The liberal media told us that the election of President Biden was going to yank America out of its dark days plagued by the coronavirus, economic depression, and former President Donald Trump’s tweets, but a new survey shows that U.S. “satisfaction” has hit rock bottom.

In the latest Gallup survey, satisfaction is the lowest the firm has recorded, down to 39%. And the survey started in 2001 showed its steepest one-year plunge, down from 53% a year ago, before the virus swept through the world and when the Trump economy was sky-high.

“Americans’ satisfaction with seven broad aspects of the way the country functions is collectively at its lowest in two decades of Gallup measurement. This includes satisfaction with the overall quality of life in the U.S., assessments of government, corporate and religious influence, and perceptions of the economic and moral climates,” said the analysis.

To be fair, multiple surveys have shown that while the nation is in a blue funk, they also expect good things in the coming year. But the Gallup survey indicated just how high a climb it will be.

In zero aspects ranging from “overall quality of life” to “the moral and ethical climate” did satisfaction increase since January 2000.

And while there were some differences between Democrats and Republicans, both said they were less satisfied this year.

The “bottom line” from Gallup:

With the U.S. battling a global pandemic, the economy still struggling to recover from the associated slowing of economic activity, and political tensions high in the wake of the election that Trump contested, Americans’ views of the country are very different today than a year ago.

This is evident in the decline in Americans’ satisfaction with the direction of the country overall from 41% last January to 11% today. But the specific ratings reviewed in this report fill out the story.

Satisfaction ratings with the quality of life, the moral and ethical climate, the distribution of income and wealth, and people’s opportunity for advancement have declined over the past year to a similar degree among Republicans and Democrats. At the same time, Republicans have grown especially put off by government and corporate power, while Democrats are less content with organized religion. These shifts are likely to influence the way politics and policy play out over the next year and beyond.

Paul Bedard, Washington Secrets

Donald Trump has left Washington, but only in physical form. Hismischievous specter still haunts that fortified cemetery where our Constitution and all our alleged norms have been interred in shallow graves. No one is talking about America’s No. 1 Matlock fan. You would never know that * is president. DC’s denizen can’t move on. They don’t want to move on. Look what they have to move onto, two years of utter failure with that desiccated old zombie at the helm screwing this up until an energized and woke wave of GOP candidates who want to burn the whole garbage Establishment down sweep into power in 2022.

And how many people got woke when * threw tens of thousands of Americans out of work as human sacrifices to the blue libs’ angry weather goddess?

How many got woke when * announced he was making the all-purpose boogeyman of “racism” a cornerstone of his administration?

How many got woke when they saw the Democrat-subsidizing tech lords shut down the speech of anyone who dissents?

How many got woke when COVID suddenly started to vanish the second it stopped being useful?

And how many will get woke when their $1,400 – not $2,000 – check arrives?

Left to their own devices, the Establishment fails. Left to their own devices, the spotlight falls on them, and when that happens people see.

The truth is that they want Trump. They need Trump. They cannot let him go. Trump truly is the greatest real estate magnate ever, since he owns all the space inside the Establishment’s bloated heads.

You can see it as they insist on going forward with their Lucy n’ the football impeachment, which will end in failure and Trump’s exoneration. Forty-five Republicans have already pointed out the obvious – you can’t impeach someone who is not in office.

Plus, the impeachment itself is a substantive joke. As the president’s brief points out, more politely, it was written by bad lawyers like my loser congressjerk Ted Lieu and Eric Swalwell, who should stick to flatulence, being scammed by Chi Com doxies, and other tasks that he is actually good at. One key theory is the president “incited” the mini-riot, except the FBI might have something else to say about that. It keeps charging people with planning it way ahead of time. Now, Trump is awesome, but even his greatest fans don’t credit him with being able to bend time and space.

The impeachment claims themselves are garbage. Reading it, you see that many are not about “inciting violence,” but, rather, about the president saying that the election results were suspect. As the Answer correctly notes, you cannot prosecute someone for exercising his First Amendment rights, yet – astonishingly – that is exactly what this garbage indictment does: “There, he reiterated false claims that ‘we won this election, and we won it by a landslide.’”

