These comments were made to us by email or on this website on the election disaster, with suggestions as to what might be done about it.

An astute observer of the political scene, retired academic Alexander Firestone, emailed us on what to expect of a Biden administration’s domestic and foreign policy:

 This is Obama 2.

Biden has in fact been elected by a bigoted psychotic-left media and this country will suffer horribly for it.

The question now is, how do we get out of it?

Re domestic policy I have no answers: Janet Yellin and the other self-appointed “experts” will return to hyper-inflation, endless bailouts for corrupt and degenerate democratic cities and states, massive deficits, much higher taxes, plainly racist affirmative action programs, etc., etc., ad nauseam. A republican controlled senate may be able to forestall some of that crap, but a lot of it is bound to get through. 

Re foreign policy, we can expect a very pro-China administration. The Bidens are already all bought and paid for. Nothing to be done here. If that annoys the Russians, so much the better. Russia and China are already positioning themselves for conflict if not war in Central Asia. We can do nothing here. If an emboldened China,  green-lighted by Biden, goes too far and there is real shooting between China and Russia, we can only cheer from the sidelines.

In the absolutely critical Middle East we can only hope that the psychotic Mullahs of Iran, humiliated by the recent assassination of their chief nuclear scientist as well as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States (except Qatar) defection to a quasi-alliance with Israel, will recklessly start a war. That will destroy the crackpot pro-Iran policy of the Obama administration and of people like Ben Rhodes, Martin Indyk, Valerie Jarrett (born in Isfahan), Jake Sullivan, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and the traitors of J-street, JVP [Jewish Voices for Peace the leading Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the US] and the ADL [Anti Defamation League – constantly defaming Israel]. Fascist Turkey may also escalate its war against Greece, Armenia, and the Kurds beyond the point of no return and create a new war with Russia.

The idea (excluding action): Letting our enemies at home fail by their own efforts, and those abroad destroy each other.   

This was a comment by our regular commenter/contributing writer Liz on the massive fraud that gave Biden a majority, and a possible reaction:

It seems to me that, so far, [Sidney] Powell and the other lawyers have presented evidence that is going to be hard to ignore or refute.

They have it on record from the makers of the [vote counting] Dominion machines themselves that they can be easily hacked and/or set up to produce fraudulent results, and the results themselves are extremely incriminating, being mathematical impossibilities.

Plus testimony by experts like Dr. Navid Keshavarz-Nia, and eyewitnesses.

If this can all be ignored, then justice, and government by the people, is truly dead.

If Biden is allowed to be our next pretend president, Trump voters just may have to form a Confederacy and secede from the Left coasts.

The idea (in extreme exigency): Form a new Confederacy and secede.  

And this comment was made by Jeanne Shockley on our Facebook page asking the right questions about where we go from here:

This is the dilemma. Civil protest and petitions seem to gain little. We try overwhelming all State Legislatures and Congress with conservatives, which seems an impossible task no matter what the people try to do. We have rallies and marches and petitions, which are ignored by media or downplayed to the extent that there is no truth in the reporting. Without doubt, there are plans for 2022 and 2024 already in the works, but there is still the problem of electoral fraud. So, we await the legal process of Trump’s team dealing with that.

We could go Galt. We could plot revolution. We could resist all compliance to authority that is Harris/Biden. We could “roil the waters”. We could start a civil war. All these are such serious tactics that would destroy our lives and possibly our country. Should we hang on and wait for 2022? Should we rally to a call to arms? Should we go Galt?

How far into the Great Reset are we? How much resistance is there around the globe to the Globalists? Are they waiting for the Americans to show up? Should Donald Trump call for the support of patriots? Would we answer that call? What then?

I have stood up before for minor things, and called for the support that I had in private circles, and ended up standing alone, then defeated because I stood alone. Revolution is not a minor thing.

The idea (tentative): We contemplate revolution or civil war, and their consequences.  

We found more suggestions for what we might do about the disaster in two articles at American Greatness: –

First, one who signs himself Bradford H. B., writes that what we should do is melt our enemies’ hearts with descriptions of our sentiments regarding hearth and home, ancestral custom, attachment to the native soil. He calls these “moral arguments”, but they have much more to do with emotion than morality:

What the conservative elite has long failed to understand is that the Left views itself more than just a pusher of human progress. It’s actually more grandiose than this. To them, they’re locked in a Manichean battle between good and evil. …

Many of us see it that way too.

