Embers in the Wind

By Charlie Johnston

The last week and a half has been the most subtly intense of my lifetime. I suspect very few people yet realize how suddenly and explosively dangerous things have become. Just suggesting that it looked like Democrats were going to be successful in completing the coup with an election steal got me a ton of blowback, even as I made clear it would be a pyrrhic victory. Matters have become extremely fluid, with rumors and gambits shifting daily. Most of the nation’s officials have become Vichy officials (those execrable bureaucrats who became the lapdogs of the Nazis in governing German-occupied France), either actively participating in the coup or wanting to avoid making a fuss about it. But a consensus among normal people is rising with astonishing speed towards critical mass. A week ago, I thought a fraudulent installation of Joe Biden would mean open widescale revolt or mass secession within a year. Today I think it is more like a month. The best-case scenario for the pagan left now if His Fraudulence is installed is that the nation would very quickly become ungovernable.

The nation is one, maybe two, sparks away from open, widespread revolt – and hot embers saturate the wind swirling around us. Seventy-six years ago yesterday, the German Army had completely surrounded the Belgian town of Bastogne, where American troops were dug in. The Germans sent Brig. Gen. Anthony McAuliffe a demand for surrender in order to avoid unnecessary bloodshed. General McAuliffe sent his famous one-word reply: “Nuts!” – and the Americans held on until relief came and the German armies were smashed. If the seditious traitors who have launched all the assaults against normal Americans complete the coup, they will quickly find the American people’s response to them will be the same. Let us take a look at some of the fiery embers swirling around us.

The Collapse of Political Authority

Around the country small groups are rising up to defy governors and mayors who seek to shut everything down and toss tens of millions out of work. I receive reports from Regional Coordinators at CORAC about county groups that are spontaneously rising across the country to defy local officials and bureaucrats. Solvang, California formally voted to defy shutdown orders. The mayor of Dodge City, Kansas resigned because of the blowback she received for ordering the enforcement of facemask mandates. More and more, as petty officials give orders that are not grounded in any credible science or public safety, people are saying, “No!” That is quickly turning into a “Hell, no!” Villages, towns and county sheriff’s departments are increasingly telling their governors to pound sand. Is it any wonder? For almost a year now, officials have been ordering people to live by draconian rules that the officials, themselves, refuse to live by. They have been shutting down small businesses, churches and schools while leaving big corporations, strip clubs, liquor stores and pot shops unmolested. They have been telling people they can’t gather with their families for Thanksgiving or Christmas while leaving mass, planned riots unmolested. They are forcing families to leave their loved ones to linger and die in solitude while they hold mass memorial services for deceased leftist activists.

The thing is, when acceptance of official orders collapses in one area, it quickly collapses in every area unless action is quickly taken to restore credibility and competence. The ruling class has simply been thumbing its nose at ordinary people. Meanwhile, the officials and media personalities who have been the loudest in insisting that everyone else shut down and sacrifice their life savings and businesses have not missed a single paycheck – while simultaneously flouting the rules they seek to impose on everyone else. Its over for these tinny narcissists.

The Collapse of Judicial Authority

Everybody in the country knows this last election was marked by fraud so large as to make a third-world tyrant blush. Everyone, including Democrats and the media. They thought to enable the fraud by saying, “Shut up, yokels!” to those with the temerity to point out the emperor’s lack of clothing. Ordinary people counted on the courts to right this obvious, flagrant violation of basic honesty and decency. Contrary to what the pagan left likes to scream, no court has ruled against the merits of the many cases before them. Rather, they have refused to hear any arguments or evidence on hastily manufactured procedural grounds. Judges are just sticking their fingers in their ears and saying, “La, la, la…I can’t hear anything.” When the Supreme Court refused to hear the Texas case, where 19 states who try to hold honest elections petitioned them, saying that those states had no standing to demand that the other states play fair and honest in a national election affecting us all, that was the end of it. The execrable Chief Justice John Roberts thought he was kicking the can down the road and protecting the independence of the judiciary by giving in to the mob. What he actually accomplished was begin the downfall of any respect for the judiciary or judicial orders.

