world into war.
On Aug. 31, 1939, as relations between Germany and Poland rapidly deteriorated, Polish troops attacked and briefly occupied a German radio station near the Polish border to broadcast this message: "Attention! This is Gliwice. The broadcasting station is in Polish hands."
Gliwice was the Polish name for the then-German town of Gleiwitz. Gunfire could be heard during the broadcast. German police "overpowered" the troops and recaptured the station.
However, the Polish "troops" were members of the SS, who not only carried out the attack but dressed concentration-camp inmates in Polish army uniforms and killed them as "proof." One of the "troops" was an unmarried German farmer who sympathized with the Poles. The SS arrested him a day earlier and murdered him.
German radio carried news of the faux attack within hours. The next day, Sept. 1, Hitler declared war against Poland, beginning World War II.
The Gleiwitz "attack" belonged to a campaign of false flags that the SS and German military intelligence, the Abwehr, organized in late August 1939. The Abwehr paid such meticulous attention to detail that it provided the "troops" with Polish military equipment and military identification.
Nearly 80 years later, a swastika and the words, "Heil Trump" and "Fag Church" were found on the walls of St. David's Episcopal Church in Brown County, Ind. immediately after Trump's election. The graffiti was "among numerous incidents that have occurred in the wake of Trump’s Election Day win," wrote the Washington Post. But six months later, police arrested organist George Nathaniel Stang for vandalizing his own church.
"I suppose I wanted to give local people a reason to fight for good," wrote Stang, "even if it was a false flag."
Undergirding these parallels is the ultimate similarity: the identity politics that defines both democratic socialists and Nazis.
Just as the democratic socialists view women, African-Americans, Latinos, Muslims. and the LGBT community as needing special legal protection from powerful whites, Christians, and capitalists, the Nazis viewed "Aryans" as needing special legal protection from Jews, socialists, and capitalists. Just as the Nazis viewed "Aryans" as superior due to their race, so do democratic socialists view the marginalized as superior due to their victimization.
If racism means that ethnicity matters more than values, ideas, and ethics, then democratic socialists and Nazis are equally racist. Individual liberty and equality under the rule of law mean nothing. Retribution, however, means everything.
Former socialist Max Eastman tied the connecting knot between Marxism and National Socialism in his 1955 work, Reflections on the Failure of Socialism. When applied to today’s democratic socialists, Eastman’s comments retain their power:

The backers of Hitler in Germany made the same mistake about the Nazi party that the workers and soldiers in Petrograd made about the Bolshevik party. Each group believed that this new brutal, rabid, monolithic fighting gang, on achieving power, would promote, as had been promised, its enlightened interests. Each found that in the growth and triumph of the gang, enlightened interest as such disappeared. The gang itself, the perpetuation of its blind fighting power, became the essential goal of the procedure.

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Trump Derangement Syndrome: It's Not in the DSM but Should Be

Trump Derangement Syndrome: It's Not in the DSM but Should Be

By Ted Noel, MD

I don't believe that Donald Trump Jr is trying to be a psychiatrist, but it appears that he has accurately diagnosed a serious real mental illness on the Left. The Daily Caller published a few of Junior's latest comments. The Democrats and the Media were pushing "sick and twisted conspiracy theories." Anyone with a "sane mind" knew those theories were garbage. And he supplied a new name for them: "Collusion Truthers," raising the comparison to the deluded people who insist that 911 was an “inside job.” 

Donald Trump Jr (photo cedit: Gage Skidmore)

When Joy Reid of MSNBC claims that Attorney General Barr's letter "feels like the seed of a cover-up," or Adam Schiff declares that there is still "ample evidence" of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians, we are not witnessing the first stage of grief, as suggested by Jonathan Turley. This is a serious psychopathology.
Phillipe Reines' performance on Fox news right after AG Barr's letter dropped is illustrative. Each time Molly Hemingway tried to point out the fact that the indictments and pleas of Trump campaign associates had nothing to do with the collusion narrative, Reines shouted her down with "37 indictments and pleas!" He could not allow the truth to destroy his narrative that the presence of malfeasance in any arena was necessarily malfeasance by Trump. In psychiatry, this is called an "obsession."
The Bible of Psychiatry, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, gives a scale for obsessive behaviors.

• "Good or fair insight
• Poor insight
• Absent insight/delusional obsessive-compulsive disorder beliefs (i.e., complete conviction that obsessive-compulsive disorder beliefs are true)"

