The High Costs of the Left’s Conspiracy Theory
Wikipedia, a liberal website, defines “conspiracy theory” as the fear of a nonexistent conspiracy. By that definition, the theory that Donald Trump conspired with the Russians to steal the 2016 election has to be ranked as the biggest conspiracy theory of all time.
As Robert Mueller closes the books on his 2-year reign of terror against Trump supporters, we should pause to consider the collateral damage Mueller caused. Mueller’s conspiracy theory about collusion with Russia caused unfathomable harm to many people, most of whom are totally innocent.
Mueller’s team burned through at least $25 million in its own costs, at taxpayer expense. But far greater costs were imposed on Mueller’s innocent victims and the American people.
In his four-page letter to Congress, Attorney General Bill Barr reported that the Special Counsel and his team “issued more than 2,800 subpoenas, executed nearly 500 search warrants, and obtained more than 230 orders for communication records.” They executed “almost 50 orders authorizing use of pen registers, made 13 requests to foreign governments for evidence, and interviewed approximately 500 witnesses.”
500 witnesses? Witnesses to what? There was never any collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, as Mueller finally admitted in his report, so there was no crime for anyone to witness.
But the targets of Mueller’s subpoenas, the victims of his search warrants, and other innocent individuals were compelled to waste enormous time and money in responding to the frightful demands by the out-of-control investigation.
Each of Mueller’s subpoenas probably cost an average of $25,000 to comply with. The D.C. rates for attorneys’ fees are among the highest in the country, and this field of law is particularly specialized.
So the wasteful expense caused by Mueller’s subpoenas alone racked up $70 million in costs, but even that is just the tip of the iceberg. Many of the “witnesses” pursued by Mueller necessarily hired attorneys for themselves, which easily incurred more than $100,000 in fees apiece.
Jerome Corsi was one of those witnesses, and he spent many days being interviewed by Mueller’s team. At the end of all that cooperation, Mueller’s prosecutors demanded that Corsi plead guilty to lying to the government, even though he had been candid.
Corsi then went public and exposed the Mueller investigation for what it was: a political hatchet job stacked with enemies of Trump. Corsi expected to be unfairly indicted and put on trial, but he courageously stood his ground and refused to cave into wrongdoing by Mueller’s team.
Corsi was right to call Mueller’s bluff. Andrew Weissmann, Mueller’s highly partisan lead prosecutor, subsequently announced his return to teaching in New York City, which is preferable to his being given so much power to impose such high costs on many innocent people.
Mueller has some explaining to do about the unfounded threats by his team to indict Corsi if he did not agree to a plea. Mueller apparently allowed the anti-Trump prosecutors whom Mueller hired to run roughshod with impunity over Trump supporters.
“I consider this entire investigation to be fraudulent,” Corsi observed. “I’m glad it’s over.”
But it’s not over for Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, even though his persecutors have left the Mueller investigation for other high-paying jobs. Gen. Flynn still faces sentencing from the deal he agreed to in order to save his family.
For spending a mere 24 days as President Trump’s National Security Advisor, Gen. Flynn has been forced to incur $5 million in legal fees. Adding insult to injury, the federal judge presiding over his case accused Flynn of being a traitor to the United States, before walking back those comments.
“Waiting for all of those apologies from journalists and left wing politicians who slandered Gen. Flynn, calling him a traitor after serving his country heroically for 33 years,” his brother Joe Flynn tweeted after the Mueller report found no collusion. The Department of Justice, post- Mueller, should move to dismiss the case against Lt. Gen. Flynn now.
On top of these massive costs is the time lost by the American public and President Trump. Overzealous prosecutions are a distraction, to say the least, and it is to Trump’s credit that he has not been completely distracted by this.
Trump could have accomplished even more in his first two years in office without the constant disruption caused by this Grand Inquisition by the Left. At one point Trump spent several days answering questions for Mueller despite no evidence for asking them.
The liberal media and Democrats who egged on the fiction of Russian collusion should be labeled as conspiracy theorists for falsely insisting that there was coordination by Trump with Russia in order to be elected. This liberal conspiracy theory harmed many innocent victims and the American people, to whom the Left should apologize.
The Violence Against Constitutional Rights Act
While the femnists are pushing Congress to pass a new Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), they overlook where most violence against women is occurring. The New York Times recently featured an exposé about how nearly every woman is raped during their migration from Central America to our open southern border.
Shutting the border is the only way that the United States can protect those women. That would take away the incentive for the long, dangerous journey. Yet House Democrats want nothing of that remedy. Instead, Democrats push for more infringements on the rights of Americans as part of a proposed new VAWA.
In their subcommittee hearing on March 7, House Democrats were uninterested in the terrible violence against women resulting from their insistence on an open southern border. The minority Republicans were allowed to invite only one witness, and she did not address the violence among migrants either.
An organization called Stop Abusive and Violent Environments (SAVE) has proposed numerous sensible reforms to the now-expired VAWA law, which was causing more harm than good. For starters, the prior law lacked a clear, appropriate definition of what it even meant when it referred to violence against women.
