Joshua Muravchik, Scott notes, was a student of Jan Karski, author of Story of a Secret State: My Report To the World. In 1987, Muravchik was a speaker at the Second Thoughts Conference put on by David Horowitz and Peter Collier, with speakers included Ron Radosh, Jeffrey Herf,  Stanley Crouch, P.J. O’Rourke and others. In his foreword to Bill of Writes, Collier wrote, the participants:

differed on many issues, but they shared one central conviction – that the god of the New Left had failed them personally during its nihilistic strut on the stage of the 60s and they were ready to testify against the smelly little orthodoxies they had once affirmed. In the future, some of these Second Thoughters went on to be conservatives, but they would always have a more profound identity as “ex-leftists,” who knew that the utopia they (we) had been building had never really been anything more than a Potemkin waste site and. that while leftism might try disguise itself as “liberal” or “progressive,” totalitarianism by any other name would smell just as rancid.

For Muravchik, the struggle against totalitarianism was of Manichean dimensions, and democracy, for all its imperfections, was the way ahead. The differences among the speakers were rather small compared to the areas of agreement. Therefore, Muravchik concluded, “be fraternal, off the commies, power to the people.” The former leftists departed in that spirit and Muravchik remained vigilant.

As he noted in “Pelosi’s Favorite Stalinist,” in 2001 Rep. Nancy Pelosi, “took to the pages of the Congressional Record to effuse her sentiments on the hundredth anniversary of Harry Bridges’ birth, an occasion celebrated only by a gnostic few.” Bridges, Pelosi wrote, was “arguably the most significant labor leader of the twentieth century . . .  beloved by the workers of this Nation, and recognized as one of the most important labor leaders in the world,” and so on. As Muravchik explained:

While Bridges and his union took transparently pro-Communist stances, Bridges denied that he was a Communist. Only after the fall of the USSR, and the opening of Soviet archives, did the truth emerge that Bridges had been not merely in the party but a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party USA, a position for which the documents show he was directly approved by the Kremlin This means, plain and simple, that he had devoted his life to the service of the Soviet Union and its ruler, Joseph Stalin, one of the three greatest mass murderers of all time. (Hitler and Mao Zedong are the other two.)

In 2007, Pelosi became House Speaker, which prompted Muravchik to conclude:

We should know Pelosi’s wretched record in judging who are history’s good guys and who are its bad. And we should be mindful that some of what she knows about political values was learned at the feet of people who believed fervently that the great enemy of mankind was none other than America itself.

That is the ethos of the current ruling class. America is an evil, racist place – except for their tenured positions at prestigious universities, their Martha’s Vineyard mansions, their book and film projects, their bulging bank accounts, and so forth.  Actual democracy has become “Our Democracy,” code for the ruling axis of Democrats, the deep state and their media allies.

For all but the willfully blind, that axis has failed miserably on every front. The nihilistic strut is now on steroids, with transgenderism, white coat supremacy and such. The genocidal anti-Semitism Jan Karski experienced is now surging in calls for a second Holocaust. The time has come to be fraternal, resist totalitarianism, and restore power to the people.