OPINION:
So agape was the world at the Jan. 6 spectacle of conservatives setting themselves up for moral equivalence with the left that everyone forgot to invoke the invisible hand of Russia-Putin.
Unless you count Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi.
“I would love to see [President Trump’s] phone records to see whether he was talking to Putin the day the insurgents invaded our Capitol,” Mrs. Clinton told Speaker Pelosi on her Jan. 18 podcast.
Mrs. Pelosi offered, “I don’t’ know what Putin has on him politically, financially or personally, but what happened last week was a gift to Putin, because Putin wants to undermine democracy in our country and throughout the world, and these people, unbeknownst to them maybe, are Putin puppets. … So, yes, we should have a 9/11 commission, and there is strong support in the Congress to do that.”
The thread didn’t seem to gain much traction nationally, and that’s because the ultimate target — the endgame of the Russia fixation — brought itself within reach: American conservatives, today known as “white supremacists” and “conspiracy theorists,” have now been upgraded to “domestic terrorists.”
That the Russia hunt has been in large part a sublimation, a temporary filler, for the hunt for “red” Americans was laid bare in the immediate aftermath of the Capitol occupation. Within hours, Twitter users’ accounts were getting shut down by the thousands.
No sooner did they migrate to Parler than Amazon booted Parler off its server. No sooner did Parler secure a new server than Rep. Carolyn Maloney, New York Democrat, asked the FBI to investigate the social media site for “Russian ties.”
In a Washington Post editorial a week earlier, Mrs. Clinton focused on the flip side of the Russia card, white supremacy: “Trump ran for president on a vision of America where whiteness is valued at the expense of everything else …,” she said. “By the time he lost in 2020, he had whipped a dangerous element of our country into a frenzy. … I believe he should be impeached. Members of Congress who joined him in subverting our democracy should resign, and those who conspired with the domestic terrorists should be expelled immediately. … Elected leaders should … advocat[e] new criminal laws at the state and federal levels that hold white supremacists accountable and track the activities of extremists. Twitter and other companies … will have to do more.”
The coupling of White supremacy and Russia is hardly unique to Hillary Clinton. Where you see one mentioned, you see the other.
To wit, a random article in a random issue of The New York Times (found when unwrapping a mug purchased at Goodwill) had these two paragraphs on Sept. 24, 2020: “Mr. [Chad] Wolf’s confirmation hearing [as Homeland Security secretary] … came amid allegations from current and former members of his department that the agency had mishandled or downplayed the rising threats of Russian interference and violent White supremacy. … The department’s former intelligence chief, Brian Murphy, claimed that the acting secretary … directed him to hold back reports that warned of white supremacist extremism and Russian attempts to denigrate the mental health of Joseph R. Biden, Jr.”
Just to the right of that article was one summing up a Senate Republican investigative report into Biden-Ukraine corruption, reading, “Andrew Bates, a spokesman for Mr. Biden’s campaign, accused [the homeland security panel’s Republican chairman, Ron] Johnson of subsidizing ‘a foreign attack against the sovereignty of our elections with taxpayer dollars’ by promulgating ‘a long-disproven, hard-core right wing conspiracy theory’ about the former vice president. … [Senate Democratic leader Charles E. Schumer said the report read ‘as if Putin wrote it, not United States senators.’”
It’s as if there had been a manual: Incite the country against Russia, then commingle Republicans with Russia — and voila, you’ve got the nation already primed to turn on their fellow Americans.
The fluidity of the Russia-to-Republican gear shift is breathtaking. And so we get headlines like this one from The Daily Beast: “Can U.S. Spy Agencies Stop White Terror: Other countries have domestic spy agencies to fight extremists at home. Does America need one, too?” Jeff Stein writes, “The pro-Trump fanatics stormed and trashed the citadel of American democracy, nearly executing what al-Qaeda had failed to do: destroy the US Capitol.”
Then there was Mr. Biden himself at his inauguration.
“In the same breath as he called for ‘unity’ and ‘healing,’ wrote journalist and blogger Nebojsa Malic, “Joe Biden denounced his opposition as ‘domestic terrorists’ and Nazis. Even before he gets sworn in, his party is using the Capitol unrest to criminalize political dissent in America. Almost every single mainstream outlet is rushing to interview ‘national security experts’ and ‘extremism researchers,’ who are selling the line that a new War on Terror is needed, right here at home, with fellow Americans as the enemy.”
There were warning signs that Republicans were to be bigger enemies than jihad, cartels and assorted criminals (whom we’ve duly been releasing while jailing conservatives and COVID skeptics).
Back in 2009, a Homeland Security Department report warned of “the possibility of violence by unnamed ‘right-wing extremists’ concerned about illegal immigration, increasing federal power, restrictions on firearms, abortion and the loss of U.S. sovereignty, and singles out returning war veterans as particular threats,” WorldNetDaily reported then.
Around that time, a report issued by the Missouri Information Analysis Center warned law enforcement agencies to “watch for suspicious individuals who may have bumper stickers for third-party political candidates such as Ron Paul, Bob Barr and Chuck Baldwin” and “watch out for individuals with ‘radical’ ideologies based on Christian views.”
By 2016, when a Muslim killed 50 at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, we saw Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton join the LGBTQ community in marching behind a banner that read, “Republican Hate Kills.” Two months later, the killer’s father attended her rally.
