RUTHFULLY YOURS

George Orwell said, “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” In the former USSR, censorship, rewriting of history and eliminating undesirable people became part of Soviets’ effort to ensure that the correct ideological and political spin was put on their history. Deviation from official propaganda was punished by confinement in labor camps and execution.

Today there are efforts to rewrite history in the U.S., albeit the punishment is not so draconian as that in the Soviet Union. New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu had a Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee monument removed last month. Former Memphis Mayor A C Wharton wanted the statue of Confederate Lt. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, as well as the graves of Forrest and his wife, removed from the city park. In Richmond, Virginia, there have been calls for the removal of the Monument Avenue statues of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Gens. Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and J.E.B. Stuart. It’s not only Confederate statues that have come under attack. Just by having the name of a Confederate, such as J.E.B. Stuart High School in Falls Church, Virginia, brings up calls for a name change. These history rewriters have enjoyed nearly total success in getting the Confederate flag removed from state capitol grounds and other public places.

Slavery is an undeniable fact of our history. The costly war fought to end it is also a part of the nation’s history. Neither will go away through cultural cleansing. Removing statues of Confederates and renaming buildings are just a small part of the true agenda of America’s leftists. Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, and there’s a monument that bears his name — the Thomas Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C. George Washington also owned slaves, and there’s a monument to him, as well — the Washington Monument in Washington. Will the people who call for removal of statues in New Orleans and Richmond also call for the removal of the Washington, D.C., monuments honoring slaveholders Jefferson and Washington? Will the people demanding a change in the name of J.E.B. Stuart High School also demand that the name of the nation’s capital be changed?

These leftists might demand that the name of my place of work — George Mason University — be changed. Even though Mason was the author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which became a part of our Constitution’s Bill of Rights, he owned slaves. Not too far from my university is James Madison University. Will its name be changed? Even though Madison is hailed as the “Father of the Constitution,” he did own slaves.

ASHINGTON — Attorney General Jeff Sessions gave his version Tuesday of parts of former FBI Director James Comey’s testimony expressing his concerns about meeting alone with President Trump, while emphatically denying to his former Senate colleagues that he colluded with Russia during the presidential campaign.

White House deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters aboard Air Force One as President Trump flew back from Milwaukee today that he watched parts of the hearing, “thought that Attorney General Sessions did a very good job and, in particular, was very strong on the point that there was no collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign.”

The Sessions testimony unfolded as the FBI has been conducting an ongoing investigation into Russia’s campaign operations since July, and special counsel Robert Mueller has been compiling a team of prosecutors to start his investigation.

On April 27, 2016, Trump gave a foreign policy address at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington at which he, Sessions and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak were among attendees at a VIP reception. CNN reported that Comey told the Senate Intelligence Committee in closed session last week that Sessions and Kisylak could have met on the sidelines, as indicated by intercepts of Russian communications.

Sessions told the committee that the reception area included “two to three dozen people” and said he didn’t remember having a conversation with Kislyak. “Certainly, I can assure you, nothing improper, if I’d had a conversation with him,” he said. “And it’s conceivable that that occurred. I just don’t remember it.”

“I didn’t have any formal meeting with him,” the attorney general said later in the hearing. “I’m confident of that. But I may have had an encounter during the reception.”

Sessions, who had been named to Trump’s national security advisory board the previous month, said he “came there as a interested person, very anxious to see how President Trump would do in his first major foreign policy address — I believe he’d only given one major speech before, that one, maybe, at the Jewish AIPAC event.”

“So it was an interesting time to — for me to observe his delivery and the message he would make,” he added. “That was my main purpose of being there.”

During his opening statement, Sessions told senators: “I was your colleague in this body for 20 years, at least some of you, and I — and the suggestion that I participated in any collusion — that I was aware of any collusion with the Russian government to hurt this country, which I have served with honor for 35 years, or to undermine the integrity of our democratic process, is an appalling and detestable lie.”

Testifying before the committee last week, Comey recounted a Feb. 14 Oval Office meeting in which he said “the attorney general lingered by my chair” before leaving the room, at which point Trump, according to the former FBI director, said, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting [Mike] Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”

Comey says that “shortly” after the Oval Office meeting, he was speaking with Sessions on the subject of Trump’s concerns about leaks when he “took the opportunity to implore the attorney general to prevent any future direct communication between the president and me.”

