Yet more evidence of fraud in the 2020 election – again contributing to a Biden “win” – turns up in Montana: twenty-eight signatures on twenty-eight ballots, different names, all the same handwriting.

John R Lott Jr. writes at The Daily Signal:

During the pandemic summer of 2020, the governor of Montana, Democrat Steve Bullock, issued a directive permitting counties to conduct the general election fully by mail.

Also a court struck down Montana’s law aimed at preventing ballot harvesting.

Missoula, Montana’s second-most populous county and one of its most heavily Democratic, opted in to the universal vote-by-mail regime.

In response, in October 2020, several county residents with experience targeting election integrity issues formed a group to ensure the legitimacy of the 2020 vote.

In November, the group approached state Rep. Brad Tschida, a Republican, to formally take up the issue. Tschida hired a lawyer involved in the group, Quentin Rhoades, to represent him in corresponding with Missoula County Elections Administrator Bradley Seaman, a Democratic appointee and a longtime supporter of progressive causes.

Seaman’s office complied with Tschida’s request for access to all of the county’s ballot envelopes, and on Jan. 4 a team of volunteers, overseen by Rhoades, conducted an audit with the assistance of the Missoula County Elections Office.

The audit consisted of both a count and review of all ballot envelopes and comparing that to the number of officially recorded votes during the Nov. 3, 2020, general election. 4,592 out of the 72,491 mail-in ballots lacked envelopes—6.33% of all votes. Without an officially printed envelope with registration information, a voter’s signature, and a postmark indicating whether it was cast on time, election officials cannot verify that a ballot is legitimate. It is against the law to count such votes.

Dozens of ballot envelopes bore strikingly similar, distinctive handwriting styles in the signatures, suggesting that one or several persons may have filled out and submitted multiple ballots, an act of fraud. 28 envelopes reviewed from the same address, a nursing home, all 28 signatures looked “exactly the same” stylistically.

An auditor reported that among the envelopes she reviewed, two [unusual and easily recognized] signatures appeared dozens of times.

When Rhoades asked Seaman about more ballots recorded than the envelope count, Seaman appeared extremely nervous and had no explanation.

The magnitude of defective—and potentially fraudulently cast—ballots identified during the Missoula County ballot audit is particularly troubling given the small margins by which local 2020 elections were decided. The 2020 local House District 94 race was determined by 435 votes; that of local House District 96, a mere 190.

If Missoula County generated problem ballots on the level of those cast during 2020, it may well have swung these statewide elections.

The Democrat-controlled U.S. House has passed HR 1, a bill that would result in universal mail-in voting across America. 

… in the November 2020 election.

The Daily Signal reports:

A veteran Democratic operative intricately involved in Green Bay’s November election was given access to “hidden” identifiers for the internet network at the hotel convention center where ballots were counted. Green Bay city officials insist the presidential election was “administered exclusively by city staff”, but emails show that Michael Spitzer-Rubenstein had a troubling amount of contact with election administration Nov. 4. Spitzer-Rubenstein offered to correct or “cure” ballots in Green Bay, and he told the city clerk that he had come up with a similar process for Milwaukee.

And despite the city’s assertions that Spitzer-Rubenstein did not have the keys to the KI Center where absentee ballots were, a hotel contract obtained by Wisconsin Spotlight shows the keys were to be delivered to the Democratic operative. “Michael Spitzer-Rubenstein will be the onsite contact for the group,” the hotel’s instructions state.

Emails show him inside the KI Center, working on a laptop by a printer at Central Count on election night.

Organizations were created to cheat in the election:

The National Vote at Home Institute is one of several private, left-leaning groups funded largely by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

The Chicago-based Center for Tech and Civic Life received hundreds of millions of dollars in funding from Zuckerberg and his wife, money they pumped out in big grants to cities in the name of “safe elections”.

John Solomon reports at Just the News:

Long after former President Donald Trump dropped his legal challenges to the 2020 election, some courts in battleground states are beginning to declare the way widespread absentee ballots were implemented or counted violated state laws.

The latest ruling came this month in Michigan, where the State Court of Claims concluded that Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s instructions on signature verification for absentee ballots violated state law.

Benson had instructed local election clerks a month before the Nov. 3 election to start with a “presumption” that all signatures on absentee ballots were valid and only reject those that had “multiple significant and obvious” inconsistencies. Republicans and one election clerk challenged her instructions in court.

Chief Court of Claims Judge Christopher M. Murray ruled March 9 that the state Legislature did not provide such guidance in its election laws, and therefore Benson needed to promulgate a formal rule – a timely process – before imposing such a requirement. Murray told election clerks they should disregard Benson’s instructions in future elections.

“An agency must utilize formal rule-making procedures when establishing policies that ‘do not merely interpret or explain the statute or rules from which the agency derives its authority,’ but rather ‘establish the substantive standards implementing the program,'” Murray ruled.

“The guidance issued by the Secretary of State on October 6, 2020, with respect to signature-matching standards was issued in violation of the Administrative Procedures Act,” he concluded. …

In neighboring Wisconsin, the state Supreme Court handed down a significant ruling in December when the justices concluded that state and local election officials erred when they gave blanket permission allowing voters to declare themselves homebound and skip voter ID requirements in the 2020 elections.

