We all know the image of Lady Justice, best represented by the statue atop the Old Bailey in London. In one hand she holds a scale, to determine the truth, and in the other she wields a sword, to dispense punishment. Her eyes are often depicted blindfolded, because justice is supposed to concern itself only with the facts of a case, not the wealth, ethnicity, or character of the accused. This ideal has been turned on its head in modern society. Today we have two parallel tiers of justice in America: One for the rich, the powerful, and the politically-favored, and another for the rest of us.

Last week, the Justice Department announced that it would not be charging former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe with a crime, despite the fact that he publicly lied under oath. Ironically, it is this same crime that was allegedly committed by General Michael Flynn, President Trump’s original choice for National Security Advisor. The FBI asked to interview Flynn, ostensibly about the allegation of election interference, but they concealed their intention of targeting him specifically. There is evidence that the FBI agents who conducted the interview were extreme anti-Trump partisans who deliberately altered their records of what Flynn said in the interview in order to indict him for supposed perjury. While Flynn has had the book thrown at him for more than three years now, McCabe got away with the same infraction.

We see this same process at work all over our government. The Mueller investigation targeted Trump confidant Roger Stone with various process crimes, and prosecutors recently recommended a sentence of nine years for the old man. That is more than many violent rapists or drug dealers receive. The Mueller team previously charged former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort with various minor crimes, but was able to put him in jail, and he was in fact kept in solitary confinement on the orders of an anti-Trump judge. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta is free, despite doing some of the same things. In fact, Podesta and Manafort actually worked together with the same firm when the crimes were supposed to have occurred. Clinton herself committed numerous crimes during her tenure as Secretary of State for President Obama, but the FBI and Justice Department declined to charge her with anything. However, other not-so-famous people who were charged with similar crimes were put in prison without mercy.

Another example in the news recently involves the opioid fentanyl which is responsible for thousands of overdose deaths in recent years. John Kapoor, former head of the drug company Insys, was found guilty of fraud and sentenced to five years in prison. However, fraud is putting it lightly. Kapoor and his company were found to have not only pushed for their fentanyl-containing drug Subsys to be massively overprescribed, but they even bribed doctors to get it into as many hands as possible. The FDA estimates that more than eight thousand people died as a direct result of Kapoor’s malfeasance. On the other hand, low-level drug dealers are often given much longer sentences, despite only being responsible for one or two deaths. Why is the former CEO given such a light sentence?

I could go on. Whether or not you are charged and convicted of a crime in America today depends greatly on who you know and how much political power you wield. Democrats accused President Trump of election tampering because he wanted to investigate obvious corruption by former Vice President Joe Biden, who is currently running in the Democratic presidential primary. Apparently, investigating possible criminal activity by a candidate is “election tampering”. According to this logic, simply declaring oneself a candidate for high office is enough to insulate you from any criminal investigation. On the other hand, these same Democrats had no problem with Obama’s FBI investigation Trump’s campaign team, and that investigation continuing into the Trump Administration itself. This is simply “who, whom” from the Democrats – anything that undermines their enemies is by definition good, while anything that attacks their own corruption is by definition bad. While this is a perfectly rational strategy for obtaining and maintaining power, it has nothing to do with the American idea of equality before the law.

The ancient world had no law under which nobility and peasantry alike were ruled. Laws were laid down by one king, then amended or replaced by another. Priests often had their own set of laws that they enforced. Outside of civilization it was simply the law of the jungle. The idea of the “Common Law,” a set of rules that was straightforward, everlasting, and applied equally to all, was one of the most important bedrocks in the development of Western Civilization. Before this concept was defined, law was simply a tool wielded by the powerful to use against everyone else. The idea that a king should have to follow the law that he gave his subjects was nearly unthinkable. Laws really were for the little people. In theory, the king was God’s representative on earth, and it was his job to sit in judgment of his people. Forcing the king to follow the law made no sense under this system. When the English nobility forced King John to sign Magna Carta in 1215 it was a watershed moment in the development of human rights. The men present at Runnymede that day declared that no man – not even the king – was above the law.

The Common Law also meant consistency, so that men knew what the law was from one day to the next. Even as late as Renaissance-era England, Parliaments could pass what was called a Bill of Attainder that declared, without a judge or jury, that a particular man was guilty of a particular crime. Parliaments would also pass “ex post facto” laws – making something that was legal yesterday illegal today, and then prosecuting people based on what they did yesterday. Both of these things were explicitly banned by the US Constitution. The philosophy of the Common Law was deeply ingrained in the founding fathers of the United States, permeating everything they wrote. The Constitution was written to be the supreme law of the land, above presidents and congressmen and judges, setting up a balance of power so that no one man could, like Julius Caesar two thousand years ago, amass ultimate authority in our nation. The founders built into the Constitution an amendment process that required super majorities of both Congress and the States, preventing one faction or party from altering the Constitution on a whim to serve their short-term interests.

The US Constitution disallows bills of attainder, as well as ex post facto laws. However, the modern bureaucratic state has found ways around these proscriptions. For example, Congress cannot pass bills of attainder that declare someone guilty, but they can endlessly investigate and subpoena anyone for any reason, and if that person says anything that is less than one hundred percent truthful, even if it is an innocent mistake, they are prosecuted and imprisoned for perjury. The FBI routinely pulls this stunt, as they did with General Flynn. It is a cheap trick to use when you cannot convict someone for actual crimes. Ex post facto laws might not be allowed, but our legal code has become so convoluted that it is often hard to tell at any given moment what is lawful and what is not.

The Constitution also disallows double jeopardy, a system in which the state could continue to prosecute someone until they succeeded in getting a jury to convict him. Today, once you are exonerated in a jury trial, you cannot be tried again for the same crime. The way around this is to use civil court to do what criminal court cannot. O.J. Simpson was acquitted by a jury in his criminal trial for the murder of his ex-wife and her lover, but his former in-laws successfully sued him in civil court for “wrongful death” and were able to deprive him of most of his fortune. While most Americans would agree that Simpson was clearly guilty, something about the way he was punished seems antithetical to the American ideal of justice.

