Category Archives: US Constitution

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Daily Broadside | Trump’s 2020 Lawyer Is Suspended But Won’t Back Down

John Eastman represented president Donald Trump in the wake of the 2020 election, challenging the election’s integrity. It’s wound up costing him personally, and The Epoch Times just published a feature about his experience. (If you have a subscription, you can read it here; otherwise I think it’s paywalled.)

Last summer, the State Bar charged Mr. Eastman, the former Dean of Chapman University Law School, with 11 counts of misconduct related to his role in representing former President Donald Trump after the 2020 presidential election.

But, Mr. Eastman told The Epoch Times in an exclusive interview on April 5, he has no regrets about representing President Trump nor for alleging fraud and questioning the election results.

“No. Absolutely not,” he said bluntly. “What I saw at the time raised real serious questions in my mind about the validity of the election.”

Since then, Mr. Eastman said his investigation has confirmed his suspicions “tenfold.”

Funny how, given enough time, anyone who looks at the evidence with an open mind comes away convinced that there are serious questions about how Brandon won that election.

Mr. Eastman, who was accused of not having the evidence to back up those allegations, said he will appeal Judge Yvette Roland’s March 27 ruling recommending disbarment, but in the meantime his law license has been suspended on “involuntary inactive enrollment,” which means he can’t practice law in California.

[…]

Democrat-appointed Judge Roland ruled that Mr. Eastman broke ethics rules by advancing President Trump’s challenges to the integrity of the 2020 election.

The judge stated in her ruling that “despite compelling evidence against him … Eastman remains defiant, refusing to acknowledge any impropriety whatsoever in his actions surrounding his efforts to dispute the 2020 presidential election results.”

“His lack of insight into the wrongfulness of his misconduct is deeply troubling,” she wrote.

“Eastman continues to hold the view that his statements were factually and legally justified. He demonstrated disdain for these proceedings by characterizing them as a political persecution, claiming that the disciplinary charges against him contained false and misleading statements, and that those who brought them should themselves be disbarred,” Judge Roland wrote in her ruling.

His “complete denial of wrongdoing, coupled with his attempts to discredit legitimate disciplinary proceedings are concerning,” she wrote.

We don’t live in a free society anymore. The Marxists are going after the professional classes who represent the opposition. When they’re either jailed, disbarred or otherwise removed, they can more easily go after the armchair opinionists (like me).

Did Eastman have any compelling evidence?

Mr. Eastman drew from evidence provided by Garland Favorito, a retired information technology professional and founder of VoterGA, a nonpartisan, nonprofit election integrity group.

Mr. Favorito, is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit filed on Dec. 23, 2020, that challenged the authenticity of 147,000 absentee ballots cast in Georgia’s Fulton County.

“He’s an independent, and he is an expert on election integrity issues, who discovered “thousands of ballots that were duplicated and counted multiple times,” in deep blue areas of Atlanta in violation of state law, Mr. Eastman said.

“We also had Michael Gableman, former Supreme Court justice of Wisconsin … who was retained by the legislature to conduct an investigation, and they discovered hundreds of thousands of illegal ballots,” he said.

Mr. Gableman uncovered alleged nursing home fraud, which Mr. Eastman said accounts for much more than the 20,000-vote margin of victory for Joe Biden, and voter turnout rates in nursing homes went from 20 to 30 percent historically to nearly 100 percent, including from within memory care wings.

“Many of the ballots are in the same handwriting, so the illegality opened the door for fraud, which Gableman proved … and it affected way more than 20,000 ballots,” he said.

“There’s no question Wisconsin was stolen. To this day, there are 120,000 more ballots than voters in Pennsylvania, a state where the margin was 80,000.”

Americans used to go to a local polling place such as a neighborhood community room at the library or the local church to vote, but in 2020 mail-in ballots were counted in much larger facilities in big cities such as Atlanta, Detroit, and Philadelphia where it would be “much easier to sneak in a pallet of ballots,” he said.

