Russiagate Was Treason; Will Trump Prove That No One Is Above the Law?

The esteemed Thomas Sowell, easily the most important economist of the last 50 years, turned 95 a couple of weeks ago. He has an extraordinary ability to take complex ideas about economics and culture and distill them down in prose that speaks to everyone from PhDs to those with a GED.

His ability and willingness to address issues from race to economics to history in compellingly readable books are unmatched. Indeed, his Cultures trilogy is one of the most robust weapons one might equip themselves with in any battle against the nonsensical wokeness that plagues America in the early 21st century.

As one would expect from a career spanning over six decades, Dr. Sowell has more than a few quotes that are perfect for our time. My favorite is easily:

“Racism is not dead, but it is on life support — kept alive by politicians, race hustlers and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as racists.”

Another is:

“One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain.”

As accurate as those quotes are, the following is perhaps the most insightful I’ve ever read:

“One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them.”

While that quote seems like a reasonable observation in a normal political framework where politicians tell lies about one another and make promises they never intend to keep, today it’s something more. Its cutting accuracy seems to have been demonstrated every week since Donald Trump 47 took office, from USAID to intransigent bureaucrats to rogue judges. But now, finally, maybe, someone is starting to heed Dr. Sowell’s words.

I’m talking, of course, about the Russiagate hoax that Barack Obama and his national security team foisted on the American people. CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper essentially manipulated the Intelligence Community Assessment [ICA] such that the impact of a Trump Russia collusion charge was devastating. And they had a bit of help from the beginning.

Essentially, they undermined the credibility of the incoming administration and saddled the country with two years of intrigue, corruption, and uncertainty in the form of an investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. What’s more, Paul Ryan, the then-Speaker of the House who basically would have been just as happy with a President Hillary Clinton, would use the distraction to undermine Trump’s No. 1 issue: the border wall. He delayed the fight until after the 2018 midterms, which of course ended up being a bloodbath for the GOP.

Needless to say, Trump’s No. 1 issue was DOA when Congress reconvened.

By the time Mueller reluctantly admitted that there was nothing to the Russiagate hoax — six months after the midterms — the damage had already been done. Some coups take the form of military takeovers, others involve assassinations; this one involved a conspiracy at the highest levels of the Obama administration.

Things are not supposed to work like that. We have elections so the people can decide how they would like the nation to be governed. While there are always many people who are unhappy with the outcome, most Americans accept it because they believe in the system established by our Constitution.

John Adams said of that Constitution: "[It] was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." That is demonstrably true. It’s a piece of paper. Americans accept the outcomes of elections not because there are stormtroopers stationed on every corner ensuring acquiescence, but rather because they believe that, while flawed, our constitutional elections are a relatively honest and fair way to decide our paths forward.

Which brings us back to Sowell’s quote: “One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them.” What the Obama cabal did to Donald Trump and the country was anything but moral. It was insidious, it was treacherous, and most of all, it was treasonous.

And now that the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, has released documents and suggested they show that Barack Obama was behind it all, we’ll get an opportunity to see what the Trump administration is really made of. It’s one thing to tell the American people about the treason of a previous administration, but it’s something else altogether to do something about it. Will it be like the Jeffrey Epstein debacle, where Americans were told the hammer is coming, only to be later told there’s nothing there? Or will this be a ruthless, methodical, and intentional prosecution of the traitors who put the nation through so much?

I would suggest that at a moment in time when public trust in government is near all-time lows, if the Trump administration has any hope of being considered successful, it will take the latter course. For far too long, Americans have watched as elites like Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, and Barack Obama have not only gotten away with what many see as abject treason, but then they have the temerity to lecture us that “No one is above the law.”

Most Americans agree with that and believe criminals should pay for their deeds. The question is, does Donald Trump? Will he demonstrate to the American people that we are indeed a nation of laws and not men, or will he tell us once again that there’s no there there and that in modern America, the only people who face consequences for their actions are those who stand up to the swamp and the ruling elites?

Follow me on X at @ImperfectUSA

Some Unsolicited Advice to Donald Trump for Winning the White House in 2024

I’d like to offer some advice to Donald Trump. This offer comes from someone who in November talked about following him into a raging inferno then in January questioned whether supporting him was worth the fight. 

