If the Republican Party fails to use every possible stratagem to retain the Presidency in 2020, it will have signed its death certificate.  The majority of the 73 million people whose votes for Trump were properly counted may well turn away from the Republican Party in disgust. Why bother to vote if the Republican Party is too feckless and incompetent to mount a successful challenge to a stolen election? However, this act of suicide comes at a cost.

When they’re accused of fecklessness, establishment Republicans, in their defense, will point to gains in the House and, if we’re lucky, to their holding the Senate gain. However, much of this gain isn’t due to the Republican brand but, instead, to Trump’s coattails.

At the “Republican brand” level, we have the self-styled “Lincoln Project” Republicans who aggressively tried to intimidate Trump’s lawyers before they got shamed and deleted their tweet.

If the Republican Party wants to survive, it must impose discipline by pushing these aggressive Never-Trumpers out of the Party. Instead, the Republican Party lets it slide.

Republicans should not only back Trump fully but should be at his side demanding that the Department of Justice’s Elections unit become an independent, continuous-audit body like the IRS. Instead, the opposite has happened. A few days ago, the head of the unit resigned when it became clear that his unit was next to useless – and when it turned out that he’d written the rules so that he got to make all the calls about investigating claimed fraud. (Funnily enough, his answer was always no.) And again, the Republican Party was silent.

The quisling Republican Party is also reluctant even to discuss the “nuclear option” in the Constitution. This option would see state legislatures have the final word about appointing electors provided that the legislators believe the election in their state was hopelessly corrupt.

But that’s not what happens. Instead, the Democrats unhesitatingly to lie, cheat, and steal; falsify national elections; falsify impeachment; and succeed in advancing their one-party-standing tactics (open borders, no elections security, no audits, etc.) with only token Republican resistance.

Again, why do the Republicans even refuse to discuss the constitutional “nuclear option” in the face of Democratic illegality in service of reaching a one-party country (as has long been the case in California)?

In addition to the nuclear options, national and state Republicans have other courses of action. They could easily identify their party as the one committed to “saving democracy” by pushing to:

• disallow unaudited mail-in ballots, or
• disallow mail-in ballots received after polls close, or
• disallow all mail-in ballots because most other democracies ban mail-in ballots, or
• assert an accurate tally shows Trump won, allowing the legislature to mandate Trump electors directly.

Further, a Republican Senate could refuse to accept certification.

Finally, if swing-state Republican legislatures simply declare their elections unreliable and, therefore, null, the final say in the election would come from the new representatives in the House. They would choose Trump.

Too many Republicans are part of the Deep State’s monoparty. They make conservative noises when they talk but, just like Chief Justice John Roberts, when anything comes along that challenges the Deep State, they are entirely progressive in their actions.

As much as Trump supporters would like to say “good riddance” to the Republican Party, doing so comes at a cost. After all, the Republican Party has a robust and deep infrastructure that cannot easily be replicated. The same is true for the Democrat Party. That’s why Bernie and his socialists have worked on eating away at the old-fashioned party from within.

If the Republican Party doesn’t want to void itself, it will do well to embrace the positions advanced by those 73 million known Trump voters (and there are almost certainly millions more). Otherwise, why should Republican voters bother even to leave their homes to vote the next time around?

Henry Edwards is a pseudonym for an engineer with a background in international technical management.

Image: Republican suicide by Andrea Widburg, using public domain clipart.

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Jean Piaget had some very interesting ideas. He wasn’t a developmental psychologist, he didn’t even regard himself as a psychologist. He wanted to reconcile science and religion. That’s what he was doing throughout his entire life, because it drove him crazy when he was an adolescent. And he didn’t think that he would be able to survive unless he could bring those two things together.

He also got very interested in the spontaneous emergence of morality in the play of children. The idea is that when kids come together and unify themselves towards a particular goal (in play) that a morality emerges. And further, each game that children play holds it’s own morality.  So, there’s a morality in game one, there’s a morality in game two, there’s a morality in game three. What’s common across all those moralities is a meta-morality.

