Seriously dangerous inflation has begun and will rapidly increase.

Senator Rand Paul decried the “Corona relief” bill, 6,000 pages long, passed late last night (December 21, 2020), without any member of Congress having read it. And he cried a warning.

Breitbart reports:

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) blasted the $2.3 trillion government spending bill — $900 billion of which is dedicated to coronavirus relief — criticizing Republicans for voting to print money with impunity. …

Rand Paul rightly called it “a deficits-don’t-matter disaster“.

He continued:

This bill is free money for everyone. … And yet if free money were the answer, if money really grew on trees, why not give more free money? Why not give it out all the time? Why stop at $600 per person? Why not $1,000? Why not $2,000?

Maybe these new free-money Republicans should join the everybody-gets-a-guaranteed-income caucus. Why not $20,000 a year for everybody? Why not $30,000? If we can print up money with impunity, why not do it?

The treasury can just keep printing the money. That is, until someone points out that the dollar no longer has value. 

To so-called conservatives who are quick to call out the socialism of Democrats: if you vote for this spending monstrosity, you are no better. When you vote to pass out free money, you … abandon forever any semblance of moral or fiscal integrity.

He assessed that the difference between the parties on this issue “is less Adam Smith versus Marx and more Marx versus Engels.”

[He] further explained the country’s fiscal situation, noting the nation brought in $3.3 trillion last year and spent $6.6 trillion.

The deficit was a “record-busting $3.3 trillion,” he said … [though] “such extraordinary spending habits have been going on for decades.”

“Today’s money is gone, so Congress is spending tomorrow’s money,” he said, noting that the country finds itself $27 trillion in debt today with no cuts, offsets, or prioritization in Congress.

Spend all this money and leave the future to figure itself out …

He also pointed out that Congress is helping to perpetuate lockdowns “by supporting states implementing rules that are arbitrary and unscientific”.

And –

Governors are picking winners and losers while family businesses are being wiped out. The need for help is real … but it’s clear that government has worsened the economic damage and acted as the biggest obstacle to economic recovery.

Think Venezuela, comrades.

The nature of the constitutional crisis, and what powers the president has for dealing with it, are clearly explained:

https://youtu.be/QVEs9yvg_Vo

President Trump is strong, but the Big State is stronger.

Bruce Bawer finds consolation in historical precedents for the political disaster happening now. They are interesting, but we omit them from our quotation of his article at Front Page, being concerned for the moment only with the great disappointment he describes:

This year’s apparently successful election fraud … was not a stand-alone event but the culmination of several years of Democratic chicanery, beginning with the effort to destroy Trump’s campaign and continuing with the attempt to bring down his presidency. During these years, one public figure after another was held up to us as a hero and then shown to be yet another Big State sewer rat. …

Remember being assured by people you trusted that Bill Barr and John Durham would get to the bottom of the Russia hoax? The other day, when Texas AG Ken Paxton took his election-fraud case against four other states to the Supreme Court, were you among those who expected the three Trump appointees to join Alito and Thomas in stopping the steal?

Yes, the Trump administration has yielded one triumph after another. But living through it has also meant experiencing one crushing disappointment after another. It’s been hard not to feel that the swamp was too deep even for Trump to drain, and that, by dreaming otherwise, we were being hopelessly naïve.

For heaven’s sake, not only did Barr, after promising to deliver a long-overdue reckoning, drag his heels on the Russia probe; it now turns out that during the entire campaign season he’s known about investigations into the Biden clan that, if made public, would almost certainly have reduced voter support for Joe to a point that would’ve made the election steal impossible.

We feel duped. Deflated. Stunned in 2016 by Trump’s victory, we’re even more stunned in 2020 to see victory snatched from our president and handed to a senile, China-owned mediocrity.

We now face the prospect of an inauguration at which Joe and Hunter, Bill and Hill, Barack and Michelle – all of whom should be in prison – will be celebrating their joint triumph over Trump. …

We shouldn’t let this election steal … make us feel that a golden age of morality has given way … to an era of perfidy and lies. …Nor should we feel disappointed in Trump if he fails to overcome the election steal. He’s accomplished a remarkable amount, but expecting the superhuman from him is neither fair to him nor good for us. …

Our country’s Founders … in their wisdom, sought to fashion a government that would, in the face of our species’ moral frailty, stand a chance not only of enduring in the long term but also of making possible, from one generation to the next, the survival of liberty.

