The Salem Witch Trials (Feb. 1692-May 1693) turned on what was called “spectral evidence.”

That was testimony from witnesses—either malicious or hysterical—who claimed the accused had assumed the form of a black cat or some other devilish creature and had come visiting in the night in order to torment the witness with bites and scratches, or to rearrange the bedroom furniture, or to send the baby into paroxysms.

Susannah Sheldon, aged about 18, testified that the defendant Sarah Good’s apparition—not the actual Sarah Good, but her spirit, her specter—“most violently pulled down my head behind a chest and tied my hands together with a whale band and almost choked me to death.” Other witnesses blamed Good for the mysterious deaths of cows or for causing a broom to fly up into an apple tree.

The judge, William Stoughton, admitted this nonsense into evidence. Hysterical fantasies had real consequences: Sarah Good and four other defendants were hanged on July 19, 1692.

Three hundred twenty-six years later, an anonymous woman—a spectral and possibly nonexistent woman, for all that one knew when the story emerged—accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her 36 years ago, when he was a high-school student.

It seemed as if the American constitutional process might be drawn back to the three centuries-old neighborhood of Salem, Mass.

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[This editorial was published in today’s Sept. 18 edition of the Wall Street Journal --JW]

The woman accusing Brett Kavanaugh of a drunken assault when both were teenagers has now come forward publicly, and on Monday (9/17) it caused Republicans to delay a confirmation vote and schedule another public hearing.

Yet there is no way to confirm her story after 36 years, and to let it stop Mr. Kavanaugh’s confirmation would ratify what has all the earmarks of a calculated political ambush.

Ms. Ford’s story is simply too distant and uncorroborated to warrant a new hearing or to delay a vote. We’ve heard from all three principals, and there are no other witnesses to call. Democrats will use Monday’s (9/24) hearing as a political spectacle to coax Mr. Kavanaugh into looking defensive or angry, and to portray Republicans as anti-women. Odds are it will be a circus.

GOP Senators should understand that the political cost of defeating Mr. Kavanaugh will likely include the loss of the Senate. Democrats are already motivated to vote against Donald Trump, and if Republicans panic now their own voters will rightly be furious. They would be letting Democrats get away with the same dirty trick they tried and failed to pull off against Clarence Thomas.

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Homer’s Muse sings of the rage of Achilles, brought forth from his tent by the death of his friend Patroclus to engage the Trojan hero, Hector, in mortal combat.

But Achilles’ anger solves nothing; although he kills Hector, he then desecrates the body by dragging it around the walls of Troy, thus violating the laws of warfare and sealing his own fate.

His determination to avenge his friend thus becomes “the accursed rage that brought great suffering to the Achaeans.” In the end, it’s not the rage of Achilles that wins the war for the Greeks, but the trickery of Odysseus that finagles the wooden horse inside the impregnable gates of Ilium.

We are witnessing a similar self-destructive rage today: the rage of the American Left against the Trump Administration in general and the president in particular.

What besides a profound, educationally inculcated, and emotionally juvenile hatred for the United States motivates them to such paroxysms of hysteria?

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This past week I asked a friend at the White House about how the president was holding up against the onslaught of media attacks. "They didn't even deliver a glancing blow," was the response. It wasn't for a lack of trying.

Has any president in modern times been the target of such a Blitzkrieg of orchestrated assaults -- from John McCain's funeral turned anti-Trump scrum, to Bob Woodward's discredited new book trashing the president, to the media infatuation with the anonymous New York Times op-ed by a disgruntled federal employee who hates President Trump?

Here we go again. Trump is (for the umpteenth time) characterized as dangerous, deranged, delusional, infantile, racist and amoral. But Trump is like Muhammad Ali playing rope-a-dope while George Foreman (the media) is flailing away and punching himself out.

For the bottom line is the surging Trump economy is the news story of the decade, for which the president is personally responsible no matter how much the media deny or ignore it.