The meta-morality emerges from the particular moralities that are embedded in particular cooperative situations.

Dr. Jordan Peterson

I would like add some comments to Dr. Peterson’s remarks based on my own observations of child behavior. Private property rights are inherent in all of us. We’re are all hard-wired for it, and begin asserting these rights as soon as we learn to speak.

What is one of the first words and concepts a small child expresses? It’s not OURS, it’s not YOURS, and it’s not THEIRS. It’s MINE. The child is expressing and asserting his or her private property rights. As the child gets older, hopefully he will learn that private property rights apply to everyone, and will later grasp words and concepts like ours, yours, and theirs.

The Artful Dilettante, Keeper of the Flame of The Enlightenment

Practically from the start of his administration, President Trump was suspected of serving as an agent of the Russian government. The U.S. national-security branch of the federal government — specifically the Pentagon, the CIA, and the FBI — were convinced that Trump had been compromised.

An enormous investigation was launched into Trump’s relationship with the Russians. For the first two years of his term in office, the liberal establishment, the mainstream press, and the deep state had no doubts that Special Counsel Robert Mueller would end up finding a mountain of irrefutable evidence showing the Trump had become an agent of the Russian government.

At that point, the plan was to impeach Trump for “high crimes and misdemeanors,” convict him, and remove him from office.

When Mueller’s efforts failed to find that Trump had become a Russian agent, there were only two viable ways to remove him from office. One way was through impeachment on some other charge. The other way was by defeating him in the next election. The impeachment effort, which involved Ukraine, failed. The 2020 election succeeded in ousting Trump from the presidency.

In the summer of 1963, the U.S. national-security establishment was facing a similar problem but actually one that was much graver. The problem wasn’t that President Kennedy had become an agent of the Soviet Union but rather that his policies, the Pentagon and the CIA believed, were leading to a communist takeover of the United States.

This was the height of the Cold War. Since World War II, most every American had been indoctrinated with the notion that there was an international communist conspiracy to take over the world, a conspiracy that was based in Moscow, Russia. In fact, that was the reason for the conversion of the federal government from a limited-government republic, which had been America’s governmental system for some 150 years, to a national-security state, one that wielded omnipotent powers, such as assassination of political leaders.

Kennedy came into the presidency as pretty much a standard cold warrior. What set him apart was his belief that Third World independence movements concerned the quest to become independent of colonial powers. The position of the Pentagon and the CIA was that such movements were communistic.

For example, the U.S. national-security establishment had no reservations about conspiring to kill Congo leader Patrice Lumumba because of his “obvious” communist proclivities in seeking independence for Congo from Belgium rule, which made him suspect in the eyes of the national-security establishment. Kennedy was shocked and dismayed over Lumumba’s assassination.

Even though Kennedy was pretty much a standard cold warrior when he entered office, he almost immediately he got into a war with the Pentagon and the CIA, a war that grew in intensity throughout his administration and lasted until Kennedy was killed in November 1963.

Soon after he was elected, the CIA presented him with a plan for CIA-trained Cuban exiles to invade Cuba, which was viewed as a communist dagger pointed at America’s neck. The CIA told Kennedy that U.S. air support would not be needed. It was lie. The CIA figured that once the invasion started to falter, Kennedy would have no choice but to provide the support in order to save face.

They didn’t know John Kennedy. When the invasion faltered and the CIA requested the air support, Kennedy said no and let the invasion go down to defeat.

Kennedy knew that he had been set up. Although he took public responsibility for the debacle, he fired the revered director of the CIA, Allen Dulles, as well as two other high CIA officials, Richard Bissell Jr. and Charles Cabell. He supposedly vowed to splinter the CIA “into a thousand pieces and scatter them to the winds.”

For their part, CIA officials considered Kennedy to a traitor to the cause of freedom and a coward in the face of communism.