But the preservation of that liberty depends on us. “Freedom,” Ronald Reagan famously proclaimed, “is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”

Indeed. At this admittedly strange and disturbing historical moment, it’s important for all Americans of good faith to rise above any self-pitying or (heaven forfend) nihilistic sense of lost innocence that we might feel, to embrace with hope and heart our role as the Constitution’s current custodians, and – for the sake of our progenitors and our posterity – recommit ourselves to our obligation to right our beloved ship of State when she’s been buffeted, or worse, by the waves of malfeasance and mendacity.

Stirring stuff. But a gang of crooks has been wangled into power by the Big State in order to discard the Constitution and replace it with a Great Reset, a new world order, an agenda that renders our Constitutionally recognized rights no longer “unalienable”.

They will if they can scuttle the ship of State. Destroy America.

What will, what can, heart and hope do to save it?

The powerful coterie that accused Donald Trump, first as a candidate for the presidency and then as president, of “colluding” with Vladimir Putin to do something-or-other in the interest of Russia and against the interest of the United States, knew perfectly well that the accusation was a lie since they themselves had invented it. They would have him exposed and punished as a traitor to the country he led, knowing full well that he was nothing of the sort but in fact a passionate American patriot.

Now their chosen president, Joe Biden, and his powerful supporters – billionaires, owners of vast international corporations, film makers, newspaper and television moguls, federal bureaucrats, career diplomats, primates of academia – are colluding with the Chinese Communist Party to do what it pays them to do in the interest of China and against the interest of the United States.

Victor Davis Hanson writes at American Greatness about the “collusion” and the collusion:

“Collusion” destroyed what was left of respect for the Washington FBI, the CIA, and the liberal news media. …

“Collusion” … allowed befuddled Russian appeasers and naïfs to … recalibrate themselves as our new version of Cold War hawks. It was as if a supposedly geriatric and anemic Russia suddenly had transmogrified back into the huge and global-menacing Soviet Union …

But the chief motive for the “collusion” accusation was the destruction of Donald Trump; the driving force behind the hoax, sheer hatred of him – and of the tens of millions of Americans who trusted him to make their lives more prosperous and fulfilling. (Which he did.)

“Collusion” was, as the debased FBI agent Peter Strzok had texted, the “insurance policy” of the administrative state to keep the “smelly”, the “ugly folk”, and “dregs” where they belonged—far, far from power. …

“Collusion” took off because so many of those directly involved in its illegality—Barack Obama, Joe Biden, John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, and Hillary Clinton—pushed the “collusion” lie in roles of respected senior “wise men and women” with “security clearances” who knew “what was really going on”. …

[The accusation of] “collusion” did hurt Donald Trump, the sum of all their hatreds. “Collusion” was behind the dishonest and embarrassing witch hunt of Robert Mueller’s 22-month $35 million investigation. It was the subtext of a fraudulent impeachment …

The “collusion” fraud tore the country apart. It destroyed the reputations of James Comey, Robert Mueller, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, network news, and what had been left of the little repute of Brennan, Clapper, McCabe, and Andrew Weissmann. …

The “collusion” effort, its proven dishonesty, and its complete failure to remove Donald Trump, did not lead to a hiatus. …  No, the abject failure of “collusion’s” outlandish premises, and the impunity given those who destroyed so many lives and hurt the country, only whetted the appetite of the “Resistance”. The slow-motion coup aficionados promised to do better in the next round.

Remember, those who lied under oath, abused government power, broke the law, and unmasked and leaked classified information, to this day, have never been held to account. Nor have the journalists who spread these untruths and demonized any who refuted them.

And so with that exemption, the Left pressed on to impeachment and, eventually, remaking the very system of how we voted in 2020. …

And while the lying was going on –

There was a real, far more dangerous collusion that was burrowed deep within the U.S. administrative state, the Democratic Party, corporate boardrooms, Big Tech, professional sports and entertainment, and the media.

If, save for its rusting nuclear arsenal, Russia was shrinking, poor, and spent, not so was China. It was rich, huge, and ruthlessly hellbent on global hegemony—if not by bribery and corruption, then by naked commercial and military force.

[There was] a NATO along a much weaker Russia’s borders, [but] until Trump there was nothing much to protect Australia, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan from China. …

Beijing, far better than Russia, understands how to unravel a new America, unhinged and obsessed with race, victimization, and “privilege”. 

Hollywood has had a field day with casting big-screen, shaved-headed, Orthodox tattooed, Russian mafia killers and brutes as the evil enemies of all noble minority and feminist film heroes. Yet at the same time, progressive studio heads and producers were reassuring the 1.4 billion people in the Chinese market that they would cull darker-skinned minority American actors so as not to offend the innate racism of the Chinese movie-goer. No one said a word about the paradox.

