Photo:Evan Vucci / AP

Volumes will be written about the scene in this picture.

Donald Trump was a great man even before a would-be assassin’s bullet hit his ear as he began to speak on Saturday, July 13, 2024, at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, attended by tens of thousands of his passionately enthusiastic supporters. If the bullet had hit his head a centimeter further forward, or further back, or further up, it would have killed him. He ducked down, and when he rose again it was to the towering height of a political martyr. He raised his fist high, shouting his defiance, “Fight!”  – and won a permanent place among the greatest men in history. 

Despicable “Democrats” – and Leftists of every stripe – will try to bring him down. Corrupted institutions of the federal state will “investigate” the attempted assassination and find the victim guilty and themselves blameless.

But try as they will they cannot reduce his stature by so much as a centimeter.

*

Excerpts from Mark Steyn’s comment (italics and ellipses in the original):

Let’s cut to the chase – the US Secret Service: In on it? Or just totally crap?

And yet and yet… it’s hard to believe even these guys could be this crap.

A goofball barely out of high school hatched a plan to have Donald Trump’s head explode in close-up on live TV – and, wittingly or otherwise, the world’s most flush money-no-object security state did their best to help him pull it off.

What’s the old line? When seconds count, the police are minutes away? Not at a Secret Service event: even when the police are on site in massive overwhelming numbers, they’re still minutes away.

Not long before shots rang out, rallygoers noticed a man climbing to the roof of a nearby building and warned local police, according to two law enforcement officials.

One local police officer climbed to the roof and encountered Crooks, who pointed his rifle at the officer. The officer retreated down the ladder, and Crooks quickly took a shot toward Trump…

Uh-huh. Actually, over half-a-dozen shots – hitting the target, killing retired fire chief Corey Comperatore, and gravely wounding two others.

Thomas Matthew Crooks took his AR-15 to a political rally. And the reason he was permitted to do so is because he was ‘outside the security perimeter’ …yet still within range of the candidate’s head.

Does that make sense even by the arseholian standards of the federal government?

No. Even in rinky-dink no-account third-rate basket-cases, it’s understood that the first job of a protection detail is to establish where the lines of fire are, and neutralise them.

Can the failure to do that really be accidental?

Yet from the decision to demarcate the easily accessible rooftop as “outside the security perimeter” all else follows. Once it was determined by the Secret Service that the building with the spiffy line of sight was beyond their purview it ceased to be of any interest to them. So that fell to local law enforcement – and a village constable shinning up the ladder.

On Saturday, America came within an inch and a second of crossing a very dark Rubicon. As Trump reveals to Michael Goodwin in The New York Post:

The doctor at the local hospital, which has a trauma center, told him he’s never seen anyone survive getting hit by an AR-15.

Indeed. Because that’s what just happened. In 1981 Reagan was hit by a revolver; forty-three years of ever more extravagant security protocols later, a loser whose greatest accomplishment was a cameo in a BlackRock ad was able to hit the head of a president with his AR-15.

And this startling fact is of less concern to a corrupted American media than the fact that a few “loud bangs” at a Trump rally might provoke, ooh, a violent backlash from the crazy Maga types…

*

Kurt Schlichter writes (in part) at Townhall:

We already know the investigation is going to be a complete cluster because there’s apparently nobody in charge. The FBI is doing some stuff, the state police is doing some other stuff, and the Secret Service seems to be in full CYA [Cover Your Ass] mode. So, we’re not going to get any information about what really happened. We’re going to get lies, and the administration is going to issue some report assuring us that it did the very best job it could, and that Donald Trump was really at fault for getting in the way of those bullets. …

What’s the political effect of this going to be? More cynicism, all of it justified, by the American people. Yet another vaunted institution has failed to perform its job adequately. We’re getting used to it. When institutions are headed by quota queens selected for their adherence to Marxist ideology rather than competence, and when they prioritize their ridiculous ideology over the job the institution is supposed to do – whether it’s the Secret Service, the FBI, the military, the NFL, the DMV … – you’re going to get failure. And we’re tired of failure.

