Government sponsorship of violence against opponents or complacency in the face of incitement to violence is a powerful tool of political repression. Regimes such as Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, Nicaragua, China, and other tyrannies have used such tactics to great effect.

When mobs attack anti-government demonstrators, for example, the police either disappear or stand by watching. In American cities run by Democrats and on the U.S. college and university campuses, the authorities increasingly have been standing by as radicals do the dirty work of beating up or silencing conservatives.

In societies riven by mutual hate, the people who control the police and public communications make all the difference.  When societal hatred or the partiality of authorities results in deaths, long-smoldering cold civil war can blaze into holocaust.  We Americans are now facing the danger of a civil war thus ignited.

We do not think of civil war this way because our Civil War from 1861 to 1865 was less a conflict within society than it was a highly organized war between states. What we face now is worse.

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After denouncing hate on Sunday, Democrats went back on Monday to calling for violence against conservatives.

In Kentucky, Mitch McConnell is convalescing at home after breaking a shoulder. Nancy's Army went to his house to harass him. He's 77.  A video of the protest shows them demanding he be stabbed in the heart.

We have to start taking the Democrats’ creation of a maelstrom of hate very, very seriously.

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Universal Pictures has produced a film called The Hunt (originally titled Red State vs. Blue State), which begins with rich liberals capturing ‘deplorables’ from red states to hunt down and murder.

If you lived in Dayton, Ohio, you might consider this a realistic premise, although I don’t think that is what the filmmakers had in mind. The video above is the official trailer; if I interpret it correctly, the ‘deplorables’ fight back and win what looks like a civil war.

In that respect, one might say that the film is realistic.

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The stifling conformity of the Great Awokening has now driven even Quentin Tarantino to the subversive right.

His immensely enjoyable buddy comedy Once Upon in a Time…in Hollywood, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt at their considerable best, has The New Yorker fulminating that it’s “obscenely regressive.”

Critic Richard Brody complains, “Tarantino delivers a ridiculously white movie” that “celebrates white-male stardom (and behind-the-scenes command).”

Well, Hallelujah…

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For the past several months now, the US media is obsessed with dire predictions of a calamitous trade war between China and the US, following numerous statements by President Trump that the Chinese trade surplus is intolerable.

Indeed, at $506 billion of Chinese exports against only $130 billion of US ones, it does look very unfair. However, things look a bit different if looked at from a different angle.

For the problem with China is, thus, not its surplus per se, but rather the economic system that produces it and here it is the Communist system and not free trade that are clearly to blame.

Trade is just a way of increasing the power of the Chinese Communist Party. Everything that contributes to its aggrandizing is fair and widely practiced – technology theft, discrimination against foreign companies, preferential loans/subsidies to state-owned enterprises, currency manipulation etc.

It is a fool’s paradise though with China’s economy beset with problems that defy easy solutions.

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Well before Sigmund Freud formalized the idea of “projectionism”—the defense of one’s own shortcomings and sins by attributing them to others—it was a common theme in classical literature and the New Testament: the ridiculing of the mole on someone else’s nose to hide one’s own boil.

The term projection more or less sums up much of the woke identity politics movement, in which obsessions with racial privilege and tribal exceptionalism are justified by accusing others of just such bias.

For example, the new racism is epidemic among those in the so-called squad, the self-referenced nickname for four media-obsessed, first-term congressional representatives, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), who without their daily charges of bias largely would be unknown back-benchers laboring away in obscurity.

They have all taken Joseph Goebbels’ advice.

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As Brit Hume pointed out recently, “People discerning a racist motive for Trump’s attack on Elijah Cummings are missing a key point: Trump attacks those who criticize him and his administration, black or white.”

Hume follows up with an amusing and color-coordinated list of people Trump has put in their place (Bernie Sanders: crazy, Elizabeth Warren: total fraud, Justin Amash: loser, Joe Biden: low IQ, Harry Reid: insane, etc., etc.).

Beyond the elements of political calculation and polemical style, however, Donald Trump’s recent tweet fests suggest that he may be on the threshold of shifting the Overton Window on race.

Public discourse in America has long been held hostage to a species of racist moral blackmail that has made it almost impossible to tell the truth about many central social realities.  The President is trying to liberate us from it.

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Ronald Reagan famously said, "I didn't leave the Democrat Party. The Democrat Party left me."

Now it's left the rest of us.

If every candidate on stage raising their hands for free healthcare for illegal aliens during the first MSNBC debate wasn't enough to brand the party and its faithful as a collection of virtue-signaling lemmings, the subsequent CNN debates should have finished the job.

Or should I say debates or game shows? They were basically contests for who could go the furthest left.

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Night Two of the second round of Democratic presidential primary debates was expected to be a fireworks display between former Vice President Joe Biden (D-Del.) and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), and CNN did its best to light the fuses early on. Sadly -- for the viewers who didn't want to be bored, anyway -- all of those fuses were duds.

The following is my assessment of the painful display, using some of my live tweets from the evening rather than having to type more. Thank you in advance for indulging me, dear readers.

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