869 Fierce battle within FBI, & between FBI and Justice Dept, over Clinton Foundation

Fierce battle within FBI, & between FBI and Justice Dept, over Clinton
Foundation

Newsletter published on 1 November 2016

(1) Fierce battle within FBI, & between FBI and Justice Dept, over
Clinton Foundation
(2) FBI investigation shifts focus to Hillary
(3) Democrats should ask Clinton to step aside - Chicago Trubune
(4) Hillary’s Wall St Fundraising used Anti-Corruption Loophole
(5) Citigroup bank chose Obama’s 2008 cabinet - WikiLeaks
(6) Ruling Class understands Trump represents a counter-revolution -
Kevin MacDonald
(7) After the Republic, by Angelo M. Codevilla

(1) Fierce battle within FBI, & between FBI and Justice Dept, over
Clinton Foundation
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/10/31/pers-o31.html

Political warfare explodes in Washington

Patrick Martin and Barry Grey

31 October 2016

Just a week before Election Day, the crisis gripping the American ruling
class and its state, marked by intractable and bitter internal
conflicts, has erupted into open political warfare.

Last Friday’s letter from Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James
Comey to Congress announcing new "investigative steps" in the probe of
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, itself a
manifestation of the crisis, has brought the underlying tensions to the
boiling point. It has exposed raging conflicts within the FBI and, more
broadly, the national security apparatus as a whole.

Comey’s cryptic letter acknowledged that the FBI has not actually
reviewed a new batch of emails that "appear to be pertinent" to its
previous investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server for
official business while she was secretary of state. The agency, he
wrote, "cannot yet assess whether or not this material may be
significant." This astonishing admission makes all the more
extraordinary Comey’s decision to make the discovery of the new emails a
public issue only eleven days before the election.

In a rapid-fire series of developments this weekend, Justice Department
officials revealed that they had opposed Comey’s decision to send the
letter, arguing that it violated a longstanding principle that no
Justice Department or FBI action that might impact on a candidate should
be announced within 60 days of an election.

The Clinton campaign and congressional Democrats lashed out at Comey for
the timing of the letter. At a campaign rally in Daytona Beach, Florida,
Clinton said Comey’s action is "not just strange, it’s unprecedented."
She also tweeted that "FBI Director Comey bowed to partisan pressure,"
suggesting that the letter was an effort to appease congressional
Republican leaders opposed to Comey’s determination last July that there
was no basis for criminal charges against Clinton over her use of a
private email server.

Democratic Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid sent a letter to Comey
suggesting that he had violated the law forbidding government employees
to use their official positions to influence the result of an election.
"I am writing to inform you that my office has determined that these
actions may violate the Hatch Act," he wrote. "Through your partisan
actions, you may have broken the law."

He added that Comey had "demonstrated a disturbing double standard for
the treatment of sensitive information, with what appears to be clear
intent to aid one political party over another," because he had made
public the renewed FBI interest in Clinton’s emails, but was silent on
what Reid called "explosive information" supposedly connecting
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump to Russian government
officials.

Here Reid was resorting to the Russia-baiting that has been the Clinton
campaign’s main response to the publication by WikiLeaks of tens of
thousands of emails and other documents sent or received by campaign
chairman John Podesta, including devastating information on Bill
Clinton’s use of the Clinton Foundation to obtain lucrative speaking
engagements with corporations and business associations. Campaign
spokesmen have refused to discuss the contents of the emails, claiming
that they were hacked by Russian government agents and then handed over
to WikiLeaks to damage Clinton and help Trump.

NBC News reported Sunday that the FBI has now obtained a search warrant
to go through all 650,000 emails found on the laptop of former
congressman Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of Clinton’s closest
aide, Huma Abedin. Weiner is under FBI investigation for allegedly
sending sexually explicit text messages to an underage girl.

The Wall Street Journal gave details, in a story posted on its web site
Sunday afternoon, of the explosive internal crisis within the FBI that
led to Comey’s letter to Congress. By this account, there has been a
fierce battle within the FBI and between the FBI and the Justice
Department not only over the Clinton email investigation, but over
separate investigations involving four FBI field offices (New York,
Washington DC, Los Angeles and Little Rock, Arkansas) into the
operations of the Clinton Foundation.

More than eight months ago, FBI agents presented plans for a more
aggressive investigation of the foundation to career prosecutors in the
Justice Department, only to have the proposal blocked on the grounds
that there was insufficient evidence. The FBI offices nonetheless
continued their investigations, which were intensified after the Clinton
email investigation was wound up in July.

The Journal report suggests that either a substantial faction within the
FBI was convinced that top FBI officials were covering up criminal
activities on the part of Hillary and Bill Clinton, or the FBI
dissidents were politically motivated to use agency resources to
undermine Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, or both.

When top officials in the FBI and Justice Department opposed these
efforts, open rebellion followed, expressed in leaks to the Wall Street
Journal centrally targeting FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, whose
wife was an unsuccessful Democratic candidate for state senate in
Virginia last year. According to some press reports, Comey sent his
letter to Congress last week because he was convinced the information
would become public anyway through further leaks by FBI subordinates.

The open warfare engulfing Washington on the eve of a presidential
election reveals that the entire political system and the state
apparatus itself are riven by tensions and conflicts so deep and bitter
that they cannot be contained within the traditional framework of
bourgeois elections. Fueling these tensions is the convergence of crises
on the economic, geopolitical, internal political and social fronts.

The US and world economy remain mired in stagnation more than eight
years after the 2008 Wall Street crash, and there are growing fears that
central bank policies designed to buttress the banks and drive up stock
prices are leading to a new financial disaster. The economic crisis is
fueling social anger and alienation from the entire political system, as
reflected in different ways in the mass support for the anti-Wall Street
campaign of the self-styled "socialist" Bernie Sanders and the "America
first" pseudo-populist campaign of Donald Trump.

Twenty-five years of unending war and fifteen years of the "war on
terror" have failed to secure US hegemony in the Middle East and only
heightened fears within the ruling elite that US imperialism is losing
ground to rivals such as Russia and China. The disarray of US policy in
Syria, in particular, has led to bitter conflicts and recriminations
over US policy, and demands for a major escalation of military violence,
not only in Syria, but throughout the Middle East. These are combined
with calls for a more aggressive confrontation with Russia and China. [...]

(2) FBI investigation shifts focus to Hillary

http://www.globalresearch.ca/waning-mainstream-media-support-for-hillary-clinton-will-she-make-it-to-the-white-house/5554004

Will She Make it to the White House? Waning Mainstream Media Support for
Hillary Clinton.

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky

Global Research, October 31, 2016

What has been the response of the mainstream media which sofar has
endorsed Hillary through a process of coverup of her criminal undertakings?

Without mainstream media propaganda, Hillary’s political legitimacy
would collapse like a deck of cards. The Second Letter by FBI Director
James Comey opens up a "Pandora’s Box" of  fraud and corruption.

Moreover, following the October Surprise release by FBI Director James
Comey, the media narrative seems to have taken on a different slant.