I believe that the 2020 election was stolen and that Joe Biden’s “presidency” is fraudulent. It’s the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on the American people, even beyond the presidency of B. Hussein Obama.

It will take all of us hanging together in refusing to concede that the election was stolen. The evidence is there—you’re just not allowed to see that it is. Noticing is verboten.

Have a good weekend.

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Daily Broadside | The Administrative State Will Be The Death of Us

I long ago came to the conclusion that the alphabet agencies populating the federal government are unconstitutional and should be defunded, decommissioned, razed and salted over — permanently abolished, never to be formed again. The federal government was supposed to be small with powers restricted to those enumerated in the U.S. Constitution.

Jefferson also felt that the central government should be “rigorously frugal and simple.” As president he reduced the size and scope of the federal government by ending internal taxes, reducing the size of the army and navy, and paying off the government’s debt. Limiting the federal government flowed from his strict interpretation of the Constitution.

Offices with the powers of the IRS, the EPA, the DOE, the HHS, the DOJ, FBI and on ad infinitum, were never envisioned by the founders.

Under that system of a separation of powers each branch of the Federal Government was expected to protect its own Constitutional powers such that no single branch accrued power it was not allocated by the Constitution. The Founders understood that individuals were free in direct proportion to each branch of the Federal Government staying strictly within its own bounds, and the most important lane was the legislative lane; a narrow road of strictly enumerated powers written by a Congress consisted of duly elected representatives; with the House of Representatives the body most regularly elected, and with special powers over the origination of revenue bills in the driver’s seat.

But today many legislative and budget powers have been ceded to Presidents and the executive branch through statutes delegating legislative responsibility to Federal regulatory agencies composed of unelected people; and statutes mandating automatic and increased spending on certain programs administered by the executive branch.

That bolded text is the crux of the issue: Congress has delegated its own authority to unelected bureaucracies which issue regulations and rules that have the practical effect of law. Constitutionally, however, only Congress has the power to make law — it’s the legislative branch of the government, for Pete’s sake! — and only the House has the ability to appropriate funds, the lifeblood of these agencies and extra-constitutional organizations.

Yet the pressures of keeping a seat in the House or the Senate means that outsourcing their responsibility to unelected bureaucrats is a convenient way of avoiding responsibility for the onerous administrative state that Americans suffer under.

At first Congress had the upper hand; Congress had been creating the bureaucracy to carry out its wishes. But the more Congress gave away its powers in the form of broad regulatory authority, the more bureaucrats effectively became the lawmakers. The rise of the new imperial Presidency, and it should be shocking but no surprise, as Congress has expanded the bureaucracy creating programs, delegating authority, neglecting budgeting; the executive has attained unprecedented levels of authority. Our executives can command the bureaucracy to implement new procedures and policies without the cooperation of Congress by abusing executive discretion, by exploiting the vagaries of poorly written laws, and now by willfully neglecting and disregarding the laws which indeed are clear.

In his testimony before the 2016 Task Force for Executive Overreach Judiciary Committee (in the same linked document), Dr. Matthew Spalding of Hillsdale College, wrote:

This transfer of lawmaking power away from Congress to an oligarchy of unelected experts who rule through executive decree and judicial edict over virtually every aspect of our daily lives, under the guise of merely implementing the technical details of law, constitutes nothing less than a revolution against our constitutional order. The significance of this revolution cannot be overstated. It threatens to undo the development of the rule of law and constitutional government, the most significant and influential accomplishment of the long history of human liberty.

This revolution has created an increasingly unbalanced structural relationship between an ever more powerful, aggressive and bureaucratic executive branch and a weakening legislative branch unwilling to exercise its atrophied constitutional muscles to check the executive or rein in a metastasizing bureaucracy. If the executive-bureaucratic rule now threatening to overwhelm American society becomes the undisputed norm — accepted not only among the academic and political elites, but also by the American people, as the defining characteristic of the modern state — it could well mark the end of our great experiment in self-government.

