You Want Conspiracy?

In a recent piece Victor Davis Hanson went through all the anti-Trump plots of the deep state -- "All the Progressive Plotters." So I think I should list them. Because. Because I want to get them straight in my mind.

1. "Green Party candidate Jill Stein... sued in three states to recount votes and thereby overturn Donald Trump’s victory in the Electoral College."
2. "B-list Hollywood celebrities mobilized... to shame electors in Trump-won states into not voting for the president-elect during the official Electoral College balloting in December 2016."
3. "[M]ore than 60 Democratic House members voted to bring up Trump’s impeachment for vote. Trump had only been in office a few weeks."
4. "[C]elebrities and politicians hit social media and the airwaves to so demonize Trump that culturally it would become taboo even to voice prior support for the elected president.
5. "[D]uring the president’s first year in office, the Democrats and the media at various times sought to invoke the 25th Amendment, claiming Trump was so mentally or physically impaired that he was not able to carry out the duties of president. "
6. "200 congressional Democrats in late 2018 sued in federal court to remove President Trump, claiming he had violated the esoteric Emoluments Clause of the Constitution."
7. "[T]he ongoing “Resistance” both covertly and overtly sought ways to retard or destroy the Trump presidency—often by leaking presidential memos, conversations, and phone calls."
8. "Michael Avenatti reintroduced pornographic film star Stormy Daniels to the public [because] supposedly improper and now invalid non-disclosure agreement."
9. "[F]ederal law enforcement officials stormed the offices of Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, in search of incriminating materials."
10. "Russian collusion hysteria continued to sweep the country. The moribund phony Steele dossier... was reignited by the media and progressive politicos after the firing of FBI director James Comey,"
11. "[C]ongressional committees and the left-wing mob next went after William Barr, Trump’s “hand-picked” attorney general... Barr’s crime was that he had followed the law to the letter."
12. "[C]ongressional committees mobilized to sue and force Trump to release at least six years of his private income tax records, elements of which already in bits and pieces had been leaked."

Just sayin'. Of course, Hanson leaves out Brennan's use of the intelligence community to spy on the Trump campaign in 2016. Never mind, we will get back to that in good time.

Perhaps this little item tells us something about the whole procedure. That Donald Trump is now a survivor. He has been through political hell and lived to tell the tale. Dov Fischer, in The American Spectator told, back in January of his own experience as a survivor after three years of being attacked as a rabbi.

That vicious and despicable experience was so jarring, so disruptive to my core, my soul, and my essence — and also to my wife and my still-innocent then-adolescent son, both of whom personally were subjected directly to behavior that only G-d could punish — that I have not been the same person since... In short, the persecution and sustained three years of public efforts to destroy me — even to ruin my family — actually resulted in the opposite: they liberated me, and they persuaded me that there is no compromise with evil.

Then he goes on to list three other survivors: Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, and Donald Trump. As he says, after you have been through an experience like that, and are now a survivor, you learn to say about your tormentors: To heck with you.

And there is also the lesson of Crane Brinton's Anatomy of Revolution. He describes the typical arc of a political/cultural revolution, from extravagant hope, to disappointment, to enraged determination in a reign of terror and virtue, to the dénouement in a "Thermidorean Reaction."

The reaction comes, he asserts, because you cannot keep everyone living at fever pitch forever. At some point the vast majority of people just want to get back to normal life: wiving and thriving and all that. That is something that the committed activist -- Puritan, Jacobin, Bolshevik, intersectionalist -- does not understand.

Just sayin'.