THE COLUMN: The Leaving of It

Donald J. Trump, most recently the 45th president of the United States, may—to use the favorite phrase of the New York Times—"make history" this week by becoming the first chief executive ever to be indicted after leaving office. Not for anything he did while in office (that would be unconstitutional, although at this point what difference does it make?) but for... wait for it... paying $130,000 in hush money to a hitherto unknown "porn star" to keep quiet about an alleged one-off sexual tryst in 2006.

Now a transaction, however trashy and unsavory, between consenting adults 17 years ago, which became a political issue in 2018 (you remember that; it was in all the papers), is hardly the crime of the century. The rogue local prosecutor, Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, Jr., is ostensibly in charge of this precedent-shattering miscarriage of justice, but everyone knows he's just a front man for the brains of the outfit, including his deputy, social-justice warrior Meg Reiss, the Clintons, and, ultimately the Biden White House.

In the brave new world of the Panopticon, anything you've done at any time your life from birth and the present can now bring you down, the corrupt cur media baying at your heels.

The alleged crime, which has something to do with campaign financing laws involving how Trump reimbursed his sleazy former lawyer and recent jailbird, Michael Cohen, who was the front man on the deal. You may rightly think that such a charge—a philandering playboy businessman paying a woman who, as a working professional, will have sex with anybody for money—is right up there with spitting on the sidewalk or picking your feet in Poughkeepsie. And cooler heads may yet prevail if, as rumored, Cohen's own former legal adviser, Robert J. Costello, appears before the grand jury today to shred what little is left of Cohen's credibility. 

But when that man is named Trump... 

Trump broke the news of what he said was his impending arrest tomorrow via social media (all caps his):

THE FAR & AWAY LEADING REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE AND FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, WILL BE ARRESTED ON TUESDAY OF NEXT WEEK. PROTEST, TAKE OUR NATION BACK!

And...

“IT’S TIME!!! WE JUST CAN’T ALLOW THIS ANYMORE. THEY’RE KILLING OUR NATION AS WE SIT BACK & WATCH. WE MUST SAVE AMERICA!PROTEST, PROTEST, PROTEST!!!”

That is the last thing anybody should do. Or didn't we learn anything from the Jan. 6 fiasco, which has landed hundreds of innocents in what JJ Sefton, the morning blogger at Ace of Spades, has taken to calling the Garland Archipelago. The Left's inability to ever stop (they never stop, they never sleep, they never quit) because the dictates of Marxist "progressivism" make it impossible for them to stop, means that should protests get even a little bit out of hand, the red-diaper babies and their amigos in the media will view it as the next Reichstag Fire, starring conservatives as the hapless Marinus van der Lubbe, and act accordingly. 

There's no question but that the Bragg/Reiss tag team is trying to provoke a confrontation with their absurd legal theories about the Trump/Daniels frolic, but one of their additional goals is to fan the flames of the Trump/Ron DeSantis rivalry. There's been talk of ringing Mar-a-Lago with Trump supporters and demanding that Ron DeSantis call out the Florida National Guard to prevent Trump's possible extradition. Already, the lunatic fringe is frothing:

Still, even Loomer has reconsidered her firebrand stance on her hero's "Protest!!" demands: 

Waco—that's not incendiary or anything. 

DeSantis would be smart to say nothing about Trump (as indeed he did not in this statement today), but instead to issue a warning about the unprecedented political chutzpah of Democrat stooges arresting and trying not only a former president but a current candidate for the office again. Despite Trump's constant whining about how the Florida governor "owes" him "loyalty" for Trump's endorsement back in 2018, DeSantis owes Trump bupkis; as Mr. Dooley famously said, politics ain't beanbag and nobody owes nobody nothing once the bell sounds. 

But what should Trump do? If and when he's arrested, or voluntarily surrenders, he should take the high road. He should utterly reject Bragg's legitimacy or authority to bring charges against him, that on behalf of all living former presidents and all future presidents he will not be a party, on constitutional grounds, to a precedent-setting farce, to wit partisan attempts to use a local legal system to affect the outcome of a national election and in defiance of the will of the people.

And then he should say "not guilty" and just walk out. No speeches to the media, no preening, no playing to the crowd, but instead cloaking his worst instincts in the solemnity of his demeanor. He should not encourage the people to rally to his side, but instead play the martyr, and let his bloody shirt wave itself. 

Another Ace co-blogger, CBD, makes these valid and troubling points:

A Trump arrest will galvanize his support and re-energize his struggling campaign for president. And why would the Democrat-Socialist apparatus want this? Maybe because they WANT to run against Trump in 2024. They see Donald Trump's electoral college success with a hard ceiling of about 235 votes, but fear DeSantis or some other new, young and nimble Republican candidate as a much stronger opponent who can savage the Democrat candidate (Biden or some other malleable vegetable) without having to deal with the baggage of the fake January 6th issues and personal peccadilloes that can overwhelm more substantive advantages.

So this is a twofer for the Democrat-Socialist machine. They continue their long march through our institutions, destroying everything in their path, and they solidify their political hold on the country by manipulating a flawed candidate into contention for the Republican nomination.

Be careful what you wish for: I think Trump is likely to be defeated by any Democrat at this point, but then again that's what everybody thought in 2016, when I thought otherwise, and said so in the pages of the New York Post. And it's possible, just possible, that he's learned enough from what happened to him in 2020 to make him competitive.

What he should not do is this:

Can Trump control himself in this crisis? He recent dog-in-a-manger behavior regarding the presidency, his childish attacks on DeSantis, and his deteriorating command of the English language, don't offer much hope:

REMEMBER, THE SAME ANIMALS AND THUGS THAT WOULD DO THIS TO PERHAPS 200 MILLION PEOPLE, BUT ACTUALLY ALL AMERICANS, ARE THE COMMUNISTS, MARXISTS, RINOS, AND LOSERS THAT ARE PURPOSEFULLY DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY!

He'll be 78 at the time of the next election, and if we've learning nothing from Joe Biden then we're even dumber than Robinette himself. To slightly paraphrase Malcom in Shakespeare's Macbeth: "Nothing in his presidency/ Became him like the leaving it." Nothing would become Donald Trump, half-Scottish himself, more than a principled, defiant—and above all peaceful—exit from the national stage. 

