No One Has the Right to Rule Over Us

I don’t know if it’s obvious, but I don’t spend a lot of time covering the top news stories of the week here. This is more about the principles that lead to freedom, prosperity, and civilization—which come under the category of political philosophy, rather than actual politics.

One of the principles of freedom is that the people grant government its powers, not the other way around. And we should always beware of power mongers—tyrants, who feel an inherent right to rule over other human beings.

So, this week’s news has been distracting me, as it probably has most people. But the underlying point is to understand and prevent tyranny.

To sum up,

·         The Democrats put announced there was a whistleblower’s report that a phonecall between the newly elected President of Ukraine and President Trump was a quid pro quo, pressuring Ukraine to investigate corruption that could be a political advantage to Trump. The call was simultaneously transcribed by several workers, whose words are then aligned to create as accurate record as possible. The whistleblower was not one of those transcribers, but apparently heard a leak that came, presumably, from one of them, each of whom would have had a security clearance that such a leak would violate. (Why is no one talking about the illegality of such a leak, and finding out who leaked?)

·         President Trump, with permission from the Ukrainian president, within a day put out the full unredacted transcript of the 30-minute phonecall, about 10 minutes of which was under question. Obviously, what was claimed about the phonecall was not actually spoken or done. No pressure. No quid pro quo.

·         Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, announced, the day after the whistleblower’s claim came out, that there would be an “official” Impeachment inquiry—a re-labeling of six committees already involved in a search for misconduct of the president. That is, not investigations into actual wrongdoing, but various searches for wrongdoing. Calling these already existing investigations officially an impeachment inquiry changes nothing about what they were doing, but it puts the word “impeachment” front and center. By the time she made this pronouncement, the transcript of the phonecall in question was already public, but she’d already set her plan in motion.

·         When it was clear the phonecall itself was not what they’d claimed, they then said the President was blocking the actual whistleblower report. So he had that released, with mild redactions (for national security and protection of names in the intelligence community). The additional claims were that there was a delay in giving certain aid, or selling certain arms, to Ukraine—with a claim that there was an implied quid pro quo of withholding those things until Ukraine followed through on the corruption investigation Trump advised in the phonecall.

In order to believe the claim that there was an impeachable offense, one must attribute motives and thoughts to the President that were not spoken and mostly do not coincide with records and timelines.

The “whistleblower,” who had no direct knowledge, observed some things that, if they were connected, might be construed to be pressure on a foreign government. But the whistleblower account reads much more like analysis than factual reporting.

Such analysis happens all the time. Think back to Jack Ryan, the analyst in Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October. He sees some facts, and, based on his background understanding of one of the people involved, comes up with the theory that the Russian submarine Red October isn’t intending a renegade attack; it’s attempting to defect. It’s a wild speculation. In the meeting in which Jack Ryan presents it, his superior is concerned at how foolish such a wild speculation makes them look. But, because it’s fiction, the analysis gets traction, and the rest of the movie ensues.

An analysis isn’t a whistleblower report; it’s one person’s speculation about the meaning surrounding facts based on the analyst’s experience and biases. If it isn’t convincing to his superiors, it’s just another data point, set aside unless and until something more comes along to make it worth a second look. This “whistleblower,” reportedly someone in intelligence with an anti-Trump bias, wasn’t satisfied with his/her theory/speculation not being taken as fact, so he/she put it out as if it were a stifled whistleblower report (something that required a change in rules concerning whistleblowers in order to qualify).

People read the phonecall transcript differently, depending on how much they hate having Trump as our president. That doesn’t make it a fair reading.

I think it’s a fair assessment that the whole situation is evidence that there is indeed a Deep State—officials within government working toward wielding their own power, regardless of who the people elect—and that’s power mongering, which is antithetical to our constitutional republic.

