Ruled by the Shadow Tyrants

For quite some years, American dreams have been haunted by Miss Clavel's nightmare - "Something is not right!"

The problem is laying our finger on what exactly has gone wrong.  The easy answer is that half the country has rejected sanity and reality and are little better than deluded zombies, marching to an evil drummer that noble you has strength enough and wisdom enough to resist... Of course, they think the same thing of you, in reverse.

A slightly better answer is that, for a hundred years, the enemies of liberty and American have, ever so slowly, one step at a time, taken control of all America's major institutions of power, communications, and education, through  Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci's ideas best described as a "Long March through the institutions."  This is how the writers of Scragged tend to view our current situation, as it lines up with observable and recorded reality, but it isn't very useful in telling us what we need to do today - we don't really have a hundred years to march things back.

Instead, as is our wont, we seek wisdom from studying historical analogues to learn from the past and, perhaps, use it to glean suggestions about the future.  Unfortunately, this hasn't been as helpful as might be expected.  Rack our brains as we might, we can't come up with another example of a nation whose leaders, be they elected or inherited, actively hate their subjects and seek to harm, impoverish, or replace them with an entirely different population.

Yes, Hitler hated and wanted to exterminate German Jews, but they were a small minority of his citizens; most Germans were, well, German, enshrined by Nazism as genetically-blessed members of the Master Race.  In contrast, even today most Americans are white, Christian, or male, yet most of our elites spare no effort to end up with subjects that are none of the above.

What's going on in America is much more similar to conquest by an outside force.  Yet even there, the similarities are quite limited: when an invading army defeats your and occupies your country, just about everybody understands that they have, in fact, been invaded and occupied, and everybody on both sides knows who the enemy is.  That's certainly not the case here.

Only in science fiction and conspiracy theories does one find examples of a hidden foreign conquest, such as the notorious "reptilian conspiracy theory" which claims that shape-shifting reptilian aliens control Earth by taking on human form and gaining political power to manipulate human societies. As un-American as we believe all too many of our ruling elites, socialists, antifa, BLM, and other such to be, we refuse to consider them to be literally inhuman.

When Hitler Didn't Cheat (Much)

There are many different ways of "invading" and "occupying."  Consider the Anschluss, where Nazi Germany annexed Austria right before WWII.  Germans and Austrians spoke the same language and had a similar cultural heritage; many of them had shared a country at one time or another as the borders of Europe skittered around throughout the 1800s.  Yes, the Nazis crossed the border with stormtroopers, but they weren't there to fight - they'd been "invited" in by a (forged) telegram from a Nazi sympathizer who hadn't yet assumed the Prime Ministership, but did shortly after the Nazis arrived to help ensure that the putative "will of the people" was properly carried out.

It had been generally thought that most Austrians didn't really want to unify with Germany, but to mild surprise, Hitler was greeted by cheering crowds of ordinary Austrians.  We'll never know how much of this was heartfelt vs. a response to the presence of Nazi tanks, but it certainly wasn't all fake.

Not long afterward, Austria held a referendum to merge with Germany which achieved a majority of votes, but by that time Hitler had imprisoned the leaders and prominent members of opposing parties, as well as of course Jews.  Historians generally consider the voting to have been accurate, in that the ballots were filled out by actual voters and tabulated correctly, but since a) Hitler had already locked up everyone who didn't like him and b) ballots were filled out in the presence of an overseeing official who took careful note of how you voted, it could hardly be said to be free or fair.

As far as we can tell decades later, it's probably true that most Austrians were OK with Anschluss, and propaganda combined with credible threats meant that overt cheating wasn't required once Hitler had removed his opponents from the voting rolls.

More recently, Vladimir Putin did something similar when he occupied the Crimea, which had been part of the Ukraine for decades.  There were strong historical and cultural ties between Crimeans and Russians; Putin also carefully used little violence and showered ostentatious benefits on his new citizens.  He didn't even have to lock up opponents en masse - Crimeans who didn't care to be Russians simply fled across the unguarded border into the rest of Ukraine where they already held citizenship.  By the time he held a referendum, even outside studies indicated that most of the remaining Crimeans really did want to join Russia, though perhaps not the 97% reported by election officials.

Voting Out a Dictator

In the previous two examples, one-sided propaganda and manipulation led to the desired result without having to resort to outright ballot packing.  There are also examples of dictators who've held free and fair elections that they expected to win, but it turned out that they were the only ones who believed their own propaganda.

Chile's Augusto Pinochet is perhaps the best-known example of this startling outcome.  In 1973, he took power in a coup, imprisoning and exiling thousands of political opponents and ruling mostly unchallenged for 15 years.

In 1988, he felt comfortable enough to put his reign to a vote to grant himself another 8 years.  He even allowed the election to be largely free and fair, granting the opposition free electoral advertising on national television.  Apparently, he felt that he'd done a pretty decent job of running Chile, which by comparison with previous governments, he arguably had.

The voters felt otherwise: his "re-election" was defeated by a margin of 10 percentage points.  Shocked, Pinochet called for his generals to implement a self-coup, taking over the capital with military forces; they declined, and he peacefully left office.

