1960s revolutionist Bill Ayers is the godfather of both the violence in Portland and Seattle and the radical Democrats on Capitol Hill in D.C. This week, my column at Real Clear Politics exposes the two-pronged attack on society to bring about the communist revolution that Ayers always envisioned when he was “education secretary” of Students for a Democratic Society in 1969.
Capitol Hill in D.C. Is an Occupied Protest Zone, Too
By Frank Miele
If you wondered how America got to be a place where mobs on the street are considered to be “peaceful protesters,” you didn’t have to look any further than last week’s House Judiciary “hearing” with Attorney General William Barr.
The Democrats in control of the hearing were just as disrespectful and thuggish on Capitol Hill as their namesakes were two months ago in Seattle’s Capitol Hill Occupied Protest zone. Rep. Jerry Nadler and his band of duly elected radicals represented congressional decorum to the same extent that the goons throwing Molotov cocktails in Seattle and Portland represent “peaceful protest.” The fish rots from the head down.
The hearing got started with Nadler accusing Barr of twisting the Justice Department “into a shadow of its former self” and the tenor never improved. The Democratic inquisitors adopted the strategy of using their five minutes of questioning to instead browbeat Barr and then scold him for trying to respond or to defend himself. “Reclaiming my time” became the Democratic equivalent of “shut the hell up!”
Occasionally, Barr’s exasperation boiled to the surface. “This is a hearing,” he told Rep. Lou Correa after being cut off in the middle of an answer. “I thought I was the one who was supposed to be heard.”
Of course, Nadler and his gang don’t value politeness much. They mostly grew up in the 1960s and ’70s or later and are the spawn of the social revolution that began with the antiwar movement. As I have argued in my new book, “How We Got Here,” the roots of our contemporary decadence can be traced directly back to Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground terrorist organization. Although the Weather Underground disbanded, it didn’t disappear — rather its members and its revolutionary ideas were dispersed into every aspect of society. The Democrats in Congress who now praise violence against the most fundamental institutions of Western society — its courthouses and its police — are the result of a corrupt system largely invented by Ayers in his role as the unofficial curriculum guru of public education.
But Ayers always intended a two-pronged attack on society to bring about the communist revolution he envisioned. Violence on the streets was also an integral part of the plan. The revolutionary goal could be summed up in the title of a 1968 resolution put out by Students for a Democratic Society (the predecessor of Weather Underground). The resolution was titled enthusiastically “The Elections Don’t Mean Shit — Vote Where the Power Is — Our Power Is In The Street.”
That power — the power of the street — has been multiplied exponentially since then as the Internet, smartphones and a complicit media have been harnessed by radicals to greatly simplify the organizing and messaging of protests as a political tool.
It is so effective that the few remaining moderate Democrats are terrified of falling victim to the left-wing mob themselves — so much so that they have turned a blind eye to the destruction in our cities. It was just a few days before the hearing when Chairman Nadler told a reporter that the violence used by antifa in Portland was “a myth that’s being spread only in Washington, D.C.”
Not one Democrat on the committee challenged that blatantly false statement. Instead they doubled down on blaming Barr and President Trump for the violence. Barr had the guts to comment on this unholy alliance between Capitol Hill Democrats and the radicals on the streets.
“What makes me concerned for the country is this is the first time in my memory the leaders of one of our great two political parties, the Democratic Party, are not coming out and condemning the violence and the attack on federal courts,” he declared.
It’s not hard to see why Democratic elected officials are running scared. Just two years ago, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ambushed longtime Democrat powerbroker Joe Crowley in a House primary election that was supposed to be routine. Instead, AOC routed Crowley by 15 percentage points. This year, in case establishment Democrats didn’t get the message, progressive candidate Jamaal Bowman crushed old-school Eliot Engel in a neighboring New York City House district by a similar margin.
The “Justice Democrats” represented by Bowman and Ocasio-Cortez are part of the political arm of Black Lives Matter and antifa in the same way that Sinn Fein was the political arm of the Irish Republican Army. In a new wrinkle, Justice Democrats are running radical candidates against incumbent moderate Democrats to press their leftist agenda on climate change, defunding police, wide-open immigration and wealth redistribution. The success of Ocasio-Cortez and Bowman on the one hand, and the normalization of violence represented by antifa on the other, have changed the game — hopefully not permanently — for Democratic Party politics. Anything is fair game for them to turn into a weapon to hurt Republicans, and nothing seems capable of deterring them from their cancel-culture revolution.
Perhaps most concerning from last Tuesday’s hearing was a little-noted thrust by freshman Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell to try to intimidate Bill Barr into committing to holding the release of the so-called Durham Report until after the November election.
The misnomer is important. There is no such thing as a “Durham Report.” John Durham is the U.S. attorney for the District of Connecticut. He has been tasked by Barr to probe the origins of the bogus Trump-Russia investigation and to charge those who improperly used the Steele dossier for political purposes. We don’t need another rehash of the Horowitz Report (written by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz), which laid bare the multiple offenses committed against Trump but resulted in zero legal action taken. This time, we need accountability — indictments, prosecutions, convictions, and perhaps even jail time for the federal officials who broke the law.
In a very real sense, the modern FBI, the intelligence community, and the liberal bureaucrats in the Justice Department are even more important to the success of the Ayers revolution than the front people in Congress. They, plus the radical district attorneys being salted across the nation by George Soros-funded election campaigns, have the power to use the full weight of the government to still dissent and to punish opposition.
We saw that most powerfully in the run-up to, and aftermath of, the 2016 election when James Comey, John Brennan, and James Clapper conspired to keep Donald Trump out of the White House, and to remove him by any means necessary if he somehow defeated their anointed candidate, Hillary Clinton. If Durham is true to his own oath of office, he will not write a report, but will rather issue indictments to those responsible for persecuting Carter Page, Gen. Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Donald Trump Jr. and of course the president himself.
What Mucarsel-Powell and other Democrats are worried about is that if the American public finally learns the incontrovertible truth that Barack Obama and his vice president, Joe Biden, participated in an illegal campaign to prevent Trump from winning in 2016, then Biden is toast in 2020.
It’s no coincidence that Comey, disgraced FBI agent Peter Strzok, Mueller puppeteer Andrew Weissmann and several other anti-Trump conspirators have books coming out prior to the election. This is a continuation of the full-court press to remove Trump from the White House. The last thing they need is an actual court unsealing indictments against the “higher loyalty” crowd in time for voters to make an informed decision about the real election interference that took place in 2016.
Fortunately, Barr stood firm against the attempt to bully him. He is no Jeff Sessions. As Barr rightly pointed out, the outcome of Durham’s investigation against alleged coup plotters is about crimes, not about politics, and therefore should not be affected by department policy against public announcements that could have an undue political influence on an election.
“Any report will be, in my judgment, not one that is covered by the policy and that would disrupt the election,” the attorney general said.
Turns out that depends on what the meaning of “disrupt” is. For Democrats, anything that leads to the reelection of Donald Trump is a disruption. That’s why, for as long as they can get away with it, Democrats are going with the party line that the targeting of Trump by the Obama administration is (to borrow an apt phrase from Rep. Nadler) “a myth that’s being spread only in Washington, D.C.”
Something’s being spread in Washington, D.C., that’s for sure, but it’s way more pungent than a myth. My guess is that since there are so few bulls in the nation’s capital these days, it must be coming from the tail end of the Democrat donkeys.
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Heartland Diary is solely operated by Frank Miele, the retired editor of the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Montana. If you enjoy reading these daily essays, I hope you will consider purchasing one of my books. They are available through the following Amazon links. My new book is “How We Got Here: The Left’s Assault on the Constitution” and is now available in paperback and as an eBook. It is 536 pages long and chock full of research on the progressive movement and the patriotic heroes who have fought against it. My earlier books include “The Media Matrix: What if everything you know is fake?” and the “Why We Needed Trump” trilogy. Part 1 is subtitled “Bush’s Global Failure: Half Right.” Part 2 is “Obama’s Fundamental Transformation: Far Left.” Part 3 is “Trump’s American Vision: Just Right.” As an Amazon Associate, I may earn referral fees for qualifying purchases through links on my website. Also consider subscribing to Heartland Diary on YouTube by clicking here for News Every Conservative Can Use. My goal is to reach 1,000 subscribers.
