Clinton’s Disgraceful Three-Headed Crime Has Compromised the FBI

Hillary played fast and loose—with both her system and the law

By Austin Bay • 10/03/16  

The first Clinton-Trump debate was Benghazi-less and all but criminality-less—but criminality wasn’t totally absent. In a brief exchange early in the debate, Donald Trump mentioned Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 missing emails.

“That was more than a mistake. That was done purposely. OK?” Trump said, adding, “when you have your staff taking the Fifth Amendment—taking the Fifth so they’re not prosecuted—when you have the man that set up the illegal server taking the Fifth, I think it’s disgraceful.”

Trump raised his hand. A high five? No. The Crooked Fifth. A gesture mimicking the act of swearing in a criminal court or before a congressional investigating committee that possesses the power to subpoena evidence and punish perjury.

The mainstream media and its Democrat operatives with bylines missed the significance of Trump’s raised palm, but I’ll bet the majority of viewers—Donald’s Deplorables, Hillary’s Utterly-Despicables and the undecideds—understood his gesture and reference. “Taking the Fifth” is what mobsters and other guilty real world crooks do when they know the DA or the congressional committee has the goods. Hollywood and television murder mysteries often portray “taking the Fifth” as a shameless and arrogant admission of guilt. As the guilty perp takes the Fifth, she grins sardonically, implicitly daring the cops, the prosecutors—perhaps an informed and non-Democrat presidential debate moderator, if there is such a creature—to prove the charge.

As a motif, taking the Fifth combines criminality and brazen evasion of justice. Trump’s gesture caught both in a single image. But then The Donald blew it and moved on.

In so doing Mr. Rookie Candidate missed an opportunity to force Ms. Perpetual Candidate—there, under the spotlights, on live television—to address the two great frauds she perpetrated during her stint as secretary of state in the Obama Administration.

* * *

Hillary’s two great frauds are linked at the hip… and cankles. I refer to The Great Benghazi Lie and the crime Democrat operatives-with-by-lines dub “The Email Scandal.”

Understand “The Email Scandal” is a befogging term employed to camouflage a complicated three-phased crime. This is the triple crime Trump called “disgraceful,” the crime upon crime upon crime that led Hillary’s aides and employees to “take the Fifth” to avoid implicating themselves in its linked illegalities and to avoid committing felony perjury in sworn testimony.

Media perjury? No problem. We can blame that on a short-circuit.

Felony perjury, however, is another matter. Even with a compromised FBI, felony perjury might have consequences. The House of Representatives began investigating the Benghazi attack and questioning the Obama Administration’s Great Benghazi Lie. Testimony wasn’t the only issue. The House had subpoena power. Providing inquisitive representatives and senators with Hillary’s Benghazi-related communications would expose the rogue email operation. Better start destroying evidence.

Hip and cankles. QED.

“Three-phased crime” accurately describes the linked illegalities, but it’s a dud headline. “Three-phased felony” is artsy—sounds like a court room accusation in aLaw and Order episode. The Triple Crime echoes horse-racing’s classy Triple Crown. The Triple Crown’s big time, and so are Hillary’s felonies.

But Hillary’s triple isn’t classy. It’s ugly. It’s a living monster that began in 2009 and continues. Thanks to the FBI’s compromised director, Jim Comey, and an obstruction of justice operation with tentacles throughout the Obama Administration, Hillary’s disgraceful Three-Headed Crime is on-going.

HILLARY’S THREE-HEADED CRIME

CRIME 1: The Server Head. Hillary made a calculated decision to establish an off-the-books communication system (rogue email server) that she controlled. The system was designed to evade laws regulating the retention of government documents and thus evade scrutiny and accountability. The document retention laws exist for several reasons. The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) that mainstream media types claim to love relies on these laws being enforced. Information tech specialist Bryan Pagliano and Hillary aide Cheryl Mills are Server Head’s human faces. The FBI gave both of them immunity in exchange for their cooperation in the FBI Director Jim Comey’s completely suspect investigation of Hillary’s Three-Headed Crime.

CRIME 1 immediately segued into CRIME 2: The Loose Lips Head. Hillary used her off-the-books and non-secure server system to transmit and analyze classified national security information—some of it highly classified.

Even compromised Jim Comey called her treatment of classified information “grossly negligent.” The law says gross negligence is criminal. That means Hillary committed a criminal act. Laws governing the handling of classified information exist for good reason—lives are at stake. The great World War 2 counter-intelligence poster reminded Americans that Loose Lips Sink Ships.

Hillary played fast and loose—with both her system and the law—so there’s no surprise the drip drip drip of accumulating evidence indicates her system was hacked. Hence poster for Loose Lips Head: Hillary whispering to Vladimir Putin.

