A black policeman shot an unarmed white woman dead on January 6 inside the Capitol in Washington, D.C.

The white woman’s name was Ashli Babbitt.

The anti-white white-dominated Oligarchy refuses to reveal the name of the policeman.

Angelo Codevilla writes at American Greatness:

By precluding criminal proceedings against the unnamed officer who killed Ashli Babbitt as she tried to climb through a window into the House speakers’ lobby on January 6, the U.S. government meant to shield itself from embarrassment. Instead, its indefensible manipulation of the justice system further confirms the patent dishonesty of the narrative by which it tries to frighten potential critics.

The Babbitt family’s $10 million lawsuit against the Capitol police and the officer who killed Ashli will force the government to defend an obviously indefensible act, and the even more indefensible attempted coverup thereof. Unless Babbitt’s attorneys and Republican elected officials prove to be extraordinarily stupid, the lawsuit will discredit the pseudo-security narrative our oligarchs are using to rule us.

The hard facts are not in dispute. On January 6, Ashli Babbitt, a 35-year-old woman weighing around 110 pounds and carrying no weapon of any kind, tried to fit through a broken window. As she struggled to get through, an armed male officer, who was presumably much bigger and stronger, shot her in the neck and killed her.

The allegations surrounding those facts are irrelevant. It seems to be common knowledge that the officer who shot and killed her is black. That may embarrass some. But race is legally and morally irrelevant. And while it is certain that Babbitt meant to demonstrate her lack of faith in the 2020 election’s management, that, too, is irrelevant to the fact that she was killed while posing no physical threat to anyone or anything.

What did the government do with the fact that one of its big, strong, armed agents had killed a small, weak, unarmed woman who was not harming anyone? The statement by which the Justice Department sought to close the case reads: “The investigation revealed no evidence to establish that, at the time the officer fired a single shot at Ms. Babbitt, the officer did not reasonably believe that it was necessary to do so in self-defense or in defense of the Members of Congress and others evacuating the House Chamber.” This assertion of justifiable homicide consists of trying to overwhelm the obvious lack of “reasonableness” by compounding two absences of evidence. Because there is nothing this stratagem would not justify, it does not work. No jury will buy that.

The government’s defense in the Babbitt case cannot survive “discovery” and a jury trial.

Right off, the trial would leave no doubt about the wrongfulness of the officer’s decision to shoot Babbitt. Odds are the government will offer a generous settlement in exchange for silence.

But as the government’s defense in the Babbitt case collapses, the regime-relevant question becomes inevitable. It is not whether Americans are subject to a multi-tier justice system. That has been undeniable for years.

Rather, the question is nothing less than what the government and its associates in society are doing by pretending Babbitt and others posed a danger to what they call “our democracy”?  How? What democracy? What regime? What cause is served by the transparent lies about hundreds of people whose actual offenses, if any, amount to trespassing, but who are being held and maligned as if they are worse than murderers?

This is a political question, properly to be pursued by politicians who purport to represent the millions of Americans whose opposition the current administration and its allies are trying to suppress.

The answer to this question proceeds from separating the “narrative”—i.e. the set of lies—that the regime has purveyed about what happened on January 6 from reality. From what did happen and did not happen.

That separation itself must begin by noting the narrative’s purveyors. The cast, it turns out, is identical with the list of those inside government (intelligence agencies, the Justice Department, assorted bureaucrats) as well as in what used to be called the “private sector” (media outlets, corporations, etc.) who acted jointly between 2015 and 2020 to forestall an electoral challenge to their growing power over our republic. This was an operation by a set of oligarchs to excise permanently the opposition to their consolidation of power over that of American voters. The narrative—repeat, the set of lies—about January 6 means to cap off the earlier one.

The substance of the January 6 narrative, as well as the manner of its purveyance, parallels that of 2015-2020, namely: America’s loser class—ignorant clingers, racists, neanderthals, etc.—aroused by demagogy, threatened the integrity of “our democratic institutions”.  Of “democracy” as in “voting”? No. Instead, they threatened the authority of precisely the bureaucrats, corporations, media, academics, et al., who run America’s institutions. Pretensions about voter sovereignty by these alleged dregs of society, their demands to use procedures to assert their role, was an attack on what oligarchs call “our democracy”, to be punished as a regime crime.

And that punishment is to be part of the warning to whomever might sympathize with them that failure to support earnestly what is now effectively an oligarchic regime will ruin them personally.

The Babbitt family’s lawsuit opens the underlying question about the truth of the narrative by which an oligarchic regime has largely substituted its sovereignty for that of the voters. That narrative’s forceful falsehood enables, among other things, one of the oligarchy’s components, Facebook, to decide in its own sovereign court whom it will and will not allow to communicate to a general audience about who did what to whom on January 6.

If ever there was a frontal attack on the Constitution, of which the First Amendment’s safeguards of freedom of speech and of the press provide the bedrock, this is it. Any politician who claims to represent the republic’s remnants must begin by calling out the official narrative’s fraudulence for what it is: the oligarchy’s attack on our democracy.

Our Nation is in deep peril. We are in a fight for our survival as a Constitutional Republic like no other time since our founding in 1776. The conflict is between supporters of Socialism and Marxism vs. supporters of Constitutional freedom and liberty.

During the 2020 election an “Open Letter from Senior Military Leaders” was signed by 317 retired Generals and Admirals and, it said the 2020 election could be the most important election since our country was founded. “With the Democrat Party welcoming Socialists and Marxists, our historic way of life is at stake.” Unfortunately, that statement’s truth was quickly revealed, beginning with the election process itself.

Without fair and honest elections that accurately reflect the “will of the people” our Constitutional Republic is lost. Election integrity demands insuring there is one legal vote cast and counted per citizen. Legal votes are identified by State Legislature’s approved controls using government IDs, verified signatures, etc. Today, many are calling such commonsense controls “racist” in an attempt to avoid having fair and honest elections. Using racial terms to suppress proof of eligibility is itself a tyrannical intimidation tactic. Additionally, the “Rule of Law” must be enforced in our election processes to ensure integrity. The FBI and Supreme Court must act swiftly when election irregularities are surfaced and not ignore them as was done in 2020. Finally, H.R.1 & S.1, (if passed), would destroy election fairness and allow Democrats to forever remain in power violating our Constitution and ending our Representative Republic.

Aside from the election, the Current Administration has launched a full-blown assault on our Constitutional rights in a dictatorial manner, bypassing the Congress, with more than 50 Executive Orders quickly signed, many reversing the previous Administration’s effective policies and regulations. Moreover, population control actions such as excessive lockdowns, school and business closures, and most alarming, censorship of written and verbal expression are all direct assaults on our fundamental Rights. We must support and hold accountable politicians who will act to counter Socialism, Marxism and Progressivism, support our Constitutional Republic, and insist on fiscally responsible governing while focusing on all Americans, especially the middle class, not special interest or extremist groups which are used to divide us into warring factions.