[China can] put 1 million religious dissidents in a gulag archipelago, destroy the semi-independence of Hong Kong, threaten any of its dissident neighbors with commercial destruction, embark on the largest imperialist and colonialist project in two centuries throughout Africa, Asia, and Europe, obliterate the culture of Tibet, militarize, with man-made atolls, the South China Sea, systematize internal surveillance, nonchalantly practice institutional racism, and infect the planet with a novel virus—and receive almost no official criticism from the United Nations and the governments of the European Union and the United States …

[What do] Michael Bloomberg, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Representative Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), the elite universities of the United States, the family of Joe Biden, Lebron James, and Colin Kaepernick all have in common?

Easy. A presidential primary candidate [Bloomberg] assures us that China is not an authoritarian country as he pours billions into jump-starting Chinese companies.

The erstwhile head of the U.S. Senate’s intelligence committee [Dianne Feinstein] has had a Chinese spy as her chauffeur for 20 years and a spouse who has millions in joint-Chinese ventures.

A congressman on the House Intelligence Committee [Eric Swalwell] was deeply compromised by an attractive young Chinese spy—a fact kept silent for years.

The Department of Education complains that our best universities have failed, again for years, to report tens of millions of dollars in “gifts” from Chinese government-affiliated companies.

Hunter Biden and his familial clique received millions of dollars in Chinese investment monies for no reason other than the “big guy” Joe Biden was vice president.

Our sports icons simultaneously trashed American democracy while keeping mum about Chinese racist dictatorship, the source of their millions in endorsements and franchising.

Remember just those few examples and one realizes that something is gone haywire with those at the very heart of America’s power and cultural influence.

And the most depressing fact of all? Even if we had investigative reporters and crusading congressional representatives, or past administrations before 2016 interested in real collusion, then what could they really have done? …

How many Wall Street grandees, how many media moguls, how many ex-politicians and bureaucrats (now “consultants” and “analysts”), and how many retired esteemed generals would journalists have had to reexamine to adjudicate whether their public views and corporate policies were warped by Chinese profiteering?

One can lie about “collusion” with impunity. But to speak the truth about collusion is to be smeared as “xenophobic”, “racist”, and “nativist”. 

China has piggybacked on the entire diversity/identity politics domestic cancel culture. …

Our elite simplistically conflates the Russian nationalist dictator and kleptocrat Vladimir Putin with the criminal past of the now-defunct Stalinist Soviet Union that killed 20 million of its own. Yet in creepy fashion, it still remains indifferent that Chinese President Xi Jinping, current General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and Chairman of the Chinese Central Military Commission, heads a government apparatus that is the direct and unbroken successor to Mao Zedong’s Communist killing machine that wiped out over 50 million of its own people. …

Given the present U.S. “collusion” hysteria of the anti-Trump Left, had a Russian city been the source of the origin and transmission of the virus, had SARS-CoV-2 been connected to research and experimentation within a Level-4 Russian virology lab, and had the Russians lied about these facts, and, either through laxity or deliberation, allowed the virus to infect the world, kill over 1.5 million, and destroy the global economy, then we would have been on the brink of war.

Once China has finished “unravelling” this “new America, unhinged and obsessed with race, victimization, and “privilege”, will it “build [it] back better” (as the slogan of the globalists runs) and make an entirely new America in its own image?

The quickest, smartest, simplest, most efficient way the Democrats, pressed as they are by their rising communist generation (represented in government by “the Squad”), could turn the United States of America into the United Socialist States of America (USSA), is to invite the Chinese to take over the running of the country. The ruling Chinese Communist Party wouldn’t need to send many of its agents here, as there are tens of thousands of them already in place.

A few top men would need to be flown over. (They would be men, not women, not transgenders. Their pronouns would be only he, him, his.)

It would be an unremarkable event when a smiling Chinese Communist fresh from Beijing enters the Oval Office, waits while a befuddled Joe Biden is gently removed from the chair at the president’s desk and escorted out into limbo, and quietly takes his place.

Will Donald Trump return to lead America and the world?

Conrad Black thinks that he could.

He writes at American Greatness:

It is a tainted election, with a poor result and a disquietingly unprepossessing presumptive president-elect.

A tainted election it is. And the [probable] president-elect Joe Biden is certainly unprepossessing, but the pejorative is too weak. More to the point, he is senile and corrupt.

The writer goes on:

The current president did great damage to himself by his frequent lapses into boorish self-obsession.