CRIME 3: The Nixon Head. Let’s paste Richard Nixon’s face on The Nixon Head. Nixon Head is the criminal obstruction of justice perpetrated by Hillary and her key aides. It begins with The Big Hide. Hillary and her aides tried to hide evidence the rogue server existed and evidence they routinely mishandled of classified information.  If they thought the server was merely shady, they knew very well their mishandling of classified information was criminal. They ignored requests by State Department information technology personnel to use a secure system. The House Select Committee on Benghazi found evidence Hillary and her aides insistently ignored advice (from many sources, including career government personnel) that they comply with the communication and document retention rules.

Yes, the Benghazi investigation. When Congress asked for documents relating to Benghazi, Crime 3’s Big Hide morphed into The Big Destruction.

This post by Jonathan Turley includes a timeline suggesting the firm destroyed subpoenaed evidence at the request of Cheryl Mills and/or Bryan Pagliano. Remember them, the human faces of  Crime 1, The Server Head? Turley initially defended Comey’s July recommendation that Hillary not be prosecuted. I didn’t. Comey clearly sold out the rule of law. Now that he’s learned the FBI dished out fast and loose immunity deals, Turley has changed his mind. He is astonished that the Justice Department “would give immunity to the parties on both ends of those communications—guaranteeing that a criminal prosecution is no longer a real threat.” However, his initial defense helped buy Hillary time and helped Comey deflect criticism. Delay. Obstruct. Then more damning evidence appears—but time has moved on. The election is now less than six weeks away.

For evidence of the obstruction of justice and delay operation, plow through the Benghazi committee’s proposed report’s Part IV: COMPLIANCE WITH CONGRESSIONAL INVESTIGATIONS like I did and the mainstream media didn’t.

When the proposed report was released in late June, big media instantly dismissed it as “old news.” That was war on honesty. Three months have passed and Hillary’s obstruction of justice crime is current news. The bizarre immunity deals given to Hillary’s aides are current news. The disgrace of “taking the Fifth” is current news.

The Benghazi committee did a remarkable job of investigation and research in difficult circumstances. As you plow through Part IV—as you read the footnotes—you may get an inkling or two that committee Democrats sought to undermine and discredit the investigation. Why, at times, it appears committee Democrats were aiding Hillary’s obstruction of justice operation.

Why on earth would they do that?

*  *  *

“What did he know and when did he know it” became a Beltway chant duringNixon’s Watergate scandal.

The FBI’s jaw-dropping revelation that Barack Obama used a pseudonym when he communicated with Hillary on her outlaw system indicates the President knew the system existed and was shady.

While interviewing Hillary aide Human Abedin “investigators showed the aide an email exchange dated June 28, 2012 with the subject ‘Re: Congratulations!’ Abedin did not recognize the name of the sender. Once informed that the sender’s name is believed to be a pseudonym used by the president, Abedin exclaimed ‘How is this not classified?’” reads the FBI’s summary of the interview.

As the report notes, President Obama claimed he learned of Hillary’s rogue operation in 2013—from press reports.

Did President Obama himself willingly participate in The Big Hide? Did Compromised Comey sell out the law to protect both Hillary and Obama? In the Watergate scandal, the FBI’s second-in-command provided Washington Postreporters with evidence of Nixon’s malfeasance.

How far the G-Men have fallen. Hillary’s Three-Headed Crime has compromised the FBI.

SEE ALSO: THE ELECTION’S CORE ISSUE SINCE CLINTON DECLARED CANDIDACY IN 1808

Disclosure: Donald Trump is the father-in-law of Jared Kushner, the publisher of Observer Media.

Austin Bay is a contributing editor at StrategyPage.com and adjunct professor at the University of Texas in Austin. His most recent book is a biography of Kemal Ataturk (Macmillan 2011). Bay is a retired U.S. Army Reserve colonel and Iraq veteran. He has a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Columbia University.