Additional National Security Issues and Actions:

• • Open borders jeopardize national security by increasing human trafficking, drug cartels, terrorists entry, health/CV19 dangers, and humanitarian crises. Illegals are flooding our Country bringing high economic costs, crime, lowering wages, and illegal voting in some states. We must reestablish border controls and continue building the wall while supporting our dedicated border control personnel. Sovereign nations must have controlled borders.
  • China is the greatest external threat to America. Establishing cooperative relations with the Chinese Communist Party emboldens them to continue progress toward world domination, militarily, economically, politically and technologically. We must impose more sanctions and restrictions to impede their world domination goal and protect America’s interests.
  • The free flow of information is critical to the security of our Republic, as illustrated by freedom of speech and the press being in the 1st Amendment of our Constitution. Censoring speech and expression, distorting speech, spreading disinformation by government officials, private entities, and the media is a method to suppress the free flow of information, a tyrannical technique used in closed societies. We must counter this on all fronts beginning with removing Section 230 protection from big tech.
  • Re-engaging in the flawed Iran Nuclear Deal would result in Iran acquiring nuclear weapons along with the means to deliver them, thereby upsetting Mideast peace initiatives and aiding a terrorist nation whose slogans and goals include “death to America” and “death to Israel”. We must resist the new China/Iran agreement and not support the Iran Nuclear Deal. In addition, continue with the Mideast peace initiatives, the “Abraham Accords,” and support for Israel.
  • Stopping the Keystone Pipeline eliminates our recently established energy independence and causes us to be energy dependent on nations not friendly to us, while eliminating valuable US jobs. We must open the Keystone Pipeline and regain our energy independence for national security and economic reasons.
  • Using the U.S. military as political pawns with thousands of troops deployed around the U.S. Capitol Building, patrolling fences guarding against a non-existent threat, along with forcing Politically Correct policies like the divisive critical race theory into the military at the expense of the War Fighting Mission, seriously degrades readiness to fight and win our Nation’s wars, creating a major national security issue. We must support our Military and Vets; focus on war fighting, eliminate the corrosive infusion of Political Correctness into our military which damages morale and war fighting cohesion.
  • The “Rule of Law” is fundamental to our Republic and security. Anarchy as seen in certain cities cannot be tolerated. We must support our law enforcement personnel and insist that DAs, our courts, and the DOJ enforce the law equally, fairly, and consistently toward all.
  • The mental and physical condition of the Commander in Chief cannot be ignored. He must be able to quickly make accurate national security decisions involving life and limb anywhere, day or night. Recent Democrat leadership’s inquiries about nuclear code procedures sends a dangerous national security signal to nuclear armed adversaries, raising the question about who is in charge. We must always have an unquestionable chain of command.

Under a Democrat Congress and the Current Administration, our Country has taken a hard left turn toward Socialism and a Marxist form of tyrannical government which must be countered now by electing congressional and presidential candidates who will always act to defend our Constitutional Republic. The survival of our Nation and its cherished freedoms, liberty, and historic values are at stake.

We urge all citizens to get involved now at the local, state and/or national level to elect political representatives who will act to Save America, our Constitutional Republic, and hold those currently in office accountable. The “will of the people” must be heard and followed.

Signed by 87 retired generals and 37 retired admirals of the United States armed forces

Open Letter Flag Officers | Censorship | Elections Open Letter Flag Officers – Free download as PDF File (.pdf), Text File (.txt) or read online for free. More than 120 retired flag officers are calling on Americans to rally and reject the nation’s excessive embrace of a radical progressive agenda, particularly the “antiracism” efforts the left weaponizes to suppress dissent. www.scribd.com

Wokeism is fast becoming the American state religion.

Ben Weingarten identifies it as such, writing – surprisingly – at (woke) Newsweek:

Should it overtake our government, in making identity politics paramount it will unmake any semblance of a unifying American identity.

In so doing, it will serve as the ultimate tool of cynical, radically leftist power-grabbers, who will be dividing and conquering under the guise of a fraudulent virtue, justice and morality.

It is the religion of the party that is now in power. The government is woke. It is making identity politics paramount.

The Woke’s core views have been bubbling up from elite classrooms to the commanding heights of society for decades.

What is different is that now such views have been legitimated by the authorities and mainstreamed in our culture. If you dare to challenge them, you are liable to end up excommunicated from American life—canceled. After all, dissenting from the Woke orthodoxy makes you a racist.

Consider some of the signs that indicate the fast-accelerating ascent of Wokeism.

In New York City, at the same time Mayor Bill de Blasio was preventing Jews and Christians from freely exercising their religions—including peaceably assembling—he permitted adherents of Wokeism to assemble en masse in protesting, rioting and looting with impunity. The Woke enjoyed First Amendment rights foreclosed to the [other] faithful.

Mayor de Blasio, Governor Andrew Cuomo and the relevant health authorities had argued the coronavirus-driven draconian shutdown of New York City, and the rest of the state, was necessary to save lives. If so, by permitting the Woke to flood the streets, were not New York officials conceding that public health was not really the number one priority? Were they not suggesting that they were willing to let people get sick and die because the right to practice Wokeism was absolute, sacrosanct and preeminent—this, incidentally, after instructing citizens to take to the streets in celebration of the Chinese Lunar New Year in February, coronavirus be damned, in context of a broader campaign against purported coronavirus-related anti-Chinese discrimination? Were they not affirming that Wokeism mattered more than the lives of the Woke—and everyone else?

Certainly, this view would seem to have been reinforced, as, in the face of the Woke, New York reduced police funding, and policing itself, which coincided with a dramatic rise in violent crime.

In St. Louis, menacing protesters by the dozens were able to threaten a couple, the McCloskeys, at their home, without consequence. The police did not rush to the McCloskeys’ aid. In fact, after the husband and wife were recorded brandishing firearms to deter those descending on their home, authorities left them not only defenseless, but threatened to disarm them and throw them in jail.

Did it not appear again as if privileging the Woke was now the highest responsibility of government, over and above protecting our natural rights, including those to life, liberty and property—all of which the Woke threatened?

The religion of Wokeism is the most extreme racist ideology since segregation.

While the “summer of love” may be over in Seattle, with CHOP/CHAZ—the ultimate symbol of government acquiescence to Wokeism—no more, its ideals persist. Seattle recently held a training session for white municipal employees—to be clear, a government training session for those of a specific race—called “Interrupted Internalized Racial Superiority and Whiteness.” Meanwhile, Washington’s state phase-in plan for public schools calls for giving priority to “students furthest from educational justice first,” specifically including “students of color”—that is, on the basis of race.

Tal Bachmann deplores it at Steynonline:

Wokism is now the official state religion of the United States of America.

By constitutional standards, this means something has gone wrong. The United States isn’t supposed to have a state religion. The First Amendment specifically prohibits the establishment of a state religion. Yet it now has one, and its name is Wokism.

