January 6, 2021: The Day of the Electoral Epiphany
January 6 marks the festival of the Christian Epiphany commemorating the visit of the Magi—the three “wise men” of popular parlance—bringing gifts to the Christ child. It is also the day on which the presidency of the United States will be determined as the “wise men” of Congress meet to certify or decertify the vote of the Electoral College. The question is whether the current legitimate president will be recognized or whether a pretender to the throne, a false messiah, or, to put it bluntly, a corrupt grifter benefitting from the largest electoral fraud in American history will be confirmed in his stead.
Three facts should be obvious.
The first is that the list of Donald Trump’s accomplishments as president is a long one: the Middle East peace treaties, wage gains for low wage earners, elimination of the ISIS Caliphate, low unemployment (pre-COVID), Operation Warp Speed, energy independence, rapid economic recovery, reduction of economy-strangling regulations, pushback against Chinese Communist subversive tactics (including his recent release of Chinese bounty intel), returning manufacturing and industry to the homeland, immigration sanity, forcing NATO allies to pay their fair share of military expenses, the renegotiating of trade deals in America’s favor, in short, the policy of America First—to mention only a few of his extraordinary achievements.
Second, he has been routinely and viscerally misrepresented and traduced by a hostile and corrupt media consortium that has suppressed or sullied a record any responsible president would be proud of. Clearly, we no longer have a fair and trustworthy press but a Soviet-style propaganda machine trading on lies, unceasing vitriol and relentless ad hominem attacks on a sitting president.
Third, the evidence of massive and unprecedented electoral fraud that may well cost Trump the election is undeniable: preventing inspectors from observing the vote count, accepting illegal mail-in ballots and invalid (without dates) absentee ballots, random assignment of ballots, vote dumping, ballot box stuffing, votes exceeding the number of estimated voters, registering 120-year-old voters, transference of votes from Trump to Biden in battleground states, suitcases filled with ballots dragged out from beneath a covered table after mandated poll observers were told to leave, thousands of affidavits attesting to illegitimate activities, election rules drastically changed, hackable and manipulated voting machines and practices, and so on. The documentation is everywhere. Pennsylvania election numbers don’t add up, outcome-determinative fraud occurred in Georgia, Republican ballots were misprinted in several swing states. The fraud, which is, in effect, an integral part of a premediated coup d’état and “the biggest political scandal in U.S. history,” cannot be doubted or dismissed except by committed partisans of the Democratic Party, #NeverTrumpers, insurrectionary cadres like Antifa and BLM, useful idiots, and data-censoring corporate magnates frustrated by an honest broker in the Oval Office.
Trump has been faulted for his brusque rhetorical style, for his lack of polish, for his incessant Twittering, for his thin-skinned reaction to criticism, for his hands, for his hair, for his past—indeed, for anything his adversaries can think of. Certainly, he is not flawless, but I suspect his only significant fault is possibly his misjudging the vast extent of the “swamp,” and not acting early enough to counter its malignance.
For the swamp is everywhere: in Congress, in the intelligence agencies, in the education establishment K-12 to post-graduate (including the professoriate and academic administration), in state legislatures, in the judiciary, in many of the churches, in the media gutters and high-tech platforms, in communal organizations and in a considerable portion of the nation. Perhaps Trump should have invoked the Insurrection Act. Perhaps he should have challenged Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act earlier in his term. Perhaps he should have fired the problematic elements and Obama holdovers in the military leadership and replaced them with reliable personnel. Perhaps he should have relied on executive privilege to ensure that the plotters who spied on his campaign and who used extraconstitutional means to remove a duly elected president be charged in criminal court or according to the Articles of the Constitution (Article II, Section 1). He should definitely have investigated the electoral apparatus and adopted preventive measures years before the current election. Then again, he is one man against a veritable world.
In this respect, I recall a lecture given by the celebrated education author and psycholinguist Frank Smith, which I attended when guesting at Brigham Young University. Smith was lamenting the state of the culture, which he felt had grown so decadent, divisive, and mendacious that it could no longer be salvaged. “We’re on the Titanic,” he said, “and we’re going down. Save yourself if you can. Jump ship.” The problem, so far as I could see, was that there was nowhere to jump. Everything is the Titanic: the sea, the land, the lifeboats, even the iceberg. The only solution, within the terms of the metaphor, was to keep bailing in order to maintain the ship afloat, in the hope that a competent crew could be dispatched to repair the damage before the foundering.
Similarly, as noted, the swamp is everywhere, giving off its fetid neo-Marxist/Globalist stench. Another four years of a Trump presidency will serve to drain it further, and perhaps make political life somewhat more bearable, but the swamp will continue to pollute the constitutional order of the nation. The battle is endless against the abominations who inhabit the swamp, the Shambling Mounds, the Green Hags, the Bullywugs, the Stirges, and especially the Mud Mephits and Yuan-tis. But this is more than a Dungeons & Dragons gaming session; it is a war for survival. Should Trump be re-elected, he will need all the help he can get when, as Adventurer-in-Chief, he enters the swamp to confront its foul denizens.
As Lee Smith writes in his recent The Permanent Coup, detailing the “desperate measures” of America’s domestic enemies, “The coup aimed at toppling Donald Trump will not end in November 2020, whether he is reelected or not…because it is aimed mainly at Americans…it’s weaponized to destroy anyone the left perceives as its enemy.” Trump and a few loyal allies are all America has as a bulwark against the advancing fen, in an effort to keep it at bay and reduce its lethality. Should a spurious and criminal election fail to be overturned, the swamp will inundate the land and there will be no Ark to ride it out, no Titanic to keep afloat.
In his Agony and Eloquence: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and a World of Revolution, American historian Daniel Mallock reflects: “Every generation has its own times that try the souls of men and women. The present belongs to the living” who must honor the gift deeded to them by great and patriotic men like Adams and Jefferson, nation builders like Washington and Lincoln. “Every generation writes its own history,” he continues, “Our interpretation will change but the truth of the matter will not; it is our responsibility to weigh the evidence and know the difference between the shadows of our prisms and the sometimes-dim light of historical truth.” The “dim light” also occludes our vision, not only of historical truth but of present reality, thanks to the efforts of an obscurantist media and the derelictions of our public institutions. Nevertheless, “it is our responsibility to weigh the evidence” of electoral malfeasance and institutional complicity to arrive at “the truth of the matter” and to act upon it.
This January 6 is the critical moment in the modern history of the United States. The secular Epiphany will “show forth” whether there will be anything to celebrate or whether it will manifest as a terminal mockery of the will of the majority of the American people and the virtual end of the American Republic.