THE COLUMN: 'Vaccine Amnesty'? Not On Your Life

This really says it all: 

Nothing better encapsulates the Stalinist Left's ability to turn on a dime and argue the same set of facts both ways than its reaction to Covid. From the "scientifically" induced panic and hysteria over a fundamentally non-existent threat to the survival of humanity (something one would think the Left would welcome, and in fact they do and are even beginning to admit it) to a state of weaponized HIPPA was but a journey of two years. Beginning as an area of some mild public concern to a fascist boot stamping on a human face for what seemed like forever, the Hoax of the Century has become the Crime of the Century. Without the slightest bit of proof that Covid-19 was indeed a planetary menace, but merely the assertions and "projections" of hypocritical "scientists," cranky lunatics, and foaming totalitarians of every stripe, a near-worldwide lockdown was imposed upon an innocent and trusting populace.

Result: madness. The elderly, dying imprisoned and alone. Families sundered. Children tortured. The rise of an internal, informal Stasi, as neighbor turned against neighbor and ratted him out. It was insane, but even worse: it was evil. Cold, calculated evil. And yet they—and you know who you are, Justin Trudeau, Jacinda Ardern, Joe Biden, and the rest of you nasty international socialists—now have the unmitigated gall to beg for mercy:

LET’S DECLARE A PANDEMIC AMNESTY

In April 2020, with nothing else to do, my family took an enormous number of hikes. We all wore cloth masks that I had made myself. We had a family hand signal, which the person in the front would use if someone was approaching on the trail and we needed to put on our masks.  Once, when another child got too close to my then-4-year-old son on a bridge, he yelled at her “SOCIAL DISTANCING!”

These precautions were totally misguided. In April 2020, no one got the coronavirus from passing someone else hiking. Outdoor transmission was vanishingly rare. Our cloth masks made out of old bandanas wouldn’t have done anything, anyway. But the thing is: We didn’t know.

Dementia meets malevolence.

Baloney. Of course, they did. Not only did they know, but they enjoyed it, in a way leftist sadists like those at the The Atlantic and their ilk always do. In a way that international moguls like Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum did in his book, Covid-19: The Great Reset. In the same way that all genuine Enemies of the People do, formerly secretly and, increasingly, openly.

Unabashed and unashamed, they have the chutzpah to throw themselves on the temporary mercies of their victims, most of whom still haven't realized that the Rubicon has been crossed, and that there is no going back for the antagonists of Western civilization. So ignore their pleas to "focus on the future." Like Satan himself, they never stop, they never sleep, they never quit. By their masks shall ye continue to know them.

Here's another amoral monster, feigning a quasi-mea culpa:

We didn't know. We didn't understand. We were just following orders. So, of course, we brought the entire apparatus of the state down on your heads in the name of "safety." It was for your own good, comrade.

Don't forget that, literarily, every Aristotelian drama can be told from two viewpoints: that of the hero and that of his opponent. Narrative storytelling has evolved into a constant clash of good and evil: the protagonist wants X (a woman, glory, power, money), while his opponent it trying to frustrate his goals and desires. Turn the story around, have the antagonist become the narrator, and you have the same story but with an entirely different outcome. In the Leftist narrative, they are the good guys trying to save the world while we, the inheritors and defenders of Western civilization are the villains, stubbornly and bitterly clinging to the old ways and trying to frustrate "progress."

Leftists, being Marxists of either the economic or cultural variety, are great believers in what they call the "arc of history," a kind of quasi-religious determinism that posits "iron laws" of history that must, eventually, result in their triumph. (Any resemblance to the narrative of the Bible, in which all promises of military triumph and spiritual salvation are conveniently located in the unspecified future, is entirely not coincidental.) As I wrote in The Devil's Pleasure Palace: 

Progressives like to throw around the phrases “the arc of history” and “the wrong side of history.” Martin Luther King Jr., quoting the abolitionist Theodore Parker, formulated it this way: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But when you stop to think about this, it’s simply a wishful assertion with no particular historical evidence to back it up. Such sloganeering emerges naturally from the Hegelian-Marxist conception of capital-H History. The only teleology they can allow has to do with abstract, ostensibly “moral” pronouncements of a chimerical, ever-receding horizon of perfect “justice.” The moral universe must not and will not ever admit of amelioration in our lifetimes, or indeed any lifetimes, they insist. It is a Faustian quest, at once admirable and yet a fool’s errand; no means will ever suffice to achieve the end.

As these things so often do, the determination to control the world at its most vulnerable and gullible point of entry, health, necessitated a coverup—Twitter and Facebook, take a bow! Overnight, our long-cherished notions of free speech, free expression, the right to "question authority," and even religious observance were overruled by a handful of crackpots aided and abetted by the social-media companies, working in cahoots with governments and the oligarchs of the World Economic Forum to create the Brave New World of the Great Reset. "The viper tongue of totalitarianism is most often bathed in palliatives before it strikes," I wrote in the introduction to our book on the subject. So also does it beg for "tolerance" when it is at its weakest. 

Against the Great Reset

Fight back.

Now that, once again, they have been exposed for what and who they really are, this is most definitely not the moment to treat them with kindness and empathy which, like "tolerance," is a destructive impulse masquerading as a virtue). Forgiveness, amnesty? Not on your life. Even now, they are plotting their next moves: "climate change" lockdowns, restricted mobility, vaccine-or-carbon tax passports, electric cars, digital currency, the destruction of the fossil fuel industries, artificial scarcity, and misery shared by everybody except themselves. 

Look at the picture at the top of this page, and ask yourselves: if they would do this to your children, what won't they do? And what kind of man are you if you let them get away with it?

 

THE COLUMN: 'A Man Who Could Have Been Great'

One of the best and most poignant moments in the underappreciated 1999 TV movie, RKO 281, about the making of Citizen Kane and the battle between William Randolph Hearst and the brash upstart Orson Welles, comes when Hearst, defeated, broke, and broken, defends himself and the choices he's made in an argument with his mistress, Marion Davies:

Hearst seemed to have everything: wealth, political influence, multiple homes, a beautiful actress-mistress in California and a wife and five sons back home in New York. And, of course, a media empire that included prominent newspapers across the country. He tried his hand at politics, serving two terms in the House as a Democrat, but losing races for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1904, mayor of New York (twice), and governor of New York. Relentlessly acquisitive, he eventually spent himself into penury, losing control of his company and retiring into seclusion. As James Cromwell, the actor portraying Hearst in the film cited above, says: "I am a man who could have been great, but was not."

If that reminds you of anybody, join the club. Donald J. Trump's recent lackluster announcement that he will seek the GOP nomination for president of the United States in 2024 has a Hearstian air about it, the last cry of a wounded bull who could have been great during the four years the nation allotted him in the Oval Office, but was not. Of course, he did some splendid things with both the economy and in the realm of foreign policy, most if not all of which have been overturned, reversed, and otherwise destroyed by the regime of the doddering Joe Biden. But he failed early and often to grasp the peril he was in, emanating not only from his avowed enemies but also from the vipers right in his own breast: his daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner (known around the West Wing as "the Democrats").

