I have come to believe that top Democratic officials are deliberately trying to provoke a violent response from some right-wing group…any right-wing group…with their heavy-handed oppressive tactics, tolerance of (encouragement of?) violence against the right, and attempts at censorship of any but the most wack-a-doodle speech. Attempt to assassinate a Supreme Court Justice and both Democratic officials and the media insist there is nothing to see here. Let a left-wing group start fire-bombing crisis pregnancy centers and Democrat officials and the media effectively say, “Suck it up, wingnuts!” Let a conservative protest in D.C. get rowdy and it’s off to the dungeons. The J6 political prisoners going in would have passed the Antifa and BLM rioters who looted and burned our cities throughout the summer of 2020 coming out – except that most of that viciously violent crowd never got arrested in the first place. Of the few who did, Kamala Harris, our fake vice-president, led the charge to bail them out. Meanwhile, our Attorney General Merrick Garland solemnly declares that “white supremacists” are our greatest national threat. If he were in charge of the beach at Amity Island, he would declare Angel Fish to be the greatest threat to swimmers because sharks and barracuda are marginalized fish and don’t count.

It takes a perversely special type of talent to make a disaster of everything you touch, but the crew which has usurped power in this country is succeeding brilliantly in that one metric. The thing that leftists, tyrants, serial killers and smug lowlifes all have in common is that they believe they are specially gifted – and that their mountain of failures is not due to any flaw in them, but because others do not understand them and are always undermining them. A normal person knows that success is predicated on careful planning, hard work, and steadfast execution of that good plan. As Thomas Edison said, genius is two percent inspiration and 98 percent perspiration. Leftists don’t think like that. They think they are brilliant because they say so…that it is a part of their identity like having blond hair and blue eyes. They all think they are Wile E. Coyote, Super Genius. When evidence abounds that they are smug losers it throws their whole worldview into a tizzy. They must either adjust course and get real – or scapegoat others for their failures to maintain the illusion of their own superiority. This is how we get fixed show trials like the J6 Committee. The losers are not really that vested in convincing you that it is all your fault: their desperate need is to convince themselves of it. You are just the collateral damage in sustaining their illusions.

We have had the most important year of my lifetime in having the Supreme Court issue rulings that consistently worked to bolster the principles of ordered, Constitutional liberty. Returning the decision on abortion to the individual states with the overturning of Roe v Wade was the most noted such re-assertion. The Court’s decision that the literal words in the 2^nd Amendment, “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed,” mean exactly what they say frustrated the authoritarian dreams of those who want to disarm the innocent while excusing the guilty. The Court further decided that the 1^st Amendment phrase, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” does NOT mean that anyone caught praying in public by any petty bureaucrat can be fired and persecuted. Finally, it decided that the EPA and other unaccountable bureaucracies may NOT enact laws in the guise of regulations that people must obey under penalty of law. If laws are going to be enacted, they must be enacted by Congress. Each of these decisions reinforces existing Constitutional rights, tosses “rights” that do not exist in the Constitution back to the judgment of the people in their legislatures and re-establishes accountability to the people for all law-making authority.

A little over a year ago a good friend of mine told me he thought the judicial branch would become the firewall which would preserve American liberty. This came in the wake of the courts refusing to investigate any evidence of massive election fraud, so I was quite dubious of his optimistic hope. This term of the court suggests to me that the court is, at least, going to make the effort. I suspect the primary problem was that Chief Justice John Roberts wanted to avoid anything that was tough – and so was glad to jettison the Constitution to facilitate that timidity. This term Roberts has clearly become the cheese which stands alone: both sides regard him with, if not contempt, as an irrelevant appendage of the court. Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have assumed majority leadership of the court – and seem determined to exercise it to fortify actual Constitutional principles while kicking “penumbras” and other leftist wishful thinking to the curb.

