Most Americans of all stripes flatter themselves that somehow we Americans are better than others. The sense that we are smarter, more civilized, built a greater country, just have something in us that makes us better because we live here. Even most leftists feel that way, quietly complimenting themselves that somehow they are better for being here in the America they hate.
We soon shall see.
Is there something uniquely corrupt and toxic in the German soul that explains Hitler’s rise? Maybe. But then you have to explain all the non-Jewish Germans like Oskar Schindler who risked and gave their lives to save Jews while some others of non-German heritage in America identified with Hitler and Nazism — as still is true even today. To this day, one of the finest souls I ever have met is a man whose ancestry traces to Germany, who practiced complex massive litigation with me at the world-famous Jones Day law firm, actually was part-mentor and part-colleague in his role as Of Counsel and specializing in the law of government contracts, and who now is a Republican mayor of a city in Missouri. I love the guy to the deepest depths of my heart. When my beloved precious Ellen of blessed memory passed in July, he read my memorial to her in these pages and mailed me a hard copy of a photograph he and his beautiful kind-hearted wife, Debra, had taken of Ellen and me at their wedding nearly two decades ago. That photo now occupies an honored place in my home, resting right at the two candlesticks where she would light the Shabbat candles every Friday night 18 minutes before sunset.
Well, he’s of German descent. No one is going to convince me that his soul is less pure and kind and loving than that of the finest American-born citizen or Mayflower-arrived American in Plymouth Rock.
Or how about those from the former Soviet Union? Are they inherently stupider than we because they tolerated and supported Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism, Communism? Are the souls of those from the Ukraine inherently corrupt, toxic? I don’t buy that. I know what happened in Ukraine during the Holodomor when Stalin murdered millions and the New York Times colluded with his mass murder by dispatching to the region Walter Duranty, a Stalinist “reporter” deserving war-criminal status, to whitewash it all and win a Pulitzer Prize in the bargain. Yes, the Russians and Ukrainians have included those who persecuted Jews so badly that 3.25 million of our forebears, including two of my four grandparents, fled here to get away from them. And yet Ukraine now has a Jewish president, Good Ol’ Volodymyr Zelensky. We all remember him from last December’s Nancy Pelosi Schiff Storm. Zelensky’s actually a really good guy. So maybe the souls of humans in Ukraine are not inherently toxic either. Maybe it is something else that accounts for why people living under brutal Communist and Nazi repression came to believe that Communism and Nazism offered solutions superior to free-market capitalism and America’s constitutional freedoms — until they no longer had a choice even to think of what to believe, while Americans have done so much better even when we have elected incompetents and mediocrities like Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, and Obama.
Well, what about us here? What about the average American? Are we so much better? Is it in our collective souls, the air we breathe, the soil that gives us our Nebraska and Iowa grain and our Idaho and Maine potatoes that makes us so much better than those who came to believe that Hitler Nazism and Stalin Communism were viable alternatives to the “American Way”? We soon will find out, because here is the thing:
What made those Germans and Russians different was not their coronary conditions, accounting for hard hearts, nor their ophthalmology or myopia accounting for what they could not see. The reason those fools came to make their peace with living under Communism that consigned them to second-class life and failed economies and starvations from five-year plans that never worked was repression reinforced by … a Fake and Corrupt News and Entertainment Media. The reason for Hitler and his remaining in power was repression reinforced by … a Fake and Corrupt News and Entertainment Media.
Yes, yes, of course. Nothing that cataclysmic is explicable solely in merely one source. It all is more complex. Of course. Brutal, merciless, and murderous repression was central to the continuation of Nazism and Communism once the systems were adopted. But the glue that helped give these systems of deadly repression their start and that persuaded masses to continue living with their horrible initial mistakes was the two Communist daily rags: Izvestia (which means “News”) and Pravda (which means “Truth”). Alas, there never was pravda in Izvestia, and there never was izvestia in Pravda. The people living there never got the truth or the real news. Their media were censored. Their entertainment followed government-approved orthodoxy. No one was allowed to think outside the box. Even artists were barred from painting in methods that veered creatively from strict reality.
