Consider this as part of my tribute to Dan Ellsberg, who is responsible for Noam Chomsky doing the oral history interview with me which I shared a couple days ago. More on Dan later with my editing of a short video I did with him last year. In being a “Truth Seeker and Truth Teller, Dan necessarily had to understand the opposition to him getting the truth out. And that was vastly disproportionately the work of “American Conservatives,” the “Right,” which Dan mentioned in a couple of his books
Was Trump Mentor Roy Cohn America’s Most Evil Man? This Film Makes a Strong Case - U.S. News - Haaretz.com
(See article at bottom.)
I never chose to be the one here to constantly stand up for the “Constitution, Against Its Enemies,” as never believing that would be necessary here. But someone has to now as anti-Constitutionalists have taken over the thought of the supposed “non-interventionist Conservatives,” the so-called “New Right,” and that of the Democratic Party’s latter day Goldwaterites/Burnhamites. With the main party of each frothing at the mouth for war against Russia, China, and Iran. As if we are back in 1953, just before the CIA regime change operation in Iran. And all channeling the “wisdom” of the National Security State’s ideological founders who called for censorship, exclusion of dissenters, and today, virtually criminalizing any form of speech which casts any doubt upon Israel as a “Benevolent Nation” (see Ron DeSantis’s boasts of the anti-BDS legislation he got passed.)
And to “defend” the Constitution against its enemies, one needs to recognize them when they self-identify themselves as such, if only to rebut their lies! As Leo Strauss lied by using historical figures to speak for him, by serving up ancient admirers of Spartan militarism as whom we needed to “listen to,” with their proto-fascist political thought. While claiming to support US democracy, simultaneously doing everything he could to subvert it. Which requires an understanding of “political theory,” to recognize the “essence” of what they actually mean, and to understand how “networks” operate, as can be seen in the attached files (from "The Conservative Affirmation," by Willmoore Kendall):
As a Guantanamo Defense Attorney, down to the present, I’ve appeared in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals as defense counsel, though the lead attorney on the case argued it, numerous times. One task I had as part of the small appellate team, was to research the judges we would be appearing before as to their "ideology,” and how that affects their decisions. For how to present our case, amongst other reasons. I was able to draw upon my own extensive reading of conservative writings going back to the 1980s, especially Legal/Constitutional “theory” (really, are we to remain permanently at a high school level of political/legal analysis by refusing to study the higher order of political acts, war, etc., where they begin? In the “ideas,” theory, of political/legal theorists, before transmitted to the public to become the “Climate of Opinion?"), to see even clearer what I had already begun to see as the “dark side” of Conservative thought. And knowing that, of the inevitability of how they would rule on particular issues, which was almost always borne out. Especially when they came right out in public at the Heritage Foundation and declared an end to Habeas Corpus, as one Conservative Appellate Court judge did (I was there and heard him, and the Conservative Heritage audience came to its feet in cheering that!
Before “reforming myself, as a Federalist Society member and President of the small Hamline Law School student chapter while in law school, I continued to study conservative “legal theory” as I’d already begun years before, with other legal theory, along with my various associations with “conservative” law professors and other attorneys beginning with my work on Low-Intensity Conflict (who were actually quite “liberal” in many ways, as Democrats and Moderate Republicans, it was a “different time” from today) with a very specific interest in Constitutional Theory. Near at hand is a book by Mel Bradford, which I now would vigorously dispute, and would have for the last 20+ years. But these types of tracts were always peddled as arguing for “restraints” on government in line with the framers of the Constitution. When in fact, they were arguments for an “unrestrained” USG for waging “unlimited war,” in foreign policy, and in their dismissal of the Bill of Rights so as to suppress any dissent, as Willlmoore Kendall made a career of. But lacking a deeper understanding of “political theory,” and its historical role in the “ideas” that led to the Constitution, and against it, the “context” necessary to truly understand political actors, I wasn’t able to know better as do few others then, and now.
