…  asks Angelo Codevilla at American Greatness, and answers that it is –

The exercise of coercive powers by and for self-selected elites. 

Which describes the present government of the United States.

America is no longer a constitutional republic.

The writer states firmly –

It is an oligarchy. 

He asks more rhetorical questions:

What are hundreds of America’s biggest corporations doing as they browbeat the public to abolish the requirement of identification for voting? What are Twitter, Facebook, et al. doing when they prohibit people from sharing facts that are inconvenient to government policy or (and) the Democratic Party? What did banks do when they turned over to the FBI the records of persons who happened to have traveled to D.C. near January 6? And what about all those big retail stores—you know, the ones that the government designated “essential,” the ones that thrived under the lockdowns—what are they doing when they continue to demand that you wear masks on their property regardless of vaccination? What are colleges and universities, even K-12 schools doing when they deprive of opportunities young people who do not fit woke profiles? And what do all of them do when they dismiss complaints that they are violating your Constitutional rights by telling you that they are exercising their own private rights?

Are they simply fronting for the government or, specifically, for the Democratic Party?

Is the government—in practice, the political party that controls the government—fronting for corporations, or do the corporations front for the Party? Do the drug companies influence what the Centers for Disease Control “recommends” regarding pandemic restrictions? Do they influence the Democratic Party, or is it the other way around? Who runs whom?

He does not answer those questions. He dismisses them.

Understanding what is happening in America begins with dismissing such silly questions. Focus, instead, on the fact that those who rule us in all these matters are essentially the same people. They are interchangeable, with near-identical interests, loves, hates, and tastes. Often, they are friends and colleagues, and are united about coercing whomever is not on their own sociopolitical side. Whether the institutions they control are public or private under our Constitutional system has ceased to matter.

The American republic was founded in 1776-89 by the people at large, to serve the general interest by mixing the power of sheer numbers with that of states, and with that of a unitary presidency. But over the last century, the increasingly homogeneous set of people who run the republic’s institutions took power out of the hands of the people’s elected representatives pretty much at all levels, and have governed in their own interest rather than in the general population’s. Nobody voted for this, on any level.

In 21st century America, this oligarchy erased the distinction between public and private powers, and replaced it with the distinction between those who are and are not part of the ruling class. The privatization of public power is oligarchy’s essence. Because government is by the ruling class few, and is for that class’s interest, the oligarchs can wield the coercive powers of government without legal limits, as if they were dealing with their own private affairs.

Those who live under oligarchies are not citizens—because oligarchy validates itself, decides for itself, within itself, and because it is committed above all to negating the people’s capacity to rule itself.

Americans struggle to understand what is happening because we still regard ourselves as citizens, and imagine that those who run our republican institutions still respect them to some extent.

But we aren’t, and they don’t.

We see persons whom the ruling class favors committing crimes with impunity, and complain of a two-tiered justice system. But this is not mere corruption.

We see corporations wielding government powers and complain that power is being franchised to favorites. But these are not mere favorites of the regime. This is the new regime being itself. Such things are not deviations from republican legality. They are the assertion of oligarchic reality. This is oligarchic justice, oligarchic normality.

The republic was yesterday. The oligarchy is today.

Conservatives’ mistake is to try conserving something that no longer exists by supporting institutions that now belong to a regime so alien to republican life that it treats attempts at citizenship as crimes against the regime. And so they are. They call today’s American regime “our democracy”. It is “theirs” all right, but not ours.

It is a classic oligarchy.

Can it be defeated? The writer thinks it can be.

Rejection of oligarchy is possible, even easy, if and when large numbers of persons do it together. This goes for ostensibly private corporations as well as for formerly republican institutions now in the oligarchs’ hands. The moment that millions of Americans, whether led by actual state governors in league with one another or by prospective presidents, recognize that Twitter and Facebook are enemy institutions, their power ends. The moment that millions are led to boycott Costco, or Pfizer, their officers are fired. The moment that these millions, so led, refuse the legitimacy of anything coming from Washington, its power ends.

