AMAC Exclusive By Seamus Brennan
Committed conservatives understand that the American left has long depended on lies, propaganda, and false claims of moderation to advance its grip on power. In a speech last month at a Heritage Foundation event, former President Donald Trump took a moment to analyze this phenomenon. “The only way the radical left has ever gained power in this country,” Trump said, is not through honest attempts to persuade the American people, but rather, according to the former president, through “deception and deceit.”
“For decades,” he went on, “they lied to the American people about what they really believe. They lied about what policies they would pursue. They flooded the airwaves with biased coverage. They fabricated hoaxes and pushed fake news…They mutilated our history. They took over our schools. They rewrote our Constitution with left-wing judges, and… they stole our elections.”
For conservatives who often find themselves reeling at the left’s seemingly total dominance of the commanding heights of American life, Trump offered a useful reminder. Generally speaking, that dominance was not honestly earned, and the American people were never really persuaded.
There is perhaps no greater example of the success of the left’s “deception and deceit” than their eagerness to treat the Constitution as a “living” document with no fixed meaning and onto which they can freely impose their own policy preferences. Over the last 50 years, the interpretive methodology of so-called “living constitutionalism” has yielded a number of high-profile decisions that, regardless of one’s policy preferences, plainly have no basis in the text of the Constitution and never earned majority support through a democratic process.
The news that the Supreme Court may be prepared to overturn Roe v. Wade prompted many reflections on the legal incoherence of the original decision, something that even left-leaning scholars readily acknowledge. (Outspokenly liberal constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe, for instance, has claimed that “behind [Roe’s] own verbal smokescreen, the substantive judgment on which it rests is nowhere to be found.”) But the uproar in the wake of the court leak also serves as a reminder that American culture has been drastically transformed by what was always nothing more than a bad-faith liberal power-grab.
Another controversial decision made according to the “living constitutionalist” paradigm was Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), which essentially invented out of whole cloth a constitutional right to same-sex marriage that, as Justice Antonin Scalia was quick to note in his fiery dissent, relied upon “the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.” As conservative lawyer Carrie Severino wrote last year, decisions like Roe and Obergefell ultimately amount to nothing more than “a brand of activism that disregards both the structural Constitution and the Constitution’s enumerated rights.”
But as Trump noted, the left’s pattern of advancing its agenda through “deception and deceit” is by no means limited to the legal realm. Think of the tactics the left has used to push its climate agenda, its policing agenda, its “Criminal Justice Reform” agenda, its gun control agenda, and its censorship agenda. In each case, the left’s tried and true strategy has been to spread false and often completely fabricated stories, concoct strings of bald-faced lies and bad-faith claims, inundate the public with propaganda, and indoctrinate children in the classroom.
While this pattern of deception has been escalating for decades, it was finally fully exposed during Trump’s presidency. For two years, the Democratic Party and the mainstream media pushed an elaborate series of fabrications trying to portray President Trump as a Russian asset who was in the pocket of Vladimir Putin. Even though the left was fully aware that Trump was not, in fact, a Russian spy, they did it nonetheless. That gigantic lie was the necessary predicate for everything that has followed—from the 2018 midterms, to the 2020 election, to the calamities of the Biden administration.
As Amanda Milius, director of the film The Plot Against the President, noted that the Russia Hoax was “the blueprint for how they lie to us” and “how they turn the whole country in the opposite direction of reality.”
Despite the bleak reality of our politics, in his Heritage speech, Trump ended on a note of optimism. “The radical left and their partners in the media have blown their cover,” he said. “Their mask is off, their credibility is shot, and no one trusts them any longer. No one believes in them, and they have nowhere left to hide.”
“Now is the time to build a new American consensus,” he continued.
As overwhelming as the left’s cultural power seems to be, with great challenge comes great opportunity. And as Trump suggested in his remarks, the false foundations of the left’s political success present the clearest opportunity for its undoing. The American public is realizing that they’ve been had. And if indeed the left’s lies are finally being exposed, they could soon face a reckoning unlike any before in American politics.