If we assume that the Left has good or fair insight, they are antisocial persons who "feel little or no empathy toward other people, and don’t see the problem in bending or breaking the law for their own needs or wants." The pictures of Hillary Clinton, James Clapper, James Comey, and many others are attached to this definition.
This has been a considerable problem for those of us who actually believe in truth, justice, and the American way. The Left protects its own, and the falls of Al Franken and Kevin Spacey from grace are rare exceptions to that rule. The Left sacrificed non-essential characters to maintain the fiction that Democrats actually believe in justice. Power is their only currency. Evil-doers will be protected as long as power continues to flow to Democrats. But one has to ask if many Democrats actually have that much insight and are merely anti-social.
As I look across Facebook and the Twitterverse, extreme sentiments appear widely. Repulsive epithets are thrown about like confetti as if they were potpourri to cover the stench of illogic. It is inescapable that a vast number on the Left have become fully Obsessive/Compulsive. This comes from a delusional belief system that completely lacks insight. In short, it's a psychosis, a major psychiatric disorder.
It may be that Van Jones is the sanest of the lot. "There’s an honest level of sadness and disappointment and disorientation among progressives and Democrats and I think it goes deeper than just what’s in the report." He noted, "The revelation that none of that was true had created a general sense of moral confusion among Democrats and also an inability to understand what the administration has done, without the filter of “Russia collusion.” Jones goes on to demonstrate his own insight deficit when he asks why Trump "kisses up to Putin." "Why does he want to meet with him by himself?"
Any sane observer would recognize those Russia-related claims to be complete nonsense. Trump has done more contrary to Putin's benefit than any president before by radically increasing US oil and gas production, which has the effect of severely impacting the sole major source of foreign currency for Russia, but Jones' psychopathology prevents that appreciation. It also allows a blindness to the time Obama told Putin's sidekick Medvedev that "after the election I'll have more flexibility." In other words, I can't kiss up right now, but I can after I'm re-elected. And, by the way, I won't put any effort into stopping your attempts to meddle in our elections.
Obsessive/Compulsive Personality Disorder (aka Trump Derangement Syndrome) is a major psychiatric defect. In this case it has its origin in the incontrovertible fact that only the Left is intelligent or wise. Thus, Donald Trump could not possibly win the Presidency. But when he won, it became imperative that his election be delegitimized.
Within hours, such luminaries as Maxine Waters declared that we needed to "Impeach 45!" Her massive intellect missed the point that you cannot impeach a president who has not yet taken office. Nor has she been able to explain how you can impeach a president for acts that predate the election. The Constitution's "high crimes and misdemeanors," only applies to the president's official tenure. But that level of insight is far beyond the capability of an obsessive.
To the delusional, when any Court rules against one of Trump's actions, that means Trump is an authoritarian, even while the President allows the Court to stay his actions pending appeal. Anything the Left doesn't like is "Unconstitutional!" but of course Obama's acts weren't, even though the Courts consistently ruled against his "pen and phone."
In short, the Loonie Left has a completely delusional view of the world, utterly divorced from reality. "The Left is smarter and wiser than the Right," and the Right must therefore be assimilated. "Resistance is futile." When the Right opposes the Left, and, heaven help us, actually wins a fight, the Left cannot bring itself to understand that they might be wrong. That would be so, so harmful to their self-esteem. Snowflakes cannot allow themselves to be triggered.
TDS is not limited to politicians and commentators. Legal analyst David R Lurie claims that Attorney General Barr has created a new and dangerous interpretation of the doctrine of Obstruction of Justice. To do so, he completely misrepresents the statements of the AG and President Trump to the point of denying that the first sentence of Article II vests all executive authority in a single person: The President. The FBI Director and the Attorney General are his subordinates. To "go easy" on Flynn would be "prosecutorial discretion." But that would contradict Lurie's delusions, and so he repeats them to all who will hear. Of course, Flynn got no discretion, and Trump did not intervene.
David Corn of Mother Jones is not so circuitous in his declamations. "Trump Aided and Abetted Russia's Attack. That Was Treachery. Full Stop." His screed contains so many distortions and lies that they become impossible to count, and even more difficult to comprehend. They stand in direct contradiction to Mueller's evidence and conclusions. We are again left with the disquieting fact that a large part of our public square has become completely bereft of any reasoning power.
The Left's echo chamber demonstrates all sorts of primitive defense mechanisms in play. Denial is obvious, but it's just the first step. Reality is too painful, so it simply cannot be true. Acting out has been ubiquitous with the Antifa movement, with physical assaults against peaceful political opponents. This is justified by projection, where the psychotic person cannot accept his own thoughts and beliefs, and so projects them on to the opponent, the "hater" or "fascist." Projection is often combined with Compartmentalization, where the evil parts of oneself are separated from "who I am" in order to avoid guilt for evil personal deeds.
Slightly more mature defense mechanisms include rationalizations. These are more common in legal commentators than the bulk of the Left. But again, even this depends on the very first, most primitive mechanism: Denial.
"Trump didn't win fair." "Trump is the enemy of America." These and similar demonstrably false tropes are so central to the identity of many on the Left that they cannot be allowed to be challenged without personal disintegration. All of the various denials of the Barr letter have to be seen in this light. They are "tales told by an idiot, signifying nothing." (Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5). Those who thought that the Left might give up the witch hunt have far too optimistic a view of the sanity of the Left. Psychotics cannot choose to gain insight.
Fortunately most Americans are not idiots. The task of providing house and home take too much time and effort to be subverted by the psychotic ravings of Democrats and their lapdogs in the MSM. In my humble opinion, more Americans will be persuaded by multiplying job opportunities and growing wages than the ravings of people who have disconnected from reality. Cries of "unfair!" to the Senate vote on the Green New Deal will be correctly answered by "Democrats were so interested in climate change that they refused to vote for their own bill." Truth will win the day. After all, Americans want safe streets, good schools, and good jobs first. Democrats offer nothing on these frontiers, while Donald Trump is working hard.
Americans are very sane. And they recognize insanity, even if they don't have the fancy language for it. "Collusion Truthers," indeed.

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