Soon after that, the Pentagon began urging Kennedy to invade Cuba. Their Operation Northwoods proposal, which didn’t come to light until the 1990s, involved deadly terrorist attacks on American soil and plane hijackings that would be falsely blamed on Cuban agents, thereby providing a pretext for invading the island. Kennedy rejected the proposal, much to the anger and dismay of the Pentagon.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Pentagon was urging Kennedy to bomb Cuba to smithereens. Kennedy refused to do so, instead deciding to strike a deal with the Soviets that entailed the removal of Soviet troops and a promise by Kennedy not to invade Cuba.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff were livid. One called it the greatest defeat in U.S. history. After all, the deal left Cuba in communist hands, which meant that the U.S. was now facing permanently a grave threat to national security from only 90 miles away.

After the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy experienced a breakthrough. He came to the realization that the Cold War was just a great big racket. In his famous Peace Speech in June 1963, he declared an end to the Cold War, without even advising the Pentagon or the CIA in advance of his speech. Kennedy began negotiating with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, who had experienced the same breakthrough.

Kennedy was threatening the entire military-industrial complex. Imagine: No Vietnam War. No arms race. No enormous military profits. No ever-increasing military and intelligence budgets. No state-sponsored assassinations. Indeed, no need for a national-security state.

Compounding the problem was Kennedy’s support of the civil-rights movement, which was considered by the FBI and the national-security establishment to be a communist front. That’s why the FBI was spying on Martin Luther King and blackmailing him into committing suicide. They were convinced that King had become a Russian agent.

What could the national-security establishment do? Here was, in their eyes, a naive, cowardly, treasonous, incompetent playboy of a president whose policies were, in their eyes, certain to cause the downfall of America and a communist takeover.

They couldn’t go the impeachment route because Kennedy had not committed an impeachable offense. They couldn’t wait until the next election because it was a virtual certainty that Kennedy would defeat Barry Goldwater, who was believed would be the Republican presidential nominee.

In the eyes of those charged with protecting “national security,” that left but one option to save the United States and the American people — regime change, the same option that the military and the CIA had used in Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, and Congo in 1961 and would use again in Chile in 1973, all to protect “national security.” In the eyes, the only other alternative would have been to continue letting Kennedy take America down the road to a communist takeover.

---

This post was written by: Jacob G. Hornberger

Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the country as well as on Fox News’ Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows and he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s show Freedom Watch. View these interviews at LewRockwell.com and from Full Context. Send him email.

The US establishment, and the world, has spent the last four years trying to adapt to the disruptive policies of a president who wanted to change the way we do business. Now the Democrats’ “adult” leadership team will return. Watch out, folks.

To those watching the drama unfolding in Washington, DC around the stalled efforts on the part of nominal President-elect Joe Biden in forming a transition team, the parallels are eerily familiar: a bitterly contested election between an establishment political figure and a brash DC “outsider’,” a controversial outcome delaying the implementation of the transition between administrations, and an openly condescending atmosphere where the incoming team postured as comprising a return to “adult” leadership. 

That time was December 2000, when a Republican team led by President-elect George W. Bush stood ready to install a cabinet composed of veteran spies, diplomats, and national security managers who had cut their policy teeth during the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. With Colin Powell as secretary of state, Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense, George Tenet as director of central intelligence, and Condoleezza Rice as national security advisor, the foreign policy and national security team that Dubya surrounded himself with upon assuming the presidency was as experienced a team as one could imagine. 

And yet, within two years of assuming their responsibilities, this team of “adults” had presided over the worst terrorist attack in American history, and the initiation of two wars (in Afghanistan and Iraq) that would forever change both the geopolitical map of the world and America’s role as world leader.

Twenty years later, the roles have reversed, with an experienced team of veteran “ adults” hailing from the eight-year tenure of President Barack Obama preparing to transition the US away from four tumultuous years of the presidency of Donald J. Trump. While Biden has not finalized his foreign policy and national security team, there is a consensus among experienced political observers about who the top contenders might be for the “big four” foreign and national security policy positions in his administration. 

While there is no doubting the experience and professional credentials of these potential nominees, they all have one thing in common: a proclivity for military intervention on the part of the US. For anyone who hoped that a Biden administration might complete the task begun by President Trump of leading America out of the “ forever wars”  initiated by the “adults”  of the administration of George W. Bush, these choices represent a wake-up call that this will not be the likely outcome. 