Instead of approaching the Left as the strident moral crusaders they are, the Republican elite traditionally has written them off as amoral, nihilistic, and godless relativists.

We too see them as amoral and nihilistic, but don’t, of course, hold “godlessness” against them.

This is dangerously naïve. Conservative scholar Paul Gottfried recently skewered this tendency when he reminded conservatives that it’s the Left which is the “more fervent and more activist side in our culture wars”; the side that routinely “expresses itself in rage”. “It would be unimaginable,” he wrote, “if the Left was not driven by its own morality.”

For the “more fervent” side then, engagement with them on non-moral terms will be futile. That is, demands for fairness, charges of inconsistency, or practical arguments on issues of public policy won’t bring a single one onside. On illegal immigration, for instance, appeals to the rule of law will generally fall flat every time. For the Left, laws against allowing the free movement of “impoverished victims of historic U.S. imperialism” are heartless, unjust, and illegitimate. …

Moral arguments have to be met with competing moral arguments. …

Traditional conservatives or the Old Right … treat traditions and customs as not only just, but sacrosanct. … They take pride and find guidance in long-cherished traditions, ancestral ties, and historical distinctions. It’s what makes people special. For the Left, however, these links must be broken. This is exactly what they do when they topple statues, “decolonize” history and the arts, and deplatform those who defend their in-group interests. Same with accusing America-Firsters of “hate speech” or calling for open borders and “refugee justice”.  It’s all a way to destroy peoples’ unique value and cut their ties to ancestry and posterity, and it must be called out in precisely these terms.

On illegal immigration then, the GOP shouldn’t lead with a law-and-order argument, but instead forcefully say that it hurts communities which the American people love and cherish. By killing labor standards and disrupting local cultures and customs, illegal aliens uproot communities which people have built up for years and have a moral right to keep as they are. Illegal immigration isn’t just wrong because it’s illegal; it’s wrong because it dispossesses people and destroys a way of life.

To the extent equality absolutism—the essence of Marxism – flattens cultural differences and crushes meaning and value for people, it’s amoral. …

Normal people, it turns out, love their communities and don’t feel the need to permanently change them. But to the egalitarian extremist, no one is special …  For this, they can and should be made to feel embarrassed and ashamed. …

Defending tradition, heritage, posterity, and group customs and values is absolutely a moral good. To seek its erasure is evil.

This is the position the Right must take to counter the ascendant hard-Left …

What Bradford H.B. is actually doing, is putting the nationalist case to the anti-nationalists – aka globalists, world-government advocates, communists, redistributionists, militant  proselytizing religions. But he is doing it in terms of emotion that simply beg the answer, “That’s how you feel, it is not how we feel.” There is nothing wrong with having an emotional attachment to one’s country and way of life, but it is hard to see it is a clinching argument against the Left’s ideal of breaking those very ties.

The idea: Pleading one’s love of country and local community, custom and rootedness.

We don’t think it will make Leftist idealists feel embarrassed or ashamed. (The appeal of nationalism can be put – and has been put on this website – in more cerebral terms.)

Next, Stephen Balch writes that the answer is to make our protest gatherings match or outdo those of the Left in clamor, frequency, and persistence. 

Do we make a stand or nervelessly surrender our rights? Do we affirm ourselves citizens—an historically rare and noble title—or do we accept becoming subjects, the fate of most humankind? …

We face something altogether new, a genuine effort at revolution. …

What is to be done? Whatever that is, it must depart from politics as usual …

An audacity is now called for, a willingness to stretch institutional bonds to a degree that genuinely alarms our conniving subverters. At this late stage in our political degeneration nothing less will suffice.

President Trump and his allies have rightly taken their case into the courts. But more needs to be accomplished, and with swift and dexterous versatility, in the courts of public opinion. …

Our strategy must buttress legal arguments with formidable public acts.

