In his fatuous four-minute public statement on Thursday, Attorney General Merrick Garland spoke up to defend the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago. The Department of Justice has posted the transcript of Garland’s remarks here.
At NRO, John Yoo and Robert Delahunty respond in the column “Why the Public Is Skeptical of Garland’s Mar-a-Lago Story.” They offer “four legitimate reasons Americans think something crassly political has just transpired.” They speak from experience and they know what they are talking about.
Yoo and Delahunty take up the sordid recent history of the FBI and the Department of Justice toward the end of their column. They do not directly address Garland’s condemnation of those who question the behavior of the FBI and the Department of Justice. Referring to “recent unfounded attacks on the professionalism of the FBI and Justice Department agents and prosecutors,” one might think he dozed off during the four years of the Trump administration.
Garland asserted: “I will not stand by silently when their integrity is unfairly attacked.” His bravado was not such that he could stand up to questions following his brief statement. Indeed, he silently skulked off.
Garland professed to be bound to silence by canons of professional or departmental responsibility: “[O]ur ethical obligations prevent me from providing further details as to the basis of the search at this time….This is all I can say right now.”
For reasons 1, 3, and 4 to doubt the bona fides of the raid, Yoo and Delahunty cite its timing, White House political pressure, and the impression of improper political motivation already created by the Justice Department and FBI. The second of the four reasons they offer for doubting the legitimacy of the raid is “the leaks”:
Garland had hardly vacated the podium when leaks from the inside began to flow to administration-friendly media. These allowed the agencies to put their self-serving spin on the raid without having to take responsibility for, or permit questioning of, those claims. Garland knows how Washington, D.C., works. He apparently wants to have it both ways: a trickle of official information but a gusher of selective, off-the-record disclosure.
If so, Garland’s invocation of “ethical obligations” is not to be taken seriously.
If, on the other hand, Garland is to be taken seriously and “ethical obligations” truly prevented him from saying more, one might infer that the leakers among Garland’s ranks belie his defense of the Department of Justice. He must be surrounded by lawyers and agents for whom the phrase “ethical obligations” is a contradiction in terms.
Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension released its report on the state’s 2021 crime statistics late Friday afternoon. My colleague Bill Glahn was one of the few who noticed.
The BCA’s numbers indicate that in 2021, homicides were up 72% over 2019, the state’s last “normal” year. Aggravated assaults were up 63% over 2019, and robberies up 30%. Minnesota’s crime wave continues to worsen.
What I really want to focus on is the demographic numbers, specifically with regard to homicide:
The racial characteristics of murder in Minnesota are very similar to 2020. Of known victims, 123 were African American, or 65 percent of the total. Of known perpetrators (a single murder could have more than one), 209 (76 percent) were African American. Compare these figures to the share of African Americans in Minnesota’s population, which is less than 10 percent.
African Americans represent less than 10% of Minnesota’s population, but are 76% of the state’s murderers and 65% of its murder victims. These facts make nonsense of complaints by Black Lives Matter activists, and liberals generally, that law enforcement unfairly targets blacks, or that blacks are “over-represented” in arrests or any other metric.
On the contrary, these basic numbers explain why, when plaintiffs successfully sued the City of Minneapolis to force it to adequately staff its police department, in accordance with the requirements of the city’s charter, those plaintiffs were blacks who live in crime-infested North Minneapolis. Liberals should be ashamed of themselves for deliberately obfuscating reality and thereby imperiling the lives of many of our citizens.
At this historical moment, somewhere around half the country remains ready to utter some version of “good riddance” to Donald Trump. And yet, in the not too distant future, a solid majority of Americans may well find themselves thanking Mr. Trump not once, but perhaps three or even four times.
For starters, he deserves thanks for running and winning in 2016. Secondly, he can be thanked for running and losing in 2020. (Stay tuned on that one.) Then there remains the hope that he soon might be thanked for choosing, Coolidge-like, not to run in 2024 before being slapped on the back a fourth time for supporting the political party that he has played a crucial role in remaking.
That would be the same Republican Party that came into being in the mid-19th century, when Abraham Lincoln’s Whig Party could not be remade. This would also be the same political party that Trump could destroy, if he should choose to abandon it.
All of this presumes that the eventual Republican nominee 1) presides over a big tent GOP that includes Trump constituents; 2) essentially follows Trump policies, domestic and foreign; 3) exhibits a Trumpian willingness to fight; and 4) wins the two terms that Trump did not. After all, it will likely take two full terms of Republican executive and legislative governance to set the country on a course that is at once new and old.