In a case challenging the practice in Dane County, one of Wisconsin’s large urban centers around the city of Madison, the state’s highest court ruled that only those voters whose “own age, physical illness or infirmity” makes them homebound could declare themselves “indefinitely confined” and avoid complying with a requirement for photo ID.

The mere existence of a COVID-19 pandemic and shutdown orders was not sufficient under Wisconsin law for all persons to skip the voter ID requirements to seek to vote absentee, the justices ruled. …

In so doing, the court ruled that local officials like Dane County and Gov. Tony Evers did not have legal authority to exempt all voters to get an absentee ballot without an ID. Evers had issued an executive order earlier this year.

“We conclude that [Evers’] Emergency Order #12 did not render all Wisconsin electors ‘indefinitely confined’, thereby obviating the requirement of a valid photo identification to obtain an absentee ballot,” the majority ruling concluded.

The court filings indicated nearly 200,000 voters declared themselves permanently confined in the state’s spring primary, a marked rise over prior years, and even more did so in the general election. Biden won Wisconsin by just 20,000 votes.

Meanwhile in Virginia, a judge in January approved a consent decree permanently banning the acceptance of ballots without postmarks after Election Day, concluding that instructions from the Virginia Department of Elections to the contrary in 2020 had violated state law. An electoral board member in Frederick County challenged the legality of the state’s instruction and won though the ruling came after the election.

“If the return envelope has a missing postmark, the ballot shall be rendered invalid,” Frederick County Circuit Judge William W. Eldridge IV ruled in the consent decree.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation, which represented electoral board member Thomas Reed called the ruling “a big win for the Rule of Law.”

“This consent decree gives Mr. Reed everything he requested – a permanent ban on accepting ballots without postmarks after Election Day and is a loss for the Virginia bureaucrats who said ballots could come in without these protections,” PILF President and General Counsel J. Christian Adams said.

Several more legal challenges remain in states, as well as two audits/investigations of voting machine logs that are pending in Georgia and Arizona.

Then comes this peculiar sentence (our italics):

And while there has been no proof the elections were impacted by widespread fraud, there are still significant disputes over whether rule changes and absentee ballot procedures in key swing states may have been unlawful.

How much proof is needed of fraud in how many states and counties before it is considered “widespread” enough to have a decisive impact? There seem to be mountains of proof. What manner of proof, in how many places, would clinch the case?

In addition, the Thomas More Society’s Amistad Project on election integrity is pursuing litigation over whether hundreds of millions of dollars donated by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and routed to local election officials in several battleground states may have unlawfully influenced the election, according to the project’s director, Phill Kline.

“We’re expanding our litigation,” Kline told the John Solomon Reports podcast on Wednesday. “I still have suits that are active in Michigan and Georgia on this, and you’ll see us take new action in Wisconsin. And we will renew action in Pennsylvania. And, and our involvement in Arizona will take a little bit of a different tack, but will involve this. The Arizona legislature is going to do an audit and we want this within the scope.”

In other words, the election [contest] between Joe Biden and Donald Trump may be settled, but the battle over how elections will be governed – especially as it relates to absentee ballots and private funding of election clerks – has only just begun.

What is the difference between “private funding of election clerks” and bribery?

When President Trump succeeded, after bitter struggles, in establishing a majority of conservatives in the Supreme Court, his voters felt enormously relieved. They and he trusted that now the country would be protected from the worst the revolutionary globalist Democrats could do to destroy the free Republic.

But as it turns out, they were mistaken. With the shining exception of Clarence Thomas, the George W. Bush appointee who has proved to be staunchly conservative (supported to some extent by Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito), the justices chose to let the free Republic go.

Margot Cleveland writes at The Federalist:

On Feb. 22, the Supreme Court refused to hear two 2020 election-related appeals, falling one vote short of the four needed for the high court to agree to hear the case. Justice Clarence Thomas dissented from the denial of certiorari, as did Justice Samuel Alito in a separate dissent, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch.

With Joe Biden now a month into his office as president of the United States, Americans may shrug at the court’s decision, but we shouldn’t: the Supreme Court’s abdication of its authority to answer important constitutional questions only encourages further lawlessness by state election officials and courts, undermines voter confidence, and threatens even more chaotic federal elections.

The two cases the Supreme Court rejected on Monday both involved the 2020 election in Pennsylvania and the constitutionality of a state court decision overriding an unambiguous deadline the Pennsylvania legislature established for the receipt of mail-in ballots by 8 p.m. on election night. As Justice Thomas explained in his dissent, “Dissatisfied, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court extended that deadline by three days. The court also ordered officials to count ballots received by the new deadline even if there was no evidence—such as a post mark—that the ballots were mailed by election day.”

The Republican Party of Pennsylvania and several members of the Pennsylvania House and Senate attempted to challenge the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision in the U.S. Supreme Court before the election, but, at the time, the justices refused to expedite the case, leaving the petitions for review to proceed under the normal briefing schedule. But following briefing, the court denied the petition on Feb. 22.

Thomas dissented from the court’s denial of the petition for certiorari, calling the court’s refusal to hear the case “inexplicable”. In his dissent, Thomas explained both the problem with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision and why it was imperative for the U.S. Supreme Court to enter the fray.

“The Constitution gives to each state legislature authority to determine the ‘manner’ of federal elections,” Thomas opened his dissent, citing Article I, § 4 clause 1 and Article II, § 1 of the national Constitution. “Yet both before and after the 2020 election, nonlegislative officials in various States took it upon themselves to set the rules instead,” the originalist jurist continued.

