THE ILLIBERAL LEFT: DO THEY INTEND TO PUNISH TRUMP SUPPORTERS FOR THEIR THOUGHT CRIMES?

by Howard Rotberg

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.” – George Orwell, 1984

Former Labor Secretary under Bill Clinton and professor at the leftist University of California Berkeley, Robert Reich tweeted recently:

“When this nightmare is over, we need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It would erase Trump’s lies, comfort those who have been harmed by his hatefulness, and name every official, politician, executive, and media mogul whose greed and cowardice enabled this catastrophe.”

This Orwellian suggestion, of course, has nothing to do with discovering truth or reconciling opposing parties in the nation. The truth is whatever Professor Reich and his colleagues says it is. And the reconciliation is meant to punish those guilty of thought crimes for supporting Trump’s agenda of draining the swamp created by Democrat party officials and sympathetic media, bureaucrats, and professors.

Popular You Tube and Fox News commentator Dan Bongino responded to Reich:

“You’ve been warned—liberal (Democrats) are looking for revenge. And they’re not kidding. What they can’t win democratically, they’ll punish tyrannically.”

Libby Emmons, writing in the Post Millenial, notes:

“In addition to this Commission, Reich is calling for a blacklist of Trump supporters. It is unclear as to what he would like to happen to the people named by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, or how it would be determined who should be on it.”

If this sounds McCarthyesque to you, then you still have a sense of political morality, notwithstanding the insanity that has swept the Democratic Party and its apologists in mainstream media and the academy. Here is Mark Bulgutch, a Canadian Professor of Journalism at the leftist Ryerson University, who was a former senior executive producer of Canada’s government owned CBC News, writing in Canada’s largest newspaper, the leftist Toronto Star, making clear his extremist anti-Trump mentality: 

“History’s verdict on Donald Trump’s presidency will be savage. Future generations will find it hard to believe that this cruel, crude, ignorant, and probably criminally corrupt, man, was ever elected. Trump’s name will forever be synonymous with disgrace …  The Trump contingent has much to answer for. We know that the soon-to-be former president will never back down from his version of what happened. He may not even know the difference anymore between what is true and what is a lie. The rest of us do.”

He is certainly entitled to his opinion. But then this fellow, who educates future journalists, writes this:

“Now that the end is near, I have some advice for those who have been his willing enablers. It’s time to come up with some good reasons you did what you did. The likes of Mitch McConnell, who pushed his agenda in the senate, Sarah Sanders and Kayleigh McEnany who lied for him from the White House press room, Kellyanne Conway who dissembled for him and invented the parallel universe where “alternative facts” thrived, Rudy Giuliani who defended the indefensible and proposed that “truth isn’t truth,” Bill Barr who allowed the U.S. Department of Justice to ignore the basic premise that no man is above the law.”

“Each and every one of his sycophants will have to answer for the last four years. (my emphasis)

“My guess is that many of them will try to escape the stain of their service to the blustering bully. They will say they recognized Trump’s failings both as a president and as a human being. They will say they stayed on to try to restrain his wild impulses. They will say that without them, it would have been worse.

“If that’s their plan, they’d better have kept a paper trail. It won’t be enough to say their hearts were in the right place. They’ll have to document the orders they ignored, the plans they scuttled, the fiats they modified, the whims they deflected, the decisions they watered down. Without that kind of solid physical proof, the henchmen and henchwomen won’t be off the hook.”

And if the foregoing is not bad enough, this from the Professor should really scare you:

“When the inevitable tell-all books are written by those who must explain, don’t let them talk their way out of their complicity. Make them prove their case.”  (my emphasis)

So those supportive of the President are not only warned that they will have to “answer” for their actions or words in some unspecified manner, but they will face what we lawyers call a “reverse onus”:  while generally in criminal law the Government has the onus to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt, Professor Bulgutch advocates making the Trump loyalists “prove their case”.  Professors Reich and Bulgutch seem to have in mind a totalitarian “truth commission” where anyone who supported Trump must prove their innocence, rather than the state proving their guilt.  This type of commission often is built on getting apologies from those who who supported the “evil regime” which might have oppressed Blacks or Indigenous peoples.  In our new hierarchy of victimhood, everyone at the bottom of the list must apologize (and compensate (?) everyone higher on the victim list.

Many small businesses in large American Democrat-run cities feel that they are under the threat of more violent protests and destruction of their properties if Trump is re-elected.  

George Orwell in his brilliant dystopian novel 1984 warned us about those seeking power above all else:  “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power – pure power.”

Just think about the variety of ways that the Democrats have sought to overturn the results of the 2016 election in their pursuit of power.

