The Democrats Broke the Constitution - If We Don't Use that Opening to Fix Things, The Republic is Lost

I spent much of the two months following the 2020 election arguing with Democrats who pretended that Joe Biden actually won.  Their line was: “Prove it was fraudulent”.  I couldn’t.  “There was no fraud” we were told by the media, every branch of government, academics, Democrats and the TDS afflicted GOP establishment types.  That fiction continues to this day, and the truth is, they have a point.  As of today, there is not a single court case that has established any significant coordinated effort to steal the election.  Every single case brought by Donald Trump and his compatriots either failed in court or failed to be considered by courts because of “standing” or some other technicality.

Now, however, three years later, with everything from Molly Ball’s TIME magazine boast to Mollie Hemingway’s brilliant Rigged to the poorly made but tantalizing 2000 Mules to the Twitter files, it’s as clear as day to anyone with a functioning brain that the Democrats conspired with the rest of America’s elite leftist cabal to steal the election, and succeeded. 

One might think that the clear theft of an election of the most powerful office in the world would be enough to cause a revolution in the streets, but that didn’t happen.  Indeed, when a few thousand unarmed patriots sought to force the government to at least examine the questions about said election on January 6^th 2021, many ended up in gulags with their lives destroyed.

Even years later when it was clear to anyone with a pulse that elites manipulated every element of our voting system and stole the election, nothing happened.  Not only did no one go to jail for that treachery, but they were allowed to do the exact same thing two years later in Arizona, an ostensibly red state.

Arizona essentially watched in real time as its election was manipulated and the office of Governor was stolen from Kari Lake.  But here we are 11 months later and Katie Hobbs is still sitting in the Governor’s office and Kari Lake is still fighting in the courts. 

Just to the East, Tucker Carlson just interviewed Texas AG Ken Paxton, who was just acquitted of corruption charges.  Paxton discussed the problems afflicting what’s supposed to be blood red Texas.  He talked about the Speaker of a GOP dominated House being elected by Democrats, and even more treacherously, about the state’s highest criminal court – populated by Republicans – taking away his ability to investigate voter fraud, thereby leaving it to George Soros backed local AGs to do, which is scheduled to happen the day after Hell freezes over. 

All of which brings us to 2024.  It’s true that there have been no court cases that have determined that the 2020 election was stolen, but just as every American knows that OJ was guilty, every American knows that the 2020 election was stolen, even if they refuse to admit it. The problem is, corruption is designed to be hard to see and much of the government, both the investigative and judicial arms are part of the swamp that wants to keep the fraud hidden.  Proving it takes far longer than the period of time between the election and the inauguration. 

Just like the Russian collusion hoax and the Hunter Biden laptop story however, eventually the media will come around to admitting that which we all know already, that the 2020 presidential election was indeed stolen.  But just like the two aforementioned stories, the truth will not emerge until long after its release would be helpful to the American people. 

The question is, what are freedom loving, Constitution loving Americans supposed to do in a situation where the theft is happening right in front of them in real time and they’re told that what they’re seeing isn’t what’s actually going on?  Between early voting, absentee voting, vote harvesting and computer voting, America’s voting system is simply broken. Not only is it broken, but the courts, filled with activist, partisan judges offer little or no outlet to address the problem.  Indeed, even the Supreme Court offers no opportunity for fixing the problem as can be seen by its allowing Pennsylvania’s courts to change the state’s voting laws in clear violation of the US Constitution then by refusing Texas’s case based on the ludicrous grounds of “Standing”. 

Today, we are faced with the fact that regardless of what a Constitutional majority of Americans vote for, the outcome of the presidential and other elections is not up to them. America is not only no longer a Republic, we’re not even a democracy in the loose sense of the word.  America is no longer a democratic nation at all, it’s a nation managed and manipulated by a cabal of elites.  If things like what happened nationally in 2020 and in 2022 in Arizona continue, there will eventually be a civil war.  It’s only a question of time.

In 247 years ago 55 men, propelled by a tyrannical government in which they had no say but which demanded their fealty and taxed them at will, signed a document that would change the course of human history.  Today Americans find themselves with even less control than the Founding Fathers did, beholden to a tyrannical leviathan like government run by an elitist cabal that manufactures the outcomes it desires. 

Power almost never gives up power willingly, but the possibility still exists.  If Americans, win or lose can once again feel confident that their votes count and that success is based on the number of votes cast and not the number of ballots manufactured, we might be able to avert another conflagration.

How might that happen?.  Here are five simple changes that would fix this problem, but they’ll never see the light of day as Democrats have no incentive to fix the current system.

1) Make election day a national holiday.
2) Eliminate early voting.
3) Eliminate absentee ballots for anyone other than persons provably outside of their registered state on election day.
4) Eliminate electronic voting.
5) Implement universal Voter ID.

Every state should be forced to comply, regardless of what the Constitution says.  “Why that’s tyranny!!!” you say.  Maybe, but the reality is, the Constitution was already shredded by Democrats via the manufactured hysteria over Covid.  We were told that the “emergency” was sufficient to disregard the Constitution. I’d suggest that if what was basically a bad case of the flu can be considered an emergency sufficient to go ignore the Constitution, then averting a bloody civil war is at least as much of an emergency.  Unlike what we were told about the Covid threat, a civil war would actually result in the loss of millions of lives and would leave devastation in its wake like Americans have never seen.   

Of course, using the same rationale, environmentalist fascists might eventually argue that “Climate Change” is an emergency too.  They could and would make the argument and try and use it to eviscerate what’s left of the Constitution. Admittedly it’s a slippery slope, but that’s where Democrats have put us.  As they learned when Harry Reid tried a “limited” overturning of the filibuster, once something is broken, there is no such thing as “limited”.  Democrats broke our Constitution to steal an election. If we don’t do something, we will eventually become a nation of serfs in the service of lords in Washington, New York and Silicon Valley.  If ignoring that broken Constitution is what’s necessary to give citizens’ back control over their government and avert a civil war, it might be worth considering. Our Republic is already gone, the question is, can we put it back together?