Against that background, Michael Walsh’s latest column takes on more urgency.

Bureaucratic parasitism has only accelerated since start of the Nixon administration … as demands for D.C. to “do something” about pretty much everything grew and grew. Having won the war in Europe with Soviet and British help, and defeated the Japanese Empire practically by themselves, Americans felt there was no task too big to tackle. On Nixon’s watch —Tricky Dick’s fatal flaw, like Donald Trump’s, was the fool’s errand of trying to get his enemies (who detested him) to like him—the regulatory agencies were summoned into being, dark golems bent on destroying the Constitution in the guise of trying to Save the Earth.

One of the first up was the Environmental Protection Agency, the demon spawn of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970, which mandated (what an ugly word for a democracy to employ) “environmental impact” statements for future federal projects. Nixon put teeth in the law with the creation by executive order of the Environmental Protection Agency at the end of that same year. Then the unelected bureaucrats took over, and turned what had been sold as benign into a ravenous, uncontrollable, punitive beast. And now here we are:

The Biden administration is planning some of the most stringent auto pollution limits in the world, designed to ensure that all-electric cars make up as much as 67 percent of new passenger vehicles sold in the country by 2032, according to two people familiar with the matter. That would represent a quantum leap for the United States — where just 5.8 percent of vehicles sold last year were all-electric — and would exceed President Biden’s earlier ambitions to have all-electric cars account for half of those sold in the country by 2030.

It would be the federal government’s most aggressive climate regulation and would propel the United States to the front of the global effort to slash the greenhouse gases generated by cars, a major driver of climate change.

Death by a thousand cuts as the administrative state piles rule upon rule on top of our backs. Today’s Washington D.C. is a sinister, grotesque Gordian knot not unlike a cancerous tumor that has wrapped itself around the brain stem of its victim. Not doing anything will allow it to eventually kill any semblance of representative government — something I believe we are fast approaching.

Yet the alternative is an aggressive, unsparing treatment that cuts it out before it can do any more damage, and one of those agencies — the DOJ — has already demonized anyone who dares raise an objection to the administrative state as a “domestic terrorist.”

This is why I’ve warned that we’re heading for a significant conflict that can only be described as a civil war. That’s the trajectory we’re on, which is underscored by the literal movement of Americans out of blue zones across the fruited plain.

What we found was striking: There has been a vast migration out of counties that voted for Joe Biden into those counties that voted to reelect Donald Trump.

Census data show a net internal migration of almost 2.6 million (2,562,937 to be exact) from blue counties to red since Biden was elected. (These figures don’t count immigrants or births or deaths, just those Americans moving from one location to another.)

More than 61% of the counties that voted for Biden in 2020 lost population, while 65% of Trump-supporting counties gained population.

Some highlights:

  • Of the 555 counties Biden won, 335 (or 61%) lost population due to internal migration, our analysis found. Of the 2,589 counties that Trump won, 1,675 (or 65%) gained population.
  • Two Biden-voting counties that lost the most from net migration were Los Angeles County, which was down 363,760, and Cook County, Illinois, down 200,718. While many of the blue counties that lost population were urbanized, the exodus was widespread and nationwide, including many far more sparsely populated liberal areas.
  • In contrast, the biggest loss in any red county was Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, down just 18,470.
  • In 13 states that had a net loss of population, red counties nevertheless showed gains. In California, which saw a massive net outflow of 871,127 people in just the past two years, counties that backed Trump had a net gain of 8,412. New Jersey suffered a loss of 107,749 over the past two years, but counties in the Garden State that voted for Trump gained 22,507. Michigan lost 43,188 overall, but its red counties had a net gain of 28,091.
  • On the other hand, blue counties lost population in states that saw overall gains. For example, Florida had a net gain of 622,476 over the past two years. But counties that backed Biden nevertheless lost 3,374. Georgia had a large gain of 128,089, but blue counties still had a net loss of 28,178. Tennessee saw an increase of 146,403 people, but counties that voted for Biden saw a decline of 37,306.

