RUTHFULLY YOURS

Let’s take a closer look at Fusion’s “academic expert on Russia,” Nellie H. Ohr, the mystery woman, intriguing for her marriage to DOJ official Bruce Ohr, her fluency in Russian, her ham radio operator’s license, and, finally, the possibility that she had a hand in the anti-Trump “dossier.”

The “H” stands for Hauke, Ohr’s maiden name. On reading through a Washington Post obituary of Kathleen A. Hauke, Nellie’s mother, and a guide to the papers of her parents, Kathleen A. and Richard L. Hauke, both Ph.D.s, which are archived at the University of Rhode Island, a sketch of the Hauke family’s life of the mind takes shape.

Clearly, Nellie grew up in a family on the intellectual Left — i.e., the mainstream of American academia. Her mother, an English professor, was active, if not activist, in black-white racial issues of the late 1960s and 1970s, including interracial adoption and “promoting racial equality in education,” a kindly-sounding idea, which, via coercive means of “promoting,” has atomized our society into a sum of non-working parts — yes, the opposite of “a more perfect union.” Whoever conceived of the project, there was something devilishly clever about turning college admissions offices into key enforcement centers of racial and other quotas of a state-mandated order. As we might finally admit, from Berekely to Yale to Mizzou, it is here where generations of cadres have received Marxian indoctrination under cover of cap and gown, the indispensable legions of ideological victory in a “Cold War” Americans still insist they won.

In this same pioneering spirit of “promoting,” perhaps, Kathleen A. Hauke devoted herself to studying black/African American authors and writers on the same Left, even communist, wavelength, from Langston Hughes to South African writer Richard Rive. One notable biographical detail was Kathleen’s first visit to South Africa in 1954, via freighter, when she was just 19 years old.

Her main academic interest, however, was a black American journalist named Ted Poston. She wrote or edited three books on Poston, including a 2000 collection of his journalism, which is described as having “infused” his newspaper, the New York Post, “with a black viewpoint on topics as varied as the paranoia engendered by McCarthyism and the light-stepping magic of Bill Bojangles Robinson” (emphasis added). A highlight of Poston’s pre-“McCarthyism”-youth came when he, along with Langston Hughes and others, journeyed to the USSR in 1932, the height of the Stalin’s mass-starvation of “collectivized” Ukrainians, to be wined and dined by the Soviets as they worked on a Comintern movie about the plight of the “American Negro.” It was never completed.

Nellie’s father, Richard L. Hauke, was a botany professor. His listed works are mainly scientific, but his biographical notes highlight his interests in creationism, bioethics and, circa 1983-1985, “nuclear winter.”

In these days of “global warming” (it was 7 degrees when I woke up), it’s easy to forget the mass hysteria over “nuclear winter” that gripped the 1980s, the final decade, they say, of the Cold War. This was the heyday of the Reagan administration, and Soviet strategists were thus concentrated on thwarting Reagan’s program to modernize US and NATO arsenals (plus ca change …). Talk about “Russian influence,” that cartoonishly misunderstood mantra of today: It was the “active measures” of Brezhnev-Andropov-Chernenko-Gorbachev’s Kremlin that drove the Western disarmament movement known as the “peace movement,” or “nuclear freeze movement,” across Europe and the US, sparking outrage via “disinformation” against neutron bombs and “Star Wars” and “war-monger” Reagan along the way.

The chance that Americans will learn what really happened between the FBI and Fusion GPS is growing with Thursday’s vote by the House Intelligence Committee to give every House Member access to key information. Soon the House should move to declassify all documents in the case that don’t jeopardize intelligence sources and methods so the public can get the complete story.

Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes also moved Thursday to release to the public his committee’s interview with Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson. Every Democrat joined Republicans in voting for that public disclosure. Yet every Democrat voted against letting the rest of the House see a memo that will list the facts about the FBI’s use of FISA warrants to surveil members of the Trump campaign in 2016. Strange. What are Democrats afraid of?

Ranking Democrat Adam Schiff has been a loud voice for accountability regarding the Trump-Russia probe, but his outrage evaporates regarding the role that Fusion GPS and its Democratic financiers may have played in persuading the FBI to seek a warrant to eavesdrop on American civilians. What were the FBI’s reasons and the evidence it used to seek such an extraordinary writ?

All of this is relevant to the House’s recent vote to extend Section 702 that allows law enforcement to monitor foreigners. Mr. Nunes provided two closed briefings to Republicans last week as they prepared to renew Section 702, and he assured Members that he’d seen no evidence that government had abused 702 powers. But he also said he had seen evidence that law enforcement misused powers involving the surveillance of U.S. citizens as part of the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign.