The media is controlled by powerful economic interest groups. Are the
power brokers behind Hillary having second thoughts? Does it serve their
interests in supporting a candidate who has an extensive criminal
record? Do they want a dysfunctional presidency?

Has the Mainstream media dumped Hillary? Sof ar, Not Yet. With some
exceptions the MSM continues to support Hillary candidacy, without applause.

A report by the Chicago Tribune  (October 29, 2016) entitled "Democrats
should ask Clinton to step aside" is nonetheless revealing. does it
point to shift in direction? [...]

(3) Democrats should ask Clinton to step aside - Chicago Trubune

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/kass/ct-hillary-clinton-emails-kass-1030-20161028-column.html

Democrats should ask Clinton to step aside

Tribune columnist John Kass says, in his opinion, the newly opened FBI
investigation of Hillary Clinton's private email server marks "a
potential Constitutional crisis" for the country.

Oct. 31, 2016

John Kass

Has America become so numb by the decades of lies and cynicism oozing
from Clinton Inc. that it could elect Hillary Clinton as president, even
after Friday's FBI announcement that it had reopened an investigation of
her emails while secretary of state?

We'll find out soon enough.

It's obvious the American political system is breaking down. It's been
crumbling for some time now, and the establishment elite know it and
they're properly frightened. Donald Trump, the vulgarian at their gates,
is a symptom, not a cause. Hillary Clinton and husband Bill are both
cause and effect.

FBI director James Comey's announcement about the renewed Clinton email
investigation is the bombshell in the presidential campaign. That he
announced this so close to Election Day should tell every thinking
person that what the FBI is looking at is extremely serious.

This can't be about pervert Anthony Weiner and his reported desire for a
teenage girl. But it can be about the laptop of Weiner's wife, Clinton
aide Huma Abedin, and emails between her and Hillary. It comes after the
FBI investigation in which Comey concluded Clinton had lied and been
"reckless" with national secrets, but said he could not recommend
prosecution.

If ruling Democrats hold themselves to the high moral standards they
impose on the people they govern, they would follow a simple process:

They would demand that Mrs. Clinton step down, immediately, and let her
vice presidential nominee, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, stand in her place.

Democrats should say, honestly, that with a new criminal investigation
going on into events around her home-brew email server from the time she
was secretary of state, having Clinton anywhere near the White House is
just not a good idea.

Since Oct. 7, WikiLeaks has released 35,000 emails hacked from Clinton
campaign boss John Podesta. Now WikiLeaks, no longer a neutral player
but an active anti-Clinton agency, plans to release another 15,000 emails.

What if she is elected? Think of a nation suffering a bad economy and
continuing chaos in the Middle East, and now also facing a criminal
investigation of a president. Add to that congressional investigations
and a public vision of Clinton as a Nixonian figure wandering the halls,
wringing her hands.

The best thing would be for Democrats to ask her to step down now. It
would be the most responsible thing to do, if the nation were more
important to them than power. And the American news media — fairly or
not firmly identified in the public mind as Mrs. Clinton's political
action committee — should begin demanding it.

But what will Hillary do?

She'll stick and ride this out and turn her anger toward Comey. For
Hillary and Bill Clinton, it has always been about power, about the
Clinton Restoration and protecting fortunes already made by selling
nothing but political influence.

She'll remind the nation that she's a woman and that Donald Trump said
terrible things about women. If there is another notorious Trump video
to be leaked, the Clintons should probably leak it now. Then her allies
in media can talk about misogyny and sexual politics and the headlines
can be all about Trump as the boor he is and Hillary as champion of
female victims, which she has never been.

Remember that Bill Clinton leveraged the "Year of the Woman." Then he
preyed on women in the White House and Hillary protected him. But the
political left — most particularly the women of the left — defended him
because he promised to protect abortion rights and their other agendas.

If you take a step back from tribal politics, you'll see that Mrs.
Clinton has clearly disqualified herself from ever coming near
classified information again. If she were a young person straight out of
grad school hoping to land a government job, Hillary Clinton would be
laughed out of Washington with her record. She'd never be hired.

As secretary of state she kept classified documents on the home-brew
server in her basement, which is against the law. She lied about it to
the American people. She couldn't remember details dozens of times when
questioned by the FBI. Her aides destroyed evidence by BleachBit and
hammers. Her husband, Bill, met secretly on an airport tarmac with
Attorney General Loretta Lynch for about a half-hour, and all they said
they talked about was golf and the grandkids.

And there was no prosecution of Hillary.

That isn't merely wrong and unethical. It is poisonous.

And during this presidential campaign, Americans were confronted with a
two-tiered system of federal justice: one for standards for the Clintons
and one for the peasants.

I've always figured that, as secretary of state, Clinton kept her
home-brew email server — from which foreign intelligence agencies could
hack top secret information — so she could shield the influence peddling
that helped make the Clintons several fortunes.

The Clintons weren't skilled merchants. They weren't traders or
manufacturers. The Clintons never produced anything tangible. They had
no science, patents or devices to make them millions upon millions of
dollars.

All they had to sell, really, was influence. And they used our federal
government to leverage it.

If a presidential election is as much about the people as it is about
the candidates, then we'll learn plenty about ourselves in the coming
days, won't we?

Listen to the Chicago Way podcast with John Kass and Jeff Carlin. Guests
are Tribune cartoonist Scott Stantis and former White House Chief of
Staff William Daley: www.chicagotribune.com/kasspodcast.

jskass@chicagotribune.com

(4) Hillary’s Wall St Fundraising used Anti-Corruption Loophole

http://www.ibtimes.com/political-capital/hillary-clintons-wall-street-fundraising-benefited-loophole-federal-anti

Oct 31, 4:13 PM EDT

Hillary Clinton’s Wall Street Fundraising Benefited From Loophole In
Federal Anti-Corruption Rule

By David Sirota @davidsirota AND Andrew Perez (MapLight) AND Avi
Asher-Schapiro On 10/31/16 AT 2:07 PM

Despite an anti-corruption rule that was designed to reduce the
financial industry’s political power, top officials from the investment
firm BlackRock hosted Hillary Clinton at campaign fundraisers earlier
this year. The cash -- which poured in through a loophole in the law —
came in as BlackRock’s federal contracts to manage billions of dollars
of retiree assets will be up for renewal during the next president’s term.

In 2010, the Securities and Exchange Commission looked to stop campaign
donations to public officials from financial firms seeking to convince
those officials to hire them to manage public employees’ retirement
assets. The agency enacted a pay-to-play rule that applied such a
restriction to state and local officials. The rule, however, was
structured in a way that effectively exempted federal agencies from its
restrictions -- and it was created even though a major federal agency
had just been plagued by an investment-related influence-peddling scandal.

In practice, the gap in the rule allows BlackRock executives to raise
big money for presidential candidates who -- if they win -- will appoint
the officials that run the federal Thrift Savings Plan, which awards
contracts to manage retirement assets for nearly 5 million current and
former federal employees. The loophole also allows Wall Street
executives to give cash to presidential candidates, even as those
executives’ firms get deals to manage -- and earn fees from --
investments for the federal government’s separate pension insurance
agency, which is run by presidential appointees.