Whether such nonlegislative actions violate the Electors Clause of the Constitution, as Article I, § 4 clause 1, has become to be known, or Article II, § 1, which governs the selection of the president, is the essence of the exercise of self-government, Justice Thomas wrote, because “elections are ‘of the most fundamental significance under our constitutional structure’.”

Elections, however, “enable self-governance only when they include processes that ‘give citizens (including the losing candidates and their supporters) confidence in the fairness of the election,” the dissent continued. “Unclear rules threaten to undermine the system. They sow confusion and ultimately dampen confidence in the integrity and fairness of elections.” … The Supreme Court should make clear “whether state officials have the authority they have claimed” [and]  “if not,” then the Supreme Court should “put an end to this practice now before the consequences become catastrophic”, Justice Thomas wrote.

Yet the Supreme Court refused to hear the case. But why? Both constitutional and prudential principles weigh in favor of granting certiorari.

Constitutionally, while federal courts only have the power to hear a “case or controversy,” meaning the Supreme Court lacks jurisdiction to hear “moot” cases, here there is a well-established exception to the mootness doctrine: the capable-of-repetition-but-evading-review exception.

This exception to the mootness doctrine provides that federal courts hold authority to resolve cases where “the challenged action is in its duration too short to be fully litigated prior to cessation or expiration” and where “there is a reasonable expectation that the same complaining party will be subject to the same action again.”

Both criteria exist here, Justice Thomas wrote, as the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision came a mere six weeks before the election, and the petitioners in the cases—the state Republican party and state legislators—are likely to “again confront nonlegislative officials altering election rules”.

In his separate dissent, Justice Alito also concluded that certiorari should be granted because the cases “present an important and recurring constitutional question.” His dissent, joined by Justice Gorsuch, focused mainly on the mootness question.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision was so broad, Alito wrote, that the questions presented to the U.S. Supreme Court are “surely capable of repetition in future elections”.  “That decision,” Alito explained, “held that a state constitutional provision guaranteeing ‘free and equal’ elections gives the Pennsylvania courts the authority to override even very specific and unambiguous rules adopted by the legislature for the conduct of federal elections.”

“Indeed, it would be surprising if parties who are unhappy with the legislature’s rules,” Justice Alito continued, “do not invoke this decision and ask state courts to substitute rules they find more advantageous.”

Not only were the cases not moot, but as the dissents both made clear, the cases both “call out for review”, as Justice Alito put it. The cases present “an important and recurring constitutional question” [one that has] “divided the lower courts”. … Further, as Justice Thomas stressed, “postelection litigation is truncated by firm timeliness,” which “imposes especially daunting constraints when combined with the expanded use of mail-in ballots.”

Thomas’s dissent highlighted another significant reason for review. “Because fraud is more prevalent with mail-in ballots,” Justice Thomas wrote, “increased use of those ballots raises the likelihood that courts will be asked to adjudicate questions that go to the heart of election confidence.”

Here Justice Thomas wisely noted in his dissent that “settling rules well in advance of an election rather than relying on postelection litigation ensures that courts are not put in [the] untenable position of either potentially disenfranchising a subset of voters or ignoring the rules the legislature believes necessary to ensure election integrity”.

Yet the Supreme Court denied review.

Maybe the six justices who voted against certiorari believe the country will be better off without re-litigating the election. The denial, however, will not heal a country that witnessed state officials and courts changing the rules mid-vote—not just in Pennsylvania, but in Wisconsin and Michigan too. Then her citizens saw the Supreme Court seemingly ignore those violations of the Electors Clause when Texas sought relief in the Supreme Court.

Worse yet will be the damage done to our republic when the bending and breaking of election laws repeats in the future.

For now, as Justice Thomas concluded, by doing nothing, the Supreme Court invites erosion of voter confidence.

“We citizens deserve better and expect more.”

It is one of the worst of our – the citizens’ – disappointments.

Considering that, in the perception of half the voters, constitutional law had been broken, and considering what was at stake – nothing less than the free Republic itself – and how confidently we had looked to the Supreme Court as the most dependable and incorruptible of the Constitution’s protectors, its refusal to do what was to us clearly right was worse than a shocking and painful blow, it was crushing.

And it is hard to believe that the refusal was for reasons of constitutional law and not political choice.

… and not lose America?

There are two American nations owning the same country. One wants individual freedom and equality under the law; the other wants authoritarian gynocracy with a caste system graded by skin color. Each loathes and fears the other. Each wants to be free of the other. But territorial separation is not possible.

Is there a solution?

Selwyn Duke thinks there is. He writes about it at Canada Free Press:

With a stolen election, stolen culture, stolen courts and stolen dreams, many Americans are realizing that rule by the Left, absolutely corrupt even without absolute power, is unthinkable. Talk of secession, something continually entertained in various states throughout history, is again in the air. The problem is that for the most part, we’ve been supinely submissive in the face of burgeoning leftist tyranny. So it would help if there were something between secession and our current slouching toward servitude. And there is.

Too many conservatives are also waxing defeatist, saying “The republic is dead; our freedoms are gone.” And, yes, if we continue operating inside the box and being “conservative” — as in status-quo oriented — we can kiss our (remaining) liberties goodbye. But the Left isn’t constrained by any box, except what’s physically and politically possible; it doesn’t abide by rules, laws, social codes or conventions except when convenient. So why should we remain in any box … ?