Worms in the apple.

Worst of all were his catastrophic errors in personnel judgment and his own insatiable craving for the love of people who loathed him. "The president thinks he can get anyone to like him," a top administration official told me early in the term, and those words certainly suit for Trump's political epitaph.

Losing a very winnable campaign for re-election, however, was the unpardonable sin. Before you start shouting "what about the Steal?" let me remind you that just before the election, I wrote a column in the Epoch Times laying out exactly how the Democrats were going to steal the election. Perfectly legally, too.

Already some 60 million ballots have been cast either by mail or via “early voting.” More votes undoubtedly will come in before Nov. 3, not to mention absentee ballots from residents and military personnel living and stationed overseas. In sum, a record number of votes will be cast by people without all the necessary information to make an informed choice on Nov. 3.

The idea behind elections is one man, one vote, one time, on one day. This ensures that everyone has equal access to all the information available about the two candidates at the same time. Thus, an election is a snapshot in time, binding for a certain period of time, and reflecting the will of the citizenry at that moment. Which is the way it should be, and has been since the ancient Greeks and Romans. What we have today is, in effect, a rolling plebiscite.

But there were rallies to be held (why?) and barbs to be traded with the media, while meanwhile the Democrats were laughing all the way to the drop boxes where the votes were already banked and the election already decided.

After two straight election disappointments, the GOP finally seems to be waking up to reality. Naturally, they've grasped it by the wrong end of the stick, and now are being advised to emulate the Democrats rather than re-establishing the notion of one-man, one-vote, one-day. But trying to out-cheat a lawyer-ridden party like the Democrats is a fool's errand; the Republicans just don't have the necessities for it, and so they'll continue to lose around the margins in crucial states, which as we've just seen twice is all is takes.

But do we hear Trump making this case? Of course not:

Almost nothing in that statement is true. As we've seen, there was no "massive and widespread fraud & deception," just the workings of the systems the Democrats, with GOP acquiescence, have put in place over the past decade or so. Yes, the big tech companies colluded with them; just how deep in the tank for the donkeys they were we are just now seeing thanks to Elon Musk. But Trump's query is just nuts: throw out the election results and declare him winner or have a new election? Even were such a thing possible, would it be advisable? That way lies anarchy, and possibly civil war.

Trump really got himself into trouble with his next statement. "A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution." The only sane response is—and immediately was—are you nuts? It does no such thing!

The former president's dwindling band of defenders promptly jumped in to "clarify" that what he really meant was not "allows for" but something more like "leads to" or "results in." That, however, is not what he wrote, and no amount of sympathetic parsing can make it so. Clearly Trump has neither filter nor proofreader on his staff of yes-women, but that a former president, who should know better, can be so cavalier with his syntax does not bode well for a second term. Words matter, and the man with his finger on the button has to be able to say exactly what he means, or else he will be accountable for meaning exactly what he said.

Finally, the kicker: "Our great 'Founders' did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!" This is entirely incorrect. From the start American elections have been marked by finagling, chiseling, horse-trading, vote suppression, and outright cheating. In fact it's something of an American art form, as any student of the elections of 1800, 1824, 1876, and 2000 knows.

With this intemperate outburst, Trump has disqualified himself from returning to office. Over the past few years he has become increasingly inarticulate, unable to complete sentences or express a fully formed thought. (In this regard, he's beginning to rival both of the Bushes, off-prompter Obama, and the senescent Biden himself.) Trump is, after all, 76 years old and would be 78 in November 2023. The man most likely to replace him, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, is 44 and will be 46 on Nov. 5 2024, just three years older than JFK when he was inaugurated in 1961. Biden, should he run, would turn 83 a few weeks after Election Day. If you think he's a geezer now, wait 'til you see him then.

In any case, Trump's day has likely passed. So much winning has turned into so much losing, and not even the small clawback of the House last month can ameliorate the disasters of 2018 and 2020. "Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing," said Vince Lombardi, quoting Red Sanders. With the house already on fire, this is no time to worry about whether DeSantis has had enough "seasoning" (did Kennedy? Teddy Roosevelt? James K. Polk? Ulysses S. Grant?). DeSantis served two terms in the House and has now embarked on his second term as governor; short of already being president, how much more "seasoning" does he need? And how can we not wish to elect the first Italian-American president, whose first name echoes that of the Gipper and whose middle name is Dion?

But no one put it better, or more bluntly, than a man who really did know how to win, General George S. Patton, Jr., who said in a pre-D-Day speech to the troops: "Americans love a winner. Americans will not tolerate a loser. Americans despise cowards. Americans play to win all of the time. I wouldn't give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That's why Americans have never lost nor will ever lose a war; for the very idea of losing is hateful to an American." Screenwriter Francis Ford Coppola adapted the speech at the opening of this 1970 multiple Oscar-winner:

For reasons both of, and not of, his own making, Trump (like Hearst) will go out a loser. For the good of the nation, when the time is right and DeSantis most needs him to, he should close down his campaign and retire gracefully to Mar-a-Lago. It may not be Hearst Castle, but if he can hang on to it in the financial disruption that is almost certain to come, he can still do his country a great service. He can be great, just not in the way he might have wished.

THE COLUMN: The Sting

If you knowingly sit down at a fixed poker game and lose your entire stash, would you also complain that some of the other players also cheated? If it was a friend who brought you into the game, would you then go to another one with him? And having lost all your money when you bet the farm, would you re-mortgage it and bet it all again on the chance that this time things would be different? If you're a Republican, the answer is: of course you would, because you just did and you're about to do it again.

If the national elections of 2018, 2020, and 2022 didn't teach the GOP a lesson or three, what will? From Donald Trump's surprise (though not a surprise to me) win in 2016, it's been mostly all downhill for the party of Lincoln, which has been thrice set back on its heels and sent to the power poorhouse. The day after Trump's election, the institutional Left launched its legal coup against Trump and as early as mid-February 2017 had claimed its first and most important scalp in Mike Flynn, the man who knew where all the bodies were buried during the Obama administration. Saddled with hostile incompetents such as Reince Priebus and Jeff Sessions, the Trump administration was kneecapped by its own naivete and betrayed by its two deadliest enemies, Jared and Ivanka Kushner, the twin vipers known around the West Wing as "the Democrats." By the time Trump was goaded by them and the media into firing Steve Bannon, the man who got him elected, MAGA was finished as a philosophical and governing force in the Oval Office. The rest, as they say, was commentary.

