An outbreak of truthiness from a high-profile US philosopher has sparked a row because he said the quiet part out loud; anything is OK if it stops Donald Trump from regaining power as president. However you dress this up, it’s extremism, a subversion of the age-old moral imperative that the ends don’t justify the means. As US cities become increasingly lawless, it behoves us to realise that this rule-breaking is generated from the top down, rather than bottom up.

The man in question, author and podcaster Sam Harris, has been at the centre of a social media storm ever since he told interviewers that censoring Hunter Biden’s laptop was warranted to prevent Trump from winning the 2020 election. He didn’t care how corrupt the Bidens were, heck, Hunter could have had dead children in his cellar and he wouldn’t have cared, because Trump was an existential threat, indeed, ‘like an asteroid heading towards earth’, and pretty much anything was justified.

That those on the Left thought law-breaking was necessary against Trump has long been a truism for some, and suspected by others, and Harris is to be commended for his honesty, despite his lamentable subsequent scramble to atone for his words with a milder restatement of his immoral and vile views. It is good to see your enemies for who they are. A US adage holds that the Democrats are the crooked party and the Republicans the stupid party. Playing by Queensberry rules when your opponents don’t must indeed seem stupid, and the outcome has been the ascendancy of the left-leaning elites we see all around us.

Country club conservatives have been no match for the whatever-it-takes fighters on the other side, a truth former prime minister John Howard would do well to remember when he castigates Donald Trump for not abiding by the umpire’s decision in the 2020 election. Umpires are all well and good when the rules are applied fairly, which seems to be Howard’s working assumption about the United States.

The reality is different. By way of corrective, I offer eminent Hoover Institute historian Victor Davis Hanson, who in a brilliant monologue on Fox News last week, said of the Left: ‘They’re talking non-stop about civil war, they really are, and they do things that are revolutionary. Nobody on the Right said let’s junk the 233-year-old Electoral College, the 180-year-old filibuster, the 150-year-old nine-person Supreme Court. Nobody said let’s bring in two more states and end the idea for 60 years of a 50-state union… nobody in the Republican Party ever tore up the State of the Union address on national TV like Nancy Pelosi. No Speaker of the House, not Newt Gingrich, not anybody else, Paul Ryan, ever said to the minority party you can’t have these people on committees, that was a revolutionary thing to do in the House. Nobody ever goes outside the homes of Justice Kagan, thank God or Justice Sotomayor, there are just not Right-wing assassins that show up out there…. Or if you read Time magazine, that classic article by Molly Ball in February 2021 where she gushed, she was giddy, outlining what she called was a conspiracy to change radically the voting laws to inject $400 or $500 million dollars to alter the way we voted for centuries, so that 70 per cent of the votes would not be cast on election day…. So these are revolutionary things they’re doing… it’s easy to say Trump is a fascist or Trump did this… but did Donald Trump ever try to weaponise the IRS in Lois Lerner fashion? Did he take the FBI and use it to go after Joe Biden’s residence when he was president? Did they go into the DoJ and have this collusion hoax? Did any of these people who worked for Trump lie four times to a federal investigator like the FBI director Andrew McCabe? So they are the revolutionaries and they project it on to others.’

I could go on with a laundry list of law-breaking, including the Roe v. Wade draft judgement leak from the Supreme Court of the United States, the unprecedented FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, the justification for which changes by the day (nuclear? Presidential records? Classified records?) and the explanation for which has not yet been forthcoming, but the point is made. The question then becomes, what are they prepared to do next time around to make sure Trump cannot win again? Testament to his enduring popularity is his overwhelming win record of GOP candidates he has endorsed, now standing at 209-17.

Pundit Scott Adams, who predicted much too presciently two years ago that Republicans would be hunted if Biden won in 2020, tweeted recently: ‘If I believed what anti-Trumpers say they believe, I’d rig an election to keep that unstable dictator out of office. I’m unclear why anyone would act otherwise.’ If you think Trump is Hitler, and believe that the ends justify the means, why would you not do something extreme to stop him?

This helps explain why there is so much talk of extremism these days. You may not hold with the psychological process of projection, but there is no doubt that Democrats fear domestic extremists and right-wing terrorists so much they are literally creating them. Mums at school board meetings, grannies at the 6 January  protest, all are grist for the mill under Biden’s regime.

But just as actor Jussie Smollett found he had to invent his own racial hatred, Chicago not having quite enough for his purposes, so the FBI has been busy inciting right-wing violence in order to label it terrorism and justify whatever crackdown and persecution appeals this week. Witness the current retrial of two dopey blowhards accused of a kidnap plot against Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer; two earlier accused were acquitted after the jury heard evidence of FBI entrapment, to the extent that of some eighteen men involved, twelve were FBI agents and informants, responsible for contriving, funding and directing the kidnap plot.

We would all wish for Sam Harris to be an outlier, but unfortunately the evidence is running in the other direction. It is the Left which wants to destroy the village in order to ‘save’ it.