Gangster Government = Wisconsin Dems

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected an appeal by three Democratic district attorneys seeking to revive a criminal investigation into Gov. Scott Walker’s recall campaign — effectively ending the legal wrangling over the four-year-old probe.
The decision marks a major victory for Walker and his Republican allies, who mounted a vigorous challenge to the secretive, so-called John Doe II investigation that involved investigators issuing dozens of subpoenas and seizing equipment and millions of documents from those under investigation.
In a statement Monday, Walker said the U.S. Supreme Court, Wisconsin Supreme Court and other judges have all reached the same conclusion — “that this investigation by prosecutors was without merit and thus must be ended.”
“I applaud the individuals and organizations who fought for and successfully defended their First Amendment rights against political opponents who wanted to silence them,” Walker said.
Eric O’Keefe, president of the Wisconsin Club for Growth, the tax-exempt organization at the center of Walker’s political operation to stave off the 2011 and 2012 recalls, called the case “a politically motivated attack and a criminal investigation in search of a theory.”
He told a conservative radio host Monday that Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm, whose office launched the investigation in August 2012, should be removed from office.
“We call upon the prosecutors to admit their wrongdoing and close their files,” O’Keefe said in a statement. “They should end their desperate rear-guard action, surrender these unlawfully seized materials, and submit to the lawful authority of the court system.”

It was Gangster Government all along.

57

FBI Colluded on Email 'Prosecution'

FBI Colluded with Democrats, Team Clinton on Email 'Prosecution'

 

BY MICHAEL WALSH OCTOBER 3, 2016 

The fix was in from the start, and we are now being governed by a gang of criminals. How else to explain this:

Immunity deals for two top Hillary Clinton aides included a side arrangement obliging the FBI to destroy their laptops after reviewing the devices, House Judiciary Committee sources told Fox News on Monday.

Sources said the arrangement with former Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills and ex-campaign staffer Heather Samuelson also limited the search to no later than Jan. 31, 2015. This meant investigators could not review documents for the period after the email server became public -- in turn preventing the bureau from discovering if there was any evidence of obstruction of justice, sources said.

The Republican-led House Judiciary Committee fired off a letter Monday to Attorney General Loretta Lynch asking why the DOJ and FBI agreed to the restrictive terms, including that the FBI would destroy the laptops after finishing the search. “Like many things about this case, these new materials raise more questions than answers,” Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., wrote in the letter obtained by Fox News.

That last remark would be funny if it were't so pathetic. The clueless Republicans -- like most Americans -- simply cannot bring themselves to realize what sort of government we are now living under. Destroying evidence? Impeding congressional inquiry? Granting immunity to some of the very persons likely involved in the crime?

The immunity deals for Mills and Samuelson, made as part of the FBI’s probe into Clinton’s use of a private email server when she served as secretary of state, apparently included a series of “side agreements” that were negotiated by Samuelson and Mills’ attorney Beth Wilkinson.

The side deals were agreed to on June 10, less than a month before FBI Director James Comey announced that the agency would recommend no charges be brought against Clinton or her staff. Judiciary Committee aides told FoxNews.com that the destruction of the laptops isparticularly troubling as it means that the computers could not be used as evidence in future legal proceedings, should new information or circumstances arise.

As PJ Media columnist Andrew McCarthy writes at NRO:

In a nutshell, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department permitted Hillary Clinton’s aide Cheryl Mills — the subject of a criminal investigation, who had been given immunity from prosecution despite strong evidence that she had lied to investigators — to participate as a lawyer for Clinton, the principal subject of the same criminal investigation. This unheard-of accommodation was made in violation not only of rudimentary investigative protocols and attorney-ethics rules, but also of the federal criminal law. Yet, the FBI and the Justice Department, the nation’s chief enforcers of the federal criminal law, tell us they were powerless to object. Seriously?

I genuinely hate this case. I don’t mind disagreeing with the Bureau, a not infrequent occurrence in my former career. But I am hardwired to presume the FBI’s integrity. Thus, no matter how much irregularities in the Clinton investigation have rankled me, I’ve chalked them up to the Bureau’s being hamstrung. There was no chance on God’s green earth that President Obama and his Justice Department were ever going to permit an indictment of Hillary Clinton.

And that's the bottom line. The Obama administration has corrupted and weaponized the major enforcement agencies of the federal government, including the IRS and the FBI, and now is reaching down to the local level in order to bring municipal police forces under Washington's control. As Andy says in the context of Islam, it's "willful blindness," and if we don't stop it on Nov. 8, expect things to get much, much worse very, very quickly.

ROTTEN FBI INVESTIGATION - Farce From the Beginning!

ROTTEN FBI INVESTIGATION: Glenn just linked to Andrew McCarthy’s NRO dissection of FBI Director Jim Comey’s flimflam investigation of Hillary’s criminal (grossly negligent) mishandling of classified information. McCarthy’s superb analysis deserves another link and quote. Like McCarthy, I too was once “hard-wired to presume the FBI’s integrity.” Note the past tense — “was once.” But not after this travesty. McCarthy is tough on Comey. Good. However, McCarthy’s language is much too diplomatic. Bad. The FBI participated in an obstruction of justice operation. McCarthy says so, albeit it with what strikes me as unwarranted delicacy.