Jurists are mortals—as are legislators whose ultimate support we’ll need more than the courts. Both are cowed by the pressure of elite opinion. To do the correct thing, both will need to be steeled by countervailing forces. They fear, correctly, that adhering to the law will bring out the rioters and streetfighters. They must be brought to see that vast numbers of peaceful but equally angry citizens won’t accept cowardly skulking when the nation is in danger.

… The president must now lead his followers into America’s streets and squares. They must especially flock to the capitol complexes of all the critical states and register indignant protest. They must do the same under the media’s noses in Washington, New York, and Los Angeles, creating a clamor that broadcast agitprop can’t drown out. This has already begun, but its intensity must greatly ratchet up, becoming incessant and overwhelming. …

In the face of their literal coup, let ours be a counter-coup de théâtre. If the president and his attorney general believe they have the federal goods on individual malefactors, let them convene grand juries, bring in indictments and make midnight (and televised) arrests of top perps. Why shouldn’t we take instruction from our foes?

And don’t just petition the jurists, have the president and his lawyers lay their case before a joint session of Congress. If House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) won’t give him House leave, provide the Senate with an exclusive. You say nothing like that has ever been tried? Then no better reason for doing it now. The proceedings would be an educational spectacle the networks, and the president’s traducers, couldn’t ignore. And its grand show would suit the occasion.

The courts won’t call the election for Trump. They shouldn’t. The best that can be expected is a vacating of the results in those states where misdeeds have been particularly egregious.

Since there’s no time for reruns, the state legislatures will then have to grasp the nettle. They could throw their electoral votes to Trump or, much more likely, find some way to withhold them, or perhaps pick electors who’ll abstain or vote for some stand-in.

If, in consequence, neither Trump nor Biden have an electoral majority, the choice will devolve upon the newly elected House, with the constitutionally prescribed delegation-by-delegation voting system strongly favoring the president. The (probably) Republican Senate will re-elect Vice President Pence.

Should state legislators fail to show sufficient spine, or should there be rival electoral ballots submitted, there is a final ditch to fall back upon. The Republican Senate could raise objections to accepting dubious electoral votes. Something like that happened in 1876, the last time rampant corruption caused official tabulations to be formally challenged. Possible end games in a scenario like that are too tangled to assess, but the battle could be won. …

And if we fail? We fail—but not without forever having branded this election as the leprous thing it was. And in doing so we will have laid the necessary foundation for a continuing unconventional struggle, one that explores the outer boundaries of our Constitution’s resources to trap “His Fraudulency” and friends in the snares they themselves have laid.

The idea: We could make ourselves more threatening, more frightening, than the Left – but without becoming violent.

So: Passive observation and hope? Secession? Revolution or civil war? Attempt to shame our enemy into concession or even capitulation? Unremitting protest calculated to frighten while remaining nonviolent?

Or … ?

This open letter from retired military leaders, declaring their loyalty to President Trump, is timely, necessary, and welcome, because his legitimate government is under threat by unscrupulous Democrat plotters, who have even threatened to use the army to remove him from the White House. Can the letter be taken as a warning to them?

Open Letter from Senior Military Leaders

The 2020 election affords the American people an urgently needed opportunity to affirm their devotion to the Constitution of the United States and to the American way of life.

As senior leaders of America’s military, we took an oath to defend the United States from all enemies, foreign and domestic. At present, our country is now confronted with enemies here and abroad, as well as a once in a century pandemic. As retired military officers, we believe that Donald J. Trump has been tested as few other presidents have and is the proven leader to confront these dangers.

It can be argued that this is the most important election since our country was founded. With the Democratic Party welcoming to socialists and Marxists, our historic way of life is at stake.

During the Obama/Biden administration, America’s armed forces were subjected to a series of ill-considered and debilitating budget cuts. The Democrats have once again pledged to cut defense spending, undermining our military strength. The Democrats’ opposition to border security, their pledge to return to the disastrous Iran nuclear deal, their antagonism towards the police and planned cuts to military spending will leave the United States more vulnerable to foreign enemies. President Trump’s resolute stands have deterred our enemies from aggression against us and our allies.

The proposed defense cuts by the Democrats will, in our professional judgment, create a potentially perilous situation for the United States during a time of great external and internal threats to our Nation.