With “well-intentioned” conservatives knowing no better in most cases, as I will give them “credit” for, which doesn’t include those who enthuse over arguments to expel the Bill of Rights from the Constitution as some “Conservatives” being promoted as precursors to Trump did, and do with the carrying on of that ideology, as here: https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2022/11/willmoore-kendalls-prescient-ken; and , https://nationalinterest.org/feature/why-willmoore-kendall-and-james-burnham-are-prophets-modern-conservatism-184046. Quote: "Burnham and Kendall helped give birth and intellectual legitimacy to a conservative movement primarily defined by its opposition to liberalism, resentment of elites, distrust of democracy, and drive to fight the liberal destruction of the America and “the West.”
No, they “helped give birth and intellectual legitimacy to a conservative movement” intended to facilitate the growth of the Military Industrial Complex and to place the U.S. on a permanent war footing. Militarily, economically, and in its “legal regime.”
Jeet Heer recognizes the link of Cohn to Trump, and the role of Willmoore Kendall’s ideology binding the two, notwithstanding ignorant people claiming Trump is merely “transactional,” as if that excludes him having absorbed political ideas from his one-time best friend, Roy Cohn: https://jeetheer.substack.com/p/racism-and-the-paradox-of-anti-democratic
Quote: "In Zion’s novel, the main character is a mash-up of Kendall and Roy Cohn, the infamously sleazy lawyer who served Joseph McCarthy and was Donald Trump’s teacher in the way of the scumbag.”
Way back in 2016, relying on what I saw at Guantanamo, and US foreign policy, I recognized how the USG and its population had already adopted “fascist principles,” as defined by Mussolini. Since then, under Trump, we increased the military beyond anything imaginable in 2016, with a vast expansion of militaristic ideas in the clamor we always hear for “martial law” by Conservatives. But this has stood up pretty well in my opinion:
Trump’s mentor in fascism, and corruption, Roy Cohn, is getting the negative attention he deserves for his corruption. But even more critical should be as one of the “Founding Fathers” of the Conservative Movement. That is, as Joe McCarthy’s applied “legal theorist,” putting into effect the anti-constitutional legal theory of Willmoore Kendall (read all his denunciations of free speech and freedom of the press and tell me different!). Like
Cohn having been the “legal advisor” to Joe McCarthy put him on the “inside” of the Conservative Movement as it grew out of its embryonic stage of “McCarthyism” and into the Conservative Movement as founded by the “dual careerists” of CIA Officers and “journalists,” in an open “Cultural Influence Operation,” identical to those the “founders,” Buckley, Burnham, and Kendall had engaged in as active CIA officers in Europe (Burnham-see the Cultural Cold War) and Kendall and Buckley in Latin America. Their role in McCarthyism was part of that as they remained with CIA until shortly before their founding of their next, perhaps/perhaps not, non-CIA “unofficial,” influence operation of National Review. For the purpose to “influence” the US public into an embrace of the “Military Industrial Complex as “an existential necessity” for the fight against communism, as if only the “maximal ideology of the offensive” was the available option. And repression of the U.S. populace was “necessary,” as Kendall, Buckley, and Bozell wrote here:
Title: Was Trump Mentor Roy Cohn America’s Most Evil Man? This Film Makes a Strong Case - U.S. News - Haaretz.com
Which explains why Kendall is so hailed by Conservatives again today, and making so disingenuous their complaints of censorship today by Democrats, Big Tech, etc. When it was they in fact, their “Founding Fathers,” principally Kendall, who established censorship, disinformation, and obfuscation, as what they called “virtue,” in claiming that as representative of “Conservatism.” When what they meant and prized in actuality, was Virtù, "a concept theorized by Niccolò Machiavelli, centered on the martial spirit and ability of a population or leader,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virt%C3%B9#Classical_and_medieval_origins. And propagated by Kendall and his friend and ideological collaborator Leo Strauss. Per Harvey Mansfield’s Machiavelli’s Virtue, according to a footnote in the preceding, and my own knowledge of the Strsaussian Mansfield, so I’m not going to look it up to confirm, “"Machiavelli suggests a different set of virtues than Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, apparently with less focus on beneficence and concord, and with more focus on courage. According to Machiavelli, virtù includes pride, bravery, skill, forcefulness, and an amount of ruthlessness coupled with the willingness to do evil when necessary." Which was and is the essence of fascism! As encapsulated on the slogan Melania Trump had on her jacket: "mi ne frego.” ("I don't care", "I don't give a damn", an Italian Fascist slogan.”)