But you might call Cheryl Mills, who was right by your side at the State Department while you were doing those things that got you jammed up, if your goal was to envelop those things in an obstructive fog of purported attorney-client privilege. The FBI was not required to treat a conspiracy to obstruct justice as if it were good-faith assistance of counsel. Nevertheless, co-conspirator Mills was laundered into lawyer Mills.

Comey’s investigation stank from the get-go. The FBI are the good guys but the good guys have gone crooked. Now Hillary’s blizzard of lies (William Safire’s term) have tarred the G-men. (Yeah, with Hillary a blizzard tars, stains and scars.) If Comey really wants to salvage the FBI’s reputation, he should either recommend indictment or resign — or better yet, do both.

115Posted at 11:08 pm by Austin Bay 

Obama's New Middle East (Transformed)

Obama's New Middle East

image: http://www.jewishworldreview.com/images/clear.gif

By Caroline B. Glick

Published Sept. 30, 2016

image: http://www.jewishworldreview.com/carics/obama_global_fireman.jpg?ref=relatedBox

 

The new Syria is being born in the rubble of Aleppo.

The eastern side of the city, which has been under the control of US-supported rebel groups since 2012, is being bombed into the Stone Age by Russian and Syrian aircraft.

All avenues of escape have been blocked. A UN aid convoy was bombed in violation of a fantasy cease-fire.

Medical facilities and personnel are being targeted by Russia and Syrian missiles and barrel bombs to make survival impossible.

It is hard to assess how long the siege of eastern Aleppo by Russia, its Iranian and Hezbollah partners and its Syrian regime puppet will last. But what is an all but foregone conclusion now is that eastern Aleppo will fall. And with its fall, the Russian-Iranian-Hezbollah-Assad axis will consolidate its control over all of western Syria.

For four years, the Iranians, Hezbollah and Bashar Assad played a cat and mouse game with the rebel militias.

Fighting a guerrilla war with the help of the Sunni population, the anti-regime militias were able to fight from and hide from within the civilian population. Consequently, they were all but impossible to defeat.

When Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to join the fight, he and his generals soon recognized that this manner of fighting ensured perpetual war. So they changed tactics. The new strategy involves speeding up the depopulation and ethnic cleansing of rebel-held areas. The massive refugee flows from Syria over the past year are a testament to the success of the barbaric war plan. The idea is to defeat the rebel forces by to destroying the sheltering civilian populations.

Since the Syrian war began some five years ago, half of the pre-war population of 23 million has been displaced.

Sunnis, who before the war comprised 75% of the population, are being targeted for death and exile. More than 4 million predominantly Sunni Syrians are living in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. More than a million have entered Europe. Millions more have been internally displaced. Assad has made clear that they will never be coming home.

At the same time, the regime and its Iranian and Hezbollah masters have been importing Shi’ites from Iran, Iraq and beyond. The process actually began before the war started. In the lead-up to the war some half million Shi’ites reportedly relocated to Syria from surrounding countries.

This means that at least as far as western Syria is concerned, once Aleppo is destroyed, and the 250,000 civilians trapped in the eastern part of what was once Syria’s commercial capital are forced from their homes and property, the Russians, Iranians, Hezbollah and their Syrian fig leaf Assad will enjoy relative peace in their areas of control.

By adopting a strategy of total war, Putin has ensured that far from becoming the quagmire that President Barack Obama warned him Syria would become, the war in Syria has instead become a means to transform Russia into the dominant superpower in the Mediterranean, at the US’s expense.

 

In exchange for saving Assad’s neck and enabling Iran and Hezbollah to control Syria, Russia has received the capacity to successfully challenge US power. Last month Putin brought an agreement with Assad before the Duma for ratification. The agreement permits – indeed invites – Russia to set up a permanent air base in Khmeimim, outside the civilian airport in Latakia.

Russian politicians, media and security experts have boasted that the base will be able to check the power of the US Navy’s Sixth Fleet and challenge NATO’s southern flank in the Mediterranean basin for the first time. The Russians have also decided to turn their naval station at Tartus into something approaching a fullscale naval base.

With Russia’s recent rapprochement with Turkish President Recip Erdogan, NATO’s future ability to check Russian power through the Incirlik air base is in question.

Even Israel’s ability to permit the US access to its air bases is no longer assured. Russia has deployed air assets to Syria that have canceled Israel’s regional air superiority.

Under these circumstances, in a hypothetical Russian-US confrontation, Israel may be unwilling to risk Russian retaliation for a decision to permit the US to use its air bases against Russia.

America’s loss of control over the eastern Mediterranean is a self-induced disaster.