Embracing Mao’s sentiment that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun”, the Left trades in violence, violence done to political opponents and to our culture, history, heroes, Constitution and just liberties. Now having seized power in government’s executive and legislative branches via the violence of electoral theft, the Left aims to use that power to become autocratic. As to how we should respond, remember:

Only power negates power.

The Left has been able to steal a national election (and some down-ballot seats, no doubt) via massive vote fraud in, largely, a handful of big Democrat-run cities. Yet despite all the electoral theft, President Trump still won half the states, some by wide margins. It is these states where power should be exercised.The power I reference is what Thomas Jefferson called the “rightful remedy” for all federal usurpation of states’ domain: nullification. This is the process whereby authorities simply ignore federal dictates, whether handed down by Congress, a bureaucracy or the courts.

There’s nothing unprecedented about nullification. Leftists engage in it continually. For example, their localities often ignore federal drug or immigration laws, and more than a score of states nullified the REAL ID Act of 2005.

Only, leftists don’t call it “nullification” — they just do it. In contrast, conservatives busy themselves conserving the status quo even though it’s leftist-born and generally abide by even unconstitutional federal laws, mandates and court rulings because “this is the way things are done”.

This said, we have seen some pushback, with county sheriffs in recent times refusing to enforce irrational China virus restrictions and some opposition to anti-Second Amendment proposals. But this effort must become widespread and organized — “Nullification!” must become a rallying cry.

To this end, we need a nullification movement. When state officials, from governor to assemblymen and senators, run for office, the first and last question must be: Will you vow to nullify all unjust federal dictates? If they hem and haw at all, they must be immediately disqualified.

In addition, nullification-disposed states should make a compact with one another so that we can enjoy the strength numbers bring.

In reality, nullification … should have been pursued long ago; the federal government has, after all, been trampling states’ powers for at least the better part of a century, and an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. … We now require a ton of cure.

The cure of nullification is the obvious next step for anyone serious about combating the burgeoning leftist tyranny. We’ve no other recourse. …

Reasoned argumentation only works with those who’ll yield to reason (the Left won’t).

Constitutional constraints only matter to those who respect laws and national contracts (the Left doesn’t).

Appealing to courts only bears fruit when judges have a sense of justice and duty and the guts to act rightly even when pariah status results (most don’t).

Making this more tragically comical still is that when we seek redress for federal tyranny, we expect relief from the federal government’s own judicial branch!

This didn’t help us with the 2020 election, which the Left got away with stealing. Moreover, it knows it can not only replicate the theft in the future but can expand it; thus have the Democrats introduced a bill taking mail-in voting nationwide. … The states can just pass on it. …

The Democrats can hobble border enforcement so that they can further destabilize our country and import more future voters — and Texas can secure its border itself. Let the left-wing, black-robed lawyers issue their contrary “opinions” as we know they will. My response would be a paraphrase of the paraphrase of Andrew Jackson: “The judges have made their decision. Now let them enforce it.”

In sum: The power of the federal government would be nullified by conservative populist states ignoring federal laws their own majorities don’t like and don’t vote for.

But the conservative populist states are the rule-of-law states. Would it not be a betrayal of their own principle to do it?

Not if the federal government has abandoned the rule of law and become a dictatorship. The Democrats now in power have amply demonstrated their contempt for any law that stands in their way. They have gotten away with conspiring against an elected president, perjury in court, cheating in an election, encouraging violent riots. They have lost the right to be obeyed.     

So yes, defiance, or “nullification”, might be a  solution. It is the practical sort of solution that evolves in response to the exigencies of conditions (like the constitutional republic of the United States), rather than the sort conceived by theorists and arbitrarily imposed (like socialism).

Then what might a Leftist federal government do about it? Would it use the US army to enforce its will?

We suspect that the gang in power in D.C. now would not hesitate to use the army. They are already doing so in the federal capital. And the Democratic Party’s radical female novices in Congress almost certainly would as soon as they’ve risen to some seniority. Or even before.

What then? Civil war?

*

Note added three days later: The North Dakota legislature, alarmed by Biden’s extravagant issue of executive orders and their effects, is considering exercising its right of nullification.

“Welcome to the American oligarchy,” Roger Kimball writes at American Greatness.

Preparation for the new type of regime, he observes, is being done by the military:

Why are there some 21,000 troops and oodles of razor wire in Washington D.C.?

Really, it is an amazing, not to say an ominous, spectacle.

What excuse for it does this type of ruler give the nation?

The ostensible reason for turning the capital of the United States into an armed camp is to protect the mostly virtual inauguration of China’s Big Guy, Joe Biden, against the onslaught of all those “right-wing extremists,” “white supremacists,” etc. that the magical magus Donald Trump is mobilizing through secret “dog whistles” and other shamanistic practices.

As always when a tyranny puts on a show of its might, it claims that it is acting only out of necessity. As always, the necessity is a fiction.

The trouble is, all those “right-wing extremists,” like President Trump’s supposed “incitement” of the crowd at his “Save America” rally on January 6, are a figment of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer’s addled imaginations. Yes, that meme is assiduously, not to say preposterously, circulated and amplified by the media, social and anti-social alike. But those threatening hordes do not exist.