Moreover, a potential Biden cabinet would more than likely complement the existing predilection on the part of the president-elect for military intervention, pointing to a foreign and national security policy which not only sustains the existing conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere, but increases the likelihood of additional military misadventures. The Biden team will almost certainly seek to shoehorn the president-elect’s aggressive “America is back” philosophy into a geopolitical reality that is not inclined to accept such a role sitting down.

So who’s likely to fill what role?

Secretary of State

The hands-on favorite here is Susan Rice, who served as both national security advisor and US ambassador to the United Nations under Barack Obama. Biden knows her very well, and they have a great working relationship. With a history of promoting US intervention in Syria and Libya, Rice would more than likely support any policy suggestions concerning a re-engagement by the US in Syria in an effort to contain and/or overthrow Bashar al-Assad, and would be reticent to withdraw US forces from either Afghanistan or Iraq. 

She would also most likely seek hardline “confrontational” policies designed to “roll-back” Russian influence in Europe and the Middle East, as well as China’s claims regarding the South China Sea. Rice would seek to strengthen the military aspects of NATO to better position that organization against Russia in Europe, and China in the Pacific.

A Rice nomination could run afoul of a Republican-controlled Senate, where a source close to the current Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, has noted that a “Republican Senate would work with Biden on centrist nominees” but would oppose “radical progressives” or ones who are controversial among conservatives. 

While Rice is not a “radical progressive,” the Republicans continue to condemn her actions while serving as the US ambassador to the UN in response to the 2012 terrorist attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that left four Americans – including the US ambassador to Libya – dead. This controversy prevented her from becoming secretary of state during Obama’s second term, and one can expect a very contentious Senate hearing if she is nominated, with no guarantee that she would pass.

Secretary of Defense

An equally qualified, but far less controversial, woman is the likely nominee for this position. Michele Flournoy, if nominated and confirmed, would become the first female secretary of defense in the history of the US. Given her extensive resume, which includes several previous appointments in senior policy positions in the Department of Defense during both the Clinton and Obama administrations, she would provide an experienced hand in the management of the Pentagon. 

Flournoy once famously told the New York Times that “warfare may come in a lot of different flavors in the future.” In her previous postings in the Pentagon, she took a hardline stance against both Russia and China, encouraged military intervention in Libya and Syria, and sustained military operations in Afghanistan. Her proclivity to seek military solutions to challenging foreign policy issues would reinforce the similar inclinations of Biden. With Flournoy at the helm of the Pentagon, America can expect to experience a full menu of war “flavoring.”

Director of the CIA

While the above two positions represent the ostensible heads of US foreign and defense policy, the reality is that the US has become increasingly reliant upon the covert action capabilities of the Central Intelligence Agency when it comes to influencing diplomatic and military outcomes. While news reports have on occasion lifted the veil of secrecy surrounding covert CIA activities, allowing Americans and the world a small measure of insight into their scope, scale and effectiveness, the reality is that the vast majority of the work of the CIA remains classified, revealed only decades after the fact, if at all. 

As the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and later as vice president, Biden is intimately familiar with these covert activities, and of the potential of the CIA to impact American foreign and national security policy. One of the names being bandied about for the role of director is Michael Morell. He is a retired career CIA officer, having worked his way up the ranks over the course of a 33-year career, finishing in 2013 having twice served as the acting director under President Obama. 

Morell would no doubt manage the agency in a professional manner. He is a CIA man, seeped in the dark arts. Insight into how this experience might manifest itself in a Biden administration was provided through comments Morell made about Syria while appearing on PBS in 2016. “What they need is to have the Russians and Iranians pay a little price,” he said. “When we were in Iraq, the Iranians were giving weapons to the Shia militia, who were killing American soldiers, right? The Iranians were making us pay a price. We need to make the Iranians pay a price in Syria. We need to make the Russians pay a price.” 

By “paying a price,” Morell meant “killing.” Russians and Iranians, he said, should be killed “covertly, so you don’t tell the world about it, you don’t stand up at the Pentagon and say “we did this.” But you make sure they know it in Moscow and Tehran.”

