Past The Rubicon
In early January of 49 BC, Julius Caesar and his army crossed the Rubicon, trigging a Roman civil war that eventually led to Caesar’s dictatorship. In early June of 2013, thousands of abortion rights protestors stormed the Texas State Capitol, successfully shutting down a Republican attempt to pass pro-life legislation. The press treated that insurrection as heroic.
In 2018, progressive protestors, inspired by Texas, stormed the Wisconsin Capitol to stop the legislature from passing right to work legislation. They forced their way in, vandalized the building, were declared heroes by Nancy Pelosi, but failed.
In 2021, Trump supporters stormed the United States Capitol and were unsuccessful in their insurrection. Unlike the Texas and Wisconsin progressives, the Trump supporters in Washington are, to this day, vilified as insurrectionists and many have been carted off to federal prison — deservedly so.
More bluntly and clearly — January 6, 2021, would never have happened had Texas, Wisconsin, the BLM riots, etc. not happened. Trump does not exist in a vacuum. He exists as the manifestation of Republicans’ anxieties over the press and Democrats constantly and forever giving a pass to their own extremists, fringe, rioters, and insurrectionists. For many, Donald Trump is the bad man who protects them from the even worse they-thems and their allies.
The problem, of course, is the double standard. When Democrats storm the U.S. Capitol to block a vote on Brett Kavanaugh, they are excused. When they storm congressional buildings to protest for Hamas, they are excused. But get Trump supporters inside the U.S. Capitol and everyone demands denunciations. It should all be denounced. It should all be condemned. But the press and Democrats together rarely condemn the leftwing insurrections.
Remember, after a man killed Asian women in a spa in Atlanta in a demented and depraved act of trying to overcome his sexual addiction, Democrats lectured us on anti-Asian violence. When the data showed most anti-Asian violence in America is done by black men, progressives changed the subject while one University of Colorado professor tried to explain that the black men were just lashing out at others over their own oppression from systemic racism.
We see this, similarly, playing out with Israel. Chant “genocide for the trans community” on any college campus or “George Floyd got what he deserved” and Ivy League universities will take swift action against the deplorable conduct. But Ivy League college presidents testified before Congress the other day that calling for genocide of the Jewish people needs to be put into context.
Harvard forced an evolutionary biologist among its faculty to take a leave of absence after declaring on television that there are only two sexes, male and female. In a press conference at the United States Capitol, Harvard, MIT, and University of Pennsylvania students told the world about anti-Semitic students storming dormitories, hunting Jews, calling for their deaths, and at least one university official insisting it is true that Israelis harvest the organs of Palestinians. Again, though, the Ivy League wants context for the anti-Semites and expulsions for the believers of biology.
On CNN the day after the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn tried to contextualize calls for genocide of Jews, the network featured stories on Donald Trump and a would be dictatorship nonstop through the day. There were vastly more stories worrying about Trump than about the Ivy League presidents and antisemitism on American college campuses. Having not really paid attention to day time news in some time, I was shocked at the wall-to-wall obsessive coverage of Trump and what he may or may not do.
Concurrently, the liberal publication The Atlantic is imaging the horrors of a second Trump term. It would, progressives believe, become a dictatorship. I fully believe Donald Trump could very well get re-elected and decide he will not leave. But I also fully believe the American system of government is far stronger than the writers of the Atlantic or talking heads on CNN think. Trump may not want to leave, but the Congress, the Supreme Court, the military, the several states, and the Secret Service would toss him out on January 20, 2029.
What the talking heads at CNN and MSNBC and the writers at The Atlantic, the New York Times, and the terrorist supporting Washington Post are not willing to openly say is that they do not trust people and do not trust the system unless their ilk run the system. They have no faith in the American constitution, just the liberal elite. It explains why they discredit the Senate when they do not control it and now why they discredit the Supreme Court. They hate that which deprives their side of power and they are fine with their side’s raw grasp of power.
Remember, Democrats and the press tell us gerrymandering is bad, but not this kind of gerrymandering. George Santos could be tossed. Bob Menendez who?
While I fully believe the system is strong enough to resist the ambitions of any man and his supporters, it is notable how many on the left and in the press doubt it. But after years of giving passes to the insurrectionists and genocide chanters of the left, I understand the left and much of the press know how many shocks to the system their side has given and they worry their own insurrections, riots, and resistance have led us too far past the American Rubicon. Many, I suspect, would be okay with the collapse of the system for an authoritarian figure, just not one with an “R” next to the dictator’s name. Hell, they were all fine with Obama suing nuns to pay for abortions and they’ve all been fine with Biden dragging pro-lifers out of their homes at gun point while not enforcing laws against protesting at Supreme Court Justices’ homes.
