Joe Biden has claimed that his opponents are assaulting democracy on the basis of the January 6, 2021, buffoonish riot.

But sometimes storming the Capitol Rotunda is deemed permissible—as in the recent pro-Hamas takeover of it.

And sometimes disrupting a federal government proceeding is deemed exempt—as in the recent pro-Hamas throng that blocked the route of the presidential motorcade and thus delayed the State of the Union address to the nation by 26 minutes.

So who really is attacking democracy?

[Editor’s Note: We’ve merged two short articles by Ms. Griffin on the subject of TikTok – one sounds a warning, the second offers potential schadenfreude!]

TikTok has long been a threat to the American people and U.S. intelligence agencies.

The video sharing app is staffed by 300 former Chinese state media workers and has direct ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

It was such an obvious security risk that former President Donald Trump tried to ban it with an executive order, which was then overturned by President Joe Biden — who has known sympathies with China.

Recently, TikTok was up for discussion again in Congress, with leaders on both sides of the aisle trying to decide on the best course of action for a nascent bill they were crafting. They were set to vote on the bill last Thursday.

Ironically, TikTok overplayed its hand.

The most obvious thing to leap out of Joe Biden’s weekend interview with MSNBC’s Jonathan Capeheart was Biden’s abject apology for referring to the fact that Laken Riley’s confessed killer is an illegal alien.

However, what that interview also revealed is that Biden has a very specific reason for demanding that Israel call a ceasefire in its war against Hamas: Doing so will allow Hamas to “survive” and “rebuild.”

As Israel engages in an existential fight against the self-avowed genocidal forces arrayed against her, Biden is stabbing her in the back.

"We can bear neither our diseases nor their remedies."

So shrugged the ancient historian Livy (59 B.C.-17 A.D.) of the long decline of Roman national character that, in his age, finally ended the Roman Republic.

Like a patient whose medicine proves worse than the disease, Livy lamented that the Romans knew that they had become corrupt and lawless.

But the very contemplation of the hard medicine needed for restoration -- and the furious reaction that would meet the remedy -- made it impossible to save the patient.

America is nearing such an impasse.

President Donald Trump and Joe Biden offered dueling speeches at the nation’s southern border on Thursday, but geography proved all they had in common. Standing on Texas soil a mere 325 miles apart, their policies came from different political universes.

President Trump promised the supportive people and Border Patrol agents of Eagle Pass he would reinstate the policies that undeniably gave the U.S. the most secure border in generations.

Meanwhile in Brownsville, Biden and a collection of Democratic politicians sought to shift the blame for our open border to his Republican rivals.

Former President Donald Trump is cruising toward the GOP nomination.

In the general election, Trump has a 2 point lead over President Joe Biden in the RealClearPolitics average, with most polls showing Trump ahead by anywhere from 1 to 6 points.

Throw in other candidates like RFK, Jr, Cornell West, or Joe Manchin, and Trump’s lead grows to 4-5 points. Meanwhile Biden’s mental state is declining, as are his poll numbers and the overall state of America.

Corporate media, Democrats, and Never-Trump Republicans are realizing the inevitability of a Trump second term, barring imprisonment or worse, and their panic is manifest.

An NBC News headline last week revealed palpable fear:  Fight or Flight: Fearful Trump critics weigh the risk of retribution if he’s reelected.

Many of us have experienced people in our lives who build a certain narrative which we accept despite evidence before our eyes. Sometimes it’s easier to accept the narrative, sometimes the benefit of the relationship outweighs the cost of facing the facts.

Very often, there comes a time when the dam we built to hold the facts away from our consciousness breaks. That is usually a critical moment.

The same holds for our relationship with government. We all have accepted a certain narrative about our government. The less informed talk about a “democracy.” Those who paid attention in civics class think of it as a “representative republic.”

As a member of the second group, I revere the genius of our Founders and the remarkable system they put in place resting on the Constitution.

Recently, I had an experience that broke my dam.

[Alexei Navalny gave this speech in a courtroom in 2014. Konstantin Kisin translated it into English because it is so powerful and important for us all, not only the Russians.]

How many times can a man who isn’t breaking the law give his last words? Zero. If he’s really unlucky, once. But over the last two years, I’ve been asked if I have any last words six, seven, maybe ten times.

I’ve heard this phrase many times now: “Mr. Navalny, do you have any last words?” I get the sense that my last words mark the last days for me, for someone, for everyone. I keep being asked for my last words and when I give them, I notice that these last days don’t seem to come.

[Speaking to the judges] If I took a photo of the three of you, or better still, a photo of you together with the counsel for the so-called victims in this case, you are the people with whom I have spent my recent days. I call you “people who look the other way.”1

Do you even notice that you are constantly looking down? You’re looking the other way. I am talking to you but you’re looking down all the time. None of you have anything to say.

