RUTHFULLY YOURS

Six months into the Trump presidency, it seems safe to say that America has never had a political experience like the one he has brought to the White House. He has sparked a stark raving mad #resistance from the left that makes Bush Derangement Syndrome look fair and balanced. The news media hang on his every tweet. Hollywood is practically self-combusting in panic and disbelief. Climate change Cassandras are melting down. Illegal aliens are feeling the heat as well. He has even thrown his own party into turmoil. All of this hysterical disarray has resulted from the impact not of a movement or a Party, but of one man, Donald Trump.

Now a new documentary offers some thoughtful commentary on President Trump’s agitating arrival on the political scene. Produced, directed and edited by Agustin Blazquez, The Trump Effect: Deprogramming the American Mind features author and filmmaker Laurence Jarvik musing upon the rise of Trump and how this iconoclastic President is changing the way Americans think about ourselves and the world. Over the course of an hour of discussion, Jarvik’s primary thesis is that Trump is dismantling the politically correct ideology that has dominated American political discourse since 9/11, which will lead the way to a newfound freedom and unification of a country on its way to becoming great again.

Laurence Jarvik is the editor and publisher of Penny-A-Page Press and the author of PBS: Behind the Screen and Masterpiece Theater and the Politics of Quality. He is also the director of Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die, a documentary about America’s indifference to the plight of European Jews during the Holocaust. Agustin Blazquez is the Cuban filmmaker behind a seven-part Covering Cuba documentary series and the founder of UnCovering Cuba Educational Foundation, a non-profit organization.

“The Trump effect,” Jarvik begins, “is the deprogramming of the American mind, and Trump is the Deprogrammer-in-Chief.” Since the traumatic terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Jarvik notes, “Americans have somehow been programmed, indoctrinated, sort of fed a lot of fantasy ideology, whether it’s in schools, whether in the media, whether in politics,” and the brainwashing and fear induced by this PC totalitarianism is similar to being immersed in a cult. The process of breaking free from its grip is not unlike the process whereby a cult follower is deprogrammed.

Jarvik is hopeful that Trump can break this spell; indeed, he is already doing it. “The techniques Trump is using are the same techniques used by deprogrammers,” he argues. “First they have to discredit the cult leader… [Trump] did it with the Clintons and the Bushes, and he did it with President Obama.”

“The second step is to show the contradictions between what they say and what they’re going to do on a policy or action level. Again, he did that,” and “that’s where the tweets come in.” Jarvik notes that Trump uses Twitter to constantly bombard the public with information and attacks on leftist hypocrisy and policy failures.

“The third stage,” Jarvik continues,

which is the tipping point in this, is that you have to get the cult member who is being deprogrammed to recognize reality. The cult creates a fantasy world that you live in. Once the cult follower is shown the leader can’t be trusted, that the policies make no sense, and then is exposed to what reality is, the former cult person can begin to think for him- or herself. So Trump has really been carrying out this experiment and deprogramming the whole country.

In this respect, Jarvik states, “Trump, far from being a Hitler figure,” which is the left’s constant refrain, “is a liberator.” Trump’s reliance on Twitter plays into that. Jarvik observes that it’s as if Trump saw the role that social media played in the so-called Arab Spring revolution and said to himself, We can have a Twitter revolution right here in the United States. Once Trump began to dominate Twitter with his round-the-clock tweets, Twitter felt the pressure and began censoring people, exposing the left’s authoritarian impulses. Trump showed that, as the great critics of totalitarianism like George Orwell and Arthur Koestler demonstrate in their novels, all it takes is one man to lead the way in challenging the power structure, and others will be inspired to follow suit. The next thing you know, a revolution is under way.

A great many misconceptions have built up around Trump, says Jarvik, and it’s important that they be dispelled. People have to realize, Jarvik insists, that “what Trump is most of all is a realist who represents a non-ideological, practical approach that is very much in keeping with his New York business background.” As a political outsider, Trump “was the right man at the right time because he wasn’t encumbered by all the constraints that other [politicians] had.”

Jarvik makes the interesting point that Trump, having come essentially from the entertainment world, is very familiar with the left but has rejected them, like a dissident to the Party. That makes him especially hated and dangerous. David Horowitz, the left’s most despised apostate, knows this experience intimately.

As for Trump breaking the chains of political correctness, Jarvik cites an insightful example. “Nothing is more politically incorrect than beauty pageants,” which absolutely outrage feminists. “Trump is the president who owned beauty pageants,” says Jarvik, and thus Trump has, in a way, helped to usher a renewed appreciation for beauty back into a culture that has been wallowing in PC ugliness.

Noting that nothing Trump’s critics hurl at him seem to derail him, Jarvik asserts that Trump is “pretty much bullet-proof.” “If Reagan was the ‘Teflon President,’” he says, “you could say Trump is the ‘Kevlar President.’” Jarvik is optimistic that the Trump presidency will move the nation forward and ultimately even resolve our political polarization.