National Security Advisor

If state, defense and the CIA are the three principal tools available to Biden in the conduct of foreign and national security policy, the person responsible for making these three players – along with a host of other departments and agencies – come together as a single team falls to the national security advisor. Here, Biden seems to be leaning toward another experienced hand, Antony Blinken. 

Blinken’s resume includes stints at the State Department and National Security Council during the Obama administration. Like the other potential nominees, Blinken possesses the kind of experience necessary to hit the ground running. As someone who knows and is well known by all the major policy players that could populate a Biden administration, including the president-elect himself, Blinken would be able to coordinate policy formulation and implementation in a seamless fashion.

Therein, however, lies the rub – Blinken would serve as a facilitator of interventionist policy positions that he is inherently inclined to agree with. Like Biden’s other potential nominees, Blinken supported the Obama interventions in Syria and Libya, two events that serve as a litmus test for ascertaining potential interventionist scenarios in the future. 

Whereas a national security advisor should insulate the presidency from the more focused, hardline policy proposals put forward by state and defense, and provide balance when it comes to considering covert action proposals from the CIA, Blinken would function more as a superhighway of interventionist policy options between these entities and a president whose own background can be defined as never having seen an opportunity for US intervention that he didn’t like.

As things stand today, one cannot predict the composition of a Biden cabinet with absolute certainty; it is likely that one or more of the potential candidates listed here will fall by the wayside, their path blocked by the unpredictability of a Senate confirmation at the hands of a hostile Republican Party. 

But the predilection for military intervention and covert action will define any Biden-led cabinet, regardless of exactly who ends up seated there. In the end, the likelihood that this iteration of “adult” leadership ends up getting America embroiled in excessive interventions that further disrupt the global geopolitical balance in the US’s disfavor while costing its people precious blood and treasure is high.

Scott Ritter, Ron Paul Institute

The following are quotes by Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. By the way, if you haven’t yet read these books, I highly recommend them now.

Here’s what Rand wrote in different contexts, over the years, about dictatorship. Ask yourself how close the United States is to becoming one.

“A dictatorship is a country that does not recognize individual rights, whose government holds total, unlimited power over men.”

“There are four characteristics which brand a country unmistakably as a dictatorship: one-party rule—executions without trial or with a mock trial, for political offenses—the nationalization or expropriation of private property—and censorship. A country guilty of these outrages forfeits any moral prerogatives, any claim to national rights or sovereignty, and becomes an outlaw.”

“Volumes can be and have been written about the issue of freedom versus dictatorship, but, in essence, it comes down to a single question: do you consider it moral to treat men as sacrificial animals and to rule them by physical force?”

“It is a grave error to suppose that a dictatorship rules a nation by means of strict, rigid laws which are obeyed and enforced with rigorous, military precision. Such a rule would be evil, but almost bearable; men could endure the harshest edicts, provided these edicts were known, specific and stable; it is not the known that breaks men’s spirits, but the unpredictable. A dictatorship has to be capricious; it has to rule by means of the unexpected, the incomprehensible, the wantonly irrational; it has to deal not in death, but in sudden death; a state of chronic uncertainty is what men are psychologically unable to bear.”

Sounding familiar yet?

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Russian writer, historian, and political prisoner Alexander Solzhenitsyn was one of the most consequential men of the 20th century.  He not only singlehandedly destroyed communism as an idea, but also had many things to say about the West that were greeted then about the way they’d be greeted by the Squad and progressives today.  Yet they are worth revisiting in this turbulent era today. 

Like many of us, Solzhenitsyn had been de facto silenced by the Western media and denounced as a nut for recounting the true history of the Bolshevik Revolution and its bloody aftermath as well as making warnings to the West.

