On Becoming a Subject

It's now settled: Joseph Robinette Biden is the duly-elected President-Elect, and as of a few days from now, will assume his rightful office as President of the United States.

And yes, he was indeed duly elected: the electors appointed by the several states met, cast their ballots for him, and the votes were properly counted by Congress.  That is how the Constitution says we get a President, and that's what was done.

Now, we can argue forever about the actual election: we've seen overwhelming evidence that it was corrupt and fraudulent from top to bottom, with both branches of the Uniparty working from the same script to dispense with a President they despise and ignore the views of citizens they loathe.

But as our Supreme Court realized, the Constitution says nothing about that: if there were truly a problem with the voting process in a given state, that state's legislature has the full power and opportunity to do something about it.  None of them did - not even those wholly controlled by Republicans.  This includes both Pennsylvania and Georgia which between them had enough electoral votes to swing the election to President Trump.

The correct way to handle the fraud and corruption would have been for the Republican-controlled legislatures involved to, on their own Constitutional authority, pass a joint resolution condemning the fraudulently-certified result, and declaring their own set of electors for the candidate they think rightfully won.  That would have given VP Pence something to work with.

But they chose not to, which meant that Mr. Pence couldn't really do anything about the fraud.  Perhaps they did not believe there was fraud.  Perhaps they were blackmailed by fears of Antifa and media-fed riots.  Perhaps they, like so many, would rather be junior members of the Uniparty than stand on their own beliefs representing their constituents.  We'll never know; what's done is done.

We are now presented with an unprecedented problem. It's clear that, as a whole, the Republican party leadership and the majority of its elected officials has no interest whatsoever in representing the constituents that vote for them.

It's also clear to us, if not yet to those same Republicans, that the Democrats fully intend to use their ill-gotten powers to alter the structure of American governance in such a way as to ensure that nobody who disagrees with them will ever again hold power at any level of government or in any private business.  We can count on a half-dozen new senators from utterly corrupt Democrat fiefdoms; instant citizenship for countless millions of Democrat-voting illegals from socialist countries; and, in all likelihood, a packed Supreme Court that will turn what's left of the Constitution into confetti.

They know they can get away with this, because they have gotten away with stealing the Presidency which is far more visible.  Our Constitution has been all but meaningless for the last year, trampled on by imperial governors by virtue of a "temporary emergency" that, as all such temporary emergencies do, lasts forever.

Have there been protests?  A few, quickly squashed, but the vast majority of "normals" grumblingly submitted.  As the days wore on and governors and bureaucrats realized that, no, there really wasn't any limit to what they could get away with, they gleefully carried on.  As George Orwell might put it, we must now endure the prospect of a diaper being forcibly slapped across every human face - forever.

The Death of Citizenship

We've long talked about how the concept of American citizenship is decaying; it has now reached a nadir of complete meaninglessness.  Citizen, green-card holder, tourist-visa holder, illegal immigrant, it doesn't matter - you can live, drive, vote, hold office, wave whatever flag you please so long as it doesn't have TRUMP on it, and nobody is allowed to say you nay.

Indeed, as historian Victor Davis Hanson has been pointing out for years, in many ways illegal immigrants have more rights than U.S. citizens do. Compare how Mr. and Mrs. McCloskey, upstanding lawyers of St. Louis, were hauled into court and prosecuted for defending their personal residence with firearms against a rampaging mob; versus five-times-deportee Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, who shot and killed an innocent American lady on a San Francisco pier with a stolen gun, but was acquitted and released.

Even more, we see the full force of the law engaged against a throng of Trump supporters who appear to have broken a few windows at the U.S. Capitol and not too much more - aside from the abhorrent murder of a policeman, the exact blame being subject to a good deal of debate, and for whom we devoutly desire swift and sure justice.  In contrast, when rampaging BLM mobs burned down entire city blocks in dozens of jurisdictions nationwide, the campaign of our putative President and Vice-President raised funds to bail them out of jail.