Following a Donald Trump Forged in a Crucible of White Hot Fire

 I first started writing a blog in 2009, after Barack Obama’s election. My first post, America’s Original Sin, addressed the then-nascent movement to disparage and denigrate America because the Founding Fathers didn’t have the foresight in 1787 to write a constitution that would dovetail with the mores of 21st-century snowflakes.

The title of my blog, Imperfect America, is followed by a quote attributed to the French philosopher, Voltaire: “Perfect is the enemy of the good.” Our nation is a billboard-sized testament to that adage. Rarely have we seen perfect, but we frequently see good. And that’s the problem with leftists… They want to sacrifice good for the fiction of perfection.

While today it’s all the rage to dwell on America’s failures, it’s far less celebrated to talk about her triumphs. Although the left has been demonizing America since the sixties, it was after Bush won in 2000 that this tactic started to stick. The cancer of hate really took off once Obama became president. On college campuses, in elementary schools, on nightly newscasts, and in papers across the country, we were incessantly told that America was racist, sexist, homophobic and destroying the environment.

It was into this miasma that Donald Trump marched when he announced he was running for president. He saw the leftist cancer destroying the very foundations of freedom, opportunity, and prosperity while undermining America’s core civilization and setting the country up for a devastating collapse. And he willingly stepped into the breach to stop it.

The problem, however, was that rather than running as a Democrat, where all solutions come from an omnipotent central government, he was running as a Republican who sought to reduce government control and return power to Americans.

That was a bridge too far. From the second he announced, Trump found himself enduring a withering barrage of vitriol and venom unseen in American politics. The abuse came from Democrats, the media, social media and academia as well as the GOP establishment. What Trump endured was relentless. Yet somehow, he won.

(Full disclosure: I initially had concerns about Trump and wrote about them often, with one post titled: Sure, Donald Trump may shiv us... but the country can’t survive Hillary Clinton’s thugs.)

In the wee hours of November 9, 2016, it became clear that Trump would become the next president of the United States. It also became clear the Democrats were not going to take it lying down.

The Russia Collusion hoax started a drumbeat that would bedevil the president for the next four years, even after it was shown to be a Clinton crafted fiction the mainstream media parroted. Indeed, the New York Times and the Washington Post would win Pulitzer Prizes for their “reporting” on the fake story, and no, not because they exposed the lie but, instead, because of their vociferous and eloquent participation in it.

During his presidency Donald Trump endured extraordinary abuse and treachery, driven by the media and the Democrat party. The irony of the media’s hatred for Trump was that channels like CNN and MSNBC virtually owed their rescue from irrelevance to the Trump presidency, while newspapers slowed their decades-long declines with pages of anti-Trump rhetoric.

As bad as the media abuse was, it was nothing compared to the treachery of the apparatchiks in the government. When Trump tried to build his promised wall, he was blocked at every step. His efforts to make Bureau of Land Management employees live closer to the lands they regulated were pilloried for making the agency “less diverse.” Lt. Col Alexander Vindman, the NSC’s Ukraine expert, launched an impeachment when he lied about Trump trying to coerce Ukraine into investigating the Bidens.

And if all that wasn’t bad enough, during the Covid “pandemic,” possibly the most economically destructive self-inflicted wound in human history, the two government-employed doctors Trump looked to for guidance lied to Trump and the country. Finally, in perhaps the greatest treachery of all, we learned that members of America’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies were actively working to undermine Trump in the election.

Worse, this orgy of Trump-directed destruction wasn’t just in Washington. The 2020 riots cost billions of dollars in damage, and brought chaos and bloodshed to cities across the country, all the while being spurred and supported by Democrats single-mindedly focused on defeating Donald Trump.

These attacks were relentless, every single hour of every single day and came from inside and outside of government. Yet somehow Trump managed to run the government well and campaign like the Energizer Bunny. In the end, it took a literal coup d’état to oust him from office.

And now he’s back—and the mainstream media, Democrats, the GOP establishment, bloggers, and erstwhile fans all insist that we’re supposed to abandon him.

Aside from the fact that the Democrats will demonize as a Nazi, racist, homophobe anyone who carries the GOP flag, the reality is that Donald Trump is a fighter for America unlike any president we’ve ever had. No one has ever had to endure the level of vitriol or withstand the relentless phalanx of persecution from every corner as Trump has.

And here’s the thing…he didn’t need to. Trump was a billionaire already. Trump was already feted by politicians and media around the world. He already had a beautiful family, spectacular homes, and his own plane! No politicians in American history had more to lose when they decided to fight for the American people than Trump did. Usually, politicians go to Washington as middle class and leave millionaires. Trump, however, had literally billions of dollars to lose, but he took on the Swamp anyway.

Now, after enduring seven years of abuse for his defense of American freedom, prosperity and farmers and truckers and little guys of all shapes and sizes, he’s once again stepping up to do battle.

You may not like Donald Trump, and there’s much to not like. He’s arrogant, he’s petty, he’s defensive, and he can be cruel. (Those attributes can just as much be applied to Barack Obama.)

Unlike Obama however, Trump doesn’t try and pretend he’s something he’s not. He’s a crude, brash New Yorker who speaks his mind and gets things done. He knows how to fix things and wants to fix America with strong borders, energy independence, limited government, a robust economy, and individual liberty… All of the things the Swamp fought him on and the very things Joe Biden has undermined.

Donald Trump circa 2022 is still imperfect, but he’s been forged in a crucible of white-hot fire and has emerged even more focused than before on making America great. So, yes, while there may be brilliant lights on the horizon, I think I’ll take a pass and stick with the guy who got out of his Bentley and ran through a gauntlet of machine gun fire into the burning mess of Democrat America in order to save the eagle stuck inside.

