The War for America's Soul

by Sebastian Gorka

  Never rest after a victory. Pile on as your foe is still in shock. Show no pity.

  Your actions are important only insofar as they force your enemies to misstep or overreact. Look at yourself as a provocateur whose mission is to drive your enemies into making mistakes again and again until their position is untenable.

  Power is measured by how strong your enemy believes you too be. Never let your foe have an accurate measure of your strength. Disinformation and deception are your friends.

  These are the rules that have been used against our nation and our values since the 1960s. Because of Alinsky-inspired leftists, we have “identity politics” that pits Americans against each other based upon our skin color, our sex, and even our sexual preferences. The fundamental building block of civilization, the nuclear family, has been gravely weakened, especially in the black community where fatherless homes have become the norm. Thanks to Marcuse’s ideas and Alinsky’s tactics, many Americans have been brainwashed into believing that killing a viable child in a woman’s womb is analogous to birth control. Women have been convinced that they should be like men, and that pursuing demanding careers should be their priority—even at the expense of marriage and motherhood. We have been lulled into thinking recreational drugs aren’t so bad for society and that some of them should be legalized. And when it comes to our place in the world, many Americans now believe that America—our power, position, and example—is a problem. Global poverty, war, injustice, and environmental doom are all our fault, they say or imply, and the least we can do is open our borders and allow the rest of the planet to take whatever is left as we slide into an inevitable and necessary decline.

  This was the power of the Frankfurt School, and this was our fate, until someone called Donald J. Trump said: “No. America was great, and we can Make America Great Again.”

  Now the question we have to ask is: can he do it?

  CHAPTER FOURCAN PRESIDENT TRUMP STOP THE RADICAL LEFT?

  Only a fool would think that the 2016 election was not a historic turning point.

  When sixty-three million Americans chose—for the first time since 1776—a non-politician businessman to be president of the United States—they sent a message of just how unsatisfied they were with the political establishment. Nevertheless, this victory of the people over the entrenched coastal centers of political, corporate, and media power was not final in any sense of the word. The media attacks against President Trump have been unrelenting. One Harvard study put some mainstream media coverage (CNN and NBC) at 93 percent negative.1 The D.C. swamp-dwellers have been equally unrelenting in trying to sabotage President Trump’s administration, most obviously by empaneling a deeply biased special prosecutor’s team, full of Democrat party donors,2 to go after the president without any reasonable cause. And unabashed, the Left has doubled down on their objective to subvert the will of the American people with continuing calls for impeachment. Even the relatively sane Nancy Pelosi is on the record saying, “We cannot accept a second term for Donald Trump if we are going to be faithful to our democracy and to the Constitution of the United States.”3 In other words, the leader of the House Democrats believes her party needs to deny democracy and the Constitution in order to save it!

  To those of us in the arena—people like myself who have served in the Trump White House and who are on the national stage openly supporting his agenda to Make America Great Again—the fight is a daily one, executed at bayonet distance in the trenches of the mainstream press and social media. It is important, however, for us all to truly understand the extraordinary events we are experiencing, to be able to put it in the right historic and strategic context, to understand not simply why our choice for president was so consequential, but also to see clearly what the Left has done since “the wrong candidate” won, what they are prepared to do to steal back power, and how we can stop them.

  To that end I have recruited two of the greatest minds in North America to provide you with the context of the threat to our Republic and predict what the future holds.

  One is Professor Victor Davis Hanson, America’s preeminent conservative writer, commentator, and strategic thinker. The other is Lord Conrad Black, a remarkably accomplished historian and incredibly successful businessman who has the benefit of having known the president in private life and even negotiated with the master of the “art of the deal.”

  Let us start with Professor Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

  Professor Hanson is a remarkable man. Recognized for decades as a leading classics scholar, he is not a person who sits isolated in his ivory tower; rather, he brings his massive learning to bear on the events we are experiencing in today’s world.

  A man who grew up on a farm and who has seen what unfettered immigration and collectivist politics have done to the once paradisiacal state of California, Professor Hanson has seen first hand how the liberal elite’s intellectual and moral bankruptcy is destroying the American Dream, and understood early on that it would take a total political outsider like Donald Trump to save our nation.

  Professor Hanson has written scores of incredibly insightful analyses on “the Trump Effect” for such thoughtful, pro-Trump platforms as American Greatness (www.AmGreatness.com), and this year published a stand-alone treatise titled, The Case for Trump.