Oh, and here’s another charge:

“He also willfully made statements that, in context, encouraged – and foreseeably resulted in – lawless action at the Capitol, such as: ‘if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore.’ Thus, incited by President Trump, members of the crowd he had addressed, in an attempt to, among other objectives, interfere with the Joint Session’s solemn constitutional duty to certify the results of the 2020 Presidential election, unlawfully breached and vandalized the Capitol, injured and killed law enforcement personnel, menaced Members of Congress, the Vice President, and Congressional personnel, and engaged in other violent, deadly, destructive, and seditious act.

When again did telling your side to “fight” to prevail become “seditious”? Oh yeah – when our side did it.

Wow. Impeachment for saying unapproved things. That’s turning everything our Constitution is supposed to mean upside down, but such is the power of Trump to reveal the true moral bankruptcy of the Establishment.

Oh, they also ignored any kind of due process – there was simply a vote (in which Liz Cheney and some other hacks shamelessly went along with this farce) and – ta-da! – Impeachment 2: Impeach Until We Go Blind.

And there’s a hilarious lawyer thing, not that actual law has anything to do with this joke proceeding. It’s about severability:

“The House charge fails by interweaving differing allegations rather than breaking them out into counts of alleged individual instances of misconduct. Rule XXIII of the Rules of Procedure and Practice in the Senate When Sitting on Impeachment Trials provides, in pertinent part, that an article of impeachment shall not be divisible thereon. Because the Article at issue here alleges multiple wrongs in the single article, it would be impossible to know if two-thirds of the members agreed on the entire article, or just on parts, as the basis for vote to convict. The House failed to adhere to strict Senate rules and, instead, chose to make the Article as broad as possible intentionally in the hope that some Senators might agree with parts, and other Senators agree with other parts, but that when these groups of senators were added together, the House might achieve the appearance of two thirds in agreement, when those two thirds of members, in reality, did not concur on the same allegations interwoven into an over-broad article designed for just such a purpose. Such behavior on the part of the House of Representatives may have a less nefarious reason, in the alternative, and simply be a by-product of the haste in which the House unnecessarily acted while depriving the 45^th President of the United States of his American right to due process of law. The 45th President of the United States believes and therefore avers that the defect in the drafting of the Article requires that Senators be instructed that if two thirds of them fail to find any portion of the Article lacking in evidence sufficient for conviction, then the entire Article fails and should be dismissed.”

Basically, the entire thing is defective because all these different claims are mixed together. Now, one might try to dismiss this as a mere “technicality,” but laws, rules and procedures are all about “technicalities.” Either the rules apply to everyone, or they don’t. Here, the Establishment is seeking to keep the inconvenient fact that it is not entitled to a conviction from stopping them from getting one. If they can ignore the rules on this witch hunt, they will ignore them when they come for you.

And since the Constitution and, you know, evidence, is no impediment to the Establishment’s grubby grabbing for power, you might think it would decline to continue this ridiculous charade on purely cynical, practical grounds. This blatant attempt to take the decision on whether Trump should ever be president out of the hands of the people is going to further get people woke, but the Establishmentarians can’t help themselves.

They have to talk about Trump, only Trump, Trump forever. And to do that, they have to shred the principles they asserted, but never really bought into.

After all, their alternative is much worse – people would be talking about them, and we’ve seen how that goes for them. So, Trump not only lives in their otherwise vacant skulls, but they invited him in, and locked him in, and will try to never let him escape.

Kurt Schlichter, townhall.com

How hard would it be to convince the vast majority of people to stop using fossil fuels, stop driving their cars, stop flying on planes and cease doing anything deemed as a threat to the environment? How hard would it be to convince the vast majority of people to alter their behavior, their choice of books or websites, or the amount of income they keep, because of a government-decreed racial crisis? After witnessing and experiencing the events of the last year, I don’t think it would be difficult at all. Remember: Dictators are just being dictators. They enjoy power because the great majority of us choose to be humble, pitifully lazy thinkers more concerned with not offending others than with asserting our natural, inalienable rights.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

It is unavoidable. The presstitutes have white conservative American Trump supporters set up as “systemic racists,” “MEGA terrorists,” “enemies of democracy,” and “white supremacist oppressors.”