Trump may tell off-color jokes and may not always be the best judge of character, but he can take the heat, and his North Star has always been prosperity and security for the American people. Given the literal evil the Democrats are seeking to impose on America, I’ll happily follow him into the fire.

Five For Freedom - A Contract With America For The 21st Century

  America’s in a civil war.  Not a cocktail party war like Vietnam or Afghanistan where Americans stand around and talk about it but relatively few are personally impacted.  No, this a WWII level existential threat war where the difference between victory and defeat is literally freedom or tyranny.  One need look no farther than what Adolph Trudeau is doing in Canada right now to understand what the future holds. 

This war has been simmering for decades and most Americans didn’t even notice.  Now it’s obvious. Virtually every element of traditional American culture is being destroyed.  The left has decided that the United States is a plague on humanity and must be eliminated.

In this case the “left” consists of government, media, big tech, big business, and academia, among others.

Here’s a short list of their targets…    

Turning schools into leftist Indoctrination centers

Government control of your neighborhood

Open borders

Money / Driver’s licenses / Voting for illegals

Legalizing crime / No bail  

Encouraging / Empowering homelessness

2^nd Amendment

Censorship

Gender reimagining

Control over your body

Free exercise of religion

Peaceably assemble

Men having babies

Banking

Climate Change

CRT

Government spying on citizens

Girl’s sports

And of course, most problematic of all is their successful coup d'état.

With that and more, do we still live in a free country?  Obviously not.

Which brings us back to war.  Ask yourself, if someone declared war on America, what more might they do in victory? Other than killing you or turning you into slaves, what more is there?

Some argue we’re not in a war, citing polls that show a majority of Americans don’t like those leftist positions.  That’s accurate, but it doesn’t matter. The majority doesn’t count. The people who “count”, the opinion makers, those in academia, media, high tech, etc are the hardcore leftists behind all of this, and as we all know, the squeaky wheel gets the oil.

Americans have traditionally been ambivalent about government. For most politics was something to be endured every four years and after the election life got back to normal.

But no longer.  If you were a Teddy Roosevelt partisan or a fan of Truman or IKE, whether your guy won or lost didn’t matter tremendously to the average American.  Maybe your taxes would go up or down a bit or maybe the price of gasoline or chicken might change a bit, but that was it for most people, because government, particularly the federal government had little impact on their everyday lives.

Today not so much. In America of 2022 the federal government impacts almost every aspect of American lives, daily.  The price of gas, grades of meat, rate of pay at work, MPG for your car, Epi-Pens, not to mention vaccine mandates, gun regulations and shipping illegal immigrants to your neighborhood.  But it’s not just the federal government.  It’s state and local government as well.  From inane licensing requirements for hairdressers, bartenders and Uber drivers to union-centric dysfunctional schools and gun laws that outlaw the 2^nd Amendment in all but name, the fists of the federal fit perfectly into the state and local regulatory gloves, together strangling American freedom. 

But government’s not the only front in this war. There’s culture too.  From social media – the 21^st century’s public square – to mass media to academia and big business, the left dominates.  Not just dominates as in winning, but dominate as in ruling over everyone else.  Live and let live is not an axiom the left recognizes or exercises.  No, the left demands fealty or will crush you.  They’ll destroy your business, get you fired or banned from social media, take your kids away, kick you out of college and anything else they can think of.

Today we’re seeing the government leviathan becoming even more powerful as it assimilates with the leftist borg.  We saw it for four years as the FBI worked side by side with the media to tarnish Donald Trump’s name and destroy his presidency. Now, Joe Biden has encouraged the silencing of “misinformation”. 

At the same time the federal government has essentially established a gulag to house political prisoners who participated in the “insurrection” despite many being invited into the building by the police, some never entering the building at all and most having been involved in no violence whatsoever.  Some of these “terrorists” have been sitting, without charges or bail, in jails for over a year.  That treatment stands in stark contrast to the treatment of those who participated in the violent and deadly BLM / Antifa riots of the summer of 2020, most of whom were bailed out in the unlikely event they ended up in custody in the first place. 

All of this points to a fracture of America. Observations about “majorities” give one hope, but the reality is that unless the “majority” who reject leftism react, it won’t matter because, as we’re seeing in real time in Canada, the wall between freedom and fascism is fragile, and once it’s breached it’s likely game over.       

If the Republic is to survive it will be up to that “majority” to do something to arrest the slide into tyranny.  The GOP needs to take a page from Newt Gingrich and give them something to focus on, to talk about, and most importantly, vote on. The Contract with America was pivotal in nationalizing the election, and that’s exactly what we need now, a message that patriots can rally around.

The fronts upon which the left is attacking are too numerous to defend against simultaneously.  The battle lines need to be streamlined just as the Contract did.  As such, here are Five for Freedom… five common sense items that every GOP candidate or official must agree with if they want to win.  If they refuse on any one of them, they should be primaried or defeated in favor of someone who does support them.

1.  The 2020 election was fraudulent and such fraud cannot be allowed to occur again.

2.  Covid mandates are unconstitutional and must stop.

3.  The #1 job of the federal government will be to seal the southern border.

4.  The United States must be energy independent.

5.  CRT has no place in American schools.

If any candidate running on the GOP ticket can’t support these five positions, they have no place in the GOP. The threats to liberty are too numerous, the threats to the Constitution too grave to elect someone who will waffle on these basic principles.

If there is indeed a majority of Americans who are interested in saving the Republic, they have to have something to rally around.  Thus far the GOP has done an atrocious job of focusing America’s attention.  They need to do that now and Five for Freedom is the tool to do just that.  It’s likely it will have to happen over the objections of establishment Republicans like McConnell, McCarthy and Ronna McDaniel, but so be it.  At the end of the day you’re either on the side of freedom or not.  As the last two years have demonstrated, liberty is fragile and without citizens willing to stand up for it, it vanishes. This is the time, this is the place and Five for Freedom is the weapon with which patriots can vanquish the borg of woke leftism that has been seeking to assimilate America for decades.  The only question is, does the GOP have the courage to wield it? 