  I have always been impressed with Professor Hanson’s work—and never more so than after he publicly stated his support for the president and his agenda, exposing himself to the slings and arrows of 95 percent of his professorial colleagues. That is why I was so delighted when Professor Hanson agreed to grant me an exclusive interview on what the Left has done to our country, why only Donald Trump was the answer, and whether we will win in 2020 and beyond. My first question was whether Professor Hanson would ever have imagined a president of the United States needing to remind Democrat members of Congress—in his State of the Union address—that America would not become a socialist state, that it would not adopt a failed and extreme ideology that cost the lives of a hundred million people in just the last century. Read on!4

  VDH: Well, you know, I heard things when I was younger, in my early teens in the 1960s. That was a pretty turbulent time in American history, there was the SDS [the radical, left-wing Students for a Democratic Society], the Weathermen, and so on, and you would hear things like that, but it was always confined to the fringe. And then growing up on a farm, I’d hear my grandfather talk about there being Socialists during the Depression, [like] Eugene Debs.… But all of these were fringe groups, third-party candidates, or they were agitators. I never saw a phenomenon as we did in 2016, where Bernie Sanders came within a few points of getting the Democratic nomination. So that is new. And then somebody like AOC [Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] or Representative Ilhan Omar, who are openly Socialist—that’s new. It used to be that Bernie Sanders was considered a crack. I think he’s been a representative or senator from Vermont for almost 30 years now, since his mid-forties. And it was always, if you went to Vermont, you’d hear them say, “Oh, good old Bernie.” He was kind of a nice socialist, but nobody took him seriously.

  And then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, in his mid-seventies, we’re supposed to consider him now a sober and judicious person? So that’s different. We have this young generation that’s poorly educated, one trillion-and-a-half dollars in debt, their demography is very anemic, they’re not marrying, they’re not buying homes, they’re not having children, at an age where most Americans of prior generations did.

  I guess this is a long-winded answer, but it’s still very disturbing to see socialism mainstreamed like that.

  GORKA: Did you ever think, born and bred in the United States, that we would have the federal intelligence community, the federal police, involved in a political spying campaign in 2016 and 2017, which probably will, when we find out the full facts, greatly overshadow Watergate, Professor Hanson?

  VDH: No, because it’s different than Watergate in the sense
that it’s not an isolated branch of government, or it’s not a rogue group, or it’s not a cover-up. It’s a systematic weaponization of the hierarchy in the Obama administration, the CIA, the FBI, the DOJ, elements of the State Department, and it follows on the heels of the weaponization, for example, of the IRS, with Lois Lerner going after the Tea Party.

  Also, during Watergate, you had an adversarial press, a sort of self-appointed watchdog. We have a fusion now between the Democrat party, the progressive movement, and the media. So, all of a sudden, the media, who used to say they were defenders of civil liberties, now say you cannot investigate the FBI, you cannot endanger the redactions coming out of the CIA, you cannot dare suggest that members of the State Department or DOJ were involved in this. That’s new. And that’s very scary because freedoms are usually lost when the media joins the government.

  Whatever you say about Trump, the Left and the media are hostile to him. But neither Trump nor anyone in the Trump administration that I know of, has said, “Let’s go after the left-wing, Soros-funded groups with IRS audits,” or, “Let’s have the IRS deny them non-profit status,” like Lois Lerner did for Obama [with the Tea Party groups]. President Trump’s Attorney General William Barr isn’t saying, “Let’s go after these Associated Press reporters, or James Rosen of Fox, and surveil them the way Obama did.” That hasn’t happened.

  Much less are the people at the FBI or the CIA saying, “You know what, this upcoming election, we have suspicions that the Democratic candidate might be influenced by Iran, or by Mexico, and therefore we’re going to surveil them.” Whatever happened in 2016, and we still don’t know the full extent of it, I don’t think there’s a parallel unfortunately in American history.

  GORKA: Talking to experts who’ve been investigating these issues for two years now—the John Solomons and the Sara Carters of the world—they say we know between 10 percent and 30 percent of the facts of the “Russiagate” or “Spygate” conspiracies. Based upon what we know already, Professor Hanson, where would this rank in terms of political conspiracies, political scandals in American history? How high does it get on the list of truly insidious plots?

  VDH: Well, I’m afraid it’s going to be the highest, because those of the past have been confined to one or two individuals as cabinet officers, but this thing could involve corruption from the CIA, which was using its foreign power prerogatives to go after American citizens, and it could include corruption from the FBI, which deliberately led a campaign of distortion and leaking. I’ve never heard of the FBI director leaking confidential memos, and classified memos, to the press for the express purpose of getting a special counsel, who was then his close friend, appointed to go after his boss, the new president.

  And then when you add the distortion of the FISA courts, or you look at using a political candidate’s funds to hire a foreign national, Christopher Steele, who then in turn enlisted other foreign nationals to subvert a campaign, as they did with Russian sources, and then you package that whole thing into the context that they are accusing, projection-style, President Trump of doing that—it just never ends.

  GORKA: So the Russiagate hoax, the conspiracy, the Crossfire Hurricane operation to surveil the Trump campaign, will go down as the worst scandal in American history. Yet it is hard to credit this scandal with simply being the result of individual actors who suddenly decided to do nefarious things. There has to be a broader context. Without going into the realm of conspiracy theories, we have to touch upon whether or not the influences of the Frankfurt School, the Alinsky and Marcuse influences, the general deconstructionist philosophies of the Left impacted how this all unfolded. How imperative were those ideologues and ideologies to getting to where we arrived with this scandal?

  VDH: The way I look at it, Sebastian, is, in a general way, they enhanced the sort of arrogance of these people, these progressive social warriors. And they saw a chance for sixteen years of Obama and Hillary that would transform the nation. The details of how that noble crusade was to be effected were not as important as the crusade itself. And that gave these people like Peter Strzok, or James Comey, or John Brennan, many of whom are just bureaucratic careerists, a sense of impunity or exemption from accountability.