Wokism is now celebrated or taught as Absolute Truth in every elementary school class, every middle and high school class, every university class, every corporate training session, every Capitol Hill political chamber, every Hollywood movie or cable show, every civic ceremony, every law, every political speech, every novel, every awards show, every sports league, every everything.

Government, its corporate allies, and cultural institutions all fund Wokism. They, along with their street troops, all demand Wokist belief and perfect compliance with Wokist commandments and rituals. They all punish those who question Wokist orthodoxy, often by completely ruining their lives. They fire dissenters, ban them from social media forever, initiate global social media pile-ons, and even threaten to kill them. Sometimes our officially Wokist government sends in goon squads to scare, or even arrest, those who dare criticize Wokism.

Wokism, the writer rightly says, is a “bellicose, uncompromising, ruthless, unself-critical, totalitarian movement“.

Does that remind you of anything else? If you say Islam, you win. The fact is that Wokism is now well on its way to becoming to American government and society what Islam is to Iranian government and society.

That this has happened means—can only mean—that something has gone terribly wrong in America (and the rest of the West). America’s original plan was to avoid funding and pushing any particular religious ideology or practice. It was to have full religious freedom. It was to keep government limited to solely protecting a few basic liberties. It was for Americans and their government to live and let live.

But things have changed. Why?

Maybe luxury spoiled us and made us fat and lazy and stupid. Maybe the Frankfurt School communists really did inject a lethal dose of philosophical poison into American thought. Maybe misguided government policies, and socially corrosive movements like sexual libertinism or feminism, really did start the implosion of the family unit.

Somehow or other, we’ve wound up in a total mess. And somehow or other, we need to find a way out of it. This is no way to live. I know I’m not the only one who doesn’t want to live in a society run by frothing ideologues who have declared war on human biology, logic, and mathematics; on unborn children, confused adolescents, and the traditional familial arrangements which raise them; on Shakespeare and Homer; on fairness and decency; on reality itself—on survival itself. These people are all manic, obsessive-compulsive nation-destroyers, community-destroyers, culture-destroyers, family-destroyers, individual-destroyers, love-destroyers, beauty-destroyers, everything-destroyers.

Victor Davis Hanson writes at American Greatness:

If wokeness should continue and “win”, by now we all know where it will end up.

The woke Left seeks a top-down erasure of America.

The public is now increasingly bombarded by 360-degree, 24/7 wokeness in the fashion of the Maoist Red Guard gangs. There appears little refuge from it. Not in television commercials. Not from CEOs. Not from professional sports. Not from movies or television shows. Not from Wall Street, the internet, and social media. Not from the administrative state, and not from the military. Not from the K-12 teachers, much less the professors.

It is largely the well-off professionals, the “privileged” and the rich—CEOs, news anchors, actors, star athletes, college presidents, foundation heads, corporate board retired military brass, Wall Street grandees—who usually do the woke remonstrating (or fund it) to the supposedly non-privileged but guilty un-woke.

The most law-abiding of Americans now seem terrified of the law—the FBI of James Comey vintage, John Brennan’s legacy at the CIA, the same old IRS of Lois Lerner, the Justice Department once branded by Eric Holder, and the predictable court order of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Enlisted men fear their inquisitional officers.

Conservatives especially fear that the once-revered FBI can become analogous to the Stasi, the once indomitable CIA after 2015 began emulating the KGB, and the federal prosecutor has become a vindictive Inspector Javert. And just when you think they are crazier for such fears, another couple is rousted out of bed by agents for supposedly being at a riot they were not at.

The current madness is the stuff of history as we watch it predictably unfold. 

Roger L. Simon writes at the Epoch Times:

An iron-fisted, ideologically extreme minority has our country under its thumb—play along or face excommunication. This is stronger than anything in our history and almost identical to what we see and have seen in totalitarian countries.

All key aspects, most parts of them anyway, of our society “get it” … the media, the corporations, the government bureaucracy, the Democratic Party, the Department of Justice, the FBI, the military (yikes!), entertainment, the university system, the K-through-12 system, the medical community, the scientific community (incredibly), the religious, and on and on.

All, to one extent or another, believe in “woke” except—the people.

What the extremist ideology of “woke” actually provokes is talk of—and not just talk—secession and even civil war.

Few of us have heard anything like that in our lifetimes. But now it’s real. We have been driven apart as never before. We have been awakened indeed.

Anything can happen and some of us, who would never have considered anything like secession and civil war, suddenly do—highly disturbing to us as those thoughts may be.

How long will it be before “considering” comes to decision and “some of us”  – ideally most of us – act?

What is the Republican Party FOR?

Where are its protests, its howls of rage,  its demands, its questions, its investigations, its objections, its actions?

As a national party in opposition to the dictatorship of the Oligarchy it is useless! Feeble! Positively collaborative with the destroyers of the Republic.

What is a conservative party needed for, what is it up against? Extreme bigotry that declares itself to be against bigotry; extreme racism that declares itself to be against racism; fascism that justifies its violence in the name of anti-fascism; terrorists that pretend they are acting against terrorists; relentless outpourings of bitter hatred against what is falsely called hate; oppressive dictatorship claiming to be against dictatorship; the spreading of fake news and misinformation to label true reporting as lies; a junta’s coup d’état to undo what it wrongly called a coup d’état; a continual committing of crimes of perjury to get honorable men punished for perjuries they did not commit; Americans destroying America. 

Daniel Greenfield writes at Front Page:

Why are Republicans so reluctant to confront Democrat racism? Why are they reluctant to use the word “traitors” for a party that funds Palestinian terrorists and favors Iranian Nazis, blows up America’s borders in the midst of a global pandemic and privileges illegal aliens and criminals over law abiding American citizens? Why isn’t it treason to systematically attack America’s constitutional order, and its revolutionary founding, aid and abet America’s enemies, and attack the integrity of America’s electoral system?

The Democrats are busily creating a one-party state by destroying the Supreme Court, abolishing the Electoral College, eliminating  voter I.D.s, flooding the polls with unsolicited mail-in ballots, demonizing opponents as “insurrectionists” and traitors, de-platforming presidents and prominent conservatives, banning books they find “offensive”, conducting witch-hunts of conservatives in the military, in the Capitol police, in the Department of Homeland Security, and turning our schools into indoctrination centers for anti-American racist ideologies. Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project are now the curricula in thousands of K-12 schools. The crackpot racism of these theories  turns our national heritage upside down, caricaturing Americans as slaveocrats and racists rather than as the leading defenders of freedom and equality in the world.

Democrats control every major inner city in America, and have for fifty to a hundred years; every killing field – Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, Baltimore, Minneapolis. Every injustice real or imagined in the inner cities, Democrats are 100% responsible for. The oppressor of inner city minorities is not “white supremacy”; it’s the flesh and blood racist, pro-criminal officials of the Democrat Party.

And nothing, no one, actively opposing it!

Please, Donald Trump, get a firm grip on the Republican Party and make it work for you, against them, and so for America.

The Left, a passionately destructive movement, has won. The Right has let it win.