(Image courtesy of www.AmericanThinker.com)

We the People... Address 2020 Now, Otherwise Our Constitution is Just Another Crumbling Piece of Paper

A solid majority of Americans know that the 2020 election was fraudulent. That’s a big problem for a country with a representative government, one in which the leaders are supposed to represent the will of the people. We’re a nation of laws ostensibly flowing from a Constitution that sets out explicit limitations on the federal government’s powers and protects a variety of citizens’ rights upon which said government cannot infringe. To the degree that a significant majority of citizens feel that the leader of this government was not constitutionally elected, that’s a problem.

For all its importance, our Constitution is nothing more than a piece of paper. It doesn’t make laws. It doesn’t have an army. It’s not the police. It’s just words on paper. It functions because Americans have confidence in its words as the foundation for the laws of our country and the guideposts governing the actions of those who actually control the army and the police and write the laws.

When that confidence is shaken, society’s foundation is shaken. While the fraudulent election of 2020 is not the first example of that shaken confidence in government, it’s easily the most important. From the economic upheavals wrought by the Industrial Revolution to widespread hopelessness during the Depression to the perceived fecklessness during the Vietnam War and economic malaise of the 60s and 70s, confidence in government has been shaken before but never before has the government’s legitimacy been in widespread doubt.

That changed with the 2020 election. Americans watched as the fraud played out in real-time, right in front of them. With violent riots in the streets that went unrestrained in the months leading up to the election, with courts inexplicably ignoring countless unconstitutional changes to voting laws, and with the media and social media censoring true stories that harmed Democrat chances, it started to seem as if the scales were tipped to one side. On election night and during the following weeks it became clear that this was indeed the case.

When almost 60% of the American people feel as if the man who is both the leader of the country and the head of the federal government is illegitimate, what are they supposed to do?

There’s nothing to be done we’re told… Not true. The election can be overturned. Not that I imagine there’s sufficient internal fortitude among Republicans to do so but, ideally, they should make the attempt. But how?

The Constitution doesn’t address anything remotely close to reversing a fraudulently achieved election. That’s true, but then it also says nothing about the right to abortion, the government providing welfare payments to citizens (or non-citizens), government control of healthcare, the imposition of CAFÉ standards, or collective bargaining rules. Indeed, there is much that goes on in government that is not in the Constitution. In 1803, Thomas Jefferson worried that the Constitution did not give him the power to make the Louisiana Purchase, but today all or part of 15 states exist because of it.

Like John Marshall’s judicial review doctrine, which you won’t find anywhere in the Constitution, things don’t exist until they do. In this case, in states where fraud is proven or where voting laws were enacted unconstitutionally, the legislatures should withdraw their Electoral College votes and recast them based on accurate and lawful counting of the votes.

It’s true there’s no existing Constitutional mechanism to facilitate that remedy, and the likelihood of a Democrat-controlled Congress doing anything to further it is less likely than a healthy college student dying of COVID, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done. It should, and it should be driven by those states where fraud so clearly occurred and tipped the election; essentially ground zero for the coup: Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, all five of which have nominally GOP legislatures.

Many will say that this is extra-constitutional, and that may indeed be true. But what is beyond debate is the fact that the 2020 election itself was extra-constitutional. The Constitution states that elections are to be run according to rules set by state legislatures. That didn’t happen across the country.

If one is going to have an election run beyond the explicit parameters of the Constitution, I’d prefer to have it hew as close as possible to what the document actually says, rather than what some hack Secretaries of State or uber partisan jurists say that it is. Our Founding Fathers gave the power to craft election rules to state legislatures and that is where it should reside.

Now, assuming that the legislatures of these five states—and others as they choose—take seriously their duty to address the fraud of the 2020 election, Congress will have a decision to make. Congress can either engage with the states to address the issue or simply ignore them. Currently, there is zero chance of action, but after the 2022 midterms Congress will likely look different and the opportunity to address the issue can be revisited.  Although with spineless weasels Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy leading the GOP in Congress the outcome would likely be exactly the same as one led by Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.  Nonetheless…

This may sound like spinning wheels, but it’s not. On the contrary, affirmatively excising the demons of the 2020 election should force all politicians or candidates to make their positions known. They either admit that the 2020 election was fraudulent and are willing to do something about it or they don’t, won’t, and should be primaried if GOP or defeated if Democrat. There can be no in between. If the flaws of 2020 are not admitted and addressed, then 2024 is gone before the campaign even begins, and almost every American understands that.

Why this matters is simple: The nation is changing, rapidly and not in a good or constitutional way. From vaccine mandates to CRT seemingly everywhere to locales providing COVID medicines based on race to transgender men competing in women’s sports to mayors and governors essentially giving their communities over to the homeless and violent criminals, America in 2022 is not one someone from even a decade ago would recognize. It’s changing, rapidly, and in most cases against the wishes of large majorities of the American population.

Importantly, though, we’re not a democracy, and the Constitution is built to rein in the passions of the majorities. It’s not a suicide pact. American citizens with confidence in their election system are willing to wait for the next election cycle to direct a change of course. Those same citizens, however, if they feel that the system is fraudulent and if they know the game is rigged against them, will find alternative means to stop the evisceration of the nation so many of them cherish. When the majority—and a growing majority, at that—of a population believe their leaders are illegitimate, bad things tend to happen.

Illegitimate regimes can stay in power for decades, but only with an army of stormtroopers and Gestapo to suppress a cowed population. The United States is not Germany in the early 1930s nor China today and Americans are not yet cowed. Indeed, they have 1^st Amendment, a 2^nd Amendment and a 250-year-old legacy of freedom most are wont to give up. This Democrat fascism will eventually come to an end. The question is how. The ideal solution is to be found at a ballot box, with all Americans confident their votes will be counted fairly. Let’s hope our leaders can find the courage to lead us down that path. 