The Obama Administration defined domestic violence very broadly to include conduct that was not violent at all, such as alleged economic, emotional, or psychological abuse. Fortunately, the Department of Justice in the Trump Administration has sensibly clarified the meaning of domestic violence to include only conduct that would be a felony or misdemeanor if charged as a crime.
Inclusion of non-violent behavior then becomes a means for grabbing guns from men, and imposing automatic sentences in prison if they are found to have any guns. Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham announced that his committee will hold a hearing on March 26 on “red flag” laws, which give government special power to seize and confiscate guns from individuals whom someone thinks might be dangerous.
The First Amendment is at risk, too, in this planned reauthorization of VAWA. Proposed expansions to the law include authorizing federal monitoring of internet communications, under the guise of punishing cyber stalking and so-called bullying.
That could result in censorship of the internet as prosecutions are brought against communications which the federal agents might consider to be inappropriate. The freewheeling online environment that makes it so popular could be chilled by a new VAWA.
Even President Trump’s colorful tweets against the women who are vying for the Democratic nomination to run against him might be considered cyberbullying, depending on how VAWA is rewritten. Robert Mueller might need to be recalled into service to do a new investigation into tweeting by Trump and his supporters.
Liberal women attempt to make VAWA a women’s issue, but in fact intimate partner violence against men is comparable in frequency to violence against women, according to a National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS). More importantly, domestic violence has been decreasing for decades, prior to the billions of dollars of handouts by VAWA to feminist groups.
One’s home with a spouse has always been the safest place for both men and women, and spousal murder is very rare. Yet VAWA trained workers to separate domestic couples, and file a complaint against men which often causes them to lose their jobs and their employability.
Women, once their partner is going to lose his job that supported both of them, then try to stop the harmful VAWA process and withdraw the accusations. But laws make that impossible, such that the women are greatly harmed by the loss in the men’s jobs that VAWA causes.
The abusive “ex parte” court orders under VAWA, which are issued without the man being in court to defend himself against false accusations, would probably expand under a new VAWA. Recall how late-night comedian David Letterman discovered in 2005 that a woman in Sante Fe had obtained a restraining order against him.
The woman insisted that Letterman had used code words on his television show to communicate that he wanted to marry her, and have her become his co-host. She said Letterman had been mentally cruel to her and caused her to endure sleep deprivation for more than a decade.
A New Mexico state judge granted the woman’s demand for an ex parte restraining order, and it became a humorous topic for Letterman’s show. His attorneys were able to reverse the court order, but most men do not have the luxury of time, money, and influence that a television celebrity has.
Perhaps VAWA should be considered under a new name that more accurately describes how it infringes on First and Second Amendment rights, in addition to turning women against men. How about calling it the “Violence Against Constitutional Rights Act”?
Gun Control Goes Stealth
The horrific massacre at the New Zealand mosque has incited demands for gun control there, but surprisingly not here in the United States. The contestants for the Democratic presidential nomination have been remarkably silent on the issue of the Second Amendment.
Cat got their tongue? They have been leapfrogging each other to go far left on other issues, ranging from climate change to immigration.
Their liberal base must be stultified at the candidates’ deafening silence on this central issue of the Democratic Party Platform, which calls for bans on “assault weapons and large capacity ammunition magazines.” Last month the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives passed the most sweeping gun control legislation in 20 years.
But leading Democrats fear a repeat of 2000, when they loudly demanded gun control in the wake of the Columbine high school shooting. Then came Charlton Heston’s famous performance at the NRA convention at which he publicly warned that nominee Al Gore would grab Heston’s guns only “from my cold, dead hands!”
Heston, who had won an Academy Award for his role in Ben-Hur and also starred in The Ten Commandments, campaigned against Gore on the issue of guns. Gore then backpedaled on the issue, pretending that he would not grab people’s guns while many voters knew that he and his party would do just that.
On Election Day in 2000 Gore then lost his home state of Tennessee, where the right to bear arms is paramount. That cost him the presidency against George W. Bush.
This time the Democratic presidential candidates are lying low on the issue of gun control until after the presidential election. Democrats are looking for more stealth ways to erode the Second Amendment, to fly undetected on the radar of most American voters.
The first way is to pack the Supreme Court with Democrat nominees. Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder has endorsed this approach, and there is even a new group called “Pack the Court.”
Multiple Democratic presidential contenders, from Elizabeth Warren to Beto O’Rourke, are open to the idea. If one of them were to defeat President Trump while their party takes Congress, they might add new justices to the Supreme Court to erode the Second Amendment. Democrat President Franklin Delano Roosevelt floated a similar idea in 1937 for a different reason, and his own party resoundingly rejected it then. But in those days the Democratic Party actually represented working Americans. The Supreme Court could soon be presented with an appeal from the Connecticut Supreme Court, which ruled that the gun manufacturer Remington can be held liable for the Sandy Hook massacre. The Second Amendment will not mean much if gun manufacturers are driven out of
business for crimes they never intended.
The second approach is to call a constitutional
convention under Article V of the U.S. Constitution, at which delegates could support an amendment to repeal the Second Amendment entirely. Hawaii legislators attempted this approach with a resolution.