Where now can those who want to live what had become the normal life of the West – being safely free under the law, having children, enjoying family life, gaining knowledge and prosperity, contributing talent and labor, pursuing happiness  – look for the preservation and protection of that normality?

Not to any institutions we can think of – government, police, army, intelligence agencies, courts of law …

Not to the Republican Party. Not to any conservative organization or grass roots movement.

Does that mean that the greatest civilization in human history, begun in the Renaissance and launched by the Enlightenment, is now over and done with? Is this the suicide of the West?

Having taken away the security of equality under the law; having put an end to real education; having wrecked the arts; having, in short, destroyed in a few decades the greatness that had taken centuries to build, the destructive Left now concentrates on putting an end to the human race itself – by sterilizing it.

Pedro Gonzalez writes at American Greatness:

The first thing we have to accept about the culture war is that the Republican Party and the conservative movement have lost.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the battle of the biological sexes, lost without a shot fired.

In the United States, Congress generously provided $5.7 million in taxpayer dollars to the National Institutes of Health for a study wherein children as young as age 8 received puberty-suppressing, cross-sex hormones that will render them permanently infertile.

Nationally, Republicans like Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson and South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem have capitulated to the queer zeitgeist. Hutchinson vetoed a measure to ban castration for minors suffering from gender dysphoria, also known as “gender-affirming therapy”.  Noem effectively killed a bill intended to restrict transgender participation in women’s sports. Even when they had the upper hand over Democrats in Florida and Texas, limp-wristed Republicans performed silent retreats from transgender sports bills, allowing Democrats to run the table.

Conservatives accept the Left’s premise that transgenderism is normative and, therefore, something to be glorified and even celebrated when they speak of the “rights” of the transgendered. The alternative, in this view, is rank bigotry and perhaps even violence. But this is a false choice.

No one should suffer abuse, but rather than exalting the virtues of our transgender culture, the Right should reject the normalization of what is essentially a pathology connected to staggering suicide rates.

An order wherein underage boys can receive hormone blockers to hinder the growth of their penises, and have male genitalia “reconstructed” into female genitalia, is not worth preserving.

Yet –

This is the order the conservative movement and Republican Party seek to preserve. They do not reject it but only protest that treatment should not be taxpayer-funded and that sports remain free of biologically unfair competition, blind or indifferent to the dishonor of it all.

A civilization that legalizes the sterilization and mutilation of its children has put itself on a path toward suicide by robbing its sons and daughters of the ability to procreate even as birth rates plummet.

It has chosen to die a humiliating death. 

But transgenderism is only the latest failure of conservatism and the GOP, which has surrendered on everything including immigration, criminal justice, and reparations.

There is, therefore, no reason to be “conservative” because to be conservative in America today is to preserve an order that has lost its legitimacy, and the right thing is not to conserve but destroy it and institute something else. The Republican Party, as it stands, is and will continue to be an obstacle to this cause.

What “something else” can be “instituted”? How? When? By whom?

The Democrat regime is not strong. But it is acting as if it were.

It is actively, deliberately, gleefully ruining America.

Victor Davis Hanson writes at American Greatness:

Any nation’s well-being—as Americans know from their own illustrious history—hinges on only a few factors. Its prosperity, freedom, and stability depend on its constitutional and political stability.

A secure currency and financial order are also essential, as is a strong military.

Perhaps most important, however, is a first-rate, inductive educational system. Of course, nothing is possible without general social calm, often dependent on a reverence for the past, along with present secure borders.

The ability to produce or easily acquire food, fuel, and key natural resources ensures a nation’s independence and autonomy.

Unfortunately in the last few months all of those centuries-old reasons to be confident in American strength and resiliency have now been put into doubt.

The challenge is not just enemies abroad such as China, Russia, North Korea, or Iran. Instead, the greater problem lies within us—as we erode the inherited and acquired strengths that made us singular, both materially and spiritually.

We are now witnessing a concentrated effort to alter the constitutional order and centuries of custom and tradition. Only that way, the Left believes, can it retain its transient power given the unpopularity of most of its current agenda.

The bedrock of a nation is its institutions. Yet, the 233-year old Electoral College and the Constitution’s emphasis on individual states establishing voting laws are under assault.

Already gone is the 176-year old tradition of a pivotal November Election Day.

The 152-year old nine-member Supreme Court, the 170-year old Senate filibuster, and the 62-year old idea of a 50-state union are all targeted by the New Democratic Party.

Given that the past presidential election was contested, that Democratic congressional majorities are minuscule, and that the Supreme Court is unsympathetic, the Left seeks to change the rules to stay in power rather than to adjust its unpopular policies.

We are running up vast annual multi-trillion dollar deficits as we race to a $30 trillion national debt. More worrisome, our elites justify the spending by sophistries that debt is either irrelevant, or that inflation and stagflation are relics of the past—even as prices are now soaring.

The military—after costly strategic stagnation in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya—is now turning on its own. Some of the politicized top brass seem more worried about the politics of their own soldiers than the dangers of foreign militaries.

Our public schools and colleges are systematically downplaying meritocratic curricula and substituting in their places ideological, racial, and cultural litmus tests. Admissions now often hinge as much on race, gender, and ethnicity as on quantifiable achievement. The First and Fifth Amendments—free speech and due process—have vanished from most college campuses.

2020 saw the most destructive riots in American history. Yet very few of the looters, arsonists, and rioters were ever indicted. Most were never arrested.

Whether government arrests violent protesters, or those assembling en masse and breaking quarantines, is contingent on their ideology.

Private monopolies that control most written communications of Americans censor expression entirely on the basis of politics.

Modern Jacobins seek to erase our founding in 1776. Mobs tear down statuary and deface monuments with impunity. There is no consistent rhyme or reason why the names of schools, institutions, and streets are erased overnight—except the relative dangers of a nihilistic electronic mob.

Our officials at the Justice Department and the United Nations either will not or cannot defend the history and reputation of their own homeland.

Record natural gas and oil production had formerly given the public affordable heating, cooling, and transportation. Self-sufficiency in energy made the United States exempt from worries over Mideast wars or foreign oil embargoes. The more we produced our own natural gas, the cleaner became our air and the smaller our collective carbon footprint.

Yet in just 100 days, energy prices have soared. The Left has canceled pipelines and limited energy leasing on federal lands—with promises to all but end our own gas and oil independence in just a few years.

In the drought-stricken West, key irrigation water is still being diverted from farms to the ocean. Billions of dollars in farm aid are doled out on the basis of race. And promised new regulations and estate taxes may well kill off what’s left of family farms.

Adam Smith said of successful societies that they have a lot of “ruin” in them. He meant that a dissolute, leisured, and ahistorical generation has to waste a lot of its generous inherited wealth before it runs out.

We are learning how much will soon be left of what our ancestors bequeathed. And the rest of the world is watching—some with glee, others with horror.

What can be done?