It hasn’t been easy recently to make an attack against President Trump that is over-the-top enough to stand out from the run-of-the-mill hysteria, but outgoing Republican Sen. Jeff Flake managed it.

In a speech hitting Trump for his broadsides against the press, Flake excoriated the president for using the phrase “enemy of the people.” Per the Arizona senator: “It is a testament to the condition of our democracy that our own president uses words infamously spoken by Josef Stalin to describe his enemies.”

The association of Trump, whose offense is being crude and thoughtless while occupying an office he won in a raucously free election, with one of the greatest monsters of the 20th century is so wildly irresponsible it is its own corruption of our discourse.

Trump isn’t a despot. Far from being an autocrat, he’s a weak president susceptible to the views of the last person he’s talked to and so deferential to Congress that he spent all of last year pining for a signing ceremony for literally anything lawmakers could send him on health care or taxes.

At its worst, the Trump White House isn’t sinister; it’s farcical. It’s not Recep Tayyip Erdogan carefully and deliberately creating a one-party state; it’s Trump getting miscued by a TV show into a tweet undermining his administration’s own position on the reauthorization of a surveillance program.

The Trump alarmists thought that a brittle democratic culture and set of institutions were about to encounter a man representing a dire, determined threat to their integrity; instead, a robust democratic culture and set of institutions encountered the guy sitting down at the end of the bar yelling at the TV.

David Frum of The Atlantic warned at the beginning of the year of Trump cowing the media. Instead, Trump faces the most hostile press at least since Richard Nixon. So comprehensively do Trump outrages dominate the news cycle that it’s difficult for a sex scandal involving a porn star to break through. If you’re a late-night host who doesn’t spend an inordinate amount of time on Trump, your ratings lag. Michael Wolff has sold more than a million copies of a loosely sourced book whose power is the salaciousness of its gossip and its confirmation of everything people who hate Trump already believe.

Rather than stretching his powers, Trump has reined in the executive overreach of the Obama years, which was brazen and unconstitutional, although undertaken with much greater politeness. Obama proudly thought he could rewrite immigration law on his own and make recess appointments when Congress wasn’t in recess.

There’s no doubt Trump violates norms that we should want to preserve. The president shouldn’t slam reporters and news organizations by name, call for people in the private sector to be fired, criticize companies or urge his adversaries to be jailed, among other routine provocations.

Democrats are out of touch.

They made that abundantly clear when every liberal lawmaker rejected the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and did everything possible to obstruct its historic passage. Instead of working in a bipartisan manner to help grow the U.S. economy and restore the American dream for all, liberal politicians — including Democratic Party leadership — told voters the GOP tax bill would be bad for them, bad for the economy and a gift to the rich.

Then millions of Americans got a raise — faster than liberals could knit another pussy hat.

Just ask the multitude of blue- and white-collar workers across industries and demographics who are enjoying higher wages, lucrative bonuses, extended family-leave benefits and an abundance of other perks thanks to the tax reform bill, which not a single Democrat voted for. Yet despite the fact that AT&T is giving out $1,000 bonuses to 200,000 U.S. employees as a result of the new law and scores of other American businesses are doing the same, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told reporters, “In terms of the bonus that corporate America received versus the crumbs that they are giving to workers to kind of put the schmooze on, it’s so pathetic. … I think it’s insignificant.”

Only an out-of-touch 1 percenter like Pelosi — a well-known multimillionaire — could dismiss thousands of dollars in working families’ pockets as mere “crumbs.” To the contrary, for 99 percent of the population, it’s significant.

Notwithstanding, Apple announced this week that it’s going to invest $350 billion in America. This investment includes expanding existing campuses and building new facilities, as well as creating 20,000 jobs. The maker of the iPhone also said it’s giving the majority of its employees $2,500 in stock options.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/269049/video-southern-poverty-law-center-scam-frontpagemagcom

In this new video, John Stossel exposes the Southern Poverty Law Center, which he reveals is a leftist hate group and a money-grabbing slander machine. Don’t miss it!

Powerless to dislodge the duly elected 45th president from office, desperate left-wingers and their media allies are borrowing a page from Soviet Communism by dishonestly portraying President Trump as mentally unfit.

This is a coup attempt in progress and there is no indication it will go away anytime soon. In an earlier age, it might have been called high treason. The difference is that in the Soviet Union it was the government doing the smearing in order to maintain power. In America today, it is the opposition that is doing the smearing in the hope of removing its enemy from power and becoming the government.

Decades ago Moscow set the example that Trump-haters are now following. (Former Soviet propagandist Oleg Atbashian wrote an excellent piece at FrontPage last week on Soviet-style psychiatry.)

