@VDHanson - Victor Davis Hanson

Who Are the Real Insurrectionaries? Part Three For four years, there followed serial, often illegal, efforts to ensure that a now President Trump failed and was not to be reelected—most notably by the 3-year-long Russian “collusion” hoax, finally and reluctantly debunked by a $40 million, 22-month sideshow investigation of Robert Mueller’s “dream team”. No matter, soon followed the Hunter laptop “Russian disinformation” hoax, in which the FBI and “51 former intelligence authorities” sought deliberately to mislead voters on the eve of a debate and election, by first lying to the public, and then hiring out social media censors to suppress accurate news accounts that the laptop was indeed genuine. Recall too “Anonymous.” He was later revealed to be Miles Taylor, a relatively minor Homeland Security official, whom the media nevertheless had inflated into a “major” Trump appointee, heroically and internally disrupting the business of the Trump administration. Taylor earned star status, a New York Times op-ed, and a book deal, as he boasted that “The dilemma -- which (Trump) does not fully grasp -- is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations. I would know. I am one of them." Frustrate an agenda?—as in free-lancing by deliberately blocking an elected president’s order? We know that Trump’s “worst” homeland security “inclinations,” in retrospect included the internal efforts to stop Trump’s efforts to build a wall to restore border security, to stop catch-and-release, and to redirect refugee appeals to one’s home country. Then there was the legion of retired 4-stars who violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice by claiming Trump was Hitlerlike, a veritable Mussolini, enacting Auschwitz-like policies, a liar, who should be removed the “sooner the better”, and on and on. The call of premature removal by a distinguished admiral was reminiscent of a similar urging from Obama-era Pentagon lawyer Rosa Brooks. Just 11 days after the Inauguration (that witnessed mass and often violent anti-Trump demonstrations, and Madonna’s “dream” speech of “blowing up” the White House), Brooks called for Trump to be removed either by impeachment, the 25th-Amendment, or a military coup. Still again that scenario was reiterated by retired officers John Nagl and Paul Yingling, who in August 2020, three months before the election, called on Gen. Mark Milley, Chair of the Joint Chiefs, to order the military to intervene to ensure Trump was escorted out of the White House. As for Chairman Mark Milley’s own China phone-call caper, Res ipsa loquitur.