So from a position of power in January 2017, when the GOP under Trump held the White House and both branches of Congress; to the 2018 mid-terms, when Nancy D'Alesandro Pelosi, the pride of Baltimore, took over the House and unleashed not one but two impeachments against Trump; to the disaster of 2020, when the Trump forces refused to take the re-election campaign seriously and instead substituted supererogatory rallies in place of a brass-knuckles ground game; to the most recent congressional elections, in which the GOP barely recaptured the House but blew the Senate again, it's been one disaster after another. Why, it's almost been as if the fix has been in the whole time! 

It's not like there was no warning. Once the Democrats miraculously cleaned out the GOP in formerly red Orange County, Calif., in 2018 it should have been clear even to such notable dummies as Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy that the game was no longer being played on Game Day, but weeks and even months before, plus a few days after the polls had "closed." Early voting, "harvested" voting, "absentee" voting was a Tammany wet dream come to life: who doesn't like their chances on Election Day when more than half the votes are already in the bag and you know to an absolute certainty where they went? Add to this the unconstitutional changes to the voting laws rammed through in blue states during the Covid hoax, and the Dems were in the catbird seat long before Nov. 8.

The old joke used to be that the dead vote was critical in Democratic precincts but now this could literally be true, since the votes of dead people could already be in the can, not to mention the candidates themselves, well before election day. This is why, in the final weeks before the vote, the Democrats were exuding (in Mark Twain's famous words) "the serene confidence which a Christian feels in four aces." Polls? We don't need no stinkin' polls! Besides, why have a traditional one-man, one-day election—a binding snapshot in time—when you can have a permanently floating crap game, one in which you're always ahead no matter when it stops?

"Cheating" scream the die-hards on the Right, playing right into the hands of those who fixed the game in the first place. "Stop the steal!" they shout, when the steal is now part of the game. The "2000 Mules" of non-dispositive red-meat fantasy, whose presence is deduced from the arcana of cell-phone triangulation and the laws of probability, may or may not have existed, but the point is: they didn't matter. They were simply the fat ladies and strong men of the sideshows, meant to distract the gullible and easily panicked into ignoring the fact that their pockets have already been picked, their cars stolen and on their way to chop shops in Tijuana, and their home repossessed.

Thus, as I mentioned last week, there's no need for "cheating." Thanks to Tammany Hall's centuries-long perfection of electoral chicanery and the Republicans' willful blindness, the system has become the steal. Typical con men, the Democrats preach the "sanctity" of the vote when what they really lust after is the roundheels of the ballot. There are no virgins in this whorehouse, just the soiled doves of the media who gussy them up for the traveling salesmen and visiting firemen, and then collect their pimp money in the back alley from the bankers and the lawyers who like the system just fine the way it is.

It's a great racket: if you play your cards right, you can deal yourself a whole new hand at the closing bell and walk away with all the chips while you opponent impotently sputters in frustration. And should the marks finally catch on and start adopting some of your tactics, it hardly matters. California has already shown the way to eliminating the two-party system in its state elections via the "jungle primary" system, and just now solidly red Alaska has "elected" a Democrat to fill its lone House seat thanks to an enormity called "ranked-choice" voting. The mouthpiece of the Democrat machine, the New York Times, explains it all for you:

Mary Peltola, whose victory in a special election on Wednesday makes her the first Democrat in nearly half a century to represent Alaska in the House, won the contest for the remainder of Representative Don Young’s term with an upbeat campaign that appealed to Alaskan interests and the electorate’s independent streak.

But Alaska’s new voting system also played a big role in Ms. Peltola’s three-percentage-point victory over former Gov. Sarah Palin, her Republican opponent. Ms. Peltola, who will become the first Alaska Native to serve in Congress and the first woman to hold the House seat, won at least in part because voters had more choices. While more voters initially picked a Republican candidate, that didn’t matter. Given a second choice, many Republican voters opted for a Democrat — Ms. Peltola — over Ms. Palin... When voters have more choices, they’re less likely to vote along strict party lines, reducing polarization and giving independent-minded or more centrist candidates a better shot.

Bet you didn't know that elections will soon no longer be binary; pretty soon we'll have as many "choices" as Facebook has genders. So step right up, suckers and try your luck. Remember, until the country returns to day-and-date elections, between limited hours, in person only, with ironclad identification, there will be no end to this mischief. The Democrats, who boast of being "the oldest voter-based political party in the world," are simply better at it than anybody else. And if nothing meaningful is done, when the GOP loses again in two years, the 2,000 donkeys of the DNC will look at their "friends" at the RNC and say like Henry Gondorff to Doyle Lonnegan: "Tough luck... but that's what you get for playing with your head up your ass!"

Enemies of the People: Donald J. Trump

THE COLUMN: Roll, Tumbrels, Roll

Ten years ago, back in the halcyon days when we simpletons believed the Republicans were at least some of the time an opposition party, and that Willard Mitt Romney was a man of probity and character, I wrote the following in the pages of National Review Online about the election that was about to take place. The piece was entitled "Crush Them."

Conservatives have a rare opportunity tomorrow to do something they signally failed to do in the landslide elections of 1972 and 1984: finish the job. Nixon’s victory was vitiated by Watergate and quickly revenged by Woodward and Bernstein, leading to his replacement in 1974 by Jerry Ford, a man who exactly nobody thought was qualified to be president of the United States, probably including Ford himself. Ford led to Jimmy Carter, whose ineptitude and weakness in turn lead to Ronald Reagan, who swept Carter away in 1980 and then smashed Walter Mondale and the Democrats to powder in 1984. 

And then, having won a famous victory, conservatives went home and left it to the establishment GOP in the form of another man who never should have been president, George H. W. Bush, to fritter away the fruits of ideological victory and be supplanted by Bill Clinton.

In retrospect, of course, William Jefferson Blythe III was Pericles of Athens compared to Barack Obama Joe Biden, who far more than Clinton has revealed the true face of contemporary American left-liberalism in all its coercive ugliness: a blizzard of executive orders; the deployment of the regulatory agencies that have (in the words of the Declaration of Independence) “sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance”; and the naked Marxist appeals to race and class envy. The most anti-American of American presidents has run the most un-American of campaigns.

Change only a couple of words and it's déjà vu all over again: shuffling, senile Joe Biden really is the zombified embodiment of Hussein's third term, staggering, one hopes, toward utter electoral disaster later today as long-suffering Americans finally awake and rise up against the tyranny of les aristocrates who have been torturing us these past two years and more. A la lanterne!