How does one go from being such a rabid fan to sitting on the fence in such a short period of time?  Messaging.  As I mentioned in my January piece, Trump’s embrace of the grifters running the GOP suggests that he might be taking his eye off the ball.  As such, I’d like to offer three bits of unsolicited advice to the former and hopefully future president. 

First, stop focusing on the stolen 2020 election and focus on America today. Not that 2020 wasn’t important, it was. But it’s 2023 and we’re 20 months away from the next election.  There simply isn’t time to fix 2020, and any energy spent trying to do is that much less energy going into saving the country in 2024.  Given the trajectory of the country, if we’re not victorious in 2024 there will likely be no more America as we know it by 2028. 

Second, to stop taking credit for the vaccine.  The more Americans know about it the less they like it, and many of us hated it from day one. While putting the development in motion was understandable at the time, the fact is that it was used as a cudgel to coerce the American people into submission, and may have terrible long term consequences to come.  It’s an issue best let go as his supporters hate it and his enemies wouldn’t give him credit for it regardless.    

Third, and most importantly, focus on issues that impact Americans where the proverbial tire hits the road.  Here are seven.

1)  Immigration:  Promise to build a wall. Guarantee that the first thing he will do in office is begin the process of building a wall from Brownsville to San Diego.  No nation can be a nation if it doesn’t have a border and the invasion on our southern border is far more of a threat to Americans than anything going on in Ukraine. We’ve seen the virtual elimination of our border since Joe Biden was installed as president and watched as over 5 million illegal immigrants walked in virtually unimpeded. At the same time we’ve seen 100,000 deaths a year from Fentanyl overdoses and are forced to watch as cartels bring their violence to American streets and mimic Mexico by bringing their infrastructure here and having comrades take powerful positions in government.  He should promise that if Democrats and activist judges throw roadblocks along the way again, he will use the military to patrol the border where no wall exists until the wall is actually complete.

2)  Wokeness in government: He should promise to eliminate every element of the racist Critical Race Theory in government along with the DEI “diversity, equity and inclusion” treachery.  He should tell America the government will stop operating programs based on race and will stop setting various groups of Americans against one another in the name of “equity” and victimhood. The police power of government will no longer be used to favor any group over another or to use demographic data to achieve “diversity” objectives. He should promise that every single element of the federal government will be agnostic as it relates to immutable characteristics. 

3)  Energy independence: Promise to return the United States to energy independence.  He will stop the demonization of fossil fuels in and by our government. We will stop having the nation’s economic well being taken for granted and sacrificed at the altar of the “climate change” hoax.  He will stop wasting American tax dollars pursuing the fiction of green energy as the destruction of the environment associated with the mining and production of materials used in car batteries, solar panels and wind turbines is far greater than that associated with the production of natural gas and oil.      

 4)  Return to gender normalcy:  Eliminate every element of the federal government that blurs the lines between men and women.  While there may indeed be a tiny number of Americans who actually suffer from “gender dysphoria” the reality is, men are men and women are women. This has been a fact throughout all of human history and remains so today for 99.995% of human beings. Our government should no more base public policy on the desires of .005% of the population who genuinely suffer from gender dysphoria than they should base it on the slightly less frequent existence of Siamese twins. And he should promise to pass a federal law outlawing “gender affirming poison and operations” for children under the age of 18.

5) School Choice: Work to give every parent in America school choice.  School is often the primary place where children learn about the history of the nation as well as the 3Rs.  Increasingly our schools are not only not teaching students to read, write and do arithmetic, but they are becoming indoctrination camps for anti-American, anti-science, racist poison that is undermining the foundations of American liberty, opportunity and prosperity.  Although most education is administered at the state level, the Department of Education plays a significant role and he should promise to harness DOE’s resources to encourage every state to give parents control over their children’s education.    

6) Crime:  Use every Constitutional resource available to reverse the Democrat’s war on police and the American people in the name of “equity”.  Democrat soft on crime policies have put citizens’ lives at risk, and cost the lives of thousands of people across the country since the fiction of Michael Brown’s “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” in 2014 and the riots in response to the death of Saint George Floyd in 2020. Gone will be the days when the justice system is more interested in the rights of criminals at the expense of the rights, the safety and lives of victims.  If Democrats were really interested in helping POC and poor Americans they’d call for greater police presences and longer prison sentences for criminals.  But they don’t.  Trump should make it clear he does. He wants to protect night clerks, subway riders, kids walking to school and every other law abiding American as they simply go through their daily lives.  Victims’ lives matter. Certainly more than those of criminals who prey upon the innocent and the weak.

