Via its institutional mouthpiece, the New York Times, the American and international far Left has laid out its battle plan for the 2024 presidential election and beyond: "The Resistance to a New Trump Administration Has Already Started." Written by a hard-core trained cadre of ideological reporter-editorialists, including Trump frenemy Maggie Haberman, Charlie Savage, Reid J. Epstein, and Jonathan Swan, it is an open declaration of war on the rest of us. In many ways, this is the prequel to Molly Ball's infamous explainer, "The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election," which appeared early in 2021:
There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.
As they say, history is written by the winners. Now, however, the Times let the word go forth, from this time and place: even if they can't stop Trump from winning in a campaign against a corrupt, barely articulate, superannuated, semi-ambulatory rutabaga named Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., the Left is fully prepared to obstruct his second administration by -- to use their favorite expression, "any means necessary."
Since the last go-around featured an imaginary worldwide "pandemic" produced in-house by Dr. Anthony Fauci & Co. that destroyed the world's economies and fascistically restricted everyone's freedom of speech, faith, and movement; a destructive series of race riots following the accidental death of lifelong criminal and drug addict named George Floyd; two supererogatory impeachments, one of which was occasioned in large part by a Ukrainian-born military snitch; and a subsequent four years of criminal charges and imprisonments directed at Trump and his closest advisors (except, entirely coincidentally, "Javanka"), you can imagine what's in store this time:
A sprawling network of Democratic officials, progressive activists, watchdog groups and ex-Republicans has been taking extraordinary steps to prepare for a potential second Trump presidency, drawn together by the fear that Mr. Trump’s return to power would pose a grave threat not just to their agenda but to American democracy itself.
“Trump has made clear that he’ll disregard the law and test the limits of our system,” said Joanna Lydgate, the chief executive of States United Democracy Center, a nonpartisan democracy watchdog organization that works with state officials in both parties. “What we’re staring down is extremely dark."
The early timing, volume and scale of the planning underway to push back against a potential second Trump administration are without precedent. The loose-knit coalition is determined not to be caught flat-footed, as many were after his unexpected victory in 2016.
That "nonpartisan" adjective is a nice touch from the Mother Church of propaganda. But hang on to your hats: the Times has the inside poop on what's coming down the pike should Orange Man Bad retake D.C.:
If Mr. Trump returns to power, he is openly planning to impose radical changes — many with authoritarian overtones. Those plans include using the Justice Department to take revenge on his adversaries, sending federal troops into Democratic cities, carrying out mass deportations, building huge camps to hold immigrant detainees, making it easier to fire civil servants and replace them with loyalists and expanding and centralizing executive power.
To coin a phrase: tu quoque. To many Trump supporters, those sound like features, not bugs, but that's not how the "our democracy" crowd sees it. “Ian Bassin, the executive director of Protect Democracy, said the planning for how to resist such an agenda should not be seen as an ordinary policy dispute, but as an effort to defend fundamental aspects of American self-government “from an aspiring autocrat. He is no normal candidate, this is no normal election, and these are no normal preparations for merely coming out on the wrong side of a national referendum on policy choices,” Mr. Bassin said.
Therefore, according to their lights, the Constitution goes out the window and prior norms must be destroyed. But it's not Trump who's currently ruling by fiat via executive order, and it wasn't Trump who threw the kluge called the American electoral system into a wood-chipper.
Hillary Clinton refused to accept her loss. The troubled Washington Post ran the first impeachment story just a few minutes after Trump took the oath of office in January 2017. The Times rallied "the Resistance." Democrats shouted that Trump was "an illegitimate president, and openly questioned the results of the elections, as they have done about every other election in this century they've lost:
"It's okay when we do it. Do as we say, not what we do. We're on the right side of history." The clichés present themselves; they never stop, they never sleep, they never quit. Writing in the pages of City Journal, John Tierney addresses the indefatigability of Leftist "activists" and attributes it to something called the "March of Dimes Syndrome," named after the organization founded in the 1930s to combat polio:
The March helped fund the vaccines that eventually ended the polio epidemics—but not the organization, which, after polio’s eradication, changed its mission to preventing birth defects. Its leaders kept their group going by finding a new cause, just as antiwar activists did after achieving their goal of ending the Vietnam War. The Three Mile Island accident offered new fund-raising opportunities and a new platform for veterans of the antiwar movement such as Jane Fonda and her husband Tom Hayden, who both addressed the crowd at that first antinuke rally.
For career activists, success is a threat. They can never declare mission accomplished.
They can't because in their eyes, their work is never done. Mission creep, thy name is Democrats. Living as they do in a counter-factual fantasy world -- at the Times, the year is always either 1933 or 1965, with Nazis and the Klan lurking in every dark alley -- the price of victory is eternal defeat, because the virtuous Left is always surrounded by enemies, lurking just over the Hudson and way down South, or unrepentant white working-class Christians, out of sight but never out of mind.
So, having unhorsed Trump in 2020 but now at least temporarily stuck with a senile old man who was once Barack Obama's vice president and who continues to be his flunky, and are constrained by reality from replacing him with Kamala Harris, they have to start battlefield prep on other fronts.
The ever-helpful Times has been waging a years-long attack on the John Roberts Court, and specifically on Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, and just published a story about how -- amazingly -- the Court is losing respect among the American public, written by the stealth-partisan Linda Greenhouse, who covered the Court for the paper for many years and now teaches at Yale Law School. True, the public observance of "Pride Month" has been noticeably quieter this year as corporations tiptoe past the head of a Bud Light transvestite up on a pike, but there are still Nazis to fight, exotic sexual practices to celebrate, a "racial reckoning" still to come, and Gaza fighters, murderers, and rapists to extol.
At his concession speak after losing the nomination to incumbent Democrat Jimmy Carter at the 1980 convention, Ted Kennedy concluded: "the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die." In their house, they believe their own version of the shahada: From the river to the sea, black lives matter, trans rights are human rights, beware of the bird flu, Trump must be stopped, and Mississippi is still burning.
The post THE COLUMN: Battle Stations, Everyone first appeared on The Pipeline.