A few individuals – Victor Davis Hanson among them – see that America is being deliberately ruined and warn us that it is happening, but we see no strong force looming up over the political horizon on its way to putting a stop to it.

Here’s part of an editorial at Humans Are Free:

The “Great Reset” and the “New Normal” are policy goals that pre-date Covid, and are far more important than any of the tools used to pursue them. The created “pandemic” is nothing but a means to an end. They might discard or sideline the narrative of the virus, they might switch storylines for a few months, or stop using certain phrases altogether for a while. But that doesn’t mean their greater agenda has changed at all.

They’ve shown us their hand. They’ve told us – upfront and out loud – what they want to achieve.

Total economic control, marked depreciation of living standards, removal of national sovereignty and radical erosion of individual liberties.

That’s the endgame here. They said so.

It’s our responsibility to hold on to that knowledge and use it. To withhold any belief and see everything with a skeptical eye. Everything. Every story in the press. Every news item on the television. Any government pronouncement or piece of legislation.

Viruses or vaccines. Poverty or prosperity. Discrimination or diversity. War or world peace. The agenda doesn’t change.

Whoever is talking. Whatever they are talking about. Whatever they claim to want. The agenda doesn’t change.

Republican or Democrat. Conservative or Labour. Red or Blue. The agenda doesn’t change.

So no help can be expected from the Republican Party? Not even under Donald Trump’s leadership?

Well then, from the 75 million or more who voted for Donald Trump to be president for a second term?

The regime fears them. Having taken power illegitimately by forging a majority of votes, the Democrats expect and fear insurrection by the actual majority. To forestall it, they pretend that the mild protest by unarmed citizens who walked into the “People’s House” – Congress – on January 6, 2021, was an insurrection, that the crowd consisted of “white supremacists”, and that there is a vast movement now mobilizing to bring the regime down by force of arms and acts of terrorism. They use those lies to justify their tyranny. They themselves – the oligarchy, the Junta – are racists and terrorists, enemies of America, actively and effectively ruining it.

If it is true, as many say, that the Supreme Court refused to hear cases against the validity of Joe Biden’s electoral “win” because they feared the packing of their court by angry vengeful Democrats, then they made a stupid decision. Obviously, they should have  done their utmost to keep the Democrats out and keep President Trump in. That would have been the certain way of protecting their numbers. It doesn’t make sense that they helped the party into power which would probably do what they fear – pack the court with judges likely to favor the Left.

THEY (not including the great and wise Justice Thomas) favored the Left. And now their court is very likely to be packed with Leftist judges.

Matt Margolis reports at PJ Media:

“Wouldn’t it be ironic if the Supreme Court of the United States, after showing that they didn’t have the courage to do what they should have done on the Great Presidential Election Fraud of 2020, was PACKED by the same people, the Radical Left Democrats (who they are so afraid of!), that they so pathetically defended in not hearing the Election Fraud case,” Trump asked.

“Now there is a very good chance they will be diluted (and moved throughout the court system so that they can see how the lower courts work), with many new Justices added to the Court, far more than has been reported,” Trump continued. “There is also a good chance that they will be term-limited.”

Trump then pointed out that there were 19 states with election challenges that were not heard by the Supreme Court. “Believe it or not, the President of the United States was not allowed to be heard based on ‘no standing,’ not based on the FACTS,” he said. “The Court wouldn’t rule on the merits of the great Election Fraud, including the fact that local politicians and judges, not State Legislatures, made major changes to the Election—which is in total violation of the United States Constitution.”

Just last month, a judge ruled that Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, broke state law when she unilaterally changed election rules by loosening the signature verification requirement for absentee ballots in the 2020 election. This ruling legitimizes a key claim made by the Trump legal team in its challenges to the 2020 election. Michigan Court of Claims Chief Judge Christopher Murray ruled that this change violated Michigan’s Administrative Procedures Act.

“Our politically correct Supreme Court will get what they deserve,” said Trump. “An unconstitutionally elected group of Radical Left Democrats who are destroying our Country. If and when this happens, I hope the Justices remember the day they didn’t have courage to do what they should have done for America.”

So what the decisions amount to is an implicit statement to the Junta in power, “Don’t add more justices- no need – look, we are already left-biased”?

But if the court is already left-biased, why would they object to the addition of a few more Leftists?

No. None of it makes sense!

Clifford C. Nichols writes at American Thinker:

Rarely do the generation experiencing the actual events and decisions that lead to their nation’s demise fully appreciate the enormity of their oversight until sometime after their culture’s destruction has been rendered incurable.  Largely, it is not due so much to their negligence as it is to most of them being too preoccupied with simply living and making a living.

Perhaps that would explain why, in just the first four months of 2021, the Supreme Court issued four decisions — or, perhaps better viewed as non-decisions — that should have caused all legitimately patriotic Americans to be alarmed and called to action…but did not seem to.

Only a few weeks ago, without offering any substantive explanation, the Court summarily refused to even look at — much less seriously consider — any of the evidence of the 2020 election irregularities offered by attorney Sidney Powell and others.  Evidently, the Supreme Court of the United States of America was not interested in doing what it could — and should — to let America know decisively whether or not its presidential election had been shamelessly stolen by those now in power.

Why would they not do this?

Perhaps the answer is best revealed by the fact that, at the same time, the Court was also apparently too busy to halt a New York prosecutor from obtaining former president Trump’s tax returns.  The practical effect was for SCOTUS to give that prosecutor an assist with his unconstitutional effort to search for any crime that might make President Trump’s ouster from office permanent.

Clearly, these two SCOTUS decisions alone evidence the fact that the agenda of the justices has become politically driven.

It doesn’t end there.

Two weeks later, the Supreme Court — again without explanation — summarily refused to reverse the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals’ denial of Judicial Watch’s request that it be allowed to take the deposition of a member of this country’s ruling political elite — Hillary Rodham Clinton.  At the end of the day, Judicial Watch was only asking the Supreme Court to uphold the rule of law by finding that all Americans — including elites like Hillary Clinton — are to be treated equally under the law.  Instead, the Supreme Court unfortunately — and inexplicably — declined the opportunity to do even this.

Then this week, SCOTUS put the final nail in the coffin containing the GOP’s 2020 election disputes with its denial of a petition for a writ of certiorari in Bognet v. Dagraffenreid.  Again, it refused to rule on whether a state’s courts are qualified or not under Article 2, Section 1, Clause 2 of the Constitution to modify that state’s presidential election laws.  In short, whether Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court violated the U.S. Constitution by usurping the state Legislature’s authority to extend the time allowed for counting mail-in ballots is apparently not an issue worthy of this SCOTUS’s time.

From such glaring displays of indefensible Supreme Court inaction, the following incontrovertible truths have been set out in plain view before the nation’s very eyes:

1. The Supreme Court today is thoroughly politicized…and thus corrupt.

2. In America, the rule of law is now dead.

3. Worse yet, by these decisions, America’s Supreme Court has put on open display its utter disregard — and absolute contempt — for whatever the American people may think about the future unavailability of equal justice in a nation that once promised that such justice would be available to all. …

An American government unleashed from the constraints set in place by the rule of law can be headed in only one direction: toward some form of centralized dictatorship limited only by the whims of those in power — i.e., a tyranny.