Our oligarchs, having seen how easy it was to cower the majority of Americans to agree to the stupid, self-destructive practices of mask-wearing and lockdowns, having rejoiced in ruining the lives of small numbers of individual dissenters, believing that, under the media’s cover, their threats to crush opponents as white supremacists will forestall serious resistance, fantasize about applying the tools of the war on terror to America’s population.

But no. Their success was due to what remained of the American people’s confidence in them. That is now gone. The oligarchs have the FBI and CIA, and the Pentagon’s generals. But who will risk his pension, never mind his life, for them? Who will risk anything for Kamala Harris, never mind Joseph Biden?

Nor, in 2021, can anybody stop the governors and legislatures of any number of states from leading their peoples in settling what is and is not acceptable to them, how they shall and shall not live—that is, nobody can stop them as they decide to govern themselves.

The American people, divided as they are, cannot purge the oligarchs from what had been republican institutions. But those so minded have full power to defend themselves from them and to leave them to their own devices.

Will some – perhaps most – states simply disobey the federal government? Is that the way back to a free republic?

It is the policy of the “Biden” government to house and feed illegal aliens free in hotel luxury while US military veterans live and die on the streets under their windows.

“Biden” is the label the American Oligarchy has stuck on itself.

Radio host James T. Harris shows a typical picture of city life in Biden’s America:

We do not generally trust polls, but these figures endorse something we are pretty sure of anyway, so we trust them more than most.

Ameer Benno reports at the Western Journal:

The Democratic Party is now undeniably the party of the wealthy.

IRS data from 2020 show that Democrats represent 65 percent of taxpayers with a household income of $500,000.

Most taxpayers in Republican districts – 74% – have household incomes of less than $100,000.

Census Bureau data that show the typical congressional district represented by a Republican in 2020 was 13 percent poorer than its Democratic counterpart.

A somewhat less scientific analysis from 2020 reinforced that the GOP is the party of working Americans. According to The Cook Political Report, 85 percent of counties with a Whole Foods store voted for Joe Biden over Donald Trump, while only 32 percent of counties with a Cracker Barrel Old Country store did so — a “culture gap” of 53 points.

This demographic shift is part of a long-term trend that began well before the arrival of Trump and his MAGA policies on the political scene.

A 2015 study revealed that families registered as Democrats have higher annual salaries than Republicans.

And, according to a Vox report from 2016, top-end wealth in America over the past several decades has increasingly concentrated in a handful of metropolises. Most of these very prosperous cities (especially New York, San Francisco, Boston, and Los Angeles) have become very solidly Democratic.

Despite these metrics, many cultural elitists on the left continue to perpetuate the canard that Republicans are country club snobs and that the Democrats are the party of the little guy, the underdog and the downtrodden. A Pew Research Center survey conducted during the Obama years revealed that more than 60 percent of Americans believed that Republicans were the party of the wealthy, but only 20 percent felt that way about Democrats. Conversely, 67 percent of Americans believed that the Democratic Party favors the poor and middle-class, and only 26 percent felt that way about Republicans.

The writer then speculates:

But if the Democratic Party is home to so many high-earners, why does it support so many wealth-killing measures, such as Biden’s 43.4 percent capital gains tax and the steep hike in the corporate tax rate?

The answer is that, generally speaking, its members view affluence — even their own — with scorn. Financial success does not inspire pride but shame. It is not something to be celebrated but punished.

Who can be so hard of heart as not to pity rich Democrats?

Luckily, there’s an easy cure for their suffering. Each has only to unload his/her/xir personal wealth onto any Republicans they happen to know or know of. Away with the dollars, away with the shame. Let Republicans endure the affliction of wealth.  

“Kill those who are not Muslim.” – Koran, Sura 9:5

Paul Joseph Watson tells how this order, sent by Allah through his Prophet (mm-hmm-hmmm), was carried out today in France – where the motive behind the killings remains a mystery.

Police officers are resigning by the thousand.

With what – surely expectable – result?

