Resistance is Futile! How the Trump-Hating Left Lost Its Collective Mind, by Ann Coulter

You want evidence of justice department and media corruption?  Coulter’s got the goods -- in spades, and served with her signature rapier wit.  Resistance is Futile doesn’t simply rehash talking points about Hillary’s serial lawbreaking, Mueller’s partisan probe, or Deep State subversion of an opposition President, though all those matters are treated with lawyerly and comedic deftness.  (Think My Cousin Vinny.)  First and foremost Coulter’s book is about collusion -- the democracy-demolishing collusion between Democrats and the mainstream media that has existed for decades but which a white-hot hatred for the “vulgarian” Trump has made unmistakably clear to most Americans.  On the bright side, this exposure is actually destroying journalism, which the author says must perish and be rebuilt on an ethical foundation for democracy to survive.  Coulter provides a veritable avalanche of media inconsistencies, inaccuracies, and lost-their-mind absurdities to support her conclusion. 

For example, Democrats and their media lackeys who only yesterday decried federal surveillance of possible terrorists (and who nearly defrocked John Brennan for lying to Sen. Diane Feinstein about the CIA’s enhanced spying activity) now view that same man as a paragon of rectitude.  Indeed, they regularly denounce as unpatriotic anyone who questions the validity of warrants obtained from a secret court to spy on Americans associated with the Trump campaign -- even during the campaign!  The same coterie of co-conspirators who were eager to vindicate Alger Hiss and praise cooperation with the Soviet Union, now portray Putin’s Russia as the gravest threat to America since 9/11 or Pearl Harbor.  According to these partisans, Putin must be publicly vilified and his country harshly punished for interfering with an American election via a few thousand Facebook ads -- many supporting Trump, some supporting Bernie, others touting Ted Cruz, Jill Stein, Black Lives Matter, United Muslims of America, and even Hillary.

This breakdown comes from Muller’s own indictment of the 13 villainous Russians he is clearly not anxious to see in court, having backed away from an expedited trial when one of the Russian ham sandwiches actually sent a legal team to the U.S. to have the charges against him adjudicated.  One possibly exculpatory element of that defense would be the fact that most of the Facebook ads were placed after the election and even jumped on the Resistance bandwagon.  Mueller, by the way, has the distinction of being FBI director during two of the bureau’s most famous screw-ups.  First, Republican Senator Ted Stevens was falsely accused of lying to investigators (sound familiar?) eight days before an election that he lost by less than 2 percent.  When the trial judge discovered prosecutors had withheld vital exculpatory evidence, he threw out the case and demanded an investigation of the investigators.

Then there was the anthrax case where Mueller worked “in lockstep” with his hand-chosen investigator, Richard Palmer.  Together these vigilantes all but destroyed the life of Steven Hatfill, an innocent U.S. Army biodefense researcher whom the FBI hounded relentlessly for six years because he fit the Bureau’s profile: “a ‘flag-waving’ patriot.”  Even after a federal judge said the investigators hadn’t found “a scintilla of evidence” against Hatfill and the government later settled with Hatfill for almost six million dollars, Mueller said, “I do not apologize for any aspect of this investigation.”  There you have the “honorable” Robert Mueller.

When it comes to immigration, the media’s “heads I win, tails you lose” reportage depends on who resides in the White House.  While Obama lived there, federal law and even federal policy that ignored those laws, ruled supreme.  That’s what CNN’s law expert informed us after Arizona vainly attempted to enforce federal immigration laws in 2010. But now that Trump’s address is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, it’s perfectly ok for blue states to ignore federal immigration law.  Indeed, thanks to a few lower court rulings cheered by mainstream media pundits, the President is now unable to exercise his “clear constitutional and federal authority” to “exclude immigrants in the best interests of the United States.”   

