The process of legislating has broken down in the US Congress. The Speaker of the House dictates and an automatic (small) majority vote follows.

Breitbart reports:

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich on Sunday [March 21, 2021] slammed the legislative process used by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to ram through the Democrats’ legislation.

Gingrich told John Catsimatidis, host of New York WABC 770 AM radio’s The Cats Roundtable, that members of the House are acting like robots in voting in step with Pelosi.

It’s a total collapse of the legislative process. It really tells you how the system is evolving that they’re ramming through all of this legislation. They have a five-vote margin, and  they’re saying to their members, “You don’t have to read anything. You don’t have to know what’s in the bill. We don’t have to have any hearings. You can’t offer any amendments. All you need to know is show up and vote yes.” It’s a machine-like House. And these folks don’t represent anybody except Nancy Pelosi. And so, they walk in, they’re told, “We’re bringing up this next bill and vote yes.” And they go, “Absolutely.” The Democrats are expected to automatically vote yes no matter what.

It’s working, but it has nothing to do with a free society or a representative government. It’s just pure machine politics. And that to me has been probably the biggest surprise of what’s happened so far this year.

If the Republicans offer an amendment — even if it’s a smart amendment — they vote no automatically.

The same thing is happening in the Senate.

The Democrats go through the customary motions of legislating just for show. They perform the ritual to make the nation think that government is being carried on as usual. But in fact, the US is now a dictatorship.

Speculation as to who leads the politburo that is doing the actual governing behind the Biden curtain has ranged from Obama right down through Valerie Jarrett to Susan Rice and even Ben Rhodes. But now we know.

At this time, and for the immediately foreseeable  future –

Nancy Pelosi is the Stalin.

The Democrats continually declare America to be a morally rotten country, racist, bigoted, unjust, cruel. (Example: see what Vice President Harris has to say about America here.)

Naturally that delights its enemies – China in particular.

As leaders of a contemptible country, representatives of the Biden administration found themselves too weak to withstand even a merely verbal attack by a Chinese delegation.

What could they say in its defense, they who scorn and condemn it as ruthlessly as any enemy might do?

John Hinderaker reports and comments at PowerLine:

On Thursday, delegations headed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Chinese diplomat Yang Jiechi met at the Captain Cook Hotel in Anchorage. It was the first such meeting of the Biden administration. … The parties agreed that the public session would begin with a two-minute statement by each. Blinken spoke for two minutes, after which Yang contemptuously ignored the agreed-upon protocol and delivered a 20-minute attack on the United States. From there, things went from bad to worse.

The London Times, which, like pretty much all mainstream European news outlets, favors the Democrats, reports:

The Chinese side came to the talks in Alaska prepared to counter every US rebuke with one of their own. To the charge of Chinese cyberattacks, Yang said that “the US is the champion” while in response to the repression of Uighurs being labelled as genocide, he said that the US was guilty of the slaughter of black Americans.

The Chinese … know that the Democrats’ peddling BLM mythology disables them from defending the United States against such attacks, and they take full advantage of the Biden administration’s weakness.

“The United States does not have the qualification to say that it wants to speak to China from a position of strength,” said Yang, who was accompanied by Wang Yi, a state councillor.

He criticised what he said was America’s struggling democracy and its poor treatment of minorities.

The Daily Wire reports on the meeting from a perspective [even] less friendly to the administration:

The meeting in Alaska came at the request of the Biden administration and was their attempt at trying to restart bilateral relations with China. Instead, after addressing some issues that the administration had with China, China openly mocked and attacked the U.S.

“Biden is weak. And many other countries are happy about it,” former Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell said. “And the woke US media is too partisan to report fairly.”

One of the Biden administration’s most contemptible themes is its declaration that “America is back.” It was during the Obama administration – when, of course, Joe Biden was vice president – that America retreated from the world, appeased its enemies, and let its defense capabilities wither.

