Do They Know What They Are Doing?

or are they cardboard cutouts

One of the big questions in politics — and indeed in life — is to answer the question: “do they know what they are doing?”

Because a lot of humans strut about in the world with great confidence, and it looks like we know what we are doing. When in fact we don’t.

Item: The decade-long campaign in Liberal-land to Get Trump. As we now know, it started in 2016 with the cooperation between the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Intelligence Community to hang Russian Collusion around Trump’s neck. And then of course we had the phony criminal cases against Trump after he left office in 2021.

Our liberal friends wanted us to think that they had Trump’s number. Turned out that they didn’t.

Item: the Supreme Court liberal ladies. In Saturday’s Supreme Court takedown of the district judge nationwide injunction fraud, experts observed that one of the three liberal ladies that voted in favor of district court nationwide injunctions, Associate Justice Elena Kagan, said back in 2022 that she was against nationwide injunctions.

[I]t just can't be right that one district judge can stop a nationwide policy in its tracks and and leave it stopped for the years that it takes to go through normal process.

Now, in 2025, with a Republican in the White House, she is all in favor of nationwide injunctions. As is the most talkative justice on the Supreme Court Associate Justice Ketanji Jackson. I just wonder if they have ever thought this through, or whether they just vote the liberal line, as set for that day.

Item: What FoxNews calls the red-green-blue alliance, between white lefties, Muslims, and the Democratic Party. The idea has been to use

American philanthropic networks, like the House of Soros, as a Trojan horse to racialize Islam, frame Muslims as the "oppressed" and embed illiberal ideologies within America’s liberal institutions, including the Democratic Party.

Is this really a good idea? Will it work? Now, I understand the Soros operation as an effort to fight against the Nazi threat of nationalism wherever it may be found. Because Hitler. I understand George Soros as believing, after he survived World War II, that “never again” would we allow nationalism to create another World War and Holocaust. Maybe the participants think they are creating a great movement that will transform America. But maybe they are creating a convenient enemy for Republicans to run against and defeat for the next generation.

Item: Zorhan Mamdani, the child of privilege, who wants New York City to go full socialist. He went to private school from age 7. His dad is a lefty professor and his mom is the film director that made Monsoon Wedding. As they say on PowerLine,

He is a spoiled, privileged young man playing today’s most popular parlor game “Look how oppressed I am.”

Actually, our rich-kid liberal friends usually like to say that they are the Allies of the Oppressed. But I get the point.

And the point is: do these progressive folks, from the liberal ladies on the Supreme Court to the liberal-Muslim alliance to the general upscale activist industrial complex, really know what they are doing, or are they just reading from a script?

Or, as the Brits ask, is the educated class past its sell-by date? Or as Shakespeare asked:

GLENDOWER: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

HOTSPUR: Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?

The line our liberal friends have been selling, since no later than Marx, is that we activists represent the vast majority of helpless, oppressed people. It worked when the working class was the majority. But today?

That’s the point. Politicians and activists and NGOs all go around radiating confidence. That’s what they do.

But my suspicion is that they are all just reciting from the script, and really don’t know what they are doing. In particular, I’d say that the current generation of western leaders, from Mark Carney in Canada to Sir Keir Starmer in Britland to Emmanuel Macron in France to Friedrich Merz in Germany to Ursula van der Leyen at the EU, are cardboard cutouts. The least amount of wind will blow them over.

One thing about Donald J. Trump. He is not a cardboard cutout. He seems to be able to withstand hurricane force winds.