For these reasons, we support Donald Trump’s re-election. We believe that President Donald Trump is committed to a strong America. As president, he will continue to secure our borders, defeat our adversaries, and restore law and order domestically. We urge our fellow Americans to join us in supporting the re-election of Donald Trump for President.

See the very long list of signatures here.

Democracy as the choice of the people, as one voter one vote, with the power of each branch of government balanced and checked by the power of the other branches, is not wanted any  more by half the electorate of the United States.

Democracy has other definitions. Regimes such as those of the Congo, North Korea, the late German Democratic Republic, have called themselves democratic but are not; “Communist dictatorships” describes them accurately. It is only in that sarcastic sense that the Democratic Party of the United States is democratic.

In the election of 2020, have the people of the free republic given to them by its Founders, failed to keep it?

Auguste Meyrat writes at American Greatness:

As votes were first counted on Election Day, Donald Trump seemed to lead in nearly all of these [“swing”] states.

Donald Trump not only seemed but was in the lead in nearly all of those states.

Then the counting mysteriously stopped. When counting resumed the next day, Biden appeared suddenly to have taken a narrow lead that would allow him to win those states. …

This situation clearly outrages those who voted for President Trump …

Clearly.

In order to prove that cheating has occurred, they now have to rely on famously unreliable institutions for conducting investigations and providing updates: legacy media, social media platforms, Democratic government officials, and federal law enforcement agencies like the FBI.

This means that with the exception of a few alternative conservative media outlets, independent journalists, and outspoken politicians, the people hoping for justice in this election must look to themselves. … It ultimately falls on them to organize and uphold accountability.

They need to protest, take legal action, support reporters uncovering fraud, and put pressure on politicians to take action. 

Will those who took power by cheating care about protest?

Will taking action in the courts be a fair risk when many of the judges are the enemy?

Through what medium will “reporters uncovering fraud” make their reports known? (Even Fox News has largely gone over to the dark side.)

Which politicians can be pressed to take what action?

The sheer size of the task has already caused some conservatives to give up. Instead of confronting the challenge, they are more willing to cut their losses, celebrate keeping the Senate and winning a few seats in the House, and take comfort in the fact that the polls and media were wrong after all.

But a stolen presidential election tends to negate most of this. True, most limits to unbridled Democratic power, like the current size and makeup of the Supreme Court, the number of states currently in the Union, and keeping the filibuster, will remain. Yet so will the forces that rigged the election in the first place [remain]. A Biden-Harris presidency effectively would be the first step in making the whole nation a one-party blue state like California.

By contrast, if Trump fights this and wins, his administration can work to fix this system and would have every reason to do so. As Jeb Bush tweeted to someone wondering why Florida could count their votes on Election Day while smaller states struggled, “Because we learned our lesson after 2000 and changed our laws.” The same could happen in the rest of America where this year’s election showed the overwhelming stupidity of universal mail-in ballots, legalized ballot harvesting, early voting weeks before the election, and not requiring voter identification. These simple fixes to the voting process would go far to ensure greater trust in the system …

The Republicans in power saw all that coming and failed to stop it. They did not even try to stop it.

It’s not an overstatement to say the outcome of this election will determine all foreseeable future elections.

The country’s democratic system is at stake. If Democrats win this election through cheating and fraud, all future elections will become meaningless and the country’s political leadership will be determined by an oligarchy of progressive and socialist billionaires. 

And all of this is plainly visible with each new update. The oligarch-owned Washington Post needs to change its motto, “Democracy dies in darkness.” As it stands, American democracy is dying in the daylight, and normal Americans need to save it before it’s too late.

Yes, Americans who value freedom need to save the republic.

One of our commenters, James Johnson, recently wrote:

We need a new Republican Party – one that’s unified. Trump was our guy, but the party squandered its opportunity to pass real legislation that withstands changes in the administration.

Personally, I’m using the coming two years to take a leaf out of the left’s book and engage in conservative activism. To win against the deep state will require massive conservative majorities; it’s tough to achieve those without matching the level of energy the left expends on direct action.

That is the sort of resolution that is needed. Only if the half of America that still wants freedom supports this idea, and a sufficient number – a great many – of the voters who have been cheated of their victory in this election become active and work with unremitting energy, can the free republic be saved. Or, if it is already lost, restored.