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[The fate of America is at stake on November 6. We can achieve a Red Wave in the Senate by having outstanding pro-America candidates like Josh Hawley of Missouri defeat Democrat incumbents.--JW]

My grandfather was the first generation of our family born in the United States. His parents came to this country from Norway and became farmers, which is what my grandpa did too until the day he died.

Grandpa was fiercely proud to be an American citizen. He once told me his father wouldn’t teach him Norwegian because “this family is American now.” Grandpa never forgot it.

I haven’t forgotten it either. When you come to this country, you join a family – the American family. And in America, we stick up for one another, believe in one another, fight for one another.

Unfortunately, our ruling elite has given up on all that. They’ve become globalists first and Americans second. If you want to see Exhibit A, look at Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., who I am running against in the November election.

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[What the New York Times did yesterday (9/05) was so unconscionable that CNN – yes, CNN – ran a condemnation of it this morning. TTP is publishing it to help  you absorb what just happened. –JW]

(CNN) In the last week, we have learned that unelected appointees of the executive branch are openly thwarting the policy desires of the President of the United States — in some cases anonymously.

To the political left, these people are heroes, doing what must be done "to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump's more misguided impulses until he is out of office," as the anonymous "senior official" in the Trump administration put it in a controversial op-ed published Wednesday in the New York Times.

These statements are alarming, of course, because of the "senior" level status of the government official purported to have written them. [Note the anonymous writer is not a senior official in the White House, but merely somewhere among the vast bureaucracy comprising the Executive Branch.]

But they are also alarming because an anonymous, unelected government appointee is substituting his or her judgment for that of the duly elected leader of a constitutional republic.

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A definition of totalitarianism might be the saturation of every facet of daily life by political agendas and social-justice messaging.

At the present rate, America will soon resemble the dystopias of novels such as 1984 and Brave New World, in which the All-Seeing Social Justice Eye penetrates all aspects of our lives with an  ideology of coerced sameness.

Or rather, the prevailing orthodoxy in America is the omnipresent attempt of an elite — exempt from the consequences of its own ideology thanks to its supposed superior virtue and intelligence — to mandate an equality of result.

We expect their 24/7 political messaging on cable-channel news networks, talk radio, or print and online media. And we concede that long ago an NPR, CNN, MSNBC, or New York Times ceased being journalistic entities as much as obsequious megaphones of the progressive itinerary.

But increasingly we cannot escape anywhere the lidless gaze of our progressive lords, the Eye of Sauron all-knowing from high up in their dark towers.

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New York City will be spending $2.06 billion on its Department of Homeless Services. There are 61,421 homeless people in the city which is spending $33,539 per homeless person.

More money will be spent on the homeless than on the firefighters who save New Yorkers from burning buildings. The FDNY will have to make do with $2.04 billion, and the health department with $1.6 billion.

Has this vast infusion of cash solved homelessness in the city?  Of course not.

Homelessness is a manufactured crisis that funnels money to special interests, building up a social welfare sector of the government, while subsidizing and fueling the scale and scope of the problem – whether in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, or most any other Democrat-run urban area.

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As the fall elections approach, it's clear that the Left side of the aisle is getting nuttier by the day.

The public spectacles of the two funerals, Aretha Franklin's and John McCain's, brought forth the usual characters from our long-running American sitcom-cum-political soap opera.

Lecherous Bill Clinton, race-hustler Al Sharpton, shakedown artist Jesse Jackson, and anti-Semitic hate monger Louis Farrakhan in Detroit for the Queen of Soul.

Leading lights of the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party, including George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Lieberman, in Washington for the now-sanctified Maverick – who seemed not to have the dearly departed on their minds, but their bête noire in the White House, Donald Trump.

Old feuds, such as that between Bush and McCain, were forgotten as, like Marc Antony over the bleeding corpse of Julius Caesar, they delivered their orations designed not so much to praise McCain but to bury Trump.