For four years, as Putin stood on the sidelines and hedged his bets, Obama did nothing. As Iran and Hezbollah devoted massive financial and military assets to maintaining their puppet Assad in power, the Obama administration squandered chance after chance to bring down the regime and stem Iran’s regional imperial advance.

For his refusal to take action when such action could have easily been taken, Obama shares the responsibility for what Syria has become. This state of affairs is all the more infuriating because the hard truth is that it wouldn’t have been hard for the US to defeat the Iranian- Hezbollah axis. The fact that even without US help the anti-regime forces managed to hold on for four years shows how weak the challenge posed by Iran and Hezbollah actually was.

Russia only went into Syria when Putin was absolutely convinced that Obama would do nothing to stop him from dislodging America as the premier global power in the region.

As Michael Ledeen recalled earlier this week, Obama chose to stand on the sidelines in Syria because he wanted to make friends with Iran. Obama began his secret courtship of the mullahs even before he officially took office eight years ago.

After the war broke out in Syria, midway through his first term and in the following years, the Russians and the Iranians told the obsessed American president that if he took action against Assad, as strategic rationality dictated, he would get no nuclear deal, and no rapprochement with Tehran.

So Obama let Syria burn. He let Iran and Hezbollah transform the country into their colony. And he let Putin transform the Mediterranean into a Russian lake. Obama enabled the ethnic cleansing of Syria’s Sunni majority, and in turn facilitated the refugee crisis that is changing the face not only of the Middle East but of Europe as well.

And as it turns out, the deal with Iran that Obama willingly sacrificed US control of the Mediterranean to achieve has not ushered in a new era of regional moderation and stability through appeasement as Obama foresaw. It has weakened US credibility with its spurned Sunni allies. It has undermined the strategic position of Israel, the US’s only 

stable and reliable regional ally. It has financially and strategically fueled Iran’s hegemonic rise throughout the region. And it has facilitated Iran’s development of a nuclear arsenal.

Far from causing the Iranian to become more moderate, the nuclear deal has radicalized the regime still further.

On Wednesday Ray Takeyh wrote in The Washington Post that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is now grooming Ibrahim Raisi, a fanatic who makes Khamenei look moderate, to succeed him in power.

On Monday night, for the first time, Israel Air Force jets flying over Syria were shot at by Syrian anti-aircraft ordnance.

Air force sources told the media that the aircraft were never in danger and the munitions were only shot off after the aircraft had returned to Israel and were in the process off landing.

The fact that no one was hurt is of course reassuring.

But the fact that Russia targeted the planes makes clear that Putin has decided to send Israel a very clear and menacing message.

He is now the protector of the Iranian-Hezbollah colony on our northern border. If Israel decides to preemptively attack targets belong to that colony, Russia will not stand by and watch. And with the US no longer well-positioned to challenge Russian power in the region, Israel will have to deal with Russia on its own.

To face this challenge, Israel needs to look beyond its traditional reliance on air power.

There are two parts of the challenge. The first part is Iran.

As far as Israel is concerned, the problem with the Russian- Iranian takeover of Syria is not Putin.

Putin is not inherently hostile to Israel, as his Soviet predecessors were. He is an opportunist. Obama gave him the opportunity to partner with Iran in asserting Russian dominance in the Middle East and he took it. Israel is threatened by the alliance because it is threatened by Iran, not by Putin. To neutralize the alliance’s threat to its own security, Israel then needs to degrade Iran’s power, and it needs to emphasize its own.

To accomplish these goals, Israel needs to operate in two completely separate arenas. To weaken Iran, Israel should take its cue from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, and from its own past successful military ties to the Kurds of Iraq in the 1960s and 1970s.

Israel needs to deploy military trainers beyond its borders to work with other anti-Iranian forces. The goal of that cooperation must be to destabilize the regime, with the goal of overthrowing it. This may take time. But it must be done. The only way to neutralize the threat emanating from the new Syria is to change the nature of the Iranian regime that controls it.

As for Russia, Israel needs to demonstrate that it is a power that Putin can respect in its own right, and not a downgraded Washington’s sock puppet.

To this end, Israel should embark on a rapid expansion of its civilian presence along its eastern border with Syria and with Jordan. As Russia’s air base in Syria undermines Israel’s air superiority and reliance on air power, Israel needs to show that it will not be dislodged or allow its own territory to be threatened in any way. By doubling the Israeli population on the Golan Heights within five years, and vastly expanding its population in the Jordan Valley, Israel will accomplish two goals at once. It will demonstrate its independence from the US without harming US strategic interests. And it will reinforce its eastern border against expanded strategic threats from both the Golan Heights and the new Jordan with its bursting population of Syrian and Iraqi refugees.