The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil Constitution, are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors: they purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood, and transmitted them to us with care and diligence. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men. – Samuel Adams

Is liberal democracy, the nation held together as such by a constitution of liberty, the genuinely open society, no longer able to sustain itself?

If so, why?

We know what enemies assail it, what developments continue to weaken it, but wonder why it has not proved strong enough to withstand them, if it is failing to do so.

Is there a fatal weakness in the best political system ever devised, exemplified by the Constitution of the United States of America?

Or do you think the long established libertarian nature of the US, Canada, Australia – perhaps even of Britain, far gone as it is – will yet prove stronger than the ruinous pull to the Left and the encroachments of Islam? Will it stop and reverse the trend now well underway towards tyranny?

John O’Sullivan wrote recently at the National Review:

I doubt Wokeness will triumph in the United States or anywhere in the English-speaking world where democratic and liberal traditions are deeply rooted, if at present very far from flowering. Those traditions will almost certainly be strong enough to contain a Woke regime long enough for an election to punish its preordained chaos, failure, and authoritarianism.

Are democratic and liberal traditions deeply rooted enough in the English-speaking world? Are they strong enough? Will electorates punish an authoritarian regime if they mistakenly put it in power? (What if such a regime abolishes elections?)

We look forward to our readers telling us any answers they may have to these questions.

(You can be as cynical about human nature as you need to be, if the answer, or part of it, lies there.)

Capitalists are lavishly funding the Communist revolution now underway in America.

Black Lives Matter, a Marxist revolutionary movement whose goal is to overthrow the free constitutional republic of the United States, has been given/promised well over a billion dollars “so far” by American businesses to help it realize its aim.

The Federalist reports:

At least seven “Fortune 500” companies donated funds to the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation despite its Marxist roots and anti-capitalistic views.

According to Axios, “the 100 largest U.S. companies have so far committed $1.63 billion to organizations fighting racism and inequality”. Analysis of social media posts, blogs, and public statements … shows that Deckers Uggs, Amazon, Pepsi’s Gatorade, Microsoft, Warner Records, Intel, Bungie of Xbox and Microsoft Games, and Mondelez International’s Nabisco all specifically pledged money to the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation following the death of George Floyd. …

The article includes a (non-exhaustive) list of of donating companies.

The beneficiaries complain:

What is surprising is the paucity of corporations and the stinginess of the donations. [!]

One of the BLM co-founders, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, explained the foundation of the movement, inspired by her and co-founders Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi, in an interview [with The Real News] in 2015:

We actually do have an ideological frame. Myself and Alicia in particular are trained organizers. We are trained Marxists.

So of course was Obama, who stated proudly that he was a “community organizer”, which means, in blunt terms, a red revolutionary rabble-rouser.

The riots – no doubt joined by many “useful idiots” who are simply bored with being kept from work and confined to their homes by the quarantine regulations – have a purpose, a point, a meaning far beyond expressing indignation for the fatal police mistreatment of George Floyd, the petty criminal and historic international martyr.

BLM is the latest vanguard of Communist revolution in America, aimed –  as one African immigrant, leading revolutionary, and elected member of Congress, Ilhan Omar, says – at “dismantling the system”, meaning the overthrow of the free constitutional republic.

The movement and its entire agenda is supported by the Democratic Party, and if the Democrats are elected to power in November, the Communist Revolution of the USA will have been accomplished.

*

Reminded by Liz, we add:

Soros, the most evil of all anti-capitalism capitalists, uses his billions to employ legions of demons – these days he prefers them to be black and female – to promote crime and cripple law and order. His money gets them into powerful positions, notably the office of State or District Attorney. Then at his command they proceed to corrupt the criminal justice system.

Facebook will not allow us to post this statement of fact quoted from The Religion of Peace with the link to that website’s comprehensive list of proofs of its truthfulness:

Given the recent interest in assessing historical characters by
their views on slavery, it bears mentioning that Muhammad,
the prophet of Islam, owned and traded African slaves.

Details in Islamic scripture here.