NBC’s release of the embarrassing 2005 Access Hollywood tape just weeks before the November election provides yet another example of media partisanship.  This electoral kill-shot, according to Coulter, “breached all professional norms and probably the law.”  By contrast, NBC’s current President, Andy Lack, when heading NBC News in 1999, “held the network’s interview with Juanita Broaddrick” in which she accused Bill Clinton of rape until after the President’s impeachment trial.  In this case timing says everything you need to know about Lack, NBC, partisanship, and a willingness to place more importance on a braggadocious utterance about consensual groping within a celebrity culture (“They let you do it,” Trump added.) than multiple accusations of actual predatory behavior by a Democrat.      

Other matters diligently dissected by Coulter include Trump’s wildly mischaracterized Charlottesville statement, George Soros’s plundering of Russia and manipulation of foreign elections, the false claim that Trump asked Russia to “hack” Hillary’s private email server, the media’s misreporting about changes to the 2016 GOP Platform in order to suggest Russian influence, and an honest comparison of Watergate with the Mueller probe.  Concerning the latter, Coulter comments, “Imagine what G. Gordon Liddy could have done working from the inside of the FBI, with FISA warrants and government-paid spies!”

Coulter offers these two summary judgments about the current special prosecutor’s investigation:  “The very nature of Mueller’s probe is Soviet justice.  He has an open-ended commission to look for any crimes committed by anyone connected to the Trump campaign…. If the Russians were trying to sow discord and undermine confidence in our democracy, then the guy they probably colluded with was Robert Mueller.” 

Closing arguments directed at the media include the following observations:  “Fake news means reporting, for example, that Trump colluded with Russia to sway the election when it was the Democratic Party and the FBI that colluded with Russia to sway the election.”  Put otherwise, Russia “is accused of doing to the Democrats what the media do to Republicans every election cycle.”

Despite her full-throated defense of the President against leftist and media insanity, Resistance is Futile isn’t a Trump hagiography.  Coulter even describes the President as “utterly undisciplined” and “the crudest kind of braggart.”  In Coulter’s estimation, however, these flaws pale when compared with Trump’s failure to achieve his primary campaign promise, stopping illegal immigration.  Coulter ends her case with the less-than-sanguine hope that Trump may yet keep that promise but also with the consolation that if he accomplishes nothing else, “at least the media will be totally discredited.”

In sum, if you seek a detailed eye- and ear-catching review of news stories that have been misreported, distorted, or conveniently ignored due to Trump Derangement Syndrome, Resistance is Futile is the book for you.

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle 

Dinesh D'Souza Versus Critics of DEATH OF A NATION

Rule of thumb: If Rotten Tomatoes and most movie critics hate a political flick, it must be good!  One of those critics who hangs out at the website RogerEbert.com deemed Dinesh D'Souza's latest film, Death of a Nation, so "shabbily constructed and artistically bankrupt" that it hardly "qualifies as a movie in the first place."  Peter Sobczynski doesn't deal seriously with the film's core assertions, which he cavalierly dismisses as "cherry-picked facts" garnished by "overt omissions." 

Those two terms do serve well, alongside "blatant distortions," as descriptions of Sobczynski's review.  D'Souza's movie, for example, compares Donald Trump to Abraham Lincoln only in certain respects, primarily as an American president who faces tremendous political hostility that once again threatens to divide the Union.  P.S. repeats a canard that D'Souza has repeatedly demolished, including in this film, that the parties "switched positions" with respect to civil rights in the 1960s.  This widely accepted misrepresentation ignores the fact that a greater percentage of Republicans than Democrats supported the '64 Civil Rights bill (which was filibustered in the Senate by Southern Democrats) and that all but two of the hundreds of segregationist Dixiecrat legislators remained Democrats throughout their long careers, including former Klansman Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia.  D'Souza also notes that the Democrat George Wallace carried the Deep South in 1968, not Richard Nixon, whose Civil Rights initiatives are rigorously ignored by leftist historians and movie critics who incessantly push the "Southern strategy" narrative.

P.S. also ignores the boatload of historical cherries that clearly put Mussolini's fascism on the "left" or socialist side of the political spectrum and has nothing to say about its curious "right-wing" repositioning after World War II.  Hitler, like Mussolini, was a national socialist.  D'Souza provides in this film several additional "cherries" that illuminate the mutual admiration that existed for years between Mussolini and FDR, as well as a few nuggets that show embarrassing links between Germany's early Nazi years and Roosevelt's New Deal.  If P.S. has any intellectual curiosity about such things, it isn't communicated in his epithet-laden review.  For those individuals who might be interested, D'Souza provides reams of additional evidence about the leftist origins of fascism in his book The Big Lie.