Once the majority of moves have been completed, the red and blue state boundaries will harden and then there won’t be anywhere else to run to. As the federal government favors blue states over red, red states will either file for divorce or have to fight to leave the union.

We’re in for a long slog.

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Daily Broadside | Justifying Opposition to the Ungodly Authorities

More than a year ago I wrote that I was making my way through a book called, “Justifying Revolution: The American Clergy’s Argument for Political Resistance, 1750-1776” by Gary L. Steward. I had said at the time that I would take notes and eventually share with you what I learned, and finished reading it sometime in late 2022.

While I can’t write a comprehensive review in a short blog post, I’ll try to sum up some of the key learnings I came away with.

The book is an academic study of how patriot clergy drew on a long history of Protestant tradition of resistance to unjust political power. In his introduction, Steward writes,

The majority of historians today, it seems, interpret the clergy’s support of the American Revolution as an accommodation of Christian teaching to various forms of secular thought. They must have ignored the clear teaching of the Bible and closed their ears to the authority of scripture to justify disobedience and armed warfare against the established political authorities. After all, doesn’t scripture condemn political resistance?

The question I wanted answered was, “how did the clergy who supported the revolution justify their resistance, even when it became violent?” There are three ways that impressed me from the book (although there were others).

First, Steward’s book is a survey of some of the key events, documents and sermons that influenced resistance to British rule and demonstrates that the clergy were entirely consistent with their rich theological traditions of resistance. He covers things like Jonathan Mayhew’s doctrine of political resistance (a 1750 sermon), which John Adams suggested “orators on the fourth of July” should study, and wrote that Mayhew “‘had great influence on the commencement of the Revolution’ and his famed sermon was ‘read by everyone.'”

The overthrow of Governor Edmund Adros in 1689 was a key event in the lead up to the revolution. Andros had been appointed royal governor of the Dominion of New England and when he arrived, he nullified the colonial charters — and thereby the legislatures — of Massachusetts, Plymouth, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York and New Jersey and took them under his direct control. He then raised property taxes and excise taxers without the consent of any local assembly. Many more abuses were heaped on the citizens until King James II abdicated the throne, when the Massachusetts colonists deposed Governor Andros on April 18 and threw him in jail, eventually sending him back to England.

Steward quotes many sermons and pamphlets throughout his book. In his chapter on self-defense he quotes Elisha Fish, a Congregationalist clergyman from Upton, Massachusetts, who “laid out a full justification of defensive warfare in his The Art of War Lawful and Necessary for a Christian People” (with my emphasis):

For if it be in the nature and reason of things lawful for Christians to enjoy their lives, liberties and property, it must be lawful, in the same nature and reason of things, to use the means necessary to defend and preserve these enjoyments, for to suppose a right to life, liberty and property, and no right to the means necessary for the defense and preservation of the same, is one of the greatest absurdities in nature.

That is a justification from reason, but the colonists also reasoned from the scriptures. In particular, they argued that Paul’s admonition to submit to the “governing authorities” in Romans 13:1-5 is not absolute. The reason it’s not absolute is because civil and political power is derivative, meaning that the power any authority has is derived from God first, then secondarily through men (e.g. through elections or appointments). Therefore, magistrates have a duty to exercise their authority according to godly principles and if they don’t, they forfeit their prerogatives and the citizens have a right to resist, sometimes violently, if their natural, God-given rights (i.e. the right to life, liberty and happiness) are trampled.

However, nearly all patriot clergy cautioned that such resistance should only come after respectfully petitioning for redress, waiting patiently, and then acting in an orderly, measured and restrained response. This was in direct contradiction to the doctrine of passive obedience and nonresistance advocated by other clergy, one of whom said that a king is to be submitted to “absolutely, without exceptions to any other commands than those directly from God, who is so far from justifying our resistance that he commands our passive obedience.”