But will the half of America that does not want a Leftist tyranny now simply accept it?

Has the Supreme Court intentionally  – or unintentionally which would mean, in this case, stupidly – helped create a state of passionate division that nothing short of civil war can settle?

Has it sentenced America to civil war?

The Supreme Court had a moment in which it could have saved the Republic from tyranny. An opportunity for glory. But it shirked it. Shrank from it. Failed the nation, failed the Founders, lost its way. 

The tyrants now in power do not want America to be prosperous and strong and happy. They want to humble it. They want it to be a country where they themselves thrive, and the majority of the people are oppressed and unhappy.

And they want to stay in power to keep things that way all their lives long, and to be followed by fellow ideological legionaries. (The collective noun for demons is legion – a legion of demons. For devils? A bombast of devils. Bombast commonly means empty speechifying, and yes, they do that too. They are demons, devils and blowhards. A collective noun for blowhards? It still needs to be invented. How about a castro or a schiff or a comey of blowhards? And while we’re at the game, how about a pelosi of haters? A brennan of liars? Suggestions are invited.)

The urge that some people have to tyrannize is as old as mankind, but hard for those who aren’t possessed of it to understand. Stalin felt it ruling over Russia. Primates of the Catholic Church felt it for hundreds of years. Protestant despots felt it too. Luther the German monster and Calvin the Swiss monster were gripped by it. As were many kings and tsars and emperors.

The present tyrants of America command the citizens to believe that a majority voted them into power. It is not true. They faked an electoral win, and now they intend to hold on to power forever.

Andrea Widburg writes at American Thinker:

The Democrats who now control Washington, D.C. are determined to change America’s election laws to ensure that they never lose another election.  The first salvo in this battle was the House’s vote passing H.R. 1, which opens federal elections to all types of fraud and manipulation.  On Sunday [March 14, 2021], Joe Biden added his bit to the effort by signing yet another executive order, this one ostensibly to enhance “voting rights” on the anniversary of the Selma protests in 1965.  However, the order is drafted to allow the federal government to control political speech.

As with most of Biden’s initiatives, it frames the power-grab in terms of race:

The right to vote is the foundation of American democracy.  Free and fair elections that reflect the will of the American people must be protected and defended. But many Americans, especially people of color, confront significant obstacles to exercising that fundamental right. These obstacles include difficulties with voter registration, lack of election information, and barriers to access at polling places.  For generations, Black voters and other voters of color have faced discriminatory policies and other obstacles that disproportionally affect their communities.

Once again, the leftist premise for increasing opportunities for election fraud is the theory that Blacks lack the mental capacity to navigate the American system without the Democrat party at their side, supporting them.  It’s an amazingly offensive position, but, sadly, Democrats have conditioned Blacks for decades to believe in their own helplessness. …

It is the responsibility of the Federal Government to expand access to, and education about, voter registration and election information, and to combat misinformation, in order to enable all eligible Americans to participate in our democracy.

There’s the magic phrase that says what all this emphasis on information is really about: the federal government will use its reach and power “to combat misinformation”.

And what is “misinformation” in the Democrats’ new political lexicon?  It’s anything with which the Democrats disagree.  The federal government, through Biden, has just announced that it will put its thumb on the scale in all future elections, combatting “misinformation” by presenting its version of “information”.

What Biden is proposing is unconstitutional, as is the case with many of his executive orders.  They are often straightforward announcements that he will no longer abide by American law, especially regarding our southern border.  Biden and his handlers are confident that the Supreme Court is so cowed by the court-packing threat that it will do nothing to stop the Democrats as they slowly, but surely, run the Constitution through a shredder.

Had the Supreme justices declared the November 2020 election the unconstitutional fraud that it was, they wouldn’t need now to fear that the fraudulent winners will pack the court. Yet we are told that very fear kept them from hearing appeals. If that is true, they missed their opportunity.

Can anything now stop the shredding of the Constitution?

When President Trump succeeded, after bitter struggles, in establishing a majority of conservatives in the Supreme Court, his voters felt enormously relieved. They and he trusted that now the country would be protected from the worst the revolutionary globalist Democrats could do to destroy the free Republic.

But as it turns out, they were mistaken. With the shining exception of Clarence Thomas, the George W. Bush appointee who has proved to be staunchly conservative (supported to some extent by Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito), the justices chose to let the free Republic go.

Margot Cleveland writes at The Federalist:

On Feb. 22, the Supreme Court refused to hear two 2020 election-related appeals, falling one vote short of the four needed for the high court to agree to hear the case. Justice Clarence Thomas dissented from the denial of certiorari, as did Justice Samuel Alito in a separate dissent, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch.

With Joe Biden now a month into his office as president of the United States, Americans may shrug at the court’s decision, but we shouldn’t: the Supreme Court’s abdication of its authority to answer important constitutional questions only encourages further lawlessness by state election officials and courts, undermines voter confidence, and threatens even more chaotic federal elections.

The two cases the Supreme Court rejected on Monday both involved the 2020 election in Pennsylvania and the constitutionality of a state court decision overriding an unambiguous deadline the Pennsylvania legislature established for the receipt of mail-in ballots by 8 p.m. on election night. As Justice Thomas explained in his dissent, “Dissatisfied, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court extended that deadline by three days. The court also ordered officials to count ballots received by the new deadline even if there was no evidence—such as a post mark—that the ballots were mailed by election day.”

The Republican Party of Pennsylvania and several members of the Pennsylvania House and Senate attempted to challenge the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision in the U.S. Supreme Court before the election, but, at the time, the justices refused to expedite the case, leaving the petitions for review to proceed under the normal briefing schedule. But following briefing, the court denied the petition on Feb. 22.

Thomas dissented from the court’s denial of the petition for certiorari, calling the court’s refusal to hear the case “inexplicable”. In his dissent, Thomas explained both the problem with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision and why it was imperative for the U.S. Supreme Court to enter the fray.

“The Constitution gives to each state legislature authority to determine the ‘manner’ of federal elections,” Thomas opened his dissent, citing Article I, § 4 clause 1 and Article II, § 1 of the national Constitution. “Yet both before and after the 2020 election, nonlegislative officials in various States took it upon themselves to set the rules instead,” the originalist jurist continued.

Whether such nonlegislative actions violate the Electors Clause of the Constitution, as Article I, § 4 clause 1, has become to be known, or Article II, § 1, which governs the selection of the president, is the essence of the exercise of self-government, Justice Thomas wrote, because “elections are ‘of the most fundamental significance under our constitutional structure’.”

