Today features another guest post by “River” and it really should have been the first one up. So, when you finish reading it, go read The Happy Warrior Lives in All of Us. Sorry about that River…
Whether you believe the American Republic died on January 6th or January 20th (and I believe a case can be made for the death date being when the Roberts court failed to strike down Obamacare as unconstitutional), the Republic as we knew it is gone.
All that remains is to see what we—you and I—are going to do about it.
We believe in American Exceptionalism. But we also believed it couldn’t happen here. Yet all around us we see our countryman content with grotesque erosions of our freedoms. So we see that yes, indeed, it can happen here. (I refer you to Dennis Prager’s excellent essay “The Good German.”)
But American Exceptionalism isn’t some magic force that’s going to save us. American Exceptionalism is how we respond to tyranny.
Trump proved he was not the despot he was made out to be. Oh, not because he couldn’t have been—because it was clear, he could have been a Caesar, returning the country to a republican form of government by decree. But for better or worse, he declined to be that guy. Did not want to be remembered as that person. Instead, he insisted that we citizens use the forms of government and law laid down by the Founding Fathers to restore the Republic. We failed.
So Donald Trump will be remembered as the last lawfully elected President of the Republic, Joe Biden its first Socialist “Beloved Leader,” propped up by all the force of a corrupt bureaucracy, and with the collusion of Big Tech and other large “private” industries that need the protection of a government enforced monopoly to exist.
So we failed to overthrow a blatantly stolen presidential (and then senatorial) election. That’s on us. It’s going to be that much harder now to succeed. They think they’ve run the table, that there’s not stopping their every country-destroying move. But the one good piece of news is that we now can see, without a doubt, exactly where the enemy of the Republic lies, how deep the corruption is. Not just a few crazy representatives and Senators, but the FBI, local district attorneys, secretaries of state, election boards, the Supreme Court, the rulers of Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, CNN, and beyond. All those calling for purges, for jail time for the exercise of free speech and assembly.
It’s a big task. And the cockroaches are all over the kitchen. (Not an anti-Semitic metaphor—just and anti-Socialist one!)
How do we clean house?
Well, we won’t do it with despair in our hearts. We know—and Trump’s 4 years proved—that if you return to first principles, you win. You can place America’s interests first, have a strong defense, peace from your enemies, a thriving economy, and freedom for your citizens. So we must go forward knowing that the only reason the other side was driven to cheating is because they’d lost the war of ideas. Oh, they won the war of rhetoric, big time. But they didn’t win the war of reality. And reality counts.
We must go forward knowing that if we hold true to the Christian principles this country was founded on—and I say this as a nonbeliever—we will win over those who only have hatred to carry them through. Hatred of human life, hatred of Trump, fear of freedom, fear of making their own choices. We must love our neighbor, even as he is willing to betray us and our cause. Not an easy task. But as my brother reminds me—we hate the sin, not the sinner. We have to help them to the light.
And each one of us will have a part in this. Some of us will be writing under our own names. Others using pseudonyms. We will take our business away from those who would hurt us, and create new networks of those who adhere to the principles of freedom of conscience. We will do without—sometimes, and that’s okay.
And we must reform the only political party we can influence. About which more, next time.