One of the strongest arguments for a right of resistance in light of Romans 13 was from Andrew Eliot, who preached an annual election sermon (an ANNUAL. ELECTION. SERMON!) on May 25, 1765, from which Steward quotes extensively.

Some have argued the doctrine of passive obedience and non-resistance in all cases whatsoever or that we are not to oppose those who are in authority, although they evidently act contrary to the design of their institution and are bent to ruin the society, which it is their duty to defend and promote. A doctrine so big with absurdity that one would think of no one of common understanding could embrace it, certainly he must have the temper of a slave that can practice upon it. St. Paul very plainly teaches us how far subjection is due to a civil magistrate, when he gives it as a reason for this subjection, “for he is the minister of God to thee for good.” The end for which God has placed men in authority is that they may promote the public happiness. When they improve their power to contrary purposes, when they endeavor to subvert the constitution and to enslave a free people, they are no longer the ministers of God, they do not act by his authority; if we are obliged to be subject, it is only for wrath and not for conscience sake, and they who support such rulers betray their country and deserve the misery they bring on themselves.”

Steward gives many other examples throughout the book of the colonists resisting tyranny and advocating for, and protecting, their civil and religious rights and liberties.

Historical theological tradition, a rejection of passive obedience, and a measured response were all reasons supporting resistance to ruling authorities.

So where do I land after reading it? It helped solidify my thinking that Christians and other citizens have the right to resist rulers who clearly begin operating outside of their derived powers. It challenged my understanding of Romans 13, which often confused me because I took it as absolute; but Paul’s explanation is more nuanced than that and supports a limited view of being subject to the authorities. And I particularly agree with being organized and measured in response to magisterial abuses once the decision to actively resist is taken.

Having read Steward’s book, I’ve challenged myself to read a book written from an opposing viewpoint — one that Steward himself mentions in his book. It’s written by Gregg L. Frazer and is called, “God Against the Revolution: The Loyalist Clergy’s Case Against the American Revolution.” I’ll read that one this year then (if I’m still blogging when I’m done with it) I’ll write a short review of it like this one.

Let me know what you think in the comments.

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Daily Broadside | Only One Vision for America Can Ultimately Prevail

Daily Verse | Genesis 26:24
“I am the God of your father Abraham. Do not be afraid, for I am with you; I will bless you and will increase the number of your descendants for the sake of my servant Abraham.”

Wednesday’s Reading: Genesis 27-29

It’s Wednesday and I can’t help but feel that we’re headed toward a showdown between the forces of freedom and the forces of tyranny, which in full flower is the evil of communism. In yesterday’s post I mentioned that there have been several articles by lefty publications fretting about a new “civil war.” They’re late to the table, though, as I, myself, have been warning for years (recent samples here, here, here and here) about the trajectory we’re on as a country, concluding that the natural (though not inevitable) end of the arc was a violent clash between Left and Right.

Today I would modify my statement to say that the clash is between those who are alarmed over the restrictions being placed on their natural rights and freedoms, and those who want to consolidate power and lord it over the citizenry. At its core, it’s a clash of visions over what America will be: will it collapse in on itself and go the way of European multi-cultured socialism, or renew its strength as the sole bastion of personal freedom and opportunity never before seen in the history of the world?

Into the debate about whether or not we’re on the cusp of another civil war drops this article by William Sullivan, titled, “What Issue Was Really at the Heart of the Civil War, and is it Relevant Today?” After tracing the causes of the war way back to 1828, Sullivan explains, “The federal government issued new tariffs which were, by design, both harmful to the South and beneficial to Northern producers. A tariff of nearly 49-percent was issued on nearly all imported goods.” In response, South Carolina threatened to secede from the Union, but war was averted with “the 1833 passage of both the Force Bill and the Compromise Tariff, which gave the federal government the right to militarily enforce tariffs and lowered the tariff rates, respectively.”