Elections, however, “enable self-governance only when they include processes that ‘give citizens (including the losing candidates and their supporters) confidence in the fairness of the election,” the dissent continued. “Unclear rules threaten to undermine the system. They sow confusion and ultimately dampen confidence in the integrity and fairness of elections.” … The Supreme Court should make clear “whether state officials have the authority they have claimed” [and]  “if not,” then the Supreme Court should “put an end to this practice now before the consequences become catastrophic”, Justice Thomas wrote.

Yet the Supreme Court refused to hear the case. But why? Both constitutional and prudential principles weigh in favor of granting certiorari.

Constitutionally, while federal courts only have the power to hear a “case or controversy,” meaning the Supreme Court lacks jurisdiction to hear “moot” cases, here there is a well-established exception to the mootness doctrine: the capable-of-repetition-but-evading-review exception.

This exception to the mootness doctrine provides that federal courts hold authority to resolve cases where “the challenged action is in its duration too short to be fully litigated prior to cessation or expiration” and where “there is a reasonable expectation that the same complaining party will be subject to the same action again.”

Both criteria exist here, Justice Thomas wrote, as the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision came a mere six weeks before the election, and the petitioners in the cases—the state Republican party and state legislators—are likely to “again confront nonlegislative officials altering election rules”.

In his separate dissent, Justice Alito also concluded that certiorari should be granted because the cases “present an important and recurring constitutional question.” His dissent, joined by Justice Gorsuch, focused mainly on the mootness question.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision was so broad, Alito wrote, that the questions presented to the U.S. Supreme Court are “surely capable of repetition in future elections”.  “That decision,” Alito explained, “held that a state constitutional provision guaranteeing ‘free and equal’ elections gives the Pennsylvania courts the authority to override even very specific and unambiguous rules adopted by the legislature for the conduct of federal elections.”

“Indeed, it would be surprising if parties who are unhappy with the legislature’s rules,” Justice Alito continued, “do not invoke this decision and ask state courts to substitute rules they find more advantageous.”

Not only were the cases not moot, but as the dissents both made clear, the cases both “call out for review”, as Justice Alito put it. The cases present “an important and recurring constitutional question” [one that has] “divided the lower courts”. … Further, as Justice Thomas stressed, “postelection litigation is truncated by firm timeliness,” which “imposes especially daunting constraints when combined with the expanded use of mail-in ballots.”

Thomas’s dissent highlighted another significant reason for review. “Because fraud is more prevalent with mail-in ballots,” Justice Thomas wrote, “increased use of those ballots raises the likelihood that courts will be asked to adjudicate questions that go to the heart of election confidence.”

Here Justice Thomas wisely noted in his dissent that “settling rules well in advance of an election rather than relying on postelection litigation ensures that courts are not put in [the] untenable position of either potentially disenfranchising a subset of voters or ignoring the rules the legislature believes necessary to ensure election integrity”.

Yet the Supreme Court denied review.

Maybe the six justices who voted against certiorari believe the country will be better off without re-litigating the election. The denial, however, will not heal a country that witnessed state officials and courts changing the rules mid-vote—not just in Pennsylvania, but in Wisconsin and Michigan too. Then her citizens saw the Supreme Court seemingly ignore those violations of the Electors Clause when Texas sought relief in the Supreme Court.

Worse yet will be the damage done to our republic when the bending and breaking of election laws repeats in the future.

For now, as Justice Thomas concluded, by doing nothing, the Supreme Court invites erosion of voter confidence.

“We citizens deserve better and expect more.”

It is one of the worst of our – the citizens’ – disappointments.

Considering that, in the perception of half the voters, constitutional law had been broken, and considering what was at stake – nothing less than the free Republic itself – and how confidently we had looked to the Supreme Court as the most dependable and incorruptible of the Constitution’s protectors, its refusal to do what was to us clearly right was worse than a shocking and painful blow, it was crushing.

And it is hard to believe that the refusal was for reasons of constitutional law and not political choice.

Karl Popper and Friedrich Hayek were two great 20th century thinkers who argued for freedom. They differed on one point: Popper held freedom to be in itself the highest value; Hayek thought freedom is valuable, indeed essential, because it enables innovation.

Innovation comes from the minds of individuals. A government controlled society in which the individual’s only – and enforced – duty is to serve the collective, does not allow origination. The organized mass is sterile. It cannot invent. That’s why it’s wrong to call socialism, communism, any shade of leftism,”progressive”. A socialist society cannot advance. It can only stagnate.

That’s why Communist China has had to steal new ideas and devices from countries in which free thought and its expression are permitted.

What many people who live in countries that are still comparatively free find attractive about socialism is that it promises “free stuff”. Vote the socialists into power and you will get free school, free health care, free housing, free strawberries with free cream. Well, okay, maybe not the cream. And maybe also not the strawberries. And maybe you will have to share a house. And the health panel will decide whether you may live or must die. And what you’ll be taught will be adherence to doctrine not search for truth. But still – it will all be free. At the time it is dispensed to you, whatever it is, you will not have to pay for it. The rest of your time you’ll be working for it.

Natan Sharansky was born in Soviet Russia and lived the first decades of his life there. He eventually escaped to live in freedom in Israel.

He writes about the torture of the mind in the prison of Communism:

My father, a journalist named Boris Shcharansky, was born in 1904 in Odessa, the cultural and economic center of the Pale of Settlement, where the Russian empire stuck most Jews. He studied in the Jewish Commercial Gymnasium, because most other gymnasiums accepted very few Jews, if any. By the time he was 16, he had already lived through the Czarist Regime with its anti-Semitic restrictions, the “February” Socialist Revolution, the “October” Bolshevik Revolution, and the years of civil war when power in Odessa seesawed back and forth from faction to faction, as hunger, pogroms, and destruction decimated the population.

When the Soviets finally emerged from the chaos, therefore, my father was hopeful. The Communists promised that a new life of full equality was dawning, without Pales of Settlement, without education restrictions, and, most important, with equal opportunities for all. Who wouldn’t want that? … [He]  was excited about building a world of social justice and equality closer to his home. …

Lucky for him, Odessa was emerging as a center for a new cultural medium—cinema. As silent Charlie Chaplin-type movies started evolving into more scripted sketches, my father put his storytelling talents to work. …

Of course, to succeed in his career as a screenwriter, he had to follow certain rules. His scripts, like every other work of art, had to follow the script of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, seeing the world through the lens of class struggle and class exploitation. As Karl Marx argued, and the Bolsheviks now decreed, “the history of all hitherto-existing societies is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight”.

Thankfully, in its final stage of class struggle, following Karl Marx’s teaching, the proletariat had seized power from its masters, establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat who would build a classless society of equals. So-called bourgeois freedoms, minor matters like civil liberties and human rights, were nothing more than facades for exploiting others. The old world and its retrograde values had to be destroyed in order to bring forth social justice. Today, such a singular vision might be called Critical Class Theory—or maybe The 1917 Project.