The use of process crimes to obtain convictions that were not otherwise possible has been around for a while. The Treasury Department famously could not find enough evidence to convict Chicago mobster Al Capone of illegal activities, but they could prosecute him for not paying taxes on his ill-gotten fortune. Obviously, Capone did not report his illegal revenues on his tax returns. As with O.J. Simpson, taking down Capone was clearly a good thing, the way it was done was surely another chip in the foundation of the Common Law in America. Today, government agencies use process crimes as a matter of course in their prosecution, whether it is of real criminals or simply of various sorts of political dissidents. The phrase “anarcho-tyranny” describes a system in which one group of people gets away with egregious crimes, while another is punished for the slightest infraction. Does that not sound like America today? Victor Davis Hanson has written about illegal immigrants from Mexico living around Fresno, California, and completely ignoring laws regarding zoning or illegal dumping. Meanwhile, white businessmen in the same region can barely conduct business due to the complexity of regulation laid upon them by the state. See also the push to legalize any crime committed primarily by black Americans, such as fare evasion in Washington DC, while calling for stronger punishment for crimes committed by less-favored ethnic groups.

The consistency of our laws is also not what it used to be. With so many laws on the books, the government cannot enforce everything, so there ends up being a lot of discretion involved in choosing what to prosecute and what to let go. President Obama’s Executive Order for the children of illegal immigrants, for example, did not change the legality of their presence in the United States, it merely instructed federal agencies to stop enforcing immigration law. This sort of capriciousness is a throwback to the time of ancient kings, who chose what laws to enforce based upon whatever criteria they considered important at the time. Today, being prosecuted is often a function of whether you are a member of a protected class or not. Are you rich and powerful? Are you a member of a favored ethnic or social group? Whether or not a crime was committed is secondary in this calculation.

There are clearly parallel systems of justice in America. The rich, the powerful, and the politically connected can get away with anything while the average American is subject to ever-changing laws that can entrap him at any moment. Former prosecutor Harvey Silverglate wrote a book a while ago called “Three Felonies a Day”, suggesting that there are so many twisted and even contradictory laws on our books today that a prosecutor could literally charge any random American with three different felonies on any given day should he so choose. The result of such a system is that prosecution and conviction are not borne out of a search for the truth regarding an obvious crime but are instead dependent on the whims of the people in power. Additionally, the use of plea bargains further removes truth from the so-called justice system. Prosecutors are increasingly charging people far beyond the scope of any actual infraction, so as to create such a threat point that the accused is basically forced to accept a plea bargain. Even for people who know they did not commit the crimes they are accused of, the risk of a guilty verdict putting them away for decades and ruining their business, their family, and their lives is so great that many will agree to plead guilty to a lower charge, despite their innocence.

Probably the greatest constitutional protection of our civil rights is the doctrine of innocent until proven guilty. In many older legal systems, the burden of proof was upon the accused to prove their innocence rather than upon the prosecutor to prove their guilt. Proving guilt is difficult, but proving innocence might be even harder, even if the accused is truly innocent. Our founding fathers would rather have a justice system where a few guilty people escape punishment than one that routinely imprisons innocent people. This too has been turned on its head by our modern bureaucratic state. Look no further than the investigation and impeachment of President Trump – the Democrats’ talking point was consistently that neither the Mueller Report nor the Senate trial actually “acquitted” or “exonerated” the president. In their opinions, he was guilty, and it was up to him to prove his innocence of whatever charges they threw at him. This twists not only American law but a thousand years of western European legal tradition entirely backwards.

The same idea powers the ever-expanding surveillance state. The government is constantly demanding more oversight over our daily lives, whether through cameras on the streets, mandatory reporting of financial transactions, or backdoors into our encrypted devices and applications. Police, border agents, and airport security demand the right to invasively search you with no probable cause. Edward Snowden proved that the NSA has been spying on Americans for many years now. Their usual excuse is that if we have nothing to hide then we have nothing to worry about. However, they maintain different rules for their class of people. The rich and the powerful are accustomed to getting away with their crimes, but they consider the average American to be guilty until proven innocent.

One of the most important corollaries in a belief in a common law is a belief in meritocracy. The conceit of America was that it was a classless society in contrast to Europe with its royal families and nobility as well as its hereditary offices and positions. While this might never have actually been the reality of America, it was at least the ideal we all aspired to. Children were taught that they could do anything, be anything in this country. Sometimes it actually happened. Abraham Lincoln was nobody special until he challenged Stephen Douglas for the Senate and made a name for himself, eventually reaching the White House. Harry Truman grew up on a farm in Missouri and ended up overseeing the end of World War II as president. While Donald Trump was wealthy and famous before becoming president, he came into the election as a true outsider, and remains the only President to be elected with no previous government or military experience. It happened outside of political office as well. Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos started off in prosperity, but they both became the richest men in the world by creating things that changed the way we lived. Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash grew up in poverty and both reached the heights of fame. However, while numerous, these examples are the exceptions that prove the rule.

Today, entrance into the upper crust is largely a product of patronage. The existing upper classes engage in a huge amount of quid pro quo, trading favors and influence like prisoners trade cigarettes. The children of presidents provide an easy example here. Chelsea Clinton received numerous high-profile internships and lucrative board positions despite having accomplished almost nothing on her own. Same with the daughters of Presidents Bush and Obama. Perhaps the most egregious example is Hunter Biden, younger son of former Vice President Joe Biden. By his mid-forties, Hunter Biden had accomplished little, but had been given cushy jobs as the son of a high-ranking Senator. By the time his father was Vice President, Hunter was given a naval commission under a special program that did not require boot camp or training or anything like that. Despite this easy entry, he was discharged due to drug use shortly thereafter. Yet having connections means never having to hit rock bottom. Hunter was immediately given a sinecure position on the board of a Ukrainian natural gas company that paid him hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, despite having little-to-no experience with natural gas, or with Ukraine, for that matter. So much for meritocracy.