The Donald Trump administration took important steps to strengthen our armed forces and, unlike Obama and Biden, stood up to both Russia and China, advancing American interests under the banner of “America first”. The only thing that is “back” under Joe Biden, or whoever is running U.S. foreign policy these days, is weakness. And the Chinese know it.

Hudson Institute Senior Fellow Rebeccah Heinrichs told The Daily Wire:

… Critical race theory and identity politics at home makes us a splintered, self-loathing mess. The CCP knows this. It’s why they used all those BLM talking points in Alaska. …

Center for Security Policy President Fred Fleitz — former NSC Chief of Staff, CIA analyst, and House Intel Com staff member — effectively said that the Biden administration was responsible for the meeting being a disaster: 

Blinken foolishly did not anticipate that the Chinese officials would retaliate in their remarks responding to him. This gave the Chinese officials a rare opportunity to dress down the Secretary of State before the press. Blinken was visibly unnerved by the Chinese response. Blinken’s response was defensive and incoherent. He also repeated Biden’s silly “America is back” theme.

Most disturbing, despite Blinken and [National Security Advisor Jake] Sullivan’s criticism of China, there was not one word on Beijing’s criminal negligence that allowed the coronavirus to become a dangerous pandemic, or any criticism of China for its continuing refusal to fully cooperate with international investigations of the origins of the virus, including inspections of the Wuhan biolabs.

This press event in Alaska was a debacle that will build a perception that the US is returning to Jimmy Carter-like incompetence in foreign policy. America’s enemies are watching and planning …

After all that scheming, contriving, cheating to get back into power, now they’ve got there the “transform America” party doesn’t know what to do, or how to do anything at all to protect the country it leads and hates.

As we have been silenced on Facebook, we will post here – in addition to our own articles – extracts and abstracts of articles we consider worth noting in the manner we posted them there.

We do not always quote directly, but when making an abstract we try to use the words of the original as much as possible. If needing to change the wording to sum up an idea, we take care not to change the author’s intention. And we always provide a link to the original article.

Discussion of all posts is invited in the comments section, pending eventual adjustments of the site to make discussion as easy as it is on Facebook.

Today we select a passage from an article on the bewildering experience of living in a country which has a senile president put there to seem responsible for executing an anti-American agenda .

Drew Allen writes at Townhall:

It is no secret that Joe Biden is not in charge of the executive branch. Nor does it come as a surprise. … What is surprising, however, is how effective and advantageous his non-presidency has been for the Democratic Party. His mental incapacitation has not hindered the left’s agenda to transform the United States from a Constitutional republic to a totalitarian state, but has helped facilitate it.  … Joe Biden is unfit for the office he nominally holds. But so long as Joe remains the “president,” even if this is understood as merely a figurative role, the Democrats will continue to have wild success in their diabolical and unconstitutional efforts to destroy America. … We are living in a nightmare scenario. … The American people and our country have been plunged into darkness. We have largely no idea what is going on. While we can speculate as to who is actually running the country — Obama? Susan Rice? — we have no access to the one individual “responsible” for the destruction of our economy, our safety, and our freedom. America is being run by a shadow government. … So long as [Biden]  remains in office, those Americans who religiously watch CNN and get their propaganda from the Washington Post will never be exposed to anything remotely resembling reality. Joe Biden is a strategy for the Democratic Party at this point, not a hindrance or frustration. As the rag known as the Washington Post declares, “Democracy dies in darkness”. We are living in darkness. I regret to say that we would be better off with [Vice President] Kamala Harris. At least if she was president, there would be no unspoken excuse either understood or accepted for this un-American and totalitarian regime. But if the Democrats are smart, they’ll keep Joe around as long as they can.

We cannot agree that “we would be better off with Kamala Harris”. We think it would be unimaginably worse if she were president. But otherwise we concur with Drew Allen’s description of the current US administration.

It is a nightmare. And a farce and a horror.

Joe Biden is not fit to be president. He has no personal qualifications for the job. He is intellectually deficient, dishonest and dishonorable. He has no experience of management. And those who have set him up to be a figurehead of state, know it.

He will not run anything; he will be ran.