It doesn’t have to be this way. America doesn’t work anymore. That’s why you see social media filled with video clips of people living joyously in the amazing 80s. This nostalgia is because America worked back then, and it does not work now. Joe Biden represents the failed present. The secret of Donald Trump is that he represents both our glorious past and a future where things work, and if you screw up, you hear that “You’re fired.”

And that’s why Donald Trump’s glorious defiance on stage, lifting his fist and refusing to give in, was so inspiring. He is the avatar of our vision of ourselves as Americans. They attempted to kill him, but they really wanted to kill us and, for one of us, they succeeded. It won’t work, though. They can lie about us and create fake scandals. They can try and silence us. They can try to frame us in kangaroo courts. They can try to murder us. But we’re not going to quit. We’re not going to surrender. We’re going to win.

Raise your fists, patriot. America will be great again.

Britain’s great conservative Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, said: “Britain was created by history, America was created by philosophy.”

What were the principles of America’s foundational philosophy?

• Freedom: freedom of the individual, and so, logically, freedom of conscience, speech, publication,  assembly; property ownership and a free market.
• The rule of law under which all are equal.
• Government by the people themselves to protect their freedom with the rule of law, and with military strength against foreign enemies.

All those principles are now being abandoned by usurping powers, to be replaced with contrary ideals.

The systems and institutions that proceeded from them are being corrupted and turned from their intended purposes to serve opposite ends.

Victor Davis Hanson writes at Townhall:

Conservatives now have lost their former traditional confidence in the administration of justice, in the intelligence and investigatory agencies, in the nation’s military leadership, in the media, and the criminal justice system.

Freedom is much diminished, especially with the forced quarantine and masking of the healthy in an epidemic of Covid flu, and threatened penalties for those who refuse vaccination.

The rule of law is scoffed at by those who should enforce it.

As Victor Davis Hanson says:

The American criminal justice system also used to earn the respect of conservatives. Prosecuting attorneys, police chiefs, and big-city mayors were seen as custodians of the public order. They were entrusted to keep the peace, to prevent and investigate crime, and to arrest and prosecute criminals.

Again, not so much now.

After 120 days of mostly unchecked riot, arson, looting, and violent protests during the summer of 2020, the public lost confidence in their public safety agencies.

District attorneys in several major cities – Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and St. Louis – have often predicated prosecuting crimes on the basis of ideology, race, and careerism.

In the current crime wave, brazen lawbreakers enjoy de facto immunity. Mass looting goes unpunished. Indictments are often aimed as much against those who defend themselves as against criminals who attack the innocent.

Government by the people has been corrupted by electoral fraud. And the military cannot be relied on to protect the nation:

Mention the military to conservative Americans these days, and they unfortunately associate its leadership with the disastrous flight from Afghanistan. Few, if any, high-ranking officers have yet taken responsibility – much less resigned – for the worst military fiasco of the last half-century.

Instead, President Joe Biden and the top generals traded charges that the other was responsible for the calamity. Or both insisted the abject flight was a logistical masterpiece.

Never in U.S. history have so many retired four-star admirals and generals disparaged their president with charges of being either a traitor, a liar, a fascist, or a virtual Nazi, as occurred during the last administration.

Never has the proper advisory role of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff been so brazenly usurped and contorted.

Never has the secretary of defense promised he would ferret out alleged “white supremacists” without providing any evidence whatsoever of their supposedly ubiquitous presence and dangerous conspiracies.

Worse, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff informed the hostile Communists who govern China that he would warn them if President Trump decided to attack their country with nuclear weapons.

Victor Davis Hanson concludes:

No one yet knows what the effect will be of half the country losing faith in the very pillars of American civilization.

Does it mean that the experiment of creating a nation from a benign philosophy has failed?

Liberty was not a fad.

Nor were honor, courage, and competence.

But their enduring value is being questioned, somewhat surprisingly by a writer at American Greatness.

American Greatness is a very good website. Articles by such erudite thinkers as Victor Davis Hanson, Roger Kimball, Conrad Black are often posted there. Opinion is conservative – though what conservatism is and should be in these troubled times is earnestly debated.

