COMMUNISM Our Mounting Orwellian Nightmare

[MinnesotaSmith]

Our Mounting Orwellian Nightmare

So we are to imagine that those who objected to Biden's having stolen the election are responsible for the violence at the Capitol? And that, going forward, any public official who questions Biden's win should be removed from offic...

www.americanthinker.com

January 16, 2021
Our Mounting Orwellian Nightmare
By Jeffrey Folks

"So we are to imagine that those who objected to Biden's having stolen the election are responsible for the violence at the Capitol? And that, going forward, any public official who questions Biden's win should be removed from office, and that any corporate leader who objects should be fired? All this when the truth is that Trump in all likelihood won the election.
It is the perfect example of Orwellian speech. In his classic essay "Politics and the English Language," Orwell spoke of the condition where "words and meaning have almost parted company." If that "almost" is a measure of Orwellian speech, then today's Democrat leaders are beyond Orwellian. Their words and meaning have parted company entirely.

As Orwell also stressed, the decline of language is both cause and effect of the decline of politics. When politicians and media begin speaking nonsense, it is the symptom of an underlying corruption of political thinking. The idea that the president should be removed from office for having defended the electoral process is truly bizarre, but it has been repeated throughout the liberal media and by most liberal politicians and even by some conservatives.

One might say progressives like Nancy Pelosi have become "unhinged," but that would let them off the hook. It would suggest that they don't quite realize what they are doing. But what they are doing is the result of crafty political calculation. They want to tie President Trump with the Capitol violence to the point that he can never run again. The same political deviousness lies behind suggestions that he should not be in control of the nation's nuclear arsenal because of his supposed mental instability.

None of these charges has anything to do with the truth. Those most responsible for the Capitol disturbance were those who rigged the presidential election, and certainly these individuals and those who coordinated their efforts or knew in advance or concealed information afterward should be punished. One might say those who committed acts of violence on the Hill should be punished to the same extent that Antifa and BLM rioters were punished last summer.
But the charges against President Trump are Orwellian in that they invert the truth. The president argued, as he had every right to do, that the election was rigged, and he urged peaceful protest to defend our republic.

Even the president's calming words on the afternoon of the Capitol break-in have been met with Orwellian reaction. When President Trump said, "Go home. Go in peace," the media charged him with inciting further violence because he expressed his "love" for his supporters. That expression of love did more than anything to get them to go home.

In a further Orwellian twist, Biden and his cronies appear to have adopted many of President Trump's ideas for running the country, but they can't admit where those ideas came from. Biden's not entirely sure we can afford to forgive all student debt, and he now believes that the existing border policies are necessary for the time being. Gov. Cuomo now says we must "open things up," just as President Trump and many conservative governors said we should. But he can't admit that the idea came from conservatives — it's his idea. None of these ideas was right when Trump was president — they're right only after Biden takes office.

The media will go along with this lie, in typical Orwellian fashion.

The most important line in Orwell's famous essay is this: "In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible." The progressive inversion of the truth is just that: an attempt to defend the indefensible.

If progressives were honest and straightforward, they would be forced to state that they are radical environmentalists and socialists who want government to control the economy and equalize wages; who want socialized medicine for all; who think religious expression should be outlawed; who believe in a universal guaranteed income; who want to outlaw the use of fossil fuels; who want to expand affirmative action putting blacks and Hispanics farther ahead of whites; who believe that any reference to biological sex should be outlawed; who believe that America should be not a global superpower, but merely one nation among others; who believe that abortion at any stage is a universal right; who believe that American aid should go to the Palestinians and not to Israel; and so on.

President Trump clearly stated his own beliefs on a thousand occasions — President Biden should do so as well, but he won't. He uses the Orwellian tactic of disguising his beliefs in gibberish, and this is not because he's going daft, as he well may be. He'll speak of "expanding Obamacare" rather than socialized medicine. He'll talk of "defense partnerships" rather than abandoning control of our military. And on the environment, it's not even possible to tell what he wants, but he wants $400 billion to do it. Once again, "the defence of the indefensible."

The coordinated effort to impeach and convict the president is nothing less than a propaganda campaign, and the associated suppression of free speech on social media and elsewhere is the beginning of a dangerous national decline. It's not possible to say where it will end, but we must be entirely clear about what is happening. A progressive government will attempt to further limit free speech, assembly, religious expression, gun rights, access to employment, and other basic liberties. Progressives have already threatened conservatives with prosecution and imprisonment for the "crime" of denying anthropogenic global warming and for questioning the result of the 2020 election. What's next? The persecution of every American conservative in the same way that Gen. Flynn was persecuted?