Now it is our turn in history to see what the great, vaunted “American people” do after four years of Pravda, Izvestia, and Der Stürmer–quality journalism. Fake news. Hidden news. Lies. Stories that have no root in reality. Real stories that never see the light of day. Censorship. The conscious placement of some stories on page one above the fold, with others relegated to page 17 in a lower corner. The conscious strategy of which sources to contact for quotes and which sources’ quotes to toss in the trash, their press releases and media statements shredded without a glance. Which photos to run. Which adjectives to use. Which allegations to pursue, which to ignore.
Did Joe Biden steal his present wife, a Biden campaign activist, from a married man who campaigned for Biden with her? Jill’s cuckolded husband says so. We know that because a newspaper in England, The Daily Mail, published it when the American media would not. If Trump were so accused, we would have heard all about it, just as the media made a celebrity for 15 minutes of some Trump-family niece who got cut out of the big family money, so showed up with her book to make a buck attacking her Uncle Donald. What about that woman who spoke of how Biden pressed her against a wall and grabbed her crotch? Talk about The Daily Male! Where did that story go? #MeToo? Well, she ended up #MeZero because she claimed against the wrong candidate. Remember Kamala Harris telling us, during Kavanaugh Days, that a woman’s narrative must always be honored and believed? Uh huh.
For four years Americans have been showered with false narratives and lies about Trump, all of which easily can be refuted by taking the time to dig deeper. This publication and its outstanding contributors, my colleagues, does an enormous service to lay out facts and to go beyond the lies. What did Trump truly say and how did he truly respond to Charlottesville? It is here. Is he a Jew-hater? It is here. Did Brett Kavanaugh get a fair shake? It is here. What about that kid in Covington, Kentucky? It is here. And how about the massive fraud that is “Black Lives Matter” and the hucksters who profit from race scams? Here and here and here.
It all is out there. It can be found in The American Spectator, National Review, American Greatness, Breitbart, the Federalist, PJ Media, American Thinker, FrontPage. It all is out there — easy to find and cut to the chase. It can be seen on Fox News in between wasted time with comedians like Donna Brazile, Jessica Tarlov, Jed Clampett, Juan Williams, Chris Wallace, and those sorts. It can be seen on Newsmax and America One. It can be heard on radio — Rush, Sean, The Great One, Larry Elder, Glenn Beck, Hugh Hewitt, Dennis Prager, Ben Shapiro, Bernie and Sid, Alan Stock in Las Vegas, Rod Arquette in Salt Lake City, Mike Gallagher, Michael Savage. There are Ann Coulter, Michael Barone, Thomas Sowell, and VDH. There even are new sources like Epoch Times. It all is out there. The truth can be found.
But half the country does not visit those sources, and they get shut out. Fearing Trump and conservatism more than they fear COVID, they self-quarantine from information and knowledge. They hear four years about a Mueller Investigation that will prove Trump colluded with Putin, and when it ever-so-predictably peters out they do not hear analysis that explains it all was a hoax to begin with, started by a venal and jealous politician who had no business thinking she could be elected president all because her sex-crazy husband could stalk and chew at the same time. They hear for three months about an impeachment, and then it peters out — so on to the next thing.
Like idols and statues made of metal or plaster, they have ears but do not hear, have eyes but do not see, noses but do not smell a rat. They even have minds but do not think. So they are told that Trump is a dictator who has suspended democracy. Some dictator. A dictator who, through four years of Obama judges, never defied a court ruling. A dictator who, through four years, never allocated a dollar of federal funds not authorized directly or indirectly by Congress. He built only the Wall for which he could dislodge congressionally approved funds. He tried to cut off sanctuary cities but backed off when the courts limited him. What civil right did he ever suspend? Bill de Blasio and Mario Cuomo are closing houses of worship. Obama spied on journalists. What law-abiding opponent did Trump ever imprison or even indict? On what American did he spy? What emails did he spoliate? Did he weaponize the IRS as Obama and Biden did? Did he send deadly assault rifles to Mexican drug cartels as Eric Holder and Obama–Biden did?