The question is whether this ends up fortifying the foundation of ordered self-government or simply illuminating the stark and, perhaps, irreconcilable battle lines in American civic culture. Certainly, the executive branch and the current legislative majority are determined to snuff out any meaningful vestiges of popular accountability and sovereignty. The Biden Administration has implicitly declared war on the American people. Just a few mileposts in the war on ordered liberty…

• Tucker Carlson has been the most prominent Cassandra, consistently revealing the sinister agenda of the first openly anti-American administration in American history.

• Democrats do not want to honestly investigate massive election fraud in 2020 – and perhaps in 2018. Some idiot Republicans agree with them, claiming that to do so would be to “look backward” instead of looking forward. Imagine if a murderer’s defense was that to try him would be to “look backward” when we needed to look forward. Holding the fraudsters to account and enacting safeguards to genuinely fortify election integrity IS to look forward – and the only possible means of restoring public confidence in elections. That is the necessary foundation to make them, once again, dispositive.

• The only things treated seriously as crime by the federal government any more are dissent from the left’s agenda, supporting Donald Trump, and being conservative or traditionally Christian. The idea of self-government is being supplanted by the demand for unquestioned rule by commissars and apparatchiks. America firmly rejected rule by actual experts at its founding. Rule by a class with increasingly cheap credentials (lacking any actual expertise) is an absurd leftist fantasy.

• Leftists call any conservative victory as a violation of “norms,” while normalizing actual violence against dissenters from what is clearly an illegitimate regime. They have come up with the preposterous proposition that speech that disagrees with them is “actual violence” while actual violence that supports them is “free speech.”

• The war on America and the world’s economy is intentional. Rolling electrical blackouts are coming to the country because our grid does not have enough capacity. The left’s answer is demand we add tens of millions of electric vehicles to a grid that is already over-stressed. They will not approve new energy plants. Oil and natural gas resources have been effectively shut down by the Biden regime, even though America has more proven reserves than almost all other countries combined. Energy prices which are spiking like a NASA launch are fueling ruinous inflation and triggering a recession which will become a depression before the year is out. Biden and the left call that success.

Effective compromise is only possible when contending sides share fundamentally similar goals but disagree on the means of achieving them. Not only do we lack the same goals in America now; we have ceased to agree on the rules on how we can settle those differences. The left gives lip service to American traditions when they can be used to leverage their aims, but reject them as illegitimate when they obstruct their authoritarian ambitions. The battle lines are drawn: one side must win and the other lose. Not only lose, but lose any hope of ever prevailing. For the left to prevail it is insufficient to win an election or two. They must crush the very idea that the people are entitled to govern themselves. For America to win, the left must come to believe that efforts to enforce their will by raw power can only lead to their abject rejection and likely incarceration.

Right now, though two of the three branches of government are currently held by the authoritarian modern Democrat Party, elections in November will almost certainly deliver the legislative branch to Republicans by a turnover margin never before seen in America.

The Democratic strategy is to try to redefine dissent as insurrection. More then this, it is to try to trigger some act of insurrection, in hopes of creating a massive backlash and snatching victory from the jaws of defeat – or justifying delaying or cancelling the fall election altogether. Their big surprise is going to be that, if they succeed in getting some faction to violently revolt, so long as that faction confines itself to politicians and government institutions, it won’t trigger much, if any, backlash. If they tamper with elections again, it likely WILL trigger a backlash that they can’t control or leverage to their advantage.

While Republicans are well-positioned to achieve a victory of historic proportions, it is doubtful they will use that victory to restore ordered liberty and self-government. Many Republican officials (maybe most) are institutionalists. If the height of political wisdom is knowing the difference between the time to make a deal and the time to make a stand, top Republicans think it is always time to make a deal. I hope I am wrong, but I think Republicans will not interpret electoral victory as a mandate to defend liberty and the concept of self-government; I think they will just see it as an opportunity to use a stronger hand to make a better deal with those who want to destroy us. Republicans will not actively attack American freedom as modern Democrats do, but they will not defend it either. I hope I am wrong. Certainly, the majority of the Supreme Court realized it is time to make a stand.