[Speaking to the presiding judge] Elena Sergeevna, what is the phrase you keep repeating to me? All of the people I deal with—investigators, prosecutors, prison wardens, civil and criminal judges—you all keep saying the same thing to me: “Alexei, you understand the situation.” It’s true: I understand the situation, but what I don’t understand is why do you keep looking the other way?

Argentina’s Javier Milei is racking up some solid wins, with the fiscal basket case seeing its first monthly budget surplus in 12 years.

Apparently, it took Milei just nine and a half weeks to balance a budget that was projected at 5% of GDP under the previous government. In US terms, he turned a 1.2 trillion-dollar annual deficit into a 400 billion surplus. In 9 and a half weeks.

How did he do it? Easy: he cut a host of central government agency budgets by 50% while slashing crony contracts and activist handouts.

For perspective, if you cut the entirety of Washington's budget by 50%, you'd save a fast 3 trillion dollars and start paying off the national debt.

It turns out it can be done, and the world doesn't collapse into chaos.

The Left has created new rules for national politics.

Here are 20 some precedents they now have established for America in the future:

1) When in control of the Senate, demand the end of the filibuster; when not, don’t.

2) Call for the end of the Electoral College–but only if it appears to recently favor the candidate of the opposition.

3) In an election year, change any state balloting laws deemed unhelpful through administrative fiat or court order to favor your political candidate.

4) Seek to flip electors from voting in accordance with the popular vote count in their states; indict as an insurrectionist any of the opposition who dare do the same.

5) Raid the home of any opposition ex-president who removed classified files; exempt any sitting president of your party who did the same.

President Joe Biden is failing, flailing, and falling. He's clearly cognitively disabled, as even the special counsel noted when refusing to charge him with crimes over mishandling classified documents. The southern border is a wide-open and deadly mess. And though the economy never went into full recession, it sure doesn't feel like it's growing. Bidenomics means wages haven't kept up with 18% cumulative inflation since Biden took office.

Biden needs a reset and fast. What better time to blame-shift than leading up to his March 7 State of the Union Address?

America's migrant crime wave is past the point of no return. Liberal mayors and a Democrat president dismantled the border... and now are wringing their hands over the nightmare they’ve created.

The results are in - the psychotic 'sanctuary cities' experiment has utterly failed.

And there's no clearer proof than the Rotten Apple – where a once proud, party-boy mayor has been reduced to a sniveling spectator to his own city's decline.

'I can't deport. I can't stop people from coming in,' Eric Adams told Fox Nation on Wednesday, referring to suicidal sanctuary city laws that prevent New York State authorities from cooperating with federal law enforcement.

Alexei Navalny’s death may spur the West to take more decisive actions against Russia.

The wave of international outrage has been much louder than denials in Moscow, where the propaganda machine has been instructed to say as little as possible on the matter.

The US House of Representatives may now be pressured to pass the $95 billion package for aid to Ukraine, and Western governments may consider seizing foreign-held Russian assets.

Navalny’s murder signifies that the little potential that existed for peace talks with Moscow has evaporated, the fall of Vladimir Putin’s regime is not imminent, and Ukrainian victory may be the best hope for change in Russia.

Oscar Wilde wrote that “moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.” Justice Arthur Engoron took that line to heart with his absurd imposition of $455 million in fines and interest against Donald Trump and his corporation.

It succeeded wonderfully with New Yorkers, who celebrated the verdict like a popular public execution. It also worked wonderfully to make it difficult to appeal.

Watching the celebrations probably caused many executives to check time shares in Florida. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has rushed to assure businesses that there is “nothing to worry about” after the corporate public execution of Trump and his company.

But the best that politicians like Hochul and Adams can offer is that you have nothing to fear from confiscatory actions unless you are Trump in New York. Which is precisely why this decision should be overturned.

Hunter Biden has a train of a dozen lawyers defending him on felony indictments ranging from several counts of tax fraud to gun violations. From time to time, the contents of his laptop come up, both in these criminal trials and in civil suits.

But the weirdest element of the Biden labyrinth of illegality is that both Hunter and his attorneys footnote their writs and statements with the inexplicable notion that the laptop is not necessarily Hunter’s own—but then again, it could be.

Translated: The surreal truth is that Hunter is very mad that what he did illegally in part is evidenced on his own laptop, and he wants that information either suppressed or disowned, but without perjuring himself by stating the material on his laptop is not his own—because of course it is his.

The same alternate universe surrounds Joe Biden’s cognitive decline.

Jack asked me to weigh in on the immigration situation that we are currently facing, to include what advice I would give President Trump in his second term for addressing it all.  First and foremost, I would tell him that it took us a long time to get into this mess and it will take at least as long to get out of it.

We need a multi-pronged approach on both the Federal level and with the states.  Some will happily cooperate and others will have to be dragged kicking and screaming.  But more on that in a minute.