The left seemed very concerned about President Trump entering office as a rich man, but what about the opposite? How often do you see people enter elected office and then somehow become obscenely wealthy? The Obama family was moderately well off before the White House, but after leaving they have been awash in money as companies offer them huge sums to get in their good graces. The value in paying Bill Clinton $500,000 for a speech, for example, is not that it will generate that much more productivity, but that it is an unregulated contribution, a bribe even, that will be remembered and rewarded later. Elite politicians, business leaders, and celebrities live for so long in a world of luxury that they forget what it is like to be an average American. They start to actually believe that the laws do not apply to people like them. They never have to wait in line at an airport or fight traffic on city streets. They do not have to clip coupons for groceries, compare cell phone plans, or anything else to try and stay within a limited budget. Their only interaction with the average man and woman might be watching them on TV now and then or at carefully staged town halls – they certainly do not rub shoulders with the hoi polloi on a regular basis.

The extreme upper class exists in another world, one that runs parallel to the one the rest of us inhabit. If we lose our job, we desperately search for a new one, hoping that our meager savings can survive until then, and hoping that there are no medical emergencies while we are in between insurance. For them, losing a job just means picking up the phone and asking for a lucrative sinecure on some other board or an easy lobbying gig in Washington DC. John Bolton, President Bush’s ambassador to the UN and President Trump’s former national security advisor, famously hung around buildings in DC while unemployed and tried to talk politics with anyone who would listen until he got a new position. If you or I tried that, we would rightly be labeled a bum who needs to get a real job. If we are accused of a crime, we can only find the best lawyer we can afford and hope that truth will win out over the massive weight of our legal system. For them, they simply send one of their high-powered attorneys on retainer to make the problem go away. When someone rich and powerful is finally given justice, it is often because the system has no more use of him. Harvey Weinstein was protected, until he wasn’t. Jeffrey Epstein was protected, until he wasn’t. How many people are still protected from prosecution for doing things far worse than many already in prison?

This two-tiered system of life and of justice in America is not a good sign for the health of our Republic. The left likes to talk about income inequality, but an even greater sign of the decline is in inequality of justice. When millions of normal Americans see the famous politicians getting away with the same crimes that would send them to prison, they lose all faith in our government and our society. This is how revolutions begin. The American people will not stand for this much longer. Something has to give. Every new injustice adds more fuel to the fire. Conservative commentator Jesse Kelly said it best:

The decline of America accelerated this week, and its inevitable fall approaches ever closer.

I am not the only one to make the comparison of Michael Bloomberg to Marcus Crassus. Earlier today on Twitter conservative commentator Jesse Kelly made the same observation after reading a long piece by Raheem Kassam at National Pulse. I briefly mentioned in my piece that Bloomberg made his fortune by gaining a monopoly on financial information systems for traders and journalists. Kassam’s piece goes into much greater detail on exactly how he accomplished that and what that sort of control means for his campaign. In short, we have a man who has nearly endless money, his own newspaper chain, and exactly zero principles who is trying to buy the White House.

Read the whole thing.

To celebrate Washington’s Birthday (despite it having been bastardized into “Presidents’ Day to honor his mediocre successors), here are some notes about each president. This is not an exhaustive biography of every president and his place in history, merely some quick thoughts:

George Washington: “First in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen.” He set the standard by which all future presidents are judged, and still stands alone.

John Adams: Principled to a fault. Would have enjoyed the VP position more in its 21^st century form.

Thomas Jefferson: His idealism sometimes failed (as when he supported the French Revolution) but it also motivated him to expand our horizons.

James Madison: Wrote the Constitution and gave us the Bill of Rights. Much of what is good about America is due to his work.

James Monroe: Known for his eponymous Doctrine, and for being the only president to have a foreign capital named after him. Only president besides Washington to run essentially unopposed, in 1820.

John Quincy Adams: As principled as his father. The last of the old guard revolutionary elites. Benefited from the “Corrupt Bargain” in the election of 1824.

Andrew Jackson: The first populist president. He spoke directly to the people and acted on their behalf, no matter what the bureaucracy wanted.

Martin van Buren: Last president until George H.W. Bush in 1988 to win the White House as sitting VP.

William Henry Harrison: The anti-war Whig party got their first win by running a war hero general. Too bad he died not six weeks into his term.

John Tyler: First VP to succeed to the presidency. Made enemies on both sides by doing so. Later supported the Confederacy.

James K. Polk: Was not even a candidate until the divided Convention. Made three promises. Achieved all three then retired. A good model to follow.

Zachary Taylor: The Whigs win again with another war hero. They lose again when he dies in office. Bad luck.

Millard Fillmore: The last Whig president. That’s all I have.

Franklin Pierce: The Whigs tried their luck a third time with a war-hero general, running Winfield Scott in 1852. Pierce won easily. America probably wanted a refund after the fact.

James Buchanan: Didn’t do anything about the growing divide in America over slavery.

Abraham Lincoln: Revered today for keeping the Union together, yet he was the one who chose to start a war to do it. Bad on civil liberties too.

Andrew Johnson: A Southern loyalist Democrat unexpectedly has to deal with a Republican Congress that wants to annihilate the South. Gets impeached for standing up to them.

Ulysses Grant: Great general. Not so good president. First president to explicitly write his memoirs after office.

Rutherford Hayes: Actually lost the election, but the South switched their electoral votes to him in exchange for withdrawing Federal troops.

James Garfield: Exemplified the late 1800s presidency – quietly running the government and rooting out corruption. Shot just four months into his term.

Chester Arthur: Another late-1800s president. Failing health kept him from doing too much.

Grover Cleveland: Everyone knows he served two nonconsecutive terms. Think about that though – his successor messed up so much that the people went back for a second look.

Benjamin Harrison: Grandson of former President Harrison. Lasted longer in office. The last president to wear a glorious beard.

William McKinley: Proved that populism was still not a golden ticket by defeating the indefatigable and popular William Jennings Bryan twice. Pressured into starting a war based on faulty intel. Hmm.