As my regular readers know, I have long described the Democrat Party—not just its lawless and fascistic modern incarnation, but going all the way back to its inception when Aaron Burr, the sitting vice president, a member of the Democratic-Republican Party, notorious traitor, and the founder of Tammany Hall, shot and killed Alexander Hamilton in 1804—as "a criminal organization masquerading as a political party." Indeed, I even wrote a small monograph concerning its violent, seditious history, still available on Kindle.

Now, after two years of Biden, everyone can see just how awful the Democrats really are. Not simply the party of slavery, segregation, secularism, and sedition, but (as they were during the Civil War, which they started) a movement actively hostile to the founding principles of the country that continues to give them shelter and legitimacy. Indeed, they have become the Anti-American Party, advocating unfettered abortion, public criminality, political violence, economic destruction, radical egalitarianism, an obsessive racialism that would make a Nazi blush, open and undefended borders, and the abrogation of the Constitution: a document they've long despised and which they are now actively trying to repeal.

As with the Great Reset (get your copy of Against the Great Reset here), the Democrats under the unholy trio of Biden. Chuck Schumer, and organized-crime-adjacent princess Nancy d'Alesandro Pelosi, together with their ideological flunkies in Congress and statehouses across the land, seized upon the uncertainty surrounding the Chinese-originated virus known as Covid-19 to suspend the first amendment and impose draconian lockdowns based on absolutely nothing but the word of a snake-oil peddling bureaucratic lifer named Anthony Fauci and a gullible president of spectacularly bad personnel judgment, Donald Trump.

No need now to limn the devastation—personal, economic, social, educational—that the Covidiots unleashed upon an unsuspecting public. Already, by April 2020, it was clear to some of us that the Covid panic was not a medical issue but a political weapon; it needed to be dealt with summarily before the evil of the "new normal" Leftist mentality fully took hold. Therefore, in the April 28, 2020 issue of the Epoch Times, I wrote:

From the available data, and the increasing preponderance of the evidence, the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, which is commonly known as the novel coronavirus and causes the disease COVID-19, has turned out to be only slightly more lethal than a normal seasonal flu—but the damage it’s done to our nation’s economy, our Constitution, and our sense of national pride has been incalculable.

Forget the pandemic—it’s time to flatten the panic curve. The fact is, the United States has just gotten a good long look at the ugly face of fascism, brought on by an overreliance on medical professionals with great taste in scarves, preening for the cameras and basking in media adoration, but without an ounce of domestic policy sense.

They’ve been aided and abetted by a hostile, ignorant White House press corps—when all you know is politics, everything looks political—intent on courting a coup against the president and determined to keep alternative viewpoints from the public as long as they can.

In this, they have willing collaborators in Big Tech, which has inflicted its peculiar brand of censorship via YouTube and Facebook to make sure nothing escapes the Washington bubble’s imprimatur regarding what constitutes acceptable public opinion.

This was my advice to president Trump:

That’s where the president comes in. The president can’t, on his own toot, command that the country reopen tomorrow. Under our federalist system, that authority lies with the governors, some of whom, such as Kristi Noem in South Dakota, never closed their states in the first place. (“I took an oath to uphold the United States Constitution,” she said.) But he can lead by example—by relishing his role as the chief executive and defender of the Bill of Rights, and making sure that freedom under the rule of law, not “safety,” remains the primary American value.

If the president wants to win reelection, he’s right to stop jousting with the press corps, and instead to break out Old Glory and announce that this unconstitutional and economy-busting overreaction is over—and will never happen again.

He didn't and that's why he isn't president any more. Had he taken command of the situation, instead of standing there beside the malignant dwarf Fauci and his wicked-witch assistant, Deborah Birx, as if watching his own funeral, Trump might still be president. Instead he allowed the Democrats to stifle dissent, punish objectors, mask children like slaves, force elderly couples to suffer and die apart, restrict travel and destroy whole swaths of the American economy, and then watched himself lose to a bitter, doddering, incontinent non-entity a few months later. And not just lose the presidency, but the Senate (and thus the Congress) as well. 

Trump's gone, but the people who did this to us are not—not yet, anyway. And now these villains have the chutzpah to request amnesty for their sins: 

In April 2020, with nothing else to do, my family took an enormous number of hikes. We all wore cloth masks that I had made myself. We had a family hand signal, which the person in the front would use if someone was approaching on the trail and we needed to put on our masks.  Once, when another child got too close to my then-4-year-old son on a bridge, he yelled at her “SOCIAL DISTANCING!”

These precautions were totally misguided. In April 2020, no one got the coronavirus from passing someone else hiking. Outdoor transmission was vanishingly rare. Our cloth masks made out of old bandanas wouldn’t have done anything, anyway. But the thing is: We didn’t know.

Of course you knew. You all knew. And yet you endorsed the social ostracization of dissenters—"deniers," to use the loaded word hijacked from the Holocaust by people who ought to know better. You fought every rollback. You unleashed shrieking hordes of Walking Dead Karens to accost their neighbors on the streets and in the shops and literally scream at them. You went from zero to World War Z in the blink of an eye. 

"But most errors were made by people who were working in earnest for the good of society," bleats the Atlantic's writer, Emily Oster, an economist at Brown University.

And that might be the biggest lie of them all. Anyone's who dealt with the Left for more than five minutes understands that mendacity is their stock-in-trade, which makes Biden the perfect president for our times. This is a man who, after all, can literally say of coal-fired electricity generating plants, "We're going to be shutting down these plants all across America," and then have his hapless press secretary insist a few hours later that her senescent boss's words were "twisted" and that of course the man who so gleefully shut down the Keystone XL pipeline on his first day in office really loves the fossil fuel industry. Hey, he's from Scranton! Coal country! 

If and when their bald-faced deceptions are found out, the next step is to fall back on their old standby, a plea for "tolerance." But tolerance is a protective coloring, not a virtue; it doesn't mean "compassion" (although that's not a virtue either), it means the process by which the breaking point of anything is ascertained. You reach full tolerance when the wing busts off your airplane and you're sent screaming to your death. You never want to go full "tolerance," because if you do you will die. Oster again:

The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat. Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn’t accord with the facts. All of this gloating and defensiveness continues to gobble up a lot of social energy and to drive the culture wars, especially on the internet. These discussions are heated, unpleasant and, ultimately, unproductive. 

We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty... Moving on is crucial now, because the pandemic created many problems that we still need to solve... The standard saying is that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. But dwelling on the mistakes of history can lead to a repetitive doom loop as well. Let’s acknowledge that we made complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty, and then try to work together to build back and move forward.