It is not difficult to guess why Facebook rejects it. Any criticism of Islam, any mention of something not in its favor, is now taboo in the social media, the mainstream media, articles, books, videos, films.

“Progressives”, the friends of Islam, overrule the First Amendment wherever they have the power to do it.

A huge victory for Islam against the still-fairly-free world.

Questions about rights – what they are, who or what grants them, how they may be upheld – are not and cannot be settled. They’re continually subject to debate in our culture.

Everyone’s right to life is quite widely accepted – though not by Communists and Muslims, and only provisionally by French philosophers and American Democrats. A right to liberty has been acknowledged increasingly by most governments – not yet all – over the last couple of hundred years. But other proclaimed rights continue to be passionately demanded and challenged: Does everyone have a right to medical treatment, to education, to housing? Do we have a right not to be offended? If these are rights, how might they be protected?

Rights are things that can be possessed. Individuals own them.

Wrongs are things that people do, or have done to them.

What it is wrong to do was settled for civilized peoples thousands of years ago: it is wrong to kill, to harm, to steal, to lie.

But unsettled questions linger about wrong-doing:

How can wrong-doing be assessed? How should it be dealt with? By whom?

Are some killings not wrong? Is it not wrong to kill in war, in self-defense, in the execution of justice?

And to acknowledge certain (uncivilized) schools of thought we note that it is not wrong according to Communists for a leader to kill individuals for the benefit of the community; not wrong according to Islam for Muslims to kill non-Muslims or their own children; not wrong according to certain French philosophers to kill for the erotic excitement of killing; not wrong according to certain American Democrats to kill an elected president.

Globalism has failed. It was always a bad idea.

It was invented by Americans. Because Americans live in a man-made multi-ethnic state, they are comfortable with the concept.

But most countries are mono-ethnic. With few exceptions, each has its own distinct culture, history, language, character – some with an uncomfortable mix of religions. They are not man-made nations, they are time-made nations. They have evolved. Through very long stretches of time.

They do not resemble each other. Many have warred with each other and have old scars, ancestral antipathies. That’s why the League of Nations – envisioned and established by President Woodrow Wilson, yet strangely never joined by the USA – failed; and why the United Nations Organization is a hellish institution; and why the European Union is a racket run by a gang.

Americans built their nation out of several young states, fastened them together, “out of many one”, with the bolt of a constitution, and the project succeeded. The land prospered, from sea to shining sea, a vast enterprise park of ethnicities, religions, cultures where individuals work together in just one language. So certain Americans, well-meaning and incapable of allowing themselves to think badly of human nature, thought the whole world could be like the USA – in 6,500 languages. 

They were wrong.

Curtis Ellis, who was a policy advisor with the Trump presidential campaign, writes at American Greatness:

The CCP virus pandemic has added urgency to a long-overdue reassessment of the assumptions underlying the post-World War II “international rules-based order.”

To be clear, “international rules-based order” is a euphemism for globalism, and globalism has taken a beating these past few months.

We’ve seen how the true cost of doing business with China is a very high price indeed. We’ve seen how an economy reliant on global supply chains and just-in-time inventory management is a fragile one, and we’ve seen how the Chinese Communist Party is not the benign force we expected it to be when we welcomed it into “the family of trading nations.”

The pandemic has exposed the flaws in the globalization project the elites have been pursuing for the past 70 years.

The World Trade Organization is a cornerstone of that project and, like the World Heath Organization, its sister in the globalist pantheon, the WTO is now under fire in Washington. …

The World Trade Organization was born after the Berlin Wall fell. Gone were the days of a trade and military alliance of Western industrial democracies—the free world standing against a Communist bloc. In the new post-Cold War world order, goods and capital would flow freely in a global economy of universal prosperity and democracy.

Though the WTO was born in 1995, it’s conception dates to 1947. That’s when the State Department sought to create an international trade organization “to bring about world peace . . . and prevent World War III.”

A California congressman at the time described Washington’s negotiators as “boatloads of smug diplomats, all wise economists, experts, theorists, specialists and whatnots eager to barter away the little factory in Wichita, the little shop in Keokuk.”

While they failed in ’47, they kept the dream alive over the decades. “What’s good for the global economy” replaced “what’s good for America” as the guiding principle for Washington’s trade negotiators, diplomats, and strategists.