Theodore Roosevelt: Maybe the most larger-than-life president of all time. Unabashedly pro-American.

William Taft: If Teddy was larger-than-life, Taft was simply large. Should have won in 1912 if Teddy’s ego didn’t ruin it.

Woodrow Wilson: Maybe the worst president. Income tax, Federal Reserve, direct election of Senators, expanded suffrage, war, civil rights restrictions. The seeds of everything wrong with America today.

Warren Harding: Super corrupt. Might have been legitimately impeached had he not conveniently died. His best decision, besides dying, was his VP.

Calvin Coolidge: Humble and soft-spoken. Understood that the best government is one that gets out of our way. One of the best.

Herbert Hoover: Not the laissez-faire leader our textbooks claim. An engineer by trade, he rebuilt Europe after WWI, and figured he could rebuild the economy with the right tools.

Franklin Roosevelt: I wonder if voters knew in 1932 that they were electing a president for life? Not quite the dictator that Germany, Russia, and Italy had in the same era, but cut from the same cloth.

Harry Truman: Humble, yet stuck with the choice to use nukes in his first month in office.

Dwight Eisenhower: Great president, great general, great man. Highest-ranking general since Washington, yet in two terms he did not start any wars.

John Kennedy: The last Democrat to be stridently anti-Communist. He was more useful to the Democrats dead than alive.

Lyndon Johnson: Third coming of Wilson, after FDR. Massively expanded government. Won greatest landslide in history in 1964, but so unpopular by 1968 he dropped out of his own primary.

Richard Nixon: Master politician. Got in trouble because suddenly doing what all presidents did was now wrong. Huge victory in 1972 belies conventional wisdom about the 60s generation.

Gerald Ford: Pardoning Nixon killed him politically, but it was the right thing to do.

Jimmy Carter: His win in 1976 was the only Democratic victory between 1968 and 1992.

Ronald Reagan: The Great Communicator. Boldly spoke directly to the people. His 1986 amnesty still haunts us today though.

George H.W. Bush: Seemed very humble and soft-spoken, but must have been different behind the scenes. Former head of the CIA, involved in Iran-Contra, and who knows what else.

Bill Clinton: Master politician like Nixon. Started the trend of replacing actual policy with cliched platitudes. 1994 triangulation was masterful but forgotten by modern Democrats.

George W. Bush: His 2004 reelection is the only time since 1988 that a Republican has won the popular vote.

Barack Obama: Most of his accomplishments have already been erased. Will be an historical footnote – “The first black president.”

Donald Trump: A true outsider – the first president to win election despite no electoral, military, or governmental experience. Faces opposition like no president in history, yet has been so-far successful in reshaping the executive branch and judiciary.

In my podcast yesterday I mentioned how leftists live in a bubble, and their only experience with the right is through strawmen on late night television. This morning I came across this piece by a leftist (former) Democrat about her experience of stepping outside her bubble and attending a recent Trump rally:

I started to question everything. How many stories had I been sold that weren’t true? What if my perception of the other side is wrong? How is it possible that half of the country is really overtly racist? Is it possible that Trump Derangement Syndrome is a real thing, and had I been suffering from it for the past three years?

And the biggest question of all was this: Did I hate Trump so much that I wanted to see my country fail just to spite him and everyone who voted for him?

It is well-written and eye opening. Read the whole thing.

View at Medium.com

(The audio version of this essay can be found here.)

“Democracy.” There is perhaps no single word more sacred to American culture than this. Pundits and politicians on both the left and right put this word on a pedestal, without ever explaining exactly what they mean by it. Did you know that the word “democracy” does not appear in either the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence? Yet that does not stop congressmen, journalists, and grade school textbooks from extolling the virtues of democracy and making it synonymous with the very idea of America itself. Like an inkblot test, or a political poll, the word “democracy” is open to whatever interpretation the speaker and the hearer want to give it.

The globalist left is especially fond of using “democracy” as a buzzword, often lacking any context regarding its actual definition. A great example of this came in 2012, when Wisconsin Democrats launched a campaign to recall newly elected Governor Scott Walker. Walker came into office with a conservative mandate to reform government and break the stranglehold that public-sector unions had on state government, but the Democrats reacted strongly against this attack on one of their pillars of power. They successfully triggered a recall election but were stunned that night when Walker was retained with an even higher percentage of votes than in his original election. Local media interviewed several young protestors at the capitol building, one of whom memorably cried, “Democracy died tonight!”

If you open a dictionary, you will find that democracy comes out of the Greek language and means “rule by the people”. However, to the left, democracy is simply a word to describe a system in which they win. This young protestor in Madison was not knowingly lying or making a non sequitur; rather, he seriously believed that Walker’s victory was a defeat for democracy. We saw the exact same thing happen with Brexit. The British people were presented with a simple referendum in 2016 that asked if they should leave the European Union. 52% of a record-setting turnout voted “yes”. The globalist left fought this too, trying various ways to undo the election or at least to hold a second referendum which they hoped would turn out differently. When these efforts were unsuccessful, many claimed that democracy was being stifled in Britain. Once again, in the minds of the left, the actual referendum of the people was not an example of democracy, while their efforts to undo the vote were examples of democracy. This is obviously backward, but that cognitive dissonance is the result of several generations of propaganda and brainwashing.

The idea of voting until you get the correct outcome is common with the globalists. About ten years ago, the European Union cobbled together a constitution that usurped the sovereignty of their member states. Calling it a treaty, they put it up for a vote in the various member nations. If the people of those nations rejected the treaty, they were forced to vote on it again, and again, each time under a constant barrage of pro-EU propaganda. Once they voted to ratify the treaty, that was it, they were done. Notice that this was the exact same tactic that opponents of Brexit attempted to use to undo that vote. In a real democracy, you don’t always win, but the left redefines the word to mean that they always do. The Democratic Party in America has treated power like their birthright for two generations now. Notice the way that Democratic lawmakers and their media friends use the word “illegitimate” these days. President Trump’s election is “illegitimate”. His impeachment acquittal is “illegitimate”. They said the same thing about the previous Republican president, George W. Bush, as well. His victory in 2000 over Al Gore was “illegitimate” because of the Florida ballot controversy. His reelection in 2004 over John Kerry was “illegitimate” because of issues with the vote count in Ohio. Notice that their supposed reasons for this alleged illegitimacy always change. That is because they are not acting in good faith, but simply trying to rationalize their belief that the only legitimate elections are the ones in which they win.