Just a week after that corrupt and craven decision, California’s Orange County Sheriff Don Barnes refused to release random inmates as a local Superior Court judge had ordered him to. The import of this was easily missed, as the defiance of local authorities to higher officials’ orders has been becoming downright commonplace. But this was defiance of a judicial order – orders which heretofore had been generally accepted. It was the first of its type, but won’t be the last, as people figure out that the entire elite class is in on this effort to cheat the suckers they think ordinary Americans have become. The American Spectator’s magnificent analyst, David Catron, predicted this cowardice at the Supreme Court – and the likely reaction. The suckers are gearing up to obtain for themselves what they can no longer get from top officials – justice and honor. It’s almost over for craven cowards and political activists wearing judicial robes.

The Collapse of Expertise

Do you believe that the wearing of masks by the general public is both useless and irresponsible? Do you believe that wearing masks is absolutely mandatory to prevent Covid? Over the last year, the CDC, at different times, has said both things. Do you believe there have been 300,000 Covid deaths in America this last year? Do you believe there are only about 20,000 such deaths? Even now the CDC says both things – listing some 300,000 deaths on its website while in another paragraph parenthetically noting that only 6% of the reported deaths are unambiguously deaths from Covid. In my home state of Colorado, they are counting gunshot fatalities as Covid deaths. Kind of a hitman’s dream.

Throughout the country, those states which have issued the most draconian lockdown rules are generally having the worst infection rates. If a governor is a Democrat who locks down hard, he is lionized as a great leader despite astronomically high death rates. If a governor is a Republican who uses a light touch, he is a monster who is killing people, despite having death rates  about half the size of the Democrats being lionized. That’s not science. That’s political hackery.

The Democrats and media insist that any conservative or Christian gathering is a super-spreader event while leftist mass rioting is protected speech. That’s not science. That’s political hackery.

Different data sources are showing wildly different data on overall death rates this last year. Only the CDC shows death rates matching its wild projections. Pulling raw data state by state shows a different, much lower rate. Some other raw sources show a slight increase, some even show a drop. There are always small variations. Only this year have the variations between source reporters been wildly at variance. I guess they forgot to synchronize their death rates. That’s not science. That’s political hackery.

The result of a year of leftist lockdowns have left small-time American businesses a rubble, while centralizing both power and money in ever fewer hands, while doing nothing significant to “stop the spread.” It is as if that is what the credentialed classes want. That’s not political hackery. It’s fact.

Now the credentialed classes expect us to all bow down without any concerns when a rushed vaccine has come to market. This is the same establishment that was wrong about most things they told us in the last year – the last four years, actually. They are often wrong, but always certain, and always eager to force their latest enthusiasm on the rest of us, their human petri dishes. They insist the vaccine has no long-term ill effects. Since it was rushed and they could not possibly identify any long-term ill effects, how can they even pretend to know? But ask any questions and the answer from them is the same: “Shut up, yokel.” Personally, I won’t go near the vaccine with a ten-foot pole. In fairness, I will provide a link to Kurt Schlichter, a man I respect, who supports the vaccine.  As much as I respect him, I think the Covid vaccine has the likelihood of becoming the greatest medical disaster in modern history.

When you politicize everything, everything becomes political and there are no longer any experts, only credentialed folks who are willing to prostitute their expertise to support a political narrative. Their time is almost over. Respect for “experts” with loads of credentials but no demonstrable expertise is in full-scale collapse.

The Collapse of Media

The principle behind the idea of free speech and a free media is that a free people, particularly a “moral and religious” one, have nothing to fear from any sort of political speech. When it is errant or provocative, simply counter it with persuasively better speech, more fully grounded in evidence and reason. Besides the abstract value of liberty, it also serves the practical goals of fully vetting every assertion and preventing resentment of suppression of conscience from growing into insurrectionary explosiveness.