Conrad Black has often criticized President Trump in those terms, lending strength to the unjustified contumely flung at him by his enemies. (Too many commentators who generally support him, feel compelled to ritually note something about him they disapprove of, as if to cover themselves from accusations of poor taste or weak discernment.) Donald Trump is not obsessed with himself, but with the desire to make America more prosperous, more happy, more great. He has a great talent for the comic riposte, with a perfect sense of timing, and often laughs at himself.

Example:

His haters call him “Orange Man”; so he finds fault with the lightbulbs Obama wanted to make state-approved and compulsory by saying, “They make me look orange – has anyone noticed that?”

And when insults are flung at him, as they constantly are in the most vulgar, filthy, vicious, murderous terms, he can and does retort, chiefly by applying apt tags to their names – never vicious, never cruel, never obscene, never outright lies as are those they apply to him.

Examples:

They say he is disrespectful of women (which he is not), so he retorts, truthfully – naming his most persistent female denigrator – “Only Rosie O’Donnell.”

They say he is a misogynist – and yet, with puritan tight lips, they also accuse him of adultery and prurience. True, he indulged in locker-room boasting about his prowess at sexual conquest – as men do. His haters wail that it is an immense stain on his character, making him a threat to all women. Thousands of the loathsome army of feminists put on pink hats and took to the public square to pretend they had been deeply insulted. They are the same sort of women who defended Bill Clinton against justified accusations of actual sexual exploitation and even rape.

They pretend to be appalled that he called Kim Jong-un “Rocket Man”. Considering that no name would be bad enough for that murdering communist dictator, “Rocket Man” was mild enough, and more importantly it stigmatized him for the menace that he was, firing off rockets that could carry nuclear warheads.

The president stood unflinching and unshaken as insults were flung at him continuously as hailstones, and they made not a visible dent in his composure – yet they call him “thin-skinned”! Battalions of haters with powerful means to do him harm hampered and undermined him in every way they could dream up, accusing him of absurd crimes and disgraceful actions which they knew to be pure fiction, yet he steadily proceeded to do great good for his country, and to spread peace in the world at large.

They say he is a racist. But he has worked all his adult life with and among people of many races and has never shown the least trace of race prejudice. To justify this accusation they say he called Mexican aliens entering the US illegally “rapists” – which too many of them, whatever their number, were and are.

They say he is anti-Semitic. But not only are members of his own family including some of his grandchildren Jewish, no American president has ever done as much for the Jews as he has done. No leader of any country has done as much. His amazing achievement of brokering peace between the Israelis and the Arabs alone has earned him a place among the great leaders of history.

They say he called neo-Nazis “good people”, which is a flat lie. That he encourages “right-wing extremism” though he never has and never would. That he welcomes the support of the KKK. He does not. The KKK was founded and manned wholly by his enemies, the Democrats.

Even some of his friends and supporters blame him for habitually writing short messages to his followers on Twitter. How else should he communicate with the millions of them when the media refuse to report the truth of what he says or what he does? Conrad Black grants him that, saying: “In a pioneering way, he used social media to communicate directly with the public and successfully countered the traditional political media.”

Some of those friends speak of him as being “flawed”, as if a there could ever be a human being – even that revered Jew who they say lived in the age of Augustus – who is not “flawed”.

Conrad Black is one of those friends. But his admiration for Donald Trump is nevertheless strong. He writes:

He also had an outstanding  term of achievement in the face of unprecedented obstruction and illegal harassment, as well as the almost unanimous and hysterical antagonism of a totalitarian opposition media. And so he’s being evicted.

The new administration comes in for serious censure:

Taking his place is a ramshackle coalition of big media, big money, big tech, big league sports, Hollywood, most of Wall Street, and an odious ragtag of urban guerrillas masquerading as civil rights crusaders. … The Democrats … have been effectively taken over by socialist, self-hating whites, white-hating blacks, and guilt-ridden renunciators of any recognizable version of American history and values. …

The political atmosphere is so charged, it is intolerable.

Donald Trump narrowly won his campaign in 2016 against the bipartisan post-Reagan political class that he and an adequate number of his countrymen believed, with a plenitude of evidence, had thoroughly misgoverned the country. The previous 20 years under administrations and congresses of both parties had been an unsatisfactory time of endless, fruitless war in the Middle East and an immense humanitarian refugee disaster, the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, millions of unskilled immigrants pouring illegally across the Mexican-U.S. border, unfavorable trade arrangements, and China advancing by leaps and bounds at America’s expense. Trump effectively ended almost all of that and eliminated unemployment and oil imports as well. 

Much, probably all, of the good that President Trump did will likely be undone by the corruptocracy coming to power.