By whom? The gang that worked the great fraud needed to get him elected.

Who are they? Media moguls, social media tycoons, bank barons, billionaires and globalists (notably George Soros), political operatives (notably Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi), and many a bureaucrat in the Deep State. (With some assistance, probably, from the Chinese Communist Party.)

Does the gang have a chief, a director, a “mastermind”?

It does. The man behind the curtain is … fling it back … Barack Obama!

But of course it is. That’s no surprise really.

Jeff Davidson writes at Townhall:

Obama … knows that if Donald Trump somehow is re-inaugurated, the ongoing investigations into Russiagate are eventually going to lead to Obama himself, and that such investigation will reveal his treachery.

Barack Obama is highly knowledgeable about the level of Democrat election and voter fraud that took place this year. He has an intricate, inside knowledge of the ploys used by Leftist operatives. However, he is silent about the phenomenon. He is actively espousing the opposite, claiming that no significant fraud occurred and that Trump is making wild accusations (as per usual in Obama’s world).

Is anything that Barack Obama says on the up-and-up? Is this monster of a politician to be believed? No. Not for a nanosecond.

Obama is among the most criminal presidents we’ve ever endured. While his criminality has been exposed in many ways, pretty much only among conservative media outlets, thus far he has not been indicted for anything. If Joe Biden assumes the presidency, everything that Obama did that was unconstitutional, illegal, and downright treasonous, would be buried, perhaps for all time. Also, he knows he can manipulate the cognitively impaired Biden at any time, and in any way that he desires.

Obama’s “management style” has always been insidious. When he ran for state senator in 1995, his campaign kickoff was held at the home of William Ayers and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn, two self-avowed, unrepentant domestic terrorists. Mayhem is their track record. Freed on a technicality, Ayers wishes he had done more harm.

Obama’s criminality and the gargantuan sized lies that he told are well-documented. The number of federal government agents and appointees in the Obama administration, as well as the number of civil servants who participated in the criminal, immoral, and treasonous behavior was shameful. The biggest offenders included the Department of Justice, Internal Revenue Service, NSA, and the CIA. …

Obama had to act with lightning speed the moment Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election. He knew that he was left naked and felt desperate to cover his eight-plus years of impeachable and treasonous acts. All earlier presidents believed that the safe and effective transfer of power was vital to the new president. Not Obama.

Among ex-presidents, only Obama launched a multifaceted campaign against his successor: Obama created an umbrella organization, Organizing for Action, which is focused on steering public discourse, members of Congress, and national events through the mobilization of thousands of volunteers – all to undermine Donald Trump.

Obama and Biden, who knew from the start that Russiagate was a hoax initiated by Hillary Clinton, were silent all the while that the Mueller committee ripped through the Trump administration and still fired blanks – because there was nothing to find.

What kind of person, what sort of commander-in-chief of the U.S. and his vice president “serving” for eight years, knowing everything that they knew, intentionally would seek to undermine the succeeding president and contort our Democratic processes?

Another dishonest and dishonorable man, but one who is not mentally impaired and has vast experience of laying plots against the American people: Barack Obama.

A Joe Biden presidency can only be another President Barack Obama term.

Nestle the famous chocolate makers are “woke”, are caring, are concerned about the environment, and advertise their virtue on all the big issues à la mode.

Nestle’s USA branch give their employees “mandatory bias training” (to show them that they are racists whether they realize it or not).

We learn this from an article by Daniel Greenfield, from which we have taken our quotations and information for this Sunday hymn to Hypocrisy.

The leadership of Nestle’s UK branch urged, “I want people talking about race, about inequality and about why it should ever be called into question that black lives matter.”

However, Nestle makes its chocolate from cocoa beans picked by –

African child slaves [aged between 12 and 14] working fourteen hours a day on cocoa plantations, given scraps of food to eat, beaten with whips and tree branches, forced to sleep on the floor, and to drink urine if they try to run away.

Nestle has a history of using slave labor. The company made use of the slave labor of Jews during the Holocaust.