For the first hundred years of the republic, almost all papers had an overt partisan slant. But they would have never dreamed of trying to censor opposing views. Remember, this was the age when Voltaire could say, as an honest liberal, “I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” He knew, as did all liberals from that age, that his task was to seek to persuade his opponents with superior evidence and logic – not to seek to shut them up. He knew, as did all intellectuals of the time, that seeking to shut opposing views off would simply light a fuse to wide-scale insurrection, whether it be a quick or slow-burning fuse.

In the late 19^th and early 20^th century a new idea began to rise in journalism. That was to give objective facts and leave it to the reader to come to his own conclusions. By the early mid-20^th century this had evolved into keeping opinions confined to the editorial pages and keeping the news pages focused on objective facts. There were still Republican and Democrat papers – but the designation now primarily applied to the slant of their editorial page, not the news pages. It was always a bit of a pretense because, people being people, their ideas were expressed through the filter of their own experiences and outlook. But there was a real effort. This was somewhat mitigated because, up until the late 20^th century, most journalists were people who had done real things and could write. They actually knew something about the way things work in real life. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein may have been the worst thing to ever happen to journalism. Not because of significant shabbiness in their reporting on Watergate, but because they provoked a huge growth in “journalism” schools on college campuses and caused reporters to imagine themselves as crusaders, partisans and advocates rather than investigators and fact-tellers. Now the profession was flooded with people who knew nothing about much of anything, but had adolescent certainty about the rightness of their cause. The quality of reporting took a general nose-dive after Watergate while news outlets retained the pretense of objectivity. Think about something: in the 80’s, 90’s and early 2000’s you probably  believed the news stories you read were basically accurate. But think of that same period and any stories you read that touched on a subject you were actually proficient in and intimate with. Did they ever get it right? At that time, you knew that they were almost always wrong about what you knew personally, but still assumed they were basically right on what you didn’t.

In 2008 the reflexive left-wing bias in most media outlets became fully intentional. Barack Obama’s shallowness, pettiness, incompetence and certitude of his own superiority was the mirror image of the modern age of journalists – and they fully supported their own. In Obama’s first term, when the news was bad, he began to do something no president before him had done: he bowdlerized the statistics. When inflation took off, Obama simply removed energy and food prices from the statistics used to calculate inflation. When unemployment simultaneously stalked the land, Obama simply quit counting those who had become so discouraged that they quit looking for work from unemployment statistics. Nobody except a few people like me, who work with raw data a lot, complained. Actually, both inflation and unemployment were much worse under Obama than under Jimmy Carter. Carter just gave us an honest accounting of it.

The press took a cue from this. In 2016 their open partisanship metastasized into rabid partisan activism. It was nothing but opinion from every quarter – but always reported as fact. When the facts overwhelmingly contradicted them, the press simply lied. No crime committed by a Democrat, however heinous and well-documented, was worthy of significant coverage – even with “blue dress proof.” Any wild rumor against a Republican was reported as documented proof. This is how we got four years of Russia collusion with Trump that never was and the suppression of massive and corrupt collusion with China by the Biden family. It is how Hydroxochloroquine was a deadly scam when Trump supported it and suddenly became a wonder drug the day the media thought they had secured Biden’s victory. Now that the media is frustrated that too many people don’t accept their wild conjectures and outright lies as fact, they have launched a full-scale effort to censor speech they don’t like, facts be damned. They censor any criticism of the integrity of the election. Twitter has already announced that it will censor any inconvenient questions about the vaccines for Covid. The media neither knows nor cares anything about facts and evidence; only about which team they are playing for.

A confident, competent institution is not cowed by dissent and does not try to censor it. Censorship is the last resort of incompetents who are trying to maintain their grasp on power and influence that they are desperately afraid is slipping away from them. I recently read a phrase that has stuck with me: people go mad in herds but recover one at a time. The media think they are shaping the narrative and preserving their hold on influence by censoring facts they don’t like. What they are really doing is infuriating normal people and accelerating the recovery of the maddened herd – and reserving their own places on the yardarms.

