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You Could Go to Prison for What You Write

By Walter Donway

February 26, 2024

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I had the thought (seriously) that I could be arrested for what I write.

For the first time since I became aware of “politics,” I had the thought (seriously) that I could be arrested for what I write. I am not so grandiose as to think that I will be arrested, now. But I no longer think “Not in America.” Now, I think “Not me.”

Since becoming aware of the Left—totalitarian dictatorships in the former Soviet Union and Nazi Germany and today in the People’s Republic of China and North Korea—I identified with those persecuted, arrested, imprisoned, tortured, killed for opposition to political power. Following the career of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and so many others, I felt a special connection. I had become aware of the process by which free or semi-free nations—under the influence of philosophical ideas, ideologies, and the metastasizing nature of statism (where the mess created by one intervention is used to justify the next)—slowly slide or catastrophically plunge into the totalitarian night. And I had read 1984, This Perfect Day, Anthem, We the Living, and Atlas Shrugged.

Grateful to be an American and determined to oppose leftist trends driven by postmodernist philosophical premises now wedded to Marxist ideology, justified by altruist-collectivist doctrine, and excused by the “emergencies” of racism, climate change, inequality…. The time to fight it was now, while we were free, the price low, not like the price paid—well, most recently, by Alexei Navalny, 47, who died February 24 in Russian corrective colony FKU IK-3 in the Arctic—almost certainly assassinated for opposing the one-party dictatorship of Vladimir Putin, an ex-KGB officer turned lifetime dictator.

Fight now, I always thought, while the price is low, so the next generation, my son’s generation, won’t have to fight dictatorship (communist, fascist, or generic socialist) armed with a silenced press, one-party prosecutors, arbitrary “law enforcement,” mock trials, secret police, torture, prison camps, and political executions.

I see leftists at this moment reaching out for their hoariest canards, the equivalent of the “Protocols of Zion” myth, that they are not “fascists”—the opposite, they are “left”! Fascism, national socialism, is the “(far) right”! In reality, of course, fascism is just a socialist variant (as both Hitler and Mussolini knew), which substitutes, for government “ownership” of property, total (or substantive) government control of property remaining nominally “private.” The chief difference pre-WWII was that Marxian “socialists” wanted to abolish the nation in the name of the international “proletariat,” “fascists” did not. Today, the U.S. left opts for the semi-fascist economic model, but appears to embrace both the “internationalist” theme—look at their attitude toward U.S. borders—and race—making it their dominant political theme.

 

A Wake-Up Call from Joel Pollack

Now, for the first time, I believe that the battle in my lifetime might not be to keep America free from a fully statist government, but to face it—and pay the price.

I believe that the battle in my lifetime might not be to keep America free from a fully statist government, but to face it—and pay the price.

This realization (better termed a “wake-up” call) came courtesy of journalist Joel B. Pollack, senior-editor-at-large of Breitbart News, one of today’s most objective, ideologically awake reporters.[1] A story, dateline 3 Feb 2024, “Democrats Treat Trump Like Putin Treated Navalny,” started this way:

“Democrats treat the Republican opposition, and former president Donald Trump, in particular, the way that Russian President Vladimir Putin treated Alexei Navalny.”

“…Democrats were quick to seize on Navalny’s death to attack Trump. …a revival of the ‘collusion’ hoax that prevents Democrats from seeing the totalitarian nature of their own behavior.

“But…through the Biden administration’s Department of Justice, and through elected Democrat prosecutors in New York and Georgia—[Democrats] want to put Trump in prison for the rest of his life.”[2]

Here is Mr. Pollack’s indictment of today’s Democratic Administration and cooperating agents in the states:

  1. Donald Trump is charged with crimes with combined penalties of more than 700 years—one charge carrying the potential death penalty. “Prosecutors claim they are not seeking that penalty, but the message was sent.”[3]
  2. A Democratic judge in NYC found Trump liable for civil fraud although no defense was permitted. Attorney General Letitia James “ran for office vowing to target Trump, used an obscure fraud statute in a completely new way to target Trump…” This despite the fact that Trump did not intend to defraud anyone and banks involved in these transactions were not harmed in any way.
  3. Trump must pay a massive fine ($354 million) before he can appeal. The prosecutor intends to seize his buildings if he does not pay. Mr. Pollack writes: “…Putin treats opposition leaders and dissident oligarchs in Russia today [exactly that way],” using methods from his KGB days in the Soviet Union. And “Navalny himself saw the parallels in 2021, when he protested against Trump being censored by Twitter.”
  4. Social media companies now censor what Democrats want to keep from the public…and censor people critical of the party. “Just ask Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), who wanted a journalist banned for reporting on him.”
  5. “The evidence is clear: the White House pressured social media companies to violate the First Amendment on its behalf.” Censorship is not the result of private companies acting on their own. That is what Democrats and Democrat-friendly media outlets [99 percent] claimed.” S. District Judge Terry Doughty of Louisiana in response to a lawsuit alleging that the federal government pressured social media companies to censor postings that might create “vaccine hesitancy” during the COVID-19 pandemic—or affect elections—cited “substantial evidence” of a far-reaching censorship campaign, “an almost dystopian scenario…. The United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’”[4]
  6. The U.S. DOJ pursues the Biden administration’s declared political enemies. After Jan 6, DOJ prosecuted hundreds of non-violent protesters, many held in pretrial detention for months, “often ruining their lives.”
  7. DOJ now is prosecuting an informant “whose crime appears to have been giving false information about a very real pattern of corrupt behavior by President Biden and his relatives.” In any case, those relatives made millions selling access to Biden to foreign investors and interests.
  8. DOJ did not punish Christopher Steele for the “Russia collusion” hoax, which sought to overturn the 2016 election of President Trump. Most perpetrators prosecuted were not punished. Today many are high in the Biden administration. The special prosecutor cleared Trump of all charges of colluding with Russia in the 2016 election. The AP story said: “the report criticized the earlier investigation [led by Robert Mueller], saying the FBI investigators repeatedly relied on ‘confirmation bias,’ ignoring or rationalizing away evidence that undercut their premise of a Trump-Russia conspiracy as they pushed the probe.” [5]
  9. “An [i.e., the 2020 Presidential] election conducted largely by mail; a practice considered potentially fraudulent by most other democracies.” Mr. Pollack may be referring to a recent shocking report from the Heartland Institute on the decisive impact of mail-in ballots on Biden’s 2020 “victory.” The report concluded: “It appears highly likely that Donald Trump, not Joe Biden, would have won the presidential election, had mail-in ballot fraud been prevented from occurring.”
  10. Democrats seek to bar Trump from the ballot in many states. Similarly, Putin barred Navalny from running against him in 2017. “The given reason, the UK Guardian noted at the time, was ‘because of [Navalny’s] conviction in a fraud case [emphasis added] which has been viewed as political retribution.’”
  11. “It is…the playbook being run against Trump—by the very people who refused to accept the legitimacy of Trump’s 2016 win, and who now claim that they are ‘defending democracy.’”
  12. “No doubt Putin is a bad actor. But worse than Biden?” “His campaign enlisted 51 national security officials to lie about his son’s laptop, then cited that lie in a debate to win an election.” And: “At least Trump stood up to Putin. Democrats not only appease him, but imitate him.” Pollock reported that before the special prosecutors’ report attacked the FBI for initially lending credence to the Russian collusion hoax: “More than 50 former intelligence officials, led by Obama-era Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, have signed an open letter alleging that the newly-released Hunter Biden emails are ‘Russian disinformation’ — even if they are real.”

No, the federal government is not going to start arresting journalists—not yet. The Breitbart news story and the existence of Breitbart are testimony to that. No publication could be more remorselessly willing to run stories damaging to President Biden, Democrats, and the media—some extremely serious, some repetitively superficial even if true, some sensationalistic, some that must make President Biden feel personally attacked in damaging, humiliating ways—and, of course, his family, too. Nor is Breitbart entirely alone in this. The media outlets in America have astounding freedom and scope.

 

How the American Left May “Get There”

One reason for this—beyond the U.S. Constitution and remnants of liberalism when it comes to “intellectual” rights versus “material” rights of property/business/trade—is that overwhelmingly, with fairly rare exceptions, the major media (so-called mainstream) are near fanatically pro-Democrat and further left than the Biden administration. I submit to you that no political figure in American history exceeds Donald Trump in “mainstream” media coverage—90-plus percent of it righteously doctrinaire negative.

In all modern history, all revolutions except that in America in 1776 have been against the middleclass.

But systematic suppression of ideas (not “censorship,” a concept applicable only to government) is now endemic in higher education, targeting speech viewed as damaging to favored groups, as emotionally challenging to protected feelings of “oppressed” groups, and as ideologically unacceptable (thus speakers are barred from campuses or attacked when they appear). One higher education site lists: “Vulnerable populations: Black, Asian American, Latinx, LGBTQ+, Native American, international, and unauthorized students. First-generation low-income students and those with disabilities are also impacted.” Wouldn’t it be easier just to say: everyone but the White American upper and middleclass? In all modern history, all revolutions except that in America in 1776 have been against the middleclass (in Germany it had been broken by the depression and great inflation).

In U.S. higher education today (and in the media) employment is extended only to those with ideas sanctioned by the code of “progressivism.” With additional strong bias favoring “vulnerable” populations. Increasingly, ideas unacceptable to favored groups are viewed as violating rights. That, of course, is the prerequisite for justifying legal suppression, including censorship. Censorship still unacceptable to much of the electorate (e.g., Baby Boomers) will not be unacceptable to generations now graduating from colleges and universities.

What is happening has not been made more vividly real, the story told better, than in Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald’s The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture (2018).[6] Mac Donald’s newest book “When Race Trumps Merit … is driven by a sense of alarm, supported by detailed case studies of how disparate-impact thinking is jeopardizing scientific progress, destroying public order, and poisoning the appreciation of art and culture.”

