Until now, I had no idea how dumb the GOP really was. Man, is our party dumb. The people who run the GOP are so dumb they couldn’t spell “win” if I were to spot them the W and the I.

First, the presidential election was clearly rigged and stolen, and they just let it happen. Now the leaders of the GOP won’t even admit it happened. They’re afraid, like whiny little snowflakes, of offending liberal activists, Democratic voters, assorted socialists, government bureaucrats, RINOs (Republicans in Name Only), woke corporate CEOs, the mainstream media and the masters of social media — you know, all the people who conspired to steal the election.

Don’t believe me? Ask Time magazine. Time just released a fascinating in-depth story of how Democrats, liberal activist groups, media, social media and, shockingly, corporate America all partnered in one big conspiracy to prevent Donald Trump’s reelection. Time admitted it was a “conspiracy.” It admitted it was an “alliance between left-wing activists and business titans.”

The detailed Time story reads like a confession of a stolen election. It admitted the game plan: This conspiracy was based on taking advantage of COVID-19, mail-in voting, last-minute changes in voting laws, gobs of corporate money backing the effort, and collusion by media and social media to silence any dissent.

And now the delusional GOP leadership compounds the problem by ignoring reality. Republican leaders keep thinking they’re going to win it all back in 2022 and 2024. Really? How? What’s the plan?

To quote Martin Luther King Jr., “I have a dream.” I have a game plan that at least gives us a fighting chance to neutralize the Democratic advantage, compete and win elections.

First, money: Money is the mother’s milk of politics. Democrats have all the money in the world. President Joe Biden raised record sums. Where did it come from? A ton came from the biggest corporations in America. How will the GOP compete with that moving forward?

The answer is to tell corporate America to go to hell. Former President Trump should remake the GOP as the party “of the people, by the people, for the people.” It’s time to announce the GOP will no longer accept any corporate money. From now on, the GOP will be funded “by the American people” only. Ask every Trump voter to contribute $10 per month.

Seventy-four million Trump voters would be thrilled to fund a party that looks out for the little guy. Some may give $100 per month, some $1,000. But everyone has $10 per month to spare.

Let’s assume only 50 million Trump voters agree. That’s $500 million per month. That’s $6 billion per year without a penny from corporations. That’s $24 billion over the next four years — the most money ever raised by any politician or political party. That’s enough to win a lot of elections.

Next, we have to admit we can never win again without voter identification. That’s why we lost the presidency in 2020. Every major country in the world has voter ID, except us. Even Mexico has Voter ID — with photo and thumbprint.

Mail-in ballots didn’t lose the election. Voter ID did. With strict voter ID, you can’t cheat by mail or in person. Dead people can’t vote. Illegal aliens can’t vote. It’s all pretty simple — to ensure fair elections and election integrity, we must demand proof of who is voting and ensure everyone only votes once.

With Biden and Democrats in charge, we can’t get it on the federal level. And we’re never going to get it in deep-blue states such as New York and California. But we just have to get strict voter ID laws in place in six states that determined the 2020 election: Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada. Five of those six states have Republican-majority legislatures.

With this plan, even with all the damage Biden and the Democrats are doing to this country, we have a fighting chance at retaking America in 2022 and 2024.

Wayne Allyn Root, townhall.com

In this 2009 article, Lew Rockwell lists the problems with government mandates on private use of mobile phones. Observant readers will note the “public safety” arguments against the freedom to use phones as we choose are essentially the same as current claims that “public health” is a justification for dictating daily habits and behavior. ]

We all want freedom for ourselves, but many people have doubts about the way others might use their own freedom. Under these conditions, the state is there to help. Get enough people to favor enough restriction, and the state is good to go, administering every aspect life from its smallest to its largest detail.

Every day presents more cases, but the most recent case is stunning. It turns out that 97% of people polled support a universal ban on texting while driving. Half of those surveyed say that the penalty should be as severe as that for drunk driving. Among these, how many do you suppose do text and drive but don’t want to admit it to the pollster? Probably plenty. And yet I couldn’t find a single online defense of the practice anywhere on the web.

The truth is that it is not necessarily unsafe to text behind the wheel. It all depends on the situation. If you are in a traffic jam, and are late to an appointment, the ability to text can be a lifesaver. Or if there are no cars around, you might be able to risk it. On the other hand, it would probably be a mistake to attempt this doing 80 mph around slower traffic on a freeway.

How can we know the difference between when it is safe and when it is not? The principle applied on American roads is that the driver himself makes that decision. If this principle didn’t make sense, there would be no way that the roads themselves could work at all.

