The left-wing professional and political classes bequeathed a number of new protocols during the Trump derangement years. And it will be interesting to watch whether the Republicans abide by them in November should they take back the House and perhaps the Senate\u2014and the presidency in 2024 as well.<\/p>\n
Will they follow the New Testament\u2019s turn-the-other-cheek forbearance, or go for Old Testament style eye-for-an-eye retribution?<\/p>\n
What Are the New Rules?<\/b><\/p>\n
Will Republican magnanimity suffice to shame the Democrats to be more professional in the future? Or will tit-for-tat deterrent reciprocity alone ensure a return to norms? Specifically, will Biden be impeached Trump-style, after losing the House in November? Say, to give just one possible example, for deliberately not enforcing and, indeed, undermining U.S. immigration law?<\/p>\n
Will Speaker Kevin McCarthy, in Pelosi-fashion, start yanking troublesome radical Democrats off House committees?<\/p>\n
Will a conservative Robert Mueller-like \u201cwise man\u201d head a $40 million, 22 month-long special counsel investigation of the Biden-family influence-selling syndicate\u2014arrayed with a \u201cdream-team,\u201d \u201call-star,\u201d and \u201chunter-killer\u201d right-wing lawyers to ferret out \u201cBig Guy\u201d and \u201cMr. Ten Percent\u201d quid pro quo profiteering?<\/p>\n
Would a Republican-led House set up a special committee to investigate the racketeering and \u201cconspiracies\u201d across state lines that led to a near \u201ccoup\u201d and \u201cinsurrection\u201d marked by \u201cthe riots of 2020?\u201d Would such watchdogs offer up criminal referrals for all those responsible for attacking a federal courthouse and torching a police precinct or for setting an historic church afire? Or causing $2 billion of damage, over 30 deaths, and 1,500 law enforcement officer injuries\u2014while carving out illegal no-go zones in major downtowns?<\/p>\n
Given the need for \u201caccountability,\u201d the \u201cthreats to democracy,\u201d and a need for \u201ctransparency,\u201d would another congressional committee investigate the Afghanistan fiasco of summer 2021? Will it learn who was lying about the disaster\u2014Joe Biden or the Joint Chiefs\u2014and how and why such a travesty occurred?<\/p>\n
Would a rebooted January 6 committee reconvene under new auspices\u2014with Democratic members limited to those selected by a new Speaker McCarthy\u2014to revisit the lethal shooting of Ashli Babbitt, to review thousands of hours of released surveillance video, to subpoena all email communications between the previous congressional leadership and the Capitol police, to demand the lists of all the FBI informants in the crowd, and to interrogate the sadistic jailers and overzealous prosecutors who have created America\u2019s first class of political prisoners subjected to punishment without trial? Such a multifaceted legal inquiry would eat up most of Biden\u2019s final two years in office. As accomplished leakers, Republicans then would also supply \u201cbombshells\u201d and \u201cwalls are closing in\u201d special news alerts on cable TV, the fuel of supposedly \u201cimminent\u201d and \u201cimpending\u201d indictments, based on special counsel leaks to conservative media.<\/p>\n
Following the Democratic cue, should the Republican-majority Senate consider ending the \u201cdisruptive\u201d and \u201canti-democratic\u201d filibuster? Should there be a national voting law rammed through the Congress, overriding state protocols, and demanding that all national election balloting must require a photo ID?<\/p>\n
Will Speaker McCarthy, Pelosi-style, in furor at more of Joe Biden\u2019s chronic lies, tear up the president\u2019s State of the Union address on national television?<\/p>\n
A Permanently Politicized Bureaucracy?<\/b><\/p>\n
Will the new Washington apparat likewise adhere to the Democratic Party\u2019s new precedents?<\/p>\n
Perhaps a newly appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs can reassure a Republican majority that its primary mission is not battle readiness\u2014and certainly not climate change or \u201cwhite rage\u201d\u2014 but rather ferreting out service personnel with known ties to radical groups like BLM or Antifa or other \u201csubversive\u201d and \u201cracist\u201d organizations?<\/p>\n
Will a conservative Lois Lerner emerge from the IRS shadows to start slow-walking nonprofit-status applications from left-wing organizations on the eve of a presidential election?<\/p>\n
Will the FBI become a Republican retrieval service to hunt down and keep inert embarrassing lost laptops, diaries, and hard drives of absent-minded conservative grandees?<\/p>\n
In the middle of a campaign, will the CIA Director believe it is his duty to inform the senior Republican leaders in the Senate that he has good \u201cinformation\u201d that leftists are intriguing with foreign governments to warp the election?<\/p>\n
The Lettered Classes<\/b><\/p>\n