Book Burning, Sticks & Stones and the Democrats' Praetorian Guard

Back in 2008 when Barack Obama was running for the presidency I was virulently opposed to his candidacy. I was not a huge fan of John McCain, but given the two I voted for McCain. McCain was a war hero by any stretch. Not only did he fight for his country and survive five long years in the Hanoi Hilton, but when given the opportunity to leave before others who’d been there longer because the North Vietnamese wanted to curry favor with his father, he refused. I disagreed with much of what McCain did as a Senator, but I knew he had America’s best interests at heart, something I never felt Barack Obama did. When Romney ran my reservations about him were similar to those about McCain, but once again I voted GOP.

I disagreed with Barack Obama on almost everything over the course of his eight years. From Obamacare to DACA to GM to DADT to virtually everything having to do with race relations. I disagreed with his trading for Beau Burgdahl, his pardon of Chelsea Manning and his commutation of the sentence of FLAN terrorist Oscar Lopez Rivera. I disagreed with his signing the Paris Climate Agreement, the Iran deal and his servile posture towards China for their designs on the South China Sea, among other things. I disagreed with his policies on housing, on education and on energy. Essentially, there was nothing I agreed with Barack Obama on. He could have been Chinese or Italian or Jewish or Klingon… I didn’t care, I thought everything he was doing was simply wrong.

But a funny thing happened on the way to Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2008… I apparently had magically transformed into a racist. Who knew? With the rise of the Tea Party movement, I, along with anyone who disagreed with the first black President of the United States was branded a racist. Somehow, because Barack Obama was black, my fundamental differences with “mainstream” Democrat policies made me a racist. Nevermind that I would have disagreed with the exact same policies had they been proffered by Joe Biden or John Kerry or Nancy Pelosi or Hillary Clinton or anyone else. No, suddenly it’s wasn’t my opinions or my actions that made me a racist, but simply the fact that I opposed the policies of a black president. Unimportant is the fact that I believe the smartest man in America and one of the most admirable human beings I’m familiar with is Thomas Sowell, a black man. Unimportant is the fact that I think Justice Thomas is easily one of the most brilliant men ever to sit on the Supreme Court. Unimportant is the fact that one of the most respected men in my life personally was a black man. I disagreed with Barack Obama’s policies and therefore I was a racist…

If that sounds strange, it should. Because words actually mean things. When they stop meaning things then we lose our foundation for a coherent society. And that is exactly what is going on today with the Democrat party. Disagree on policy? You’re a racist. Support Donald Trump? You’re a cultist. Assert election fraud? Suddenly you’re a terrorist.

Democrats have taken to defining their political opponents not only as the enemy, but they are using the English language as a tool to literally destroy the United States. Racist actually means something. According to Webster, it means this: A belief that race is a fundamental determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race. That is a pretty specific definition, and it’s one that likely very few Americans actually believe and act on. There are indeed racists among us, but until 2008 racism was a tiny problem in America. Hate crimes had plummeted over the 20th century to become almost nonexistent by the dawn of the new millennia. Then came 2008, 2016 and finally 2020.

From “The police acted stupidly” to Kaepernick to Ferguson, America took a giant step backward in race relations during the presidency of Barack Obama… but the worst was yet to come. Donald Trump added an entirely different element to the storm. He’s a guy who seems to have no filter and often insulted delicate snowflakes with language that often sounded more like what you’d hear in a locker room or on the factory floor of a steel mill rather than on a dais at the UN. But more than his words, it was his ideas that were abhorrent to Democrats and establishment Republicans alike: Get the government out of people’s lives. Reduce government power! Allow citizens to be free and keep more of their own money. Stop endless wars. Those words are Kryptonite to career government apparatchiks, contractors and the universe of sycophantic lobbyist and media pilot fish that swim around them and feast on their scraps.

And so today we find that Democrats, having fraudulently eliminated the single biggest threat to the leviathan of government power in a century, have decided to eliminate all potential for a resurrection of any such threats. Not only is the left seeking to bar Donald Trump from ever running again, they are seeking to demonize and ostracize his supporters… fully half the population of the United States. How? Language. You’re labeled a racist or a terrorist or a fascist on social media, where friends, friends of friends and potential employers can see. (That should help you getting your next job.) Most pernicious of all is the assertion that Trump supporters are “terrorists”. The terrorist designation used to be reserved for people who blow up planes, kill innocent people in discos or set fire to churches or synagogues. Today however that is no longer the case. Simply stating that you believe the Democrats stole the 2020 election is sufficient to get you labeled as such. Stating you support Donald Trump is sufficient. And voicing support for Congress to investigate anomalies in the election is apparently sufficient.

This wouldn’t be a catastrophic problem if it was limited to social media because you can always leave the platforms or try and build another… but, being designated a terrorist and landing on a government watchlist has enormous consequences for actual people, from the inability to fly to risking the custody of your children to your ability to exercise your 2nd Amendment rights.

Make no mistake, that is exactly where we are headed and exactly what they want. Democrats discussed throwing out of Congress members who supported the president in his calls for a review of the election. They’ve talked about making lists of his supporters and even “reprogramming” white supremacists, which is what all Trump supporters apparently are. And based on this fiction of widespread “white supremacism” the Biden administration is “standing down” the American military in order for commanders to address “extremism” in its ranks… So essentially one political party is seeking to eliminate all supporters of their opposition from within the ranks of the military – despite soldiers taking an oath to uphold the Constitution, not a man or party – so that should they call on the military to support their purges, they will face less resistance from soldiers who understand the Posse Comitatus Act and who might be adverse to raising their weapons against law abiding American citizens. The Democrats are essentially using the fiction of Trump supporters being terrorists to craft the military into a Praetorian Guard for use against the American people when and if necessary. Anyone with a familiarity with the Roman Empire understands why that might not be conducive to a free society.