Socialists love to use democracy as a buzzword as well. North Korea is one of the most oppressive and authoritarian nations on earth, but what do they call themselves? The Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea. Despite this name, North Korea is obviously not democratic, nor a republic, nor it is run by the people for that matter. Yet this is the image they present to the world. Like the globalist left, socialists believe that the natural outcome of democracy is that their side wins, and that socialism expands across the globe. Any other outcome is, to them, evidence of sabotage by evil capitalists.

In America, proponents of a socialist revolution have explicitly adopted the term “democratic” to soften their image for the American voters. They still claim that Stalin’s purges, Mao’s murders, Castro’s oppression, and the collapse of Venezuela are all examples of things that were never “real” socialism, because they define any failure as “not socialism”. Yet they still feel the need to qualify their ideology. Democratic socialism, they claim, is different, because it is merely redistribution of wealth at the behest of the voters instead of the result of violent revolution. Just because they use different words does not change the ideology. Project Veritas recently recorded more than one Bernie Sanders campaign official casually discussing the logistics of putting conservatives in gulags should he win. The vote that brings about socialism in America would be one of the last meaningful votes we would ever have. As the saying goes, you can vote your way into socialism, but you must shoot your way out.

Finally, our news media uses democracy as a meaningless buzzword as well. Mainstream media especially likes to use the term to make themselves sound overly important to America. After the 2016 election, recall that the news media came up with the term “fake news” to describe non-approved sources that supposedly propelled President Trump to victory. However, Trump turned the term around and applied it to mainstream media such as the New York Times, CNN, and the Washington Post. Angry over this use of their own propaganda against them, the Washington Post adopted the slogan “democracy dies in darkness,” sanctimoniously presenting themselves as the objective guardians of our sacred democracy. This is all despite the fact that it was the mainstream media themselves who have constantly been publishing fake news about Russian collusion in order to try and influence our politics in the direction they want. Our media considers themselves a fourth branch of government, with equal authority over the American people as the president, Congress, and the Supreme Court. When the White House revoked the press credentials of CNN’s Jim Acosta, who would spend every news conference smugly arguing with President Trump or his representatives, the media acted like this was a constitutional crisis. They said that because he removed one irritating journalist from the press pool, Trump was now an authoritarian dictator. This is the same CNN that doxed a random young man who made a meme making fun of fake news, and CNN specifically. It is an odd conception of democracy that features an unelected priestly class ruling over the common man, yet that is what our arrogant media would have us believe.

As I said, the word democracy comes from Greek and means rule by the people. Historically, this has taken two forms – direct democracy, where citizens vote on every issue, and representative democracy, where citizens elect representatives who vote on their behalf. Obviously, the American system is more like the latter than the former. Commentators will often point out how anti-democratic voting once was, with only landowning white men voting, and presidential electors picked by state legislatures. However, our founders were not naïve believers in democracy, as they are often portrayed. They feared the power of the mob. In that they were like the founders of ancient Greece and Rome, where the concept of democracy was born. In the Roman Republic, for example, Senate membership and voting was restricted to the patrician families who had originally founded the city. Plebeians were barred from voting, despite being a majority of the population. The founders of Rome, like the founders of our country, knew that the mob was fickle, and would often support whichever policy or politician that promised them the greater share of the spoils. It was the Romans who coined the phrase “bread and circuses” to explain how to keep the mob at bay. By restricting the franchise to landowning men, only those with skin in the game had direct influence on the policies of our young nation. Contrast this with today, where entire populations on welfare go to the polls to elect representatives who promise them ever more of the public purse. As Winston Churchill is supposed to have said, “Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.”

You can see the pernicious effect of the mob in the downfall of the Roman Republic. The Gracchi Brothers learned how to use the mob to accomplish their goals. They used patronage to entice people to their side, and then deployed the mob to protest and riot on command. Sound familiar? Gaius Marius used the power of the mob to run roughshod over Roman law and remained in power for five consecutive years rather than leaving office after one as all his predecessors had done. One of Marius’ proteges was a young Julius Caesar who took his mentor’s positions to their logical extremes, marking the end of the Republic and the birth of the Roman Empire. The lesson is clear: A republic cannot survive the mob. Once electoral power is given to the great mass of people who vote only based on bread and circuses, the republic inevitably dies. Alexis de Tocqueville recognized this two hundred years ago when he made his survey of the young American republic. “The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.”

We are told that expanding the franchise means more democracy which is an unmitigated good. Yet if you look at tyrants throughout history, they are always expanding the franchise. Adolf Hitler allowed more people to vote in Germany than had the Weimar Republic before him, because he understood how to use the mob to his advantage. Several centuries ago, King James of England found himself unable to pass certain laws in the House of Lords, so he simply created enough new baronets that he could overcome that opposition. President Franklin Roosevelt tried something similar in the 1930s. After the Supreme Court struck down several parts of the New Deal, FDR threatened to appoint enough new justices that he could get anything declared constitutional. While he ended up not doing this, the threat alone was enough to cow the Supreme Court into supporting the New Deal from then on.

Third-world dictatorships and banana republics always claim high voter turnout, with their preferred leaders winning close to 100% of the vote. Saddam Hussein of Iraq was always reelected with nearly unanimous consent, for example. What this tells us is that voting itself is not a guarantor of freedom or even of the truthful will of the people. Joseph Stalin was supposed to have said “It’s not the votes that counts, but who counts the votes,” and this is proven time and again. Democracy is often just a veneer that is used to legitimatize totalitarianism. The mob is fickle, and in the hands of a deft political propagandist it can be made to support nearly any position. By expanding the franchise to ever more people, a clever tyrant can cloak his dictatorial ambitions in a façade of democracy.