Typical ideas suppressed by universities and the media, today—those framed as “hurting” favored groups—are taking us toward the chief rationalization used by dictatorships: Attacks denigrate the German Volk, the proletariat, or the “Chinese people.” The ideas are labeled “attacks,” attacks are equated with “violence,” and “rights” are invoked to justify prosecution of “enemies” of the “people.” Oxford Academic writes of the early Soviet communist revolution: “If people were ‘bourgeois‘ they were ipso facto ‘enemies’ and worse.”

Do you see, now, that Donald Trump must win the 2024 presidential election? If he does not, then the entire break-and-jail-Trump campaign has “worked”—and success confirms its righteousness. American democracy is “saved,” American freedom is “saved,” America is “saved” from “fascism.” Saved by the DOJ, saved by Democratic prosecutors, saved by the media, and saved by all who cheered them on.

His shortcomings, and there are many, no longer are the decisive issue. (Recall that his 2016 –2020 presidency saw none of the disasters that had been predicted.) If he wins it will be because Americans (as now seems to be the case) credit nothing in the mainstream media reports; dismiss all actions of our justice system as what they are—weaponized non-objective law; and do not believe the sacred catechism that Trump lost the 2020 election and engaged in “sedition” and “insurrection” to overturn it. (I saw a recent poll reported on CNN that some 10 percent of Republican voters might not vote for Trump if he were convicted of a felony.)

The question is: Can Trump win any election, given what the Democrats pulled off at the federal, state, and local levels in the 2020 election? If you have not read the Heartland Institute report, do so. Until I read it, I had no opinion on the “stolen election” issue. The report on its own, and in light of what the anti-Trump forces since have shown themselves capable of doing, makes sense of what happened after the election, including the astonishing persistence of some half of the American electorate—to the gob-smacked horror of the media—in doubting that Biden won the 2020 election.

A last point. Our days are numbered. When the $30 trillion national debt increases with $2–3 trillion annual deficits, and inflation (the Fed more than doubled the total U.S. money supply after the COVID lockdown), can delay no longer the cataclysmic day of reckoning for the U.S. economy, we may experience decades of economic and financial chaos, runaway inflation, and economic ruin resulting from statist economic policies.

Revolutions rarely are friendly to freedom, economic liberalism, and the rule of law.

On that day, the stage will be set in classic historic fashion for the politics of revolution. Revolutions catalyzed by misery, fear, and burning resentment—whether they are violent, electoral, or by an incumbent party’s putsch—rarely are friendly to freedom, economic liberalism, and the rule of law. They pit racial, economic, ethnic, or political groups against each other—and we are already well-primed for that. The U.S. Holocaust Museum Encyclopedia makes the point: “What most contributed to the Nazi Party’s success was Germany’s economic collapse during the Great Depression, beginning in 1929. The crisis resulted in widespread unemployment and poverty. It also led to an increase in crime. Germans’ resulting anger and fear left them vulnerable to arguments from the extreme right and left.” That is, competing socialist parties.

In such an interlude, time after time, it has proved impossible to make the argument that government cannot rescue us, solve our problems, defeat the “enemies of the people” (take your pick, it has been Jews, the bourgeois, land-owning peasants). Impossible to make the argument that government should do nothing useful except get out of the way of the economy, uphold objective laws, forbid violence, and let people work and trade. Good luck in that atmosphere with defending the absolute necessity of permitting criticism and debate.

The Donald Trump the Left is desperate to finish off was created by the Left. From the first moment in 2016 that he declared his candidacy, and swept the field for the Republican nomination, the tactics of the Left have been distort, demonize, spread fear, impeach, bankrupt, create a “criminal,” win by any means, then blame, blame, blame Trump.

Trump’s survival (so far)—personally, psychologically, politically, legally—with astonishing resiliency personally and politically—suggests the tactics and tools of the Left have failed. All that remains is assassination—literal or legalized. One colleague commented to me: “They will not stop until they drive the man to his grave. It’s disgusting.”

Whether Trump wins or loses—ends in the White House, prison, or the grave by January 2025—a kind of “Last Battle” is shaping up in America. It can be won by reason and logic—by philosophy—but to use them we must remain free. For the first time, I see–need no longer imagine–a time America no longer will be.”

 

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[1] Joel Pollack is the author of the recent book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it)”… and Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. His reporting on the Israel-Hamas conflict has been superb.

[2]www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/02/23/blue-state-blues-democrats-treat-trump-like-putin-treated-navalny.

[3] “Trump Faces 76.5 Years in Prison in Georgia; 91 Counts, 717.5 Years Overall, Plus Law That Includes Possibility of Death Penalty”

[4]  AP News, “Judge limits Biden administration in working with social media companies,” January 4, 2023.

[5] “Prosecutor Ends 4-Year Probe of FBI’s Trump-Russia Investigation with No New Charges but Some Harsh Criticism [of Mueller FBI investigation] (Associated Press May 15, 2023)

[6] “…toxic ideas first spread by higher education have undermined humanistic values, fueled intolerance, and widened divisions in our larger culture.”  Here latest book is When Race Trumps Merit. (https://manhattan.institute/book/when-race-trumps-merit

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