No, let's not. Instead, let's vote as many of you out of office today as possible. Let's round up and fire en masse the malicious thugs and petty party functionaries and time-serving rent-seekers and the cabal of Ivy League-educated media punks and poetasters who view themselves as part of the Democrat machine and daily proclaim their fealty to the Party. Let's publicly call out the neo- and cultural-Marxists who adhere to the Brezhnev Doctrine and will never willingly take one step back in their pursuit of "social justice." For them, every Democrat executive order is Order 227, for which they are supposed to fight to the end.

So let's make them do it. Give them what they want. No surrender, no quarter, no mercy. Fire them, strip them of their pensions, blacklist them. Kick them off Twitter and hound them on Facebook, as they have done unto us. Banish them from the town square. Inscribe their names on the Wall of Shame. RICO them and their infernal political cells. Go full Kurtz on them, literarily speaking. Hell, make sure they never eat lunch in this town again. Remember: they never stop, they never sleep, they never quit.

I concluded my NRO piece thus:

It’s not enough for the GOP to win tomorrow. It needs to win big, a win so convincing that even the Left won’t be able to explain it away. The definition of victory in war is not a 50.1 percent majority that allows the other side to keep fighting — it’s the battleship Missouri, on whose deck the losing side signs articles of capitulation. The modern Left — the unholy spawn of ’30s gangland and ’60s academic Marxism — must be forced to its knees in surrender.

There’s a honored place in our political system for a leftist party, one that pushes for improvement in areas that need improving, but not one devoted to revolutionary “fundamental change.” A vote for Romney tomorrow is a vote against the socialist elements that seized control of the JFK/Scoop Jackson Democratic party in 1972, and has worked against America’s best interests ever since. A vote for Romney tomorrow is a vote for a restoration of the old Jacksonian — Andrew, that is — Democratic party, a true populist party shorn of its Communist accretions that is every bit as all-American as the other guys. Unless and until this happens, though, the modern donkeys will continue their war on the Constitution, convinced they are on the side of the angels, and taking solace in the late Ted Kennedy’s words, “the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”

It’s up to the electorate tomorrow to show them that the dream is really a nightmare, from which it’s time to awake, that the cause of America always endures, and the work of restoring our founding principles begins anew today. 

Maybe I'll be right this time. It's up to you; it's up to all of us. Finish the job.

Enemies of the People: Javanka

Do MAGA Republicans Cause Street Crime?

If you were to judge the state of affairs in today’s America based solely on President Biden’s assessment, you might assume the greatest threat to your personal safety is that posed by all those “MAGA Republicans” he so logorrheically denounced in his speech to the nation from Philadelphia last week. “MAGA Republicans,” he said, “do not respect the Constitution. They do not believe in the rule of law. They do not recognize the will of the people.”

Such a curious speech it was, with the words inspired by Vladimir Lenin and the cinematography by Leni Riefenstahl. The president mentioned MAGA Republicans 13 times before he finished, with the references growing more and more ominous as he proceeded. “MAGA Republicans,” he darkly intoned, “look at America and see carnage and darkness and despair. They spread fear and lies – lies told for profit and power.”

And the viewer was left to think: “Sinister bunch, those MAGA people. I must secure the doors and windows and be on the lookout for them.”

But if you were to go out on the streets of America today in search of actual acts of violence committed by this group, which the president came just short of labeling as Enemies of the People, would you find any? And when you did encounter genuine carnage and despair, when you witnessed actual affronts to the rule of law, which in most cities wouldn’t take long at all, do you think you could attribute any of it to MAGA Republicans?

Of course not.

If your senses can bear it, take a few minutes to peruse the Twitter feed from Street People of Los Angeles, one of several feeds where you can find videos, photos, and news stories illustrating the lawless, dystopian depths to which large swaths of Southern California have descended. As you watch the videos, ask yourself how many of the people shown committing the various acts of depravity are MAGA Republicans, and how many would be more inclined to vote for Democrats?

Look closely at the hundreds of videos you can find on the internet of the recent phenomenon of street takeovers in Los Angeles, where crowds converge on major intersections and commandeer them into use as temporary raceways, occasionally leaving behind a looted convenience store and even a dead body or two when they move on. Do you see any clothing or bumper stickers betokening allegiance to the MAGA movement?

And of course it’s not just Los Angeles. Street takeovers, or “sideshows,” have become common elsewhere, Chicago, for instance, where responding police officers routinely come under attack from the mobs. Do you see any MAGA hats or T-shirts on any of the people shown committing these crimes, or do you think they’re more likely to vote for the party that’s run that city since the Earth cooled?

President Biden of course reminded us of the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, as we are incessantly reminded of it by his many servants in the elite media. We should brook no excuses for anyone’s criminal behavior that day, but neither should we overlook the wide variance in what that behavior was. It is true, as the president said, that some Jan. 6 protesters “brutally attack[ed] law enforcement,” but it is also true that the great majority of them are guilty of nothing more than trespassing, or even "parading," a crime most often punished by a modest fine. Let all the Jan. 6 protesters have their day in court without delay and let each be judged according to his own misdeeds, but to claim that even the most committed of them represented a clear and present danger to the republic, as the president did on Thursday, is beyond absurd.

And when discussing the menace posed by MAGA Republicans, it bears reminding that of those whose deaths have been attributed to the Jan. 6 riot, the only verified victim of deliberate homicide was Ashli Babbitt, an unarmed woman who, for no legal justification I am able to discern, was shot and killed by a U.S. Capitol Police lieutenant. Unlike any number of people killed by the police in recent years, Babbitt’s death aroused little curiosity in the press, whose members yawned when federal authorities declared the killing justified in a memo that was insulting in its cursory brevity.

There can be no gainsaying the perception that the law itself and the fervor with which it is enforced are sometimes calibrated so as to align with the interests of those in power. We have reached the point where Washington, D.C., and all its corridors of power are regarded among the opinion makers of the news media, the entertainment industry, and academia as the rightful province of Democrats, and that any time Republicans gain control of them it is regarded among those same opinion makers as a usurpation to be corrected by whatever means necessary, to include the mobilization of the FBI in the cause.

How else to explain President Biden’s fixation on the supposed dangers posed by MAGA Republicans while ignoring the very real mayhem committed by leftists? Was the effort to identify and arrest every last Jan. 6 protester commensurate with that directed at those who rioted at Donald Trump’s Jan. 2017 inauguration, and those who for an appalling 100 straight nights laid siege to the federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon? Was there a similar effort expended to bring to justice those who rampaged in cities across America following the 2020 death of George Floyd, even those who committed murder in his name?