7) Overhaul of the security apparatus:  Trump should promise to return the American security agencies to their original mandates, i.e. protecting the lives, property and rights of the American people and their country.  Promise to clean house of the leadership in the Justice Department, the FBI, the CIA and the NSA so that the American people can once again have confidence that their government is there to protect them, not act as the enforcement arm of a political party and persecute them for exercising Constitutional rights.  In addition, he should promise passage of legislation that makes explicit a prohibition of government agencies working with social media firms to infringe on 1^st Amendment rights guaranteed in the Constitution.  

The entire point of this suggestion is for Trump to make it crystal clear that his sole focus is the saving of the American Republic, securing for all Americans the ability to exercise their God given rights and the ability to go through their daily lives without fear that the borg of government or the thugs empowered by it will destroy all that they live for. 

If Trump can convince voters his focus is on their future and not his past, the White House is his for the taking.  

Joe Biden Transforms the Pentagon From a Strong Horse to a Weak Woke Horse, Just When It Counts Most...

Back in 2003 a Muslim woman sued the Florida DMV because she wanted her driver’s license photo to be taken while she was wearing a niqab, or veil, which would have covered her entire face other than her eyes.  I remember thinking how absurd such a request was.  Not that the veil was absurd, but rather the idea of taking a picture specifically intended to identify someone with all of their identifying features covered. The request obviated the basic reason of why the picture was being taken in the first place. 

A year later, again out of Florida, the North Miami police department dropped its requirement that police officers know how to swim.  Apparently because they were having a hard time finding qualified black applicants who could swim, rather than teach otherwise qualified black applicants to swim, the police did away with the requirement.

The purpose of the DMV issuing drivers’ licenses is to make it possible to identify someone by looking at them and the purpose of a police force is to protect and defend the people within a particular jurisdiction, and in cities surrounded by water that might require swimming.  Anything that defeats the very purpose of an organization is probably a bad idea from the perspective of accomplishing that organization’s mission.   

Which brings us to Joe Biden’s Pentagon.  Building on Barack Obama’s turning NASA into a Muslim outreach program, Joe Biden has decided to turn the Pentagon into a monument to wokeness.  While the Pentagon has been moving in the woke direction for years (as demonstrated by a deadly political correctness, the repeal of DADT, women in combat and picking up the tab for sex change operations) Joe Biden has turned the military into a full fledged social program.

So how can Joe Biden beat Obama’s deadly despicable modifications to the Rules of Engagement?  How about pregnant women in military cockpits?  Yes, you read that right.  Joe Biden has the American military “Designing body armor that fits women properly, tailoring combat uniforms for women, creating maternity flight suits and updating requirements for their hairstyles… It will take an intensity of purpose and mission to really change the culture and habits that cause women to leave the military.” 

If the legion of stumbles Joe Biden has already made in his short time in office haven’t convinced you of such, that sentiment alone should demonstrate clearly that he is not a serious man.

The role of the military is to protect and defend the nation and its allies as well as enforce treaties the United States has entered into, whether that’s ensuring safe passage of shipping in domestic and international waters or making preemptive strikes against terrorists planning on striking American or allied targets.  All of those things and more involve training to kill, and possibly actually killing enemies.  Military is deadly business as large numbers of lives are at stake.  Not only are there hundreds of thousands of Americans under arms who actively or potentially put their lives in danger to protect the nation on a daily basis, but there are millions of people at home and abroad whose lives are impacted by the success or failure or American military operations.

And so, in this universe where the Chinese are willing to operate the open secret of concentration camps filled with their own citizens, are claiming sovereignty over virtually the entire South China Sea, are building outposts around the world, cornering the market on strategically critical rare earth minerals and turbo charging the world’s largest military, Joe Biden wants to make sure pregnant pilots have uniforms that fit.  In a world where nuclear weapons are in more, and more unstable hands than ever before, where bioweapons like the Coronavirus can kill millions and terrorism can strike anywhere anytime, one of Joe Biden’s first acts was to lift the ban on transgender enlistments.  Joe Biden is an unserious man who has no place as Commander in Chief and in any rational world he wouldn’t be allowed within a thousand miles of the nuclear football.  But there he is sitting in the White House – sadly as the result of Democrat fraud – and turning our military into a woke petri dish.

