This summer at a conference at a well-known university, I sat down with the head of a new institute on campus who was  blunt. “At this point, if you can’t answer yes to a basic question, nothing else counts. Doesn’t matter where you stand on taxes, foreign policy, regulations . . .”

“What’s the question?” I asked.

 “Are you ready to fight?”

“That’s it?”

“Yeah,” he replied with a shrug, “that’s it.”

The Left has been making war by other means for 50 years, changing history textbooks, peddling films that mock fatherhood and faith, designing bogus studies that show pay gaps and systemic racism.  No more compromise, no more calls for bipartisanship with them.  Now we fight.

Let’s face it: Democrats’ embrace of thuggery over democracy is not normal.

Democrats have become the party of thuggery, from the top leaders abusing President Trump as a traitor and criminal, to the Antifa black shirts beating up Trump supporters in Democrat cities. The ginned up hysteria over Trump’s election has grown with Trump’s triumphant successes with the economy and national security.

The Democrat Party has veered far left very fast, without any pushback from within the party. Their voters have turned, seemingly overnight, from normal American citizens to a deranged mob after Trump’s blood. This weird transformation is normalized by blaming it on Trump himself, and the shock of his victory.

A moment’s reflection shows how superficial that derangement explanation is.

"Why are Leftists so unreachable by reason? You can point out holes in their arguments but they are unmoved.  And some of their claims are entirely out of touch with reality." 

Later on in his introduction to another piece he posted, he cites Freud in calling what leftists do "displacement," meaning that, in their minds, their anger is always caused by something outside of themselves, like injustice for example.  Leftists do not want to solve problems though, they want to "luxuriate" in them; they need problems to explain their anger.

These are among the several reasons why the Dems’ plot against plot if falling apart.

What does it mean after the House of Representatives — on an almost one-hundred-percent pure partisan vote, save for two Democrats who wisely demurred — decides to expand an impeachment investigation on what they claim to be serious charges when... the very next day... the stock market zooms to all-time highs, breaking records substantially on all major indexes, and black unemployment goes to all-time lows?

Well, the latter spells big trouble for the Democrats a year from now and the former means the investment world thinks impeachment is a bunch of horse hockey that will never happen (the Republican Senate will never convict Trump, not even envious Mitt) and the real news was the job figures.

And it's easy to see why both of those are true.

What a world we live in. A confidential asset of a hyper-political CIA director, handpicked by the director to spy on the Trump White House, is now called a “whistleblower.”

All the while the mainstream propagandists gaslight us by shrieking that Trump is the corrupt one, that Trump’s ideas are destructive as the economy soars and unemployment remains at 50 year lows. When the Washington Post intones that “Democracy dies in darkness” they evince no apparent awareness of irony. They’re knifing democracy to death every single day.

In the meantime, as our constitutional republic faces the wrecking balls of the Left and is asked to endure as they smash away at every norm that has made this country great, many Republicans find themselves conveniently absent from the action.

“I killed my parents so now I ask for mercy on the grounds that I’m an orphan.”

That's the canonical definition of chutzpah -- shameless effrontery -- and it summarizes the Democrat position on the attempted impeachment of President Trump.

The Hillary Clinton campaign paid for the Steele dossier, assembled out of bits handed to ex-MI6 spook Christopher Steele from his Russian intelligence sources, and the FBI used this concoction to obtain FISA warrants to bug the Trump presidential campaign.

Now, THAT'S foreign interference. And those facts aren't in dispute. When the Trump administration tries to get the truth out of foreign governments about their involvement in nefarious activities in the U.S., the Democrats scream, "Impeachment!"

The Wall Street Journal editors got this exactly right:

More than 2 million Californians were recently left without power after the state's largest utility, Pacific Gas and Electric -- which filed for bankruptcy earlier this year -- preemptively shut down transmission lines in fear that they might spark fires during periods of high autumn winds.

Consumers blame the state for not cleaning up dead trees and brush, along with the utility companies for not updating their ossified equipment.

Californians know that having tens of thousands of homeless in their major cities is untenable. In many places, municipal sidewalks have become open sewers of garbage, used needles, rodents and infectious diseases.  These are but a few of many examples that the once-golden state has reverted to a primitive premodern age.

Under Islamist strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey has become NATO’s only non-democratic nation. It’s also NATO’s only Muslim-majority member. Erdogan has been trying to re-create Turkey as a new Ottoman imperial power. He feels no allegiance to Western-style democracy.

During the Obama administration, Erdogan snubbed the obsequious American attempts to promote Turkey as the cornerstone of America’s Middle East policy. President Trump should remember that and perhaps reconsider his own sometimes appeasing outreach to Erdogan.

Turkey opposes, if not detests, almost every American ally in the region, and befriends almost every U.S. enemy.  Here are prime examples.

The weekend raid that resulted in the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was named after Kayla Mueller, an American aid worker killed in Syria in 2015 while being held captive  and repeadedly raped by the sadistic ISIS leader.

After the U.S. confirmed Mueller’s death, President Obama issued a statement. “ISIL is a hateful and abhorrent terrorist group whose actions stand in stark contrast to the spirit of people like Kayla. No matter how long it takes, the United States will find and bring to justice the terrorists who are responsible for Kayla’s captivity and death.”

Obama, however, did not bring those terrorists to justice; nearly five years later, it was Donald Trump who made good on that promise.  Obama and his top national security officials were too busy hunting down Trump campaign aides.

The Left’s fixation on climate change is cloaked in scientism, deploying computer models to create the illusion of certainty.

Ever more convinced of their role as planetary saviors, radical greens are increasingly intolerant of dissent or any questioning of their policy agenda. They embrace a sort of “soft Stalinism,” driven by a determination to remake society, whether people want it or not—and their draconian views are penetrating the mainstream.

“Democracy,” a writer for Foreign Policy suggests, constitutes “the planet’s biggest enemy.”  Spoken like a true Stalinist.