In all, the loophole in the SEC rule effectively leaves nearly a
half-trillion dollars of retirement assets unprotected by the nation’s
major anti-corruption measure. Clinton’s presidential campaign has
raised more than $1 million from financial firms that are contracted to
manage those assets.

Two SEC spokespeople, Ryan White and Judith Burns, declined to answer
questions from International Business Times and MapLight about the
pay-to-play rule carveout for federal agencies.

‘Particularly Vulnerable To Pay To Play Practices’

This report is part of an IBT/MapLight series examining the extent to
which corporate interests are able to circumvent federal and state
anti-corruption rules designed to restrict the influence of money on
public policy.

When the SEC passed its rule to restrict Wall Street campaign
contributions, the agency said the measure was necessary because
publicly administered retirement programs "are particularly vulnerable
to pay to play practices" which can end up "leading to inferior
management, diminished returns or greater losses" for retirees. A study
released last month validated that concern: Researchers at Stanford,
Rice and Erasmus universities found that retirement systems whose
overseers "have received relatively more contributions from the
financial industry have lower returns."

Federal regulators ended up prohibiting investment firms from earning
fees from "a government entity" -- that is, a retirement system -- if
firm executives donate to a public official who has power to influence
the retirement system’s investment decisions. The rule, though, narrowly
defined "government entity": It says the term means only an agency at
the state or local level, not the federal government.

"There's no clear carve-out for federal plans, but the definition itself
also does not insinuate that they are covered," Benjamin Keane, an
attorney at the law firm Dentons, told IBT/MapLight.

Through legislation, congressional lawmakers could close the loophole by
passing a pay-to-play law that defined "government entity" to encompass
the federal government. Without that, the loophole will remain. [...]

(5) Citigroup bank chose Obama’s 2008 cabinet - WikiLeaks

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/10/15/wiki-o15.html

Citigroup chose Obama’s 2008 cabinet, WikiLeaks document reveals

By Tom Eley

15 October 2016

One month before the presidential election of 2008, the giant Wall
Street bank Citigroup submitted to the Obama campaign a list of its
preferred candidates for cabinet positions in an Obama administration.
This list corresponds almost exactly to the eventual composition of
Barack Obama’s cabinet.

The memorandum, revealed by WikiLeaks in a recent document release from
the email account of John Podesta, who currently serves as Hillary
Clinton’s campaign chair, was written by Michael Froman, who was then an
executive with Citigroup and currently serves as US trade
representative. The email is dated Oct. 6, 2008 and bears the subject
line "Lists." It went to Podesta a month before he was named chairman of
President-Elect Obama’s transition team.

The email was sent at the height of the financial meltdown that erupted
after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers on September 15. Even as
Citigroup and its Wall Street counterparts were dragging the US and
world economy into its deepest crisis since the 1930s, they remained, as
the email shows, the real power behind the façade of American democracy
and its electoral process.

Froman’s list proved remarkably prescient. As it proposed, Robert Gates,
a Bush holdover, became secretary of Defense; Eric Holder became
attorney general; Janet Napolitano, secretary of Homeland Security; Rahm
Emanuel, White House chief of staff; Susan Rice, United Nations
ambassador; Arne Duncan, secretary of Education; Kathleen Sebelius,
secretary of Health and Human Services; Peter Orszag, head of the Office
of Management and Budget; Eric Shinseki, secretary of Veterans Affairs;
and Melody Barnes, chief of the Domestic Policy Council.

For the highly sensitive position of secretary of the Treasury, three
possibilities were presented: Robert Rubin and Rubin’s close disciples
Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner. Obama chose Geithner, then
president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Geithner, along with
Bush Treasury Secretary (and former Goldman Sachs CEO) Henry Paulson and
Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, had played the leading role in organizing the
Wall Street bailout.

Rubin had served as Treasury secretary in the Bill Clinton
administration from 1995 until 1999, when he was succeeded by Summers.
In that capacity, Rubin and Summers oversaw the dismantling of the
Glass-Steagall Act (1933), which had imposed a legal wall separating
commercial banking from investment banking. Immediately after leaving
Treasury, Rubin became a top executive at Citigroup, remaining there
until 2009.

A notable aspect of the Froman memo is its use of identity politics.
Among the Citigroup executive’s lists of proposed hires to Podesta were
a "Diversity List" including "African American, Latino and Asian
American candidates, broken down by Cabinet/Deputy and
Under/Assistant/Deputy Assistant level," in Froman’s words, and "a
similar document on women." Froman also took diversity into account for
his White House cabinet list, "probability-weighting the likelihood of
appointing a diverse candidate for each position." This list concluded
with a table breaking down the 31 assignments by race and gender.

Citigroup’s recommendations came just three days after then-President
George W. Bush signed into law the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which
allocated $700 billion in taxpayer money to rescue the largest Wall
Street banks. The single biggest beneficiary was Citigroup, which was
given $45 billion in cash in the form of a government stock purchase,
plus a $306 billion government guarantee to back up its worthless
mortgage-related assets.

Then-presidential candidate Obama played a critical political role in
shepherding the massively unpopular bank bailout through Congress. The
September financial crash convinced decisive sections of the US
corporate-financial elite that the Democratic candidate of "hope" and
"change" would be better positioned to contain popular opposition to the
bailout than his Republican rival, Senator John McCain of Arizona.

As president, Obama not only funneled trillions of dollars to the banks,
he saw to it that not a single leading Wall Street executive faced
prosecution for the orgy of speculation and swindling that led to the
financial collapse and Great Recession, and he personally intervened to
block legislation capping executive pay at bailed-out firms.

The same furtive and corrupt process is underway in relation to a
Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump administration. Froman’s email is one of
many thousands released by WikiLeaks from the account of Podesta. Those
communications, such as the Froman email, which expose who really rules
America, have been virtually ignored by the media. The pro-Democratic
Party New Republic called attention to it in an article published
Friday, but the story has received little if any further coverage.

The media has instead focused on salacious details of Republican
presidential nominee Donald Trump’s sexual activities, designed, in
part, to divert attention from the substance of the Clinton
campaign-related emails being released by WikiLeaks and other sources.

The New Republic drew attention to the Froman memo not because it
opposes such machinations, but as a warning to the interests it
represents that they must move now to influence the eventual composition
of a Hillary Clinton administration.

"If the 2008 Podesta emails are any indication, the next four years of
public policy are being hashed out right now, behind closed doors,"
wrote New Republic author David Dayen. "And if liberals want to have an
impact on that process, waiting until after the election will be too late."

(6) Ruling Class understands Trump represents a counter-revolution -
Kevin MacDonald
http://www.unz.com/article/claremonts-codevilla-on-the-coming-revolution-americans-will-be-nostalgic-for-donald-trumps-moderation/

Claremont’s Codevilla On the Coming Revolution "Americans Will Be
Nostalgic For Donald Trump’s Moderation."