Just so, the violent mob scene at the Capitol on January 6 was not an “insurrection” or an act of “domestic terrorism” but rather … a political protest that “got out of hand.”

Here’s something else that has got out of hand: the American political order.

Many people, myself included, have been quoting Benjamin Franklin’s response to an inquisitive citizen upon the conclusion of the proceedings of the Constitutional Convention in 1787.

“What sort of government have you given us, Dr. Franklin?”

“A republic, madam, if you can keep it,” was Franklin’s reply.

Well, that’s all over now. Welcome to the American oligarchy.

THE FREE REPUBLIC OF AMERICA IS OVER AND GONE.

The Left has been promising for years to “fundamentally transform,” this country, and now it has done so.

The transformation was accomplished with the election of 2020.

As the years go by, historians, if the censors allow them access to the documents and give them leave to publish their findings, will count the 2016 presidential election as the last fair and open democratic election.

Beginning with the election of 2020, the game was rigged.

I know, I know, we are not supposed to say that, and Twitter, Forbes, Facebook, and other woke guardians of the status quo will frown upon the suggestion.

But every honest person knows that the 2020 election was rigged.

The statistician William M. Briggs has a handy round-up of the evidence. He also makes the commonsense observation, “If a party cheats, and is in charge of investigating accusations of cheating, and if the media calls the cheating a conspiracy theory, and if the rulers move to expel those who question the cheating, as has already happened, then that party will win by virtue of its power.”

That, as he goes on to observe, “is the way power works.”

An evil chance helped the long-striving would-be transformers to succeed:

The forces that rigged the 2020 election had tried before. Hitherto, their efforts had met with only limited success. But a perfect storm of forces conspired to make 2020 the first oligarchic installation of a president.

The evil chance came in the form of a contagious sickness, the Covid-19 virus. Government everywhere, in universal accord, turned an epidemic into a panic, and the panic into an urgency so pressing that it required an abrogation of law.

It would not have happened, I think, absent the panic over the Chinese virus. But that panic, folded in a lover’s embrace by the democratic establishment, was not only a splendid pretext to clamp down on civil liberties, it also provided an inarguable excuse to alter the rules for elections in several key states.

Well, “inarguable” is not quite the right word. There could have been plenty of arguments, and many lawsuits, against the way the executive branch in many states usurped the constitutionally guaranteed prerogative of state legislatures to set the election rules when they intervened to allow massive mail-in voting. But the Trump Administration, though foreseeing and complaining about the interventions, did too little too late to make a difference.

There has been “an unaccountable administrative state for many years” directing and implementing policy, regardless of which party is in power. Through all that time, the continuing existence of the free republic of America has been to a large extent illusory.

The illusion has been possible because …

 … the people do have a voice, but it is a voice that is everywhere pressured, cajoled, shaped, and bullied. They have a choice, but only among a roster of approved candidates.

The central fact to appreciate about Donald Trump is that he was elected without the permission, and over the incredulous objections, of the woke oligarchy that [now openly] governs us.

Representatives of that power tried for four years to destroy Donald Trump. The first mention of impeachment came mere minutes after his inauguration, an event that was met not only by a widespread Democratic boycott and hysterical claims by Nancy Pelosi and others that the election had been hijacked, but also by riots in Washington, D.C. that saw at least six policemen injured, numerous cars torched, and other property destroyed.

Kimball fully appreciates the good that President Trump has done for America:

Donald Trump’s accomplishments as president have been nothing less than stunning. (Here’s a nice summary by a spokesman for the administration.) Trump was, and is, a rude force of nature. He accomplished an immense amount. He lacked one thing. Some say it is self-discipline or patience. I agree with my friend who suggested that Trump’s critical flaw was a deficit in guile.

Yes. President Trump trusted too easily and was betrayed over and over again.

Trump seems never to have discerned what a viper’s nest our politics has become for anyone who is not a paid-up member of The Club [of oligarchs in both political parties].

But Kimball, despite his finding that “the transformation of the United States of America from a republic into an oligarchy” was long in the making and decisive in its recent consummation, seems to think it is temporary. He does not say that the oligarchy will go and the free republic return, but implies it with a prediction that remorse will set in among the oligarchs:

Someday—maybe someday soon—this witches’ sabbath, this festival of scapegoating, and what George Orwell called the “hideous ecstasy” of hate will be at an end. The orgy will end one day and people will be aghast, some will be ashamed, of what they did to the president of the United States and people who supported him …

We think it highly unlikely that the oligarchs will regret anything they are doing to gain power, exact vengeance, and vent their resentment, spite, malice, contempt and fury on Donald Trump.

And on his tens of millions of devoted followers.

They are taking power as the choice of a minority of voters and plainly do not care to win the majority over. It is the tyrants’ pleasure to force those who hate them to obey them.

As the Catholic Church did in ages past, and Islam still does, the Left strives to bring every nation, and every last member of every nation, under its rule: a rule not of law but of lawyers, law-makers and law-breakers; bureaucrats, bankers, communication controllers, billionaires.

In America there are still tens of millions who refuse to comply, and they are being treated as heretics, infidels, and pariahs. If you are a Trump supporter, or in the least degree opposed to the Leftists who have seized the executive branch of government and now control both houses of the legislative branch, you are likely to be forced into conformity and unquestioning obedience. The means to be employed will be cutting you off from the services you need to live a normal life.