Everything had to serve Communist ideology: every institution, every medium, every art form. Lenin particularly appreciated the propaganda potential of movies, declaring, “Cinema for us is the most important of the arts.” So while all creative artists had to subordinate plot, character, and complexity to advancing the Bolshevik political agenda, movie-makers endured extra scrutiny. The term “politically-correct“, which is popular today, emerged in the late 1920s, to describe the need to correct certain deviants’ thought to fit the Communist Party Line. Any positive characters with bourgeois origins had to eventually check their privilege, condemn their past as oppressors, and publicly take responsibility for their sins.

At first, True Believers who championed the Revolution’s noble aims easily accepted these restrictions. But as the Red Terror grew … the number of True Believers kept shrinking …

I was born … in 1948. My father had fought as a soldier in the Red Army in World War II for four years, and had returned a hero. … (Our] family which had lost so many friends and relatives in the Holocaust, then watched so many friends suffer during Josef Stalin’s political and anti-Semitic purges …

Every day, my father went to work [as a journalist] …  seeking interesting stories. But, when it came to writing them up, his imagination had to shrink, his mouth had to be wired shut, his hand had to clamp tight, as he produced what the Party required. He knew the handicapped journalism he created was not true journalism, the art that resulted was not true art, the thoughts triggered were not real thoughts and the conversations surrounding it all were not real conversations. Yet my father remained a storyteller at heart—and now he had an audience—my older brother by two years and me.

When my father came home from work, he could leave the suffocating grey false universe he helped to create behind, and welcome his beloved family into a full-color world. From the time we were very young, he would tell us stories on three levels—explaining to us what the author said, what the author wished to say, and what the author could not say. When we started, from a very young age, our ritual of weekly outings to the movies, he would recreate the movie for us on the way home, filling in what the screenwriter probably wanted to write, and explain what he could not write. …

No [professional writer] was ever quite sure what would be permitted or not, what red line they might cross tomorrow; what “macro-aggression” or “micro-aggression” they might suddenly be found guilty of committing. To be a man of letters in a sea of fear was to worry about drowning constantly. …

Looking back at the history of Soviet literature, it’s hard to find any of the thousands of writers [who conformed] … who wrote anything worth reading or remembering. Their books, published on a massive scale—often selling millions—simply disappeared. … Eventually, their lies consumed both the characters and their authors, leaving nothing behind.

By contrast, the works that lasted defied Stalinist orthodoxies in the service of truths, both immediate and internal. Stalin killed some of these honest writers, like the poet Osip Mandelstam. Some killed themselves, like the poet Marina Tsvetaeva. Some lived daily with the fear of arrest, or under the shadow of purges, like Anna Akhmatova. Some, like the novelist Mikhail Bulgakov, accepted the fact that their books would go unpublished in Russia—his classic The Master and Margarita didn’t see the light of day for decades. Others, like Boris Pasternak, who smuggled Dr. Zhivago to the West, sought readers elsewhere and paid the price back home ….

By my generation there were few True Believers left. Your field of vision had to be very narrow indeed to still see the crumbling society around us as some kind of Communist paradise. …

I spent my high school years as an academic grind, drowning in problem sets, working around the clock to amass five out of fives in mathematics and physics. Because I knew that I had to follow a very specific script to get the character reference I needed from the local Komsomol authorities, I also spouted the right slogans, participated in the right youth activities, and sang the right songs. Yet even after I fulfilled my young dreams and made it to MFTI—Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, the Soviet equivalent of MIT—the scrutiny continued. We math and science students had to keep paying lip service to the Soviet gods, like everyone else. We kept taking tests on Marxist doctrine every semester, even when studying at the postdoctoral level. …

Our professors subtly encouraged us to brush such annoyances aside. We were the elite, they kept telling us, racing toward a golden future. It was all worth it. I was luxuriating in the sanctuary of science, an asylum protected from the daily insanity the Soviets imposed on nearly everyone else. I decided that the deeper I was into my scientific career, the less stressful this double life would be.

It was a comforting illusion—until I read Andrei Sakharov’s manifesto.

Sakharov was our role model, the number one Soviet scientist sitting at the peak of the pyramid each of us was trying to climb so single-mindedly. In May 1968, this celebrity scientist circulated a ten-thousand-word manifesto that unleashed a wrecking ball which smashed my complacent life. “Intellectual freedom is essential to human society,” Sakharov declared. Bravely denouncing Soviet thought-control, he mocked “the ossified dogmatism of a bureaucratic oligarchy and its favorite weapon, ideological censorship.”

Sakharov warned that Soviet science was imperiled without “the search for truth”. … At the time, there were few who could understand the depths of this critique. The Soviet Union wasn’t just relying on its scientific wizards to develop nuclear weapons; we now know that the research ran in tandem with an elaborate spying operation that stole as many of America’s atomic secrets as it could.

The message was clear for us. Sakharov helped us realize that the Soviet restrictions on free thought ran deep. You not only have to control your political opinions, but every interaction with your colleagues, every new insight, has to be checked and rechecked, for fear of ideological implications that could destroy a career in this world where even entire fields of inquiry were cancelled for being politically incorrect. Soviet scientists spent so much time looking over their shoulders and in their rear-view mirrors that they could not plunge ahead and catch up with their Western peers.

Long before most others, Sakharov saw in the Soviet scientific community the equivalent of the literary mediocrity we all saw in Soviet Realism. … Life in a dictatorship offers two choices: either you overcome your fear and stand for truth, or you remain a slave to fear, no matter how fancy your titles, no matter how big your dacha.

Natan Sharansky made the decision to stand for truth.

He applied to emigrate to Israel.

As a result of both decisions, he was jailed for nine years.

Once I had done it, once I was no longer afraid, I realized what it was to be free …

And that was why, during nine years in prison, when the KGB would try tempting me to restore my freedom and even my life by returning to the life I once had, it was easy to say “no”. …

Over the last three decades in freedom, I have noticed that … the feeling of release from the fear … is universal across cultures. This understanding prompted the Town Square Test I use to distinguish between free societies and fear societies: Can you express your individual views loudly, in public, without fear of being punished legally, formally, in any way? If yes, you live in a free society; if not, you’re in a fear society. …

[Today] nearly two-thirds of Americans report self-censoring about politics at least occasionally … despite the magnificent constitutional protections for free thought and expression enshrined in the Bill of Rights

To preserve our integrity and our souls, the quality of our political debate and the creativity so essential to our cultural life, we need … a test [that] asks: In the democratic society in which you live, can you express your individual views loudly, in public and in private, on social media and at rallies, without fear of being shamed, excommunicated, or cancelled?

A lot of American voters – even if not as many as the socialist Democratic Party claimed in order to seize power –  recently voted against freedom. They voted for the political party that promised free stuff. And already masters of the social media, most of them politically correct social justice warriors, refuse to let opinions they disagree with be expressed on their forums. Free speech is deeply unpopular with the Leftists now in power in America. Freedom itself is not valued. Those “magnificent constitutional protections for free thought and expression enshrined in the Bill of Rights” are being swept aside.

You will not be free – and the stuff you get from government won’t be free either.

Anything that costs you your freedom, costs too much.