“The Soviets devised a system that allowed for political figures — especially those who posed a threat to party leaders — to be declared mentally unfit for office,” Jordan Schachtel writes at Conservative Review.

To combat unsavory political opinions, Soviet leaders from Nikita Khrushchev to Yuri Andropov called on friendly psychiatrists to diagnose dissidents as mentally incapacitated. Some dissidents were then sent to a psikhushka (mental hospital), where they were imprisoned and removed from political life. The pseudo-psychiatry establishment — which in effect acted as an ideological policing agency — continued until the fall of the Soviet Union.

Pseudo-psychiatrists, along with some actual psychiatrists and psychologists, now smear President Trump daily. “Without evidence that there is anything [in] particular wrong, CNN’s Jake Tapper, NBC’s Chuck Todd, the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman, and other media figures are now regularly asking about the president’s mental health,” Schachtel writes.

Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), who wants the 25th Amendment invoked and Trump impeached, tweeted Jan. 9: “We have a president who is intellectually ill-equipped for the job. … He is the antithesis of what we should have as a moral leader in our country.”

Left-wing bloviator Keith Olbermann tweeted Jan. 11:

This man has to go. Now. I don’t care if it’s the 25th Amendment, Impeachment, Arrest, Resignation, something “coming up” at his physical tomorrow, General Strike, or we all crash the stock market by selling off. We must Make America AMERICA Again. #MAAA

A couple of weekends ago, we urged the Justice Department to restore the rule of law to the protection of classified information by enforcing the Espionage Act as it is written, rather than as it was distorted in the Hillary Clinton emails investigation. That appears to be happening.

On Tuesday, the Justice Department announced the arrest of a former CIA officer on a felony charge of unlawfully retaining classified information. Jerry Chun Shing Lee (a/k/a “Zhen Cheng Li”) is charged in a complaint with one count of unlawfully retaining classified information, a felony carrying a potential ten-year prison sentence.

Sneak and Peek

There is surely more going on here than meets the eye. Lee, a naturalized citizen, lived in Hong Kong after retiring from the CIA in 2007, at the age of 43. An Army veteran, he had worked for the agency for 13 years as a case officer in various overseas postings. His missions required top-secret clearances, which were terminated as a matter of course when he left the CIA.

Five years later, he decided to move his family back to the United States, to live in Northern Virginia. By then, whatever he had been up to since leaving the agency — activities that are not described in the affidavit supporting the arrest complaint — had drawn intense government interest. En route to the mainland U.S. from Hong Kong, he and his family stopped in Honolulu for several days. There he was the subject of physical surveillance by the FBI. Moreover, the bureau and the Justice Department had obtained a search warrant for his hotel room — meaning they must have suspected him of serious wrongdoing before he ever got to Hawaii.

The search warrant was of the “sneak and peek” variety. Such warrants allow agents to enter the premises covertly, look around, and take pictures. The agents normally do not seize anything, however, even though they are not forbidden to do so, because they want the subject to remain unaware that he is being watched. It is a technique used when the government sees an opportunity to confirm suspicions while also continuing the investigation. This way, they can keep surveilling the suspect, take note of whom he meets with, and figure out if there is a criminal conspiracy — which, in a case like this, might well involve espionage. On that score, it would be interesting to know what Lee’s overseas postings were and how much they may have involved, for example, interaction with Chinese intelligence.

The ruling class won’t rest until Trump accepts its lies.

Journalists are forever harping on Trump’s “lies.” But what really bothers them is his blunt truth-telling. His refusal to conform to their political correctness infuriates them.

Political correctness is just one big lie — a denial of reality in the name of this or that “sensitivity” or ideological demand of the moment. The media devotes almost all of its coverage to policing deviations from those lies. That is why Trump’s ruthlessly reality-based approach to politics is such a shock to its system. The media had grown used to skittish Republicans jumping to attention and discussing issues only within the parameters of decreed lies. A “responsible” Republican wasn’t supposed to notice the problems of illegal immigration from high-crime, high-poverty countries. He wasn’t supposed to notice the militancy of Islam. He wasn’t supposed to notice any number of problems. Rather, he was expected to second the lying sanctimony of the media. Trump came along and exposed that charade, and the media has never forgiven him since.

The media goes on and on about the importance of “facts” in the age of Trump. But it could not care less about facts. It operates entirely in the realm of feelings. It spends most of its energy suppressing facts in the name of feelings. Almost every single controversy it has ginned up against Trump revolves around some fact or truth the media wishes suppressed for the sake of protecting the feelings and interests of a liberal constituency.