Check out more of Laurence Jarvik’s thoughts in The Trump Effect below, and get more information about it here.

My heart is with the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, which last night published an editorial defending Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s decision to recuse himself from the so-called Russia investigation. Unfortunately, my head cannot go along because the editors miss important points.

Preliminarily, the Journal addresses an aspect of President Trump’s unseemly public critique of his AG that has bothered me, too. Trump has said that if Sessions had informed the White House that he’d recuse himself from the Russia investigation, Trump would have nominated someone else for AG. The Journal counters that “the contours” of the investigation were not clear to Sessions until he started on the job in February.

I’m not sure I buy that — at least not completely. The FBI, CIA, and NSA released the non-classified public version of their report in early January. They indicated that there was an ongoing investigation of Russia’s interference in the election, and they spelled out the agencies’ theory that Putin had been trying to help the Trump campaign. Given that Sessions was a key figure in the Trump campaign and was about to take a position in which the FBI would answer to him, there were enough red flags to raise the prospect of a conflict situation.

Still, regardless of Sessions’s state of knowledge about the investigation, Trump was briefed on it in detail by the agency heads. Why should anyone assume it was incumbent on Sessions to raise any conflict-of-interest concerns? Trump was better informed on the matter. If, in nominating an AG, it was important to the incoming president to know the nominee’s position on disqualification, it was incumbent on Trump (or someone on the staff vetting nominations) to raise the issue. Obviously, we don’t know what discussions took place between the president-elect and his AG nominee. Assuming they failed to discuss this topic of great importance to Trump, however, I fail to see how that is Sessions’s fault — or at least, solely or principally Sessions’s fault.

Now, to the main point. As I recounted in yesterday’s column, Sessions expressly based his recusal on Section 45.2 of Title 28, Code of Federal Regulations. But that provision does not support his recusal. It says disqualification is necessary only if there is a criminal investigation or prosecution for which a prosecutor has a conflict of interest. The Russia investigation is not a criminal investigation; it is a counterintelligence investigation, which, for the reasons I outlined in the column, is saliently different from a criminal investigation.

In defending Sessions’s blind eye to this distinction, the Journal’s editors assert:

Some legal sages say this means Mr. Sessions did not have to recuse himself because this was a “counterintelligence,” not a criminal, probe. But you have to be credulous to think [the FBI’s then-director James] Comey would ignore potential crimes if he found them in the course of counterintelligence work. Mr. Sessions might have become a subject of the probe because of his meetings with the Russian ambassador.

This is wrongheaded. To take on the snark first, it is not a matter of being a “legal sage.” It was Sessions who cited a legal regulation as the basis for his recusal. It doesn’t require sagacity to point out that the regulation doesn’t say what he claims it says.

While everyone is fixated on President Trump’s unbecoming and inexplicable assault on Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the media has been trying to sneak away from the “Russian collusion” story. That’s right. For all the breathless hype, the on-air furrowed brows and the not-so-veiled hopes that this could be Watergate, Jared Kushner’s statement and testimony before Congress have made Democrats and many in the media come to the realization that the collusion they were counting on just isn’t there.

As the date of the Kushner testimony approached, the media thought it was going to advance and refresh the story. But Kushner’s clear, precise and convincing account of what really occurred during the campaign and after the election has left many of President Trump’s loudest enemies trying to quietly back out of the room unnoticed.

Cable news airtime and in-print word count dedicated to the nonexistent collusion story appear to be dwindling. Democrats and their allies in the media seem less eager to talk about it, and when they do, they say something to the effect of “but, but, but … Kushner didn’t answer every question … He wasn’t under oath … There are still more witnesses … What about this or that new gadfly?” They are stammering. And it hasn’t taken long for news producers and editors to realize that the story is fading.

At last, the story that never was is not happening.

There are a few showstoppers from Kushner’s testimony that make it obvious to any fair-minded, thinking person that there was no collusion with Russia. In his own words, Kushner makes it clear that his actions were innocent but, at times, misguided and ill-conceived. He plainly states he had “hardly any” contacts with Russians during the campaign and found his June 2016 meeting with Donald Trump Jr. and the infamous Russian lawyer to be an absolute “waste of time.”

Democrats and their allies in the media have exhausted themselves building a scandalous narrative surrounding the Russian lawyer meeting, but according to Kushner, the meeting was so useless that he “actually emailed an assistant from the meeting after [he] had been there for ten or so minutes and wrote ‘Can u pls call me on my cell? Need excuse to get out of meeting.”’ Maybe the collusion didn’t take very long, or maybe he realized what the lawyer had to say was a useless farce and he wanted to get on with his day.