Kevin MacDonald

October 11, 2016

We are nearing the climax of a watershed election. The Ruling Class
understands that Donald Trump represents a counter-revolution to all
they have built up over the last 50 years. That emphatically includes
GOP leaders like Speaker Paul Ryan, who hastened not merely to step on
Trump’s bounce back in the second debate by announcing he was suspending
support, but is signaling he will continue to damage Trump as much as
possible [Inside Ryan’s decision to (almost) dump Trump| The speaker
might still fully rescind his endorsement before Nov. 8, sources told
POLITICO, by Jakee Sherman and John Bresnahan, Politico, October 11, 2016]

This phenomenon has inspired an important essay from Angelo M.
Codevilla, a Senior Fellow of the Claremont Institute and emeritus
professor of International Relations at Boston University, : After the
Republic. [Claremont Review, September 27, 2016]. Codevilla’s basic
idea: the cultural revolution of the last 50 years has destroyed America
as a constitutional republic. As many on the Alt Right have noted, there
is nothing left to conserve. The question now is where our post-republic
period will take us. Codevilla [Email him] writes

     Because Republicans largely agree with Democrats that they need not
take seriously the founders’ Constitution, today’s American regime is
now what Max Weber had called the Tsarist regime on the eve of the
Revolution: "fake constitutionalism." Because such fakery is
self-discrediting and removes anyone’s obligation to restrain his
passions, it is a harbinger of revolution and of imperial power.
[Emphasis added]

This is why we see repeated crazy comparisons of Trump to Hitler—most
recently, This New York Times ‘Hitler’ review sure reads like a thinly
disguised Trump comparison. [By Aaron Blake, Washington Post, September
28, 2016] Despite absolutely no statements from Trump suggesting that he
would suspend the Constitution and assume dictatorial powers, the
concern is lurking that, like Hitler, he would do just that.

The fundamental reason for this fear among the elites: their guilty
conscience. They understand that in the last 50 years they have
completely upended the old order in America. They have created a
revolution that opposes the most fundamental interests of the historic
white American nation. They understand that this election could confirm
their revolution—but only if Hillary Clinton wins.

Her victory would mean continued Leftist appointments to the Supreme
Court (Codevilla has an excellent summary of the vast changes in
"Constitutional Law" imposed by the new regime) and it would mean
importing around many millions more non-whites, the great majority
uneducated, poor, and dependent and the vast majority of whom will be
entirely on board with their revolution.

The top-down nature of this revolution cannot be overemphasized. There
was never a demand by a majority, or even close to a majority, from any
Western country for a complete transformation, to the point that white
people will soon be minorities in societies they had dominated for
hundreds and, in the case of Europe, thousands of years. This top-down
revolution has never been supported by a majority of white Americans.
There is anger, resentment, and fear for the future.

Trump represents an inchoate backlash against this revolution. But we
have entered an era where it is too late to simply turn back the clock.
The changes have been too drastic. One could change the legal situation
with one or two judicious Supreme Court picks. But that will not undo
the importation of a new people—tens of millions of non-whites with all
that that implies for the future.

As Codevilla notes, because we have entered an era of fake
constitutionalism and because the most fundamental interests of the
traditional American majority have been r uthlessly suppressed, there is
no obligation to restrain one’s passions. The situation is indeed what
Codevilla calls "a harbinger of revolution and of imperial power."

The new Ruling Class realizes that it rules by lawless bureaucratic
coercion:

     In today’s America, a network of executive, judicial, bureaucratic,
and social kinship channels bypasses the sovereignty of citizens. Our
imperial regime, already in force, works on a simple principle: the
president and the cronies who populate these channels may do whatever
they like so long as the bureaucracy obeys and one third plus one of the
Senate protects him from impeachment. If you are on the right side of
that network, you can make up the rules as you go along, ignore or
violate any number of laws, obfuscate or commit perjury about what you
are doing (in the unlikely case they put you under oath), and be certain
of your peers’ support. These cronies’ shared social and intellectual
identity stems from the uniform education they have received in the
universities. Because disdain for ordinary Americans is this ruling
class’s chief feature, its members can be equally certain that all will
join in celebrating each, and in demonizing their respective opponents.
[My emphasis

While the traditional America aspired to be and substantially attained a
society based on individual merit, the new elite is not a meritocracy
(the poster child for this is Elena Kagan), and not just in terms of
Affirmative Action and ethnic favoritism in university admissions. The
Clintons may be seen as representative of the corruption of this new
ruling elite, able to flout laws with impunity. At this writing, Hillary
Clinton remains ahead in most national polls and has the support of the
entire Establishment, left to right, despite:

     highly credible charges of unprecedented corruption involving
hundreds of millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation from donors,
many of them foreign entities, while she was Secretary of State, as well
as outrageous speaking fees for Bill Clinton from these same donors
(importantly, his speaking fees skyrocketed after Hillary became
Secretary of State);

     violation of an agreement between Clinton and the Obama
Administration not to accept foreign donations during her tenure as
Secretary of State;

     the destruction via BleachBit (a program designed to make the
information non-retrievable) of likely incriminating emails after a
subpoena,

     being cleared of criminal conduct by the FBI that would have sent
ordinary people to prison;

     her staff pleading the Fifth Amendment in Congressional hearings;
    many of her staff receiving immunity deals even there is good reason
to think they lied to the FBI;

     an agreement for the FBI to destroy computer owned by Clinton
aides, including Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s Chief of Staff, plus looking
only at contents between June 1, 2014 and February 1, 2015 and hence
ignoring much possibly incriminating evidence. [...]

If the Democrats win, Codevilla sees them driving "the transformations
that it has already wrought on America to quantitative and qualitative
levels that not even its members can imagine."

They would continue their war on traditional "racist," "sexist" America
with literally nothing to stop them. The

     disdain for how other Americans live and think has remained
fundamental…. The media reacted to Hillary Clinton’s remark that "half
of Trump’s supporters could be put into a ‘basket of deplorables’" as if
these sentiments were novel and peculiar to her. In fact, these are
unremarkable restatements of our ruling class’s perennial creed.

Exactly.

Thus, despite appearances to the contrary, there is a unified oligarchic
Establishment that straddles both the Republican and Democrat parties.
This has not been so obvious in previous elections, when Republicans and
Democrats were apparently quite different on some issues. However, the
rise of Donald Trump has shown that the Establishment is entirely
united. For example, billionaires are supporting Hillary Clinton 20–1,
whereas in previous elections, they were much more split between the two
parties. Not one Fortune 100 CEO is supporting Trump.

The other pillar of the Ruling Class is the media which reflects
academic culture and political culture generally. The media, along with
academia, and the bureaucracy, have been prime drivers of this top-down
revolution, in which the moral and intellectual high ground has been
seized by people hostile to the traditional peoples and cultures of the
West. This new Ruling Class is completely out of touch with the
interests of a majority of its citizens—particularly White Americans.
Thus the print media is almost completely in the anti-Trump camp:

     The [endorsements] are overwhelmingly against him, and they just
keep coming, in language that is notable for its blunt condemnation of
the candidate and its "save the Republic’’ tone.