As Biden’s staffing reveals, the regime is staffed with people hostile to white gentiles. The regime’s “anti-domestic terrorism bill” voids the First Amendment by criminalizing dissent from controlled explanations.

I am not the only one who sees this. Here is Tulsi Gabbard, the last honest Democrat. She tells us that the Domestic-Terrorism Bill Is “a Targeting of Almost Half of the Country”:

“This is an issue that all Democrats, Republicans, independents, Libertarians should be extremely concerned about, especially because we don’t have to guess about where this goes or how this ends. What characteristics are we looking for as we are building this profile of a potential extremist, what are we talking about? Religious extremists, are we talking about Christians, evangelical Christians, what is a religious extremist? Is it somebody who is pro-life?” https://www.nationalreview.com/news/tulsi-gabbard-domestic-terrorism-bill-is-a-targeting-of-almost-half-of-the-country/

Constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead sees it:

“Watch and see: we are all about to become enemies of the state.” https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/enemies_of_the_deep_state_the_governments_war_on_domestic_terrorism_is_a_trap

Honest journalist Glenn Greenwald sees it:

“The last two weeks have ushered in a wave of new domestic police powers and rhetoric in the name of fighting ‘terrorism’ that are carbon copies of many of the worst excesses of the first War on Terror that began nearly twenty years ago. This New War on Terror—one that is domestic in name from the start and carries the explicit purpose of fighting ‘extremists’ and ‘domestic terrorists’ among American citizens on U.S. soil—presents the whole slew of historically familiar dangers when governments, exploiting media-generated fear and dangers, arm themselves with the power to control information, debate, opinion, activism and protests.” https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-new-domestic-war-on-terror-is

The only people who don’t see it are the brainwashed Americans who voted Democrat. These indoctrinated people might think that they are demonstrating their superior morality by lining up with oppressed people of color against their own race, but if they had read The Camp of the Saints, they would know that they too are “systemic racists” and “oppressors.”

Even a handful of members of Congress who believe, or pretend to believe, that “white nationalist” Trump supporters attacked the Capitol believe we are heading into a totalitarian existence:

“While many may find comfort in increased national security powers in the wake of this attack, we must emphasize that we have been here before and we have seen where that road leads. Our history is littered with examples of initiatives sold as being necessary to fight extremism that quickly devolve into tools used for the mass violation of the human and civil rights of the American people… To expand the government’s national security powers once again at the expense of the human and civil rights of the American people would only serve to further undermine our democracy, not protect it.” https://tlaib.house.gov/sites/tlaib.house.gov/files/NationalSecurityOpp.pdf

Too late do Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and their ilk realize that no one is safe in a police state. In Stalinist Russia not even the heroes of the Bolshevik Revolution who were members of the Politburo were safe. Bukharin himself was framed in a show trial and executed.

All elements of a police state are now institutionalized in the FBI’s thinking and bureaus. As John Whitehead writes, if you exercise Constitutional rights, such as free speech, free association, own a firearm, or demand a warrant as is your right before being searched, you qualify for the government’s terrorism watch list.

You can be listed as a “domestic terrorism threat” if you espouse “conspiracy theories,” that is, if you demur from official controlled explanations.

As Whitehead makes clear, an American no longer has to commit a crime in order to be arrested and prosecuted. Whitehead reports that the FBI’s counterterrorism division “classifies domestic terrorism threats into four main categories: racially motivated violent extremism, anti-government/anti-authority extremism, animal rights/environmental extremism, and abortion extremism.” Arrests and detention on suspicion alone–even execution on suspicion alone without due process–are now part of US practice.

It is not only the United States that has fallen into totalitarianism. It is the fate of the entirety of the Western World. In no Western country does the government represent the people. In Sweden, UK, Germany, France, Italy the governments represent immigrant-invaders. Anyone of French, Italian, British, German, Swedist ethnicity who thinks that a country is defined by its ethnicity, language, history, customs is considered a neo-fascist. Any citizen of a European country who believes in national sovereignty is labeled a nationalist racist. Leaders of national ethnicities, such as Marine le Pen are demonized and prosecuted.

The notion of a “Free West” has become an absurdity.

China’s social credit system is frightening, but it is less frightening than what has been set in motion in the United States. There has been a revolution from the top, and it will be enforced by bringing the power of the state against the individual.