Recently, in an article titled Living in Another Time and Place, Max Morton expressed the view that conservative values must change to fit the times.

He writes:

The current batch of generals and national security bureaucrats are neither competent nor honorable, certainly not courageous, and America would be better off without the lot of them. Amazingly, shouting “Have you no shame?” in the halls of Congress doesn’t make them want to resign their prized sinecures.

How did we get to the point where the worst among us are now leading us? It is because we, as a nation, failed to hold our elected officials accountable for the state of our government and its institutions.

We assumed (Morton thinks)that our military’s generals and civilian leaders were honorable. But they are not. “We don’t live in that world anymore,” he writes.

Our understanding is that America is a constitutional republic, founded in democratic principles, with a representative government by and for the people. We have been told—or have at some point assumed—that our bureaucratic officials work for the good of the nation and are accountable to the people via our elected representatives. We were led to believe that our originally designed system of checks and balances was a guard against the tyranny that tempts human kind. All of this was true . . . at some point. In other words, this was once a valid American construct.

But he surely cannot mean that something was true only for a time and then stopped being true; he means, and goes on to explain, that a system can work for a time and then not work as it had done.

Pedro Gonzalez, a frequent contributor to American Greatness, wrote in his essay Middle America’s Road to Power: “A fundamental problem with conservatism is that it reflexively seeks to conserve institutions that either don’t exist anymore, or which have been perverted to become hostile to the right.” Gonzalez’s words are the perfect description of the problem of an obsolete construct.

Traditional America is mired in an obsolete construct due to our failure to observe certain substantial changes in our political and cultural environment.  Processing these types of changes is difficult for most people.

Inevitable changes? Impossible to reverse or reform? Changes we must accept? And that’s difficult for most of us (though not for him)?

As examples of such changes he cites the villainy of the FBI and the Department of Justice. The FBI, once trusted to enforce the law, has been caught “framing Trump officials, lying under oath to Congress, falsifying FISA warrants, and generally acting like a corrupt secret police outfit”. And the DOJ, “responsible for oversight of the FBI”, let it all happen and did nothing. And “Trump supporters,” he observes, “couldn’t process the fact that something so foundational to their belief system (the integrity of federal law enforcement) had so significantly changed.”

“Process” it? Or accept that it must be so?

Must we accept that the FBI from now on will be corrupt, and the DOJ will allow, approve of, connive at its corruption?

Many in conservative and traditional America are still arguing and debating “the facts” thinking the other side will listen or care about them and that, this time, they’re going to change minds. Some, still yearning for the old bipartisanship, can’t see that in the construct of present-day America, classical liberalism is dead.

To deal with the dilemmas we now face, we must transport ourselves out of our obsolete construct and into the reality of the moment. We must see the world for what it truly is. We must know both our enemy and ourselves, where we are and where we are going.

We can no longer complain that the other side is not playing by a rulebook they discarded long ago, but to which we still irrationally cling. Instead, we should determine what we stand for, what we want our future to look like, and plot a course to that future understanding, anticipating the resistance we will face along that path. Our road to victory starts when we can see that truth, join with our fellow like-minded citizens and face forward towards the imminent struggle ahead.

“They” discarded the old rulebook, so we must discard it too, conserving nothing? And put what in its place?

Struggle how? Not with integrity? Not with honor, courage, competence? (Surely not with deception, dishonor, cowardice, incompetence?)

Under what system if not one of accountability, with checks and balances to guard against tyranny?

To what goal if not liberty?

If there are better values, what are they? If there can be new kinds of institutions to enforce the law, describe them.

If there can be a better system than that laid down by the Constitution of the United States, what is it?

Suddenly the FBI has changed its institutional mind. The January 6 protest at the Capitol was not an insurrection after all, it now declares. According to Reuters, the FBI now says there was no conspiracy behind the event.

Has the shock of America’s calamitous fall in the world’s esteem with its defeat in Afghanistan woken the agency up? Will it wake up  all the  “woke” half of America to the extreme danger this country is now in?