Today on Andrew Klavan’s show [partial video on Facebook, entire audio podcast at The Daily Wire], he talks about this pretty accurately. Here’s the transcript from his Big Idea segment:

Andrew Klavan, September 30, 2019, screenshot from here

In a world of fake news, it’s important sometimes to remember the real news, the story that’s not being covered. And that story is this: The heads of the intelligence community, under Barak Obama, used Russian disinformation, bought and paid for by the Democrat Party and the Hillary Clinton campaign, to launch a spying operation on an opposition candidate, namely Donald Trump. They then engineered and launched a two-and-a-half-year investigation into a Russia collusion hoax in order to distract from their incredible act of American subversion.

Today, as the Department of Justice Inspector General prepares his report on these doings and his DOJ Prosecutor John Durham leads a separate investigation, a completely meaningless story about Trump and the Ukrainian president, has replaced the collusion hoax as the tool of distraction, and is being covered by the press with the same breathless and reckless hysteria as the Russian hoax—and for the same reasons.

It’s as if the Russian hoax had never been exposed, but it has.

Now, why do I say the Ukraine story is meaningless? I say it because no one cares. Zero percent of the population of the United States cares if our loudmouth president said stupid stuff to the president of Ukraine. To put that in numerical terms, no people care. None.

Now, don’t get me wrong. There are people who care very deeply about hobbling Trump and getting him out of office. And they care very deeply about what they hope to get out of the Ukraine story. And there are people who care very deeply about defending Trump from the Deep State, and they care about disproving the story. But no one cares about the substance. It makes absolutely no difference to anyone if Trump was nudging the Ukrainian president to investigate Hunter Biden’s obviously nepostistic sinecure with their stupid gas company, and Joe Biden’s likewise obviously compromised integrity because of it.

At the very worst—and I don’t believe this at all, by the way—but at the very worst, Trump was organizing a jerry-rigged, tape-entwined version of what Obama did to him using the full power of the government. It’s the exact story that the press, not only won’t cover, but is covering up what Obama did to Trump. And now Trump—if the worst of this is true—is sort of, kind of, maybe a little trying to do that to Joe Biden—which is absurd, because he would have much rather run against Joe Biden than Elizabeth Warren.

Now, you may say, well this could still be serious if it leads to impeachment. And we know that would be serious, because people keep saying that it’s serious. Reporters, politicians, commentators. Just listen to them. They all keep saying impeachment is a serious business. But, in fact, nothing is serious if it’s not done seriously. An impeachment show about something no one cares about, that will not result in the president leaving office, is only serious in the sense that it disgraces a legislature that no longer actually legislates, but spends all it’s time in politically motivated investigations and show trials when it’s not raising the debt ceiling to pay for the politically motivated investigations and show trials.

Want to know the news? Follow the Obama story—Obamagate. It’s a big scandal, and a dangerous scandal. And if anyone actually covers it and investigates it, it may begin to root out a Deep State that is willing to do and say anything to cover up the fact that it has gotten way, way out of control.

A bit later in the podcast, Klavan shares a couple of montages. First is one minute of a five-minute montage of the press fawning over Obama. Next is the media dishing up the “impeachment” idea, starting in November 2016, before Trump had taken office, on up through this past week.

from the montage included in the Klavan podcast
screenshot from here

What we have is a segment of society—and media, politicians, and other elites fit in here—that refuses to accept the results of an election. It was an election Hillary Clinton, with the help of a sitting president, attempted to secure through illegal means, and yet she lost. My guess is that Nancy Pelosi’s giving in to talking about impeachment now, after three years, when an election will come up before an actual impeachment could take place, is a desperation move intended to taint the president, because, based on the state of the economy and the increase in personal freedoms after Obama, the Democrats greatly fear Trump will be reelected, despite all their efforts.

As Klavan says later, this isn’t about any of the things they claim it is about:

The target is you. The target is to teach you a lesson: "Do not vote for whom we do not want you to vote for."

Those who feel they have the right to rule over us are tyrants, who should be kept as far away as possible from any of the reins of government.

If there is anything good that can come out of this, I hope it’s that truth will reveal the nefarious works of those trying to undermine the best and most important experiment in self-government in the history of the world.

Trump is not the enemy of our freedom. Maybe, as unpleasant as he is in the Twitter world, he’s exactly the tough leader we need to stand up to the tyranny. I hope he wins this particularly uncivil war against him, against us, and against our constitutional republic.