Mike Pence’s trip to the theater didn’t end as badly as Lincoln’s, but it is not hard to imagine the entitled actors shouting “Sic semper tyrannis!” at him. They are in a secessionist mood. Hollywood liberals are now entertaining fantasies of an independent California through “Calexit.” They would like to “leave the country” but without leaving their Malibu mansions. At this rate, John Wilkes Booth may end up with a star on Hollywood’s walk of fame.

It was amusing to watch the actors lecture Pence on the founding “ideals” of the country even as they throw infantile tantrums about those supposedly antiquated principles. When not performing in Hamilton, they are out marching against the electoral college, which Alexander Hamilton in part designed.

The “ideals” to which they refer originated, not in 1776, but more like 1966. And they don’t even rise to the level of ideals. They amount to a totalitarianism in which “freedom” and “justice” possess no meaning apart from whatever liberals want at any given moment. Under this willfulness, to take one of its more blatant manifestations, honest cops are treated like criminals while advocates for the criminal class, such as Al Sharpton, get to re-design police departments.

The prospect of that racket coming to a close has the Borking bullies of the left gearing up for a savage trashing of Sen. Jeff Sessions. Newspapers under their control are publishing glorious reminiscences of Sen. Ted Kennedy’s opposition to President Ronald Reagan’s appointment of Sessions to the federal court. But anyone who bothers to study that Borking can quickly see what a Soviet-style show trial Sessions suffered. Ted Kennedy’s opening statement against Sessions was pitiful in its crudeness. Kennedy thundered against Sessions on the most nebulous of charges — that he had the wrong “attitude,” that he criticized the NAACP (so what?), that he made a handful of comments which liberals in the pocket of Kennedy construed willfully as racist.

“Everything is true except the facts” — the description once given to the British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge about Stalin’s show trials — applied just as much to the Kennedy-dominated proceedings. Whatever Sessions said in a moment of gallows humor was laughably minor, compared to the comments made by Teddy’s brothers, President John F. Kennedy and Sen. Robert Kennedy, about Martin Luther King Jr. Yet Teddy faked up shock at the tendentious testimony against Sessions and declared on the basis of it that he was a “throwback to a shameful era” in America.

The Pravda-like editorial in the New York Times the other day about Sessions is Exhibit A of how the left builds on its own lies. We’re told that the testimony of the hearing was “devastating”; in fact, it was disputed. We’re told that the “Republican-controlled” Senate rejected Sessions “out of concern… that he was a racist.” There is no mention that Arlen Specter, the Republican chairman who allowed Kennedy his miscarriage of justice, later admitted the racist charge against Sessions was a crock. The editorial then tells us that Sessions is still a racist. Why? Because he didn’t become a liberal after the bruising hearing: “It would be nice to report that Mr. Sessions, who is now 69, has conscientiously worked to dispel the shadows that cost him the judgeship. Instead, the years since his last confirmation hearing reveal a pattern of dogged animus to civil rights and the progress of black Americans and immigrants.”

How dare he not dispel those “shadows” by refusing to support vote-stealing, affirmative action, illegal immigration, and drug legalization. The editorial also somberly reports what it considers a very embarrassing and disqualifying quote from Sessions, that in a Senate hearing he once said, “Good people don’t smoke marijuana.” Oh my. What else is this odious man capable of?

By the end of the editorial, the “shadows” around Sessions have thickened to the point that he “embodies” white supremacy: “Donald Trump ran a presidential campaign that stoked white racial resentment. His choice for attorney general — which, like his other early choices, has been praised by white supremacists — embodies that worldview.”

It is this outrageous demagoguery that the American people rejected at the ballot box. They have grown tired of scaremongering as a substitute for solving problems, and they recognize that it is the self-appointed champions of “victims” who behave like bullies, subjecting mild-mannered figures such as Pence and Sessions to diatribes about decency. The “shameful era” to which they didn’t want to return turned out to be the one in which the Ted Kennedys treated mere conservatism as a career-ending crime.