Steven Hayward of PowerLine quotes part of the Reuters report, including these paragraphs:

The FBI has found scant evidence that the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was the result of an organized plot to overturn the presidential election result, according to four current and former law enforcement officials.

Though federal officials have arrested more than 570 alleged participants, the FBI at this point believes the violence was not centrally coordinated by far-right groups or prominent supporters of then-President Donald Trump, according to the sources, who have been either directly involved in or briefed regularly on the wide-ranging investigations.

“The violence?” The only violence recorded on the videos we have seen was on the part of the Capitol police – one of whom shot an unarmed protestor dead.

“Ninety to ninety-five percent of these are one-off cases,” said a former senior law enforcement official with knowledge of the investigation. “Then you have five percent, maybe, of these militia groups that were more closely organized. But there was no grand scheme … to storm the Capitol and take hostages.” 

FBI investigators did find that cells of protesters, including followers of the far-right Oath Keepers and Proud Boys groups, had aimed to break into the Capitol. But they found no evidence that the groups had serious plans about what to do if they made it inside, the sources said. 

‘Far-right?” What Reuters – and Leftists in general – mean by “far-right” are Americans who like their country and want its Constitution to remain unchanged and in full force.

One source said there has been little, if any, recent discussion by senior Justice Department officials of filing charges such as “seditious conspiracy” to accuse defendants of trying to overthrow the government. They have also opted not to bring racketeering charges, often used against organized criminal gangs.

Senior officials had discussed filing such charges in the weeks after the attack, the sources said.

Hayward comments:

But we’ve been told that the events of January 6 were an “insurrection,” and the gravest threat to American democracy since the Civil War. And this narrative is the pretext for the Biden Administration to claim “domestic terrorism” is the single greatest security threat facing the country. And also the pretext for banning Trump from social media platforms because he incited the mess.

As with the Muller report on the 2016 election, don’t expect the left, and the media, to give up on their “insurrection” narrative easily.

Right! With that pretext, that claim, that lie, the “Biden” administration hopes to destroy the Constitution and entrench the America-hating Democrats in power.

 Resist not evil (Matthew 5:39 KJV)

In humility count others more significant than yourselves (Philippians 2:3 English Standard Version)

Victor Davis Hanson writes at American Greatness:

Americans are growing angrier by the day in a way different from prior sagebrush revolts such as the 1960s Silent Majority or Tea Party furor of over a decade ago.

The rage at the current status quo this time is not just fueled by conservatives. For the first time in their lives, all Americans of all classes and races are starting to fear a self-created apocalypse that threatens their families’ safety and the American way of life.

The border is not just porous as in the pre-Trump past. It is nonexistent. Some 2 million people may cross illegally in the current fiscal year—with complete impunity.

There is zero effort to stop them. Officials daily hector Americans to get vaccinated and tested for COVID. But they are mute about illegal entrants, some of them infected with the virus.

Joe Biden has conceded that his hold on housing evictions deliberately defied a Supreme Court ruling. He added that he probably did not have the legal authority to ignore the court, but did not really care.

As in the case of demolishing immigration law, the president seems either unaware or proud that he is insidiously dismantling the Constitution.

America has never quite seen such overt and multifaceted efforts to undermine the foundations of free-market capitalism.

At a time of resurging GDP, low unemployment, and record worker shortages [thanks to Trump – ed.], Biden has announced that renters can continue to avoid paying what they owe their landlords—even after a prior year of such free housing.

In a rebounding economy amid record debt, the government is still sending workers unemployment benefits that are more remunerative than the paychecks they would earn if employed.

Such insanity means not only that labor-short employers cannot provide goods and services to American consumers. The new ethos also institutionalizes the pernicious idea that it is smarter to stay home and idle than to get a job and be productive.

Biden is also considering further extending exemptions for the repayment of $1.7 trillion in student loans. That amnesty will only further mainstream this growing notion that borrowing money entails no legal or moral obligation to pay it back.

No one seems to acknowledge that both students and the universities—which lured them to borrow—knew exactly the risks they were taking. Meanwhile, millions of American youth, the working classes who choose not to attend college, and those who paid their loans off or whose parents saved enough over the years to cover their tuition obligations, will subsidize those who renege of their debts by paying higher taxes.