Supplementing all of the machinations within the government is the takeover of the town square, Vis-à-vis the blocking of Trump and his supporters from social media platforms, banking or even being tracked.  And with the cancel culture seeking to keep Trump supporters out of colleges, jobs, and the quashing of publishing contracts you have the modern equivalent of book burning. What’s more, the authors, readers and supporters of such unapproved content will be figuratively stoned in the public square until they surrender their minds to the majority.

And so here we are, in February 2021, two weeks after Joe Biden and the Democrats took total control of Washington and on the eve of an Impeachment trial so unconstitutional it would be laughable if it were not so indicative of what it foretells for freedom. The goal of the Democrats is to eviscerate any opposition and that starts with the man who inspired 75 million Americans to seek to Make America Great Again.

Regardless of the outcome of the Impeachment trial, the die has been cast, and it is indeed dark. The Democrats seek complete control of the American government, unlimited authority over every aspect of American life and most of all, total domination of the American people. They will of course use their traditional tools of regulation and taxation, but it’s not enough. They have new tools: name calling, book burning, intellectual fascism and focusing of the military on domestic enemies. Those policies didn’t end particularly well in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, and I wouldn’t expect them to end well here either.

Before It's Too Late: The Public Square Must Be Saved From Twitter & Facebook

Last week Twitter & Facebook decided they would stifle the speech of the leader of the nation that gave them birth and allowed their owners to become billionaires many times over. We’re not of course talking about the oppressive China and Chairman Xi… No, we’re talking about the United States and President Trump. Think about that. The duly elected president of the United States is no longer able to communicate to supporters and opponents alike via the biggest microphones on the planet because of the decision of two unelected billionaires, Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg.

This is a watershed moment in modern American history. As a virulent capitalist I believe that private businesses should be allowed to do what they want, and that includes Twitter and Facebook and Apple and Google et. al. As long as they don’t infringe on the rights of others. This is particularly true as it relates to the 1st Amendment. The Amendments limit the actions of government, not private industry. As such, they should be exempt…

Except, however, when they shouldn’t be. In 1996 Congress passed the Communications Decency Act which included this language in Section 230: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." Publishers exercise editorial control over what they publish, which is why if the New York Times printed “John Smith is a bank robber” John Smith could sue for defamation, and if he proved the statement was false, he could be awarded damages. Indeed, 230 was written specifically to give Internet firms protection from such circumstances. It was the result of an early ISP, Prodigy, being sued for defamation by Jordan Balfor – the guy Leo DeCaprio made famous in “The Wolf of Wall Street” – after someone on a Prodigy-run message board had accused Stratton Oakmont of fraud.

The author of the legislation, then Washington Rep. Ron Wyden, was concerned that if Internet companies were treated as publishers they would be sued into oblivion, killing the baby of the Internet in its crib. If a tech company was financially liable every time an Internet troll called someone a liar or a Nazi or claimed Jim Jones was cheating on his wife we’d never have Facebook or Twitter or YouTube or Yelp or customer reviews on Amazon or doctor reviews on Healthgrades.com or memes on Instagram or virtually anything involving user input.

But we do have Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and Amazon and Apple. Using the shield of 230 these companies grew not only to become the biggest and most valuable companies on the planet, but they also became the most powerful companies in the everyday lives of Americans as it relates to free speech and the exchange of ideas. Americans barely read newspapers anymore. In 1995 the year before 230 was written, 23% of Americans read a newspaper on a daily basis. Today that number stands at 8.3%. In 1995 0% of Americans used Facebook or YouTube or Twitter on a daily basis… because they didn’t exist. Today 74% of Americans use Facebook every day, 51% use YouTube and 42% use Twitter. Overall in 2019 Americans spent an average of 395 minutes on the Internet verses 11 minutes reading newspapers. They are no longer “as the publisher” they are publishers.

Essentially, social media has become the de jure American town square of the 21st century. That is where we get our information, where we exchange ideas and where we interact with one another. And they became that because of 230, based on the premise that they did not exercise editorial control.

But now today, when they have become the modern equivalent of the town square they’ve decided they do indeed have editorial control over their platforms. They most certainly have that right, but their choosing to do so should remove from them the shield of 230.

Of course all of this comes down to the 1st Amendment and the right of Americans to speak out without censorship or coercion by the government. But Twitter and Facebook aren’t the government you say. That’s true. But they have become so ubiquitous, so dominating, so central to an American’s freedom of speech that they are actually more powerful than the government. Not sure about that? Take a look at Knight First Amendment Institute v. Trump where President Trump tried to block from following him on Twitter accounts with whom he disagreed. In forcing Trump to unblock the unwanted followers the court said Trump’s account bears “all the trappings of an official, state-run account” and is “one of the White House’s main vehicles for conducting official business.”

So, if these social media giants have become the modern town square for the exchange of American ideas, if they are violating the spirit of the law that provided them with the ability to successfully become such, and if a federal appeals court agrees that their platform is “one of the White House’s main vehicles for conducting official business.” they should no longer the protections 230 accorded. They should be treated as the publishers they have willingly become and should be at risk for all the liabilities, financial and otherwise that come with that.  

That does not necessarily mean that 230 should be eliminated. On the contrary. Its protections can and do function as intended, allowing small online firms to give users platforms to exchange ideas without fear of being financially ruined because of a content that someone doesn’t agree with.

But for those tech companies who violate the premise of lack of control of editorial content 230 should no longer apply. They could of course step back and adhere to the idea of not exercising editorial control, but they won’t. It’s no longer about building a successful company or getting rich for Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg. They both have that in spades. No, now it’s about power, and their power to remake America (for now) into what they think it should look like. They want Donald Trump on their platforms not because of what he says or who he is. They want Donald Trump off their platforms because his words resonate with so many regular, blue collar Americans, because he inspires patriotism in America and because he wants Americans to be free of the yoke of government control over virtually every aspect of their lives.

At the end of the day, it’s not Donald Trump they fear. It’s freedom of thought. It’s freedom of expression. It’s ideas they can’t control that they fear. And most of all, it’s you and your desire to live your life as you see fit. In a free market they’re welcome to go out and build any kind of platform they want and use editorial control to stifle as much speech on it as they wish. But they can’t do that behind a government provided shield of protection. It’s one or the other. They can’t have it both ways.