     The endorsements are coming not only from the usual mainstream
media suspects but also from newspapers that either never before
supported a Democrat or had not in many decades—The Dallas Morning News,
The Arizona Republic, The Cincinnati Enquirer—or had never endorsed any
presidential candidate, like USA Today. The Wall Street Journal has not
gone there, at least not yet, but a member of its conservative-leaning
editorial board has: Dorothy Rabinowitz, who called Mr. Trump "unfit."

     What’s most striking is the collective sense of alarm they
convey—that Mr. Trump is a "dangerous demagogue" (USA Today) whose
election would represent a "clear and present danger" (The Washington
Post, The Cincinnati Enquirer), or, as The Atlanticeditor Scott Stossel
said in an interview Tuesday [October 4, 2016 "a potential national
emergency or threat to the Republic."[The Editorialists Have Spoken;
Will Voters Listen?, by Jim Rutenberg, NYT, October 5, 2016 ] [Links in
original]

It is ironic indeed that these media people see Trump as threatening the
republic when, as Codevilla notes, that republic is already gone as a
result of the actions of our new Ruling Class. [...]

But as Codevilla notes,

     Under our ruling class, "truth" has morphed from the reflection of
objective reality to whatever has "normative pull"—i.e., to what
furthers the ruling class’s agenda, whatever that might be at any given
time. That is the meaning of the term "political correctness," as
opposed to factual correctness."

Truth is whatever you want to make it, just as the Constitution now
means whatever the Ruling Class says it means.

While it’s obvious what a Clinton victory would mean, the consequences
of a Trump victory are far less certain. Codevilla is pessimistic that
there could be real change:

     Because it is difficult to imagine a Trump presidency even thinking
about something so monumental as replacing an entire ruling elite, much
less leading his constituency to accomplishing it, electing Trump is
unlikely to result in a forceful turn away from the country’s current
direction. Continuing pretty much on the current trajectory under the
same class will further fuel revolutionary sentiments in the land all by
itself. Inevitable disappointment with Trump is sure to add to them.

But the two great revolutions of the twentieth century—the Bolshevik
Revolution and National Socialism—did indeed replace ruling elites. And
of course, the fear that a Trump victory would indeed lead to a
wholesale replacement of our ruling elite is behind the hysterical
opposition that he has received from the entire Establishment.

Codevilla’s conclusion is worth pondering:

     We have stepped over the threshold of a revolution. It is difficult
to imagine how we might step back, and futile to speculate where it will
end. Our ruling class’s malfeasance, combined with insult, brought it
about. Donald Trump did not cause it and is by no means its ultimate
manifestation. Regardless of who wins in 2016, this revolution’s
sentiments will grow in volume and intensity, and are sure to empower
politicians likely to make Americans nostalgic for Donald Trump’s
moderation. [Emphases added]

Finally, given my research interests, II would be remiss if I did not
mention the critical role played by Jews and the organized Jewish
community in the changes that are now coming to a head.

There is no question that Jews are a prominent component of our new
elite and played a determinative role in passing the watershed 1965
immigration law. I have written five VDARE.com articles on Jewish
opposition to Trump, often expressed in terms of Jewish identity,
interests in multiculturalism, immigration and refugee policy, and fear
of a fascist America.

Given the very powerful position Jews enjoy in the American media
(summarized briefly here and more extensively here, pp. xlvi-lvi), they
necessarily play a major role in the anti-Trump movement.

Jewish opposition to Trump is virtually unanimous, and in the Republican
Party, Jewish neoconservatives are leading the #NeverTrump movement.
(One of them, Paul Ryan adviser Dan Senor, is rumored to have leaked the
Access Hollywoodtape, although the MSM seems reluctant to ask him).
According to 538, in 2012, around 70% of money given by Jews directly to
candidates went to Obama, while in 2016, 95% has gone to Clinton. [The
GOP’s Jewish Donors Are Abandoning Trump,By Eitan Hersh and Brian
Schaffner, September 21, 2016] Jews are vastly overrepresented among the
top donors to pro-Clinton PACs, while the Republican Jewish Coalition
has not endorsed Trump, with many donors switching to Clinton. Adelson,
after investing $93 million in the 2012 campaign for Republicans,
including $30 million to a Romney PAC, now says he will donate only $45
million, of which only $5 million will go to Trump, the rest going to
House and Senate candidates. [Donald Trump Gains the Support of a Former
‘Never Trump’ Billionaire, by Michal Addady, Fortune.com, September 20,
2016]

Codevilla says frankly that a deep unhappiness with the current
political culture is brewing that could ultimately lead to a
revolutionary upheaval.

Trump accomplished a hostile takeover of the Republican Party. Can he
accomplish a hostile takeover of the presidency in the teeth of
unanimous opposition from our hostile elites?

(7) After the Republic, by Angelo M. Codevilla
http://www.claremont.org/crb/basicpage/after-the-republic/

After the Republic

By: Angelo M. Codevilla

September 27, 2016

Over the past half century, the Reagan years notwithstanding, our ruling
class’s changing preferences and habits have transformed public and
private life in America. As John Marini shows in his essay, "Donald
Trump and the American Crisis," this has resulted in citizens morphing
into either this class’s "stakeholders" or its subjects. And, as Publius
Decius Mus argues, "America and the West" now are so firmly "on a
trajectory toward something very bad" that it is no longer reasonable to
hope that "all human outcomes are still possible," by which he means
restoration of the public and private practices that made the American
republic. In fact, the 2016 election is sealing the United States’s
transition from that republic to some kind of empire.

Electing either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump cannot change that
trajectory. Because each candidate represents constituencies hostile to
republicanism, each in its own way, these individuals are not what this
election is about. This election is about whether the Democratic Party,
the ruling class’s enforcer, will impose its tastes more strongly and
arbitrarily than ever, or whether constituencies opposed to that rule
will get some ill-defined chance to strike back. Regardless of the
election’s outcome, the republic established by America’s Founders is
probably gone. But since the Democratic Party’s constituencies differ
radically from their opponents’, and since the character of imperial
governance depends inherently on the emperor, the election’s result will
make a big difference in our lives.

Many Enemies, Few Friends

The overriding question of 2016 has been how eager the American people
are to reject the bipartisan class that has ruled this country contrary
to its majority’s convictions. Turned out, eager enough to throw out the
baby with the dirty bathwater. The ruling class’s united front in
response to the 2008 financial crisis had ignited the Tea Party’s call
for adherence to the Constitution, and led to elections that gave
control of both houses of Congress to the Republican Party. But as
Republicans became full partners in the ruling class’s headlong rush in
what most considered disastrous directions, Americans lost faith in the
Constitution’s power to restrain the wrecking of their way of life.

 From the primary season’s outset, the Democratic Party’s candidates
promised even more radical "transformations." When, rarely, they have
been asked what gives them the right to do such things they have acted
as if the only answer were Nancy Pelosi’s reply to whether the
Constitution allows the government to force us into Obamacare: "Are you
kidding? Are you kidding?"