Through institutions of government and enormously powerful corporations, the heresies of patriotism, populism, anti-tribalism, individualism, and defiant defense of free speech, private property, arms bearing, and the teaching of reading writing reckoning and history to your children, will be punished.

You will be denied the services of banks, credit card companies, the internet, social media, insurance companies, the national health service, schools, universities. It will be very hard for you to find a job.

There will be degrees of deprivation. If you are a mild offender, you may be allowed some health care, for instance, and a low-paying job. If you are a grave offender – one who goes so far as to persist in speaking well of Donald Trump – you may face long imprisonment. An active attempt to reinstate him could be ruled a capital offense.

If you capitulate and submit, your life will not be easy. Your record will be held against you.

Even if you always supported the Left and voted the totalitarians into power, you will receive only the information that the rulers choose to allow you. You will have no way of knowing – unless by chance you personally witness a reported event – whether what you are being told is true or false.

Bruce Bawer writes at Front Page:

I’ve been ranting for years about the perfidy of the left. At times I’ve been accused of exaggerating. On rare occasions I feared – or hoped? – that perhaps I was exaggerating. In fact I can now see that these people are worse than I ever imagined. Worse than most of us ever imagined. …

Worse than even Donald Trump “with all his insight” imagined.

He went into office determined to clean up the swamp. He was tireless. But not tireless enough. No mere mortal could have been tireless enough. Trump had denounced the swamp in apocalyptic terms, but it proved to be even deeper and more extensive than he knew. It reached into the upper echelons of the intelligence community and the military, into cabinet departments and the judiciary.

Not only did the Democrats try to derail his campaign and then his presidency. Even people whom he appointed to White House jobs proved unreliable. Far from being too suspicious, he’d been too trusting. He’d appointed two-faced D.C. insiders. He’d trusted people who turned out to be snakes in the grass.

The news media, with very few exceptions, made it their task to thwart his progress and poison his name with a constant flow of disinformation. They said Trump had told people to drink bleach. They said he’d called neo-Nazis “good people”. They said many other outrageous things that they knew were outright lies. They relentlessly repeated the charge that he did nothing but lie, lie, lie, when in fact it was they, the media, who were constantly feeding us lies. …

When enemies of Trump, and of freedom, created violence and mayhem in cities around the country, they were whitewashed, protected, and even praised by the media, by Democratic politicians, and by police officials. In a debate with Trump, Biden said Antifa was an idea, not an organization. Congressman Jerrold Nadler called it a myth.

Meanwhile Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey gave BLM $3 million. While the leftist gangsters went unpunished, citizens who tried to protect their homes and businesses from destruction by them were arrested by the police and demonized in the media. If you tried to spread the truth about all this on social media, you were shut down by Silicon Valley bosses who said you were lying.

And then the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.

Republican officials in the states affected by the steal sat on their hands. State legislatures, ditto. Even the justices he’d named to the Supreme Court refused to hear Texas v. Pennsylvania, absurdly maintaining that a state didn’t have standing to challenge the conduct of a presidential election in another state.

Trump’s supporters, ever civilized, waited patiently while every possible means of stopping the steal was dutifully exhausted. When it came down to the final vote certification in Congress, an army of [between 600,000 and 2,000,000!) MAGA folk gathered peacefully in Washington to show that they had Trump’s back.

Then a tiny percentage of them foolishly entered the Capitol building. And a tiny percentage of that tiny percentage – at least some of whom seem to have been Antifa goons – caused minor damage. Most of them appear to have milled harmlessly around the building, leaving paintings and statues untouched. The contrast with the conduct of Antifa and BLM insurgents during the previous year could hardly have been more striking. …

One of those people, an Air Force veteran named Ashli Babbitt, was shot dead by a Capitol Hill policeman. She didn’t do anything to provoke the shooter. It was impossible not to think of George Floyd, the career criminal who, on May 25 of last year, died while resisting arrest after committing a crime. Floyd was black; the arresting officer was white. In the ensuing months, Floyd’s death was used to justify rioting, arson, and vandalism by Antifa and BLM agitators, none of whom ended up being killed by a cop.

But nobody’s making a martyr out of Ashli Babbitt.

I’m not saying anybody should. I’m just saying that after four years of reportage that routinely demonized Trump, sugarcoated his opponents, and cruelly mocked his supporters, and after an election that was blatantly stolen yet described in the media as eminently fair, those supporters could hardly be expected not to explode – especially since they’d seen, during the previous few months, one leftist explosion after another rewarded with praise.

But they did not explode.

On January 6, Biden, oozing faux solemnity, addressed the ongoing situation on Capitol Hill. After months of referring to Antifa and BLM thugs as “protesters”, he called the non-violent people who’d entered the Capitol a “mob” of “domestic terrorists” who, in an action bordering on “sedition”,  had made an “unprecedented assault…on the citadel of liberty….This is not dissent, it’s disorder”.

He wasn’t alone. In one voice, people who’d spent months cheering leftist violence expressed horror at the breach of the Capitol building and blamed it on Trump. Once the Capitol was secured, the planned challenges to the vote steal were scuttled and the election of Biden and Harris duly certified.

Whereupon the left – and not just the left – moved with the swiftness of lightning.