Seven months later, how are Trump voters feeling about their decision? Gary Abernathy of Hillsboro, Ohio’s Times-Gazette was a rare newspaper editor who endorsed Donald Trump for President in 2016. On Friday, he provided an update from his community of 6,600 people:

Interestingly, the conservatives I speak with do not really consider Trump one of them. Rank-and-file Republicans tend to view Trump more as an independent who ran under the Republican banner.

But for the most part, they’re still with him. They appreciate Trump’s “America first” agenda, not because they believe in isolationism, but because they believe the U.S. and its citizens should be the government’s top priority.

The president’s tweets can be as annoying to his supporters as to his opponents, and if there is a common criticism it is that he should tweet less. But his inability so far to overhaul health care, enact tax reform, destroy the Islamic State or “drain the swamp” is largely blamed on overreaching courts and the open “resistance” that appears dedicated to opposing anything Trump wants.

The 2016 election made clear how little the average voter in the Midwest has in common with the average journalist on either coast. But your humble correspondent is struck by how much the Trump analysis offered by small-town Midwesterners squares with the view of Trump voters who live and work in Manhattan. Yes, there are a few, and just like the much larger population of Trump voters in Middle America, they understand his faults but tend to appreciate his goal of American revival.

Meanwhile back in Ohio, Mr. Abernathy finds that constant negative coverage of Mr. Trump in the national media is still not having the intended effect, and may even be backfiring:

While Trump carried Highland County heavily, there are people here who did not vote for him and who do not care for him. But overall, despite the avalanche of negative news stories, Trump’s support remains firm. Hillsboro’s mayor mentioned recently that he has noticed Trump yard signs popping up again, either in a show of support or a sign of defiance.

Imagine a movie scenario. The nation is at war for its very survival, following an unprovoked assault on the Twin Towers in Manhattan and on the Pentagon, killing more than 3,000 innocent people. But the nation has been infiltrated, sabotaged, and subverted by the enemy, in close alliance with the radical left, which controls what Karl Marx called the Organs of Propaganda: The schools and media. Two of our worst enemies, North Korea and Iran, are working in close cooperation to develop nuclear weapons and ICBMs, which could destroy our cities with only 15 minutes warning time.

We are therefore at war, quite possibly a war that will end in national catastrophe for us and the civilized world.

This is an important point, because the U.S. Constitution defines “treason” as “aiding and abetting an enemy of the United States in time of war.”

The President of the United States has been elected in a close election, and promises to clean out the swamp in Washington DC. He is therefore attacked by the swampocrats, who have long controlled the media, the bureaucracy, the judiciary and the legislature. (See: Ben Bradlee and Watergate; See the New York Times and the Pentagon Papers.)

But the losing party whips up open rebellion around the country against the winning party, and manages to stoke enough suspicions about the President of the United States using its control of the media to compel the appointment of an independent prosecutor. But the track record of independent prosecutors is entirely corrupt. The Watergate “independent” prosecutor confessed to colluding with the Nixon-hating media of that time. The anti-George W. Bush “independent” prosecutor jailed an entirely innocent man for a “process crime,” Scooter Libby. The currently appointed “independent” prosecutor is a personal friend of the Machiavellian former head of the FBI, who tried to trap the President by leaking a completely fictional rumor of Russian collusion in the last election, for which not a shred of evidence has been produced, based on a completely fraudulent “dossier” made up by a former agent of British intelligence. The fired FBI head has admitted on national television to sending a fraudulent document to be leaked to the New York Times in order to trigger an “independent” prosecutor appointment against the duly elected President of the United States.

Meanwhile the United States is at war, a war started and prosecuted by two major Muslim oil powers, Saudi Arabia and Iran. Admiral James Lyons, a highly respected retired flag officer, has described the infiltration, sabotage, and mass migration of ideologically indoctrinated enemies, beginning as early as the 1970s. The House Intelligence Committee has just fired three Pakistani IT specialists, three brothers with the last name Awan, who had extensive access to the confidential emails and documents of the committee’s computer system. The fired IT contractors were not arrested, but are now in a jihadist country, Pakistan, being celebrated as public heroes. Pakistanis obviously believe the three brothers were an espionage ring at the very center of the House of Representatives, where highly secret documents are routinely shared. The fired brothers have been publicly defended by the former head of the Democratic Party National Committee, Debbie Wassermann-Schultz, and the former Democratic Majority Leader, Nancy Pelosi. Not one member of the House Intelligence Committee has admitted to knowing anything about the three fired Awan brothers. They are playing dumb, and our media are doing nothing.