Inflation is roaring back as the administration is printing trillions of new dollars that do not reflect commensurate gains in productivity or population.

Soaring prices are a direct result of incentivizing the unemployed not to work, while discouraging manufacturers and producers of food, gas, oil, timber, mineral, and metals.

The crime wave likewise is not accidental. It is the logical result of deliberate nihilistic policies of releasing thousands of criminals from jails and prisons, defunding and defaming the police, and empowering woke mayors and prosecutors to contextualize crime as the fault of society, not of the criminal.

In response, millions of Americans now simply avoid the mayhem and chaos of blue-state big cities.

Race relations have regressed 50 years. Under the fad of critical race theory, the color of our skins is now deemed essential to who we are.

The current woke revolution is an elite, top-down effort to smear the nation as some sort of contemporary racist hellhole. 

All this multifaceted chaos is not just faculty lounge stuff. We are beginning to see the collective craziness filter down to disruptions in our everyday lives.

Airliners cannot take off due to fuel shortages. Automobiles, houses, gas, and lumber are in short supply.

Consumers can’t get their roofs fixed or their houses painted or the trees trimmed as employers plead to their idle government-subsidized employees to come back to work.

No one knows whether our laws even still exist—or at least exist haphazardly depending on who breaks them.

Thieves steal with brazen impunity.

Scared Americans have lost faith in the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon, the CDC, and most of the federal bureaucracies that are as politicized as they are increasingly incompetent.

What started out as elite woke nonsense now warps everyone’s daily life. If we don’t wake up from wokeness, we will continue on our sure trajectory to self-inflicted, systemic paralysis—followed by civilizational collapse.

Accused by the ruling elite, many Americans are doing penance for actions they never took, words they never spoke, ideas they never thought. They plead guilty to being oppressors. In penance they hand power to their destroyers and abase themselves.

Why do millions of Americans accept the accusation that they are guilty of oppressing minorities when they are doing no such thing?

Could it be because a religion, still common to millions of Americans, taught self-abasement to generation after generation? Taught that you were born guilty? That you must always put the wants of others above your own?

That you must not resist evil?

Wokeism is fast becoming the American state religion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tal Bachmann deplores it at Steynonline:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But things have changed. Why?

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

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

Victor Davis Hanson writes at American Greatness:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roger L. Simon writes at the Epoch Times:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joy Pullmann, writing at The Federalist, rightly accuses the FBI of spending hundreds of millions of dollars and years going after Democrats’ political enemies, while letting known Islamic and other domestic terrorist threats slip through their fingers.

Instead they focus on helping a Democrat coup – called Crossfire Hurricane – against President Trump; on tracking down, and holding without trial, right-wing “extremists” who were mere onlookers at the unarmed raid on the Capitol; and persecuting NRA members.

It is past time to shut down the FBI and start over from scratch. We cannot continue to have an FBI more interested in pulling off Crossfire Hurricane than stopping mass shooters.

Read it all here.

The top analyst assigned to the FBI’s Russia “collusion” case codenamed Crossfire Hurricane, admitted under oath that neither he nor his team of half a dozen intelligence analysts could confirm any of the allegations in the Steele dossier [falsely incriminating Donald Trump], including ones the FBI nonetheless included in several warrant applications as evidence to establish legal grounds to electronically monitor a former Trump adviser for almost a year.

FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten made the admission under questioning by staff investigators for the Senate Judiciary Committee during closed-door testimony in October.

Read the story about the vicious callous lying of Brian Auten, John Brennan and the whole portapotty of Democrat demons here.

As more and more information emerges on how wide and deep and zealous the opposition to President Trump was throughout his four years in office, it becomes more and more astonishing that he was able to accomplish anything at all, let alone the enormous amount that he did.

He was still president and head of the executive branch of government when agents provocateurs led a few of his supporters in a raid on the Capitol on January 6, 2021 – so that the Democrats could accuse him of inciting an insurrection. Yet none of the officials who worked under him and in theory for him did anything at all to counter the resulting onslaught against him by the legislative branch, including his second impeachment by the House and the farce of a trial by the Senate.

