If the United States cannot, in Lincoln's words, “bind up the nation’s wounds,” and re-emerge as a strong democracy, the end of Western Civilization is in sight.
Americans should know how perilous their democracy has become. The majority of Donald Trump’s voters already believe the presidential election was rigged, and there is no doubt that suspect voting changes, attributed to the requirements of voting in a pandemic, have created large anomalies in five states that made a great many such votes impossible to authenticate. Untold numbers of ballots arrived at a time and in a manner that incites the inference that they were substantially fraudulent. The numbers of votes involved in Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin are undoubtedly adequately numerous to have influenced the election.
The courts have failed to address the questions raised by this disturbing pattern of votes confined to only five states. Some of the responsibility rests with President Trump’s counsel, who often have demanded remedies out of all proportion to the complaints alleged. They seem only now to be getting around to an attack on the constitutionality of unverifiable voting on a large scale in the four or five suspect states, which stand out like pike-staffs among the others where all went smoothly.
The refusal of the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the appeal from the state of Texas, joined by 18 other states, is an outright abdication. Of course, Texas and its co-petitioners have perfectly adequate standing to demand that all states, in choosing a president, conduct their elections credibly enough to assure the whole country that the Constitution has been followed in filling the nation’s highest offices. For the Supreme Court to take the position, as it did, that it could not hear the election challenge case because Texas and the others did not have the standing to challenge how another state conducts its presidential election is completely spurious in the circumstances. Where the courts don’t exercise their jurisdiction, a vacuum arises which is likely to be filled by lawlessness, and potentially, even violent lawlessness.
The United States has become a country where a majority of Americans—people of good will from both parties—believe presidential elections are not conducted honestly. (Think back to the contested election of 2000.) An overwhelming majority do not trust the media, which, in political matters, is effectively a totalitarian enterprise slandering the Republicans and censoring criticism of the Democrats.
The Supreme Court has declined to opine on the most important question that possibly can be legitimately brought before it, and the criminal courts approve approximately 98 percent of prosecutions, over 95 percent of those without a trial, such is the corruption of the plea bargain system that enables prosecutors to extort false inculpatory testimony with no consequences to itself or the untruthful witnesses who are granted immunity from prosecution for perjury.
Crime rates are skyrocketing across the country, and last summer “peaceful protests” against civil rights abuses tore apart cities across the country, killing approximately 50 people, injuring 700 police, with looters, vandals, and arsonists (not protesters) committing billions of dollars of property damage. The Democrats made no reference to this at their convention; almost all of these riots took place in Democratic-governed states and cities, and the elected leaders of those cities largely identified with the rioters and responded by reducing police funding. Again, the clear trend is to lawlessness.
The treatment of the controversy surrounding the financial relations of presumptive President-elect Joe Biden and his family with Russia, China, and Ukraine in particular, raises further disquieting questions. The severity with which practically all of the media and social media denounced and ignored suggestions of potential misconduct by former Vice President Biden and his family, including suspending the Twitter account of the New York Post, the country’s oldest newspaper, and of the White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, is indicative of the undemocratic tendencies of the media and it helps to explain why professionally conducted surveys uniformly show that fewer than 15 percent of Americans trust the media. A free press is an indispensable pillar of a functioning democracy, but is now in the United States a despised, corrupted, and shriveled facsimile of the reliable and fearless media a vibrant democracy requires.
There is certainly room to question the conduct of Attorney General William Barr in unilaterally deciding that no mention should be made of the grand jury criminal investigation that has been conducted into these matters for over two years, enabling the media barely six weeks ago to suppress the story in a manner replicative of dictatorial regimes. There is no doubt that the existence of that investigation was a material fact in determining how people voted, and if Barr had emphasized the presumption of innocence, it would have been appropriate to reveal it to allow voters to...