We've already seen the kind of damage such information control can do to our social cohesion and our political process.  Do we need to wait until America is plunged into a full scale civil war before we realize that allowing a tiny minority of tech oligarchs to control our speech forums is probably not conducive to a free society?  

Freedom Will Not Go Quietly Into That Good Night

Adolph Hitler said: “If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.” That line may never have been as true as it is today. What is that lie? It comes in many flavors: America is racist. Donald Trump is racist. Trump supporters are racists. Republicans are racists. You might notice a theme here. Now repeat the above and exchange the word racist for fascist...

None of those things are true. But truth doesn’t matter. Why? Because truth is not the objective, power is. In 2020 America, if you disagree with the left on anything from abortion to immigration to tax cuts to global warming you are an enemy who must be destroyed. And the primary weapons of choice are the slurs of racist and fascist.

And the beauty of it is that no proof beyond the assertion is necessary. Before he became president Donald Trump lived most of his life in front of cameras in the most media obsessed city on the planet. Morning shows, talk shows, radio shows, news shows, press conferences, grand openings, the Apprentice… you name it and Trump was there. As we all know, Donald Trump basically can’t keep his mouth shut, yet for the first 67 years of his life this man who never met a camera or microphone he could resist somehow kept the secret of his virulent racism a secret.

Then, once he became president he did such racist things as fund Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) at a level no president ever had, label the KKK as a terrorist organization, signed into law sentencing reform that had been called for by black leaders for decades, pardon the late boxer Jack Johnson and the very much alive Alice Johnson. He also supported “opportunity zones”, pushed for school choice, both of which disproportionately benefit minorities, and at the same time created an economy that brought about the lowest black and Hispanic unemployment rates ever recorded. But he’s a racist.

The proof Donald Trump is a fascist is equally strong. He arrests and jails any reporter who dares to question him. He uses the CIA and FBI to spy on anyone who disagrees with him. He imprisons judges who rule against his policies. He trains the military on people who are peacefully protesting his policies. Clearly Donald Trump is a fascist.

To understand how accurate Hitler’s words are look no farther than a Newsweek piece from July: Half of Americans Think Trump Is Racist and an Additional 13 Percent Are Unsure.  That is simply staggering, and the reason is simple: In excess of 90% of the media coverage of Donald Trump is negative. “If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.” Add to that the manipulation by Facebook, Google and Twitter and you get us to where we are today with an election that was not only stolen, but with 1/2 the population thinking that a flawed but good man is racist and a fascist... 

The above is only a symptom of the real problem however. The real target is not Donald Trump per se, but rather the half the population who support him, and the truth is they hated us long before Donald Trump came onto the political stage, most clearly seen when we were called racists and Nazis for opposing Barack Obama in 2008.

Democrats and their comrades get away with it because they know we respect the rule of law. In 2008 when we lost to Barack Obama we didn’t riot.  We peacefully protested and went to the voting booth. In 2010 we went to the polls and the Democrats lost 64 seats in the House and we finally turned the Senate red in 2014. That is what conservatives and Republicans generally do. We don’t riot when we don’t get our way. Even when we’re cheated, as happened in 1960 with Nixon, 2004 with Dino Rossi and 2008 with Norm Coleman, we don’t try to burn the country down because we respect the rule of law.

But the question is, what if there is no real law to respect?  What if there is one law for the suckers who play by the rules and basically a lack thereof for Democrats? For decades Democrats have fought attempts to secure out our voting process by continuously opposing voter ID, supporting same day voter registration and encouraging mail in balloting among other things. Any attempts to ensure credibility of the system were labeled “racist” or called “voter suppression” and usually withered on the vine. When they won in 2008 they proceeded to weaponize the federal government against the citizens. In the ultimate demonstration of such tactics, the Obama administration used the IRS to silence opponents, spied on media who dared question their actions and turned the FBI and the courts into a vehicles for the launching of a coup d'état against their successors. And now that they think they're poised to take complete power again, they’ve threatened to pack the Supreme Court, grow the Senate, eliminate the Electoral College and keep “lists” of their opponents. There's a word for that and it's not liberty.

What do 75 million Americans do if they discover that despite playing by the rules they’ve been duped again, this time on the single most important election of their lifetimes, with the future of the Republic literally hanging in the balance? They are told by the same media who spent four years pushing the fiction of Russian collusion that they should simply shut up and accept defeat, regardless of the myriad examples of voter fraud, both big and small.

Lincoln said “A house divided against itself, cannot stand.” He was referring to the issue of slavery, but the line might also well apply here today. When fully half the American population loses confidence in the integrity of the election process upon which the nation is governed, loses confidence in the media - both traditional and social - who have been lying to them for years about fictional election tampering, and come to believe that their political opponents will use everything from rioting to mayhem to outright theft to gain control of the government, what should they do? What is their motivation to continue to participate in a process where the game is rigged?  What is their motivation to continue to engage in a system where one side believes the Constitution is but a barrier to be subverted rather than the rulebook by which the nation is governed? What is their motivation to be constrained by a Constitution which their opponents disregard at every turn as they seek to undermine the very rights it was written to protect? What is their motivation to engage in a process legally when they know that their opponents seek to bastardize that very process to accumulate more power and eviscerate the very ideas upon which the nation was founded?

I don’t have the answer and I’ve no idea where we are on a spectrum of anarchy vs. tyranny, but I’m certain that the closer Democrats push the United States towards tyranny the closer we get to a point where liberty loving Americans look for other means to protect the God given rights the Constitution was written to guarantee.  What that looks like, I’ve no idea, but Carl von Clausewitz once said “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” That’s something to keep in mind as the Democrats continue their march to eviscerate our Constitution and destroy the country that has given so much to so many for so long.  I don't believe that freedom will go quietly into that good night...