Paul Craig Roberts, UNZ Review

Two of my memes from social media yesterday:

Here’s an inexpensive COVID relief bill: SHUT DOWN the government and leave the economy the hell alone. Cost: $0

Biden doesn’t want to reopen government schools. I agree. Defund them, shut them down and PRIVATIZE education.

From an article entitled, “The GameStop Rally Is a Lively Party, and Regulators Aren’t Welcome”:

“The stock market saga surrounding GameStop has shown that retail investors hold immense potential. Where GameStop gave power to the players, financial apps have given power to the people. These apps have brought investing to the palms of countless hands across the world. Maybe these new investors will “disrupt” the market, but every great innovation was at one point termed a market disruption. This is no different.”

It’s fascinating to watch leftist Democrats rush to use government regulation to protect the hedge fund investors from market losses. Our Uniparty, the Democrats, are now everything they always claimed their conservative opposition to be. Money, not markets, are all these shallow, power-grubbing leftists care about.

From another article entitled, “Why Corporations Should Cater to Consumers, Not Causes”:

“Firms leveraging situations and social issues is not new, but showcasing their moral authority despite a disinterested consumer base is.”

Exactly right. Business is not politics. Businesses should focus on the product or service they’re selling, NOT on political views. Unfortunately, that becomes impossible in a fascist state where government has so much sway over companies via regulation and taxes, that businesses no longer function AS businesses.

#NotMyDictatorship

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

The Congressional Budget Office now projects that economic recovery in 2021 will be faster than it predicted last July. It projects that the economy will be back to its pre-pandemic levels by mid-2021. This very good news reflects the fact that the economic turndown was not as severe as the CBO had expected, and that the recovery was stronger than expected.

Former President Donald Trump, recently rejected for reelection by American voters, can take full credit for this.

These are the dividends of the strong economy that the Trump administration put in place through well-directed tax cuts and deregulation.

Let’s again recall that last September, 55 percent of Americans told Gallup that they were “better off now” than they were four years ago. This is the highest percentage since Gallup first asked the question in 1984.

Most astounding is that this question was asked in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis. Yet, most still saw themselves better off than four years earlier.

Across the board, the Trump presidency was transformational and indeed went a long way to “make America great again.”

Among many important accomplishments, Trump departed leaving an economy much stronger than the one he inherited, likewise with our court system and the support received by the pro-life movement to end abortion.

It is also essential to note how he remarkably achieved peace accords in the Middle East that no one ever dreamed possible.

That there are peace accords between Israel and a lineup of Arab and Muslim countries — the most recent announcement coming from Kosovo, a majority-Muslim Balkan nation, which has announced its intent to open an embassy in Jerusalem — is mind-boggling.

We might say that just as Donald Trump defied convention in getting elected to the presidency, he defied convention in failing to get reelected.

Despite tangible and meaningful achievements, Trump departed with an approval rating of 34 percent and was the first president in history to not crack a 50 percent approval rating for the duration of his presidency.

I will leave it to others to speculate why President Trump failed to connect with sufficient numbers of American voters, despite a presidency of remarkable achievement.

One obvious answer is a decidedly left-leaning and hostile media.

Certainly, President Trump must take some credit for this failure with voters because of his personal style, which, to say the least, is not always the most endearing to those who are not already on board with him.

The extraordinarily strong Republican showing in House elections, with Republicans picking up 13 seats, enforces the sense that the repudiation of Donald Trump in the presidential election was not a repudiation of his policies and accomplishments but rather a personal repudiation.

The question is: What now for the Republican Party? How does the party pick up the pieces, regroup, refocus and advance forward once again?

I would suggest more focus on what, rather than who.

Republicans need to get the discussion back on agenda and away from personalities.

President Trump was taking America in the right direction. That direction, refocusing on the core principles that indeed made American great to begin with, is certainly the place to start: limited government, capitalism, sanctity of life, faithfulness to our Constitution and the rule of law.

As our national debt spins out of control, and as our new government, which thinks it can print and borrow money to no end, clamps down on business and individual freedom, America will again start down the wrong path that President Trump worked hard to get us off of.

As Republicans regroup, I think of the words often attributed to General MacArthur: “We are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.”

Star Parker