It is ironic that the new Middle East is coming into focus as Shimon Peres, the failed visionary of a fantasy- based new Middle East, is being laid to rest. But to survive in the real new Middle East, Israel must bury Peres’s belief that peace is built by appeasing enemies along with him. The world in which we live has a place for dreamers.

But dreams, unhinged from reality, lead to Aleppo, not to peace.

Read more at http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0916/glick093016.php3#AytrC6SAtOk95g7z.99

Obama’s Blinkered Generals.

JED BABBIN: Obama’s Blinkered Generals.

Earlier versions of the NMS have followed the guidance set in Obama’s National Security Strategy and the National Counterterrorism Strategy by avoiding mention of Islamic ideology in an effort to avoid the responsibility of having to plan to defeat it. The 2016 version evidently won’t be any better. It will, for example, use the bowdlerized term “violent extremist organizations” instead of “Islamic terrorist networks.”
(This is more than a semantic exercise. The Department of Homeland Security has defined Violent Extremist as “an individual who supports or commits ideologically-motivated violence to further political goals,” thereby including right wing extremists having no connection to Islamic terrorism.)
Since 9/11 we haven’t defeated any of the terrorist networks in part because we haven’t even attempted to defeat their ideology. President Obama, in July 2009, said that he is uncomfortable using the word “victory” to describe the United States’ goal in Afghanistan. He said the U.S. fight there is against terrorism and not a nation.

Read the whole thing.
I’d add that there doesn’t seem to be much threat of a “victory” in Afghanistan, and that there never was. The war there has been largely a distraction since about mid-2002, and an increasingly expensive distraction since about January, 2009.
I’d also add that Obama has doubled down on Bush’s failures (as described above by Babbin), and purposely squandered Bush’s successes. That’s one hell of “a mess” Obama’s successor will inherit in January.

Obama’s Blinkered Generals.

28Posted at 8:32 am by 

The Construct of the White Working-Class Zombies - VDH

The Construct of the White Working-Class Zombies

September 28, 2016 9:56 am / Leave a Comment / victorhanson

Hillary Clinton’s ‘deplorables’ have their antecedents in Obama’s ‘deplorables.’

By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

One of the strangest transformations in the era of Obama has been the overt and often gratuitous stereotyping of so-called white people — most often the white working classes who have become constructed into veritable unthinking and unrecognizable zombies. For progressives especially these were not the sympathetic old foundation of the Democratic party, who were once romanticized as the “people” pitted against the industrialists and the bluestockings, but rather have become monstrous caricatures of all sorts of incorrect race/class/and gender behavior and speech.

Stranger still, this disparagement was concurrent to the release of a variety of recent studies that have shown that the white working class has been “losing ground” in far more dramatic terms than have other ethnic groups, especially in key areas such as health and life expectancy. Such news might once have earned liberal sympathies rather than derision. Odder still, the so-called one percenters — that includes high percentages of whites, who have benefited from globalization and changes in the U.S. economy — are often precisely those who damn the less fortunate for supposedly enjoying racially based privileges that are largely confined to themselves.

From ‘tricks’ to ‘clingers’
Obama himself had long ago made popular the idea that there are not individual white people, good and bad, lazy and industrious, but more generally a collective Borg of racist and culpable “white people.” Or, as he characterized his own “effective” tricks over clueless whites in his admittedly fictional memoir Dreams from My Father, “it was usually an effective tactic, another one of those tricks I had learned: [White] People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves.”

The president himself repeatedly amplified this emphasis on clueless retrograde whites during his two presidential campaigns, which in toto can be fairly characterized as a refutation of his earlier admirable 2004 speech at the Democratic convention (‘There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America — there’s the United States of America”).

Indeed, on a number of occasions during the 2008 campaign, Obama reverted to the “white men” tropes earlier found in Dreams from My Father and commonly heard in Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity Church. In Obama’s much heralded March 2008 apologia (“A More Perfect Union”) for intimacy with the racist Reverend Wright, he drew a moral equivalence between the racist firebrand Wright and his own grandmother, who had sacrificed to send him to prep school (“I can no more disown him [Wright] than I can my white grandmother”).

When later he was called on equating Wright’s racism with his clueless grandmother’s supposed racist fears of being alone on a street with young African-American males (in the manner that progressives such as Jesse Jackson, Mark Cuban, and Lena Dunham have similarly confessed), Obama further dismissed her with the curt remark that “she is a typical white person, who, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn’t know, you know, there’s a reaction that’s been bred in our experiences that don’t go away and that sometimes come out in the wrong way, and that’s just the nature of race in our society.” In a public reading of Dreams From My Father in Cambridge, Mass., in September 1995, a young Obama emulated his prejudicial grandmother’s supposedly nerdy white accent.

