A version of Les Misérables, new to U.S. viewers, began airing on PBS last week. While even nominally civilized people of the West were cognizant of the cruelty human beings were capable of for hundreds of years, Victor Hugo's novel of 1862 was an exceptional rendition of man's capacity for barbarity.

While Lincoln and the abolitionists were fighting to end slavery in America after having won independence from England, France was still suffering the disastrous consequences of its own ten-year revolution.

That nation lacked the spirit of humanity that animated our revolution and resulted in the American Constitution.  Their revolution devolved into mass murder.  The Reign of Terror began when the Jacobins seized power in 1793.  Thousands were guillotined, and Christianity was eradicated.

Sound familiar?  Our Left has driven itself into a Jacobin frenzy.  If they could guillotine President Trump and every one of his supporters and get away with it, many leftists would.

On Monday (4/22), the Trump Administration announced full sanctions on all countries importing Iranian oil would be in effect next week on May 2.  In announcing the decision, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said:

"The goal remains simple: to deprive the outlaw regime of the funds it had used to destabilize the Middle East for four decades and incentivize Iran to behave like a normal country… We have made our demands very clear to the ayatollah and his cronies:

End your pursuit of nuclear weapons, stop testing and proliferating ballistic missiles, stop sponsoring and committing terrorism, halt the arbitrary detention of US citizens. Our pressure is aimed at ending these and others and it will continue to accelerate until Iran is willing to address them.”

China, India and Turkey can do little to resist Donald Trump’s extra-territorial sanctions against Iran.  Why? Washington has established hegemonic control over global finance and the dollarized payments system.

The cost of defying the White House on a large scale is punitively high. A cell at the US Treasury called the Office of Foreign Assets Control – or simply OFAC to its victims – has perfected the art of economic strangulation through the global banking, insurance and shipping nexus.

On April 9, Israeli voters went to the polls and reelected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a landslide to serve a fifth term as prime minister.

American Jewish leaders on both sides of the partisan aisle routinely applaud Israel’s democracy. They argue that it is Israel’s democracy that forms the basis of U.S. support for the Jewish state.

In light of this consistent position, American Jewish leaders across the partisan divide could have been expected to celebrate the elections and the vibrancy of Israeli democracy and the independent mindedness of Israeli voters.

But this did not happen. While conservative Jewish American groups congratulated Israelis for their open democracy, liberal American Jewish groups responded to the Israeli election results by throwing a collective fit.  Such is the tragedy of liberal American Jewry.

Hamas has left Gaza in shambles. Life there is difficult, sad and abnormal.

Only buildings with generators actually maintain steady power. The lack of power affects everything from preserving fresh food to treating sewage.

If a person in Gaza falls ill, he is likely to find trained medical professionals unable to help because of the lack of equipment and medicines. The people there — even the talented and educated — can’t find jobs. The store shelves are empty.

The shoreline, which in many other places in the Mediterranean would be filled with beach resorts, is covered in the raw sewage and debris from successive wars. The cost of conflict is seen in all aspects of life in Gaza.

America and the world wants to help – but the terrorists of Hamas won’t allow it.

What’s in the special counsel’s findings is almost as revealing as what’s left out.

By the fall of 2017, it was clear that special counsel Robert Mueller, as a former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was too conflicted to take a detached look at a Russia-collusion story that had become more about FBI malfeasance than about Donald Trump.

The evidence of that bias now stares at us through 448 pages of his report.

President Trump has every right to feel liberated. What the report shows is that he endured a special-counsel probe that was relentlessly, at times farcically, obsessed with taking him out.

No wonder Obama talks of a circular firing squad, because Democrats are drawing a bead on other Democrats with malice. aforethought, and mayhem in their hearts.

Being intersectional (enjoy all the Urban Dictionary definitions) means never having to say you're sorry, and it also means demanding that everyone else say they're sorry.

Feminists like Pelosi are Islamophobes, gays like Buttigieg are racists, blacks are homophobic, and white men like Biden and Sanders are misogynist and classist, as the case may be.

No goofier notion ever invaded American political thinking than the idea of a coalition based on entitled victimhood and invented identity.  Do Democrats want a Trump Landslide in 2020?

Pete Buttigieg is the latest star to emerge from Democrats’ 2020 pack, which is no surprise since he exhibits all the tropes we have come to associate with this party in the era of its Trump derangement.

On the evidence just of his attacks on Vice President Mike Pence, Buttigieg is a shameless liar, a calculating character assassin and an anti-religious/anti-free speech bigot, motivated by a virulent hatred of his political opponents, especially those who have been good to him like Pence.

Buttigieg’s chosen target is one of the most decent human beings in politics, who was supportive of Buttegieg both before he revealed he was gay and after.

Using a gracious and decent opponent as a prop in a hate campaign against Christians for political gain, tells you how low Democrats have sunk this electoral season.

The media’s bias has never been subtle, but its disinterest in a presidential candidate’s track record has never been this blatant.

Mayor Buttigieg’s candidacy is being covered as if he weren’t the mayor of an actual city with actual problems. Instead his prospects have been covered purely in terms of his identity, a gay millennial, his past career before taking office, and his current witticisms and applause lines.

At no point in time does the media stop to tell the viewers and readers it is regaling with stories of Mayor Buttigieg’s charm that he runs “one of the most dangerous cities in the United States,” according to USA Today.

South Bend is a crime-infested bloody mess, for which its mayor for the last eight years bears responsibility.   And he has the gall to run for president?

Today (4/17), the Islamist dictator of Sudan for 30 years, Omar al-Bashir, was incarcerated in Kober Prison in Khartoum, the maximum security prison that held so many of the political prisoners Bashir put there.   He was overthrown by his own military last Thursday (4/11).

Putin has now lost his key to his goal of an African Empire for Russia.

On orders from Russian President Vladimir Putin, his agent Yevgeny Prigozhin—popularly known as “the cook” because of his ownership of a catering company—has inserted “political technologists” in at least 20 African countries.

The Kremlin has for years viewed Sudan as an important base for this operation on the African continent. But the recent coup in this country shows how fragile and changeable is the foundation on which that Russian effort is based.

Donald Trump says “trade wars are good and easy to win” if your foes depend on your market and you can break them under pressure.

You see, he knows that China’s majestic and elegantly-stable GDP figures are best seen as an instrument of political combat.  Which is why he proclaimed victory when the Shanghai equity index went into a swoon over the winter. This is classic Trumpian gamesmanship.

It is in China’s urgent interest to puncture such claims as trade talks come to a head. Xi Jinping had to beat expectations with a crowd-pleaser in the first quarter. The number was duly produced: 6.4%. Let us all sing the March of the Volunteers.

“Could it really be true?” asked Beijing-based Caixin magazine. This was a brave question in Uncle Xi’s evermore totalitarian regime.

Of course it is not true.