Think of this the next time you are in a big city zooming around curves and between lanes along with thousands of others, doing top speeds. Here we have 4,000-pound hunks of steel barreling down the road without aids other than a dotted yellow line on the road. These are real-life death machines in which one wrong move could cause a 100-car pileup and mass death. We do it anyway.

What’s remarkable is not that there are so many wrecks. The miracle is that it works at all and that, for the most part, people get to where they are going. And consider too the demographic behind the car: old, young, abled, disabled, experienced, inexperienced. Some people have a facility for driving and others do not. Some people have spatial agility and others do not.

How does it all work? Don’t tell me that it is due to central planning and the police. The police aren’t driving every car and controlling every wheel. Our human volition on the road and the decisions we make that affect other drivers are nearly 100% our own.

And yet it works. Why? The reason is that it is not in anyone’s interest to get in a crash. It is in everyone’s interest to get to where one is going in one piece and to do it efficiently. Roll together tens of thousands of people with the same broad goal and you get spontaneous cooperation. Something that people normally think could not work does in fact work. Looked at from that angle, the orderliness we see on the roads is a general expression of the capacity for human society to work in the context of self-interested individuals.

Now think of this poll showing a widespread opposition to texting while driving. I submit that you would get similar results from a poll that asked people about the right to drive:

Do you support or oppose the right of everyone to own 4,000-pound heaps of steel and control them completely and autonomously at top speeds in the midst of thousands of other citizens whose lives could be in danger with so much as a slight flick of the wrist to the right or left?

That question could elicit nearly 100% negative results. We generally trust our capacity to manage ourselves but we do not trust the capacity of others to manage themselves. And we surely don’t believe that society can generally function well under conditions of freedom. Even though we live in the midst of spontaneous order and use its brilliance every day (grocery store, the world wide web, restaurants, housing developments), we don’t really understand it.

Or how about this one:

Do you support the right of anyone over a certain age to buy and consume as much hard liquor as he wants, even to the point of drinking himself into a life-threatening stupor, neglecting the kids, wrecking family life, and killing brain cells that cannot be replaced?

Probably most people would say no. And yet this is precisely the reasoning behind Prohibition, which most people today regard as a terrible error. Today, we supposedly realize that the social cost of the right to drink hard liquor was greater than the supposed benefit we receive from enforcing Prohibition.

So it is with texting and driving. There are times when it is safe. There are times when it is not safe. The only ones who can really know the difference are the people behind the wheel. These people already enjoy the freedom to talk to passengers, to fiddle with their stereo, to drive following an exhausting jog, to drive while distracted with anxieties over work and marriage, to pray or sing in the car, and do many other things that seem like a distraction from the goal at hand. Somehow it all works, and there is a lesson here. You can count on more order to emerge from trusting freedom than you get from attempting to micromanage people’s lives.

Now, the libertarians among us might point out that these roads are publicly owned and that this is the core source of the problem. Under privately owned roads, there might be intense restrictions on what you can and cannot do and these might be part of the contract you make with the road owner.

The market would take care of the rest. If an owner were too restrictive, drivers would take other routes. If they are too lenient, their insurance premiums would rise and they would pay too high a price. The resultant rules of the road would be a result of this careful calibration, tested constantly by the forces of supply and demand.

Under the existing rules of private roads, we see no evidence of a crackdown on texting. Maybe it would come in the future, but at least there would be a market test. When a rule fails in private markets, the rule is changed.

But it is different with government. No matter how preposterous the rule, it stays and stays, regardless of whether it works to accomplish its end. And there can be no question that a crackdown on texting is coming. Obama has already banned texting while driving for federal workers. A bill that would deny federal funds to states is flying through the Senate. Look for a nationwide ban in the coming months.

The ban says, You don’t know what is good for you so you must be forced to do what the government thinks is good for you. The ban gets support because people generally think that while they are responsible and good at calibrating what is safe and unsafe, others are not. Through this method, all freedoms could be abolished.

It’s a bad way to form the rules of a society.

Llewellyn Rockwell, mises.org

Originally published November 2009.

One major difference between the United States and a Communist country: Communists have concentration camps; we don’t. At least — not yet. We are so very close to this, and the clueless millions who support Democrats either have no idea, or perhaps are just fine with it.

From Breitbart News: Uyghur, Kazakh, and other ethnic minority survivors of China’s brutal concentration camp system told the BBC in an extensive report published Wednesday that they witnessed and endured rape at the hands of Chinese government agents on a regular basis, including the use of electric batons to rape and torture women.

China has been operating concentration camps in Xinjiang, its westernmost and largest region, since at least 2018. While estimates suggested as many as 3 million people were imprisoned in the concentration camp system at its peak, the most recent estimates from the U.S. government suggest a population of about 2 million people remain trapped there. The number dropped after reports that the Chinese Communist Party sold concentration camp victims as slaves to factories nationwide. Beijing officials claimed the missing prisoners had simply “graduated” from the camps.