The modern Democratic Party has its origin in the Democratic-Republicans of Thomas Jefferson, founded as an alternative to the Federalist Party. However, they owe more to the populism of Andrew Jackson. The Democrats have long considered themselves to be the party of the common man, which really means that they are the party of the mob. Although the Democrats of the late 19^th and 20^th centuries were a far cry from the socialist of today, that is where mob rule eventually leads. The Southern Democrats who supported secession after the election of Abraham Lincoln were strong proponents of states rights and distrusted the federal government. Modern Democrats desire a strong federal government, as the old Federalist Party once did, but they have also adopted the ideologies of the socialist and labor movements of the 20^th century. FDR’s New Deal might not have been as dramatic or violent as the socialist movements of Russia, Italy, or Germany, but it was still a great expansion of federal power and a move toward totalitarianism. The New Deal government began subsidizing certain industries, used taxpayer money to guarantee bank deposits, established a public old age pension, and told farmers what they could and could not grow. Al Smith, former governor of New York and the Democratic candidate for president in 1928, warned America that the New Deal was taking his party away from the ideals of Jefferson, Jackson, and Grover Cleveland and leading instead to those of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin.

Today’s Democratic Party nearly fully embraced socialism. The Bernie Sanders / Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wing is in the process of taking control of the party as we speak. Former Vice President Joe Biden, once considered the frontrunner for the 2020 Democratic primary, has been sinking in the polls, while Senator Sanders has been rising. The Democratic establishment is not happy with this situation but there is not much they can do at this point. The Republicans cannot outdo the Democrats in pandering, welfare, and identity politics, so the Democratic establishment cannot compete with the socialist wing in the same manner.

As I said before, the modern American socialists claim that their brand of “democratic socialism” is not the same as the variants of socialism that have been tried and failed in the past. They believe that rather than overthrowing their capitalist overlords and seizing the means of production, they can instead vote their way into a socialist utopia. If someone like Bernie Sanders is elected president, they would claim this as a mandate to reshape the American economy and society in a socialist manner. The Constitutional protections for the rights to life, liberty, and property would be as easily brushed away as the rights of free speech, free religion, the right to bear arms in self-defense. Yet once lost, those rights will be extremely difficult to get back. It begs the question – does sacred democracy give the people the right to vote away their liberty? Remember that it’s not just our own liberty at stake, but our children’s, and their children’s after them. High school civics classes teach us that democracy is sacred, and that the right to vote is the most precious right we can possibly have. That is little comfort as we watch millions of Americans exercising that right with the intent of wrapping chains around our cherished liberties. What good is the right to vote if we have little choice in whom to support? What good is the right to vote if our elected officials simply delegate their lawmaking powers to unelected bureaucrats who steadily erode our freedoms? What good is the right to vote if we cannot use it to protect ourselves from the capricious mob? We are the sheep, and the vote on what to have for dinner is fast approaching.

The farce that is modern American democracy is nowhere as evident as in the efforts of the American people to exert control over government policy. Buried in the kabuki theater performance that is the impeachment of President Trump is a fundamental disagreement about the nature of American government. That is, who runs the country, specifically foreign policy? If you ask a random person on the street, they might say the President, or perhaps Congress. If you find someone particularly civic minded, they might say the people. Yet when you look at the way our foreign policy works today, you have to ask who is pulling the strings. Is it the president? Congress? The people? Our foreign policy today is a complicated mélange of military deployments, foreign aid, sanctions, covert actions, and quid pro quo. There are few Americans who know entirely what we are doing in the world, much less who understand why we are doing it. Sometimes different factions of our government even conduct completely contradictory operations. So how do we the people exercise any control over what our government is up to?

According to Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution, the president is not only the Commander-in-Chief of the military, but also has the power to appoint ambassadors and other ministers of government, with the “advice and consent” of the Senate. This gives the president broad authority to dictate American foreign policy. In the original conception of the Constitution, the president was elected by electors appointed by the states, and Senators were also appointed by state legislatures. While this might seem anti-democratic to us today, remember that the state legislatures themselves were elected by the people of the state, so ultimately the final authority was with the people. Today, we the people actually have more influence over these offices, with the direct election of Senators and direct voting for a state’s electors. However, we seem to have less control over American foreign policy than ever before. In November of 2016, more than sixty-million Americans voted Donald Trump into the White House because they believed he would reign in an out-of-control foreign policy, yet this is exactly why Democrats, NeverTrump Republicans, the media, and the Deep State have been trying to oust the president since Day 1.

Prior to World War II, American foreign policy was relatively simple. The military was used to protect American citizens while taxpayer money financed the essential roles of government. The military was kept small and close to home except in times of war. Even as late as 1916, General Pershing’s Punitive Expedition into Mexico to try and capture Pancho Villa was a big deal. Ever since World War II, but especially since 9/11, American foreign policy has involved deploying troops all across the globe while at the same time distributing huge amounts of foreign aid to try and maintain the postwar new world order. During the Cold War, the goal of these twin planks of foreign policy was supposedly to counter the aggressive expansion of the Soviet Union and prevent more of the world from falling behind the Iron Curtain. Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, however, the goal has been less obvious. The 90s saw even more military action in places such as Iraq and the former Yugoslavia, while foreign aid continued to increase. The 9/11 attacks have been providing justification for unlimited military action for nearly twenty years. If you talk to a neoconservative politician or a general at the Pentagon, you’ll hear a platitude such as “we fight them over there, so they don’t come over here.” This statement rings hollow when you consider that our immigration policy now lets in more people than ever – in fact, after 9/11 we actually increased our quotas of refugees and immigrants from Muslim nations such as Somalia.