And there’s a reason he can do it…  Most people think of the military as jets in dogfights, solders storming a den of bad guys or ships bombing a coastline.  It is all of those things and more, but the reality is the military spends an overwhelming majority of its time preparing, planning and training rather than actually fighting… which is why leftists think they can turn it into a series of social experiments.  It’s easy to measure quotas and enforce the latest politically correct policies when no one is actually shooting at or trying to kill you. Importantly, that work is where troops learn the skills necessary to survive actual combat and lay the groundwork for success in actual war.  But to the left in America doesn’t care about that. They’re more interested in the optics of diversity and inclusiveness than they are in mission success and are willing to sacrifice the latter for the former. And to the degree the military focuses on those social issues, counts pigments or genders or tries to manipulate political allegiances, the less effective the training is and at the end of the day, the less capable the military is to accomplish its primary mission.  

Osama Bid Laden said:  "When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse." Joe Biden is signaling to the world the American military is anything but a strong horse and he’s leaving no ambiguity about it.  The world sees this, our allies see this, and most importantly our enemies see this.  People around the world recognize that the United States has been the vanguard of freedom for a century and ushered in a period of economic prosperity unprecedented in human history.  But at the same time, most rational people recognize that nothing good lasts forever.  If the United States is literally telling the world that our military is focused on maternity flight suits and trans enlistments while the borg of China is expanding and strengthening its military and economic reach to unprecedented levels, we shouldn’t be surprised to see American influence deflate like a week old balloon animal as allies and friends turn their allegiances toward the strong horse.  When the left’s dream of diminished American influence comes to pass the irony will be that the tag on the boot standing on their necks will read “Made in woke America”. 

Wokeness jumps the shark with Meghan Markle, Oprah Interview

Rare is it when you have one person so perfectly embody a moment in history as you do Meghan Markle in 21^st century America.

Meghan Markle is gorgeous. She’s well spoken. She’s famous. She’s rich. She’s literally married to a prince and has a beautiful child. She’s got it all… And yet she’s an insufferable crybaby and perpetual victim.

By any measure, Meghan Markle is living a princess’s life. From a broken, mixed race home, Meghan grew up in southern California before she went on to earn degrees in Theater and International Studies from Northwestern University. From there she spent years with bit parts in Hollywood until her big break at 30 when she landed a major role in the USA Network show Suits. After spending six years on the hit show Markle decided it was time to leave as she had literally found her prince. And they lived happily ever after…

Not so much. Despite having a life that 99.999% of the people on the planet might exchange their own for – at least the women – Meghan Markle wants us to know that she's a victim. She’s been forced out of the British Royal Family as she and her husband and her baby have been disrespected because she’s American, because she’s half black and because they’re jealous of her.

As a result of being booted from the Royal Family – despite the fact that it was she and her prince who chose to leave – Meghan has been forced to drag her family around the world, first staying in an exclusive home in Canada, later renting Tyler Perry’s estate in California and finally settling for the purchase of an $11 million California mansion of her own. In their often mentioned efforts to find “privacy” Meghan and the Harry sat down for an interview with one of the world’s most high profile journalists. In addition, the pair of outcasts will be forced to scrape by on just under $100 million a year in income via production deals with Netflix and Spotify.

If all of this sounds a bit surreal, it should. If it sounds familiar too, it should. Why? Because just as Meghan Markle, one of the world’s richest and most famous women spends her time whining that she’s a victim, the American left, home of some of the most pampered people to ever live in human history, spends its time lamenting the victimhood of its various constituencies.

And the victim groups are legion… blacks, Hispanics, Asians, gays, transgenders, women, Muslims, the poor, single mothers, teachers, the handicapped, illegal aliens and more… America’s left never met a group – other than perhaps the oppressive straight white Christian males – that they didn’t see as a victim group to be exploited for power and money. America is racist, sexist, homophobic or whatever else turns the group of choice into a victim of hate at the hands of those aforementioned oppressors.