“Typical” (along with “they” and “them”) is a favorite stereotyping adjective of Obama’s and reappeared recently during his Laos trip, when he blasted Americans as racist: “Typically, when people feel stressed, they turn on others who don’t look like them.” That invoked memories of his clinger speech eight years earlier. After losing the Pennsylvania primary, Obama generalized the white working classes as mindless zombies of a xenophobic and racist sort who had not supported his candidacy: “And it’s not surprising, then. They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

In repeatedly emphasizing “they” and “them,” Obama sought to reinvent the country into two groups — one, a noble if not long-suffering ascendant coalition of various aware racial minorities, aided by largely sympathetic but naïve and condescending well-meaning whites. The other half were the “lazy” Americans who in times of economic stress “typically” revealed their innate ignorance through racism and nativism.

The Deplorables, B+ers, and Such
Since then, such progressive disparagement of so-called whites has become pro forma, as campuses and popular culture have become emboldened by Obama’s imprimatur. Most recently, Obama’s “clingers” reemerged as Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables”:

You know, to just be grossly generalistic [sic], you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people — now 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.

Ironically the white working classes whom Hillary now had written off as “not America” and “irredeemable” (if so, what ultimately are we to do with such reprobate zombies who are incapable of ever being reeducated or saved?) were precisely those whom as a candidate in 2008 she had sought to pander to along racial lines to counteract Obama’s own race-based appeals:

Senator Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me. . . . There’s a pattern emerging here. . . . These are the people you have to win if you’re a Democrat in sufficient numbers to actually win the election. Everybody knows that.

In our new age of racial polarization, few have been quite as crude as Minnesota governor Mark Dayton, who lashed out at any Minnesotans who questioned the wisdom of allowing into his state mostly unvetted refugees from Somalia, a few with demonstrable Islamist ties: “If you are that intolerant, if you are that much of a racist or a bigot, then find another state. Find a state where the minority population is 1 percent or whatever.” Then Dayton zeroed in with contempt for the white working class: “Our economy cannot expand based on white, B+, Minnesota-born citizens. We don’t have enough.”

What are we to make of the clingers, the deplorables, and B+ whites? What, for example, were Dayton’s criteria in labeling white B+ers as intrinsically less admirable (or valuable?) than immigrants from Somalia?

Low Expectations and Zombie Corpses
The new normal is to double down on such pejorative stereotyping, on the assumption that there is such a thing as a typically culpable white person, that such a person is mostly a foul creature deserving of condemnation, and that there is only an upside is saying just that. Or as Ta-Nehisi Coates phrased such disdain in supposedly high-brow fashion: “When people who are not black are interested in what I do, frankly, I’m always surprised. . . . I don’t know if it’s my low expectations for white people or what.”

The low-brow version of Coates’s hard bigotry of low expectations is something akin to Kendrick Lamar’s (the president recently gushed over Lamar at the White House) album cover of a mutilated corpse of a white judge (replete with xed-out zombie eyes), amid young African-Americans toasting his demise on the White House lawn. And of course the lowest-brow manifested itself in something like the recent video, taken during the rioting in Charlotte, of a white bystander who was chased into a parking garage, stripped, and kicked unmercifully on the ground by black youths — apparently a sidebar to the ongoing protests against racism.

The white working classes are increasingly the butt of popular caricature. They are the grammatically incorrect, dentally challenged, and obese who inhabit reality-televisions shows of the last decade, such as Ice Road Truckers or Ax-Men or the hunting, fishing, and survivalist loser vignettes set in Sarah Palin’s Alaska. SometimesNew York Times reporters or columnists, in the role of cultural anthropologists, venture out in the field to do survey work and to report back how strange such folk are who live between the coastal corridors.

For all the charges of Islamophobia in Hollywood, today’s collective villains are not so much jihadists, Communist Chinese, or even bluestocking conniving corporationists but increasingly demented and tattooed right-wing white nihilists — sometimes inept buffoons from rural America, sometimes Russian criminal psychopaths disfigured with full-body tattoos and struggling with sinister accents, and even sometimes the sun-burnt white racist remnants from South Africa or the Old Confederacy, with properly Germanic accents or Southern drawls.

What is behind the new disparagement of the white working classes?