While the president is the commander-in-chief of the military, Congress has broad powers to determine how that military is used. According to Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, Congress is the sole body that can declare war against a foreign country. The last time they exercised that power was in 1941 in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attack. Since then, presidents have deployed troops nearly at will, sometimes asking Congress for permission after the fact. Presidents Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon deployed American soldiers in Korea, Vietnam, and Cambodia with varying degrees of congressional authorization. In 1973, Congress passed the War Powers Act in order to constrain the president’s use of military force, though every president since Nixon has maintained that this is unconstitutional. In 2001, Congress approved the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The original idea of the AUMF was to give President Bush the authority to invade Afghanistan to root out Al Qaeda and their Taliban allies. Since then, however, Presidents Bush, Obama, and even Trump have used the AUMF to justify their deployment of American soldiers and equipment not only in Afghanistan but also Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Niger, and many other places throughout the world. Most of the Congressmen who voted for the AUMF are out of office now, and later Congresses have not held any new votes to continue their authorization or to retract it. So, who now is actually deciding American military policy?

It might seem like the president is unilaterally deciding foreign policy at this point but consider what happened when President Trump tried to pull troops back. In late 2018, Trump ordered the withdrawal of troops from Syria and Afghanistan, and order that was met with consternation in the halls of Congress. The House even passed a resolution condemning the president’s plan, despite never having explicitly authorizing the deployment in the first place. To sum up: President Obama deployed US troops to Syria, using a Congressional resolution that authorized President Bush to invade Afghanistan as justification, and President Trump is therefore not allowed to withdraw those troops without congressional approval. Got it?

There has been much discussion since the election of President Trump about the so-called “Deep State”. Mainstream media initially denied that such a thing existed, then later turned around and said that the Deep State was going to save us from our crazy president. When I say “Deep State” I am not implying the existence of some sort of secretive organization like the Illuminati that is covertly controlling world affairs. This is the sort of conspiracy theory that the media uses to tar the entire idea as crazy. Instead, the Deep State is simply the thousands of faceless bureaucrats and staffers in the State Department, the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, the Justice Department, and other governmental organizations that remains in place from one administration to the next. Some commenters use the terms “administrative state” or “permanent political class” to describe the same thing. Unlike presidents or elected representatives, these bureaucrats are not elected for a term and then sent home. Rather, they spend their entire careers in these positions, gradually assuming more power and authority in their respective spheres. I believe that these Deep State bureaucrats see themselves as a moderating influence on the elected officials who are supposed to be in charge. Presidents and Senators come and go, having made various promises to their constituents, but the Deep State makes sure that American foreign policy continues unchanged no matter who is in the White House.

During the leadup to impeachment, several politicians, pundits, and former diplomats complained on cable news that President Trump was not properly carrying out American foreign policy. They did not like the way he was dealing with Russia, Ukraine, and other nations. This complain is a non sequitur, as the president is supposed to be the one who sets American foreign policy. Yet these representatives of the deep state do not see it that way. To them, foreign policy is decided in some backroom at the State Department, and the job of the president is to allow them broad latitude to carry it out. They see the president as a figurehead, like Queen Elizabeth of the United Kingdom, who according to the British constitution is obligated to support the policies of the elected government, no matter what they might be. At least the British people have the option of voting out their government; in America, who oversees these career bureaucrats of the Deep State?

In 2014, a pro-Russian government in Ukraine was overthrown by a pro-European government, and it turned out that the CIA was involved in this coup. When did the American people vote for this? When did our elected representatives take a vote on whether to involve ourselves in an internal Ukrainian matter? Same thing with Libya – in 2011, American blood and treasure was involved in the coup that overthrew Muammar Gaddafi, which ultimately led to the Benghazi disaster that saw our ambassador and three of his staff murdered. Not only was there never a democratic vote on our involvement, but there were no repercussions for its consequences. To paraphrase the biblical proverb about the adulterous woman, “the deep state eats and wipes its mouth and says I have done nothing wrong.”

It was not always this way. In the America envisioned by the founders, government would be as transparent as possible, and voting would give people real influence over the course of the nation. In the presidential election of 1800, voters had a clear choice between the pro-British John Adams and the pro-French Thomas Jefferson, among other distinctions. In the election of 1844, James K. Polk clearly laid out his platform, which included annexing Oregon and declaring war on Mexico over Texas. When he was elected, he fulfilled his promises. It seems like it was in the 20^th century, as the United States was increasingly drawn into European affairs, that the people lost their control of American policy. Woodrow Wilson ran for reelection in 1916 with a pledge to keep America out of the Great War, yet he had barely finished his inaugural oath when we declared war on Germany and began shipping a million men to the trenches. In the 1930s, a majority of Americans were against involvement in another European war, yet Franklin Roosevelt nevertheless embargoed Japan, sent military equipment to the Soviet Union, and made plans with Churchill for the postwar world order. The American people did not vote for any of this and would surely have voted against it given the chance. Once Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, public opinion inevitably swung toward war and gave FDR the mandate to do what he wanted to do all along.

In 1959, Fidel Castro led a revolution that overthrew the pro-American president of Cuba and established a Communist state that allied with the Soviet Union. Not only was this a national security issue, with a Soviet ally now within a hundred miles of the continental United States, but it was a blow to American business interests that had found Cuba very friendly to their investments. The CIA immediately hatched a plot to overthrow Castro using Cuban refugees backed by American air power. In 1961, John F. Kennedy entered office having defeated the sitting Vice President Richard Nixon in a very close and contentious election. Kennedy was the youngest man ever elected to the presidency and immediately found himself facing foreign policy crises on all sides. He had campaigned on taking an even harder stance on Cuba than had Nixon, so when the CIA briefed him on this plan, he gave it his authorization. The invasion was a massive failure, and while Kennedy took full responsibility, some reports say that he privately seethed at the way the CIA handled the invasion and its aftermath. One later report quoted Kennedy as wanting to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds,” though he apparently relented after a congressional inquiry. Kennedy did fire CIA chief Allan Dulles, but the damage was done. The invasion pushed Cuba even further into the arms of the Soviet Union, leading to the Cuban missile crisis, while Kennedy’s desire to avoid looking weak after the fiasco led him to draw a line in the sand in Vietnam, escalating US involvement in that conflict. There are some who even suggest that Kennedy’s threat to dismantle the CIA might have even provoked his assassination, though we will likely never learn the truth behind that.