And so we find ourselves in 2021, with Fox News’ Mike Tobin reporting, “The lockdown in D.C. was like nothing ever seen for an inauguration before. Twenty-five miles of fencing and 25,000 troops on the ground from the National Guard.” (Suddenly, walls and policing are good.)
It was a show of force by the consolidated Woke regime: “We rule now; you are traitors who will be treated as such.”
And Trump-supporting National Guardsmen need not apply.
Indeed, a dozen were removed for social media posts, with Rep. Steve Cohen, Tennessee Democrat, calling any Trump supporters among them “suspect” and in need of vetting.
The same Steve Cohen who in 2018 tweeted, “Where are our military folks?” hinting for a military coup against Trump for not buying into the intel on Russian election meddling. “The Commander in Chief is in the hands of our enemy!”
Former CIA Director John O. Brennan went on MSNBC and used all the angry-children-approved buzzwords: “Members of the Biden team … are now moving in laserlike fashion to try to uncover as much as they can about what looks very similar to insurgency movements: religious extremists, authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, nativists, even libertarians.”
Local network affiliates fed us “the harrowing stories of D.C. police officers attacked during the hostile takeover of the U.S. Capitol.” Hostile takeover. Were we treated to harrowing police testimonials from six months (and counting) of violent nationwide riots?
“The team around [Mr. Biden] who are radicals, who believe if they could exterminate Republicans, that would be one way to get to unity,” Newt Gingrich told Sean Hannity on Thursday. “As a New York Times columnist wrote this morning, if Biden really wanted unity, he would start by lynching Vice President Pence.”
So this kind of speech is good enough for the “Paper of Record” when it comes from the correct side, as it is for Twitter and Facebook, but not when it comes from the “wrong” side. And why should it be? If the oath of public office is to defend the Constitution “against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” by golly, that’s all they’re doing.
The “enemy” should not have a platform, and if it does, that’s a legitimate target (ergo, Parler’s troubles). And if “enemy mouthpieces” are legitimate targets, then of course, at the very least, Republicans must be stripped of a voice for their “propaganda.”
By the corporate tech giants to whom censorship has been outsourced by lawmakers dog-whistling, “Police your forums!”
Of course, all this would mean we’re in a war, a cold civil war, as Louis Marano called it last week on “American Greatness,” explaining that “conservatives have lost.
Every U.S. institution is dominated by cultural Marxists, their fellow travelers, their supplicants, stooges or useful idiots. Common-sense assumptions that held for 4,000 years now are taboo. What was accepted wisdom until 15 minutes ago will get you fired, ostracized, barred from earning a living, possibly divorced and estranged from your kids.
“It’s ‘Lord of the Flies,’ and conservatives are Piggy. It’s ‘Chinatown,’ Jake, but we can’t just forget it and walk away. There’s no place to go. … Conservatives are an occupied population in their own country.”
Similarly, Mr. Malic, an endangered RT journalist by the looks of it, wrote, “Just look at the glamour photos of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi reviewing the National Guard troops at the Capitol on Wednesday. Does she look scared for her life — as the congressional Democrats have claimed in the aftermath of the ‘insurrection’ last week — or like a leader of the winning faction relishing her triumph? … Meanwhile, the Republicans who opposed the impeachment … kept invoking Lincoln, all about ‘malice towards none’ and ‘charity for all.’ Supposedly a plea for unity, it sounds unmistakably as a plea for mercy from the vanquished.”
The sooner the right acknowledges this — and what the game was really about — the sooner it can fight back and stop falling for the Russia distraction.
The question is, with the “real enemy’ in hand, will the Democrats be satiated, away from continuing their pursuit of the Russian decoy — the conservative proxy they managed to dupe conservatives into cannibalizing?
That is, can the country finally turn inward and look at ourselves and have the fight we’ve been avoiding by pointing in Russia’s direction, or will this go doubly bad, wherein we resolve nothing internally and paper over it temporarily by continuing to poke Russia and stoke World War III, so that we might simulate unity?
Indeed, we may be only weeks away from President Biden “unifying” the country through war. Will conservatives let themselves be recruited again, and as usual let the destructive impulses of the left become “bipartisan” policy? (Yugoslavia, Syria, Russia, climate change, COVID-19 lockdowns, etc.)
It’s quite something to use non-communist Russia to sow communism here. Russia watches as we regress to progressivism 30 years after we dismantled theirs, what Jan. 6 misguidedly aimed to prevent.
The difference is the communists killed more people than will be killed here, but they emerged still being Russians, Poles, Serbs, Ukrainians, Azerbaijanis, Croats and so on. Here, they’ll accelerate the demographic shift, turning America into a land of squabbling tribes, in agreement on only one thing: The Old America was racist and malicious and had to be destroyed.
We will be left with just the trappings of America, such as the Capitol building, behind whose stately skirts Democratic lawmakers hide as they desecrate it daily, inverting what it stands for and selling out the country.
It’ll still look like America but will in fact be the distorted doppelganger we’ve been cultivating.
“So now it’s rightists who dream of revolution — or restoration,” Mr. Marano continues. “For those who are serious, take a tip from the Trotskyites of 1976. Organize, network, plan, but keep it quiet. … Even yard signs and bumper stickers are unnecessary giveaways. … Be careful about who you trust. … Assume three-letter agencies will penetrate your organizations. Your own government will try to sting and entrap you. … Retain good lawyers. They’re coming after you. Don’t make it easier for them.”
⦁ Julia Gorin was a Soviet refusenik who came to the U.S. in 1976. She is editor of “Hillarisms: The Unmaking of the First Female President.”
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