The Durham Probe Exposes Our Elites as Lawless Dictators, and Their Allies as Corrupt Collaborators

By John Zmirak Published on May 16, 2023

What would you call it when Southern white elites defied the U.S. Constitution and stripped freed black Americans of the right to vote? When they stuffed ballot boxes, imposed arbitrary conditions for voting, or outright faked the results, to keep blacks and Republicans out of office during Reconstruction — then for another 100 years after that?

I know what the perpetrators called it at the time. They termed it “Redemption,” and styled themselves the “Redeemers,” blasphemously comparing themselves to our actual Redeemer. That’s how committed they were to rejecting the will of the people — or rather, of those Americans they didn’t consider fully people, capable of governing themselves.

In The Unvanquished, the genius Southern author William Faulkner depicts the motives of the men who managed to overturn democracy and restore white rule. They saw themselves as heroes, leaders of a Resistance to unjust conquest and rule by the mindless mob. They saw the Ku Klux Klan as a noble partisan militia, mobilized to fight for what they considered social justice.

If We’re the Resistance, That Makes You the Nazis

In the wake of the French Resistance to Hitler, that term itself took on a deeper meaning. It came to convey a desperate, heroic movement against the ultimate evil, which by the very nature of its struggle must use “any means necessary” to frustrate a tyrannical, wicked, illegitimate regime.

And that’s how the anti-populists in both political parties, and our media, and federal agencies saw themselves. When Democrats and NeverTrumpers adopted the term “Resistance” for their efforts to frustrate Trump, they were telegraphing the fact that no rules applied, no means however corrupt or even violent was off the table. They would leave no rule unbroken, no string unpulled, no method untried. That was how thoroughly they rejected the voters’ will, and how much they despised the voters.

Dog Whistles for the Attack Dogs

Hillary Clinton’s use of the word “Deplorables” quickly backfired. Instead, supporters of Trump’s center-right agenda were smeared with stickier epithets. They were outright “racists,” “white nationalists,” “Christian nationalists,” or (in Biden’s current usage) “domestic extremists.” Not fellow Americans who differed with the politics of our urban, coastal elites, but barely human time-bombs ticking, waiting to explode with violence and hate.

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We really haven’t seen this level of contempt felt by one group of Americans for another since the darkest days of segregation. That’s why I make the comparison. Remember when leftists in Washington started hounding and threatening employees of the Trump administration as they tried to eat in restaurants? They were acting like Southern whites intimidating blacks at segregated lunch counters, outraged that those whom they considered barely human were eating alongside them.

Scapegoating the Unvaccinated

Of course, things got much worse during the COVID panic, which gave (fake) public health excuses for one set of Americans to ostracize, denounce, and try to ruin the lives of another — because they wouldn’t take an experimental, abortion-derived vaccine. It was okay to wish them early deaths, and fantasize about denying them health care, or herding them into camps.

No the vaccine didn’t stop the spread of COVID, or in fact save lives as advertised. But the vaccine served its purpose: it gave our elites and those sheep who aspire to emulate them one more pretext for scorning and hating their neighbors, and stripping away their God-given rights. It was a practice session for the large-scale political persecution of Christians and conservatives. So for them it was worth it.

The Deep State Overturned the 2016 Election

As Al Perrotta explained, the Durham Report shows us just how eager our elites were to embrace massive corruption, the abuse of power, false prosecution, perjury, and all the other apparatus of tyranny to undo the voter’s choice in 2016. A president and a vice-president colluded with the FBI to pursue and publicize charges of treason they knew were false, just to frustrate the people’s will. Not in Guatemala or Cameroon. In the United States of America.

And all those Republicans and Christians of the NeverTrump movement were perfectly happy to play along. The likes of Russell Moore and David French were eager to cite and amplify the false charges, suddenly losing their capacity for asking skeptical questions or defending the rule of law. They were so desperate to join the elite campaign against the people, they didn’t ask too many questions. Instead they blathered about how Trump violated the “norms” and “decorum” proper to American politics … never mind that the FBI was violating the law.

The Lie Will Set You Free

But we should believe all these people when they assure us that the 2020 election was the most secure in history, and that the January 6 protestors — who gathered in frustration at the refusal of any court in America to examine election fraud charges on their merits — were dangerous “insurrectionists.” That they engaged in “seditious conspiracy,” and deserve long prison sentences.

We should believe that there’s nothing corrupt or anti-democratic about blue states and cities scrambling to convict Trump of some felony, to keep him off the ballot. If we doubt any of that, we could join the ranks of the scapegoats, get canceled or fired or raided by the FBI.

Move along people, nothing to see here. I said “Move along!” Unless you want to end up like Ashli Babbitt … .

 

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. He is co-author with Jason Jones of “God, Guns, & the Government.”

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