End of the week and the weekend before Christmas Day. I hope you enjoy this one because the next one might not be so jolly.
In my last two posts I’ve mentioned a second civil war here in the U.S. I believe that, unless there is some divine intervention, we’re on track to a violent and bloody confrontation. I’m no Michel de Nostredame, nor am I somehow smarter than all other prognosticators. I just look at the developments around our country and think about where it will all lead. It’s really not hard to guess.
A writer I really respect is Victor Davis Hanson (or VDH). He’s an historian and understands the rising and falling of nations. Even he is looking at what is happening, especially in light of the Colorado Supreme Court ruling removing Trump from the ballot in that state, and he’s aghast.
Trump Derangement Syndrome became Orwellian with the recent ruling of the Colorado Supreme Court.
It approved the erasure of Trump from the Republican primary ballot in Colorado, by invoking Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.
That ossified clause was intended to bar any ante-bellum federal officials who joined the Confederacy from again holding federal offices after 1865.
In no way is Trump’s conduct on January 6 comparable to calling for secession, much less prompting a Civil War that cost the country 700,000 lives.
Right. It doesn’t make sense. The reason it doesn’t make sense is because “making sense” is not the goal. Removing Trump from the ballot is the goal. That’s the foregone conclusion of the four hacks-in-black; they just needed to find a law to fit their conclusion. When it didn’t exactly fit, they made it fit.
The Colorado court ruling is sadly only the most recent in a long series of disastrous firsts that are slowly unwinding the republic and making a mockery of the rule of law.
Remember the Russian collusion hoax and the 2016 Clinton/Fusion GPS effort to destroy a presidential candidate?
Recall the 2020 Russian disinformation farcical claim concerning the genuine Hunter Biden laptop?
Do not forget the precedent of impeaching a president twice and then trying an ex-president and private citizen in the Senate.
Then there was another first of raiding an ex-president’s private home over disputes about the removal of presidential papers that are typically solved bureaucratically and as a civil matter.
We are also witnessing ongoing lawfare waged by state and local partisan prosecutors to destroy the current leading presidential candidate.
Their indictments either have no merit or would never have applied to liberal politicians or both.
What will be Colorado’s precedent?
Will red-state courts now respond by erasing Joe Biden from their ballots on grounds that he is “guilty” of insurrectionary activity—by deliberately destroying the southern border, undermining U.S. security, sabotaging federal immigration law, and violating his oath of office?
He’s not the only one to think this is exceedingly dangerous. Ben Shapiro is a quick thinker and is dead-on with this:
This is, to put it mildly, unbelievably dangerous.
It sets up a perverse set of incentives for both political sides.
Trump can and will rightly claim that lawfare has been used to thwart the workings of democracy—that a slate of judges in any state can simply negate the will of the voters, and that President Joe Biden’s own Department of Justice has been attempting to drag him into court before the election in order to stymie his shot at the presidency.
Meanwhile, the Colorado Supreme Court has now set up expectations for Democrats across the country that Trump can be legally barred from the presidency—and when the Supreme Court overturns that Colorado Supreme Court ruling, they will claim that the Supreme Court itself is rigged.
All of which means that 2024 is going to be the most insane and ugly presidential election in American history. And that’s saying a lot, since 1968 and 2020 are both years that existed. Under what circumstances, precisely, would Democrats accept the result of a Trump election? Under what circumstances, precisely, would Republicans accept the result of a Biden election?
The weaponization of the legal system creates an all-consuming fire, burning everything in its path. There is simply no 2024 result likely to result in anything but complete—and perhaps violent—chaos at this point.
The problem here is that we can listen to the warnings, even agree with them, and not know what to do. All of these developments are slowly becoming “the norm” and the danger is that we are lulled into dismissing them because they seem less than lethal one at a time over years. But, taken together, they form an alarming pattern and deviation from historical, legal precedent and American jurisprudence. We are slowly and steadily becoming a third-world nation where political criminals rule through the courts and the regulatory state.
I think the place to start is with recapturing the pride, gratefulness, and the fragility of our freedoms. Let me offer you three quotes to take with you this weekend.
First, Ronald Reagan warned us in 1961 that freedom is only one generation away from extinction.
The next two come from Eric Metaxas. The first is from his book, “If You Can Keep It.”
The Constitution given to us that 1787 was a sufficient beginning. It was the foundation of the United States of America, but merely existing—and merely obeying the laws that stem from that Constitution—was hardly what the founders had in mind. The idea that our government is “we the people” is not a corny idea that doesn’t mean much. It is something that is utterly real. It is in fact an idea of great genius and is the main operating principle by which this nation has stayed alive and has expanded its freedoms for over two centuries. But once “we the people” begin to forget that, and cease to do what is necessary as Americans, it all begins to fall apart. And alas and alack, we have gone a long way toward forgetting that and toward forgetting that and toward ceasing to do what is necessary as Americans. We are in desperate, indeed urgent, need of a primer on these vital things.
Finally, Metaxas argues that the American Church has a role to play here. In his book, “Letter to the American Church,” he writes:
I have written this book because I am convinced the American Church is at an impossibly—and almost unbearably—important inflection point. The parallels to where the German Church was in the 1930s are unavoidable and grim. So the only question—and what concerns us in this slim volume—is whether we might understand those parallels, and thereby avoid the fatal mistakes the German Church made during that time, and their superlatively catastrophic results. If we do not, I am convinced we will reap a whirlwind greater even than the one they did.
Do you understand what we have and the danger we face? Take time to reflect on it.
Have a good weekend.
Good to see you read Letter to the American Church. It’s an excellent book … a must read. America take heed!