Though ignored in President Biden’s speech and absent from any of his policy prescriptions, there is a very real violent crime problem in America today. We are lately told to be comforted by the fact that murder in the U.S. has declined from last year, but less comforting is the knowledge that this slight downward trend follows the massive increase that began in the summer of 2020—the Summer of George Floyd.

Neither the president nor his trusted stenographers in the media will dare talk about who is responsible for this bloodshed, but be assured it isn’t MAGA Republicans.

THE COLUMN: From Hell's Heart

After Joe Biden's disgraceful speech last week —the worst and most deliberately provocative bully pulpit address in American history—many people have finally woken up to the very real threat threat of Leftist fascism (historically, there is no other kind) and its burning desire for civil war, and have begun asking themselves: what if this idiot is serious?

That Biden is, in fact, an idiot, is beyond dispute. For more than half a century this thoroughly nasty piece of work has been bullying, blustering, bragging, plagiarizing, insulting, sliming, and attacking his political enemies—who now apparently include anyone who opposes him and his criminal Anti-American Party—without any fear of reprisals whatsoever. Since he spent most of that time in Congress, profiting handsomely at the public teat, attacking Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas, he was immune from consequences thanks to the Speech and Debate clause in the Constitution: the same Constitution he now openly despises and seeks to supplant.

The Senators and Representatives shall receive a Compensation for their Services, to be ascertained by Law, and paid out of the Treasury of the United States. They shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.

Bidding fair to claim the title of Second-Worst Irish-American politician in American History, and closing fast on the current titleholder, Ted Kennedy [the noxious "Robert Bork's America" speech begin at 25:38 and is well worth a watch], Biden vilified his predecessor, his supporters, and by extension every American who voted for the Republican candidate during the contentious and hotly contested 2020 election. You can see the hatred and the anger on his face as he "calls for unity":

The fact is, Biden is Fredo Corleone without the wit, charm, or brains: "I can handle things. I'm smart. It's not like everybody says, I'm dumb. I'm smart and I want respect." He is Ubu Rex without the self-restraint, a Roman emperor who judging from the two Marines outrageously stationed behind him actually trusts his Praetorian Guard. Like another National Socialist who instantly comes to mind, he's forever mad at the world for not recognizing his talent and his genius and will show us who's boss or die trying.

Too much of what’s happening in our country today is not normal. Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic. Now, I want to be very clear — (applause) — very clear up front: Not every Republican, not even the majority of Republicans, are MAGA Republicans.  Not every Republican embraces their extreme ideology. I know because I’ve been able to work with these mainstream Republicans.
 
But there is no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven, and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans, and that is a threat to this country. These are hard things. But I’m an American President — not the President of red America or blue America, but of all America. And I believe it is my duty — my duty to level with you, to tell the truth no matter how difficult, no matter how painful. And here, in my view, is what is true:

MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution.  They do not believe in the rule of law.  They do not recognize the will of the people. They refuse to accept the results of a free election.  And they’re working right now, as I speak, in state after state to give power to decide elections in America to partisans and cronies, empowering election deniers to undermine democracy itself. MAGA forces are determined to take this country backwards — backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love.

Caligula and the Praetorians in 41 AD: oops.

All of these "rights," of course, are not rights but policy prescriptions of the Left. There is no enumerated, nor implied, "right" in the Constitution to "choose" to murder your unborn children, to contraception, to "marry who[m] you love." "Privacy," unenumerated, is something we would all like to have, but given the initial privacy violation of the 16th amendment, which has made the lives and ledgers of every citizen open to the inquiries of the state, and to which the presumption of innocence does not apply, it's a little late for a "progressive" Democrat to be bitching about loss of privacy. More of what in decent Irish neighborhoods used to be called fighting words:

They promote authoritarian leaders, and they fan the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country. They look at the mob that stormed the United States Capitol on January 6th — brutally attacking law enforcement — not as insurrectionists who placed a dagger to the throat of our democracy, but they look at them as patriots. And they see their MAGA failure to stop a peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 election as preparation for the 2022 and 2024 elections. They tried everything last time to nullify the votes of 81 million people.  This time, they’re determined to succeed in thwarting the will of the people.

Make no mistake: despite Biden's walk-back the next day—for members of Congress, words have no lasting meaning— this was an evil speech and tantamount to a declaration of war on both conservatives and a Republican Party that, however poorly, represents them. It should have been immediately been greeted with articles of impeachment by the hapless, cowardly, and contemptible GOP, but of course it wasn't. Biden and Left have backed the Chicken Party into a corner, from which they cannot fight back without giving MSM credence to the charges he just laid against them. Grandpa Joe (more like your Wicked Uncle Ernie from Tommy), a veteran of nearly half a century of "reaching across the aisle" in order to pick the country's pockets, may be dumb but he's not stupid. He knows his enemies and their foolish desire to be loved by the press, and knows that they won't dare stop him as he fiddles about.

Despite his manifest unworthiness for the highest office in the land, Joe Biden is in a way the perfect president for our times. Since Reagan, and with the partial exception of Donald Trump, we have had a parade of base, weak, conniving, corrupt, and otherwise unsuitable presidents, so why should he be any different? In latter-day America, only scions and plutocrats need apply: starting with the CIA's very own commander-in-chief, George H.W. Bush, we've had William Jefferson Blythe III, George W. Bush (aka Junior), Barack Hussein Obama II, Donald J. Trump, and now Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. And if the president's staff of Drs. Feelgood can keep him ambulatory and relatively sentient and publicly continent until January 2025, there's a very good chance he'll be POTUS again, especially if he runs against his fellow obsessive geriatric, Trump.

Die, MAGA, die!

Like Captain Ahab in Melville's masterpiece, Moby-Dick, JB, Jr., has finally harpooned his nemesis, the American government, determined at last to make the magnificent monster pay for laughing at him all these years. 

But the Whale is bigger than Biden, and swims in a school far beyond his understanding or ken. On Thursday night, Robinette's concluding words were:

And I have no doubt — none –– that this is who we will be and that we’ll come together as a nation.  That we’ll secure our democracy.  That for the next 200 years, we’ll have what we had the past 200 years: the greatest nation on the face of the Earth. We just need to remember who we are.  We are the United States of America.  The United States of America.  (Applause.) And may God protect our nation.  And may God protect all those who stand watch over our democracy.  God bless you all.  (Applause.)  Democracy.  Thank you.  (Applause.)

What they should have been were: "From Hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee." Ahab's last words, just before the White Whale drags him down to Davy Jones' Locker. Talk about a call for unity: the (applause) on both sides of the aisle, from both satanic Left and patriotic Right, would have been thunderous.