Other "cherries" P.S. "overtly omits" from his review include the re-segregation of the White House by President Woodrow Wilson, that same Progressive Democrat's White House screening of D.W. Griffith's Klan-boosting The Birth of a Nation, and the blatantly racist aspects of Margaret Sanger's progressive eugenics-based organization, Planned Parenthood.  Needless to say, P.S. has nothing positive to say about Trump and adds for his mindless readers that D'Souza never mentions "the countless [unspecified] scandals surrounding the administration."   

From my own perspective, Death of a Nation does cover much of the material that was dealt with in D'Souza's prior films, but this "repetitious" objection doesn't seem to count against the hundreds of Watergate or McCarthy-era retellings that continue to titillate Democrats and the mainstream media.  Moreover, it certainly takes more than a few reiterations to drive home points that counter well established lies like "the parties switched in the '60s" and "fascism is on the right."  Another important point the film makes is that northern Democrats opposed the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution that outlawed slavery and granted citizenship and voting rights to blacks.  Consequently, the Civil War was not just a war of North versus South, but, in some respects, a war of anti-slavery Republicans against pro-slavery (or anti-abolition) Democrats who resided in both the North and the South.  

A completely new component of D'Souza's recent film is his interview with a white supremacist leader, Richard Spencer, whose favorite presidents include the founder of the Democratic Party, Andrew Jackson, and expansionist Democrat slave-owner James Polk.  Far from being a conservative, Spencer sees rights being bestowed on us by "the state" and not "by God or nature."  P.S. writes in his review that D'Souza "twists things around" to get Spencer to say "I guess I'm a Progressive," but what D'Souza actually does is point out how Spencer's political beliefs coincide with the state-centered philosophy of Progressivism.  The mainstream media portray Spencer as a leader of the "Alt-Right" animated by President Trump, who, despite media claims, has actually pursued a non-state-centered agenda. 

For those of us who have seen D'Souza's prior films, Death of a Nation may seem like more of the same, even if "the same" is stuff that's essential to the nation's survival.  For those who aren't familiar with D'Souza's work, Death of a Nation could be a revelatory moment that turns their political world upside-down.  At the very least, for those folks whose minds are at all open, it can be an invitation to explore whether ideas that most folks take for granted are actually true – and if they aren't true, how and by whom those lies came to be propagated.

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?" is available on Kindle.

We Have Overcome: An Immigrant’s Letter to the American People, by Jason Hill

We Have Overcome: An Immigrant’s Letter to the American People, by Jason Hill, Bombardier Books, New York, July 10, 2018 (192 pages, $19.07 Hardcover, $9.99 Kindle)

One can scarcely imagine the ideological venom generated among leftists by a well-spoken black professor with a doctorate in philosophy who has the temerity to make public statements like these: “Americans as a group of people are good people.  But hatred of the good for being good … has become a fashionable emotion among certain elitist groups who resent America and her people for such virtues.”  “America in the 21^st century is one essentially free of racial, ethnical, and religious clashes and violence among all her varied peoples.”  “America is a place of universal belonging. It is the prototype of what a benevolent universe looks like … It celebrates civic nationalism as the political principle that would forge a common identity among strangers and foreigners from disparate parts of the globe.”  “[A]n insidious cottage-industry of victimology [is] often predicated on black suffering and white guilt, guilt for past transgressions that whites have long atoned for as a group.”

If even a third of America’s black citizens shared the views of Jason Hill, a 1985 Jamaican immigrant to this country, the Democrat Party as currently constituted would not exist.   Consequently, Hill and black Americans with similar views are despised and vilified by “compassionate” Dems and by blacks who’ve embraced the “victim” status assigned to them by “alt-left” politicians and academicians like Cornel West and Ta-Nehisi Coates. This is how Professor Hill puts it: “Hell...hath no greater fury like a far-left-winger rejected for his or her redemptive gestures….  Because if the moral meaning and purpose of your existence as a far-left liberal rests on my suffering and victimization as a black person, then you will need me to suffer indefinitely in order to continue to cull some meaning and purpose from your life.” 