WE ARE LIVING IN A DICTATORSHIP. Do you believe it yet?

Example: Fox News host Tucker Carlson reported exclusively on Thursday night that Bank of America is allegedly turning over private information about its customers to federal law enforcement officials — without the knowledge or consent of its customers — in an apparent effort to identify those who participated in the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol Building.

Carlson led off the segment by talking about how the Biden administration and law enforcement has stated that they want to go after domestic “extremists” but have not laid out a clear definition of what qualifies as an “extremist.”

“Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin Calls for 60-Day ‘Stand Down’ to Discuss Extremism in the Military” [Breitbart News]

What exactly does he mean by “extremism”? Usually leftists refer to support for the Second Amendment, free speech rights, lower taxes, fewer regulations and opposition to the open-ended lockdowns of healthy people as “extremism”. Is the Secretary of Defense of the Biden regime suggesting that all members of the military must hold the far-left, socialist or Communist views of his party?

THIS is what dictatorship looks like. We are there.

#NotMyDictatorship

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

I’m not even sure one can still speak freely about theoretical matters. Nevertheless, against the background din of “insurrection” charges against MAGA America, I’ve tried to distill the hardcore libertarian take regarding the storming of the Capitol Building, on January 6, in a brief YouTube clip.

It is very plainly this: Principled libertarians will distinguish pro-Trump patriots from the armed wing of the Democratic Party: Black Lives Matter, Antifa and other criminal riffraff.

BLM rioters trashed, looted and leveled their countrymen’s private property, their livelihoods and businesses, doing billions in damages

In contrast, the ragtag men and women of the MAGA movement stormed only the seat of power and corruption that is the State. Once!

Yet, in reply to the fact that “entire cities were burned to the ground” by BLM troops (the Democratic Party’s violent militia), some of the staunchest of conservatives have asserted that “storming the Capitol building” is much worse than “than burning down strip malls.”

Wrong!

Principled libertarians, very plainly, think the opposite.

Like us or not, the radical property-rights libertarian—who does not live inside and off the Beltway—will strongly disagree with the Trump-blaming conservatives.

A certain kind of libertarian, the good kind, distinguishes clearly between those who, like BLM, would trash, loot and level private property—the livelihoods and businesses of private citizens—and between those who would storm the well-padded seats of state power and corruption.

The State is, after all, an entity that, by definition, forsakes the legitimate defense of the lives, liberty and property of its citizens.

The State’s standard operating procedure is to fleece us without so much as flinching, shake us down, so as to fatten its members and increase their sphere of influence.

Libertarians who live by the axiom of nonaggression will always prefer the man who proceeds against the State, to the man who destroys private property.

That is because the state is governed by aggression; whereas the institution of private property is rooted in peaceful, just and voluntary transactions between consenting participants.

There, I’ve said it!

It’s no secret that rock-ribbed libertarians—as opposed to the lite, fluffy establishment libertarian—view the State, certainly in its current iteration, as a criminal enterprise. For it operates with force and without the consent of the governed.

If you are tempted to argue this theoretical point, think only of the meaning of the 2020 election:

Upwards of 81 million people, or 51.3 percent of those who voted, not of the people, get to impose their will on more than 74 million, or 46.8 percent of the voters, as well as on the millions who didn’t vote.

Moreover, the winner in an election is certainly not the fictitious entity referred to as “The People,” but rather the representatives of the majority. And while it seems obvious that the minority in a democracy is openly thwarted, the question is, do the elected representatives at least carry out the will of the majority?

The answer is No! In reality, the majority, too, has little say in the business of governance – they’ve merely elected politicians who have been awarded carte blanche to do as they please.

Carte blanche because we are no longer a republic in which central authorities have only limited and clearly delineated powers. Certainly, all the people in the commonwealth are compelled to do as the Permanent State and the new, incoming state dictate.

No! Government governs without the consent of the governed, for the most, and with the backing of often-brutal police powers.

One never Trumpkin conservative at the Spectator whined that he couldn’t tell the difference between the Red Hats and Antifa, decrying that, “They [the Red Hats] were desecrating something they pretend to love.”

The non-statist libertarian has no problem telling the difference.

To us, those “citadels of democracy” mean very little that is good. Loss of life we lament—but the song-and-dance about the January 6 trampling of the Capitol Building we consider overheated.

Our country is not to be equated with our Capitol.

Ilana Mercer has been writing a weekly, paleolibertarian column since 1999. She’s the author of Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa (2011) & The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed” (June, 2016). She’s currently on Parler, Gab, YouTube & LinkedIn, but has been banned by Facebook and throttled by Twitter.

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