However, that raised the question that remained unanswered right up until South Carolina actually seceded from the Union in 1861:

If the people of a state surmise that the federal government is pursuing a policy that compromises the liberty and prosperity of its citizens, does that state have to conform to what is perceived by the people of the state as an unconstitutional abuse of power, or, more bluntly, intolerable tyranny?

Sullivan goes on to quote Clifford Dowdey, who “offers a fairly good summation” of what led the country to civil war:

[The North and South] had diverged into patterns of life which became increasingly antithetical; antagonisms and rivalries grew in intensity. The industrial North did wish to buy cheap and sell dear at the expense of the South, while Northern money power needed the South in a colonial status for exploitation.  Slavery did exist in the South, and there was a high moral tone in the issue of freedom, held by a small minority. Extremists on both sides did inflame passions. There was, as an amalgam of all this, the nationalistic sweep of the new industrial middle-class society represented by the North, in alliance with the expanding, democratic West, and against these the South stood as an anachronistic, arrogant feudal culture in the path of manifest destiny. All of this defines the elements of duality within the corporate body of the nation; yet, put them all together, with equal emphases or any single emphasis, and the element of explosion is missing.

Sullivan then draws the parallels with our own age:

Red and blue states have, in fact, diverged into patterns of life that have become increasingly antithetical in recent years, and antagonisms and rivalries are growing in intensity. Blue states did fleece the taxpayers of red states last year by demanding a federal bailout for their decision to keep their states irrationally closed during the pandemic and in order to keep their broken, and internally unsustainable, entitlement programs afloat. There is a high moral tone being expressed on abortion in red states, an institution that disregards the right to life among the unborn just as the institution of slavery disregarded the right to liberty among slaves. Extremists on both sides are inflaming passions. Effete coastal liberals and elitists in the media and academia view middle-class, red-state denizens as anachronistic God-worshippers who prioritize their families and communities before the needs of the national collective, and are thereby impediments on that Hegelian path of history toward their inevitable vision of “progress.”

Red and blue states do, in many ways, seem like separate parts locked in a struggle that must be resolved if we are to function as a nation. Will this warring duality be resolved, or will we explode when, for example, the federal government decides to mandate vaccination IDs be issued by all of the states, and several states refuse?

Nobody would deny that we’re deeply divided in our country today. But what is the core cause of this divergence that we’re experiencing between red and blue states or, more candidly, between progressive activists and conservative citizens? What started the divergence in the first place?

Sullivan hints at it when he writes of “red-state denizens as anachronistic God-worshippers.” Remember that a key feature of cultural Marxism and its ultimate state, communism, is the superiority of Man and the rejection of God in any form. In his book, Witness, written 70 years ago, Whittaker Chambers explained that the trial of Alger Hiss, “was a trial of ‘the two irreconcilable faiths of our time — Communism and Freedom.’ And that struggle, that trial, he wrote, ‘can end only in the destruction of one or both of the contending forces.'”

Communism, he wrote, is

man’s second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil: “Ye shall be as gods.” It is the great alternative faith of mankind. Like all great faiths, its force derives from a simple vision. Other ages have had great visions. They have always been different versions of the same vision: the vision of God and man’s relationship to God. The Communist vision is the vision of Man without God.

It is the vision of man’s mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world. It is the vision of man’s liberated mind, by the sole force of its rational intelligence, redirecting man’s destiny and reorganizing man’s life and the world. It is the vision of man, once more the central figure of the Creation, not because God made man in His image, but because man’s mind makes him the most intelligent of the animals …. Communism restores man to his sovereignty by the simple method of denying God.

That is the root cause of the division we are experiencing in our nation today—the denial of God in favor of the supremacy of Man. As John Adams wrote,

“Because we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and Religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.“

If we are no longer a “moral and religious people” who acknowledge the sovereignty of God and our Constitution wasn’t written with such people in mind, then we find ourselves adrift with no governing structure fit for us. Our system of government depended on self-restraint, or self-governance, which came from a belief in a sovereign God.