Nestle … had helped finance the Swiss Nazi Party and became an exclusive supplier of chocolate to the Wehrmacht. Helmut Maucher, Nestle’s longtime CEO and honorary chairman, had served in the Wehrmacht. But that’s all water under the national socialist bridge.

Nestle went from profiting from Jewish slave labor it claimed it couldn’t do anything about to profiting from African slave labor it claims it can’t stop.

Cocoa is the black gold of the Côte d’Ivoire. 

The slaves … were trafficked from Mali to Côte d’Ivoire … which underwent a Muslim-Christian civil war in Obama’s first years in office.

Why would child slavery have dramatically increased under Obama?

Obama’s backing for Islamist takeovers in Cote d’Ivoire, Libya, and Nigeria … led to a boom in slavery. Obama did more than any other politicians to mainstream both black nationalism and black slavery. 

Côte d’Ivoire’s indigenous population was concentrated in the richer forests of the south, allowing the migration of Islamic tribes to occupy the drier north. When Muslim rebels, many of them illegal migrants, rigged the 2010 Côte d’Ivoire election, Obama backed the Muslim north over the Christian south. [And] the French and the UN intervened militarily to subjugate the indigenous Christians to Muslim rule. Since then, Alassane Ouattara, a descendant of Muslim rulers, dubiously won the latest presidential election by 83%.

The virtuous Obama, virtuous Europeans, and that upholder and arbiter of the world’s political virtue the UN, subjugated the Christians of Côte d’Ivoire to Muslim rule and the whole country is now being Islamized and turned into a slave state. 

The beneficiaries of that slave labor are the multinationals who preach social justice, as long as it doesn’t raise the price of cocoa. It’s one thing to chant Black Lives Matter and support the racist hate group burning and looting stores, and another to actually stop profiting from black children being sold into slavery …

Nestle dispensed money to maintain farmers’ loyalty as exclusive suppliers to the men running the slave plantations.

While Black Lives Matter leaders get cash from woke corporations, those same corporations profit from slavery in Asia, where lives don’t matter, but also in Africa, where they supposedly do. While the Times serves up the 1619 Project [ridiculously claiming that the US was founded in that year as a slave nation], and the statues of anyone who ever had anything to do with a slave centuries ago are toppled, real African slavery continues today.

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?

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.

… with the story that Joe Biden has won the presidency.

Roger Kimball writes at American Greatness:

The Associated Press called the election for Joe Biden a couple of weeks ago. Other news agencies, from the Wall Street Journal and Fox News to CNN, the New Woke Times, and the Washington Post were right there on cue, hailing him the winner. Time, the former news weekly, devoted its cover to Joe Biden, “46th President of the United States.” Twitter was on the case, adding little warning messages to tweets about the election it didn’t like, suspending the accounts of people whose opinions it disagreed with, throttling the ability of those who dissented to broadcast their dissent. Who knows what Google and Facebook are doing with their search results. Some secrets are too deep for the light of day.

And that is my point. The strongest argument for Biden’s victory is not the vote tally. It is the monolithic narrative, pumped up like one of those inflatable play castles at a child’s birthday party. With every passing day, that narrative becomes more boisterous, more assertive, more uncompromising. It is a collective primal scream, emitted with eyes shut and ears plugged.

There is a problem for the narrative, however. Or more to the point, there are 73 million problems. A major concession in the Biden-won-give-it-up-narrative is revealed by the hawkers of the “Unity Now” meme. Let us all come together as one nation, under Joe, and reassert the American normality that has been so sorely missing under the despotic reign of Donald Trump.