It's a fine line between federal prison here in America and Dachau in Germany, and one can transform into the other in a matter of weeks. It did so in Germany in 1933, just five weeks after Hitler became chancellor. Don't think it can't happen here. It begins with "the defence of the indefensible" — and that is already well underway."

Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture including Heartland of the Imagination (2011).

 

[MinnesotaSmith]

Related:

Cancel Us at Your Own Risk

The left has redefined language, what is said and what it means -- words now mean what they say they mean, “nothing more and nothing less.” Silence can become “violence.” Actual violence and destruction can sometimes be &ldquo...

www.americanthinker.com

January 15, 2021
Cancel Us at Your Own Risk
By William L. Gensert

"The left has redefined language, what is said and what it means -- words now mean what they say they mean, “nothing more and nothing less.” Silence can become “violence.” Actual violence and destruction can sometimes be “mostly peaceful” at other times, “insurrection” or “sedition.”

Control the meaning of things and you control the narrative -- control the narrative and you control communication. Through the control of communication, such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, they hope to control America and Americans.

That is why Democrats perceive Trump as dangerous; he has used Twitter brilliantly, negating their narrative control. They spent four years trying to destroy him with lies. Yet, our leftist elites were doomed by their incompetence and a misunderstanding of why people elected Trump in the first place.

The Capitol Hill riots terrified the left because they occurred as Democrats were on the threshold of supposed triumph over an insipid electorate they thought too impotent to fight back. They hate Americans and have so little respect for us they made no effort to hide the steal.

To Democrats, the storming of Capitol Hill on January 6th was their worst nightmare, plumbing the depths of their deepest insecurities and fears -- it showed them their grip on the reins of power was tenuous at best and illusory at worst.

When they saw those people in the Capitol building, not one Democrat thought to try and engage them. Too afraid, they turned tail and ran from the despised unwashed.

In all things, the left is motivated by hate. The Democratic Party is an organization of hate. Blinded by animosity for America and a visceral loathing for Americans, they saw COVID and the Floyd riots as strokes of luck in their battle to control “We the People.”

Conversely, they saw the Capitol Hill storming as 9/11 and Pearl Harbor, a tragedy.

Even more ghastly, they also knew it was not just Trump supporters. Antifa infiltrators, such as the man with the backpack and black hat who bullied the officer and broke the window with the tool hidden in his hand just before Ashli Babbitt was shot, helped turn a mostly peaceful protest into a riot. Afraid of the people and no longer in control of their own paramilitary, they ran.

Yet when their fear dissipated, they realized the riot could be providential.
Here were the “right-wing” riots they had been yearning for these past decades, but which had always eluded them. They created a crisis they would not waste.

Democrats and their partners in media, Big Tech, and Big Finance purged Trump from the public square. Exercising their millenarian instincts to “change the world,” they intend to use emergency powers to declare war on more than half the country.

Yet, they always overreach. They stole an election but seem to have deluded themselves into believing they are winners. They think they can abolish America and we will do nothing. The reason they trumpet Capitol Hill, calling it an insurrection while threatening everyone involved with capital murder, is that they are frightened of the conservative movement.

They believe they run the country, but they are out of touch with anyone but their own base. It is the same with Trump; they want to ruin him because he scares the Schiff out of them, knowing if he runs in 2024, he is the favorite. To stymie his candidacy, they are impeaching Trump again.

And they are determined to make us pay as well. Anyone who disagrees with them on any policy must be destroyed. Anyone who supported Trump must be ostracized and not merely silenced, but also lose jobs and careers.

January 6th allowed Biden to label all doubt of his electoral conquest, “the big lie.” His solution, of course, is always the left’s solution, a thousand little lies. He says he wants “unity.” But Biden and his ilk define “unity” the same way Barry and his minions defined “bipartisanship.’ Both are offers of grace to political opponents who do as they are told. We have seen this movie before; it did not work for Obama and it will not work for chiliastic Joe.

Biden is a despicable human being, a pederast, corrupt as hell, not too bright, even before the onset of his aphasic dementia. He will show the world exactly who he is, and it is a good bet he will do so sooner rather than later. He must, because just as with the scorpion, it is his nature.

Cancel culture once belonged to the too woke. Now a tool of Left Inc. a motley agglomeration of Democrats, media, Big Tech, and Big Finance, they will wield that weapon with brutality -- all while gaining power and amassing enormous wealth.