Example:

Throughout a year of riots, autonomous zones, demonization of the police by public officials and defunding in 2020, over 200 officers quit the Seattle force. An additional 66 officers have quit so far in 2021. There are only 1,080 deployable officers –  a record low not seen since the 1980’s when the population of the city was less than half what it is now.

In August, the Seattle City Council defunded the department in perverse response to the riots following the death of George Floyd. Millions of dollars were funneled from the police department to local activist organizations, many of which were involved in the riots and the setting up of an “autonomous zone”. 

The defunding of the police has meant that the department is critically short-handed. This affects the investigation of crimes, and curtails routine patrol shifts to prevent crimes being committed. Residents wait long for a response after calling 911. Often there is no response.

This week it took police almost an hour to respond to a gun emergency on a public school campus.

Crime has increased across the city. The homicide rate in 2020 doubled from 2019 and is continuing the same upward climb in 2021.

Despite this, the City Council is considering more cuts to the police department’s budget.

In an interview with NPR, Seattle’s former police chief, Carmen Best, who resigned last summer, said the cuts and anti-police climate convinced her that her department was “destined to fail”.

Even Democrats can figure out, since it is obvious, that if you have too few police, or none, you will have a lot of crime. 

So having a lot of crime is their intention.

The agenda for which, they tell us, a majority of Americans voted in 2020!

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?

At last count, approximately 8,000 people live on San Francisco’s streets. 

Erica Sandberg writes at City Journal:

The most important walk you can take in San Francisco is not to the grand Golden Gate bridge, down crooked Lombard Street, or to the brightly painted Victorians in Alamo Square.

They are still there of course. But they are not the most memorable things about San Francisco. Not any more. What is?

It’s to the city’s large and gritty sixth district, which contains the Tenderloin, Civic Center, and South of Market neighborhoods. What you’ll find there will shatter any preconceived notions about homelessness you might have heard from activists, city departments, and elected officials. You’ll realize that San Francisco doesn’t have a homeless problem—it has a substance-abuse crisis. And Project Roomkey, California governor Gavin Newsom’s hotels-for-homeless plan that he’s touting as a model for the rest of the country, won’t help any more than a band-aid will cure a cancer patient.

Block after block, you’ll see thousands of people who are barely alive. Some are alone; others are piled on top of one another, running into traffic, or standing slumped over, unconscious. They’ll be injecting or smoking heroin, fentanyl, and methamphetamine in front of you, unaware or unfazed by your presence. Scabs cover their faces and bodies, limbs are swollen red and blue, often bloody and oozing pus. You’ll notice the garbage, rotting food, discarded drug detritus, and feces surrounding them. A shocking number are mere teenagers, but many are old or have aged well before their time.

Yet Newsom has declared that with programs like Project Roomkey, the United States can solve homelessness. To see the results of the program is to know what a bizarre claim this is. While a small portion of the unhoused are healthy enough to shift into and benefit from such housing, the vast majority are not—and their troubles won’t be alleviated by a hotel room.

Crime has also surged around the SIP motels and hotels, as people score from dealers just outside the lobbies. Shootings, robberies, and car break-ins have become commonplace, as have open-air drug use and sexual acts performed in broad daylight—an alarming change for neighborhoods like the Marina, which not long ago did not have a high population of unhoused, addicted people.

The tide of people coming into the city, drawn by easy access to cheap, potent narcotics, will continue unabated. Some may get a hotel room, but most will become fixtures on the streets. Few, if any, will get better. Based on current projections, more than 1,000 people will die from overdose in 2021.

Who or what turned pleasant charming San Francisco into a hellhole?

What political party governs the city? And the state?

To what party does Governor Gavin Newsom belong?

No prizes for the right answers.

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.

Nobody knows or can ever know if Derek Chauvin intended to kill the criminal drug-addict George Floyd.

It is very unlikely that he intended to. Why would he?

Multitudes accuse him of the cruel intent. They don’t care if he did or didn’t want to do it, did or didn’t actually do it. They want Chauvin to have intentionally murdered Floyd. They want it as an excuse for anger. They enjoy the lovely feeling of righteous indignation, and who dare say it’s not righteous?

