What They Do When Threatened

     If you dare to threaten a ruling Establishment -- in any way -- it will do whatever it takes to bring you down. Below are some examples.

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     More public officials and civil servants are opposed to same-sex marriages than one might imagine. One such is Judge Vance Day, a county court judge in Oregon. As Brendan Eich and others would tell you, the Sodomite Brigade can’t abide any sort of opposition, much less from a sitting judge, so it publicized, acontextually, the photo of Adolf Hitler that hangs in the judge’s courthouse. Yes, such a photo is there. Many readers were shocked to learn of it. But does it mean Judge Day is a Hitler admirer?

     According to [spokesman Patrick] Korten, it was part of a World War II display. “We went to war against Hitler,” Korten told Reuters. “His picture was there. It was not admiringly. It was him as the epitome of the enemy that we went to fight against.”

     A photograph of the display has now surfaced, and appears to bear out this story. While Hitler’s image is unusually large, it is surrounded by American veterans’ memorabilia.

     A bit like calling baby photos “child pornography,” isn’t it?

     Do not doubt it: the homosexual activists are part of today’s Establishment. Note how widely they’re feared. There are good reasons to fear them.

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     Donald Trump has the Establishment’s knickers in a twist. He’s pulling record crowds, speaking the unspeakable and challenging the kingmakers’ power to decide who gets the next turn at bat. But his life is an open book. Everyone knows everything there is to know about him. What to do, what to do... Ah! This will do it! Associate his father with the Ku Klux Klan!

     Read the article. Note that there isn’t one bald assertion in it that Donald Trump is a Klansman, or even that his father was. The article even admits this:

     To be clear, this is not proof that Trump senior—who would later go on to become a millionaire real estate developer—was a member of the Ku Klux Klan or even in attendance at the event.

     The insinuation is effective because of readers’ tendency to stop after a paragraph or two, and to infer what has not been said. It’s an exceptionally clever and unusually vicious technique for slandering the living by defaming the dead. But the Establishment, however clean its hands might appear, has a sufficiency of cat’s-paws to put to such a task.

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     If there’s anything an Establishment cannot abide, it’s the assertion that its decrees are subordinate to a higher law. Therefore, an Establishment will always be hostile to Christianity, especially the oldest and best rooted of all the Christian denominations, Catholicism.

     Cast your memory back a few years, to the making of Mel Gibson’s “controversial” movie The Passion of the Christ. New York Times columnist Frank Rich, arguably the lowest life form ever to be allowed regular space in a major newspaper, was unrestrained in his attacks on Gibson and his project. He descended even lower than his venomous norm by attacking Gibson’s father, who had expressed anti-Semitic views:

     New York Times columnist Frank Rich hasn't seen Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ but he already knows it's insincere. "I have no first-hand way of knowing whether the film is benign or toxic and so instead must rely on eyewitnesses," he writes. If Jerry Falwell attacked a film through "eyewitnesses," Rich would knit his brows over such a lunging affront to "art". But it is okay for Rich to do, because "I am one of the many curious Jews who have not been invited to press screenings of 'The Passion.'"...

     Rich's column is titled (in one edition) "Chutzpah and spiritual McCarthyism." It sounds autobiographical but it isn't. Rich can describe a film as anti-Semitic without seeing it, can smear it through "eyewitnesses," without falling into spiritual McCarthyism apparently. He can also attack Gibson's faith through an attack on Gibson's father's faith without falling into it.

     Mind you, this was at a time when Gibson (like Jim Caviezel, the actor who played Jesus) was still a remarkable exception to the Hollywood norm: a devout Catholic. Indeed, he arranged for Mass to be said on the set before each day’s filming, deeming it an important preparatory step for so delicate and sacred a project. The attacks on Gibson and his father by Rich, the ADL’s Abe Foxman, and other Establishment figures helped to unhinge him, precipitating him into the subsequent behavior spiral that included his descent into alcoholism and the abandonment of his wife.

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     Every Establishment seeks the utter destruction of every last opponent. An Establishment doesn’t seek to win arguments over rights or public policy; it seeks to maintain and enlarge its power. Power is inherently intolerant of opposition. It cannot abide even unexpressed dissent. If it could, it would consign its opponents to the custody of an American O’Brien:

     'You are a flaw in the pattern, Winston. You are a stain that must be wiped out. Did I not tell you just now that we are different from the persecutors of the past? We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us: so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. We make him one of ourselves before we kill him. It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be. Even in the instant of death we cannot permit any deviation. In the old days the heretic walked to the stake still a heretic, proclaiming his heresy, exulting in it. Even the victim of the Russian purges could carry rebellion locked up in his skull as he walked down the passage waiting for the bullet. But we make the brain perfect before we blow it out. The command of the old despotisms was "Thou shalt not". The command of the totalitarians was "Thou shalt". Our command is "Thou art". No one whom we bring to this place ever stands out against us. Everyone is washed clean.

     As matters stand, our Establishmentarians must settle for its opponents’ utter degradation and destruction. How very sad.

     Let Glenn Reynolds, our beloved Instapundit, provide the summation:

     This is who they are. This is what they do.

     Remember that.