The Fragments of a Civilization

 

By Victor Davis Hanson
NationalReview.com

(Mario Anzuoni/Reuters)

Government crimes and coverups, a corrupt media, a candidate hiding and lying to the public, and plans to undo the foundations of the republic

Piece by piece, our civilization is beginning to disassemble. And the agents of fragmentation are as obvious as the efforts to conceal them are frantic.

In nonchalant fashion, we learned last week from newly released government documents that Hillary Clinton’s campaign team cooked up the Trump-Russia collusion hoax as a way of diverting attention from her own ongoing embarrassing email scandals.

Clinton, through three firewalls, paid foreign ex-spy Christopher Steele to create a bogus smear-Trump dossier. Steele, who had no data on, or information about any such collusion, apparently drew largely on fabrications dreamed up by a former Russian spy working at the liberal Brookings Institution. The convoluted conspiracy baffled even the sneaky Russians, who were confused when they got wind of it — possibly through the direct participation of one of their own assets.

Did we then spend millions of dollars on Robert Mueller’s nearly two-year investigation, a wild goose chase consuming millions of collective media hours hyping fantasies, and paralyzing an administration for three years — all for Hillary Clinton’s machinations, the apparent true and only Russian colluder?

John Brennan’s CIA intercepted Russian concerns over such a ruse. He even briefed President Obama on the Clinton caper. Yet the U.S. investigatory and judicial branches did not stop Clinton’s efforts to subvert a rival’s campaign. Indeed, many of the highest officials of the Obama administration shortly joined her efforts to seed the fraudulent Steele dossier throughout the Obama government and thus into the media as well — their efforts peaking in timely fashion right before the November 2016 election.

Translate all that, and the evidence grows that Hillary Clinton, in felonious fashion, paid for the Steele dossier to subvert an election and, after the election, to destroy a presidential transition and indeed a presidency itself — government efforts that historians one day will assess as the most intense effort on record to destroy a U.S. president.

These crimes were committed with the apparent cooperation of at least some in the Obama DOJ, FBI, and CIA, along with their epigones who were deeply embedded in the administrative state when Trump won the election. The tactics of such a strategy included altering federal documents, lying to a FISA court, leaking classified information, illegally surveilling American citizens, conspiring to frame top administration officials such as General Michael Flynn, unmasking names in confidential intercepts and leaking them to the media — and lying under oath about the above and more.

Hillary’s efforts constitute the most egregious scandal in American election history. And yet, shameless to the end, she continues to foam about “Trump collusion,” in the manner of a beached whale, gasping for air and twitching about on the sand.

Hackery

In nonchalant fashion, we also just learned that CrowdStrike — a company in which the Pelosis made an initial $1 million investment and that is now run by billionaire Shawn Henry, a former high official of Robert Mueller’s FBI — was given the sole proprietorship of the hacked DNC computers. Has the FBI ever allowed the victims of a felonious federal crime to conduct their own forensic investigations? The FBI outsourced the analysis even though the computer hard drives were the key evidence at the crime scene of a supposed conspiracy, allegedly cooked up by the Russians.

The scandal was not just that the FBI did not object to a private company taking over its own responsibility for the investigation. Worse still, for two years Washington insiders have known that CrowdStrike’s president had testified before Congress that he had no evidence that any Russians had hacked the DNC computers.

His secret testimony — apparently also known to Mueller’s investigators — came at a time when the nation was convulsed by the media-driven Russian hoax, much of the frenzy generated by MSNBC, where Henry himself had been an occasional “security” analyst.

We may never know how, why, or by whom the computers were hacked, only that the DNC and the Clinton campaign most certainly did not want any government agency investigating those mysteries.

If Biden wins in 2021, as surely as the sun rises, all the current investigations into the illegal weaponization of the DOJ, the FBI, and the CIA will abruptly cease within days.

De-debating

In nonchalant fashion, we also belatedly learned that the moderator of the vice-presidential debate, Susan Page, a USA Today Washington News Bureau Chief, is currently writing a biography of arch-Trump antagonist Nancy Pelosi. (Would the Biden campaign have objected if a debate moderator was now writing a likely favorable biography of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell?)

At about the same time, it was belatedly disclosed that the designated moderator of the now cancelled second presidential debate, Steven Scully, once worked as an intern for debate participant Joe Biden. (Would the Biden campaign have objected had the moderator once interned for the Trump organization?)

Apparently, Scully also had mistakenly sent a message over the public Twitter airways — rather than through intended private direct messaging — seeking the advice of now prominent Trump hater and fired former Trump press secretary Anthony Scaramucci. Scully asked the “Mooch” whether to respond to Trump’s charges that he was biased — though Scaramucci is the most publicly biased of all self-described media experts. (Would the Biden campaign have objected if it learned that the debate moderator had been communicating with Kellyanne Conway for advice on how to reply to criticism from Biden?)

Is America so short of informed beltway creatures that it cannot find, if only for the purpose of appearances, a single moderator who has not either interned for Joe Biden or Donald Trump, or who is not currently writing a bio of a Trump-hating or Biden-hating public figure?

Worse still, Scully deleted his tweet, froze his account from public access, and claimed that his computer was “hacked.” “Hacked” is now the operative defense when caught in embarrassing electronic communications. To avoid responsibility for their own embarrassing actions, Joy Reid, Anderson Cooper, and Anthony Wiener also claimed, probably falsely, that their phone or social-media accounts had been hacked.