But the thing is, America is in reality one of the least racist, sexist, homophobic etc. countries in the world, indeed Americans share far more with one another than we differ. Rare is the instance where someone can’t find success in America because of the characteristics the left champions. While America is not perfect, it in fact provides more opportunity to more people from more backgrounds than any nation on earth. Not sure? The dirty little secret the left will never let you know is that the poorest Americans are economically better off than the average European and exponentially so relative to the average person living in Asia, Africa or South America. Most Americans enjoy a standard of living better than virtually every person who’s ever lived on planet earth, including kings. The left won’t tell you that Americans enjoy a level of individual freedom unprecedented in human history. The reality is, despite what you hear on television and social media platforms, black Americans are not being hunted and killed by police and, according to the FBI, black and white interactions with police are actually quite similar overall.

Sadly, the fact that the reality of Meghan Markle’s lavish lifestyle does nothing to diminish her claim of victimhood is not unique. In 21st century America victimhood has become the coin of the realm. The left discards the reality of the egalitarian nature of the United States, the freedom of opportunity shared by almost every American and a standard of living that most people on earth would die for, all in the name of dividing Americans, turning them against one another and most importantly, accumulating wealth and power.

If America is lucky the Meghan Markle / Oprah interview might just jump the shark.  Perhaps Americans will finally come to recognize that if wealth, fame, beauty and influence can’t satiate the woke need for pity and victimization, then nothing can. Maybe after seeing the vapid blatherings of a prince and princess with a staggering lack of self awareness and frame of reference Americans will finally get back to the business of living their lives and seeking to interact with one another based on their content of character rather than viewing each another through a prism of glass fractured by the fabricated divisions of the left.

The NFL has become the No Freedom League - How Wokeness Helped Bring America to the Brink of Revolution

I grew up in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, before they had satellite TV. As such, on the Monday after the Super Bowl everyone on the entire base would try and get through the day without knowing who won the game. That night, after a tape of the game had been flown down from the US, we'd watch the game and be riveted to our TVs. The military TV stations weren’t allowed to show private commercials so we would all greet a Pepsi or McDonalds commercial that might slip by the censors with wondrous applause. The NFL was my passion, along with my sainted Dolphins, with Gods Bob Griese and Dan Marino at the helm. Today however, I doubt I’ll watch another NFL game and most certainly won’t spend a penny on NFL merchandise.

Why? It’s simple. The NFL, helmed by men who are ostensibly some of the smartest businessmen in America, literally helped bring America to the brink of revolution, maybe even led the way. Of course we’re talking about Kaepernick and Black Lives Matter.

The NFL, and to a lesser degree, MLB and the NBA used to be oases from which all Americans could seek refuge from the slings and arrows of daily life. Monday at the office used to be “Did you see that catch?” or “The zebras blew another one!” Since Kaepernick started his grandstanding however the conversations became more about who was kneeling, what star was lecturing America about this grievance or that and ceased to be about the excitement or pain or joy of the actual games.

In a sad irony, Charlie Daniels once wrote an anthem called “In America” where he used an NFL team to demonstrate American's unity. 

And we may have done a little bit of fighting among ourselves, 

but you outside people best leave us alone...

Cause we'll all stick together, and you can take that to the bank,

that's the cowboys and the hippies and the rebels and the yanks...

You just go and lay your hand on a Pittsburgh Steelers fan and I think you're gonna finally understand”

It’s almost apropos that Daniels died in the very year when it’s not outsiders who have started a revolution, but other Americans, and they were set on that course by the NFL.

Had the “geniuses” who run the NFL understood anything about America and put a stop to Kaepernick’s on field preening four years ago, we wouldn’t be where we are today. Freedom of speech had nothing to do with anything. Kaepernick had and has every right to say what’s on his mind. The NFL however did not have to allow him to hijack their platform to trumpet it. Had they not helped him become a media darling, he probably wouldn’t have walked away from is multimillion dollar contract and become the least worthy “martyr” in the history of martyrs.

And just to be clear, it's not because they couldn't have done anything.  The NFL controls virtually every single thing about its games and programs. It choreographs everything!!! Uniform colors… check. Shirts tucked in… check. Fines for faux cellphone celebrations after a touchdown? Check. Yet somehow they weren’t able to tell players that they could not disrespect the American flag and National Anthem. They could have required standing, or required those not wanting to participate to stay in the locker room, or they could have kept all the players in the locker rooms and let the fans sing the song… But they didn’t. Instead, they allowed what would have been a flash in the pan to become a raging inferno that has the potential to turn the United States and its Constitution into ashes.  The fires and riots and attacks on police and federal buildings and America are simply the progeny of the boiling tempers fueled in part by the victim mentality emboldened by the NFL's wokeness.