Before turning to the controversies inspired by the Public Theater’s new production of Shakespeare’s “ Julius Caesar ” at Central Park’s Delacorte Theater, consider what makes the title character such a tyrant. The evidence is strangely scant. We hear from Brutus that he was ambitious. He valued theatrical display as a political tool. And while boasting of being as constant as the Northern Star, he inconsistently gave into whim and superstition.

Be that as it may, fearsome tyrant he is taken to be. But in this production, the real tyrant is not Caesar, but its director, Oskar Eustis. He more clearly comes across as ambitious, inconsistent, with little regard for limits, manipulating his audience by playing to popular taste. Perhaps, given such directorial tyranny, I might follow the example of the play’s conspirators, justly take dagger in hand, and add a bloody gouge to his self-inflicted wounds.
If that idea seems rather tasteless, is it any more so than Gregg Henry, as Caesar, impersonating not a Roman tyrant but President Donald Trump ? Or Tina Benko, as Caesar’s wife, Calpurnia, appearing as a slinky model with a Slavic accent meant to suggest Melania Trump (though Ms. Benko sounds more like a Transylvanian Israeli)?

Maybe every director is entitled to some political posturing, particularly with Shakespeare who, like Bach, can take a lot of interpretive abuse before he becomes something else. But Mr. Eustis’s territorial claims are imperial. In the program notes, he boasts: “I can say without embarrassment that I decided to open our summer season with Julius Caesar as of November 9, 2016.” In other words, he saw Trump as Caesar the day after Election Day, he thinks that point of view is self-evident, and he still sees the analogy.

Let’s say he’s correct. So when Caesar emerges from a bathtub in this production, stark naked and displaying himself for conspirators and audience alike, no doubt we are meant to think of Trumpian narcissism. What then are we to think of when this erstwhile president is lying in a puddle of blood in the Roman Senate?

Ay, there’s the rub. It is not surprising that Delta Air Lines and Bank of America announced they were pulling out of sponsorship of the production.

But, given Mr. Eustis’s political perspective, such corporate opposition must be like the coronet Caesar covets. It is an honor, which increases because he finds it so wrong-headed. He has said the play is really a “warning parable” about the dangers of fighting for democracy using undemocratic means. Brutus and Cassius come to no good. The play opposes assassination; it does not glorify it.

University of Virginia student Otto Warmbier visited North Korea over New Year’s in 2015 as a tourist, and on Tuesday the 22-year-old returned home to the U.S.—in a coma.

Mr. Warmbier traveled to North Korea for a five-day tourist trip, despite State Department warnings and the North’s long record of taking Americans hostage. As he was preparing to leave with his fellow travelers in January 2016, he was detained and accused of stealing a propaganda poster from his hotel. The next month he gave a tearful public confession, and that March he was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor for a “hostile act” against the state.

Mr. Warmbier’s parents told the Associated Press Tuesday that they recently learned their son has been in a coma since March 2016, or shortly after his show trial. They say North Koreans told U.S. authorities that their son contracted botulism and never awoke after he was given a sleeping pill. “We want the world to know how we and our son have been brutalized and terrorized by the pariah regime,” Fred and Cindy Warmbier said in their statement.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson declined to comment on Mr. Warmbier’s condition “out of respect for the privacy” of the family. But a U.S. official told the New York Times that the U.S. had recently obtained intelligence indicating the young man had been repeatedly beaten in custody. A United Nations commission documented in 2014 that “the use of torture is an established feature of the interrogation process” in North Korea.

Otto Warmbier’s fate underscores the grotesque nature of former basketball player Dennis Rodman’s latest visit this week with his pal Kim Jong Un in Pyongyang. Kim still holds three other American hostages, and any American who visits is tempting torture and death.