It is far from unheard of, to say the least, for powerful people to be too full of themselves to hear the grumbling of the masses.  Our American elites had just such an experience in 2016, when a buffoonish billionaire beat the most qualified person ever to run for the Presidency - or so they supposed.  Somehow, despite all their education, they were incapable of seeing Hillary's earsplitting shrillness or stomach-churning corruption, contrasted with Trump's decades of actual visible accomplishment in the real world combined with a manly self-confidence in forward motion.

Tenuous Grips on the Levers of Power

Our elites seem to have failed to grasp the limits of their power even now.  They thought they had things in the bag for Hillary.  This time, they thought the fix was in for a Joe Biden landslide.  That's why he didn't really have to campaign - so long as he did nothing so spectacularly outrageous that the media couldn't cover for him, he'd be dragged across the finish line by fraud.  Hunter Biden's laptop came close, which is why the Tech Lords engineered an unprecedented news blackout to stop news of Hunter's sexual and financial escapades from spreading.

They're certainly doing a far more competent job of across-the-board cheating and manipulation this time around... perhaps too competent, given the odd coordination of multiple Democrat-run cities in battleground states abruptly stopping counting votes in the middle of the night, giving Republican counties a chance to complete their counts and turn in their numbers first.  This is precisely what was reportedly done in 1960 by Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, delivering the election to JFK.

That was just one state though, and a notoriously corrupt city. Can the Left accomplish this in a half-a-dozen different places at once?  Do they think nobody will notice that Joe Biden got a lower percentage of votes than Hillary Clinton in every single major Democrat-run city in the nation, except specifically Milwaukee, Detroit, Atlanta and Philadelphia - just those cities in the battleground states where he needed a few more votes to eke out a win?

For the fact is, they aren't able to wield many of the classical weapons of electoral manipulation.  They certainly can't imprison all their opponents ahead of time Hitler-style.  Thanks to our long tradition of secret ballots, they can't intimidate most people by watching them vote - though that's a strong argument against widespread mail-in balloting, where "harvesters" can actually watch the voter vote and reward or punish them as desired.

Every trick in the propaganda trade has already been tried, and largely failed - Mr. Trump's percentage of voters was, at worst, only slightly less than four years ago, and his number of votes significantly more.

Josef Stalin never had these problems - he always won with 99% of the vote ensured by the secret police, but everybody knew the elections were meaningless.  America presents a more challenging problem - our elites must maintain the illusion of a real election while actually controlling the outcome.  This is turning out to be a far more difficult balance than they imagined.

Four years ago, they thought the propaganda was sufficient and mass cheating not required.  This time, there's been even more propaganda, and certainly far more cheating... but will there turn out to have been so much that it can be actually proven?  Particularly in the face of a massed media that simply refuses to report anything that looks bad for Democrats or good for Mr. Trump?

At the moment, the country is carpeted in statistical impossibilities that - shock! - all swing Joe Biden's way.

In this election, Democrats with a sub 40% enthusiasm level for their candidate, were able to erase gains in states Trump won, erase registration advantages, turnout record voters, and beat their 2016 turnouts by 20 and 30%? It doesn’t add up.

A real media would be doing some serious investigating.  Instead, every single mass media source - yes, even the nominally "conservative" media - is saying that Mr. Biden won and that Mr. Trump just needs to go away.

Where Is The Man?

Perhaps the biggest disappointment of the Trump years is that, after four years of The Donald showing us "how it's done" by defying the Democrats when they tried to derail Justice Kavanaugh and stared them down when they kept the Russia hoax going, there is still not one single other Republican both able and willing to take the battle to the enemy and win even occasionally.  A bare handful, like Senators Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham, are willing, but they seem to be too senatorial to get traction with ordinary folks the way the President can.  We saw several astoundingly-talented young Republicans try what seemed like should have been a compelling arguments - only to be squashed at the polls after being outspent.

The question we've been asking for a long time now remains unanswered: what, exactly, do you and I do besides buying guns and ammo?  It appears that Democrat electoral corruption skills now exceed their incompetence and are sufficient to make up for what total control of propaganda and a massive spending advantage can't do for them.  Yes, possibly a slightly-Republican Senate will be able to block the worst excesses of single-party rule assuming that the Democrat fraud machine in Georgia can't steal the last two Senate seats they need, but what difference will it make if there is no one with the imagination and cunning to lead us?

Joe Biden is not a would-be dictator.  Kamala Harris may have fascist dreams, but she has neither the intelligence nor the personal support to make it work.  In the end, they're not really the primary problem anyway - what must be overthrown is the establishment that, year after year, indoctrinates the young to be leftists as the older Americans who remember what America is supposed to be die off.

If Americanism and conservatism is to be locked out of power for the foreseeable future, perhaps we'll take the opportunity to learn how to combat the expertise the other side has developed - how to throw wrenches in the gears, how to use "lawfare" against our enemies, how to defend our allies against assaults, all things that the right has shown itself utterly incompetent at.  Whoever develops these abilities may be the next generation of leaders on the right; for sure, there are plenty of empty seats going begging.

We find ourselves echoing the Lord as quoted by the prophet Ezekiel:

And I sought for a man among them, that should make up the hedge, and stand in the gap before me for the land, that I should not destroy it: but I found none.  Ezekiel 22:30