So, The Deep State Is Real? So What?? That’s Old News!!!

By CHRISTOPHER MANION

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity” — W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming (1919)

• + + On Monday, the Justice Department released the Special Counsel’s report on the “Crossfire Hurricane” Investigation.
  In one sense, the document revealed what everybody already knew. Donald Trump was right. “Russia!!” was indeed a hoax. It was all lies, conjured up by the Clinton campaign, cleared by Hillary Clinton, and approved by Barack Obama.
  Like many lies, “Russia!!” had a long life. It was first used to defeat Trump in 2016 (it failed), to bring down his presidency after 2017 (with mixed results), and to defeat him in 2020 (it worked).
  When a liar accuses an innocent person of a crime, at least two people immediately know the truth: the accuser and the accused. But others might not know it, and the target is often left “twisting slowly in the wind,” as Nixon aide John Ehrlichman put it fifty years ago.
  Regarding “Russia!!”, everybody already knew long before last Monday. And by “everybody,” we mean not only the perpetrators, their fellow conspirators, and their political bedfellows, as well as their targets, but the public at large.
  In another sense, however, Durham’s report revealed something that many of us didn’t know.
  If we didn’t know then, we know now. The FBI is corrupt, possibly beyond repair. And it thrives amidst a corruption of spirit that has befouled our nation’s permanent political institutions.
  And it’s not just the FBI leadership. When agents were told to spy on the Catholic faithful attending Mass according to the Old Rite, pro-lifers praying on sidewalks, or fathers objecting to boys who rape their daughters in Loudoun County Virginia public school girls’ restrooms, agents on the ground did as they were told.
  After all, they were “just following orders.”
  Meanwhile, the “Russia!!” hoax perpetrators will continue undaunted. Cong. Dan Goldman (D., N.Y.) spoke for them on Wednesday in an interview on MSNBC. Goldman ignored Durham’s findings, called the investigation an “abomination,” claiming that Durham, not the FBI, was guilty of an “abuse of power.”
  Think Nashville: There, a transgender terrorist bigot carried out a carefully planned massacre of six innocent Christians.
  The Left immediately responded: “Transgenders are threatened!” The mob, the media, and Joe Biden agreed.
  And on Thursday that threat became the shot heard round the world enshrined in U.S. foreign policy, as Biden’s Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, chimed in to declare war on “Homophobia, Biphobia, Interphobia, and Transphobia.”
  The FBI, aping Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, agrees as well. The Nashville killer’s manifesto and the Durham report will both disappear down the Memory Hole.

Why The Left Won’t Quit

Donald Trump represents for the Left a nagging but inescapable obstacle to their total dominance: the Deplorables.
We constitute an unruly pack of proles who refuse to be grateful for all that our betters, the anointed elites, have done for us.
We must be destroyed.
But those designated as “Enemies of the State” must first be tortured, then converted, in Room 101, then beg for forgiveness at our show trials in the Ministry of Truth, and only then be shot.
George Orwell knew totalitarians well. His “Homage to Catalonia” recounts his experiences in the Spanish Civil War that opened his eyes to the danger posed by the insatiable lust for power.
And he was right. History reveals that the Left kills those who stand in its way. Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Castro — all of them eliminated opponents so casually that many on the Left might even envy them as they survey our own defiant Deplorables with unctuous disdain.
And the attacks on Donald Trump, who represents those unlettered ingrates, will continue because, in the language of classical political theory, he has become a mythical symbol. He represents the millions whom the Left wants to lock down for good next time.
Big Brother had his daily “Two Minutes Hate” — target: Emmanuel Goldstein. Today the Left has Donald Trump — “The Sum Of All Evils.”
They don’t just hate him. They envy him.
Envy is a Deadly Sin. To explain its gravity, Helmut Schoeck helpfully explains the distinction between envy and jealousy.
The jealous man sees his neighbor’s new car and says, “Hey, I like that car. I’m going to emulate my neighbor’s good habits, work hard, and soon I’ll be able to earn enough to buy a nice car like his.”
But the envious man grovels in spite. He is lazy and slanderous. He knows he will never work hard, and he knows his neighbor is the better man. So, he fumes. “I know I’ll never have a nice car, but I don’t want my neighbor to have his nice car either.”
But he can’t just steal his neighbor’s car, right?
So, he tells the government to steal it for him.
You know, “Equity” and all that.
The FBI agent who goes along to get promoted might well envy his colleague who refuses to sell out. On May 18, the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government heard testimony from three agents who refused. A report published by the Committee the same day details how “FBI supervisors retaliated against agents blowing the whistle on corruption and partisan misconduct.” Suspended Agent Garrett told the Committee how the FBI “destroys their careers, suspends them under false pretenses, takes away their security clearances and pay with no true options for real recourse or remedy.”
So, when it comes to truthtellers, the Deep State envies and punishes. But at times, it can also be jealous. And today, its operatives are jealous indeed of their counterparts in tyrannical countries.
The Chinese Communist Party’s security forces can simply “disappear” those miscreants identified by the “Social Credit System” as opponents of “Great Leader” Xi Jinping.
If the FBI and the CIA could only do that to their Deplorable critics!
No, they don’t want to destroy the totalitarian enemies of the United States. They want to emulate them.

Where Gratitude Is Due . . .

And last . . . Hey, there’s a war going on! And as it accelerates, the United States is closer to the risk of a war with a nuclear power than it has been in sixty years.
By February 2022, everyone knew that “Russia!!” was disinformation. But the Left had successfully integrated the slander into their arsenal in their war with Trump. Durham or no Durham, it was now indelible.
So, it was no surprise that Democrats, usually the prideful party of peaceniks, jumped at the chance to support U.S. involvement in the Ukraine war primarily for domestic reasons: to perpetuate their war with Trump.
Question Biden’s “proxy war” and you were a “Putin Stooge” or a “MAGA Republican.”
Whatever the foreign policy merits of our involvement, the Left used the war to distract Americans from the disasters that Biden had wrought on the country.
And it worked. The predicted Republican “Red Wave” all but disappeared by November.
Today there is a wide range of opinion regarding U.S. involvement and its possible escalation into direct U.S.-Russia military hostilities in Ukraine. As that prospect increases in coming weeks, the Durham report’s exposure of the “Russia!!” lies could well allow that discussion to seek a more sober level.
On one side of that broad and necessary conversation are many who have advocated a greater role for the United States in support of Ukraine for legitimate reasons of national interest.
They might take a moment to reflect on the irony: “Russia!!” was perpetrated to destroy Trump, and the country with him. And yet, while the Left manipulated it for domestic gain, the hoax and its significant staying power also made it easier for the United States, with virtually no debate, to get involved in another undeclared foray that has brought us perilously close to the prospect of a hot war with Russia.