How the Trump administration plans to fuel a hate war

Just when conservatives have the chance to show that the liberal narrative offered for so many years is completely wrong, we now have to deal with the Trump administration making the liberals right.

Charlie Kirk has not been dead a week, and Vice President J.D. Vance co-opted his popular podcast to promise that the federal government is about to shred the First Amendment, targeting “leftist nongovernmental organizations.” The Trump administration’s attack dog, Stephen Miller, took the script full West Wing.

“With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, eliminate and destroy this network and make America safe again for the American people,” Miller said, according to the New York Times.

The left-leaning media will scratch its collective head and say “what network?” Then they’ll check their listservs, Discord and Slack chats to figure out the best way to resist. Of course there’s a network. The Twitter Files is proof positive that various left-leaning groups actively collaborate, exchange information, and feed slanted or even faked stories to the public in service of a liberal narrative. These stories have, in the last 10 years, been mostly to discredit or stifle Donald Trump’s agenda.

I don’t need to relitigate Russiagate, the Hunter Biden story, and all the organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center that maintain “hate lists” and how those organizations shape discussion and narrative in the media. In 2012, Floyd Lee Corkins tried to commit mass murder at the offices of the Family Research Council, wounding a security guard. He was motivated by the FRC’s inclusion on the SPLC’s “hate list.” POLITICO reported at the time that Corkins said “I don’t like your politics,” before shooting.

The SPLC maintains a robust list of Christian groups and individual preachers they call “hate groups.” The list includes some people I consider the most gentle, engaging, and open souls, like Dr. Michael Brown, who runs a podcast called “In the Line of Fire.” Their version of “hate” is Christian orthodoxy, which holds certain lifestyles, like homosexual practice, and the trans movement, in a Biblical light, and considers abortion to be a grievous sin. Many people disagree, and some consider a Biblical worldview to be an insult to their own identity. But the left has been peddling a “Handmaid’s Tale” version of theocratic rule for so long that it’s baked in to the invective. This means even supporting worldviews that align with Christian orthodoxy represents some vague threat that people’s “rights” to engage in bedroom sin or life-altering surgery would be “taken away” by Bible-thumpers.

It’s assumed that anyone on the SPLC’s hate list, or a list maintained by any other “leftist nongovernmental organization” is there to take over the government, assert central control, and remove the rights of others in favor of a jackbooted Christianity.

I’m supposed to say “nothing could be further from the truth” here. But J.D. Vance and President Trump have made it impossible, because they’re putting teeth to the Handmaid’s Tale.

Just because it is true that there exists the kind of network that feeds hate into people so they fear speakers like Charlie Kirk or Tony Perkins to the point where they’d take action to kill them, doesn’t mean that the network itself is a target because of what it says. Fighting hate and fear with hate and fear is not the way to end the cycle of violence. It’s the way to exponentially increase violence, hate and fear.

The government of the United States exists to safeguard our God-given rights, among these is the free expression of ideas and free association with others who share those ideas. Inherent in that right is the right to defend and debate ideas in the public square, in a civil, non-violent discourse. Those who violate the non-violent part are subject the power of government. But going after groups that exist to promote policy—even if that policy is one the government in power doesn’t like—is an abrogation of the government’s obligation.

Going after liberal groups because they foment their own “hate speech” is the completely wrong thing for the government to do. What really disappoints me is that J.D. Vance, a Yale lawyer, knows this. I wouldn’t expect Donald Trump to know it, or to care, because his version of policy is a feather in the wind. Vance knows that trashing the First Amendment is going to create more violence, and more people are going to be killed.

Just when conservatives have the chance to show that the liberal narrative offered for so many years is completely wrong, we now have to deal with the Trump administration making the liberals right. There is no end to the lunacy.

Israel’s army has begun its second occupation of Gaza City. I hate to be the one to say “I told you so,” but way back when this war began, I predicted that we’d be here, because there’s no way Israel could dismantle and destroy Hamas without destroying every building in Gaza down to rubble. I had hoped that the IDF would never go in to Gaza in the first place and find another way.

Of course, the events that followed were beyond my wildest expectations in freeing Israel from the Sword of Damocles that hung over its head for so many years, with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, Syria to its north and east, and Iran pulling the strings and close to being a nuclear state. Israel did what its government promised—not just Netanyahu’s government, but every government—for decades. It played full “jungle rules.” Israel went after every leader, every facility, every nation that presented a great threat, and so far, it has triumphed.

But looking at the goal of eliminating Hamas, Israel has failed, and continues to fail. They say they’re on the brink of doing it, but I think they’ll always be on the brink of doing it, because there are still close to two million Palestinians in Gaza, constantly on the move, constantly avoiding death from the IDF, and from Hamas.

Hamas is also playing the “genocide” card and doing it effectively. The U.N. redefined “genocide” to include specifically what Israel is doing, so that it can conclude Israel is committing genocide. The U.N. general assembly is going to vote a Palestinian state into existence, though who governs it, and how it is governed is not one of the points they will discuss. The main point is that Israel will not govern it. Which means any annexation will be another violation of U.N. rules, which seem to exist to punish Israel.

The IDF will reoccupy Gaza City, what’s left of it after airstrikes and artillery have leveled any building where Hamas terrorists can overwatch Israeli movements. And one out of every three buildings in Gaza urban areas has a tunnel access point. After nearly two years, Israel hasn’t destroyed even half the tunnel network. The hostages remain packed away, and the chance of anyone else making it out alive is quickly dwindling to zero.

But this was all predictable the moment the IDF moved into Gaza in 2023. In order to pursue a “destroy Hamas” objective, the lives of the hostages had to be secondary, meaning they had to be declared dead from the get-go. The fact that we’ve seen many returned alive, in this strategy, is a bonus, not an objective.

Now, Israel must finish what it started. Every gain that it made in military and power victories could be flittered away if this fails. There is no choice but to bring in the bulldozers, sandbags and fire bases. It’s no way to win, but Israel must win.

I’m just not sure it’s possible.

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