Conrad Black, consolingly, declares that the incoming administration will fail:

The celebration of Trump’s enemies will soon bore the public and the media will soon cease to lionize the ungalvanizing Biden and his entourage of political manipulators and faction-heads. There will be little leadership, little unity, and they will be to the left of the country, stalled by the Congress, and generally tedious and ineffectual. The times will not be gentle and the attempt of Anthony Blinken and John Kerry and the other quavering Obamans to sanitize the world and collegialize the Western Alliance will be an almost total failure.

He conjectures that Donald Trump could return triumphantly to power :

If he holds his fire for a year and allows the mediocrity and ineptitude of Bidenism … to be exposed in its infirmity, Trump will make the greatest American political comeback since FDR came out of his convalescence from polio and rolled his wheelchair into the White House, which would be his home for the remaining 12 years of his life.

A return of the great president is deeply to be desired. But the ramshackle coalition of Leftist forces that Conrad Black describes is united in one thing – a passionate determination to take away every existing and imaginable means and opportunity the Right could make use of to regain power.

As our commenter Cogito has several time pointed out, the reign (so to speak) of Donald Trump can be likened to that of the Emperor Julian (361-363 C.E.). Emperor after emperor had allowed the dark tide of intolerant Christianity to spread over the Roman Empire. Julian tried to stop it. But he was killed in battle before he had succeeded. For a little while there was light, but when he was gone the darkness came back and Europe remained stagnant for a thousand years.

We would liken it also to the decade of Margaret Thatcher’s leadership in Britain. She tried, against ferocious resistance, to stop the advance of socialism. For a time the British people were free and prosperous, share-owning and property-owning. Then swamp creatures in her own party and the opposition defeated her and the decay of the kingdom resumed.

While Donald Trump has been in the White House, America has enjoyed prosperity and freedom. Was it nothing more than a brief bright interval in a time of Western decay that is now again gathering pace?

Or will President Trump return?

Breitbart reports (Friday, December 11, 2020):

The Supreme Court dismissed a prominent legal challenge [today] Friday to the 2020 election results filed Monday by the State of Texas.

“The State of Texas’s motion for leave to file a bill of complaint is denied for lack of standing under Article III of the Constitution,” the statement from the Supreme Court reads. “Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections.”

What is now to be done?

Secession?

Civil war?

The Supreme Court is about to rule on ballot “irregularities” in four battleground states, which might alter the result of the presidential election if the state legislatures have the courage to change their certification of electors.

While omitting some declarations of trust in “God”, we urgently quote Fredy Lowe, writing at Canada Free Press:

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton … filed an “original jurisdiction” lawsuit on Monday (December 7, 2020), which means the case does not need to be heard at the district or state level, but goes directly to the Supreme Court. This lawsuit, that everyone is talking about (oh, with the exception of the cowards in our legacy media, that is) was filed against Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin for violating the Electors Clause of the US Constitution, by illegally changing their individual state voting rules and procedures by executive actions and/or at the state court levels. In no case were these changes made lawfully through state legislatures. The US Supreme Court has given Pennsylvania until Thursday for their rebuttal, where the outcome will be known soon.

President Trump’s personal attorney, Jay Sekulow said, “This is the most significant of the cases that have been filed … because it is completely outcome-determinative, which means that if the Supreme Court were to rule in favor of Texas, those four states named in the complaint would require their state legislatures to determine the outcome [of the election], by choosing the electors instead of the fraudulent vote counts. It’s a very significant piece of litigation …”

These four defendant states have also violated the Equal Protection Clause of the US Constitution by implementing unlawful voting rules and procedures without seeking the approval of their state legislators. And, last but not least, one of the key issues in the lawsuit states that the aforementioned constitutional violations led to many “voting irregularities” that resulted in fraudulent election results, which must be overturned by the legislators in the interest of preserving free and fair elections in the United States.

To many, much of what we presented here are encouraging words that the outcome of this fraudulent election will soon be determined, but they are just that—words.

It is action by the state legislators that will be urgently needed if the verdict of the Supreme Court permits it. The writer addresses them –

To the individual state legislators on the ground in each one of these four states:

Your vote will require courage!

Think first about the courage of our Lion Donald Trump who stands in the breach, seemingly alone most days, fighting against many corrupt Democrats and Republicans in Congress, who want to remove him from office, and – lest we forget – their New World Order cabal of financiers. …

There are reports from veteran legislators stating how they will be afraid to vote in favor of President Trump, which would revoke the electors set by the fake majority votes for Biden.

They fear Antifa and BLM vengeful violence against them.