I’ll share with you my private thoughts. 2020 was not stolen. But if Trump remains ahead of Biden heading into the November 2024 election, I have little doubt the Democrats will do whatever it takes to stop Trump from winning, and I have little doubt Trump supporters, convinced the other side stole it and will steal it again, will themselves do whatever can be done to make sure Trump wins.
It is a situation that needs to be defused on both sides. But a press corps that hates the people and lacks trust in the people to get it right is not a vehicle by which the case can be made, and the Democrat and Republican bases are so insistent on rubbing everyone’s noses in the old person smell of their frontrunning octogenarians, that I suspect the poop show moves to diarrhea of the system.
We, as a nation, will get the election we deserve and we’ll all be worse for it unless God, by His design and perhaps His own term limit rules, spares us the angry old men.
About Last Night’s Debate
Your candidate won. Congratulations. The candidate you hate the most had a horrible night. Good for you.
DeSantis had his strongest debate. Haley had her weakest. Christie answers the questions best. DeSantis picked Coolidge, which means he won. Nikki Haley debate, though her weakest because of all the attacks, shows she is a real contender and the DeSantis campaign is concerned with her momentum. Megyn Kelly needs a TV show.
Anyone on the right who is willing to give Trump the pass, regardless of what job Biden is doing, is living the same lie the left is if they are willing to vote for Biden. The bottom line that 3 of the 4 candidates on that stage last night were afraid to attack Trump is the same reason many in Congress are afraid to attack Trump. They are attracted to the cult of personality that is Trump and his followers. Trump, as Christie says, is unfit to lead our country ever again. To this day he denies the 2020 election, mostly because he has to, as that is his defense during his couple trials. He is a self absorbed narcissist who cares only for himself. He creates the alternate reality surrounded with his lies, and so many people have bought into it, hook line and sinker. We are a foolish nation to have an opportunity to get beyond these two old has beens, and move forward to a brighter future, instead of one hell bent on retribution, and hoping to stay out of prison by avoiding what he’s been accused of. Those are his focuses, and we are following him down the rabbit hole. God help us if we do not wake up sooner than later, or WE will all get what we are asking for. The 2020 repeat and whatever we get, we deserve it!
Erick is on fire here. This is probably the best take on I've heard from conservative commentators on the recent wave of Donald Trump hysteria. I'd add a few points though. First, it would not be unexpected that if a Democrat had done the things that Trump did on Jan 6th, 2020, that Republicans would be acting in similar way. I think a lot on the Right poo-poo the idea of Trump the authoritarian but forget that, like I was, in the run up before 2020, we thought we thought Trump was contained by cooler heads in his administration and that something like Jan 6th wasn't possible. We were wrong and it is an indictment of the Right that Trump is likely the GOP nominee in 2024. Erick and others who see what's coming have made a persuasive case most of the Right remains attached to a man unfit for office and who will further the decline of America, not make it great again.
Second, the Democrats are every bit of authoritarian as the Maga Right but there's is a, to quote Jonah Goldberg, a friendly fascism. They see what they are doing as liberating the oppressed and ignore that they shred constitutional norms, the shared language we use to figure out the terms of debate, and the failures of progressive policy (that is always great and never causes any problems!). They are hyping the threat of Trump to justify their own authoritarianism which a post-liberal rule run by bureaucrats and Democrat political patronage. That the country is becoming more unequal and the world a more dangerous place matter not. They will double down on the same insane policies that brought us here oblivious to the fact that they breathe life into the Trump phenomena.
This leaves an interesting dilemma for conservatives heading into 2024. I vowed that I would not vote for Trump again after voting for him in 2020 after his actions after the election but on pretty much every issue (as seen in the previous debate between DeSantis and Newsom) conservatives have been vindicated on pretty much every policy issue. The world is on fire with war under Biden's watch and rather than face the fact Democratic policies are failing or that Biden is too old for the office, they inconvenient facts as "misinformation". Do I vote third party and risk the continued rule of the "friendly fascists" or do I renege my promise and vote Trump to stop the bleeding and stick it to the bureaucrats? Either way the choice does not leave me enthusiastic for voting or for the future of America.