The “experts” pursued their plan without debate or congressional vote. No one came right out and told the American people their nation and system of government were being replaced.

As Richard Gardner, the man who served as Bill Clinton’s ambassador to Spain explained, “The ‘house of world order’ will have to be built from the bottom up. . . . An end-run about national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than a frontal assault.”

Strobe Talbott served in Bill Clinton’s State Department when the WTO was founded. He described “The Birth of the Global Nation” in Time magazine in 1992: “Countries are . . . artificial and temporary. . . . Within the next hundred years . . . nationhood as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority. A phrase briefly fashionable in the mid-20th century—“citizen of the world”—will have assumed real meaning by the end of the 21st.”

Long before the pandemic exposed the follies and fallacies of the globalist project, before it showed us how, when push comes to shove, national governments will always put their own interests first, administrations on both sides of the aisle had problems with the WTO.

Another problem of the WTO involves its appellate body—judges who interpret WTO rules and settle disputes among members. Yet the WTO doesn’t follow its own rules.

Article 17.5 of the WTO rules says cases that come before the organization—disputes between nations over unfair trade practices—must be settled within 90 days. In reality, cases drag on for years, during which time the victims go bankrupt while awaiting justice.

The rules also say judges cannot be affiliated with any government. Yet in a recent case involving paper imports, none of the judges met the WTO’s criteria, and one was actually an official of the Chinese government. The judges, not surprisingly, ruled against the United States.

Where should the judges come from? Another planet?

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer blasted the ruling as “the latest example of judicial activism” by the WTO aimed at undermining U.S. trade laws.

And when the WTO isn’t flouting its own rules, it’s making up new ones.

We thought we signed a contract when we joined the WTO, but it’s a contract with terms that keep changing. We put our country at the mercy of an entity with rules and authority that are constantly growing.

Past administrations both Democratic and Republican objected to WTO judges creating obligations to which the United States never agreed.

The Trump Administration, fed up with U.S. complaints falling on deaf ears, stopped approving new judges and froze the appeals “courts” process. In response, WTO bureaucrats went ahead and created a new judicial body outside the agreed-upon rules—and it is using American taxpayer dollars to fund its operation.

The WTO’s various power grabs threaten American sovereignty.

The Article XXI rule,the national security exception, reads: “Nothing in this Agreement shall be construed . . . to prevent any contracting party from taking any action which it considers necessary for the protection of its essential security interests.”

That’s what the United States signed and we take its meaning to be absolutely clear: We can take actions based on what we consider to be in our national security interest and the WTO can’t stop us.

President Trump determined the national security interests of the United States require us to be self-sufficient in producing steel and aluminum. To that end, he imposed tariffs to stop China and other countries from dumping their metals and driving American producers out of business.

But the Eurocrats in Geneva believe it’s up to their unelected “judges,” not the elected government of the United States, to decide what’s in America’s national security interest, no matter what Article XXI says.

Steven Vaughn served as counsel to the office of the United States Trade Representative. He believes there’s a fundamental problem with the WTO when we can read the same text and come to opposite conclusions.

“Somebody misunderstood what we all agreed to. We were told we had not given up any of our sovereignty,” Vaughn says. “If we’re this far apart just in terms of the basic concept, what is the point of trying to paper over them.”

How can you even talk about reform with an organization that doesn’t agree on the meaning of “cases will be settled within 90 days”? What good is rewriting rules for an outfit that doesn’t follow rules?

Why bother to remain in the WTO?

It has done nothing to stop the greatest threat to world trade today: Communist China’s beggar-thy-neighbor predatory trade practices.

China supports its export industries with subsidies, tax breaks, export rebates, low-cost loans, and cheap inputs including a militarized workforce. The WTO has allowed Beijing to maintain its trade barriers even as we lowered ours. It requires the United States to treat repressive regimes that use forced labor the same as our democratic allies.

President Clinton’s Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott saw the WTO, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank as “protoministries of trade, finance, and development for a united world”.

The WTO was part of a bold experiment to build a borderless, post-national world.

We can now say with certainty the experiment failed.