It’s terrifically enjoyable – they find – doing damage to property and harm to people, as an expression of righteous indignation, of ever-so-fully-justified anger.

Who can rebuke them when they are doing the damage and harm in the name of a victim cruelly murdered? The name of George Floyd – a martyr canonized as the patron saint of all black victims in the centuries-long victimhood of black people subjected to the authority of white people?

The cause is so great, it even justifies killing. What a joy! What thrilling nights spent in burning, looting, killing! Great sport! Bliss is it on these nights to be alive, and to be violent is very heaven!

Joy Pullman writes at The Federalist:

A Minnesota jury has found former police officer Derek Chauvin guilty of second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter. This means they claim to have concluded that they unanimously believe beyond a reasonable doubt that Chauvin caused Floyd’s death.

The judge in the case refused to sequester jurors from media coverage and outside influences during the trial, and the pressure conveyed to them was beyond intense. It was made perfectly clear to them that the nation would be engulfed in flames if they expressed a reasonable doubt over whether Floyd’s death was Chauvin’s fault.

The entire bloody year of 2020, in which unprecedented and murderous riots swept the nation, was premised on the incident that led to this trial. At least 30 people died amid waves of riots that widely used Floyd’s death as the pretext. The Floyd riots have caused the most high-dollar damage in U.S. history, an estimated $2 billion.

The rioters’ violence against police, and elected officials’ willful endorsement of the rioters and failure to back law and order in response, helped cause a historic surge in homicides. As measured across 34 sampled cities, homicides surged 30 percent in 2020, causing an additional 1,200 dead. That’s just in 34 cities.

So, thanks to the anti-police unrest employed in the wake of Floyd’s death, thousands more people are now dead, and a disproportionate number of them are black. The riots’ unchecked anti-police violence metastasized in deadly crime. Anyone who lives in or near a city like these jurors do, especially those in the Twin Cities epicenter, is fully aware of this.

That was all before the verdict. During the Chauvin trial itself, rioters smashed buildings and assaulted police nearby in the aftermath of another officer-involved shooting. Minneapolis police put up razor wire around their offices in preparation for the verdict announcement. So did police and cities across the nation.

National Guard troops were deployed in Minnesota and D.C. in anticipation of the verdict announcement.

The jurors knew that the media covering the trial and looking at their faces every day for three weeks knows who they are. An in-state newspaper even signaled to the jurors its willingness to expose them to the violent mobs roving Minnesota over the last year by publishing descriptions of the jurors in advance of the verdict. Those descriptions published in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune contained age, race, location, profession, even immigration history.

The city government building where jurors heard the case was fortified like a military installation in an occupied country. Every day, they walked into this.

You think jurors would have been willing to have themselves and their families go into witness protection to venture a reasonable doubt about Chauvin’s potential contribution to Floyd’s death? You think they’d be willing to trade their lives plus nationwide violence for one stranger’s?

No. Which means that the rule of law cannot be maintained while this government is in power. Rule of law and Black Lives Matter anti-American revolutionary Leftism are incompatible.They are  antithetical concepts.

Officials from the local mayor all the way up to the president of the United States made it clear in widely reported news the jurors and all their family, friends, and neighbors could read and would have to live with for the rest of their lives that the only verdict they would accept was “guilty”. Democrat politicians openly called for violence if the jury did not decide as street thugs wished, and the Democrat Party — which controls all levels of the national government at present, as well as controlling the state in which these jurors live — backed them up.

Everyone, including these jurors, knew exactly what would happen to them at the hands of mobs like this if they expressed a reasonable doubt about whether a man who died while overdosing and with a serious heart condition was actually killed by a police officer kneeling on him after he had struggled with police repeatedly. …

America’s left purposefully made a fair trial impossible, all for political power. They deliberately perverted justice in favor of violent mob rule to strengthen their political hand.

They have done evil and called it justice.

And are guilty too of making the far from saintly, far from heroic Derek Chauvin into the only actual martyr.