The Collapse of Religious Authority

I will reserve deeper discussion of this for another time. Suffice it to say that, in all Christian traditions, many leaders are treating the commands of Christ and His Apostles as suggestions while treating the uninformed enthusiasms of the pagan left as commandments. Thank God for faithful leaders like Cardinal Raymond Burke, Archbishop Carlo Vigano, Cardinal Robert Sarah, Bishop Joseph Strickland and the Rev. Franklin Graham who are keeping fidelity during the paganization of our churches. Just as in our society and culture, they are harbingers of a much larger cohort beneath the surface of formal leadership. Find a parish or church which keeps fidelity to Christ. I almost guarantee there is one near you. I have found some of the most faithful Christians in the toughest places – California, Oregon, Washington and New York. Pay attention to your Bishop and don’t be quick to condemn him over trivial disputes. Many are courageously and, sometimes quietly, trying to hold the line for Christ.

A Time of Choosing

On Monday evening, I gazed at the Christmas star to the southwest. Many Christians have regarded this as an important portent. I am among them. In fact, I think it is as important as the Revelation 12 sign that appeared in the sky on September 23, 2017. At the time of that sign, I had already come to believe that I had made a critical error – that rescue from our cultural dysfunctions would not be an event, but a process. I thought the process would begin with all things being revealed – the depth of the rot would be shown to all of us. Within a few weeks of the Revelation 12 sign, news of massive sexual dysfunction in Hollywood, the news industry, politics and the Church began flowing freely. Over the years since, we have watched as the credibility of almost all of our most important mediating institutions has collapsed, as I described above. I think what this Christmas Star portends is that the time of choosing has come. Everyone must now choose whom they will serve and publicly declare it. Only an overt  choice of God is acceptable to the Master now. To refuse to choose is to choose the satan. There is no longer a place of neutrality.

Last week I was still reeling from the stunning refusal of the cowardly Supreme Court to even hear evidence about election fraud with its rejection of the Texas case. Many interpreted my assessment that this meant Joe Biden would be fraudulently installed as an illegitimate president to mean that I had given up and was ready to just take it. That is not what I meant at all, but in my shock at the magnitude of what had happened, it was not an unreasonable assumption on my critics’ part.

The overt and brazen theft of a national election for president was an act of war by the pagan left. It was not a mere offense; it was not mere corruption; it was an act of war against ordinary Americans, the Constitution, and the rule of law, itself. Had the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case and review the actual evidence, it would have caused strife. Had the evidence proven beyond any doubt that Trump had won – and the Court so ruled, it would have caused intense strife. But it was our last chance to avoid actual internal and fratricidal war. War broke out on election day with the brazen theft of a national election. The last chance to back away from it came when the Supreme Court abdicated their most solemn responsibility. Americans can no longer get justice from the system – and the rule of law is dead. When I wrote that the tombstone of America would read, “Born July 4, 1776; Died December 11, 2020,” I meant it. I was not engaging in hyperbole. We are at war now. What will come next we can only see through a glass, darkly. But the old is already gone.

I am in the process of adapting my thinking to our new and unprecedented situation, because I, too, hoped it would not get to this. Several decades ago, an important mentor told me that I should take pains to differentiate between those who had actively chosen evil and those who were merely duped by it. It is a very tricky business because the two types look almost identical. You have to know a man’s heart to make that distinction reliably – and only God knows men’s hearts. It was important because those who have actively chosen evil are already lost, while those who have been duped by it can still be reclaimed. I think that each of us face a dual accountability, one that none of us can get entirely right but which we must strive with all our might to do well. We will be held to account for everyone we could have reached but did not because of our anger – and we will be held to account for every aggressor we could have stopped from molesting the faithful but did not out of timidity or false charity. We are fully in the deep now.

On January 20, I will be in Washington, D.C., either to celebrate Donald Trump’s inauguration for his second term or to protest against the fraudulent installation of that illegitimate pretender, Joe Biden. I don’t know every detail of the way forward. I only know we are already at war. It is the only way honest Americans can get justice now. And I know which team I am fighting for. (Correction: I will be in D.C. on January 6 for the massive demonstration planned. I may or may not be there on the 20th – CJ)