The United States must get serious about its own survival as a republic dedicated to protecting individual life and liberty.
If that strikes readers as a pessimistic first sentence, take a deep breath and compare polarized June 2022's American public faith in U.S. institutions -- just courts and freedom of speech in particular -- with the faith in those institutions expressed on Dec. 8, 1941, and Sept. 12, 2001.
In the 24 hours prior to those dates (12/7/1941 and 9/11/2001), foreign enemies bloodied U.S. soil with vicious surprise attacks calculated to threaten the physical existence of the U.S. republic and shock American citizens. Believing their divinely inspired wills were undefeatable, both Imperial Japan and Islamist al-Qaida gambled that "weak" Americans would panic and politically capitulate, to Japan's Co-Prosperity Sphere or Osama bin Laden's Global Caliphate.
Result: Bad gamble. Note Vladimir Putin's Russian juggernaut failed to blitzkrieg Ukraine. Why? Tyrannical leaders and their autocratic, violent systems "cancel-culture" opposing points of view and embrace imperialist fantasies and delusional certainties of victory.
In the case of 20th-century Communist states, they didn't have the mandate of God (they were and are atheists) but they had what they called "historical inevitability" -- which is a god in academic jargon. The Soviet Union cancel-cultured its internal critics, sending them to the gulag or executing them.
The USSR eliminated corrective feedback, and is now, to paraphrase Karl Marx, in the dustbin of history.
For whatever reason -- racial or religious arrogance; pseudo-intellectual pretense; clique cultural affectations -- autocracies assume some type of utopian superiority. Pursuing the dictatorship's utopia justifies silencing opposition feedback -- corrective feedback.
Like Hitler's Third Reich (a racist utopia), Xi Jinping's communist Chinese authoritarian utopia has concentration camps. Xi's utopia combines Marxism and ethnic Han racism. Strange conjunction? Not really -- absolute power breeds absolute contradictions and when the contradictions are challenged the authoritarians respond with more cancel culture and concentration camps.
Recommended
They can't stand any corrective feedback.
Hard fact: America's National Basketball Association overlooks Xi's camps and slave labor production of NBA-sponsored athletic shoes.
Why? The NBA has muy million Chinese video viewers. That may not qualify as bribery. However, allegations swirl that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has lured an NBA franchise owner or two into difficult billion-dollar investment tangles.
In the classical Chinese historical lens, the NBA functions as a neo-tributary nation. Instead of bringing gold and concubines to China's emperor, NBA owners and players selling shoes serve as a narrative warfare asset. Their kowtows get airtime on MSNBC and the BBC.
But the NBA's a carny sideshow. China's prime targets are American centers of power and knowledge. Check out Hunter Biden's laptop for the Biden Organization's China deals -- corrosive sleaze at the political top. Since April 2019 we've learned that Beijing has compromised several score U.S. research institutions and possibly hundreds of professors and technical science, medical and engineering personnel.
Bottom line: The sellout of fundamental American values by U.S. political and scientific elites for Chinese cash does strategic damage to America just as Pearl Harbor and 9/11 did psychological and operational damage. Professors; political creeps; the universities that debase and ignore American constitutional, political and cultural values -- these craven actors betray the values that underpin the free and productive system that spurred and supported their individual and corporate successes.
They also undermine the sources of America's domestic defense and international security.
Prussian strategic theorist Carl von Clausewitz described war as a clash of wills -- the will to win. The Ukrainians' will to win has sustained their country against great odds. They have faith in themselves and faith in a better future tied to Europe and the West.
However, faith in the U.S. system of "liberty and justice for all" has been denigrated for years by "critical theory" academics and leftist America-haters seeking power through destruction of American institutions.
Politically calculated attacks on police by hard Left district attorneys like San Francisco's Chesa Boudin threaten local security -- and glory be, as I finish this column it appears he lost his recall election. Good.
But we can't recall a bigoted jury decision.
The most lethal attack on U.S. internal cohesion is the emergence of a two-tiered system of justice where one party can cancel its opponents and pretend the cancellation was lawful. The most noxious example is the failure of a Washington, D.C. jury to convict Michael Sussman of lying to the FBI in the former President Donald Trump "Russia collusion" case. The collusion narrative was a Hillary Clinton campaign lie, which Sussman peddled. By lying to the FBI Sussman committed a federal crime.
But a D.C. jury let Sussman walk. Quote by the unnamed jury forewoman: "...I don't think it should have been prosecuted because I think we have better time or resources to use or spend to other things that affect the nation as a whole than a possible lie to the FBI."
Forewoman: you are a dangerous bigot and ultimately a threat to national unity. As investigative reporter John Solomon recently noted, Trump administration national security adviser Mike Flynn was pressured to plead guilty to lying to the FBI while the bureau's then-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was allowed to escape any punishment for allegedly lying during an internal investigation."
Given their politically corrupt local mores, D.C. Beltway juries cannot be trusted to decide hearings of national security import.
I recommend special prosecutor John Durham try the next Russia Collusion case in Lubbock, Texas.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member