THE COLUMN: 'Alea Iacta Est'

In early 49 B.C., fresh from his conquest of Gaul, Julius Caesar and his Thirteenth Legion approached a small river that separated the Roman province of Cisalpine Gaul from the Roman Republic's heartland. This stream, called the Rubicon, marked the political boundary of Rome's military might: no Roman general could bring men under arms into Italy. But Caesar, politically ambitious, was under threat. His eight-year campaign in Gaul had been deemed illegal by many in the Senate and there were calls for his head.

Further, one of his fellow members of the First Triumvirate, Crassus, had  been killed in a foolish, vanity fueled misadventure against the Parthians at Carrhae in 53 B.C., while Caesar's alliance with his  other triumvir, Pompey, had been shattered irreparably when his daughter Julia, Pompey's wife, had died in childbirth the year before. Although he was a hero to the people of Rome, Caesar knew his enemies in the Senate, led by Cicero, were plotting his downfall. What to do?

The only solution was to march on Rome and fight for power. Alea iacta est, he was supposed to have said as he led his troops across the muddy stream: "the die is cast." Thus began the civil war that destroyed the Republic and led to Caesar's own assassination in 44 B.C., paving the way for the rise of his grand-nephew, Octavius, to become Augustus, Rome's first emperor (he called himself, modestly, Princeps, or First Citizen), and thus establish the Roman Empire. Ever since, to "cross the Rubicon" has come to mean taking an irrevocable step, a daring gamble either to win or lose with the highest stakes depending on one throw of the dice.

Show me the man and I'll show you the crime.

With the raid on former president Donald Trump's private residence at Mar-a-Lago in Florida last week, that's exactly what the Democrats have done.

The Democrats, a criminal organization masquerading as a political party, love to boast about their "firsts," and they are indeed impressive. Aaron Burr, effectively the party's first vice president, rose to political prominence via his control of Tammany Hall, the gold standard of American political corruption. He shot and killed Alexander Hamilton, one of the Founding Fathers, and was later involved in a trial for treason, but of course skated, as Democrats are wont to do under our system of "justice."

A mere half a century later, Democrats had become the full-throated party of slavery. After their loss in the presidential election of 1860 to the new Republican Party under Abraham Lincoln, they reacted with typical class by declaring Lincoln an illegitimate president, seceding from the Union, and firing the first shots of the American Civil War at Fort Sumter in 1861. In the 1864 election campaign, in which the Confederate states did not take part, the remaining "peace" or "Copperhead"  Democrats ran one of Lincoln's own, failed generals (George McClellan) against him. And when that failed, they assassinated Lincoln a week after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox. 

That's quite a record, and yet today's Democrats seem hell-bound to top it. Under the demented, corrupt hulk of non compos mentis called Joe Biden, they've destroyed the booming Trump economy, humiliated their own country with the summary abandonment of the Afghanistan war, turned loose the nation's criminals on a legally defenseless population, let loose the dogs of debt, inflation and commodity scarcity, blown up the supply chain, solidified the power of the Praetorian Deep State, weaponized the intelligence community and the FBI in the service of the Party, terrified the gullible via their reprehensible Covid scare tactics, crippled the domestic energy industry, injected the poison of Critical Theory into the national bloodstream, and castrated much of the Bill of Rights, including the first, second, fourth, fifth, ninth, and tenth amendments. As soon as they can figure out a way to quarter soldiers in your homes and apartments, you can bet they will.

For "our democracy," by any means necessary.

Now in the vengeful attorney general Merrick Garland—whose nomination to the Supreme Court by Barack Obama luckily died in the Senate in 2017 with the arrival of the Trump administration— we have the second coming of Lavrentiy Beria, the head of the secret police under Josef Stalin in the country Democrats long most admired, Soviet Russia. (They've since transferred their affections to Communist China.) Never before in the history of our Republic—a phrase conservatives ought to be using as a counterweight to the Democrats' deceitful "our democracy"—has the nation's chief legal officer ordered an armed raid on a former president, in this case on Biden's immediate predecessor and the leading contender for the GOP nomination in 2024. 

It's step of breathtaking audacity, but hardly surprising. Not for nothing is the Democrats' unofficial motto "by any means necessary." Since the days of Burr and Jefferson Davis and John Wilkes Booth, violence has always lurked just below the surface of their "higher" patriotism. Indeed, as the Sixties exemplified, it's part of their appeal. "The worst are full of passionate intensity," wrote William Butler Years in his widely quoted poem, The Second Coming, written in 1919. "Surely, the Second Coming is at hand."

A century on, it's still an apt image. The contemporary America Left, a strange hybrid of Protestant evangelism and Marxist atheist millenarianism, is fueled by the red-diaper-babyism that is the Frankfurt School's primary contribution to the realm of American arts, letters, philosophy, and mores. They're getting old now (Biden is 79, Garland is 69), and time is running out. Eternally marching under the banner of "progress" to a Promised Land that doesn't exist and will never arrive, the Left is in the midst of a long-planned (see Marcuse, Herbert, et al.) and daringly executed assault on the foundations of the United States, which latterly includes even a frontal attack on the Constitution itself. They were perfectly happy to enjoy the protections of that document when they needed them, but now that they don't, the hell with it. 

The key to understand the Left, pretty much from Rousseau on, is that they believe in an "arc of history," which amazingly bends toward their preferred transient policy prescriptions in the here and now. It's a kind of misplaced messianism, with an imminent savior ready to descend to earth to establish a new kingdom of heaven, one in which they will witness the destruction of their enemies, and over which they will rule for ever and ever, amen. "The country is on fire," Trump reportedly wrote to Garland in a message sent after the raid. "What can I do to reduce the heat?"

Agog at Gog and Magog.

The answer, of course, is: nothing. Their belief in the righteousness of their destructive cause is practically biblical, as is their hatred for the Gog and Magog of this story, Donald Trump, his benighted supporters, and his MAGA country, who stand in the way of Progress and therefore must be liquidated. Trump's surprise election in 2016 caught them with their pants comfortably down around their ankles, Clinton-style, but they instantly mounted a counter-counter-revolution via the "Russian collusion" hoax, the Ukrainian impeachment fracas, and their nimble corruption of the January 6 protests in the aftermath of the "fortified" Biden election. And yet they know their fingernail-hold on power can all disappear this fall, and the specter of an enraged Trumpzilla returning to stomp them into matchsticks in 2024 absolutely terrifies them. As it should.

Like Caesar, they're playing for keeps now. Either they complete their overthrow of the Republic or, in Ben Franklin's memorable phrase, they'll all hang together. The die is cast: "by any means necessary"? You ain't seen nothing yet.