The core of our conflict is a clash between those who believe in God’s Providence and those who would assume for themselves the ruler’s throne. We can’t go on this way indefinitely. One or the other of the competing visions for our life together will be destroyed, but which—freedom under God or communism under Man?

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Daily Broadside | You Know Something Isn’t Right—And You’re Right

Daily Verse | Genesis 4:7
But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it.

Tuesday’s Reading: Genesis 6-9

Tuesday and we’re still getting used to thinking “2022.” How many of you can immediately begin saying “2022” and using it on official documents and letters? It sometimes takes me a good two or three weeks to start referring to the current year accurately.

I’m reading a newer book by Gary L. Steward titled, “Justifying Revolution: The American Clergy’s Argument for Political Resistance, 1750-1776.” It’s published by Oxford University Press and sets you back $74 on Amazon, which is a lot for a thin academic volume of 221 pages—92 of which consist of endnotes, a bibliography and an index. However, I have a driving interest in understanding how the Christian church of the 18th century justified supporting the American Revolution.*

We here in the contemporary U.S. are troubled by the increasingly authoritarian actions we’re seeing from our ruling class. I’m talking here not just about the Peking Lung Pox lockdowns, but things like the January 6 Select Committee that seems to be operating with lawless malice; the conspiracy to “fortify” the 2020 election—”in which state authorities openly flouted election laws and in which all manner of irregularities ensued;” the lawlessness that we see taking place in cities run by far-left Democrats and Soros’-supported state attorneys; the deplatforming of national politicians (who all happen to be Republicans, never Democrats; or who are experts who defy the official narrative) from techopolies like Twitter and Facebook and YouTube; and the deliberate scare tactics of a “white supremacist” terrorist threat that is never explained but only warned about; and a “free press” that is fully compromised.

What I believe we’re watching is the progression of the slow coup put in motion by the Obama administration after Donald Trump won the 2016 election. What we are seeing is the consolidation of power, inch-by-inch, by the anti-American progressive Left.

We are experiencing from our rulers an indifference toward our guaranteed liberties and constitutional rights, similar to what the patriots in the 1700s experienced when the British Parliament under King George III imposed first the Sugar Tax in 1764 and then the Stamp Act in 1765. Our ruling elite are over-reaching and getting away with it because of the cancerous rot known as cultural Marxism that has infected all three branches of government, and business, education, the sciences, the military, the press, the church and more.

In his column on Monday, Ben Weingarten writes about the J6 “insurrection”:

Consider how disturbing the treatment of Capitol rioters has been, no matter how contemptible the actions of the worst actors among them. There are people with no prior criminal record who participated in the breach now rotting in a squalid D.C. prison for months on end in pretrial detention, allegedly facing assaults, stuck in solitary confinement for hours a day and made to plead before judges before whom they repent their political views in order to try and garner their release. The process is the punishment. The cruelty is the point. The message to Americans is clear: You no longer live in a nation with anything remotely resembling equal, impartial justice. Enemies of the regime will be brought to heel; woke social justice warriors will get off scot-free. This is meant to both instill terror in and demoralize dissenters.

It also serves as a prior restraint on dissent because Americans know that every critical response the Ruling Class’ actions provoke will provide yet another pretext to turn the screws tighter in order to “save democracy.” We see similar themes in the pursuit of the perfectly peaceful political foes of the regime—the dozens and dozens of them—subjected to the Soviet justice of the lawless and limitless January 6 Select Committee.

What astonishes me is that Republicans on the hill have not risen up in loud protest. Normal Americans have been abandoned by both sides of the aisle. It really will come down to citizens having to make a difficult choice between acquiescence and resistance.

What will you choose?

*As I make my way through the book, I’ll take notes and eventually share with you what I learn.