On the Republican side, 17 hopefuls promised much, without dealing with
the primordial fact that, in today’s America, those in power basically
do what they please. Executive orders, phone calls, and the right judge
mean a lot more than laws. They even trump state referenda. Over the
past half-century, presidents have ruled not by enforcing laws but
increasingly through agencies that write their own rules, interpret
them, and punish unaccountably—the administrative state. As for the
Supreme Court, the American people have seen it invent rights where
there were none—e.g., abortion—while trammeling ones that had been the
republic’s spine, such as the free exercise of religion and freedom of
speech. The Court taught Americans that the word "public" can mean
"private" (Kelo v. City of New London), that "penalty" can mean "tax"
(King v. Burwell), and that holding an opinion contrary to its own can
only be due to an "irrational animus" (Obergefell v. Hodges).

What goes by the name "constitutional law" has been eclipsing the U.S.
Constitution for a long time. But when the 1964 Civil Rights Act
substituted a wholly open-ended mandate to oppose "discrimination" for
any and all fundamental rights, it became the little law that ate the
Constitution. Now, because the Act pretended that the commerce clause
trumps the freedom of persons to associate or not with whomever they
wish, and is being taken to mean that it trumps the free exercise of
religion as well, bakers and photographers are forced to take part in
homosexual weddings. A commission in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts
reported that even a church may be forced to operate its bathrooms
according to gender self-identification because it "could be seen as a
place of public accommodation if it holds a secular event, such as a
spaghetti supper, that is open to the general public." California came
very close to mandating that Catholic schools admit homosexual and
transgender students or close down. The Justice Department is studying
how to prosecute on-line transactions such as vacation home rental site
Airbnb, Inc., that fall afoul of its evolving anti-discrimination standards.

This arbitrary power, whose rabid guard-dog growls and barks: "Racist!
Sexist! Homophobic!" has transformed our lives by removing restraints on
government. The American Bar Association’s new professional guidelines
expose lawyers to penalties for insufficient political correctness.
Performing abortions or at least training to perform them may be imposed
as a requirement for licensing doctors, nurses, and hospitals that offer
services to the general public.

Addressing what it would take to reestablish the primacy of fundamental
rights would have required Republican candidates to reset the Civil
Rights movement on sound constitutional roots. Surprised they didn’t do it?

No one running for the GOP nomination discussed the greatest violation
of popular government’s norms—never mind the Constitution—to have
occurred in two hundred years, namely, the practice, agreed upon by
mainstream Republicans and Democrats, of rolling all of the government’s
expenditures into a single bill. This eliminates elected officials’
responsibility for any of the government’s actions, and reduces them
either to approving all that the government does without reservation, or
the allegedly revolutionary, disloyal act of "shutting down the government."

Rather than talk about how to restrain or shrink government, Republican
candidates talked about how to do more with government. The Wall Street
Journal called that "having a positive agenda." Hence, Republicans by
and large joined the Democrats in relegating the U.S. Constitution to
history’s dustbin.

Because Republicans largely agree with Democrats that they need not take
seriously the founders’ Constitution, today’s American regime is now
what Max Weber had called the Tsarist regime on the eve of the
Revolution: "fake constitutionalism." Because such fakery is
self-discrediting and removes anyone’s obligation to restrain his
passions, it is a harbinger of revolution and of imperial power.

The ruling class having chosen raw power over law and persuasion, the
American people reasonably concluded that raw power is the only way to
counter it, and looked for candidates who would do that. Hence, even
constitutional scholar Ted Cruz stopped talking about the constitutional
implications of President Obama’s actions after polls told him that the
public was more interested in what he would do to reverse them, niceties
notwithstanding. Had Cruz become the main alternative to the Democratic
Party’s dominion, the American people might have been presented with the
option of reverting to the rule of law. But that did not happen. Both of
the choices before us presuppose force, not law.

A Change of Regimes

All ruling classes are what Shakespeare called the "makers of manners."
Plato, in The Republic, and Aristotle, in his Politics, teach that
polities reflect the persons who rise to prominence within them, whose
habits the people imitate, and who set the tone of life in them. Thus a
polity can change as thoroughly as a chorus changes from comedy to
tragedy depending on the lyrics and music. Obviously, the standards and
tone of life that came from Abraham Lincoln’s Oval Office is quite
opposite from what came from the same place when Bill Clinton used it.
Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm was arguably the world’s most polite
society. Under Hitler, it became the most murderous.

In today’s America, a network of executive, judicial, bureaucratic, and
social kinship channels bypasses the sovereignty of citizens. Our
imperial regime, already in force, works on a simple principle: the
president and the cronies who populate these channels may do whatever
they like so long as the bureaucracy obeys and one third plus one of the
Senate protects him from impeachment. If you are on the right side of
that network, you can make up the rules as you go along, ignore or
violate any number of laws, obfuscate or commit perjury about what you
are doing (in the unlikely case they put you under oath), and be certain
of your peers’ support. These cronies’ shared social and intellectual
identity stems from the uniform education they have received in the
universities. Because disdain for ordinary Americans is this ruling
class's chief feature, its members can be equally certain that all will
join in celebrating each, and in demonizing their respective opponents.

And, because the ruling class blurs the distinction between public and
private business, connection to that class has become the principal way
of getting rich in America. Not so long ago, the way to make it here was
to start a business that satisfied customers’ needs better than before.
Nowadays, more businesses die each year than are started. In this
century, all net additions in employment have come from the country’s
1,500 largest corporations. Rent-seeking through influence on
regulations is the path to wealth. In the professions, competitive exams
were the key to entry and advancement not so long ago. Now, you have to
make yourself acceptable to your superiors. More important, judicial
decisions and administrative practice have divided Americans into
"protected classes"—possessed of special privileges and immunities—and
everybody else. Equality before the law and equality of opportunity are
memories. Co-option is the path to power. Ever wonder why the quality of
our leaders has been declining with each successive generation?

Moreover, since the Kennedy reform of 1965, and with greater speed since
2009, the ruling class’s immigration policy has changed the regime by
introducing some 60 million people—roughly a fifth of our
population—from countries and traditions different from, if not hostile,
to ours. Whereas earlier immigrants earned their way to prosperity, a
disproportionate percentage of post-1965 arrivals have been encouraged
to become dependents of the state. Equally important, the ruling class
chose to reverse America’s historic practice of assimilating immigrants,
emphasizing instead what divides them from other Americans. Whereas
Lincoln spoke of binding immigrants by "the electric cord" of the
founders’ principles, our ruling class treats these principles as
hypocrisy. All this without votes or law; just power.

Foul is Fair and Fair is Foul

In short, precisely as the classics defined regime change, people and
practices that had been at society’s margins have been brought to its
center, while people and ideas that had been central have been marginalized.