  And then the other thing that’s more banal, and here you have got to go back to the time of 2016, when everybody was saying that Donald Trump was going to wreck the Republican party, that he had no chance, he would not get the nomination, and if he got it, he would not be elected, and if he got elected, he would destroy the country.

  So, there’s a sense that, as an “insurance policy,” to quote FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, they could do all these things since Hillary was going to be president. And, given her reputation, what would otherwise be illegal behavior would be rewarded as service to a noble cause. These people were really in a competition to prove to future president-elect Hillary that they were responsible for her landslide mandate. And once you start looking at the whole thing in that prism or that matrix, then it makes a lot more sense. It explains why these people were so, not just arrogant, but so careless in the manner in which they operated. I mean after all, Bruce Ohr—how could the fourth-ranking person in the DOJ think he could get away with having his wife work for Glenn Simpson [co-founder of Fusion GPS, which hired Christopher Steele to compose the “dossier” on Donald Trump], and then channel that material all on their side into the FBI? And then not even report that on a federal form about his wife’s employment?

  It’s an arrogance in deluding the FISA courts. There was not even an attempt to cover it up because they were certain that they were morally right, that Hillary Clinton would appreciate their conspiratorial obedience and reward them for it.

  GORKA: I think this last point is so interesting because very few people ever mention it. There is a propensity, perhaps, on the Right to jump on the “Deep State” and assume an uber-sophisticated conspiracy theory. But there really is not just a level of arrogance, but also a level of dilettantism with these conspirators: that people responsible for counterintelligence at the FBI are having affairs with each other, cheating on their spouses, and then texting inappropriate comments about the president on their government phones. Or when you have President Obama’s former national security adviser, Susan Rice, send herself an exculpatory email on Trump’s inauguration day stating that President Obama wanted to make sure everything in Comey’s and the DOJ’s investigation of Russian “collusion” was “done by the book.”5 This really does undergird the analysis that these people are nefarious, but also incompetent, surely.

  VDH: Absolutely. And after all, why would Andy McCabe think that after his wife was a recipient of this nearly $700,000 in Clinton-sourced PAC money, he would not, just a few weeks later, have to recuse himself of investigating her emails? Or why would Hillary Clinton think that she could destroy 33,000 emails under subpoena and destroy the devices they were on, and think she would get away with it?

  There was something about the attitude of the country in 2015 and 2016. You really have to remember that Obama had kind of checked out and that his core popularity had gone up because people liked the idea of Obama as president, not the reality of it. And Hillary was supposedly the sober and judicious Democratic stalwart whose time had come. Everybody was jumping on her bandwagon to prove that they were more loyal than the next, and they would do a better job than the other.

  And then Trump was such an outsider, an outlier, and that’s the climate in which this all took place. And so they weren’t careful, they were arrogant, they were sloppy. But they were also nefarious because deep down inside, they felt that they had the right to act against the Constitution of the United States. They tried to destroy a campaign, they tried to destroy a presidential transition, and then they tried to destroy a presidency.

  GORKA: How much was this a function of their belief that Donald Trump could not be president, and that when sixty-three million Americans chose him, they chose the “wrong candidate”?

  VDH
: Well, I think almost all of it was. And remember that almost immediately, we had an effort in three states to sue to overturn the results—they said the voting machines were corrupt. But that didn’t work. And then we had, on Inauguration Day, all those protests—Madonna saying she wanted to blow up the White House. Then there were Articles of Impeachment. And there was that appeal earlier to the electors of the Electoral College not to follow their mandate, that they should be renegades and deny Trump the White House. And then we have flirtation with the Logan Act, and then we have flirtation with the emoluments clause, then the Twenty-fifth Amendment. They even got a Yale psychiatrist to testify. And then, finally, we have the Mueller investigation, and we have the pseudo-coup plan of McCabe and Rod Rosenstein.

  So there were a series of efforts to destroy the Trump administration, and they were all based on the idea that this cannot stand because these are not the right people to be in the positions of power. They’re not at the Brookings Institution, they’re not on the Council of Foreign Relations, they’re not from the Economics department at Harvard. These are just crazy people, and we don’t want them around. And this was not just the left-wing reaction; there were a lot of prominent Republican Bush-ites who felt the same way.

  GORKA: Professor, you’ve outlined for us the depth and the breadth of the corruption, the conspiracy that really was an attempt, a repeated attempt at a silent coup against a presidential candidate and then a president of the United States. As an American, as an observer, as a commentator, Professor Hanson, what do you think it will take for the American people to regain their trust in those institutions that have such incredible power: the intelligence community and law enforcement?

  VDH: I think three things. First, all of the documents, the relevant documents, the millions of pages accumulated during the Russiagate investigations have to be released without redactions. Very few redactions are justified in national security. A few are, but not as many as we’re seeing. We have to have the corpus of literature out there. And then second, we’ve got to get away from this idea of invoking another special counsel, another Patrick Fitzgerald; we have to have confidence in the Department of Justice.