1.  Spying on the Trump campaign and early stage presidency. Abuse of the FISA process to get illegal warrants to spy. 

2.  The fake Russian collusion charge which took up years of time and millions of dollars as the Mueller investigation turned up no evidence.

3.  The phony impeachment charge based on supposed collusion with Ukraine for one letter where the impeachment charges, stood no chance of being approved in the Senate, and which charges were not even impeachable offences. In fact, we now know that it was Hillary Clinton that colluded with the Russians and Joe and Hunter Biden were colluding with Russian, Ukraine and China.

4.  Joe Biden’s tweet the day after President Trump’s January 31, 2020 banning of flights from China, that Trump has shown “a record of hysteria, xenophobia, and fear-mongering, which Democrats have ever since tried to twist its plain meaning into something not related to the travel ban.  

5. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif. read into the Congressional record his own “parody” version of President Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky without noting he’d made it all up.  By this May, the Wall Street Journal reported that recently released documents proved that Schiff was aware along that there was no Trump-Russian collusion.

6.  Nancy Pelosi blaming Trump for Coronavirus deaths when she invited masses of people to come to San Francisco’s ChinaTown when there should have been a lockdown;  and her disregard of the lockdown to get her hair done by a closed hair stylist and not wearing a mask.  And her ripping up of the State of the Union address.  And her refusal to properly criticize Ilhan Omar for her anti-Semitic statements.

We can go on and on. Trump opponents can cite all the ways they disagree with him, but the American democracy does not give the losing party the right to lie and cheat to take down the winning party, or to breach the Constitution to exact revenge.

Joe Biden still alleges that Trump at Charlottesville said white nationalists were fine people when he clearly said that there are fine people on both sides of the issue of taking down statues of historical figures.  The Democrats still try to target the President as a supporter of white supremacists, when he has disavowed them numerous times on tape.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris do not criticize the violent looting and destruction of Antifa and Black Lives Matter.   They do not seek to identify and prosecute the leaders and financial backers of these horrible people.  In fact, Harris has directed funds to pay bail to get violent accused people out of jail.  

Are we allowed to question whether China may have used the Wuhan Virus as a weapon of war, and are we allowed to comment on how Chinese experts on internet censorship have been hired by Facebook?  The New York Post reports that there are at least half a dozen Chinese nationals who are working on censorship in Facebook’s Seattle office.

In Orwellian fashion the team is called the  Hate-Speech Engineering team.

All of the foregoing has created a mentality that should really worry us.  The President of a Jewish organization in Toronto, which has a long history of identifying leftist anti-Semitism, has forwarded to me a note allegedly left at a home in Florida, which oozes the kind of hatred that we Jews have to contend with, although it doesn’t specifically target Jews (yet):

“Dear Neighbour:

“You have been identified by our group as being a Trump supporter.

“Your address has been added into our database as a target for when we attack should Trump not concede the election.

“We recommend that you check your home insurance policy and make (sic) that it is current and that it has adequate coverage for fire damage.

“You have been given ‘Fair Warning’.

“Always remember that it was ‘you’ that started this Civil War.

“Be prepared to face the severe consequences of your pre-emptive actions against democracy.”

We should not really be surprised to see this, when the media and big tech utilize their raw power to censor stories that show criminal and unethical conduct by Joe and Hunter Biden, such as the current email evidence from several sources showing that Joe Biden, notwithstanding his statements to the contrary, was a full participant in the influence peddling and bribes now disclosed, and the conflict arising between their personal financial interests in China and U.S. foreign policy and national security dictates.

The New York Post is a reputable newspaper, fourth largest in the U.S. and 200 years old. Facebook and Twitter not only censor any sharing of this story but have shut down the Post’s own accounts in a clear effort to censor. The rest of the American media don’t see any problem with Joe Biden hiding from media questions on this and for not carrying in their newspapers what could be the most explosive news story of the year.

The usual Democrats whose truthfulness should forever be challenged due to what they said during the Mueller commission and the Impeachment trial, now assert the Biden emails are  (you guessed it) Russian “disinformation.” However, The Department of Justice agrees with spy chief John Ratcliffe’s assessment that emails published by the Post from a laptop owned by Hunter Biden are not part of a Russian disinformation campaign.

What can we do when the New York Post and Fox News are the only news organizations willing to report on these stories?  And what will people like me do when we have to prove our cases before a Truth Commission? Will the Commission believe me or the New York Times?

 

Howard Rotberg writes on political culture, values and ideologies.  His two latest books are The Ideological Path to Submission… and what we can do about it and Tolerism: The Ideology Revealed.   He writes periodically for New English Review, FrontpageMagazine, Israel National News and others. He is president of Canada’s sole conservative publishing house, Mantua Books  – www.mantuabooks.com.-