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There’s an old expression that goes, “It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good.” My dear departed mother-in-law turned that old saw on its ear and used to say, “Never does an ill wind blow that doesn’t blow some good.” I don’t know if she herself came up with that or if she just heard it somewhere, but with that in mind, and considering the relentless Category 100 hurricane we’ve endured these past three years, here’s a question: How many of you had John Fetterman as the voice of reason on your bingo card? Me neither. Yet there he is.

“It’s a great American value to protest, but I don’t believe living in a pup tent for Hamas is really helpful,” Fetterman said…. Since the start of the anti-Israel encampments, students at several universities and colleges have been suspended, those participating in the encampments have been arrested, and graduation ceremonies have been canceled.

Fetterman added that there was a “germ of antisemitism in all of these protests and then sometimes it flares up,” continuing on to reference words Khymani James, one of the leaders of the anti-Israel encampment at Columbia University, had said.

“One of the leaders in Columbia said some just awful things talking about, ‘Well, they’re lucky I’m not killing Zionists,’ and things like that. And, then he defended himself by saying, ‘Well, those were taken out of context,’ and I’m like, well those are very similar to the way the college presidents, same kind of language.”…

“We have imported alien, violent, dark-age cultures that work hand in hand with our own native-born tyrants to drag us back to an even darker age.”

Since Hamas’ attack, Fetterman has defended Israel and criticized anti-Israel protesters.

How John Fetterman, a trust-fund layabout whose résumé consisted of getting elected mayor of a dying Pennsylvania coal town and driving the final nail in its coffin, somehow emerged as a viable candidate for U.S. senator remains a mystery. Likely PA election shenanigans aside, there he was in grubby sweats and sneakers, taking his place in “the greatest deliberative body in the world.” At the time I thought, how low can one be to be so disrespectful to not show up in a suit and tie? Yet considering the corruption, venality, and tyrannical thuggery that infests that building and every other government edifice in D.C., why should I get all exercised? Recall the late, unlamented Harry Reid, currently roasting in hell, complaining how he could smell the body odor of commoner peon tourists visiting the Rotunda. All things considered, Fetterman actually is a breath of fresh air.

Was it the stroke, the lump on his neck, or even his Addams Family-esque wife, Giselle, that brought out this latent flash of sanity, reason, and actual moral clarity from someone who at first glance should fit quite comfortably between the likes of Titty-Caca AOC and multimillionaire multiple-mansion-owning Marxist Bernie Sanders? Who knows, and who cares? His voice of support of the state of Israel and American Jews being persecuted on our own soil (and if I remember correctly his anti-open-borders statements) have been full-throated and consistent since this current nightmare began last October.

For sure, he is a liberal if not leftist, but to go against a shibboleth and central tenet of the anti-American left by refusing to equivocate between Israel and the “Palestinians”—especially now during an election year when the Sponge-Brain Sh*ts-Pants/Kalorama Klown Komintern is desperate to rally their rabid base—surely is political death. But still he persists.

On the latest edition of our podcast, author and historian Michael Walsh lamented the slim prospect of a nation so divided, not merely on issues but on the legitimacy of the nation itself, ever finding any sort of common ground. Perhaps it’s reaching out to as many people like John Fetterman or Tulsi Gabbard (who Walsh would like to see as Trump’s VP pick) that will be the key. But given the nature of so-called cancel culture, a rather anodyne phrase for blackballing, ostracism, and outright persecution (with either the blessing or active participation of our own government), are these people on both sides of the divide brave enough to come forward?

It’s why I get so disheartened and frankly p.o.’d when politicians and pundits on our side are incapable or even unwilling to take a stand because they are blind, perhaps willfully, to the corruption that is or should be so obvious all around us. Case in point is the usually erudite Christopher Roach.

I will state as a preliminary matter that there is a difference between protest and targeted harassment and that the latter should not be protected as free speech. That said, our foreign policy towards Israel should be subject to debate and accepted as a target of protest as much as anything else. Suggestions that such views are beyond the pale and warrant expulsion simply because they are unpopular are impossible to square with the First Amendment and more general American principles of free speech….