No. No, that’s not going to fly, and not only because of the snarling viciousness that attended Donald Trump and his entire administration from the moment he was elected until now. Granted, Democrats are masters of hypocrisy. … They are utterly unembarrassed by double standards. Indeed, they glory in them. …

[Kamala Harris’s] sense of entitlement is unshakable, beyond embarrassment. “When we do it”—go without masks, eat out with friends after telling hoi polloi to stay home, run a private email server for government business, collude with Russians to upset an election, leak classified material, lie under oath, etc.—“It’s OK because—reasons.” …

But glaring hypocrisy is not the only reason that the narrative’s call for unity is failing. There is also its essential fragility. It is loud. It is seamless. It is asserted by all the best and most beautiful people, the really smart ones with fancy degrees, the right attitudes, the impressive ZIP codes. But it is also like an elaborate barque in high winds and choppy seas on a leeward course off a rocky coast.

That coast is the anti-narrative, otherwise known as reality.

The really hard and jagged part of the impinging reality … is the actual vote tally in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Huge anomalies have been alleged in all of those key states. …

Inquiring minds want to know, how is it possible that voter turnout in just those key cities in just those key states was so high: often 90 percent or more? How is it possible that Joe Biden, who barely campaigned, garnered more votes in just those spots than even Barack Obama had done? How is it possible that, as everyone was getting tucked into bed on the night of November 3, Donald Trump had notable leads in almost all of those states and then, suddenly, all at once, in the wee hours, floods of votes poured in and—wouldn’t you know it—they were overwhelmingly, sometimes exclusively, for Biden?

And what about those voting machines from Dominion: are we confident that they are secure?

Aristotle tells us that “Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.” Do we have instruments capacious enough to measure the improbabilities that attend Joe Biden’s performance in these key states?

There seems to be a couple of different attitudes towards voter fraud. For some, a little voter fraud is just the cost of doing business. …

That, anyway, is one point of view. But even if one grants that in principle, it seems legitimate to ask, how much voter fraud is OK? I am not aware of any political FDA weighing in and telling us what percentage of the vote can be tainted before it is ruled inadmissible. In this election, hundreds of thousands of votes are alleged to be fraudulent. At the moment, Joe Biden is said to be ahead by some 150,000 votes in Michigan, 80,000 in Pennsylvania, 20,000 in Wisconsin, and 10-12,000 in Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada. What if his standing in a majority of those states were shown to be the result of fraud?

Then there is that stretch of coastline known as election law. The particular rules of our elections are generally entrusted to legislatures of the various states. But in several instances, courts or various executive entities weighed in at the last moment to change the rules about how votes would be counted. Pennsylvania is an especially egregious case. … Election officials clearly violated the law by inspecting mail-in ballots before November 3, in clear defiance of the law, which requires such ballots to be safely kept in “sealed or locked containers” until 7 a.m. on Election Day.

Because of this and other irregularities, a state judge on Friday, finding that mail-in ballot procedures likely violated the Pennsylvania constitution, ordered that Pennsylvania halt the process of certifying the vote. “Petitioners,” Judge Patricia McCollough wrote, “appear to have a viable claim that the mail-in ballot procedures set forth in Act 77 contravene” the law. In a blow to Team Trump, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court vacated Judge McCollough’s order Saturday night, clearing the way for the state to certify the election. Next stop? The Supreme Court of the United States.

Something similar is happening in all the battleground states. Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis, part of Trump’s official legal team, are pursuing alleged violations of the law in Pennsylvania, Arizona, and elsewhere. Sidney Powell, an activist lawyer who is not on Trump’s official legal team, has filed suit in Georgia and Michigan, alleging massive voter fraud significant enough to overturn the vote there.

If state legislatures and the courts find the courage to stop the momentum carrying Biden to the White House, if Trump is declared after all to be the legitimate winner of the election, a general strike is threatened, and rioting and arson, murder in the streets, are to be expected.

That outcome is not to be shirked at all costs. It is not worse than the loss of America to the globalist Left. May the executive, led by Donald Trump, have the courage to meet force with force, and defeat the saboteurs, the killers and destroyers, wherever they arise, whatever they do.

***

Here is a clear discussion of Sidney Powell’s case. It demonstrates that Joe Biden has NOT won the presidency. His party is committing a gigantic fraud against the American people and making a mockery of the democratic system:

https://youtu.be/Xbx-MKEet7M

(Hat-tip to our commenter pepaz for the video)