Democrats once hid who they were. Now, the mask has dropped. They want us to know who they are -- they want us to be afraid. They are making lists and checking them twice. They want us to know they are coming for us. And none of our rights are sacrosanct.

Recently, a tall Boston girl (her description) in commenting on one of my Tweets informed me she had reported me to the FBI for the martial content of my articles. I gave her a “like.” She soon deleted her Tweet.

I had wondered why I was getting emails from alt-right sounding sources telling me I should “Fight Back Today.” “Your 2nd Amendment rights allow you to buy a machine gun… click here,” and telling me I could buy an illegal gun (poison gas, grenades, field mortars, and artillery) online, if I would just click on that button in the email. They were bare-bones emails -- no heading or advertising. This smacks of “entrapment” to me, but you know the FBI?

I felt like George Papadopoulos or Carter Page, with the authorities trying to set me up but doing it in such a clumsy fashion, that no one would (or should) fall for it. Biden should appoint a man in an eyepatch stroking a cat as director.
They have completely deplatformed Trump, something I predicted previously. I lost over a thousand followers over a two-day span. It is the drip, drip, drip of the trip to nonexistence.

The reason the ayatollah still has his accounts is the Democrats and the ayatollah want the same thing: “Death to America.” And if they must, they will eliminate as many Americans as they need to in the process.

The left is isolated and incompetent. Most Americans do not want what they are selling. So, they will try to use the latest “emergency” to force their policies on the nation while silencing all who object.

To paraphrase Talleyrand, the Democrats, just as the Bourbons, “have forgotten nothing and learned nothing.”

For four years, Trump was able to Tweet, and 50,000 people would show up at an airport… in the rain… during a pandemic, while Biden could not get 10 people at one time in one place.

Trump and his followers are not going away.

Parler will be back -- there is too much money involved for them not to be. (It has been reported that they have obtained access to independent servers.) And there are always bootleg coders to make apps that will work on iOS and Android.

The Democrats are playing with fire. It is as if they want “insurrection.” They are foolish. They should look at the electoral map by county. They may control the cities, but the vast landmass that is America is controlled by the people whose rights they seek to abrogate -- and there are many more Americans than Democrats."

 

[MinnesotaSmith]

The Honor of the Legal Profession

Decades ago, when I went to law school, students were drilled about the importance of

www.americanthinker.com

December 13, 2020
The Honor of the Legal Profession

By James V. DeLong

"Decades ago, when I went to law school, students were drilled about the importance of "process values" to the legal system and to society. Citizens needed to be confident that a cause, win or lose, was heard with attention by competent and disinterested judges acting according to those general principles called "the rule of law." Defeat would still sting, but not fester.
Inter arma enim silent lex is a familiar Latin aphorism meaning "amidst arms, law falls silent."

We need an aphorism expressing the complementary truth: "If law falls silent, arms will decide," because if process values are systematically ignored, then all hell can break loose. In a recent article, the Serbian-American author said "as someone who (barely) lived through a civil war, [I know that they] begin when a faction decides it can no longer pursue its goals through the political, legal or economic means, as they have all been foreclosed to them."

My professors, who had seen the rise of the great totalitarian states, the consequent World War II, and the tensions of the Cold War, were very aware of the dangers. They regarded reverence for process values as fundamental to the honor of the legal professional.

Judging by the current election controversy, the legal curriculum has been reinvented according to woke principles, because the current legal establishment is not just indifferent to process values, but screechingly opposed.

Anyone who reads the complaint filed by Texas (and rejected by the Supreme Court) must conclude that there are serious reasons to believe that this election was characterized by massive fraud in certain swing states and that this fraud was prepared and executed by partisan party operatives who used litigation to erode mechanisms of ballot security and control of the counting to consummate the win.

Note that I do not claim that the evidence is conclusive, though I personally think it overwhelming. I use the softer "reason to believe", which means only that it needs investigation.

A legal establishment dedicated to upholding process values would regard itself as honor-bound to demand an investigation of these charges. If true, something must be done. If false, their proponents need to be convinced and, even more so, the huge number of neutrals who don't know what to think. Or, even if not convinced, social peace demands that these groups believe they lost only after fair, competent inquiry.

This is not the reaction of the real legal establishment, which is demanding not just that the charges not be investigated, but that any lawyer who represents the president be damned.

A group called Lawyers Defending American Democracy has collected 1,500 signatures on an open letter condemning lawyers who work for the president and calling for disciplinary action by bar authorities. The letter, signed by prominent members of the legal profession, accuses the Trump team of making "wild fraud and conspiracy claims" that have been rejected by judges.