And what of our corporate and professional classes?<\/p>\n
Should conservative zillionaires pool their resources and, Zuckerberg-style, select key precincts in the next general election, hire armies of activists, and then absorb and supersede the work of state or county registrars? Only that way, could they ensure the \u201cright\u201d people vote and their \u201ccorrect\u201d ballots were accurately counted?<\/p>\n
Should conservatives start rounding up \u201cprofessionals,\u201d \u201cscientists,\u201d and \u201cscholars\u201d to express their superior morality and erudition in pursuit of political agendas?<\/p>\n
Certainly, a recent trend has been a spate of letters of \u201cconscience\u201d and \u201cstatements of concern\u201d signed by revolving-door government, academic, and corporate grandees who pose as disinterested experts to mold public opinion.<\/p>\n
When we read such letters of principle\u2014characterized by shared and collective outrage by assorted professionals, replete with letters and\/or titles after their name\u2014beware!<\/p>\n
Do we remember the recent \u201cstellar\u201d cast of Nobel-Prize winning and near-Nobel laureates who admonished us that Biden\u2019s massive deficit spending programs would never lead to inflation?<\/p>\n
In circular fashion, Biden solicited and then cited this \u201cblue-chip\u201d group of experts led by Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz. Stiglitz warned the hoi polloi not to worry about printing trillions of dollars at the very moment pent-up demand from the COVID lockdowns was surging, when for millions the government kept issuing checks that made staying home more lucrative than working, when interest rates were at near zero, and when the national debt was cresting at $30 trillion.<\/p>\n
The distinguished economists promised us that if we just followed the Biden lead, then inflation would actually decrease. Or as they put it, \u201cBecause this agenda invests in long-term economic capacity and will enhance the ability of more Americans to participate productively in the economy, it will ease longer-term inflationary pressure.\u201d [emphasis added].<\/p>\n
As inflation nears or exceeds eight percent per annum, will they write an apology or instead issue yet another letter assuring us that inflation is easing?<\/p>\n
Do we remember the 50 \u201cformer intelligence officials\u201d letter writers rounded up by former National Intelligence and CIA Directors James Clapper and John Brennan? (The latter two previously had confessed to lying under oath to Congress.) Yet just two weeks before the 2020 election, these revered \u201cprofessionals\u201d assured us that Hunter Biden\u2019s laptop was not just fake but likely Russian disinformation.<\/p>\n
Or as the shameful 50 put it in their sorta, kinda conspiratorial style, \u201c. . . our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.\u201d The guidance of Brennan and Clapper alone\u2014apart from the clear evidence that the laptop was Hunter\u2019s\u2014should have made all Americans \u201cdeeply suspicious\u201d that the Biden campaign \u201cplayed a significant role in this case.\u201d<\/p>\n
Do we remember \u201cthe over 1,000 health professionals\u201d who in 2020 signed a letter of conscience, assuring us that:<\/p>\n
. . . we wanted to present a narrative that prioritizes opposition to racism as vital to public health, including the epidemic response. We believe that the way forward is not to suppress protests in the name of public health but to respond to protesters demands in the name of public health, thereby addressing multiple public health crises.<\/p>\n
So, in \u201cfollow the science fashion\u201d we were told not just that some violations of strict masking, quarantines, and lockdowns were more equal than others, but that flagrantly ignoring health mandates entirely was, in Orwellian fashion, actually good for the health of the exempt.<\/p>\n
Do we remember the 27 Lancet \u201cscientists\u201d who signed the now infamous letter reassuring us the Wuhan lab played no role in the origins in COVID? Do we also recall that all but one of these progressive humanitarians failed to disclose that they themselves had connections with Wuhan?<\/p>\n
Leftist professionals in politics, government, and private enterprise debased themselves for short-term political gain, or in furor at their bogeyman Trump, or in anger at the unwashed. They have now set precedents, which if embraced by conservatives and applied to the Left, would be called unethical at best and fascistic at worst.<\/p>\n
In the end, all the warped grandees accomplished was to further discredit the entire notion that those with high salaries, prestigious degrees, impressive titles, and insidious influence are somehow less likely to lie, connive, cheat, and conspire than those whom they libel and attack.<\/p>\n
By Victor Davis Hanson<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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