Nothing About This Is Normal

For the first time since 1776, the American government is engaging in open war on the American people.

William Jacobson, Cornell law professor and proprietor of the great site Legal Insurrection, recounts this Morgan Ortagus tweet:

“9/11 altered my career path & is why I went into govt service. The events of the past week feel like they are having the same life-altering effect; I hope for the rest of the country too. I don’t know what it all means yet, but this forever changes the course of our country.”

As Professor Jacobson notes in his post, President Biden has reduced America to groveling at the feet of the Taliban, and by extension, at the feet of every single one of our global competitors and enemies.

He is right. As I thought about it, the entire Democrat platform is based on giving up and relegating America to what former (thank God) President Barack Obama always thought we were – just another country, not exceptional in any way, maybe a little bit evil, and certainly not fit to lead the free world.

In the past seven months, Americans have witnessed the following actions from their president, his administration, and his party – they have:

• Surrendered the border to illegal aliens.

• Surrendered America’s position as the world’s leading energy producer to OPEC.

• Surrendered civil society to the race baiters and anarchists of BLM and ANTIFA.

• Surrendered our public education system to communists who are intent on creating a race/class war through our children.

• Surrendered public safety to criminals.

• Surrendered public health and private choice to a virus.

• Surrendered the liberty of citizens to a feckless, inconsistent, and often wrong public health leadership.

• Surrendered free enterprise and small businesses to a few radical socialist politicians allied with gigantic corporations by paying people not to work, cancelling rent and triggering inflation.

• Surrendered our fair and impartial legal system to arbitrary and capricious enforcement and ideological standards of application.

• And now, complete surrender in Afghanistan, effectively creating a terrorist state and ceding global leadership to a communist country in China.

Every surrender a voluntary and self-inflicted wound.

How could the outcome of any of these surrenders be seen as a positive for the American people?

The short answer is that none of these are good for the people, not even those who immediately benefit, because those benefits are temporary and extremely costly in the long run. America has lost the ability to recognize tyranny – just because you agree and allow a process to continue, does not mean it is not tyrannical. Whether it benefits you or not is not the standard.

Charles Krauthammer once said that American decline is not inevitable, it is a choice.

And yet, it is difficult not to conclude these surrenders represent the conscious choice for decline. These are the policies of the Democrat Party and its leadership in the Biden administration. In the process of prosecuting their agenda, the Democrats have destroyed any remaining trust and confidence in almost every single formerly respected American institution – but the most dangerous and incendiary is the fact they have completely severed any tenuous connection between the government and the governed that remained.

A Facebook friend posted this comment to a post of mine:

“Presidents don’t “rule” over the people. Only monarchs and tyrants to that.”

True - but this administration has proven monarchial and tyrannical, as did the Obama administration, the difference is that where Obama did it with a scalpel and a sweet, sugary smile, Biden is doing it with a nail studded cudgel and a dismissive demonic scowl.

Like the Obama administrations before them, the Biden people see themselves as lawless and unfettered, following the Wilsonian era idea that a president is free “…to be as big a man as he can. His capacity will set the limit; and if Congress be overborne by him, it will be no fault of the makers of the Constitution, – it will be from no lack of constitutional powers on its part, but only because the President has the nation behind him, and the Congress has not.”

Wilson continued:

“The old theory of the sovereignty of the States, which used so to engage our passions, has lost its vitality. The war between the States established at least this principle, that the federal government is, through its courts, the final judge of its own powers…”

This idea, once put into practice, severs the connection between the government and the people in both in principle and application and subsequently abrogates and cancels that from whence government draws its legitimate and constitutional powers - the consent of the governed.

Essentially, the Democrats have induced government to breach the only contract it has with the American people – the Constitution.

In the classic tome, “On War” by Carl von Clausewitz, he states that “War is politics by other means,” and if true, one can make the case the converse is also true – that politics is war by other means. If a foreign power had forced such complete capitulation through attack or invasion rather than by political action, Americans would recognize it as war - largely because it is.

Morgan Ortagus’ tweet expresses my sentiment, and one I believe I share with many Americans, that some life-altering change has taken place, even if we cannot quite put our fingers on it. President Biden’s supporters claimed his election would return America to a state of normalcy.

There is nothing normal about his presidency. Nothing.

It is not inaccurate or hyperbolic to state that, for the first time since 1776, America’s government has begun, and is openly engaging in, an open war on its own citizens.

What happens next is anybody’s guess – but what I know is that it is entirely up to the citizens of America.