One of the most valuable defectors from the possessed Left is Naomi Wolf. I remember her from college, where as a loudly pro-choice feminist she was pretty much my campus nemesis. She wore a pink triangle, I wore a “Better Dead than Red” T-shirt I’d bought from Soldier of Fortune, and we largely avoided each other at Yale.

Since then, to her great credit, she has clung to the actual values which so many on the Left once claimed to believe in, then cast off like cheap costumes when the chips were really down. She believes in the Constitution, so she opposes censorship. She believes in bodily autonomy, so she opposed the COVID vaccine mandates and public health dictatorship. She believes in the rule of law, so she speaks out against partisan lawfare of the kind that landed Steve Bannon (and so many others) in prison.

She even invited me on her Daily Clout channel to talk about my new book on the Second Amendment. That wasn’t on either of our bingo cards back in the 1980s.

A gifted writer who wasn’t afraid to burn most of her professional bridges over principle, Wolf’s now offering strategic advice to Republicans in the 2024 election — drawing on her experience advising two Democratic presidential campaigns. And I think we should listen to her. And for her own peace of mind, she needs to understand why it’s so hard for conservatives and Christians to follow her wise prudential counsel.

For the past week, Wolf has been sending messages in a bottle to those of us equally alarmed by the prospect of a Kamala Harris victory in November. Here’s the latest:

I can’t say this enough. The DNC message that Republicans are weird creepy incels is a trick to get Republican men esp to spend the next 4 months saying that they are not. Instead of ignoring the attack and pivoting to border, crime, economy, unity. Why do Republicans fall for… https://t.co/7Iy4Emky2k

— Dr Naomi Wolf (@naomirwolf) July 30, 2024

Wolf is urging us not to take the bait the Left is throwing out, to fight out this election as a front in the culture war. And why? Because she’s convinced it’s what the Democrats want, because they know we will lose. The Left is much more disciplined, controls most of our media, and is completely unencumbered by any attachment to the truth. So battling over “values” might get our base excited, but even if we win a given argument on the merits, we will lose it politically.

Yes, it’s insane that the party of “furries,” bondage-obsessed Satanists, late-term abortionists, and “throuples” can label J.D. Vance “weird” because he’s a milquetoast-looking white guy from the Midwest who believes in marriage and family. And we can point that out to our friends and family all we like. But facts are facts: For the past 20 years our media have relentlessly normalized every kind of perversion and demonized white Christians. Voters’ perceptions have been poisoned, tainted, and skewed. That’s something we need to roll back, of course — but not in the course of a desperately important, quite-close presidential election where the other side is willing and able to flagrantly cheat.

Instead of battling back against the DEI hires, sex weirdos, and witches the Left are fore-fronting to bait us, Wolf urges us to focus on Kamala Harris’s pitiful track record, extremist positions, and manifest incompetence. In other words, we should go on the offensive instead of defensively trying to reaffirm Norman Rockwell America. And she’s mostly right.

But instead of getting frustrated with us, she needs to understand: Those of us who are part of the “old America,” which was largely white, Christian, middle-class, and apolitical, realize what’s happening. We are being demonized the way the Tutsis were in 1990s Rwanda shortly before they were targeted for genocide. “Whiteness” is now routinely discussed as something to be “abolished” or “eradicated.” Any attempt to vote our consciences is demonized as “Christian Nationalism,” a made-up leftist dog-whistle crafted to sound like “White Nationalist,” even though it’s the worldview of every president before Jimmy Carter. Routine (to us) obvious claims like “I believe that children are the future” get painted as creepy obsessions with policing people’s sex lives. Peaceful pro-lifers get imprisoned while looters walk free.

So we’re on the defensive because we’re being attacked. We’re paranoid because elites are genuinely out to get us. And we need to not play into their hands, as Wolf correctly warns us. Don’t rush into a minefield the enemy has laid for us. If we want to know the consequences of blowing this election, we just have to tune in to the news from Venezuela — where the army is attacking democracy demonstrators. Half that country’s citizens are now effectively January 6 prisoners.

The Supreme Court Under Siege from Without and Within

For decades, the Left could count on the Supreme Court to rule as what Justice Antonin Scalia called “a dictatorship of five lawyers.” It ran as a sitting constitutional convention, routinely ignoring the text of our founding documents, twisting its words and fudging its meaning to suit whatever elites wanted to impose on us without consulting the voters. Now that we finally have a court which sometimes (only sometimes) actually tries to defend our Founders’ original intent, the Left is going crazy with schemes for packing, crippling, policing, or intimidating the court. Those are the enemies without. (For some excellent analysis of why this will never work, read this piece by Harry Mihet from last week.)

But a news story from The Daily Beast reveals that the beleaguered defenders of the Constitution on the court also face subversion from within: illegal, politicized, poisonous leaks of secret deliberations, intended to whip up public pressure on justices to change their legal decisions:

Intimate details of months of disagreement among the nine justices were reported at length by CNN Monday, just hours after President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris both backed major reforms to the court, with the president accusing justices of being “above the law.”

Go read it, and remember how ruthless the people we face really are. I don’t often quote Lindsay Graham, for obvious reasons. But he was right when he finally blurted out during the Christine Blasey Ford rape-perjury hearings: “Boy, y’all want power. God, I hope you never get it!”

The Warren Commission Version of the Trump Assassination Attempt

Our courageous defenders of freedom in the GOP House decided that their summer vacation was more important than investigating the attempted murder of Donald Trump, or the upcoming election fraud national Democrats are planning. So they’ll be silent for the next four weeks, clearing brush or catching fish, or otherwise fiddling while Rome burns. The committee created to look into the shooting has dissatisfied House conservatives. So one of them admirably stepped up to create his very own, as Gateway Pundit reports:

GOP Congressman Cory Mills on Monday said he will be conducting a “parallel independent investigation” into the attempted assassination against President Trump after Speaker [Mike] Johnson assembled a disappointing task force to probe the Butler shooting.

The Florida lawmaker and former sniper expressed his disappointment in Johnson’s Trump Assassination Attempt Task Force.

Notably missing from the task force are two veterans who happened to be snipers: Eli Crane and Cory Mills.

“It’s very unfortunate but not surprising for anyone familiar with how DC works. I’m not a politician, leadership, or a ‘yes man,’” Mills said in a statement on X on Monday.

Let’s pray that all secret things will be revealed.

Christians Besieged in Gaza

The Stream’s frequent contributor Jason Jones is trying to help the small, embattled Christian community in Gaza — descended from Jesus’s original disciples — to survive the horrible conflict between Israel and Hamas. He’s running a prayer and aid campaign through the Vulnerable People Project. Go check out their new video about the plight of unarmed, apolitical Christians caught in the crossfire.

Along The Stream

How should we respond to the blasphemous paganism at the Olympics opening ceremonies? By understanding true beauty, and embracing its power to attract people to the Truth.

Jules Gomes reports this morning on the persecution of Armenian Christians and efforts to hold Azerbaijan responsible for it at the Olympics.

Coming up later this morning, don’t miss my review of Official Secrets, a 2019 movie about the persecution of Iraq War opponents that eerily prefigured the hunting of January 6 protestors and peaceful pro-lifers by the Deep State.

 

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 10 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.