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It was only a week ago that Democrats, journalists, and NeverTrump Republicans were (again) calling for the impeachment of the president. But this time, they were certain the end was near.

Following the plea agreement between Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, and federal prosecutors for campaign finance violations tied to payoffs in 2016 to Trump’s alleged lovers, this tiresome anti-Trump cabal insisted the Cohen fiasco would finally spell the doom they’ve been counting on since Trump took office.

A New York Times columnist claimed Trump was “credibly alleged to have purposefully conspired with Cohen to commit criminal acts,” and that the conduct met the constitutional threshold of “high crimes and misdemeanors” for which the president should be removed from office.

The entire media herd brayed this to the moon.  Things looked grim. Even longtime defenders of the president were gobsmacked about how to mitigate the damage as the political pile-on continued.

Then along came Lanny Davis.

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At this very moment the GNP is humming along at 4.1 percent, the S&P and NASDAQ are at record highs, and unemployment is at record lows for Blacks. Hispanics, Women and everyone else.

Meanwhile, the infantile buffoons in the Democrat Party and their mainstream media lackeys are calling so loudly and incessantly for the impeachment of the president you'd have to be on the North Col of Everest not to hear them.

Let’s be clear on what’s going on. Nothing could be more obvious than that Donald Trump is the most hated man in this country because he’s being successful as president. They want to bring him down personally because his policies, most of them anyway, are (gasp!) actually working.

He’s not hated for what he’s doing wrong.  He’s hated for what he’s doing right.

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Andrew Cuomo, Governor of my home state of New York, was recently speaking in Manhattan (8/15), signing a bill to make sex trafficking a felony in the state. He made a now-famous gaffe, which says a great deal about the state of the modern Democrat Party.

So there was Cuomo doing the soft-shoe shuffle. Our Governor is a sort of grandee of the Democrat Party: son of a former three-term Governor, ex-husband of a Kennedy gal.

But I should say that the phrase “Democrat Party” in my last sentence refers to the old Democrat Party, the party of FDR, JFK, Bill Clinton and John Kerry.

Andrew Cuomo, like those other names, is a white guy of European ancestry. Like other white guys in his party, Cuomo has the uncomfortable feeling that the ground is moving under his feet—that the Democrat Party is turning into something different from what it has been though his, and my, lifetime.

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The great engine of American capitalism is once again firing on all cylinders, as shown by the 4.1 percent annualized growth of America’s gross domestic product (GDP) in the second quarter of this year.

Most Americans (with the exception of Democrats in Congress) are celebrating the good economic news. There is quiet rejoicing in many European and Asian capitals as well, since their mostly sluggish economies will now be drawn along in America’s powerful wake.

But there is one capital where the American economic renaissance is definitely not welcome news. Consternation reigns in China, where President Xi Jinping is nervously watching his “China Dream” of dominating the United States go up in smoke.

You see, surprising though it may sound, America’s economy may now be growing at a faster clip than China’s. And this changes everything.  Actually, as the photo of the US and China First Ladies symbolizes, ever since Trump, it’s no contest.

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It’s possible to derive some comfort from contemplating the Chinese. Sure, unless something radical is done, Western civilization is going to collapse due to the most intelligent women having the fewest children, combined with massive low IQ (and highly fertile) immigration from the Third World.

So argues Edward Dutton in his forthcoming At Our Wits’ End.  Some will then argue that surely civilization will be preserved by the Chinese. Unfortunately, research is showing that this is just wishful thinking.

Such as leading IQ researcher Professor Richard Lynn actually proclaiming in his book Dysgenics that China’s one child policy—introduced in 1979 and abolished in 2015—was the savior of civilization.

Unfortunately for China, this is not what research by a young Chinese psychologist has found  -- that such dysgenics has caused a drop in overall Chinese IQ.   The problem is compounded by research showing that Northeast Asians are genetically less intellectually creative than Europeans. It asks: Why Do Northeast Asians Win So Few Nobel Prizes?

