What Is to Be Done? See the Adversary Clearly

Fifth in a series

Mail-in ballots at the Salt Lake County election office in Salt Lake City on Oct. 29, 2020. George Frey/AFP via Getty Images

Commentary

With Donald Trump’s reappearance on the political scene a few days ago at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, the former president has once again emerged as the activists’ choice for the 2024 nomination—if the election were held today. Trump won the votes of 70 percent of the attendees, followed by Florida governor Ron DeSantis at 21 percent; the others, including Ted Cruz, Nikki Haley, and Mike Pompeo, each collected less than one percent of the straw vote.

The presidential election, however, isn’t going to be held today or any other day except (nominally) Nov. 5, 2024. At least the Republicans had better hope that’s the case. Because in our ongoing discussion of What Is to Be Done, a crucial element of my prescriptions is regaining control of our electoral system—something, to its credit, the Republican Party actually seems to be trying to do following the bitter lesson of 2020.

As I’ve written many times in these pages, we no longer have an Election Day, but rather a rolling plebiscite that includes not only bogus “absentee” ballots for those in the country but too lazy or too stupid to get to the polls on the day designated by the U.S. Code, but now also “curated” ballots for those too dumb to correctly mark their choices; “harvested” ballots, those delivered by activists purporting to be from lawful voters; “early” ballots, in other words, illegal ballots; and even “late” ballots, in other words, double-plus illegal ballots.

As a result, the 2020 election was the first in American history in which the vote on Election Day itself was secondary. With the calm confidence of “a Christian holding four aces”—Mark Twain’s famous phrase—the Democrats knew going into the count on the night of Nov. 4 that the game was already rigged, and that they had enough “votes” in the bank they could trot out at 4 a.m. that it didn’t matter how far ahead Trump was as the polls closed.

This is a standard Democrat trick, having been tested successfully over the past few cycles in places like Washington state, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut, where boxes of ballots suddenly fall off trucks, get found in the trunks of cars, or otherwise materialize, even as Democrat judges abruptly but predictably decide to order the polls in certain friendly precincts to stay open a few hours after they were supposed to have closed, the better to overcome however large a lead the Republicans might have.

The genius of it is that somehow Republicans never seem to catch on. By law, judges have no—none, zero—constitutional role to play in how each individual state conducts its elections. But the pernicious doctrine of “disparate impact” gives them a fig leaf to claim they’re merely acting to protect minorities from the structural racism of our democracy, which apparently includes calendars and clocks. But so thoroughly has the judiciary seized both the legislative and executive functions over the past half-century that nobody puts up much of a fuss.

Futile Last Stand

Operation Barn Door began on the morning of Nov. 5, 2020, when the Trump “campaign” suddenly realized it should have been paying attention—over the previous two years!—to what the Democrats were up to via the George Soros-funded secretaries of state project. It involved an entirely futile and doomed last stand to somehow overturn the certified (a better word would be “rubber-stamped,” which is all the legislatures and the Congress actually do) results according to the timetables laid down by law. At that point, there simply wasn’t enough time for the Trump team to do what it should’ve been doing from the 2018 congressional elections onward.

This doesn’t speak to whether the election was “stolen.” Democrats have cheated since the first Democratic vice-president, Aaron Burr, killed one of the Founding Fathers while he was the sitting vice president, and later attempted to sell out his country. (Naturally, he got away with both crimes.) As I often say, they’re a criminal organization masquerading as a political party. But by the afternoon of Jan. 20, Trump was an ex-president, and there’s nothing anyone can, or could have done, to change that.

The sore-loser Texas Democrats who have recently fled the state rather than lose a vote on election reform in the Lone Star State will eventually admit defeat, as they’ve done throughout their history—most notably in Wisconsin in 2011. But it should be clear by now to everyone that they’re no respecter of traditions or persons or laws or ethics or anything other than the aggrandizement of political power by any means necessary.

Take Them as They Are

The key now isn’t to fight the sure-loser battle over the 2020 election, but to apply the lessons of that loss, however finagled, to 2022 and beyond. Smart generals fight the next war, not the last one.

Thus, the first thing that needs to happen is a clear-eyed understanding of the nature of the enemy—for such they are—and an abandonment of the quaint notion that modern Democrats are “friends across the aisle.” Indeed, some years back, I wrote a small pamphlet on the subject, called The People v. the Democratic Party, laying out the Democrats’ sordid, disgraceful history, which has continued, practically uninterrupted, since 1804.

In addition to Hamilton, their other notable victims include Abraham Lincoln, James A. Garfield, William McKinley, and John F. Kennedy, killed respectively by a Southern Democrat, a lunatic sex addict and cult follower, a Polish-American anarchist, and a New Orleans-born Castro supporter, Soviet defector, and self-proclaimed Marxist.

Their record as the party of slavery, segregation, secularism, and sedition has continued apace and shows no sign of letting up. Expect their current attacks on the Founding, the Constitution, and the soul of the nation to worsen as they apply the battering ram of critical theory to every American institution.

So what is to be done? The first rule of warfare is never to underestimate your enemy, nor to judge his likely actions by what you would do in his situation. Contrary to the neo-Marxist propaganda bleat that everybody is pretty much the same all over the world, there are peoples and cultures antithetical to our core values, many of them now living in these United States.

Having concealed their true, hostile beliefs while they were weak, they’re now very clear about their malign objectives. Take them as they really are, not as you wish to see them. Take them at their word.

Trump had a partial sense of his opponents, but failed to follow through. There were too many of them within his own administration actively working to frustrate it, and, until the very end, the advice he got on personnel was poor. Nor did he ever quite credit the antipathy he faced until it was too late. As one of his advisers said to me early in the administration: “The president thinks he can get everybody to like him.”

Has he learned from the experience? Or is Trumpism without Trump a better path? We’ll consider our options next week.

This is the fifth article in a series. The previous articles may be read here, here, here, and here.

Michael Walsh is the editor of The-Pipeline.org and the author of “The Devil’s Pleasure Palace” and “The Fiery Angel,” both published by Encounter Books. His latest book, “Last Stands,” a cultural study of military history from the Greeks to the Korean War, was recently published.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.