At one time, a U.S. passport could take you anywhere around the world.  Today, it takes you almost nowhere; you have more effective freedom of movement as an "undocumented" person, so long as you don't mind a quick swim if even that.

The flowery language of a passport was once quite literal, though today it's a mere printed formality: "The Secretary of State of the United States of America hereby requests all whom it may concern to permit the citizen/national of the United States named herein to pass without delay or hindrance and in case of need to give all lawful aid and protection."  British passports similarly cite Her Majesty the Queen - and, once upon a time, were signed by a royal minister in the name of the Monarch.

If you had such a document, it meant you were Somebody; more to the point, it meant that somebody very powerful indeed cared about you, and foreigners messed with you at their peril.  The Brits in particular took this seriously: in 1847, Lord Palmerston sent a naval squadron to blockade Greece after local police had allowed rioters to burn down the house of Don Pacifico, a holder of a British passport who had never even been to the British isles.

Today, U.S. citizens are imprisoned for years on end and nobody much does anything. Yes, so are some illegal immigrants - but they enjoy an entire political party dedicated to letting them out.

Kissing the... Ring

So, how does one behave as a subject whose rulers seem not to care one whit about your life, liberty, or property?  Queen Victoria's subjects never believed themselves to be anything more than what they were, and yet Lord Palmerston forcefully demonstrated that their Government cared about them very much indeed.  As citizens, we are supposed to be the masters of our governmental authorities; instead, 2020 has revealed us to be less than serfs.

Fortunately, history is full of examples of how to get on in this situation, most notably the Robin Hood era beloved of Hollywood.  Simply put, as the legendary Despair.com poster has it: "If you want to get to the top, prepare to kiss a lot of the bottom."

The Sheriff of Nottingham lorded it over the longsuffering residents of his county, but when it came to Prince John, the noble swaggerer suddenly became a cringing toady.  Far be it from the Prince to dispense with such an obsequious lickspittle!  Human nature hasn't changed; our arrogant, entitled, incompetent, self-absorbed lords are no better than the Sheriff or the Prince, but neither are they much worse.  Lips glued to royal backsides can make a world of difference - just look at how well it's done for those at the pinnacle of our so-called media, who need do no work more strenuous than reading aloud Democrat Party press releases, yet live the Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous!

You may shout, "This is un-American!"  Indeed it is, but we no longer live in America in a meaningful way, at least for a time.

America, as we've known it, would not tolerate factual information about a Presidential candidate from being barred from public discussion and debate.  The America of the past would not even have censored false political information, instead trusting in the good sense of the American people to distinguish truth from falsehood.

America, as our Founders designed it, certainly had electoral fraud; that's nothing new.  But we never before have found every court in the land, right on up to the Supremes, refusing even to hear a presentation of mounds of clear evidence of fraud.

America of time past clung to, as someone famous once put it, its religion and its guns.  Today we find governors forcibly closing churches by executive fiat, and, if the political promises of our incoming administration are to be believed, firearms will shortly suffer the same fate.

Robin Hood and his Merry Men didn't have to hide from the Sheriff's drones hovering over Sherwood Forest, nor fear that their movements and conversations were being tracked by a constellation of satellites.  We know both to be the case today.

And yet, despite the Sheriff enjoying far more apparent firepower than Robin, somehow his crew always came off the worse in their encounters.  Is there any reason to suppose that our newly anointed masters are competent tyrants?  They don't appear even to be able to tie their own shoes!

We've long cried out against government incompetence.  It may now be the only thing that saves us all.

Would you rather live in Hitler's cold, organized, efficient, effective, and competent Nazi Germany... or Mussolini's haphazard, disorganized, comic-opera Fascist Italy?  Which one will rule by Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, or Nancy Pelosi most resemble?

As we've now seen, direct challenges will be stopped with brutal force.  Perhaps the weapon of choice now becomes the strategically placed banana peel and the artfully-thrown cream pie?