Had the debate taken place, one wonders whether Scully, much like Fox’s Chris Wallace and USA Today’s Susan Page, would have zeroed in on Trump, in similar gottcha, moralistic fashion to explain why we should not presume him to be untruthful or racist.

The morning after we saw the recent, live vice-presidential debate carried out successfully with proper social distancing and testing precautions, the Commission on Presidential Debates abruptly insisted that the second presidential debate, to be moderated by Scully, would be virtual for the first time in American history.

The commission — an ostensibly bipartisan group that nonetheless consists exclusively of Democrats and Never Trumpers —  knows that Trump thrives on “reality” television while Biden has crafted a unique campaign based almost entirely on remote communications through Skype and Zoom, often with the assistance of poorly concealed teleprompters and scripted talking points. Moreover, when a candidate leads, as the mainstream polling suggests Biden now does, debates are considered unnecessary hazards, even as underdogs see them as critical chances to reboot campaign momentum.

The commission’s decision came even though the president’s doctors reported that by October 15, Trump would be medically fit to participate and virtually immune for months from reinfection. In addition, as with most asymptomatic and recovered patients with viral antibodies, Trump would be unable to pass on the virus for months, if ever.

In other words, Biden — and anyone else present — would have had far less chance of being infected by Trump in the now cancelled second debate than during the first debate.

Issues Are Bad

In nonchalant fashion, Joe Biden just announced that he will rule neither in nor out the Democratic plan to “pack” the Supreme Court to either 13 or 15 justices, should he win and the Senate flip Democratic.

As Biden put it to his questioner:

I know it’s a great question, and you all, I don’t blame you for asking, but you know the moment I answer that question, that headline in every one of your papers will be about that, other than, other than focusing on what’s happening now.

Biden was only clarifying what he had said earlier in the first debate when he stonewalled with, “Whatever position I take on that, that’ll become the issue.”

That incoherence was a further clarification of an earlier admission that the inquiry was “a legitimate question” but one that Biden was “not going to answer.”

And most recently Biden quadrupled down and insisted that voters do not “deserve” an honest answer on whether their Supreme Court will be packed — as he reverted to his bizarre earlier campaign mode of “lying, dog-faced pony soldier,” “You’re a damn liar, man” and “Look, fat, look. Here’s the deal.”

If we follow all the contorted Biden logic, he seems to now believe that the public has a reasonable interest in what he would do about enlarging the Court to nullify Trump’s conservative picks — but that the public nonetheless doesn’t deserve to know.

And Biden will not meet that “legitimate” but undeserved public interest, because, by answering, his very response would become the “issue.” That is, Biden would take a position on an issue, and therefore either delight or offend many voters. And he must avoid that at all costs.

Biden’s answer may be the most surreal response of any presidential candidate in memory.

But it is emblematic of his entire stealth campaign, in collusion with a cheerleading media — a virtual candidate who has no answers to questions that are now rarely asked.

Any reporter, debate moderator, or journalist who asked a question that Biden could not answer or that would in any way embarrass Biden would now earn lifetime ostracism and career beltway ruin for aiding and abetting the Prince of Darkness and the enemies of progressivism.

The current Democratic Party, hostage to the hard-core Left, has asserted that in victory it may seek to pack the Supreme Court and thereby end a 150-year law governing that nine-member body. It has also said it might end the 170-year-old Senate filibuster, on cue from Barack Obama, who as a senator nonetheless found the filibuster useful when he was in the minority. It claims it might do away with the 233-year-old Electoral College, a foundation of the U.S. Constitution that sought to ensure a republic rather than a democracy ruled by the 51 percent and urban centers.

Biden will no longer repeat his earlier no-fracking pandering, but his party (“I am the Democratic Party right now”) has often said it will end fracking. Fracking, remember, has helped to lower world oil prices, to the detriment of Russia and the Middle East. Fracking has helped to keep American troops out of Middle East interventions (remember the now calcified slogan “no blood for oil”?), aided middle-class commuters, created millions of well-paying jobs, and made electricity cheaper, and the air far cleaner.

On all these questions, Biden will offer no answers to voters who do not “deserve” to know. Yet he could very well seek to change the core rules by which America is governed — as part of a larger project to ensure systemic progressive dominance.

He has no answers because to answer honestly would either reveal himself to be a leftist pawn now and thus an anathema to the suburban swing voter; or, contrarily, he’d be exposed as an oath-breaker in the eyes of the AOC–Bernie Sanders socialist near majority of his own party.

So in Orwellian fashion, “issues” can no longer be issues, even if they could alter the United States in a way not seen since its founding.

Sleepwalking to the Revolution

To paraphrase Sophocles, 2020 saw many strange things and nothing stranger than peak Trump derangement syndrome, COVID-19, a self-induced recession, our first national quarantine, and riots, looting, and arson, all mostly unpunished and uncontrolled, in our major cities.

So we are in revolutionary times, even as we snooze about a recent systematic effort, hidden with great effort by our own government, to destroy a prior presidential campaign and transition, and now a presidency.

We are asked to vote for a candidate who will not reveal his position on any major issue of our age, because he feels to do so would enlighten the undeserving electorate and thereby cost him the election. So we continue to sleepwalk toward a revolution whose architects warped our institutions in 2016–2020, and they now plan to alter many of them beyond recognition in 2021.

Translated, that means that they don’t regret what they did in 2016–2019, only that they belatedly got caught for a brief time.

And so by changing the rules after 2020, they are vowing never ever to get caught again.