Fifty years ago, prayer in the schools was near universal, but no one
was punished for not praying. Nowadays, countless people are arrested or
fired for praying on school property. West Point’s commanding general
reprimanded the football coach for his team’s thanksgiving prayer. Fifty
years ago, bringing sexually explicit stuff into schools was treated as
a crime, as was "procuring abortion." Nowadays, schools contract with
Planned Parenthood to teach sex, and will not tell parents when they
take girls to PP facilities for abortions. Back then, many schools
worked with the National Rifle Association to teach gun handling and
marksmanship. Now students are arrested and expelled merely for pointing
their finger and saying "bang." In those benighted times, boys who
ventured into the girls’ bathroom were expelled as perverts. Now, girls
are suspended for objecting to boys coming into the girls’ room under
pretense of transgenderism. The mainstreaming of pornography, the
invention of abortion as the most inalienable of human rights and, most
recently, the designation of opposition to homosexual marriage as a
culpable psychosis—none of which is dictated by law enacted by elected
officials—is enforced as if it had been. No surprise that America has
experienced a drastic drop in the formation of families, with the rise
of rates of out-of-wedlock births among whites equal to the rates among
blacks that was recognized as disastrous a half-century ago, the
near-disappearance of two-parent families among blacks, and the social
dislocations attendant to all that.

Ever since the middle of the 20th century our ruling class, pursuing
hazy concepts of world order without declarations of war, has sacrificed
American lives first in Korea, then in Vietnam, and now throughout the
Muslim world. By denigrating Americans who call for peace, or for wars
unto victory over America’s enemies; by excusing or glorifying those who
take our enemies’ side or who disrespect the American flag; our rulers
have drawn down the American regime’s credit and eroded the people’s
patriotism.

As the ruling class destroyed its own authority, it wrecked the
republic’s as well. This is no longer the "land where our fathers died,"
nor even the country that won World War II. It would be surprising if
any society, its identity altered and its most fundamental institutions
diminished, had continued to function as before. Ours sure does not, and
it is difficult to imagine how it can do so ever again. We can be sure
only that the revolution underway among us, like all others, will run
its unpredictable course.

All we know is the choice that faces us at this stage: either America
continues in the same direction, but faster and without restraint, or
there’s the hazy possibility of something else.

Imperial Alternatives

The consequences of empowering today’s Democratic Party are crystal
clear. The Democratic Party—regardless of its standard bearer—would use
its victory to drive the transformations that it has already wrought on
America to quantitative and qualitative levels that not even its members
can imagine. We can be sure of that because what it has done and is
doing is rooted in a logic that has animated the ruling class for a
century, and because that logic has shaped the minds and hearts of
millions of this class’s members, supporters, and wannabes.

That logic’s essence, expressed variously by Herbert Croly and Woodrow
Wilson, FDR’s brains trust, intellectuals of both the old and the new
Left, choked back and blurted out by progressive politicians, is this:
America’s constitutional republic had given the American people too much
latitude to be who they are, that is: religiously and socially
reactionary, ignorant, even pathological, barriers to Progress.
Thankfully, an enlightened minority exists with the expertise and the
duty to disperse the religious obscurantism, the hypocritical talk of
piety, freedom, and equality, which excuses Americans’ racism, sexism,
greed, and rape of the environment. As we progressives take up our
proper responsibilities, Americans will no longer live politically
according to their prejudices; they will be ruled administratively
according to scientific knowledge.

Progressivism’s programs have changed over time. But its disdain for how
other Americans live and think has remained fundamental. More than any
commitment to principles, programs, or way of life, this is its
paramount feature. The media reacted to Hillary Clinton’s remark that
"half of Trump’s supporters could be put into a ‘basket of deplorables’"
as if these sentiments were novel and peculiar to her. In fact, these
are unremarkable restatements of our ruling class’s perennial creed.

The pseudo-intellectual argument for why these "deplorables" have no
right to their opinions is that giving equal consideration to people and
positions that stand in the way of Progress is "false equivalence," as
President Obama has put it. But the same idea has been expressed most
recently and fully by New York Times CEO Mark Thompson, as well as Times
columnists Jim Rutenberg, Timothy Egan, and William Davies. In short,
devotion to truth means not reporting on Donald Trump and people like
him as if they or anything they say might be of value.

If trying to persuade irredeemable socio-political inferiors is no more
appropriate than arguing with animals, why not just write them off by
sticking dismissive names on them? Doing so is less challenging, and
makes you feel superior. Why wrestle with the statistical questions
implicit in Darwin when you can just dismiss Christians as
Bible-thumpers? Why bother arguing for Progressivism’s superiority when
you can construct "scientific" studies like Theodor Adorno’s, proving
that your opponents suffer from degrees of "fascism" and other
pathologies? This is a well-trod path. Why, to take an older example,
should General Omar Bradley have bothered trying to refute Douglas
MacArthur’s statement that in war there is no substitute for victory
when calling MacArthur and his supporters "primitives" did the trick?
Why wrestle with our climate’s complexities when you can make up your
own "models," being sure that your class will treat them as truth?

What priorities will the ruling class’s notion of scientific truth
dictate to the next Democratic administration? Because rejecting that
true and false, right and wrong are objectively ascertainable is part of
this class’s DNA, no corpus of fact or canon of reason restrains it or
defines its end-point. Its definition of "science" is neither more nor
less than what "scientists say" at any given time. In practice, that
means "Science R-Us," now and always, exclusively. Thus has come to pass
what President Dwight Eisenhower warned against in his 1960 Farewell
address: "A steadily increasing share [of science] is conducted for, by,
or at the direction of, the Federal government.… [T]he free university,
historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery,
has experienced a revolution…a government contract becomes virtually a
substitute for intellectual curiosity." Hence, said Ike, "The prospect
of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project
allocations, and the power of money is ever present—and is gravely to be
regarded." The result has been that academics rise through government
grants while the government exercises power by claiming to act on
science’s behalf. If you don’t bow to the authority of the power that
says what is and is not so, you are an obscurantist or worse.

Under our ruling class, "truth" has morphed from the reflection of
objective reality to whatever has "normative pull"—i.e., to what
furthers the ruling class’s agenda, whatever that might be at any given
time. That is the meaning of the term "political correctness," as
opposed to factual correctness.

It’s the Contempt, Stupid!

Who, a generation ago, could have guessed that careers and social
standing could be ruined by stating the fact that the paramount
influence on the earth’s climate is the sun, that its output of energy
varies and with it the climate? Who, a decade ago, could have predicted
that stating that marriage is the union of a man and a woman would be
treated as a culpable sociopathy, or just yesterday that refusing to let
certifiably biological men into women’s bathrooms would disqualify you
from mainstream society? Or that saying that the lives of white people
"matter" as much as those of blacks is evidence of racism? These
strictures came about quite simply because some sectors of the ruling
class felt like inflicting them on the rest of America. Insulting
presumed inferiors proved to be even more important to the ruling class
than the inflictions’ substance.

How far will our rulers go? Because their network is mutually
supporting, they will go as far as they want. Already, there is pressure
from ruling class constituencies, as well as academic arguments, for
morphing the concept of "hate crime" into the criminalization of "hate
speech"—which means whatever these loving folks hate. Of course this is
contrary to the First Amendment, and a wholesale negation of freedom.
But it is no more so than the negation of freedom of association that is
already eclipsing religious freedom in the name of anti-discrimination.
It is difficult to imagine a Democratic president, Congress, and Supreme
Court standing in the way.

