He helped conceive a hoax so outlandish that only the most gullible, craven, or witless person could believe it.

The attack, as he called it, allegedly was executed by mysterious and politically motivated thugs with the intent to inflict harm. It exploited the political climate of the moment given that the chief goal of the ruse—and of the perpetrator himself—was to sow division in an already-fractured American populace for his own gratification.

Lawmakers, journalists, and celebrities acted as accomplices, allowing themselves to be duped and conferring immediate legitimacy to the event. As authorities began to expose the hoax, the mastermind lashed out, blasting his detractors and making incendiary accusations.

No, I am not talking here about Jussie Smollett, the “Empire” actor who concocted an elaborate story about how MAGA-hat wearing hoodlums attacked him in the middle of a frigid night on an underground street in downtown Chicago.  I am talking about…

Democrats are fighting mad — at each other. For once, President Trump is not the prime target of their rage.

Amazon’s decision to scrap plans for an HQ2 campus in New York sent the circular firing squad into action. The blue-on-blue attacks pit the far left against the far, far left in yet another front of the party’s civil war.

In addition to sharp differences about a Green New Deal, taxes, socialism, Medicare-for-all and open borders, Dems are now split over how and whether government should work with the private sector to create jobs and boost the tax base.

But while the battle still rages and analysts study the entrails of Amazon’s decision-making, here’s a thought: What if both sides of the Dem battle are wrong? What if both sides are causing the epidemic of the blue-state blues?

During the Lunar New Year holidays this month, political circles in Beijing were abuzz with this question: “Who, or what, are ‘black swans’ and ‘gray rhinos’?”

This followed a major speech given by President and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary Xi Jinping at the Central Party School (CPS) last month, in which the 65-year-old leader raised the highest alert for Party officials to “be on guard against black swans and keep watchful for gray rhinos” (jingti hei tian’e, fangfan hui xiniu / 警惕黑天鹅, 防范灰犀牛) (People’s Daily, January 22).

Noting that China’s national security and stability were under multiple threats from within and without, the “core leader” warned: “We must keep our highest alert about ‘black swan’ [i.e., unforeseen] incidents and take steps to prevent ‘gray rhino’ [i.e., known risks that are ignored] incidents.”

At first, the Beijing buzz was these threats are external, coming from an increasingly successful Trump administration in confronting China.  Now comes the realization that Xi means internal threats to his power and that of the Chinese Communist Party.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think,” wrote the American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft in the opening to The Call of Cthulhu, “is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.”

In the Lovecraftian mythos, this refers to the occult world of the Great Old Ones, eldritch gods from outer space, as old as time itself who lie beyond our ken, dead but still dreaming. If we could only grasp their existence and see how fragile our imaginary world really is, we would go mad. Thus, we go on believing in an illusion and subconsciously hope Cthulhu and Azathoth never show us their true faces.

With the Democrat Party embracing full hardcore totalitarian Leftism, the secret to being a successful Democrat is very similar.

While President Trump was holding his Monday (2/11) rally in El Paso for a packed stadium, the hapless Beto O'Rourke was hosting his own pathetic anti-wall protest, his "March for Truth," a quarter of a mile away.

His little march attracted about three hundred people.  Beto spoke Spanish while his supporters waved  Mexican flags, and his gathering was close enough to the Trump event that the big rally's music could be heard.

It may be safe to say that Beto's potential run for president is over before it has begun.  He is a self-serving, anti-American intellectual lightweight like Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, and every other Democrat who has thrown his hat in the ring for 2020.

There is a famous poem by Sir Walter Scott published in 1805 that perfectly describes people like Beto, Obama, Hillary Clinton, Schumer, Harry Reid , Nancy Pelosi, and the rest of the Left:

“We stand with the Venezuelan people in their noble quest for freedom — and we condemn the brutality of the Maduro regime, whose socialist policies have turned that nation from being the wealthiest in South America into a state of abject poverty and despair. Here in the United States, we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country. America was founded on liberty and independence — not government coercion, domination, and control. We are born free, and we will stay free. Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.”  --President Donald Trump, February 5, 2019

After all, the three greatest mass-murderers of all time were “Socialists” – Hitler the National Socialist (30 million), Stalin the leader of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (40 million), Mao the leader of “the Socialist revolution” of the Chinese Communist Party (60 million).

The reason Trump's outspoken opposition to socialism is so timely, more necessary than ever in our country, is the catastrophe of America’s schools. While few were noticing, our educational system -- from the earliest years through college -- has been turning, indeed has turned for the most part, into a virtual indoctrination program for socialism.

The nadir of the amoral egotism of what might broadly be called “Me-ism” has been reached by the avant garde of the Democrat Party in their race to the bottom of the electoral depths.

The renunciation of any notions of sacrifice, patriotic pride, the spirituality of life, or the recognition of anything except the smash-and-grab politics of endless atomized grievances and instant gratification of convenience, has reached what must, in its way, be the end of its history.

As the party of infanticide and open borders, they are indulging in a frenzy of primal extremism from which they will not recover.

There were laughter, tears, raucous cheers and awkward silences. But more than anything else, it was a punch in the gut that President Trump delivered Tuesday night.

Time after time, on issue after issue, he laid down a marker about the remaining two years of his term — and the outlines of his re-election campaign.

Speeches that are too long — as this one was — often smother their key points in windy verbiage. But there was no mistaking Trump’s meaning or his intent to seek a second term on the platform of a strong economy, strong defense and secure borders.

The state of the union is frighteningly divided and hostile, but the state of the president’s aim is sound. For all the talk of chaos and churn in his administration, Donald Trump knows what he’s about. As he always has, he’s playing to win.