Beyond being labeled a traitor to his race, Hill suffered professionally for his non-racial, self-reliant, capitalist beliefs in the corrupt halls of academia.  In that setting Hill struggled mightily for admission to numerous graduate schools (despite having excellent qualifications) and was ultimately denied tenure by his “far-left, postmodern, Marxist-infected” colleagues (despite possessing a sterling teaching and publication record). Fortunately, this essentially “racist” decision for the “uppity” black professor was overturned by the university’s president who was, uncharacteristically, “a huge fan” of Hill’s work.

Adding fuel to the fire of leftist hatred is this hard-to-refute argument: “I adduce my own life as evidence of the utter nonsense of this [minorities-as-victims] narrative.”  That life included interactions with countless whites in and around Stone Mountain, Georgia -- an area once considered (and by leftists still considered) Klan country.  Here in the late-80s Caribbean families bought homes and conversed with neighbors “in utter fearlessness.”   “None of us ever missed a night’s sleep,” Hill notes.  Indeed, his grandmother went to an all-white church, “and soon she was its most beloved parishioner.”

In addition to his own experience, Hill relates with sympathy the stories of many non-white immigrant friends.  Dinesh, for example, was an “untouchable” in his native India but was “embraced as an equal” by Hill’s friends, a group that included “foreigners from all over the world” as well as white Southerners.  Hill provides the most detail when discussing the success story of Thai, a young Vietnamese man who couldn’t speak English but who, with the help of his friends, was able to learn enough of the language to gain admission to Georgia State University and later to open his own restaurant.  Thai, who ultimately graduated magna cum laude, accomplished all this with no help from his family in Vietnam -- “illiterate peasants too poor even to visit.”

Countless stories like Thai’s refute the assertion by black academicians like Ta-Nehisi Coates that the American Dream is an illusion -- that it is not only unattainable for blacks and immigrants but also a denial of their true cultural selves.  In a touching episode near the book’s end, Hill contacts Thai by phone twenty years later and is “shocked to hear the American twang in his accent.”  Thai, who made additional money in the stock market and real estate, had sold his “three restaurants” and moved to Los Angeles to be closer to his grandchildren.  All this success occurred after his first restaurant failed. When asked by Hill what he now thought about America, Thai replied, “America has brought me where I am.  I can’t imagine a world without, you know, this place.”  So much for Ta-Nehisi Coates and his America-hating cohorts.  

Hill’s love for America has as its logical corollary a passionate hatred for America’s corrupt universities.  “The biggest breach in this country,” Hill declares, “is not between blacks and whites.  It is between the intellectuals and the people.”  Put more succinctly, “The American professoriat hates America!”  Consequently, the author boldly declares a remedy that would do wonders were it actually implemented: “The solution is not just to defund the American humanities and social science departments in current universities, but to also shut them down entirely and rebuild them from scratch.”  Beyond seeking the unlikely defunding of these institutions by the government and alumni, Hill’s “rebuild from scratch” prescription appears to be, for all its rhetorical merit, a Dream too far. 

Overall, Hill’s book is marvelous for its use of personal details to bolster profound psycho-political insights. On occasions, however, the author’s academic language detracts from his mostly engrossing narrative.  This “scholarly” tilt often produces needlessly complex and extended formulations.  (The term “metaphysical,” for example, appears as a qualifier dozens of times.)  This problem unfortunately characterizes much of Hill’s introduction.  I would advise readers to skip all but the first few pages of that section and to read the intro in full after finishing the book.  One other problem I had was the insertion of material where Hill describes, with poetic sensitivity to be sure, his own battle with suicide -- a struggle that was not linked clearly to any professional or political issues and had a familial precedent.

That said, Hill’s book is well worth reading for its glowing tribute to America, its penetrating insight into the essentially racist mentality of the left, and its concrete examples of these two conclusions.     

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle