Remember Peggy Noonan’s 2016 column about the “Donald Trump and the Rise of the Unprotected”? Well, in my new column at Real Clear Politics, I take a look at the 2020 election as the sequel: “Revenge of the Protected Class.” Will this country’s elites be able to crush the Trump revolution? We’ll have a pretty good idea in one week, but Big Tech, the Intelligence Community and the Democrats have pulled out all the stops to put “their guy” Joe Biden in the White House.
Revenge of the Protected Class
By Frank Miele
The intellectual dishonesty is breathtaking.
Exhibit A is Rep. Adam Schiff, the maestro of all things Russian. When President Trump was being investigated, having information from Russia was considered top-of-the-line evidence of wrongdoing. Don’t forget that almost all of the damaging claims in the infamous “Steele dossier” were supplied to a Brit by Russians.
But now that Joe Biden’s behavior has come under (grudging and belated) scrutiny, the mere possibility of information originating in Russia is a get-out-of-jail-free card. If it looks for all the world like Joe Biden is a crook, then just lie and say the information came from Russia. The “watchdogs” in the media shriek and run the other way.
Seems like a double standard, doesn’t it? Except the Democrats don’t have any standards at all. They will do and say absolutely anything to gain or hold power. For them, in the words of George Orwell, “Power is not a means; it is an end.”
Before the Russia Hoax in 2016, there were the Hillary Clinton emails. You know, the work product of the secretary of state that was being stored on a private server, against federal law, and then was in large part destroyed in response to a congressional subpoena. But then-FBI Director James Comey unilaterally cleared Clinton of wrongdoing because … well, just because. Because ultimately she was Hillary Clinton and you aren’t.
Peggy Noonan wrote about the unexpected success of Donald Trump in February 2016 in a column titled “Donald Trump and the Rise of the Unprotected.” Although this was before Comey’s extraordinary exoneration of Clinton, the concept Noonan proposed of a new “political dynamic” explained not just why Clinton never faced criminal charges but also why she doesn’t inhabit the White House.
“There are the protected and the unprotected,” Noonan declared. “The protected make public policy. The unprotected live in it.”
She defined the protected as “the accomplished, the secure, the successful — those who have power or access to it. They are protected from much of the roughness of the world. More to the point … they’re insulated from many of the effects of their own decisions.”
The unprotected, of course, are the rest of us. Noonan tied her analysis of Trump’s ascendancy to the rise of the unprotected. “The unprotected are starting to push back, powerfully,” she said, and she was right, but the protected were not through. Trump had promised to drain the swamp, but when he assumed office, he discovered that the swamp creatures were ready and willing to fight back to hold on to their power. Whether it was the Mueller probe, the fake impeachment for daring to ask questions about Biden corruption in Ukraine, or just the endless leaks, the Trump administration was under constant attack by the Military-Media-Congressional-Intelligence Complex.
No matter how much Trump fought back, he always seemed to lose ground. More and more, it was obvious that Noonan was being generous in her assessment of the “protected.” They aren’t just protected. They are immune. They are exempt.
The exempt class doesn’t have to play by the rules. They do what they want, regardless of whether it is legal or not, regardless of whether it is moral or not, because they know they can get away with it.
Take the case of Cal Cunningham (pictured above), the decorated military officer and lawyer who is running for Senate against incumbent Republican Thom Tillis in North Carolina. According to his campaign website, Cunningham “will take on the corruption in Washington and stand up for North Carolinians,” even while Cunningham engaged in corruption of his own by carrying on an affair with the wife of a wounded veteran.
The result? Despite being under investigation by the U.S. Army, Cunningham remains atop the polls, and could very well be headed to D.C. in January as the next exempt politician to join the Senate. There are plenty of them, including Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, who lied about serving “in Vietnam” when he actually did all of his service as a Marine Corps reservist while stateside. Now he’s in Congress where his specialty is savaging conservative judicial appointments from his sinecure on the Senate Judiciary Committee. He had the temerity during Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to ask the appointee if he was familiar with “Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus” a legal principle holding that jurors can rule a witness to be false in everything if he says one thing that is not true.
President Trump, as a political outsider, has repeatedly tried to hold people like Blumenthal to their own standards. This has made him the enemy of not just the establishment politicians but also the establishment media.
CNN and MSNBC talking heads, for instance, were horrified by Trump’s crowd in Michigan chanting, “Lock her up!” about Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
“How dare he?” the gentrified poohbahs asked. Whitmer herself said that Trump had put her life in danger, when in fact it was Trump’s Justice Department that had discovered a plot to kidnap Whitmer and put an end to it. The media cried foul and painted Trump as the vicious leader of a ragtag militia that would overthrow the lawful government of Michigan.
But wait a minute. That’s not what happened. Turns out, it was Whitmer who had broken the law by ruling unilaterally and taking away citizens’ First Amendment rights as part of her anti-COVID crackdown. Eventually, a court decided what the people already knew — that Whitmer’s lockdown was unconstitutional. Her orders had been illegal.
And yet … and yet … what were the consequences? Nothing. Nada. Because she belongs to the exempt class just like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.
Nor, for that matter, does the exempt class have to follow the rules of its own lockdowns. Remember when Whitmer’s husband decided to go boating over Memorial Day weekend when the non-exempt (if they were lucky enough to have boats) were told it was too dangerous to hit the water (even if you were all alone, wore a mask, and said three Hail Marys)? Remember Nancy Pelosi parading through that hair salon in San Francisco without a mask?
Yes, Donald Trump holds Whitmer responsible for what she has done to her state. Yes, Trump lampoons Pelosi for going commando after chiding Trump relentlessly for his appearances without a mask. But that was all child’s play compared to the hypocrisy on display in the presidential election. Joe Biden’s blithe dismissal of overwhelming evidence of a pattern of corruption in his years of public service is the most stunning deception yet.
Remember, Biden confessed early in 2017 — on camera — that he had used American foreign policy to extort the president of Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating Burisma Holdings, the energy company on whose board Joe’s son Hunter served. That was bad enough, but when Hunter’s laptop surfaced two weeks ago, with emails that documented how the Biden family had enriched itself by trading on the former vice president’s name, it went from bad to downright sinful.
Remember, candidate Biden has repeatedly denied that he knew anything about his son’s foreign business deals — which curiously involved Ukraine and China, the two nations where Biden was put in charge of foreign policy while he was vice president. But the hard drive that was seized by the FBI in December 2019 contains evidence that Joe not only knew about Hunter’s business deals, but also was a partner in some of them.
No problem, say the arbiters of truth at Twitter, Facebook and the mainstream media. Those incriminating emails are “unverified” or “unconfirmed.” Wikipedia dismisses the entire Biden corruption scheme as a “conspiracy theory” based on a “series of unevidenced claims” that are centered on “the false allegation” that (you guessed it) Biden is corrupt. In other words, Joe Biden is an untouchable. No matter what evidence exists, the media and the power brokers who run things will declare him exempt from consequences.
The 50 former intelligence officers who wrote a letter clearing Hunter and Joe Biden of any wrongdoing are typical of the charade being played against the American people. Without evidence, without having access to the evidence, without any knowledge whatsoever, these 50 former members of the so-called “Intelligence Community” declared that the “arrival on the U.S. political scene of emails purportedly belonging to Vice President Biden’s son Hunter … has all the earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
This despite the fact that the letter writers admitted “we do not know if the emails … are genuine or not and … we do not have evidence of Russian involvement.”
In other words, please believe us because if you don’t, it’s going to look awfully bad for our preferred candidate for president, Joe Biden.
“If we are right,” the statement continued, “this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election.” Left unsaid was the corollary: If we are wrong, this is the U.S. intelligence community trying to influence how Americans vote.
That’s exactly what it is — one more ugly ploy by the intelligence community to target Donald Trump and remind him that he is not exempt, that he is in fact the target, and that no matter what the facts are, the establishment will stop at nothing to destroy Trump before he ruins their corrupt scheme.
Consider Chuck Todd’s description of President Trump in the first three minutes of “MTP Daily” on MSNBC the day of the last debate. To Todd it seemed virtually impossible that Trump could appeal to new voters and pull off a win against Biden. What could a president “with this lack of credibility and this level of instability” do to change the trajectory of the election, he asked. He suggested that Trump is pushing “unverified” reports involving Hunter Biden’s emails in order to “paint Joe Biden as corrupt,” and dismissed the allegations as evidence of Trump’s “pervasive instability.”
This is so dishonest that it is depressing. By “instability,” Todd means that the president doesn’t play by the rules of the Washington establishment. By “lack of credibility,” he means that the mainstream media hates Trump because he is an effective conservative. By “unverified,” he means that although independent sources have confirmed the authenticity of Hunter’s emails and have confirmed that Joe Biden was a partner in Hunter’s corrupt schemes, NBC and the rest of the mainstream media refuse to get off their butts and find out the truth for themselves.
Lesley Stahl, in her now infamous Trump interview for “60 Minutes,” actually said she would not cover the Biden corruption scandal because it is not verified. She also told Trump that she had no idea that his campaign had been spied upon by the Obama administration. That means she is either a blithering idiot or a liar. When Trump challenged her for her obvious bias, she said, “You’re trying to discredit me.”
In a retort that sums up the whole filthy mess, Trump said, “I’m not trying to discredit you; you’re discrediting yourself.”
If Joe Biden wins the election on Nov. 3, it will signal that the protected have won the war — that they will remain exempt from consequences for not just the next four years, but for the foreseeable future. And it will mean that the unprotected — the rest of us — are not just non-exempt; we will be a non-factor. Even Orwell could not have written a more pessimistic ending.
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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 SUBSCRIBE to www.HeartlandDiaryUSA.com by leaving your email address on the home page. Also please 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 please subscribe to Heartland Diary on YouTube by clicking here for News Every Conservative Can Use.