Above all, these inflictions, as well as the ruling class’s acceptance
of its own members’ misbehavior, came about because millions of its
supporters were happy, or happy enough, to support them in the interest
of maintaining their own status in a ruling coalition while discomfiting
their socio-political opponents. Consider, for example, how
republic-killing an event was the ruling class’s support of President
Bill Clinton in the wake of his nationally televised perjury.
Subsequently, as constituencies of supporters have effectively condoned
officials’ abusive, self-serving, and even outright illegal behavior,
they have encouraged more and more of it while inuring themselves to it.
That is how republics turn into empires from the roots up.

But it is also true, as Mao Tse-Tung used to say, "a fish begins to rot
at the head." If you want to understand why any and all future
Democratic Party administrations can only be empires dedicated to
injuring and insulting their subjects, look first at their intellectual
leaders’ rejection of the American republic’s most fundamental principles.

The Declaration of Independence says that all men "are endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable rights" among which are "life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness." These rights—codified in the
Constitution’s Bill of Rights—are not civil rights that governments may
define. The free exercise of religion, freedom of speech and assembly,
keeping and bearing arms, freedom from warrantless searches, protection
against double jeopardy and self-incrimination, trial by jury of one’s
peers, etc., are natural rights that pertain to human beings as such.
Securing them for Americans is what the United States is all about. But
today’s U.S. Civil Rights Commission advocates truncating the foremost
of these rights because, as it stated in a recent report, "Religious
exemptions to the protections of civil rights based upon classifications
such as race, color, national origin, sex, disability status, sexual
orientation, and gender identity, when they are permissible,
significantly infringe upon those civil rights." The report explains why
the rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of
Rights should not be permissible: "The phrases ‘religious liberty’ and
‘religious freedom’ will stand for nothing except hypocrisy so long as
they remain code words for discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism,
homophobia, Islamophobia, Christian supremacy, or any form of intolerance."

Hillary Clinton’s attack on Trump supporters merely matched the ruling
class’s current common sense. Why should government workers and all who
wield the administrative state’s unaccountable powers not follow their
leaders’ judgment, backed by the prestige press, about who are to be
treated as citizens and who is to be handled as deplorable refuse?
Hillary Clinton underlined once again how the ruling class regards us,
and about what it has in store for us.

Electing Donald Trump would result in an administration far less
predictable than any Democratic one. In fact, what Trump would or would
not do, could or could not do, pales into insignificance next to the
certainty of what any Democrat would do. That is what might elect Trump.

The character of an eventual Trump Administration is unpredictable
because speculating about Trump’s mind is futile. It is equally futile
to guess how he might react to the mixture of flattery and threats sure
to be leveled against him. The entire ruling class—Democrats and
Republicans, the bulk of the bureaucracy, the judiciary, and the
press—would do everything possible to thwart him; and the constituencies
that chose him as their candidate, and that might elect him, are surely
not united and are by no means clear about the demands they would press.
Moreover, it is anyone’s guess whom he would appoint and how he would
balance his constituencies’ pressures against those of the ruling class.

Never before has such a large percentage of Americans expressed
alienation from their leaders, resentment, even fear. Some two-thirds of
Americans believe that elected and appointed officials—plus the courts,
the justice system, business leaders, educators—are leading the country
in the wrong direction: that they are corrupt, do more harm than good,
make us poorer, get us into wars and lose them. Because this majority
sees no one in the political mainstream who shares their concerns,
because it lacks confidence that the system can be fixed, it is eager to
empower whoever might flush the system and its denizens with something
like an ungentle enema.

Yet the persons who express such revolutionary sentiments are not a
majority ready to support a coherent imperial program to reverse the
course of America’s past half-century. Temperamentally conservative,
these constituencies had been most attached to the Constitution and been
counted as the bedrock of stability. They are not yet wholly convinced
that there is little left to conserve. What they want, beyond an end to
the ruling class’s outrages, has never been clear. This is not
surprising, given that the candidates who appeal to their concerns do so
with mere sound bites. Hence they chose as the presidential candidate of
the nominal opposition party the man who combined the most provocative
anti-establishment sounds with reassurance that it won’t take much to
bring back good old America: Donald Trump. But bringing back good old
America would take an awful lot. What could he do to satisfy them?

Trump’s propensity for treating pronouncements on policy as flags to be
run up and down the flagpole as he measures the volume of the applause
does not deprive them of all significance—especially the ones that
confirm his anti-establishment bona fides. These few policy items happen
to be the ones by which he gained his anti-establishment reputation in
the first place: 1) opposition to illegal immigration, especially the
importation of Muslims whom Americans reasonably perceive as hostile to
us; 2) law and order: stop excusing rioters and coddling criminals; 3)
build a wall, throw out the illegals, let in only people who are vetted
and certified as supporters of our way of life (that’s the way it was
when I got my immigrant visa in 1955), and keep out anybody we can’t be
sure isn’t a terrorist. Trump’s tentative, partial retreat from a bit of
the latter nearly caused his political standing to implode, prompting
the observation that doing something similar regarding abortion would
end his political career. That is noteworthy because, although Trump’s
support of the pro-life cause is lukewarm at best, it is the defining
commitment for much of his constituency. The point here is that,
regardless of his own sentiments, Trump cannot wholly discount his
constituencies’ demands for a forceful turn away from the country’s
current direction.

Trump’s slogan—"make America great again"—is the broadest, most
unspecific, common denominator of non-ruling-class Americans’ diverse
dissatisfaction with what has happened to the country. He talks about
reasserting America’s identity, at least by controlling the borders;
governing in America’s own interest rather than in pursuit of objectives
of which the American people have not approved; stopping the export of
jobs and removing barriers to business; and banishing political
correctness’s insults and injuries. But all that together does not
amount to making America great again. Nor does Trump begin to explain
what it was that had made this country great to millions who have known
only an America much diminished.

In fact, the United States of America was great because of a whole bunch
of things that now are gone. Yes, the ruling class led the way in
personal corruption, cheating on tests, lowering of professional
standards, abandoning churches and synagogues for the Playboy Philosophy
and lifestyle, disregarding law, basing economic life on gaming the
administrative state, basing politics on conflicting identities, and
much more. But much of the rest of the country followed. What would it
take to make America great again—or indeed to make any of the changes
that Trump’s voters demand? Replacing the current ruling class would be
only the beginning.

Because it is difficult to imagine a Trump presidency even thinking
about something so monumental as replacing an entire ruling elite, much
less leading his constituency to accomplishing it, electing Trump is
unlikely to result in a forceful turn away from the country’s current
direction. Continuing pretty much on the current trajectory under the
same class will further fuel revolutionary sentiments in the land all by
itself. Inevitable disappointment with Trump is sure to add to them.

We have stepped over the threshold of a revolution. It is difficult to
imagine how we might step back, and futile to speculate where it will
end. Our ruling class’s malfeasance, combined with insult, brought it
about. Donald Trump did not cause it and is by no means its ultimate
manifestation. Regardless of who wins in 2016, this revolution’s
sentiments will grow in volume and intensity, and are sure to empower
politicians likely to make Americans nostalgic for Donald Trump’s
moderation. ==

Also see
http://www.claremont.org/crb/basicpage/donald-trump-and-the-american-crisis/
Donald Trump and the American Crisis
By John Marini
July 22, 2016