If the strategy of both Democrats and Republicans flounder the time will come when ordinary Americans and many states will have to seriously consider how to defend themselves. Democrats want to take America off the cliff as quick as possible. Republicans want to compromise on how fast we should go off the cliff. That is the stark choice before us – and people are desperately hoping we will retreat from the cliff. When that hope is gone, people will get serious about defending themselves.

Fortunately, we have some options, almost all of which involve some significant pain. First, the Republicans could surprise me and govern like Ron DeSantis has governed Florida. That would be the death knell of the authoritarian left but is also the most unlikely scenario. If the Republicans win and govern well but choose to let bygones be bygones with those who have tried to rule Americans and criminalize dissent, it will be calm for a time, but it will only delay the day of reckoning.

States that so choose could decide to engage in large-scale nullification. Why should Texas, Wyoming, the Dakotas, Louisiana and the other energy producing states starve when the answer is, literally, just below their feet? What if, as leftists plunge America toward ruin, some of these states decided to drill and produce energy despite federal rules and arrest and detain any federal authorities who came to try to stop them? The precedent for that sort of nullification was already established by leftist states which refused to cooperate with federal immigration authorities. If it comes to a matter of survival, precedent doesn’t mean much in any case.

In Texas, Republicans are advocating for a referendum on whether the state should secede from the American Union. Texas is in a unique position because it retained its right to secede in its original charter joining the US. Leftists, of course, insist that even with that provision in its charter, Texas cannot secede. I am not impressed with the Constitutional scholarship of people who think the phrase, “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” means infringe away and confiscate if you want; that the phrase, “Congress shall make no law…infringing the free exercise of (religion)” means any tinpot bureaucratic functionary can fire or even arrest anyone caught praying on public grounds; and that mysterious penumbras and emanations that are not actually in the Constitution give them power to enact whatever they want. Still, a legal mind as sound as that of the late Antonin Scalia agreed that The Civil War negated the right of legal secession of any state. In a rare moment of disagreement with Scalia, I think there is a significant difference between those states that did not secure such an agreement in their original charter and the one state, Texas, that did. In any case, secession is rarely governed by legal means. Every revolution and almost every successful secession was accomplished by entities that had the means, the motive and the will to make it stick. If things were to get so desperate that the only ones still irrevocably vested in the institutions that have been turned against us are those who are officials there, it will not stop either nullification or secession.

Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate and respect institutionalists – in times of general peace. One of the compliments I most cherish was when a Deputy Governor once told me, “Charlie, I can’t figure out whether you are the most pragmatic ideologue I have ever known or the most ideological pragmatist.” In times of relative peace, ideologues often gum up the works of getting any action done. I’m not the type who ever refused half a loaf when it was extended to me. But in times of great strife, institutionalists usually become hapless toadies forever being rolled by the radicalized opposition.

Things are extremely volatile in America and the world now. Frankly, I think they are significantly more volatile than they were in the lead-up to the American Civil War. Our best chance of weathering this storm in one piece is for Republicans, after their massive victory, to understand, with the Supreme Court majority, that now is the time to make a stand, not to make a deal. There is an old Chinese curse (comically often errantly cited as an Irish blessing): May you live in interesting times. Like Frodo, Aragorn and Gandalf, so we do.

John Adams said that, “Our Constitution was made only for a religious and moral people. It is wholly inadequate to any other.” I have no confidence in modern Democratic officials. I have very little confidence in Republican officials. My confidence in most religious officials is as shaky as it has ever been. I am willing to be persuaded otherwise, but I do not believe there is a political solution to the darkness that has enshrouded us. There must come a great awakening. We must become, once more, a religious and moral people. Evangelization is the key to restoration. I have long said that this time, it is the hour of the laity. And so, with Frodo and Samwise, we must take our leave of the beloved shire and begin our pilgrim journey to Mt. Doom.

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