Today in the United States the idea of free speech is vanishing and the NFL, by showcasing a struggling, marginal, spoiled quarterback with a chip on his shoulder helped make it so. Today in America, everything is political… science, education, healthcare and now, sadly, even sports. Sure politics in sports has been around for a while, go back to the 1968 Black Power Olympic protests or Muhammad Ali, but those were news, not everyday life.

Now politics has infested every corner of American life and you can’t help but see it everywhere from shopping to going to the movies to wedding cakes to science. Not to mention workplaces.  Up until about 2016 Americans had at least one refuge from the cancer of political rage… that was sports. Americans of different colors, of different religions of different national origins could get together and cheer for (or against) the Cowboys, the Raiders, the Patriots or the Steelers and feel like they were part of something bigger than themselves, members of the same team.  "How'd we do this weekend?" or "Where are we at this Sunday?" wasn't reserved for players or coaches... Fans were part of the team, the 12th man, they weren't just observers, they were family.  Sports made fans' differences inconsequential, even if only for as long as they were cheering together or drinking beer together or wearing the their matching Giants jerseys.

In putting politics front and center of their offerings, in letting their platforms become a cultural litmus test, in actively turning their sport into a vehicle for wokeness, the NFL has destroyed their brand as an American icon. Never again will many Americans look to it for a welcome respite from the chaos of everyday life. Never again will it have the capacity to change American life the way the Heidi Bowl did.

The NFL may continue to be a viable business for some time, but its place in history will be sealed by its engagement in wokeness. The thing about wokeness is that there are always new victims to be supported, new causes to be championed and new targets for expropriation and destruction. The geniuses who run the league shouldn’t be surprised that eventually they will be on the wrong side of some victims rights group and their businesses will be targeted, their directors will be hounded and eventually their assets will be taken, one way or another. When that happens they shouldn't be surprised that more than a few people might be whispering feelings of Schadenfreude.

Don't Look Now But The Democrats of 2020 are Eerily Similar to the Nazis of 1933...

One of the brilliant things about the United States’ founding fathers was their understanding of human nature. They understood that it is the nature of man to seek to accumulate power. It’s been that way throughout human history. The seemingly unquenchable thirst for the accumulation of power has created empires across the globe. In Africa you had the Egyptians, the Songhai and the Carthaginians. Asia had the Ming, the Han, the Mongols, and of course the Ottomans. Europe had the Greeks, Romans, and the Spanish. The Americas had the Mayans, the Aztecs and the Incas. The British eventually assembled an empire that literally circled the world.

The parts of the world that were not subsumed into giant empires were part of smaller civilizations of varying sizes that operated, in most cases, through the accumulation of power via conquest and slavery. It was usually the conflict or potential conflict with competing powers that dictated how large a nation or an empire would grow. Because, after all, it is largely a trait of men to seek to accumulate more power until prudence dictates not doing so – and even then in some cases prudence is not much of a deterrent. And that applies even more to competing powers within a state than to those between states.

Our founding fathers knew this and decided to craft a Constitution to yoke the darker nature of men. Thus we have the federal system, where states have some powers and the federal government has others. The federal government would handle most large national issues while states would handle those closer to the people.  We have a separation of federal power between three theoretically equal branches of government. Within the legislative branch – which at the time of writing was expected to be the first among equals – there is a separation between the houses, and within the houses different powerbases. The states appointed Senators and the citizens elected the Representatives. Add to all of this the staggering of terms of office and you have a vehicle that was designed to limit the powers of mobs and keep any single group from being able to play on the emotions of men and take power.

And finally of course, for the single most powerful limit on the accumulation of government power, you had the Bill of Rights which clearly articulated the rights of the people, both individual and collective, that could not be tread on by the government. Free speech, a free press, free practice of religion, the freedom of assembly, a right to be secure in their persons and homes, and most important of all, because it protects all the others, the right to bear arms.