Sara Carter of Circa is citing three anonymous sources in an exclusive report identifying a suspect in the investigation of the criminal leak of classified information from the FBI. Are you shocked to learn that the suspect is highly placed, highly regarded and a close friend of James Comey? She writes:

FBI General Counsel James A. Baker is purportedly under a Department of Justice criminal investigation for allegedly leaking classified national security information to the media, according to multiple government officials close to the probe who spoke with Circa on the condition of anonymity.

FBI spokeswoman Carol Cratty said the bureau would not comment on Baker and would not confirm or deny any investigation.

This comes as Department of Justice Attorney General Jeff Sessions said he would soon be making an announcement regarding the progress of leak investigations. A DOJ official declined to comment on Circa’s inquiry into Baker but did say, the planned announcement by Sessions is part of the overall “stepped up efforts on leak investigations.”

Baker, like Mueller and Comey, seems to have accumulated a lot of positive adjectives, such as “distinguished,” from his beltway colleagues.

Baker was appointed to the FBI’s general counsel by Comey in 2014 and has had a long and distinguished history within the intelligence community.

After working as a federal prosecutor in the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice during the 1990s, he joined the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review In 1996, according to his FBI bio. (https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/news/pressrel/press-releases/james-a.-baker-appointed-as-fbis-general-counsel).

In 2006 Baker received the George H.W. Bush Award for Excellence in counter-terrorism—the CIA’s highest counter-terrorism award, according to his biography. During Baker’s long and distinguished career he received the “NSA’s Intelligence Under Law Award; the NSA Director’s Distinguished Service Medal; and DOJ’s highest award— the Edmund J. Randolph Award.”

He sounds like quite the public servant. An image like Comey’s and Mueller’s.

Never forget that Baker may be totally innocent of leaking, and it may be others:

A federal law enforcement official with knowledge of ongoing internal investigations in the bureau told Circa, “the bureau is scouring for leakers and there’s been a lot of investigations.”

Baker will no doubt have the full protection of the safeguards built into our criminal justice system, should he be indicted. The leaks will not stop until prison sentences are handed down for some “distinguished” members of the deep state.

Slavery in America, typically associated with blacks from Africa, was an enterprise that began with the shipping of more than 300,000 white Britons to the colonies. This little known history is fascinatingly recounted in White Cargo (New York University Press, 2007). Drawing on letters, diaries, ship manifests, court documents, and government archives, authors Don Jordan and Michael Walsh detail how thousands of whites endured the hardships of tobacco farming and lived and died in bondage in the New World.

Following the cultivation in 1613 of an acceptable tobacco crop in Virginia, the need for labor accelerated. Slavery was viewed as the cheapest and most expedient way of providing the necessary work force. Due to harsh working conditions, beatings, starvation, and disease, survival rates for slaves rarely exceeded two years. Thus, the high level of demand was sustained by a continuous flow of white slaves from England, Ireland, and Scotland from 1618 to 1775, who were imported to serve America’s colonial masters.

These white slaves in the New World consisted of street children plucked from London’s back alleys, prostitutes, and impoverished migrants searching for a brighter future and willing to sign up for indentured servitude. Convicts were also persuaded to avoid lengthy sentences and executions on their home soil by enslavement in the British colonies. The much maligned Irish, viewed as savages worthy of ethnic cleansing and despised for their rejection of Protestantism, also made up a portion of America’s first slave population, as did Quakers, Cavaliers, Puritans, Jesuits, and others.

Around 1618 at the start of their colonial slave trade, the English began by seizing and shipping to Virginia impoverished children, even toddlers, from London slums. Some impoverished parents sought a better life for their offspring and agreed to send them, but most often, the children were sent despite their own protests and those of their families. At the time, the London authorities represented their actions as an act of charity, a chance for a poor youth to apprentice in America, learn a trade, and avoid starvation at home. Tragically, once these unfortunate youngsters arrived, 50% of them were dead within a year after being sold to farmers to work the fields.

A few months after the first shipment of children, the first African slaves were shipped to Virginia. Interestingly, no American market existed for African slaves until late in the 17th century. Until then, black slave traders typically took their cargo to Bermuda. England’s poor were the colonies’ preferred source of slave labor, even though Europeans were more likely than Africans to die an early death in the fields. Slave owners had a greater interest in keeping African slaves alive because they represented a more significant investment. Black slaves received better treatment than Europeans on plantations, as they were viewed as valuable, lifelong property rather than indentured servants with a specific term of service.

These indentured servants represented the next wave of laborers. They were promised land after a period of servitude, but most worked unpaid for up to15 years with few ever owning any land. Mortality rates were high. Of the 1,200 who arrived in 1619, more than two thirds perished in the first year from disease, working to death, or Indian raid killings. In Maryland, out of 5,000 indentured servants who entered the colony between 1670 and 1680, 1,250 died in bondage, 1,300 gained their right to freedom, and only 241 ever became landowners.