Courage is contagious. Once one brave legislator takes a stand, the spines of others [may be] stiffened. …

Be the one to take a stand, knowing that [millions of] Americans who voted to reelect President Trump will be standing with you.

As President Trump often says, “We’ll see what happens.” Tomorrow.

***

More Republican-led states join the challenge –

The Western Journal reports:

The attorneys general of Missouri and Arkansas signaled their support of Texas’ lawsuit shortly after the state’s Monday filing with the Supreme Court, while the attorneys general of Louisiana and Indiana said the court should hear the Texas case.

“Election integrity is central to our republic,” Missouri Republican Attorney General Eric Schmitt tweeted Tuesday. “And I will defend it at every turn. As I have in other cases — I will help lead the effort in support of Texas’ [Supreme Court] filing today. Missouri is in the fight.”

“After reviewing the motion filed by Texas in the U.S. Supreme Court, I have determined that I will support the motion in all legally appropriate manners,” Arkansas Republican Attorney General Leslie Rutledge wrote on Twitter. “The integrity of our elections is a critical part of our nation and it must be upheld.”

Alabama Republican Attorney General Steve Marshall also vowed to secure election integrity, although he said he will wait to see if the Supreme Court grants Texas’ request to bring the case against the four swing states forward before acting in an official capacity. “The unconstitutional actions and fraudulent votes in other states not only affect the citizens of those states, they affect the citizens of all states — of the entire United States,” Marshall said in a statement. “Every unlawful vote counted, or lawful vote uncounted, debases and dilutes citizens’ free exercise of the franchise.”

Louisiana refuses to be left out of the fight, and the state’s attorney general [Republican Jeffrey Landry] released a scorching statement that urged the Supreme Court to consider the Texas motion: “Louisiana citizens are damaged if elections in other states were conducted outside the confines of the Constitution while we obeyed the rules.”

Indiana Republican Attorney General-elect Todd Rokita publicly spoke of the importance of Texas’ case, which revolves around the alleged disenfranchisement of American voters: “Millions of citizens in Indiana have deep concerns regarding the conduct of the 2020 Presidential election,” Rokita said in a statement, according to the Indianapolis Star. “Deeply rooted in these concerns is the fact that some states appear to have conducted their elections with a disregard to the U.S. Constitution.”

The call for the Supreme Court to hear the lawsuit was echoed by outgoing Indiana Republican Attorney General Curtis Hill, who pleaded with the court in a statement to consider the case and to do so quickly.

While the cards may seem stacked against Texas, and by extension President Donald Trump, there’s still no guarantee as to who will sit in the Oval Office come Jan. 20.

If even more states join forces with Texas and these other conservative strongholds, this could very well be a critical legal battle in deciding the 2020 election.

***

Later same day: SEVENTEEN states have now joined Texas in the lawsuit.

The governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, who calls himself a Republican, has done everything he could to get Biden – the Chinese choice – elected to the presidency, and everything he could to oppose Trump.

Were you wondering why?

Here’s the answer. Kemp is in the pocket of the Chinese.

On July 12, 2019, Georgia Governor Kemp met with Chinese Consul General Li Qiangmin for tea. Two weeks later on July 29, 2019, he signed a $107 million contract for Dominion Voting Machines statewide. Later in 2019, his substantial personal debts were repaid anonymously.

Governor Kemp & Li Qiangmin, Consul General of Chinese Consulate in Houston, which has been shut down by the Trump administration over espionage. China installed undercover operatives to spy on the US govt, US businesses, & academic research institutions.Brian Kemp co-operated with the espionage operation.

Kemp is a traitor, and shamelessly corrupt.

Here’s another picture and the cover story of what it was about:

On behalf of the state government, Governor Brian Kemp expressed his gratitude to Consul General Li Qiangmin for his contributions to the promotion of commerce and tourism in China and Georgia for more than 5 years. Consul General Li emphasized the importance of the development of friendly relations between China and the United States and welcomed Governor Brian Kemp to visit China as soon as possible.

After the meeting, Governor Brian Kemp personally wrote a message on the title page of the book and presented “Inspired Georgia” to Consul General Li Qiangmin. Consul General Li also presented exquisite Chinese crafts to the governor. Also attending the meeting on the same day were the Executive Director of China Affairs of the Georgia Economic Development Agency, China Chief Representative (Global Business) Xu Sixing, the Manager of the China Department of the Georgia Tourism Bureau Jassy, ​​and the heads of Liu Bo and Ge Mingdong of the Chinese Consulate in Houston.”

(Our thanks to Zerothruster for the link)

Without the protection of law, how will we survive?

How will we earn a living? Where can we live?

How can we protect ourselves, our dependents, our possessions?