In both Australia and Great Britain, massacres enabled gun control forces to push through tight new restrictions on guns. Their entire political culture then shifted to the left as voters became less self-reliant and more dependent on government.
“The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic,” wrote longtime Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story in 1833. He explained that the Second Amendment “offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them.”
Chelsea Clinton was met with criticism by students at New York University who blamed the carnage at the New Zealand mosque on her gentle criticism of the Muslim congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-MN). So apparently President Trump is no longer the culprit for everything in the minds of Leftists anymore.
New Zealand itself is turning its sights on Facebook, Google and Twitter for how they provided an unregulated channel for the mass-murderer to live-stream his killings. Internet users then copied and reposted the hideous videos before those companies could take them down.
As three of the most liberal corporations in America, these Silicon Valley behemoths were slow to react to the New Zealand live-streaming. One reason may be that they devote much of their resources to censoring legitimate political speech.
Facebook admitted that a high-resolution video of the attack was uploaded 1.5 million times within the first 24 hours, and that 300,000 of these were unblocked. The mass murderer used its platform to promote his heinous crime live.
Multiple prior killings have been done by others who touted their evil deeds on Facebook. Yet there are no calls to ban Facebook, the way that liberals demand gun control.
Unfair Trans Competition in Girls’ Sports
Boys have clear athletic advantages over girls, both on average and among the best. The higher levels of testosterone and muscle mass in boys enable them to run faster and jump higher than girls can.
Martina Navratilova won 18 grand slam titles in women’s tennis, the fifth most ever. She has also been an outspoken supporter of gay rights, but the unfairness of men competing as transgendered women has sparked her ire.
Navratilova recently called it “cheating,” “insane,” and “it would not be fair” to allow transgender women to compete in women’s tennis. Yet the rules of the International Olympic Committee allow men who claim to be transgendered to compete in women’s sports, if their testosterone levels remain below a certain level.
A backlash from the transgender community then resulted despite how she merely stated the obvious. For that she was called “transphobic” and removed from the advisory board of Athlete Ally, which supports transgendered athletes.
Many other women and girls are also crying foul about the unfairness of transgendered athletes in women’s and girls’ sports. There was an outcry in New Haven, Connecticut, home to Yale University, when the top finishers in the indoor state championship for the 55-meter dash for high school girls were two transgendered girls, formerly boys.
The “winner” broke the girls’ record, finishing the race in 6.95 seconds. Connecticut is one of 17 states that has no restrictions on boys, who claim to be transgender, competing in girls’ sports.
The same transgendered former boys also finished first and second in the state championship for the 100-meter dash last year. Meanwhile, girls who would have won trophies – and perhaps college scholarships – were unfairly denied them.
The top six 55-yard dash finishers then qualified for the New England regional races. Selina Soule, who would have qualified for the regional races if the transgenders were not counted, lost that opportunity.
“We all know the outcome of the race before it even starts; it’s demoralizing,” Miss Soule said. “They should have the right to express themselves in school, but athletics have always had extra rules to keep the competition fair,” she added.
The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) would require all 50 states to allow this unfair form of competition, if it ever became part of the Constitution. The Virginia House of Delegates defeated ERA last month, but by only one vote in a 50-50 tie.
Under ERA, no law or governmental entity can make any distinctions based on sex. That means it would become impossible for girls’ sports to keep boys out.
Led by Phyllis Schlafly, conservatives defeated ERA in
the 1970s, and its deadline for ratification expired in 1979. Congress improperly attempted to extend the deadline until June 30, 1982, but no states ratified it during the extra three years.
The expiration of the deadline for ERA, however, has not stopped radical feminists from trying to ratify it now, four decades later. ERA would cause more unfairness in girls’ sports, as it has done in Massachusetts which has a state version of ERA.
There, muscular young men routinely break girls’ records in girls’ sports. In one championship game in Massachusetts a young man caused a concussion to a girls’ field hockey goalie while scoring a goal to defeat her team.
Meanwhile, an example of the havoc that ERA would require emanated from a federal court in Houston on February 22. Senior District Judge Gray H. Miller, an appointee of President George W. Bush, declared that the Selective Service system was discriminatory in not requiring women to register for a possible draft.
“Combat roles no longer uniformly require sheer size or muscle,” the Court found. With similar strange arguments the Court declared that there is no justification for Congress to draft men unless women are also drafted.
If ERA were ever ratified, then courts would be required to rule against a men-only draft. As Phyllis Schlafly often argued in the 1970s, ERA would compel drafting women just like men, or forcing women to register for the Selective Service just like men.
Without ERA, the recent federal court decision can be successfully appealed, in this case to the Fifth Circuit. President Trump has placed five conservative judges on that court, which seems almost certain to overturn this decision invalidating our all-male Selective Service system.
Without ERA, the unfair intrusion of transgenders into girls’ sports can be solved by legislation forbidding it. Notice how transgendered former girls are not breaking records in boys’ sports.
Fortunately, ERA is not merely one state away from ratification, as some fake news headlines promote. For ERA to become part of the Constitution, Congress would need to pass it by a two-thirds supermajority in both the House and Senate, and then 38 states would need to ratify it anew, which should never happen.