Tom Wolfe, in his book Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine, gave a good taste of the flavor of that time here:

Intellectuals in Europe and America were willing to forgive Solzhe­nitsyn a great deal. After all, he had been born and raised in the Soviet Union as a Marxist, he had fought in combat for his country, he was a great novelist, he had been in the camps for eight years, he had suf­fered. But for his insistence that the isms themselves led to the death camps — for this he was not likely to be forgiven soon. And in fact the campaign of antisepsis began soon after he was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974. (“He suffered too much — he’s crazy.” “He’s a Christian zealot with a Christ complex.” “He’s an agrarian reaction­ary.” “He’s an egotist and a publicity junkie.”)

Solzhenitsyn’s tour of the United States in 1975 was like an enormous funeral procession that no one wanted to see. The White House wanted no part of him. The New York Times sought to bury his two major’ speeches, and only the moral pressure of a lone Times writer, Hilton Kramer, brought them any appreciable coverage at all. The major tele­vision networks declined to run the Solzhenitsyn interview that created such a stir in England earlier this year (it ran on some of the educa­tional channels).

And the literary world in general ignored him completely. In the huge unseen coffin that Solzhenitsyn towed behind him were not only the souls of the zeks who died in the Archipelago. No, the heartless bastard had also chucked in one of the last great visions: the intellec­tual as the Stainless Steel Socialist glistening against the bone heap of capitalism in its final, brutal, fascist phase. There was a bone heap, all right, and it was grisly beyond belief, but socialism had created it.

Ed Driscoll has much more on this here.  Those were the times, weren’t they?

Except they seem to be here again now.

I found two quotes from Solzhenitsyn himself that are worth reflecting on, considering that America is steadily sliding away from its ancient system of self-governance. 

Over half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia. “Men have forgotten God, that’s why all this has happened.” Since then I have spent well-nigh so years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were as possible the main course of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”  

—Alexander Solzhenitsyn

…and…

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

―Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

Solzhenitsyn warned America and the West time and time again that abandoning its religious foundations and embracing secularism would in turn lead to total chaos, followed by a complete loss of freedom.  America and the rest of the West are already in chaos.  What follows is the people’s determination and destiny.  Either way, we get the government we deserve.

Will Stoutamire

President Donald Trump left the glamorous world of celebrity, fame, and fortune in June 2015 on a mission, not for himself, but for the American people.

Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment with a new government controlled by you, the American People. There is nothing the political establishment will not do, and no lie they will not tell, to hold on to their prestige and power at your expense.

He knew the path ahead would be lonely. Before his famous escalator ride at Trump Tower in 2015 to announce his candidacy, he prophetically warned his son Don Jr.

The day of the announcement my father told me something that I would remember, again and again in the coming weeks and months. It would be one of the most accurate observations I would hear since my own immersion into politics. We got on the elevator and he turned to look at me and he said, “Now we find out who our real friends are.”

Trump has few real friends these days within the Washington D.C. ruling class, aside from his inner circle. After as corrupt an election as one can imagine, many of his so-called friends are eager to stick a shiv in his ribs rather than defend him against a coup that makes Spygate looks like child’s play.

Trump led in the crucial swing states on election night to a degree that if it were any other candidate or election, the media would have called it before midnight. Instead, the voting stopped at midnight and votes were either fabricated for Joe Biden or magically switched from the Trump to Biden column, in only the states and in only the amounts to put Biden over the top so the DNC media could declare Biden the winner.

How convenient that just before Trump hit the magic number of 270, Fox News called Arizona for Biden, with other states on cue, stopping their vote counts, allowing the vote rigging to begin, avoiding having to declare Trump the winner. It almost seems like a coordinated plan. Was it?

We are learning more by the day about corrupt voting machines and software, and a scheme, as Trump attorney Sidney Powell describes, “organized and conducted with the help of Silicon Valley people, the big tech companies, the social media and even the media companies.”

It was less than a year ago that Senators Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar and Ron Wyden were concerned about these voting machines, yet today this is all “conspiracy theory.” Was there foreign interference in the election via corrupted voting machines? Were U.S. votes routed through servers in Spain and Germany? Election interference was of great interest to congressional Democrats during Trump’s first term, yet they seem to have no interest in such interference today.

Where are the Republicans? Where are so-called conservatives? Where is the outrage? Where are Trump’s friends? Does he have any these days?