What is the point of voting if our elected representatives simply carry out the will of some unaccountable bureaucrats in Washington DC? Think back to the 2008 election and ask yourself if American foreign policy would have been that much different had John McCain defeated Barack Obama. If anything, McCain would have been worse. Obama deployed troops and drones to Syria, Yemen, Libya, and elsewhere, while McCain might well have done all that and invaded Iran too. The Deep State is not confined to one party or another but sees itself as beyond partisan politics. Tucker Carlson of Fox News recently highlighted this on his show, saying,

“Both parties work together to keep America overextended abroad, stuck in quagmires across the world that enrich defense contractors & lobbyists, while killing our finest young men & hollowing out this country.”

The other prong of the permanent foreign policy scheme is money. The United States delivers billions and billions of dollars to various countries under the term “foreign aid”. It is supposed to help these countries prosper and become more democratic, but in reality, it mostly enriches NGOs and friendly oligarchs. There are few countries on earth that do not receive some form of aid from the US, by which I mean taxpayer dollars. Did we ever vote for this? When did we hold a referendum on sending over $800 million to Pakistan or $260 million to Bangladesh? Why are we sending nearly half a billion dollars to Morocco or Colombia? Who decided that Palau should get $10 million in US taxpayer funds, or that we should divert $3.2 billion to Israel? Why are we sending another half a billion dollars to Ukraine?

Ukraine seems to be at the center of American foreign policy lately. It was the CIA, along with Obama administration operative Victoria Nuland, that helped oust the pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych and replace him with an EU stooge. In response to the coup, Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula in order to secure their naval base at Sevastopol and deployed troops in eastern Ukraine ostensibly to safeguard Russian-speaking citizens. The US and most western nations condemned these invasions, and relations with Russia have been unsteady ever since. US foreign policy had turned against Russia shortly before the Ukrainian coup, for reasons that are not entirely clear. At the start of the Obama Administration, you’ll recall that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gifted the Russian foreign minister a trinket that said “reset,” in reference to the cooling of US/Russian relations at the end of George W. Bush’s administration due to disagreements over Russia’s conflict with the nation of Georgia. However, just a few years later, the Obama Administration was stirring up trouble against Russia. Why? And how are voters supposed to guide American foreign policy when our relations with other nations switch for no apparent reason?

Coming back to Ukraine, the supposed impetus for the Democrats finally passing articles of impeachment against President Trump was his alleged threat to withhold foreign aid to that country unless they investigated apparent corruption by former Vice President Joe Biden. Shortly after the coup that installed a pro-European president in Ukraine, Biden’s son Hunter was given a lavish position on the board of a Ukrainian natural gas company, despite having no background in the industry or in Ukrainian politics. The reason why this was done is obvious to anyone with eyes to see – by dumping money on the son of the Vice President, the Ukrainians hoped to gain favor with the Obama Administration. For the powerful people of the deep state, this is normal. This is simply how business is done. An enormous amount of money is moved around between foreign leaders and dignitaries, businessmen, and American politicians and diplomats. This system keeps them all enriched, but it is entirely removed from the control of the American people or our elected representatives.

Enter Donald Trump. As far back as the 2016 Republican presidential primary, Trump was already suggesting that as president he would not only withdraw American troops from around the world but that he would also take a look at the foreign aid racket that has enriched the deep state for so long. I believe this is the biggest reason why so many people have tried so hard to stop President Trump, one way or another. He is a serious threat to the military/industrial complex that has grown up since the end of World War II. He is a threat to the New World Order that keeps the world running for the benefit of powerful people both here and abroad. They couldn’t stop him with the Access Hollywood tapes. They couldn’t stop him at the ballot box. They couldn’t stop him with the Mueller Report. They will not be able to stop him with impeachment. I fear for what they will try next. John F. Kennedy challenged the deep state, and he ended up murdered.

This is the great battle of our time. Who runs our country? Who decides American foreign policy? Is it the American people, expressed through our elected representatives who must return every few years for reelection? Or is it the career bureaucrats in Washington DC who face little to no accountability for their decisions? Do we have a democracy, or are we ruled by a corrupt oligarchy? We still vote in elections for Congress, the Senate, and the Presidency, but do these really matter? The right to vote is not an end unto itself. Our founders understood that the rights to life, liberty, and property needed constant safeguarding against tyrants above and the mob below. Our freedom is not secure so long as a simple majority can vote to take it away. The next time you see a politician or journalist speaking of democracy as a sacred thing, see it for the crass propaganda it is. Picture Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars solemnly intoning that “I love democracy.” Even George Lucas, bleeding-heart liberal that he is, understood the ability of a tyrant to use the power of the people to make himself a dictator. Today’s dictators are not Sith lords shooting lightning from their fingertips but are instead career bureaucrats who cloak themselves positive-sounding phrases such as “civil servants”.

I will leave the last word to Steve Cortes of the America First Political Action Committee who wrote a great piece on RealClearPolitics last week. He says,

“Herein lies the real rub, the underlying struggle that truly thrusts our nation into this historic showdown. The administrative state, the permanent political class, wages an all-out assault on the will of the people who, through President Trump, decided to regain control over the leviathan of the federal government. Amazingly, Adam Schiff admitted as much in his impeachment presentation to the Senate, stating the conflict “cannot be decided at the ballot box, for we cannot be assured that the vote will be fairly won.”

Some politicians, like Schiff, are perfectly content to pretend to lead our government and simply perform as actors in a play. But Donald J. Trump demands to be the director, not some bit-part extra. For this “sin,” our national security and foreign policy elites have turned their political guns against him for almost four years. His coming acquittal, exoneration, and reelection will secure an important victory for a people fervently focused on reclaiming power over Washington.”