Victor Davis Hansen writes at American Greatness:

Amid plague, national lockdown, riot and arson, iconoclasm, recession, and the most contested voting in history, the country leaves 2020 with some scars that won’t heal. …

Mail-in voting now joins open borders and promises to pack the Supreme Court and junk the Electoral College, as systematic efforts to change the system when the system cannot guarantee the Left the retention of power. It will be impossible to return to a mostly Election Day vote, and so another American tradition of more than two centuries has been jettisoned cavalierly. …

What was new about the recent destructive rioting in Seattle, Portland, Washington, and New York during the summer of 2020 … were three strange developments.

First, local and state authorities did not regularly try to suppress the violence. They either sympathized with the complaints of lawless Antifa and Black Lives Matter rioters or found the general chaos and sense of unrest during the Trump Administration conducive for Joe Biden’s candidacy in the November presidential election. … Rarely in modern times have authorities abdicated … as Seattle officials did with the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” over the summer.

Second, when violent demonstrators, arsonists, and looters were on rare occasions arrested, in most cases they were released by local and state public prosecutors, many of whom clearly sympathized with their use of violence. The result was a crash in police morale. To arrest a violent offender was simply deemed a waste of time and money, given his near-instant release and likelihood that he would never face any consequences for his actions. In other words, as is the case in former Third World countries, America’s criminal justice system became warped. Now there was good and bad looting, permissible and outlawed arson, correct and incorrect resisting of arrest, and quarantine-violating mass rallying and mass rallying that is exempt from lockdowns. Carving out a swath of autonomy for rioters and looters in downtown Seattle proved “legal”; had a row of restaurants and bars done the same to be allowed to serve the people, they would have been fined, closed, and likely jailed.

Third, Democratic mayors are now avowed revolutionaries, at war with their own police departments—or at least those other than their security details that protect their families and property from the very Jacobins they empowered. In the old days, Democrats ran the cities, but a Richard Daley in Chicago, Jerome Cavanagh in Detroit, Sam Yorty in Los Angeles, or Frank Rizzo in Philadelphia at least assured the public that there would be consequences for law breaking and often begged for more federal support to quell unrest.

If one believes some of these prior mayors were racist, illiberal, or corrupt, then that indictment reflects the inherently racist traditions of the Democratic Party and its long history of delivering votes to Democratic candidates as the price of exempting their city machines from civil rights and racketeering investigations by mostly Democratic state and federal attorneys. …

Coups, revolutions, and civil wars often witness the toppling of statues, usually of those identified as “tyrants” by self-described liberationists, reformers, and democratic activists. But in times of peace in general, and, in particular, in a constitutional United States, iconoclasm, Taliban-like destruction of statuary, and the Trotskyization of the past—whose luminaires are suddenly deemed enemies of the people—was mostly unknown.

Not now. By summer 2020, the Left was well beyond defacing, toppling, and destroying en masse statues of Confederate generals. The mob of Antifa, BLM, and renegade students had gone on to “dead white males” in general, whether it was Miguel de Cervantes, Father Junipero Serra, or Abraham Lincoln. What was new in American history was that mobs could assemble on spec and destroy or deface any statue or icon they wished—with impunity. For the foreseeable future, no civic organization or municipality will erect a statue, without first informally consulting the local Antifa thugocracy.

Antifa and BLM so terrified authorities that the latter often preemptively retired their once revered statutes, usually by night and without a vote of a local council or plebiscite. Hundreds are now hidden away in sheds and storage, apparently on the chance that a saner generation in a century or so may one day resurrect them as reminders of 21st-century mass insanity.

The reverse of statue toppling was also true, as the work of destructive creation was sanctified. BLM could simply declare plazas or sections of streets its own, brand them with its trademark BLM signature, and rightly assume mayors in Washington and New York would protect their sloganeering with the force of law—in the fashion of the Old West in which cowboys were given free rein in saloons to shoot and destroy. Defacing had now been redefined as the good ruining of public property. What is illegal is the attempt to restore a street to its original condition before it was illegally painted over with BLM slogans. From now on, mobs know that destroying art, statues, and monuments is their birthright—at least if they are professed revolutionaries.

Well before Trump, the country was bifurcating into two nations, two globalized bicoastal, wealthy internationalized ribbons within 50 miles of the Atlantic and Pacific, with a vast red interior in between. …

[The ribbons] were left-wing … and had higher percentages of the college educated and pseudo-credentialed, but more also without practical ability. They were mostly in control of the nation’s culture and politics—as defined by the administrative state, bureaucracies, media, academia, foundations, corporate boardrooms, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, the elite echelon of the military, professional sports, and entertainment in general.