Yet because of such base ignorance of fascism, Machiavelli, Strauss, and Willmoore Kendall, “ordinary people,” meaning non-ideologues, cannot see what statements like this really mean: "As Kendall read The Federalist, the supreme symbols of the American tradition are “rule by the deliberate sense of a virtuous people.”[106] It will not suffice merely to have the deliberative process, for a process alone cannot guarantee a moral and just result. In order to ensure the integrity of policy decisions, it is essential that “virtue” be the basic component of a people employing the deliberative process.”
Which must be read in the Straussian/Schmittian/Kendallian sense.
Instead, as what I will call the “Stupid Conservatives,” stupid in the Latinate Sense, and meaning no less pernicious than their Schmittian/Straussian intellectual/ideological fellows in readily defending Trump, and adopting such Machiavellian language, but reinterpreting it in their ignorance to its “plain meaning,” as if pertaining to Christianity in particular. And thereby concealing its true odious fascist/Machiavellian meaning. While lamenting the "cultural change” we’ve seen in the post-WW II period, attributing it to “liberalism,” and/or schools, media, Hollywood, Wokeness, etc., but never our wars, which do more to change "cultural values” than any other phenomena. Whatever negative change to be found in "cultural values” as defined by “Conservative” standards, actually began out of our wars. Including Conservative’s own “values,” which can be seen to have been taken directly from our WW II enemies. As if in Conservative’s eyes, the “wrong side won” in WW II! To include in the Civil War, with the adoration spilled on John Calhoun, even in the latest book on Conservatism, which I won’t name here, but will say I find is as odious as any I’ve read promoting “Conservatism,” by a “Conservative,” for reasons too numerous to list here. But in short, finding the “failure of American Conservatism” to be in part, the “failure” of Conservatives to “change the culture, failing to see that the fetishization by Conservatives of the AR-15 (our “National Gun”) is a direct result of Conservatives to make war and the worship of the Military Industrial Complex their contribution to “changing our culture!"
With the following more on Trump’s “ideological mentor.” That’s “Conservative Culture:”
Quote: "Now in his late 70s, Mr. Trump is still searching for lawyers in the mold of the one who first mentored, protected and, in his words, “brutalized” for him: the ruthless and ultimately disbarred Roy M. Cohn.”
Quote: "In the decade before his death, he made a protégé of Donald Trump. Cohn’s pitbull methodology became Trump’s own: never apologize, never explain; attack, attack, attack; when in doubt, create a diversion and blame the press."
I deleted the movie review in second part of the article below (get your own subscription to Haaretz if you want to see it), except for this sentence: "Most chilling is an interview with Cohn from – presumably – the ’70s, in which he proudly holds up a framed picture of the two men together and recites this ringing endorsement from Trump: “Roy is my greatest friend.” Yep, it figures.
"A beaming Cohn adds: “I have a feeling someday [in the] not-too-far distant future, you’re going to see Donald Trump in other parts of the country as well.” Thanks to Trump, Cohn’s amoral approach to life still haunts us today, making this documentary more vital than we could have imagined just a few short years ago."
"In the late 40’s through the mid-50’s Joe McCarthy sought to undermine freedom of speech and association. The nation suffered but the law and the Constitution ultimately won. President Trump can seek to emulate this tactic. Once again, the nation may suffer, but President Trump ultimately will lose."
If Roy Cohn was the villain in a thriller, you’d spend the whole movie kvetching that his character was too one-dimensionally diabolical to be remotely plausible. Yet “Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn” is not adapted from a pulp fiction novel. It’s a documentary about the man who may well merit the title “America’s most evil man who never served time.”
For those unfamiliar with the name Roy Cohn, Ivy Meeropol’s film – premiering on HBO this Thursday in the United States, and in Israel on Saturday – is going to blow your mind. He was Sen. Joe McCarthy’s far-right-hand man during the communist witch hunts in the early 1950s, being part of the prosecution team that helped convict “atom spies” Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1951. He then ensured that they received the death penalty for their alleged acts of espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union.