Even his vice president, Mike Pence, who seemed exceptionally loyal, has been exposed as a Swamp denizen.

William B. Allen writes at American Greatness:

Where was Trump’s national security team, and what counsel did they provide? The gravity of this obvious lacuna should instantly appear to anyone who considers this was a national security event of the greatest significance …

That it was a national security event is apparent from the immediate and since daily repeated descriptions of the riot as an attempted “insurrection” or “coup’. It is also apparent what protocols prevail in such an event: a national security team exists precisely to appraise and respond to such threats.

But where was FBI Director Christopher Wray? Where was the director of national intelligence? Where was the director of homeland security? Where was the attorney general? Where was the secretary of defense? Where was the director of central intelligence? Were they gathered in the White House within 30 minutes of the development of an event that lasted for hours? What counsel did they give? Were they rebuffed by the president? If the president were guilty of criminal negligence (a “high misdemeanor”), here would be the irrefutable proof of the fact.

At no point … since the events of January 6 has this question been raised in a publicly visible forum. It stands to reason that it should have been raised by virtue of the clear fact that the president’s conduct has been repeatedly described as “criminally negligent”. This would have been a credible charge of misconduct that could have supported impeachment. That such a charge was not filed, and such questions not posed, indicates the high likelihood that to pursue the inquiry on that line would have proved embarrassing—and even condemning—for the officials involved and for those pursuing the impeachment on the weak and inappropriate grounds of “inciting an insurrection”. 

One is forced to think that an obvious path to secure conviction was not pursued solely because it could not be sustained. If that is so, however, it also means that something far more significant happened. Namely, the president was not in control of the government.

The Democrats’ enormous exaggeration of the danger in the raid, their determination to make it seem that Donald Trump had tried to overthrow the legislative branch of government and that he is the leader of some 74 million “white supremacist terrorists” actively threatening American “democracy” – and therefore equivalent, they imply, to an alien enemy – gives them the pretext to take every step they can think of to make it impossible for him, or anyone like him, ever to come to power again. They will destroy him personally by any means  they can, and make it criminal to be on his side.

And they are destroying all his accomplishments. Every problem, domestic and foreign, that he solved, they are returning to its problematic condition. Everything he saved from ruin, they are ruining.

William Levin writes at American Thinker:

The Democrats are pursuing a multi-prong strategy to cement a permanent majority.  To accomplish the goal requires upending the constitutional design.  Until the scope of this effort is seen in its entirety, it can proceed in the shadows.

It has six astonishing elements:

1. 1. Enable Congress to determine who can run for President,
   2. Eliminate the Electoral College without amending the Constitution,
   3. Override the states’ constitutionally mandated authority to determine presidential election rules,
   4. Grant statehood to the District of Columbia by statute,
   5. Rewrite the First Amendment to limit political speech, and
   6. Enable open border immigration through executive agreement instead of Congressional action.

Taken together, the program represents a comprehensive challenge to representative democracy. …

Right. It is they who want to end democracy in America. As usual, they accuse their opponents of the wickedness they themselves really are plotting and doing.

Two more articles at American Greatness explain what is happening.

Christopher Roach writes:

Trump thought if he was a loyal American running for president, it would not be possible the CIA and FBI would wiretap him and destroy his supporters’ lives in the process. Similarly, he thought he could talk to foreign leaders or make changes to executive branch policy, and those subordinate to him would do what they were told.

His supporters thought elections mattered, and that they had a right to protest when those elections appeared fraudulent.

But he and they were wrong. Those expectations were aroused by advertisement. They are advertised in the Constitution and its Amendments. But the reality is, as always, different:

The rules, procedures, and priorities of the bureaucrats determine which laws get enforced and which ones don’t … [and] which companies, donors, and groups are entirely exempt from the rules that apply to everyone else.

In other words, these are the real laws, determining what is permitted and what is forbidden. … The mandarin class that writes and interprets them, decides when a riot is “mostly peaceful” or a dangerous “insurrection”. They determine when democracy means the opposite of democracy.