The financial base of LDAD is a mystery, but its head is a longtime Democratic operative and onetime D.A. in charge of the Amirault persecution, perhaps the most horrifying of the phony child abuse cases in the 1980s. Another member of the Steering Committee is a retired partner of Covington & Burling, the elite D.C. law firm that billed General Michael Flynn millions of dollars while helping the government bludgeon him into pleading guilty to a crime that never occurred. And so on — not exactly a good start for a group that wants to lecture on legal ethics.

The list of signers is indeed long, but I would bet that few of them have any serious knowledge of the controversy, given the blackout imposed by the MSM. They are, with a high probability, calling for sanctions against other lawyers in a matter about which they are basically ignorant. In any case, arguing that a cause is so benighted that no lawyer can ethically represent it violates a fundamental tenet of the profession that every cause should be represented, perhaps most especially those that the mob thinks benighted.

LDAD is right that several judges have rejected the president's claims, but the judges have used procedural trumpery to avoid considering the claims on the merits and have expressed considerable irritation with the Trump team for raising them.

The Supreme Court dismissal of the Texas complaint was in the same vein. The ruling said Texas lacked standing to defend its citizens' interest in an honest election in other states. But every ragtag, foundation-funded group had been given standing to persuade judges to disrupt the election laws of many states. No coherent law of standing exists, and the doctrine can, without undue cynicism, be seen as a tool by which politicized judges play favorites. (See, e.g., Virginia House of Delegates v Bethune-Hill.)

LDAD is not the only entity that wants to suppress efforts to get to the truth of the allegations about the election, and one could easily compile a long list of calls for the professional disgrace of any lawyer who questions the election. Any professor at any leading law school expressing sympathy for Trump's position, however qualified, could be a career-ender.

And all the while, other appalling behavior by goes unnoticed. Threats of economic harm and personal violence force lawyers for Trump to withdraw. Witnesses to vote fraud are doxxed and blacklisted; state legislators are intimidated. Lawyers are involved in all of this behavior, without censure by the establishment.

The legal establishment does not seem to grasp the long term consequences of its failure to uphold the profession's honor and integrity by supporting process values.

Millions of people believe, with good reason, that this election was stolen in the swing states. If the allegations receive an honest and searching inquiry from disinterested judges, these people will accept defeat, if that is how it turns out.

Other cases have been filed, and the courts, including the SCOTUS, may yet address the merits. If judges are too biased or cowardly to face the issues, then the law will indeed have fallen silent.

The consequences, not immediately but over the long term, will be ugly. Trump supporters will not rise in armed revolt, but the cynical betrayal of electoral honesty and legal honor will weaken the legitimacy of the legal and political systems.

For example, the U.S. electoral system depends on the integrity of thousands of local officials. My home county in Virginia is 70% red, but no one doubts that every election is run honestly. But how can this continue if it appears that the electoral systems of the cities are corrupt, and will not be fixed? Why should each election not become an exercise in competitive ballot stuffing?

One must be a fool indeed to persist in being the only honest person in a crooked game.

Even more darkly, the loss of legitimacy will deprive our polity of the resilience needed to weather any serious crisis, and crises will indeed come, from some unexpected economic, foreign policy, or natural disaster.

At that point, we will also see the wisdom of the great lines from A Man for All Seasons:And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned around on you--where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast--man's laws, not God's--and if you cut them down...d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?"

James V DeLong lives in the Shenandoah Valley. He is a former member of the board of editors of the Harvard Law Review.

 

[Samuel Adams]

All of these articles are spot-on, of course, but the academic approach is fast losing steam.

We need a gif., audio not visual, of the sound of the bolt of an AR15 being pulled back, released, and snapping into position.

 

[cupid's romance]

Very well articulated articles!

 

[raven]

it isn't mounting.
it is no longer in some distant hazy future to be debunked by your friends by calling you "crazy Larry" with your tin foil hat.
it is no longer a competition between who can get the most votes - not about losing at the polls.

forget about freedom
it is your job. your home. your savings.

 

[WFK]

Orwellian speech by politicians has bothered me for years. It is being perfected more and more, but has been in use by politicians and military for a long time.

 

[sy32478]

Manipulating language has long been a tool of the Marxists. However it seems to have reached a point where language is divorced from reality. Soon the inability to communicate will make internal divisions unable to be bridged. We are awfully close...

 

[WalknTrot]

As an aside and point of "interest", American Thinker has shut down their comments sections after each article, claiming a lack of moderation staff.

Look for that to happen at many Conservative essay and aggregation sites. They are in essence self-censoring to pre-empt a loss of hosting support...