Cohn was a mere 23 when he helped send the Rosenbergs to the chair, but this was just the prelude to a shockingly amoral life. His gangsterish appearance was straight out of central casting, looking like a relative of that most famous of Jewish mobsters, Bugsy Siegel: permanent tan, battered nose and dead eyes that call to mind the shark in “Jaws.”
When you hear him say the words, “I found out one thing in life: Don’t ever threaten unless you intend to follow through,” you 100 percent believe that this monster was all about the follow-through. It’s as if he took the Jewish concept of tikkun olam and decided it meant “‘fixer’ the world” rather than fix it.
There have been other documentaries about Cohn, but what makes “Bully. Coward. Victim” unique is how personal it is to the director. Ivy Meeropol, 52, is the granddaughter of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and has already recounted their story in greater detail in her moving 2004 documentary “Heir to an Execution.”
"Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn" director Ivy Meeropol. Credit: Courtesy of HBO / Yes Docu
Part of “Bully” is concerned with her father Michael Meeropol and his Sisyphean battle to clear his parents’ names. He offers his own lucid thoughts on Cohn – particularly when revealing the quirk of fate that gives the documentary its title (which I won’t spoil here) – and his own memories of visiting his condemned parents in Sing Sing before their execution in 1953.
He and his brother Robby were just 10 and 6 when their parents died, and the footage of these two young boys on their way to the notorious New York correction facility for one final visit is particularly heartbreaking. As you might expect, there’s lots of fantastic family footage of the Meeropols, including a very young Ivy explaining what happened to her grandparents.
The documentary has several competing narratives, which can make it feel rather fragmented at times: As well as the Rosenbergs-Meeropols story, there’s also Cohn the heartless communist slayer; Cohn the heartless attorney, defending the indefensible in New York – including mob bosses and socialite Claus von Bülow; Cohn the heartless power broker, acting as mentor to a young Donald Trump (Roger Stone and Paul Manafort also make appearances); and Cohn the closeted gay man, presenting a straight face to the public while leading a hedonistic lifestyle in ’70s gay meccas like Manhattan’s Studio 54 and the Massachusetts resort of Provincetown.
Some of the most chilling commentaries come from Cohn’s family members. One cousin calls him “the personification of evil,” while another simply shudders at the mere thought of him. It doesn’t take long to understand why.
Some of the most entertaining stories come from the likes of filmmaker John Waters, who recalls eyeing Cohn with disgust in Provincetown, and playwright Tony Kushner, who made Cohn a key character in his two-part play about the AIDS epidemic, “Angels in America.”
Meeropol makes great use of audio recordings of journalists’ interviews with Cohn back in the ’80s (he died in August 1986), while gossip columnist and Cohn crony Cindy Adams has some crazy stories about how he never paid a bill in his life. We can only hope his business cards read “Attorney at lawless,” because this guy had the chutzpah of the devil.
Of course, because all roads seem to lead to Donald Trump these days, “Bully” spends some time examining Cohn’s influence on the then-wannabe real estate tycoon in New York. Looking at both men’s obsession for tanned features, it certainly suggests Cohn was the original “Agent Orange.”
The poster for HBO's "Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn."Credit: Courtesy of HBO / Yes Docu
Most chilling is an interview with Cohn from – presumably – the ’70s, in which he proudly holds up a framed picture of the two men together and recites this ringing endorsement from Trump: “Roy is my greatest friend.” Yep, it figures.
A beaming Cohn adds: “I have a feeling someday [in the] not-too-far distant future, you’re going to see Donald Trump in other parts of the country as well.” Thanks to Trump, Cohn’s amoral approach to life still haunts us today, making this documentary more vital than we could have imagined just a few short years ago.
The second part of this article is a review of:
‘The King of Staten Island’: Unhappy endings
I deleted all but this sentence:
"But, as I may have mentioned, the film is almost as long as a Trump rally, and what follows is a redemption tale that feels horribly clichéd about salt-of-the-earth firefighters.”
“Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn” is on HBO in the U.S. from Thursday. It is showing in Israel on Yes VOD, Hot VOD, Sting TV and Cellcom TV from Saturday, and on Yes Docu on Monday at 10 P.M.