Accusing Trump of having incited the Capitol breach, [Speaker] Pelosi and [Senate minority leader] Schumer raised the possibility of using the 25^th Amendment to deny him his last few days in office …

And she absurdly introduced a proposal to impeach him for a second time, though he had only a few days more as president. .

Republicans who were never strong Trump supporters to begin with were quick to profess outrage at Trump’s purported provocation. Cabinet members Elaine Choi and Betsy DeVos quit. The Wall Street Journal called on Trump to resign. Senator Pat Toomey gave a thumbs-up to impeachment. Forbes warned companies not to hire anybody with a Trump connection.

Both Twitter and Facebook deplatformed Trump, and when he shifted from his personal Twitter account to the POTUS account, Twitter silenced that one, too. Other enemies of the left were also kicked off social media – among them Sidney Powell, Michael Flynn, and Steve Bannon. Facebook ejected the WalkAway movement, in the process deleting countless heartfelt posts by ordinary citizens explaining why they’d quit the Democratic Party. YouTube took down a video by Rudy Giuliani. Amazon, Google, and Apple removed Parler, a “free-speech” alternative to Twitter and Facebook, from their app stores. The CEO of Mozilla, developer of the Firefox browser, wrote an essay entitled “We Need More than Deplatforming.”

(Yet the social-media accounts of the Chinese Communist Party and Ayatollah Khamenei remained untouched.)

Pelosi tried to get the military to stop taking orders from the President. …

She urged the Chiefs of Staff to mutiny against their commander-in-chief! (They refused.)

The director of ABC News spoke of “cleansing” the Trump movement after January 20, whatever that might mean. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called for Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, who’d taken the lead in challenging the vote steal, to be expelled from the Senate. Simon & Schuster canceled Hawley’s contract for a book about cancel culture. Biden likened Cruz to Goebbels. …

There’s no intrinsic magic about America that protects it from becoming Mao’s China or Stalin’s Russia. Only utopians believe in the perfectibility of man. People are people. And some of the people who are now, or are about to be, in power in the United States would, if accorded enough power, do far more to those of us who falter in loyalty than merely take away our social-media accounts.

Indeed, as scary as the situation may be right now, one thing’s for certain: worse is on its way. The Democrats now control both houses of Congress and are about to be handed the executive branch. The totalitarian-minded elements in that party are on the ascent, backed up by Silicon Valley, the legacy media, and much of corporate America.

Bruce Bawer thinks that by “listing, arresting, and imprisoning ‘enemies of the state'” – as, he reminds us, was done in the terrible reign of Stalin, and under the brutal tyranny of Mao –

These people will overreach. Their lists will grow so long, their cancelations so widespread, that, as happened with the Reign of Terror, everyone who isn’t clinically insane will finally realize that things have gone too far and will, in one way or another, put an end to the madness.

He asks:

But how far will things have to go before that happens? How long will it take? And how many lives will be destroyed before it’s over? These, alas, are the all too sobering questions that have yet to be answered.

In the meantime, those of us who care about liberty will simply have to do our best to keep enduring the daily tsunami of evil ideology, fake news, and contempt for decent people, and to continue hoping that the true and good will yet prevail.

Much as we would like his optimism – such as it is, sorrowful and tentative – to hearten us, we are less sure that such a realization will come, or that “the true and good will yet prevail”.

What has happened seems to us to demonstrate that there is a tragic weakness in freedom and tolerance. They permit those who value neither to exploit them to gain the power to abolish them. 

America no longer has a government of the people for the people.

The chambers of Congress are occupied by rulers for the rulers.

They do not parley. They speechify. They grandstand. It is not a real parliament.

So says Mark Steyn with scorn. He writes that he finds himself “at odds with virtually the entire politico-media class” in his reaction to “the ‘storming’ of the US Capitol” on January 6, 2021.

He thinks the members of Congress got a taste of what they deserve: a scary expression of the anger citizens feel towards them. And we agree with him.

The political class (represented by a Speaker who flies home to San Francisco on her own government plane) has been largely insulated from the pathologies they have loosed upon the land. For a few hours [on January 6] they weren’t.

In a self-governing republic of citizen-legislators, that ought to be sobering and instructive. But, of course, it wasn’t. Still, I was surprised that even politicians and pundits could utter all that eyewash about “the citadel of democracy” and “a light to the world” with a straight face. It’s a citadel of crap, and the lights went out long ago …

I despise the United States Congress, and not merely for the weeks I had to spend there during the Clinton impeachment trial. My contempt pre-dates that circus. It dates to the moment I first realized, as a recent arrival to this land, that when [a member] is giving some overwrought speech on a burning issue he is speaking to an entirely empty chamber – because there are no debates, because most of these over-entouraged Emirs of Incumbistan are entirely incapable of debate …

The American media go along with the racket, and there’s only the one pool camera with the fixed tight shot so that you can’t see the joint is deserted and the guy is talking to himself. …

I have never seen such rubbish in the House of Commons at Ottawa or Westminster or their equivalents around the Commonwealth – and it’s a charade in which the media are all-in.

So it’s a Potemkin parliament.

That leads easily to the next stage of decay – for why would a Potemkin parliament not degenerate further into a pseudo-legislature? The Covid “relief” bill is 5,593 pages. There is no such thing as a 5,593-page “law” – because no legislator could read it and grasp it. For purposes of comparison, the Government of India Act, which in 1935 was the longest piece of legislation ever drafted in British law and which provided for the government of what are now India, Pakistan and Burma, is 326 pages.