We will vote for the person whose decisions will impact our lives and those of our loved ones, our homes and our jobs, our careers and our dreams — and yet so many do not even know rudimentary facts of what lies in store, what is on the table. Lesley Stahl said a great deal when she told the president she would not ask him about the Hunter Biden laptop because CBS had not independently verified its ownership. So the biggest scandal imaginable — a corrupt and immoral presidential candidate who leveraged his political positions for half a century to get his family and him rich by compromising the national interest in order to curry favor with our nation’s mortal enemies — is kiboshed. In lockstep Facebook and Twitter will not allow the New York Post to share its extraordinary journalistic breakthrough on the Hunter Biden laptop. Of course the laptop was Hunter Biden’s — the signature on the repair order, the photos within it of him naked in a bathtub, the emails verified by a third party who worked with him. But they will not tell the story, and they will not allow others to tell it, so half the country’s voters do not even know enough about the story to reject it. Half the public are voting without knowing that Biden called Black schools a “jungle,” that he called their mothers fools incapable of giving them a working vocabulary, and that he has produced half a century of outright public racism.
Half the country are voting without knowing that Trump built the strongest economy ever recorded, with record-shattering lows in Black unemployment, Asian, Latino, female unemployment. They were frozen out of the information. They are told night and day that he is a racist and do not grasp that racists do not set up enterprise zones for the groups they hate and criminal justice reform for the races they despise. Hitler never set up 10-year grants for Historically Jewish Colleges and Universities. Yet these people do not know. They do not even know what Hitler is, what Hitler means. They just spew the word after reading it on Huffington or Daily Beast or Slate, or seeing a tweet from someone whose imprimatur for American national leadership is that she carried an outlier congressional district in Queens populated most heavily by those who, like her, descend from Puerto Ricans who, in many cases, barely speak English. When she tweets stuff and nonsense about the origins of the 22nd Amendment or falsely compares American compassion at the border to Hitler concentration camps, they do not even have a clue that they have sent an ignoramus to Washington. Yet her texts and tweets pass Twitter-management muster, while the legacy New York Post, founded two centuries ago by Alexander Hamilton, gets quashed. Consequently, half the country see only the “news” that Facebook and Twitter approve, and they miss the actual news that Silicon Valley’s social media monopolies black out. They have no idea what’s flying. They mouth memes: “The science proves … ” without having read scientific papers that would help them know what science proves. For example, the science proves that a fetus is a living being who takes real shape. The science proves that bans on logging and prohibitions against removing dried leaves and dead branches from forests assures there will be incendiary fuel to propel wildfires in tghe West.
In the next few days we will get our first authoritative glimpse of what the 2020 elections have wrought. We may not know the actual results for months — itself a matter fraught with danger. No one fairly argues for unanimity. In any reasonable polity, there should be a split of 52-48 or maybe 55-45 or even maybe 60-40. People with free and independent minds are entitled to differ. There are adequate reasons to justify a split between two worldviews when 150 million or so cast votes. But this election also will cast light on what happens when half an electorate goes to vote without knowing half of what has transpired the previous four years and without even knowing what they do not know.
Purely on his record of proven and documented achievement, and his opponent’s 47 years of mediocrity and now declining cognition, it is kind of a preposterously easy call. But reasonable minds can differ. What we will find out is whether “the American people” still value freedom and bother to seek information that is hidden from them. One vying side could not be more clear that this election will end the courts and judicial system as we know them, will prompt changing rules to stack votes by turning a city of 700,000 into a state with two permanent Democrat U.S. senators, and granting 11 million illegal immigrants overnight citizenship and the right to vote to further stack the deck of “democracy.” We shall see whether, no differently from Russians and Ukrainians and Germans brainwashed for years by a lying news and entertainment media to believe that Communism and Nazism offered solutions superior to free-market capitalism and America’s constitutional freedoms, “the American people” similarly can be led by the nose to vote as their masters and handlers would lead them.
The one thing we do not have to wait to know is this: If we lose our freedoms in this country, it won’t be because China’s Xi took them away or because Putin or the North Korean Dough Boy manipulated Facebook. Only the much-vaunted “American people” have the power in their hands to destroy the freedom of thought and conscience, the economic machine, the gift for invention and innovation, and the core goodness of spirit and willingness to be better that 244 years of greatness has endowed. It is in the hands of the American People to overcome their media manipulators — or to do their bidding. But if the American People choose wrongly, it may not be in the hands of the American People again in our lifetimes later to rectify the error they could perpetrate — on themselves, on us.