There have been many overwrought and dishonest criticisms of recent campus protests, but they do not appear more violent or more sinister than other protests of recent years. They mostly seem to be peaceful sit-ins. While violence and threats of violence have no place on campus, part of academic freedom and the college experience involves encountering ideas one disagrees with. Like most protests, these assemblies consist of a majority that is law-abiding and engaging in free speech and a much smaller minority of angry, anti-social agitators. And this division is evident everywhere you look….

If Israel and its policies are so great, they should be able to win the battle of public opinion with facts, logic, and protests of their own. In many respects, they have. Americans are mostly pro-Israel. But life is not always black and white. Some of Israel’s supporters, as well as many Israelis, also object to the scale of destruction in Gaza and the military operation’s apparent inability to provide long-term security.

A moral panic over ordinary expressions of political disagreement, controversial views, and uncouth language is not the way. Such a policy would be inimical to free speech, based on a distorted record, and will only give the activists of the progressive left the validation they are seeking. University and government policy should be built on the solid, content-neutral ground of distinguishing permissible free speech from prohibited criminal violence and harassment.

The abject cluelessness Roach demonstrates about this issue is bad enough. But that he asserts that there is still an atmosphere of tolerance on campuses and even in the nation as a whole, especially with a junta in D.C. that has provably collaborated with the media to suppress opinions and the voices of its political enemies, is just gobsmacking in its obliviousness. As for that last sentence, Pollyanna just called from Beldingsville, VT, to say, “WTF, dude?!” Maybe we can get Nina Jankowicz to head up the effort. Winning.

How can one call for the defense and preservation of the First Amendment when it not only doesn’t function, but when the other Amendments are on the ropes if not de facto dead? Did the election of 2020, the imprisonment of political prisoners for using that First Amendment they foolishly thought protected them, and the in-your-face persecution of Donald Trump not prove anything? Evidently not.

Free speech does not exist anymore because the civil society it was part and parcel of, to greater or lesser extents since 1789, is either dead or about to flatline. Wanting to preserve the First Amendment is a nice sentiment, even admirable. But in 2024, it’s sort of like trying to set the broken arm of someone who’s in the final throes of total organ failure.

The notion of having to destroy the Constitution in order to save it is repulsive. Yet, as things stand today, the Constitution has all but been destroyed. The question is, should we somehow overcome those who shredded it during the course of the past century or more, do we get out the Scotch tape, simply paste it back together, and declare the nation restored? So, the NYPD have gone in and booted the micturating, matriculating Muslim/Marxist minions from Columbia and CCNY. Problem solved? Hardly.

The corruption of our entire society, which began with the Democrat-Left’s 200-plus-year will to power and the “progressives” who glommed onto them, was supercharged by the hijacking of academia that started more than eighty years ago with the likes of the Frankfurt School refugees, Horace Mann, John Dewey, and others who took Lenin’s words to heart:

Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.

Well, they’ve had a lot more than four, as can plainly be seen (those that I’ve chastised notwithstanding) by our house divided, on fire, and collapsing in all around us. The only way forward is the complete eradication and full-on purge of every professor, teacher, and administrator who has poisoned and will continue to poison the minds of students, the First Amendment be damned. And then we can try to deprogram and de-Nazify upwards of three generations of pod people posing as American citizens and prevent subsequent generations from their fate, and doing us in once and for all.

Only then will we have a shot at creating a society that respects and reveres individual liberty and the rights of those with whom they disagree while at the same time protecting us from those who do not. Meh. We have imported alien, violent, dark-age cultures that work hand in hand with our own native-born tyrants to drag us back to an even darker age. Forever. They must be vanquished and excised from our midst.

If that means ditching the original Constitution to do so, then God help me, so be it. The left is fond of spouting that the Constitution is not a suicide pact. Well, it’s high time we take that attitude.