Dan Gelernter writes:

The Left’s hatred of Trump is merely a symptom of their guiding philosophy, which is … gradually to exclude people from government. The Left is in favor of any action that will expand the authority of bureaucrats by taking decisions out of the hands of citizens.

With the coronavirus, the Left is beside itself with glee: This is the first crisis since 9/11 broad enough to make possible a fundamental transformation of American society. …

The reason coronavirus so delights today’s Left is that the public response to their power grab has been overwhelmingly docile: The numbers of deaths are vastly below historic health panics, even with generous inflation via guidelines encouraging doctors to record anyone who previously had the virus as having died from it.

Even so, the government was able to lock people in their homes for a “two-week period” that turned out to be roughly a year, destroy much of the hospitality sector of the economy, force people to cover their faces in public as though living under a secular sharia, and, perhaps best of all, they got neighbors to snitch on neighbors and children to report their parents when these edicts weren’t followed.

It has been a bonanza. The everyday American citizen will always remember 2020 as a painful, terrible, soul-crushing year. For the Left, that makes it one of the best years on record. It is one of those great years in which they changed how Americans live….

They need only to cement this victory by making those changes permanent. …

The Left wouldn’t want you to think that the danger has lessened. This is why the Biden Administration suggested that social distancing and mask-wearing will continue to be vital, even once the entire population is inoculated. They don’t want the pandemic to go away: A successful Biden Administration is not one in which coronavirus disappears, it is one in which Americans accept wearing masks for the rest of their lives. …

These are incremental steps on the road to tyranny: They don’t necessarily increase public safety—they may harm it. But they do give the government more power, and that is the important thing, the operative goal. Europe is a few steps ahead of America in its gradual dissolution of democracy, but America will follow just as fast as the public is willing to tolerate.

Tolerate the process of decline and fall?

Is there a choice?

Hasn’t resistance proved futile?

When Joe Biden was vice president of the United States, he was bribed through his son by a crooked Ukrainian company to force the Ukrainian government, under threat of denying aid, to fire the prosecutor in charge of investigating it.

Vice President Joe Biden was televised boasting about how easily he had worked the threat to achieve his end.

All this has been well known for years. But new evidence that Joe Biden “subverted American foreign policy in order to enrich his own family” (to use the words of Tucker Carlson on Fox News) has come to light in emails from a laptop computer belonging to Hunter Biden.

Now that Joe Biden is the Democrat candidate for the presidency, the fact that their candidate is a corrupt crook must surely trouble the Democrat Party? Obviously no, it doesn’t. Not in the least. The Democrats and their voters want to have a corrupt crook as their president.

The case shows that the US already has a crooked and corrupt federal police force. We’ve known that also for years, but there’s new evidence of that too from the Biden emails.

Megan Fox points out at PJMedia:

The FBI had possession of this information back in December? Why didn’t the FBI come forward with this evidence about Hunter Biden’s emails, which appear to show collusion and influence-trading? Isn’t that something they should have told the president or members of Congress? … If the good citizen who came forward and alerted the FBI of the contents of the laptop [containing the emails] had not made a copy of the information, it would still be under FBI lock and key. … It’s a stunning indictment of the FBI that an American citizen who alerted them to … multiple crimes involving a guy with the last name Biden knew not to trust them and made other arrangements should they try to cover it up (which, apparently, they did).

One new revelation is that the son, Hunter Biden, wrote about giving 10% of bribe money he got from a company in China to the “big guy”. There can be little doubt that the”big guy” is Joe Biden, candidate for the presidency.

These corrupt practices are a political scandal of immense proportions.

It is so big and appalling that the Democrat-supporting mainstream media refuse to report it. Twitter and Facebook, actively trying to get Joe Biden elected, have blocked or limited users’ discussion of it. Why? Not because they are disturbed by the Bidens’ immorality, but because they know that many citizens would be.

The facts are spreading anyway. The election will show whether America is still a moral nation, by voting Donald Trump back into the presidency; or has become an immoral nation, happy to be led by the venal scoundrel Joe Biden.