Donald Trump, Superman and the Suit of Kryptonite

I was skeptical when Donald Trump announced he was running for President.  I was however, by election time very much in his camp and up until January or February I thought he’d been an extraordinary president.  But this Coronavirus has changed the calculus.

Since the problem was first brought up, he hasn’t done what almost any modern President would be inclined to do… He hasn’t taken charge of or nationalized anything.  Not hospitals, not pharmaceutical companies, not healthcare manufacturers not university research labs.  He hasn’t used the power of the office to require citizens to shelter in place, nor demanded testing nor quarantine or tracking of those with the virus.  The bottom line is, he hasn’t used the power of the federal government to take charge of this crisis and impose a solution.      

Most certainly Hillary Clinton would have done so.  As would have Barack Obama and probably John McCain and even George Bush… But Donald Trump didn’t… And that’s to his credit and our good fortune.

Just as Sol Wachtler famously said "a grand jury would 'indict a ham sandwich,' if that's what you wanted."; had virtually anybody else been in the White House during the Coronavirus pandemic, you can be certain that the Executive Branch would have usurped a vast array of powers from state and local governments, created new previously unimagined powers on the thinnest of Constitutional grounds and in turn created a plethora of new agencies with vast powers that would undoubtedly lasted far longer than the “crisis” itself.  But it wasn’t anyone else in the White House, it was Donald Trump, and he didn’t do any of those things.

He has managed this crisis almost perfectly.  It hasn’t been without problems, but he has done what an American president is supposed to do.  He utilized the Constitution and its inherent federalism to help states and governors to respond as best as they could to their particular circumstances.  He didn’t dictate, but rather, he gave assessments and information and suggestions and came to the aid of states and cities when they called.  In a word, he acted like a President in the Constitutional sense.

This is particularly notable because of the extraordinary claims experts were producing via a variety of “models” that were supposed to predict the future.  Two million or more Americans dead.  Three hundred million Americans infected.  This was the Black Death incarnate.  But Donald Trump didn’t bite.

He actually did what Presidents are supposed to do in war… take the advice of the generals, of his advisors and decide what is best for the country.  Generals are often accused of wanting to bomb the enemy into the Stone Age.  That’s usually wrong, but it is the case that a general’s job is to win a battle or a war.  That is their focus and for outsiders who don’t understand the dynamics of what the military is tasked with, the generals and admirals focus on attacking and killing or neutralizing the enemy can seem barbaric.  But it’s not.  That’s their job… but it’s the President’s policy to set policy, taking their input into consideration along with that of the State Department, the intelligence community and other players.  Generals are focused on the battlefield but the President is focused on the country and the world.

The same holds true here.  While the “experts” were looking at the worst case scenarios and  predicting Armageddon, Donald Trump was taking a 30,000 ft. perspective and trying to figure out what made sense and what didn’t, and deciding what he should do and say.  And in the process, he tried to remind the country that economics matter and jobs matter and prosperity matters, both in dollars and actual lives.  In the process, rather than taking over industries or companies, he partnered with the private sector to advance everything from manufacturing ventilators and PPE (Personal Protection Equipment) to developing testing kits to searching for drugs that help protect from the virus or treat it. And he enlisted the Navy and the Corps of Engineers to increase capacity when governors thought they needed it.  Things haven’t proceeded perfectly, but they’ve worked far better than they would have had some proto dictator with a D next to his or her name been sitting in the Oval Office. 

On the ground some governors have applied a light hand in navigating this virus while others revealed the petty autocrats within as they revel in their newfound “emergency” powers – with diktats which often ignored or even set fire to the Constitution and individual rights.  All the while the President resisted calls for the White House to “take command” and issue decrees as to how the country should deal with this virus.  While he listened to the experts, he understood they, like generals in war, are not the only voices to be heard.  The result has been a combination of daily information, regular suggestions as to how states and citizens might comport themselves, and an aggressive suspension of regulations that would have otherwise hindered potential problem solvers.

As if all of this was not enough, Donald Trump has somehow managed to shine throughout this crisis despite having spent the last four years battling the Democrats, Never Trumper “Republicans” and the media on a daily basis. From tax evasion to being paranoid about wiretapping to removing MLK’s bust from the Oval Office to Mike Flynn to Michael Cohen to the 25^th Amendment & incapacity to kids in cages to being a racist to simple incompetence to the Emoluments Clause to the Russian Collusion hoax to the Ukraine hoax to impeachment to claims that he ignored warnings of the coming Coronavirus, the last four years have been an unrelenting hail of vicious attacks.  I can’t help but wonder how most of us would fare if we had to deal with such abuse every day of our lives, and had it broadcast to the world to boot!

Yet somehow, in the face of these withering daily assaults coming from every direction, Donald Trump has not only managed to largely keep his cool, but he’s been able to be an extraordinarily effective president the entire time, from bringing the economy back to recalculating the Judiciary to exiting the absurd Paris climate agreement and the preposterous Iran nuclear arms deal to streamlining bureaucracy to rebuilding the military.  He’s not been perfect, nor has he always kept his cool, but somehow, in the face of endless, pernicious attacks from all sides, Donald Trump has gotten up every day and done his job in leading the American people and the nation.  The equivalent, I think, would be Superman spending 4 years saving the world despite his enemies having clothed him in a suit of Kryptonite from which he could not escape. 

Donald Trump is neither perfect nor warm and fuzzy, but neither is what American needed in 2016 and is not what it needs today.  We need a leader who not only articulates a road ahead that allows Americans to get back to doing what we do best, which is drive freedom and prosperity, but do so in a way that minimizes the yoke of the bureaucratic apparatus built by generations of a swamp culture.  Just as the Civil War gave Lincoln an opportunity to rise to a level few imagined he could, the Coronavirus may give Trump the opportunity to demonstrate leadership that will create his legacy despite the incessant attempts to damage and defame him.  Perhaps 100 years from now we’ll see his visage on Mount Rushmore.