Such a sustained victory would confirm that the country had finally reversed what President Obama once deemed inevitable — namely, that an “arc of history” is forever bending in the progressive direction of an ever more centralized administrative state. That would be the very state that has been growing in fits and starts for better than a century now.
Such a state has long been in the process of becoming an increasingly secular state. In truth, such a state could only be a secular state. Such a state must also be reversed, but not to impose a state-sponsored religion. Not at all. An increasingly secular people have demanded and will continue to demand an ever more powerful state. A return to religious faith would constitute a return to the vision of the founders, meaning a republic of limited government. Such a republic, said John Adams, is fit for only a religious people.
If such a reversal does occur, Trump might eventually — and ironically — be credited with helping to spark it, not to mention the country’s renewal and revival. To be sure, this reversal will not be without its own fits and starts, since history is always a story of people acting rather than history “arcing.”
There might even be a bipartisan tinge to the whole thing. After all, the original centralizing thrust was initiated by progressives of both major parties. As time went on, the Democrats became the senior partner in this operation, while Republicans were reduced to a supportive role. Wouldn’t it be ironic if the two parties reversed their senior/junior roles as the country reversed its course?
In any case, there is no inevitable “arc” to any nation’s history. Instead, there are choices. If centralized consolidation is a series of choices, as it surely has been, so will be the story of its reversal. For that matter, if decline is a choice, so is a revival. The same goes for choices that the Democrats have made since their sweep (?), such as it was, in 2020.
In 2020, the Democrats won nothing at all comparable to their massive majorities of the 1930s and 1960s that ushered in the New Deal and the Great Society. Nonetheless, in their giddiness at having rid the country of Trump, the Democrats pressed ahead in 2021 as if it were 1933 or 1965 all over again.
Let’s not kid ourselves. The senior partner, the Democrat party, has been moving steadily leftward for a good while now — and all thanks to choices, not arcs. The same goes for Democrats’ allies in the media, education, entertainment, and the bureaucracy, as well as large-scale enterprises, best exemplified by the oligarchs of Silicon Valley.
The last named constitute a band of robber barons all their own. In truth, they are much more powerful and much more dangerous than the original “robber barons” of the late 19th century, whose activities and excesses triggered the original progressive movement. Wouldn’t it be deliciously ironic if our modern oligarchs unintentionally spurred a movement in a very different direction?
If such a movement ultimately does succeed, Trump will deserve credit for starting the ball rolling. Whether as candidate or president, Trump fought the arc-minded progressives harder and in ways that the two Bush Republican presidents did not. For that matter, he likely fought them harder than the would-be Dole, McCain, and Romney presidencies would have. He even often fought them harder than Ronald Reagan did. In doing so, he was not just the Democrats’ worst enemy, but his own worst enemy as well.
In the end, Trump played his role so well that he gave the Democrats additional determination to win in 2020, as well as justification to move farther left in the process. But the results of the 2020 election did not indicate that the country has moved dramatically to the left with them. In fact, if President-Elect Biden had a mandate to do anything, it was a negative mandate of sorts: he was simply being asked not to be either Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders.
Instead, with Biden as their party’s figurehead, the Democrats chose to use their slim victory to revive Obama’s arc of history and to demonize those fellow Americans who were once a key democratic constituency in the process.
Isn’t that ironic? What once constituted the voting heart of the New Deal Democrat party, the Northern working class and the solidly solid Democratic South, is now both the object of Democrat animosity and the heart of a remade GOP. What’s doubly ironic is that a nominal Catholic is presiding over a party that has long been abandoning its Catholic base, an abandonment that will no doubt pick up speed as our “devout” Catholic president leads the battle to dismantle the Dobbs decision while legislatively restoring Roe v. Wade.
Given all of this, plus Biden’s sagging poll numbers, Trump must be champing at the bit to run in 2024. If he would run and win, he would be replaying the presidential career of a fellow New Yorker, Grover Cleveland, and his non-consecutive terms. Here’s one more parallel: Trump in 2020 was the first incumbent president since Cleveland to run for re-election, top his original vote total…and lose, as Cleveland did in 1888.
That must grate. Then there is the not so small matter of unfinished business concerning matters such as the border, China, re-restoring energy independence, and continuing to “drain the swamp.”