It’s time to take back control of our destiny, leave the WTO, and rebuild America

Leave the UN. 

Leave all international organizations.

Trade yes, join no.

To make America great again.

Adrian Vermeule is a Harvard professor of Constitutional Law who doesn’t like the US Constitution, is nostalgic for Roman Catholic statist totalitarianism, and proposes a new dispensation for Americans under “authoritative rule for the common good” which, he gleefully declares, requires the “overriding” of “the selfish claims of individuals to ‘private rights’”.

Vermeule is a convert to Catholicism. He does not mention Catholicism by name in this article, but his belief that morality is rightly defined and imposed by a central authority for the “common good” belongs to his religion. And the idea that self-sacrifice is the highest moral good is essentially a Christian teaching. A fear of heresy – people being allowed to voice an opinion that the state-as-church does not approve – suffuses his political philosophy.

“Free speech and free-speech ideology — that government is forbidden to judge the quality and moral worth of public speech,” he writes, “should be not only rejected but stamped as abominable, beyond the realm of the acceptable forever”.

The article in which he propounds these views appears in the Leftist journal, The Atlantic, as “part of the project The Battle for the Constitution, in partnership with the National Constitution Center”. (Go there to see how all the contributions to this project are actually against the Constitution.)

It is easy to see why The Atlantic likes his ideas. Stalin would have applauded them.

As for the structure and distribution of authority within government, common-good constitutionalism will favor a powerful presidency ruling over a powerful bureaucracy, the latter acting through principles of administrative law’s inner morality with a view to promoting solidarity and subsidiarity. The bureaucracy will be seen not as an enemy, but as the strong hand of legitimate rule. The state is to be entrusted with the authority to protect the populace from the vagaries and injustices of market forces, from employers who would exploit them as atomized individuals, and from corporate exploitation and destruction of the natural environment. 

The close resemblance between Left statism and Catholic Christianity could not be more candidly displayed.

This Constitutional Law professor would not allow a thread of the Constitution to remain … Oh, wait! He does allow a few threads to remain, useful for the re-construction of the United States of America:

The general-welfare clause, which gives Congress “power to … provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States”, is an obvious place to ground principles of common-good constitutionalism (despite a liberal tradition of reading the clause in a cramped fashion), as is the Constitution’s preamble, with its references to general welfare and domestic tranquility, to the perfection of the union, and to justice.

And he could endure the retention of some words, provided they were re-interpreted:

Constitutional words such as freedom and liberty need not be given libertarian readings; instead they can be read in light of a better conception of liberty as the natural human capacity to act in accordance with reasoned morality.

“Reasoned morality” being the “common-good” morality such as was propounded by the Catholic Church and for many centuries enforced by the Papal and Spanish Inquisitions.

This imposed “common-good” morality will be resisted at first, but –

Subjects will come to thank the ruler whose legal strictures, possibly experienced at first as coercive, encourage subjects to form more authentic desires for the individual and common goods, better habits, and beliefs that better track and promote communal well-being.

Notice that citizens have become “subjects” under this ideal regime. And the state run by bureaucrats has become “the ruler” – more pope than king.

If it can be taken that The Atlantic speaks for the Left – and surely it can? – we are being told in the strongest possible terms that the Left wants and intends to abandon the Constitution – which alone binds the states of America together into a nation – and substitute a federal government with totalitarian policies and absolute powers that would establish Roman Catholicism as a state religion, substitute central planning for the free market, and implement the “green” policies of environmentalists further to restrict our lives as “subjects” of the Moral State.

If it was just one Catholic religious nut pleading for the establishment of this utopia, we could laugh at it and forget it.

But it is not just one. It is millions of – mostly young, school-indoctrinated – Leftist religious nuts wanting dependence on parental government; the drowning of individuals in an ocean of common-good; the implementation of anti-industrial “green” policies with the hard forced labor and poverty they’ll entail; sacrifice of personal ambitions and talents; acceptance of chastisement for sin (you “will come to thank the ruler” for it) and life-long indebtedness for food, shelter, and apportioned health care; total loss of self-determination; obedience.

Obedience. Bureaucrats will tell you what to do. Do it!  It is for the common good.

Above all, obedience.