How ironic that George W. Bush was quick to congratulate “president-elect” Joe Biden. Bush barely ‘won” his election in 2000, while his opponent Al Gore fought for 37 days before the U.S. Supreme Court forced his concession. But Bush felt it reasonable to fight dimpled and hanging chads in one single state, yet scoffs at Trump fighting multi-state fraud?

Failed former Republican primary candidate Chris Christie suggests it may soon be time for Trump to “move on.” What a show of support. No wonder his candidacy failed.

Another loser, Mitt Romney, joined the chorus. I would not be a bit surprised if Romney had the 2012 election stolen from him in the same way as is happening to Trump today. Yet like most establishment Republicans, Romney prefers to give a “statesman-like” concession speech rather than soil his wingtips in a street fight to claim what is legitimately his. Interestingly, the Romney family has financial ties to voting machines.

World leaders have been quick to call and congratulate the assumed president-elect, the café-au-lait crowd happy to see the America-first president sent packing in exchange for another sap in the White House willing to pay the credit card bills of their freeloading nations. Trump is learning who is friends are.

There are a few exceptions. Leaders from Russia, Brazil, Mexico, Slovenia, and North Korea have not offered Biden their congratulations, prudently waiting to see how this plays out. Perhaps they know more about a recent U.S. raid on a voting machine server facility in Frankfurt, Germany that might reveal an international conspiracy to switch votes in our recent election. Perhaps, as in the case of Mexico’s leader, they know the smell of a stolen election when they see it.

Most congressional Republicans lost their voices after the election, even those fair-weather friends who happily rode Trump’s coattails to election or re-election. They see nothing suspicious or sinister in Republicans maintaining control of the Senate and gaining ten-plus seats in the House while the leader of their party supposedly lost reelection.

Members of Congress eager to investigate bogus claims of Trump colluding with Russia have no interest in probing electoral irregularity that defies statistics and common sense. How did states where Trump drew 50,000 to his rallies and Biden could not draw 50 to his events, chose the unpopular dullard to lead the country?

Trump has 89 million Twitter followers compared to 19 million for Biden. But more people voted for Biden?

Then there is voter turnout higher than the number of registered voters, and in some areas, a slew of 120 year old voters in some cities.

Where have Trump’s friends been on spygate? This was a fraudulent and illegal attempt to disrupt an election, transition, and presidency and to date there has only been a single plea deal for some mid-level no-name while the ringleaders are writing books and securing lucrative cable news gigs. The GOP establishment wants to “move on” from this scandal as well.

NeverTrumpers, once apparently conservative Republicans, have made themselves irrelevant by becoming liberal Democrats. Fox News, once a “fair and balanced” alternative to the left-wing drumbeat of the remaining big media, is following the NeverTrump path into irrelevancy.

Trump thought he had friends at Fox News, giving frequent interviews and shout-outs, only to have them stick the first election night shiv between his ribs. Who will watch Fox now as they are no different than any of the other far left news outlets?

Trump may appear alone, but 70-plus million Americans supported and voted for him. This group isn’t going away. They watch television, shop, travel, vote, and otherwise control much commerce in America. They will observe who Trump’s friends are and who are not. He may appear lonely, but he has 70 million close friends out there.

No one knows how this show will play out. Will it be a biblical takedown of the deep state or has Trump finally met his match? Although he appears alone, he has the thoughts and prayers of millions of Americans as the wind beneath his wings. As Margaret Thatcher told former President George H.W. Bush, now is not the time for Trump’s friends to go wobbly.

Brian C. Joondeph, M.D., is a Denver-based physician and freelance writer for American Thinker, Rasmussen Reports, and other publications. Follow him on Facebook,  LinkedIn, Twitter, Parler, and QuodVerum.

“Learn to distinguish the difference between errors of knowledge and breaches of morality. An error of knowledge is not a moral flaw, provided you are willing to correct it; only a mystic would judge human beings by the standard of an impossible, automatic omniscience. But a breach of morality is the conscious choice of an action you know to be evil, or a willful evasion of knowledge, a suspension of sight and of thought. That which you do not know, is not a moral charge against you; but that which you refuse to know, is an account of infamy growing in your soul. Make every allowance for errors of knowledge; do not forgive or accept any break of morality.”

― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“I have never understood why it is “greed” to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.”

― Thomas Sowell, Barbarians inside the Gates and Other Controversial Essays

While it might not be popular to say in the wake of the recent social disorder, the true plight of black people has little or nothing to do with the police or what has been called “systemic racism.” Instead, we need to look at the responsibilities of those running our big cities.

Some of the most dangerous big cities are: St. Louis, Detroit, Baltimore, Oakland, Chicago, Memphis, Atlanta, Birmingham, Newark, Buffalo and Philadelphia. The most common characteristic of these cities is that for decades, all of them have been run by liberal Democrats. Some cities — such as Detroit, Buffalo, Newark and Philadelphia — haven’t elected a Republican mayor for more than a half-century. On top of this, in many of these cities, blacks are mayors, often they dominate city councils, and they are chiefs of police and superintendents of schools.

In 1965, there were no blacks in the U.S. Senate, nor were there any black governors. And only six members of the House of Representatives were black. As of 2019, there is far greater representation in some areas — 52 House members are black. Nine black Americans have served in the Senate, including Edward W. Brooke of Massachusetts, Carol Moseley Braun and Barack Obama of Illinois, Tim Scott of South Carolina, Cory Booker of New Jersey, and Kamala Harris of California. In recent times, there have been three black state governors. The bottom line is that today’s black Americans have significant political power at all levels of government. Yet, what has that meant for a large segment of the black population?

Democratic-controlled cities have the poorest-quality public education despite their large, and growing, school budgets. Consider Baltimore. In 2016, in 13 of Baltimore’s 39 high schools, not a single student scored proficient on the state’s math exam. In six other high schools, only 1% tested proficient in math. Only 15% of Baltimore students passed the state’s English test. That same year in Philadelphia only 19% of eighth-graders scored proficient in math, and 16% were proficient in reading. In Detroit, only 4% of its eighth-graders scored proficient in math, and 7% were proficient in reading. It’s the same story of academic disaster in other cities run by Democrats.

Violent crime and poor education is not the only problem for Democratic-controlled cities. Because of high crime, poor schools and a less pleasant environment, cities are losing their economic base and their most productive people in droves. When World War II ended, the population of Washington, D.C., was about 800,000; today, it’s about 700,000. In 1950, Baltimore’s population was almost 950,000; today, it’s around 590,000. Detroit’s 1950 population was close to 1.85 million; today, it’s down to 673,000. The population of Camden, N.J., in 1950 was nearly 125,000; today it has fallen to 74,000. St. Louis’ 1950 population was more than 856,000; today, it’s less than 294,000. A similar story of population decline can be found in most of our formerly large and prosperous cities. In some cities, the population decline since 1950 is well over 50%, and that includes Detroit, St. Louis, Cleveland and Pittsburgh.

Academic liberals, civil rights advocates and others blamed the exodus on racism — “white flight” to the suburbs to avoid blacks. But blacks have been fleeing some cities at higher rates than whites. The five cities whose suburbs have the fastest-growing black populations are Miami, Dallas, Washington, Houston and Atlanta. It turns out that blacks, like whites, want better and safer schools for their kids and don’t like to be mugged or have their property vandalized. And like white people, if they have the means, black people cannot wait to leave troubled cities.

White liberals and black politicians focus most of their attention on what the police do, but how relevant is that to the overall tragedy? According to Statista, this year, 172 whites and 88 blacks have died at the hands of police. To put police shootings in a bit of perspective, in Chicago alone in 2020 there have been 1,260 shootings and 256 homicides with blacks being the primary victims. That comes to one shooting victim every three hours and one homicide victim every 15 hours. Three people in Chicago have been killed by police. If one is truly concerned about black deaths, shootings by police should figure way down on one’s list — which is not to excuse bad behavior by some police officers.

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University and a columnist for Creators Content Agency.