Adding to Trump’s temptation to run again is the Russia hoax than consumed much of his term, as well as the two impeachments near its end. The prospect of an unhoaxable, unimpeachable second term must be alluring. But it should be resisted — and not just for the good of the country, but for his own good as well.
He should even — nay, he should especially resist the doubly alluring possibility of a rematch with Hillary. After all, a re-elected Trump would be an instant lame duck. And if the country is to return to making a different set of post-progressive choices, well, then a fresh start with a re-electable GOP president would be a good start.
Finally, if Obama’s “arc of history” is to be consigned to the dustbin of history, future generations, including future historians, might well look to the Trump single term in office as the historical point when it all began. Besides, one septuagenarian/octogenarian president at a time should be more than enough for a country somewhere in advanced middle age or beyond. It should also be more than enough for a country in great need of revival — and in many senses of that word.
Beyond all of that, there should be nothing wrong with a little un-Trumpian reticence, a little golf, a lot of Florida sunshine, not to mention the knowledge that one did one’s part in a much larger cause. Just ask Grover Cleveland, who should have been satisfied with his single term. After all, Cleveland’s Democratic Party lost 130 seats in the middle of his second term in 1894.
A similar fate could befall the Democrats in 2022, but don’t tell Trump. It would only encourage him to do what he shouldn’t do come 2024.
John C. “Chuck” Chalberg writes from Bloomington, Minnesota.
We live in a difficult time. Atheistic fascism has risen to command evil to our American youth…..teaching them to be evil, cruel, isolated, dishonest, corrupt among Democrats from coast to coast.
Neighbors no longer exist…nor does family. Female has come to disappear into fat, ignorance, and foreign from loving its potential to raise a miracle child.
Life is brief to the human animal. In my past lifetime nearly everyone had a family whom they loved and went to Church on Sundays or Saturdays if Jewish. Uncles, aunts, cousins, neighbors, friends, Church or Synagogue, schools and universities recognized THE GLORY OF CIVILITY, CARE, HONESTY, SHARING in the world I lived and my elderly relatives lived in.
MY GREAT GRANDMOTHER KRAFT WAS BORN IN 1848. SHE WAS RAISED AND HAD HER OWN CHILDREN IN GERMANY. THEY ALL CAME OVER TO MINNESOTA SHORTLY AFTER WORLD WAR I WAS OVER. GRANDPA DANNER BECAME A HOUSE BUILDER IN ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA IN THE 1930S.
ON THE OTHER HAND OF THE FAMILY, MY DAD’S DAD WAS BORN BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR BEGAN!!! HIS FAMILY LIVED IN CHERRYFIELD, MAINE. THEY WERE WEALTHY AND PRACTICED PRIMOGENITURE, THAT IS, IN THIS FAMILY’S CASE THE TWO OLDER BOYS WOULD RECEIVE THE FAMILY WEALTH AT THE END OF THEIR FATHER”S LIFE.
MY GRANDFATHER WAS THE THIRD BOY OF THE FAMILY. AFTER THE CIVIL WAR HE WENT WEST BY HORSEBACK AND ALONE, TO SEEK HIS WORLD IN NORTH DAKOTA. HIS DAD HAD PURCHASED ACREAGE NEAR HOPE, NORTH DAKOTA.
MY GRANDPA RAY WAS ONLY 16 YEARS OLD. SOMEWHERE IN MY HOUSE I HAVE HIS POSTCARD TAKEN WHEN HE STOPPED AT CHILLICOTHE, OHIO FOR WHATEVER….ON THE CARD HE WROTE:
“MOTHER! I’M FINE….FRANK!”
He died of throat cancer during the first world war. Two of his boys were sent to Europe to do their duty and returned safely. My dad was born in 1901. His Mother, my wonderful Grandmother, died in 1948 at age 80.
WE, MY RELATIVES AND OUR NEIGHBORS HAD REAL JUDEO-CHRISTIAN FAMILIES IN THE 1930S AND 1940S.
IT BECAME IN THE LATE 1960S THAT OUR UNITED STATES OF AMERICA WOULD MEET ITS POPULATION OF ATHEISM, IGNORANCE, ISOLATION AND GREED, LONELINESS AND STUPIDITY OF ITS TEACHERS ALMOST EVER SINCE…..THE DEMS OF OUR DAY!
MN Prager Discussion Group 
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