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[President Trump has denounced Obama’s John Brennan as “the worst CIA Director in our country’s history.” Yet, as Foreign Policy’s investigative journalist Zach Dorfman describes below, Obama’s CIA as a whole is responsible for the disaster he recounts. –JW]

It was considered one of the CIA’s worst failures in decades: Over a two-year period starting in late 2010, Chinese authorities systematically dismantled the agency’s network of agents across the country, executing dozens of suspected U.S. spies.

Since then, a question has loomed over the entire debacle.  How were the Chinese able to roll up the network?

Now, nearly eight years later, it appears that the agency botched the communication system it used to interact with its sources, according to five current and former intelligence officials.

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Donald Trump won in 2016 precisely because love trumps hate—the love of a parent for her children; the love of people for their community; and the proper love citizens have for their country.

Those people—62 million Americans, give or take, and counting—are tired of seeing their love undermined and negated by years of hateful Democrat Party policies. That’s the truth of the matter.

Over the past few weeks, a missing persons case involving a 20-year-old University of Iowa student, Mollie Tibbetts, has been in the news daily. While taking a run in the evening in July, the Iowa student did not come back home.

And why did this happen? Because Mollie was murdered by an illegal alient—24-year-old Cristhian Bahena Rivera. Not only is Rivera an illegal alien but he had been in the country illegally for seven years.

Angel Moms ask, “How many more will it take for all of America to wake up and get behind President Trump to secure our borders and clean up our country?”

Let the memory of young Mollie Tibbetts, of her family, and of all the people who’ve been victims of illegal immigration remember just what’s at stake in November.

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Facebook, Twitter, and Google are far worse than the original monopolies like International Harvester and Standard Oil and far more dangerous because they monopolize not just our industries but our brains. They control, or at least inordinately influence, how Americans and even much of the world think.

The news that Facebook has "trust" scores for users but will not reveal them to those same users is, to put it mildly, distressing.

Indeed, Facebook has a lot in common with Communist China these days. From the Daily Mail: Communist China will use a 'social credit score' to rank it citizens and give those with the most favored behavior perks.

So here’s what we need to do to end their evil – and it has to be done now, before they cause irreparable damage to the viability of our coming mid-term elections.

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For the better part of the past 15 years since Erdogan and his Islamist AJP party were first elected in December 2002, Turkey watchers in the US – like here at TTP – have warned that US leaders and policymakers that Erdogan is an Islamist revolutionary who intends to transform Turkey into a radical Islamic state.

The Trump administration, like its two predecessors, was not at all eager to acknowledge reality, let alone act on it.

But since Trump entered office, there has been a major obstacle that made ignoring Turkey’s hostility to the US and its interests increasingly difficult to sweep under the rug.

That obstacle is the imprisonment of Pastor Andrew Brunson.  Now, thanks to him, President Trump finally understands the evil that is Erdogan.

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Brian Dye, Senior Vice President of Information Security at Symantec, (in)famously declared back in 2014 that “Antivirus is Dead” in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.

Symantec, if you’re not aware in non-Tex-land is the maker of Norton Antivirus.  So, needless to say, his remarks generated significant shock and criticism at the time.

The truth is he was and is absolutely right.  However, as with most things that’s not the whole story.

In my first article on TTP, A Clean Start, I made the following assertion, echoing Dye’s sentiment:

“Anti-virus is today at best about 30% effective at stopping malware.  It’s near-0% in stopping a determined attacker and also near-0% if not kept up-to-date daily.”

What he and I mean when we say Antivirus programs are “dead” is that any computing defense that relies on a “blacklist” of programs that shouldn’t be allowed to run is ineffective by itself in today’s connected world.  We need defenses based on new technologies like behavioral analysis and “whitelisting.”

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