Yet [the Trump-supporting interior] …  was what still fed, built, and fueled America. That is, the interior is where the food grows, oil and gas gets pumped, timber is cut, cement, steel, and building materials are fashioned, and things get built—from cars to tractors to plastics to shingles.

Globalization gave the coastal elite a new market of 7 billion—and the interior, outsourcing, offshoring, and stagnant incomes. [And during the COVID-19 pandememic] millions lost their jobs. …

Like it or not, the Democratic Party is run by billionaires … Barack Obama is the master of the script, now and then emerging from one of his three mansions to lecture the nation on the revolutionary logic of adding new states, or the false-consciousness of [Trump-supporting] black males, or the voting pathologies of counter-revolutionary Latinos. The Left’s officer corps is the wealthy professional of the upper middle class, its legions of highly paid and well pensioned government employees, and the elite woke apparatus, all united by the fierce protection of their privileges … [They assure]  minorities that they are the vanguard of the woke and know best how to spot “white privilege” among those who have none of it. …

Rarely has illiberality and bias been so redefined as social justice.

So the Left weaponized an entire culture – everything from lifestyle magazines and NBA games to Netflix and fashion. …

How weird that the party once of the Bushes and Romneys is now the [Trumpist] party of the working-class … earning the everlasting hatred of the NeverTrump elite, whose interest in conservatism was mostly its bicoastal cultural cachet, not in any concern with bettering the plight of millions of the working lower middle classes. …

The summer of COVID-19, quarantines, riot and arson, and an absence of confidence in the sanctity of voting ended with a lot of scars—and we will always bear them from now on.

Worst of all, Professor Hanson states firmly that at the end of this annus horribilis – 

There is no longer the rule of law as we once knew it. 

You live in – say – Seattle and you have been assaulted? Robbed? There is nothing you can do about it. No law, no law-enforcement by police – there are no police who can come to your aid. That is what Democrat “government” means.

So if now the entire country is coming under such “government” by the Democrats, will it mean that unless you are part of that “government” you can be assaulted, robbed, even murdered, and there will be nothing you can do about it?

Not exactly, citizen. You need not be entirely helpless.

Arm yourself.

Alexander, Caesar, Washington, Napoleon, Churchill, Thatcher, Reagan, Trump.

There he stands among his peers – people who personally redirected the course of history. No matter what he does from now on for as long as he lives, he has already earned his position among the greatest leaders of our common Western past.

Matthew Boose, writing at American Greatness, seems to go even further in his admiration of Donald Trump, suggesting that he may be uniquely great, at least in American history:

There’s a reason that Trump commands a fierce devotion … He is an historic phenomenon, a singular personality the likes of which we have never seen, and are unlikely to see recur, in our lifetimes. 

Trump has done what few men can say of themselves: he altered the course of events in a way that no one saw coming. Totally by surprise, he presented an opportunity to save a nation in decline, an opportunity which, if lost, … may never return. That is what has made these four years so momentous, so eventful, and so full of conflict. Trump’s enemies sensed it too, which is why they have worked so desperately to crush him.

Few men could have withstood the extreme pressures that Trump has faced these four years. Millions of Americans have been inspired by his incredible tenacity through it all.

America does not produce many great men anymore, but Trump is a great man: he has an unusual degree of courage and willpower, qualities rare in our time in any measure. …

Trump and his supporters understand that the opposition is vicious, evil, and totally without honor, and that future leaders who want to defend America in more than name would have to be willing and able to incur enormous hostility and personal risk. …

“Trumpism” is a vague thing, and the Republican establishment and the kept Right are eager to jettison Trump and leave us with an ersatz version of his movement. Trump’s primary achievement … is that he made the Republican Party the home of a multi-racial working class. [Which is true but] this elides an essential part of Trump’s rise, which was that he acknowledged American whites who had felt put upon and alienated in an increasingly hostile regime. Any “Trumpism” that lacks the courage to push back against the relentless, anti-white sentiment of the Left is counterfeit.

Trump’s movement is a genuine revolution. Like any revolution, it is liable to corruption and change. This has happened with many movements before: the momentum gets lost, and it turns into a husk of its former self. … It is possible that Trump’s movement dies with him. History does not always [or ever? – ed] offer second chances. …

If Trump’s downfall really is a fait accompli, then millions of Americans will take his loss like a deathblow to America. If that is cultism, count me in. We are lucky to have Trump. He is an American hero, the best—the only—real defender we have had in generations.

Can Trumpism survive without Trump?

Can America survive without Trumpism?