Go down the media’s feverishly assembled lists of Trump’s “racism” and all you will find are dissents from the approved lies of the media. CNN’s hosts recite these lists like robots, then crowd their shows with panelists who call for the most color-conscious policies imaginable. The casual reverse racism contained in the remarks of guests fresh from this or that “black pride” rally are never questioned.

After reaching a certain age, one is rarely shocked by human behavior; one thinks of oneself as having gotten used to the ways of the world. But I have to admit that the scale of the revelations that began with Rowan Farrow’s exposé of Harvey Weinstein genuinely shocked me. Charlie Rose “groping female colleagues and walking around naked in their presence”? Met conductor James Levine molesting a boy of fifteen and continuing to do so for years? Matt Lauer installing a door lock under his desk to facilitate sexual assaults on colleagues? Kevin Spacey trying to rape a 14-year-old boy?

Two or three stories like this wouldn’t have shaken my world. But one after another of them, coming to light day after day? Mind-blowing. I never imagined that so many respected (in some cases beloved) public figures could be such sleazeballs – and creepily creative ones, at that. As an old friend of mine wrote the other day on Facebook, “It’s strange to suddenly discover in late middle age that I’ve always been even more of a straight-arrow type than I knew at the time.” It’s even stranger to make this discovery knowing that you were once, long ago, as I was, a white-bread, well-behaved-to-a-fault young gay guy who thought his sexual orientation made him the most aberrant thing in town.

The reckoning that Weinstein and others of his ilk have faced is necessary and gratifying. But the longer this has gone on, the less it has looked like a righteous round-up of rogues and the more like a witch hunt by people who are determined to take down every man who ever looked at a woman the wrong way. Last Saturday, front and center on the New York Times website was an article claiming that fashion photographer Bruce Weber had subjected male models to “unnecessary nudity and coercive sexual behavior.” One of the models said Weber had grabbed his equipment: “We never had sex or anything, but a lot of things happened. A lot of touching. A lot of molestation.”

The same article accused another photographer, Mario Testino, of subjecting male models to “sexual advances that in some cases included groping and masturbation.” I don’t know anything about Testino, but what I’ve seen of Weber’s oeuvre over the years consists largely of pictures that, oozing eroticism, seem to document the placid interludes in the midst of pansexual orgies. In other words, these models should have had a good idea of what they were getting into. As grown men, in any case, they were perfectly capable of saying no, of pushing away the hand of a photographer two or three times their age (Weber is now 71), and, if necessary, of simply putting on their clothes and walking away.

In a January 3, 2018 article for American Thinker, “The Left’s 1942,” J.R. Dunn argues that leftism may be approaching its last days, at least in the U.S. Its losses, failures, and absurdities have ensured its gradual demise. “While certainly not as dramatic as the events of WWII,” Dunn writes, “the political defeat of leftism may well be just as decisive.”

“Never in my memory,” Dunn concludes, “has leftism been so disarrayed and subdued. For the first time in many decades, we can turn our eyes toward the bright sunlit uplands, where liberty reigns, and where each may abide by his vine and fig tree and be not afraid.”

Dunn’s assessment deserves to be taken seriously. The author of a major political work, Death by Liberalism, he has considerable authority to pronounce on the present condition of the liberal-left project. In that book, Dunn expresses his conviction that any government that denies the social “compact” or “bargain” between government and governed will ultimately collapse, “as surely as the British went in 1781, as the imperial states after WWI, as the [USSR] went in 1991.” We may add that the latest instance of total socialist miscarriage is the oil-rich state of Venezuela, now officially out of gas.

This domino effect is certainly the case in individual historical episodes. But hybristic liberalism – aka utopianism, leftism, communism, fascism, or any of the sobriquets by which it is known – is a Hydra-headed phenomenon that, after every defeat, inevitably regenerates. As Jean-François Revel wrote in The Totalitarian Temptation (1976), “[t]he only way to reform [c]ommunism is to get rid of it,” yet even he, in Last Exit to Utopia (2000) admitted “[c]ommunism’s ongoing capacity for ideological terror.”

It seems to me that what we now call “leftism” or any of its nominal substitutes will always be with us. It is an indelible part of human nature, going back to time immemorial and probably rooted in the necessary sharing arrangements of primitive or subsistence societies. Socialism also has a message that it relentlessly disseminates. As Dunn himself points out in Death by Liberalism, dictatorial liberalism – that is, leftism – has profited and spread by virtue of an ideological component abetted by modern technology and communication systems. “Ideology provided the dictators,” he explains, “with a means of mobilizing support and instilling revolutionary zeal.” It was – and is – no longer merely a question of jackboots and tanks; the ideological message and missionary zeal guarantee the longevity of the doctrine being propagated.