Oh, I’m sure paragons of republican virtue will object that no Indian or Burmese citizen-representatives were involved in that piece of imperial imposition. Well, no American citizen-representatives were involved in the Covid “relief” bill. The legislation was drafted not by legislators, nor by civil servants, nor even by staffers or interns. Instead, a zillion lobbyists wrote their particular carve-outs, and then it got stitched together by some clerk playing the role of Baron von Frankenstein. The “legislators” voted it into law unread, and indeed even unseen, as the Congressional photocopier proved unable to print it: It was a bill without corporeal form, but the yes-men yessed it into law anyway.

Whatever that is, it’s not a republic. …

This institution, this branch of the government of the vast and mighty United States of America, is no “beacon to the world”.

I wish no ill to anyone in the building, but I do support, during the next recess, its complete dismantling and the salting of the earth: it is not a “citadel of democracy”, only a sick perversion thereof. Whatever Sudan and Chad and Waziristan need, it’s not the US Congress.

Whatever the American people need, it’s not this pseudo-legislature; it’s not a corrupt and senile president such as they’re about to get; it’s not a Supreme Court that refuses to judge a case of flagrant fraud and outright defiance of the Constitution in a presidential election.

Has the great experiment in founding a nation on a Constitution designed to give all power to the people failed beyond repair?

Who stormed the Capitol on Wednesday, January 6, 2021? Was it mostly a Trump supporting mob, or Antifa?

Antifa were there, bused into D.C. in four buses with a police escort according to this witness [is he credible?]:

Chuck: ANTIFA being escorted into DC by police ahead of Jan 6th MAGA Stop The Steal rally. pic.twitter.com/PBqqXIU87N

— Steven Diana (@Mini_Collective) January 4, 2021

And reputed Antifa/BLM protestors were noticed inside the building. But it is almost certain that the invaders were overwhelmingly Trump supporters.

Whoever initiated the incursion, whoever joined it for political reasons, made a tactical mistake if also a moral one*.

To occupy a parliament building in order to bring down a government successfully, you need to be an army. Like Oliver Cromwell’s. Otherwise it is a mere gesture.

Even a mere gesture can cause serious harm. This one did. It was lethal.

Matt Margolis writes at PJ Media:

It’s hard not to see the hypocrisy of the left when they act surprised or condemn what happened at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday. In June 2020, in the aftermath of the nationwide rioting following the death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer, Kamala Harris even gleefully predicted that the rioting wouldn’t end, telling Stephen Colbert, host of “The Late Show,” that they shouldn’t end:

They’re not going to stop. They’re not going to stop. This is a movement, I’m telling you. They’re not gonna stop. And everyone beware because they’re not gonna stop. They’re not gonna stop before Election Day and they’re not going to stop after Election Day. And everyone should take note of that. They’re not gonna let up and they should not.

The protests Kamala Harris spoke of were responsible for an estimated $1 – $2 billion in property damage between May 26 and June 8, 2020, and dozens of deaths …

What would happen if Trump said of the protestors who stormed the U.S. Capitol Wednesday, “They’re not going to stop. They’re not going to stop. This is a movement, I’m telling you. They’re not gonna stop. And everyone beware because they’re not gonna stop. They’re not gonna let up and they should not.”

But Trump never said anything like that. In fact, Trump urged his supporters to go home.

He said:

I know your pain, I know your hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it, especially the other side. But you have to go home now. We have to have peace. We have to have law and order. …  We don’t want anybody hurt.

Stephen Green writes also at PJ Media:

It’s difficult to be glib about the news after a day like yesterday, so today’s Insanity Wrap will be less of a wrap-up and more of a lament.

Four people are dead.

So many of us told you something like this was inevitable after Antifa/BLM was allowed for months to get away with their anarcho-communist brand of street thuggery. …

Still, the timing and location came as a shock.

It remains to be seen whether yesterday’s deadly riot represents a one-off venting of political frustration or a sea-change in that the Right will from now on operate more like the Left does.

And Stephen Green writes again at PJ Media:

The first thing I noticed while scanning the news was that virtually every conservative commenting on the situation was condemning the violence. Immediately. That stood in stark contrast to high-ranking Democrats and their flying monkeys in the mainstream media spending all last summer telling us that things were peaceful while we were staring at burning buildings. …

Conservatives like me have been radicalized by the Democrats and media pathologically lying about us for so long. Now we know that mainstream Republicans are going to try and marginalize us.

Here’s the thing though: there are a lot more of us than either side realizes.

So keep not getting why Trump got elected in the first place, people. Keep blaming factors that had nothing to do with his popularity. Keep selling out, Republicans. It just makes our long game easier.

We’re not going away.

We agree most closely with Mark Steyn:

*We’re not sure that it was a moral mistake on the part of the invaders. As Trump supporters, they had of a  lot of immorality and illegality to protest about, and where should they show their anger but to the government that caused or at least permitted the offenses? The woman who was shot was killed by a police officer over-reacting to the mass incursion. The police officer’s action was certainly immoral, but were the invaders to blame for his or her decision to shoot? And – according to the reports we can find – the other three who died lost their lives through natural causes, having attended the rally voluntarily.

What is disgraceful is that Congress is so poorly guarded.

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.