Our Constitution, like its authors, was and is not perfect, but over the years it’s evolved to ban slavery, grant equal application of laws and to expand suffrage. What is perhaps most interesting about the American Constitution is the fact that it’s guided the country for 233 years without a standing army of enforcers. Yes, there is an army of course, but it’s not used to keep citizens in line, because there is no line to be kept in. America was, for most of its history, a nation defined by freedom. Citizens could largely go about and do and say what they wanted. They could buy land where they wanted. They could start just about any kind of business they wanted. They could worship as they wanted. They could say anything that came to their minds… although whether or not that was prudent is another matter. Americans could move from place to place without permission of the government. They could, at the end of the day exercise their freedom, and that came from the Constitution. Barack Obama accurately stated “Generally, the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties, says what the states can't do to you. Says what the federal government can't do to you. But it doesn't say what the state or federal government must do on your behalf.” Obama meant that as a criticism of the document, but the fact is, that is exactly why our nation has endured and our freedom has endured so long and allowed us to change the face of the world along the way.

Which brings us to America circa 2020… Virtually all of those key elements that have kept our nation and her citizens free are today under direct assault… largely by the Democrat party and their partners in the media, academia, BLM and Antifa.

The left is today using the blueprint of the Nazi party to bring America as we know it to an end. Although the Nazi party came to power legally, constitutionally in Germany in 1933, prior to that the Storm Troopers (Sturmabteilung - SA) had spent a decade using violence and intimidation to cow some Germans into submission while simultaneously emboldening others to take up their cause. Once the Nazis were in power it was game over for a free Germany. The model of using the freedoms / rights afforded citizens of a nation to take control of that nation and then eviscerating those very laws and rights that allowed them to come to power in the first place can have staggering results. The Nazis took a dysfunctional post WWI Germany and turned it into an extraordinarily efficient killing machine, both of its own citizens and millions of others as it set the world on a course of war. That model of gaining power followed by death and destruction has proved highly effective in modern times from Robert Mugabe to Hugo Chavez to Vladimir Putin to Xi Jinping.

And today the left is seeking to use that very model to destroy America. Not sure? Just listen to them. They want to pack the Supreme Court. They want to eliminate the Electoral College. They want to eliminate free speech. They want to take away your guns. They have no compunction about using the IRS to stifle opposition. They have no problem using the FBI to overturn a fair election. They want to defund the police. They want to expropriate your property. They seek to rewrite American history. They want to implement laws based on race. They want to decide what communities look like. They want to keep schools and churches closed. They want to obliterate science. They want to decide what art you see. And of course they want to control the means of production to save the planet from the fiction of global warming.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Make no mistake, Democrats do not decry the violence in the streets, they seek to harness it. Make no mistake, Democrats hold no love for the Constitution other than how it can be used to bring them more power. Make no mistake, the Democrats don’t care one iota about your freedom or your liberty and they will take them in a heartbeat, if you let them. And this is not a bug in their system, it’s a feature. The Democrat party in 2020 no longer has a vested interest in freedom. Their only goal is power and subjugation. “Think what we believe or you’ll be cancelled.” “Say anything we don’t like and you’ll be cancelled.” “Support our opposition and you’ll be cancelled.” Today mostly what they do is get you fired, kicked out of school and shamed on social media, but with amorphous “hate crime” legislation advancing on every front, soon there will be literally no place to hide, because words no longer mean anything so the woke can literally characterize anything as “hate”. Taken individually some may argue these are nothing like Hitler’s fascist state. Perhaps, but collectively they are as clear a portent to the future as was Mein Kampf.

The most telling thing about this situation is that it’s not actually the Democrats per se leading it. It’s the Twitter and Facebook mobs. It’s the fascists at BLM and Antifa. It’s academia and the media. The Democrats (who nonetheless agree with all of it) are too spineless to actually believe in anything other than power. They are not leading, but rather playing catch-up, trying to run to get out in front of a parade that’s already in progress and pretend they're leading it to keep the money flowing in. Once in power – i.e. having the White House and both houses of congress – they will enact every over the top progressive policy BLM and George Soros can come up with because they understand that if they are not on the bleeding edge of wokeness, the mobs will simply replace them with people who are even more hardcore.

One wonders what the reaction to all of this will be from Americans who still value liberty and freedom… will they go quietly into that not so good night or will they “cling to guns or religion” and decide to push back against the new fascism?