As their titles indicate, both authors seek to explain the increasingly oppressive “cancel culture” prevailing on both sides of the Atlantic as the recrudescence of a 17th-century British religious cult that is now mainly remembered for its members who were the first European settlers in New England in 1620 and, a generation later, spearheaded the English revolution, which ended with the beheading of King Charles I.
With all these New Puritans about, the new king must have thought twice before deciding to be called Charles III.
Both books are persuasive in making the comparison between the “woke” ideology and a species of religious fanaticism that was a precursor of those 20th-century totalitarianisms that sought to dictate how everybody should live.
But Rothman’s emphasis on the “progressives’ war on fun” is the least of it. It’s the war on anybody and everybody who might stand in the way of the ongoing progressive revolution that worries me.
Non-conformists among the early American Puritans were expelled from their communities, planted in the midst of the North American wilderness, and denied the protection of their laws—the equivalent in the 17th century of the Lubiyanka prison, or the Gulag that awaited dissidents in Soviet Russia.
Our New Puritans have their own version of ostracization from decent society in what’s come to be called the “cancel culture,” the apologists for which think of it as no more than a social sanction and tend to deny that it involves any deprivation of the rights of ordinary citizens.
Such a view can only be maintained by a determined ignorance of the way in which the machinery of government and the law have been mobilized against those who are regarded as ideological heretics.
The vindictive prosecutions of Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Conrad Black, and Gen. Michael Flynn should have prepared us for the Justice Department’s hounding of Jan. 6 demonstrators, now re-labeled “insurrectionists,” throughout the country—the converse of its lack of interest in the much more destructive and lethal riots by progressives in the wake of George Floyd’s death in 2020.
But of course, it’s the desperate quest of the Justice Department, the FBI, and local prosecutors to find anything at all for which former President Donald Trump can be prosecuted that is the best evidence of the quasi-religious fervor motivating today’s New Puritans.
Cardinal Richelieu, back in the days of the old Puritans, is supposed to have said, “If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.”
In the same way, our legal establishment knows that the hated Trump must be guilty of something, they just haven’t managed to figure out what it is yet.
Now, the man charged with exposing this corruption of the highest law-enforcement authorities in the land has been defeated in court for a second time, with the acquittal by a jury in my home town of Alexandria, Virginia, of Igor Danchenko on a charge of lying to the FBI.
Earlier, a D.C. jury had acquitted Michael Sussmann, a lawyer working for Hillary Clinton, on a similar charge.
Whether one believes both men lied to the FBI or not, in both cases the FBI seemingly was unconcerned, since the information gave them the pretext they needed to pursue their jihad against Trump.
For this reason, optimists—who want to believe that Lady Justice still has her blindfold on and that juries (at least those in the national capital area) are not so fed up with the rule of law as the Justice Department is—are now blaming John Durham for not having gone after the FBI itself, rather than its stooges.
I would like to believe this too, but I can’t avoid the suspicion that a jury of my progressive neighbors is actually more sympathetic to the New Puritan view that the former president is no longer entitled to the protection of the nation’s laws, and that the FBI’s crusade to brand him an outlaw by any means necessary must therefore be justified.
The Wall Street Journal editorial, mentioned above, thought it no great matter that the jury failed to convict because Durham still has a report to write for the attorney general on his investigation in which “he can knit together the information he’s been relaying piecemeal through court filings,” thus “educating the public about what really happened, and why.”
Of course, the highly political Merrick Garland is under no obligation to make the report public, but he wouldn’t dare suppress it. Would he? Durham, says the Wall Street Journal “is the only reason America has had a glimpse of the FBI abuses. Any attempt to squelch his report would compound the scandal.”
But, as Bump among many others in the media would no doubt reply, “What scandal? Didn’t the Durham probe, like that of Inspector General Michael Horowitz before it, just prove that the FBI and the Justice Department were blameless?”
As in so many other instances—such as Joe Biden’s alleged influence-peddling through his son Hunter when he was vice president—the real scandal is that there is no scandal.
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