Useful Know-Nothings
One reason for the new stereotyping is simply careerism and demography. The construction of a xenophobic monolithic white know-nothing class empowers a notion of an antithetical and ascendant collective “non-white” nation. The idea, common in the Obama campaigns of 2008 and 2012 (e.g., “get in their faces,” “punish ourenemies”), was that illiberal whites can help to establish commonalities among otherwise often disparate Asians, blacks, and Latinos, who are supposedly fashioning a “new America” from the shrinking and embittered old white world. When the nation is no longer 90 percent white and 10 percent black but rather 70 percent white, 20 percent minorities, and 10 percent “other,” how else can an us–them reductionist dichotomy be maintained that pays any political dividends? In 2016 progressive thinking, a wealthy Punjabi broker, an Asian ophthalmologist, and an inner-city resident apparently are all to share a common un-white status that transcends their own class and race differences — and any idea that they are all unique individuals who do not define their existences by their appearances.

Sometimes the idea of non-white solidarity was taken to Orwellian lengths. Recall the buzz word “white” as used by the New York Times to demonize the half-Peruvian George Zimmerman. When Zimmerman was reinvented as a “white Hispanic,” the Trayvon Martin case was not seen as a brawl between two people of color. Obama himself, of course, whose mixed ancestry mirror-images Zimmerman’s, would call racist any similar attempt by the Times to suggest that he was a “white African American.” But certainly with the aid of reversed linguistic gymnastics, a Barry Soetoro might have once seemed whiter than had George Zimmerman used his Hispanicized and maternal nomenclature, Jorge Mesa.

White progressive elites also explain much of the disparagement. By focusing on the supposed racism of the working classes, they find exemption for their own often exclusionary lives. Paula Deen’s long ago insensitive racial epithet was nearly a career-ending gaffe, whereas the nation simply shrugged off the more recent and racist characterization of Barack Obama in 2008 by then senators Joe Biden and Harry Reid. Saturday Night Live, worried about the appearance of its nearly all-white cast, just hired a “Latina” comedian who in preemptory fashion deleted 2,000 tweets that had illustrated her own racial stereotyping of black men and Asians in general.

Those with real “white privilege” can both alleviate guilt and navigate around the ramifications of their own racialist ideologies by expressing outrage at supposedly unrepentant Confederates and hillbillies — and, more recently, Trump supporters. I know hundreds of working-class whites in rural central California and have not heard racial slurs from any of them. But then again, none stereotype other white people as “deplorable” in the fashion of Hillary Clinton in 2016. Maybe because none ever traffic in the race vocabulary of “white people,” in the fashion that Hillary Clinton did in 2008, they now feel no need to do so to demonize them.

Cowardice too plays a role. It is much easier to blast faceless white supposed Neanderthals from afar when proximate whites are frequently the sensitive metrosexuals and pajama boys of the Yale campus, in the MSNBC green room, or among the Washington press corps. When a Princeton environmental-studies major confesses to her white privilege, she seeks exemption for her own apartheid by suggesting that white racists are epidemic in places she has never visited.

Speaking truth to power is not chastising those of the same elite class but rather venturing to a Bakersfield NASCAR race or a rural Ohio fairground to blast “white privilege.”

Certainly Obama would not travel to Utah to caricature an audience as typically lazy and uninformed when it is so much easier to do so in Laos among the traveling White House press corps. Many minority politicians, journalists, and writers are of the class identical to that of their culpable white counterparts, and all have become accustomed to stereotyping without any verbal pushback. It is not incongruous, but logical, in such an elite world for Colin Powell in his hacked e-mails to play his race card while caricaturing “poor white folks” and thus blasting Trump as a pariah — all the while name-dropping at the Hamptons and Bohemian Grove and whining that Hillary Clinton’s jacked-up campus-lecture fees imperiled his own.

Finally, life is too confusing for the new racialists without an old demonized Other. Only that way can 64 percent of the white vote for Trump be seen as racist in a way that 95 percent of the black vote for Obama was not. If a female cop shoots a black suspect in Tulsa or a black policeman shoots a black suspect in Charlotte, how do the racial mechanics work out if there is not a large amorphous clinger-and-deplorable class to fall back on as the root cause that supposedly prompts such racist violence? White racism trumps free will. Cops of color in police departments headed by black chiefs can incite riots if they shoot black suspects precisely because ignorant racist whites created the rules by which the more enlightened were tragically forced to play.

In a new world of racially segregated dorms, racially safe spaces on campus, and racial preferences for the children of Eric Holder and Jorge Ramos, one needs a quite unattractive white working class other than the sympathetic multimillionaire cadre of a John Kerry, Chelsea Clinton, or George Soros. In that context, the Clingers, the Deplorables, and the B+ers of America’s vast loser interior serve well enough.