Thousands of Americans are trapped in Afghanistan and the Taliban are crowing about their victory over the world’s lone superpower, but far-Left “journalist” David Rothkopf wants to make sure we keep our head and focus on the really dangerous threat out there. Rothkopf tweeted Friday: “The Taliban, all of them together, plus every Al Qaeda fighter in the world, do not pose the threat to the United States that Trump or Trumpist extremists do. Let’s maintain our perspective.”
Moral myopia this severe borders on the psychotic. Yet Rothkopf is not some antifa meth head scrawling ACAB on a post office in Portland. Instead, David Rothkopf is one of the cosseted elites, and a respected member of the foreign policy establishment: He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and has taught at Johns Hopkins’ Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, as well as at Columbia and Georgetown. He is a regular on MSNBC and at the Daily Beast.
Late in 2020, Rothkopf published a book, Traitor: A History of American Betrayal from Benedict Arnold to Donald Trump, that came fitted out with accolades from all the usual suspects. Neocon Never-Trumper Max Boot called Rothkopf “one of America’s leading public intellectuals” and said that the book was a “tour de force of provocative argumentation,” making the case that “Donald Trump deserves to be grouped with those few American leaders who have betrayed America.” Leftist lawyer Lawrence Tribe, who convicted Trump of all manner of crimes on Twitter, declared: “Anyone interested in the preservation of the United States from those who would betray it from within must read David Rothkopf’s compelling history of treasonous acts,” in which, of course, “Rothkopf saves his harshest condemnation for Donald Trump and the deep currents of which Rothkopf sees Trump’s rise as but a symptom.”
And so on and on. The appalling David Frum stated that “with elegantly controlled fury, David Rothkopf arraigns the 45th president of disloyalty to the United States and its people.” Obama State Department wonk Richard Stengel, who has called for criminalization of burning of the Qur’an, said: “Throughout our more than two-century history, America has experienced its share of traitors. But as David Rothkopf’s eloquent and powerful book asserts, we’ve never had an individual who has betrayed the country as consistently, as resolutely, as completely as Donald Trump.”
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Yeah, sure. The Left has pulled out all the stops since 2016, with the Russia hoax, impeachment over a phone call, and everything else they could think of to discredit and destroy the “America First” president. Claiming that he is a mortal danger to the country he tried to save is nothing new, but Rothkopf’s words of course have an ominous edge. Rothkopf, while attempting to maintain the illusion that he is sane, is accusing Trump and “Trumpist extremists” of being worse than a group that murdered nearly 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001, and that has been responsible for the murder of countless others around the world. He wants you to believe that Trump and his supporters are worse than people who gouge out women’s eyes, set fire to human beings, and call on their followers to run down and murder defenseless civilians with their cars.
Rothkopf is not likely to be ignorant of the atrocities that the Taliban and al-Qaeda commit on a routine basis. He is also not likely to be so paranoid and foolish as to think that the former president and those who value his America-First stance are ever likely to commit any atrocities that are remotely comparable. But the thoroughly tied-in Rothkopf at the same time is almost certainly aware that the more often this Big Lie about a domestic “Trumpist” terror threat is repeated, the easier it will be for uninformed Americans to accept the criminalization of political dissent and the arrests of those who hold political views that the elites have deemed to be outside the bounds of what is acceptable.
That could never happen in the United States, the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, right? I used to think so. But David Rothkopf’s hysterical, defamatory, and highly incendiary rhetoric is not remotely unusual on the Left today. We have seen many times in the history of the last century where this kind of rhetoric leads. We would be foolish now to think that the likes of David Rothkopf don’t know what they’re doing.