Russia’s economy benefited from increased military expenditures, but industrial production is stagnating as growth limits. Heavy prioritization of the defense industry is causing contractions in other sectors like consumer goods production.

The Russian energy sector suffers from declining revenues, delayed projects, and challenges in the global market due to sanctions. Sanctions loopholes are being closed, complicating Russian efforts to circumvent restrictions and maintain its economic model.

Ukraine’s victory against Russia hinges on economic ties and integration with Europe, which possesses superior industrial, technological, and scientific capabilities.

Special counsel Robert Hur did a great service to America last week in two ways that fundamentally and irreversibly transform the Presidential race. As a result, just like in Hillary Clinton’s ‘3 a.m. phone call’ television ad in the 2008 contest, the iPhone is buzzing in Barack Obama’s Martha’s Vineyard compound, and he had better answer it.

The last Democrat president has been warning Biden and party leaders for months -- privately and publicly through former aides like David Axelrod -- that he faces an uphill fight to win a second term.

Now that Hur’s report has detonated like a shaped charge in Biden’s political bunker, Obama is the only man on the planet who can talk Jill and Joe Biden out of standing for re-election.

[VDH at his insightful best]

It is hard to destroy a naturally beautiful city like San Francisco, with ideal weather and stunning infrastructure inherited from far better earlier generations. Yet, San Francisco continues its much-publicized and self-inflicted doom loop.

Cities like Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and New York follow the same trajectory. In all these doom-loop cities, progressive reformers in the eleventh hour are now trying to undo the very policies of those they elected, as if they are slowly waking up from a collective madness—in an election year.

Abruptly, the Democrats insist that after three years and over 10 million illegal aliens into the Biden administration, something must be done—perhaps even a rebranding of what worked in 2020 as their own.

The same rethinking of energy is occurring, as well, among the left—in an election year.

DeSantis is gone. Christie, Bergum, Scott, and Hutchinson are all gone.  And if current polling is indicative of the primary voter preferences, Haley will be out before a catastrophically embarrassing loss in her own state of South Carolina.

Therefore, President Trump is the de facto GOP candidate, and given the latest head-to-head polls, he would beat Joe Biden if the election were today.

So if Jack Smith, Judges Engoron and Chutkan, Alvin Bragg and Fani Willis, and the rest of the Deep State Bureaucracy fail to neutralize President Trump and he wins, what then?

What will a new administration, with President Trump as the 47th Chief Executive, look like, and who will man it? Here is one version of what we can expect. Here are the names of those who have demonstrated their unswerving commitment to AMERICA First and who are the top-tier choices for MAGA 2.0 to Make America Great Again. Again.

(And yes, I know I have left out the VP slot. That’s because I am privy to the president’s choice for that position but not at liberty to reveal it just yet. But don’t worry, it’s an excellent choice!)

A country cannot survive, let alone thrive, when the voting process itself has been tainted, thereby driving a significant portion of the citizenry to no longer trust in the electoral system. In the United States, we have generally been immune from this nightmare scenario, at least for the most part.

Yes, we have had our share of highly contested elections, most recently in 2000. But these situations have been much more the exception than the norm in the United States over the past two centuries.

Unfortunately, it has become clear that the 2020 presidential election did not reach this historically high bar due to the sheer level of fraud mail-in voters admitted to committing in the 2020 election.

Our story begins in the months leading up to the 2020 election, when several states, including all the critical swing states, changed their voting rules under the pretext that traditional in-person voting was dangerous due to the pandemic.  We cannot let this happen again.

Something rather amazing is happening across Western Europe, although American media outlets really would like to pretend that nothing is happening at all.

The sea change is that ordinary people are pushing back against green policies that will destroy farming (and also destroy the food supply) and against the endless immigration that’s intended to wipe out Europe’s ancient populations in favor of entirely new populations from the Muslim world and Africa (both Muslim and non-Muslim regions).

The farmer protests began last year in the Netherlands when the government announced that it intended to cut livestock farming by 30% to prevent “greenhouse gases.” It was a pure “you vill eat ze bugs” moment, and the farmers protested vehemently.

Because those policies are not limited to the Netherlands but have spread across Europe (where post-WWII socialism provided a ready landing pad for environmental madness), the same farmer protests are now in other European nations. Here’s a snapshot of what’s happening, in France, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, Spain, and Ireland.

And just like that, Canada’s storied Liberal Party, in power for one hundred years, the country's self-described "natural governing party," is done.

Before the ruling this week, Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives were projected to win 222 seats, according to Angus Reid's January 21st poll, with the Liberals at 53 seats. Trudeau’s partner-in-crime, the fetching champagne socialist Jagmeet Singh, he of the mauve headwraps and Rolex watch? Twenty-five seats.

With the decision, handed down by a federal judge, that Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act illegally, to end the truckers’ protest in Ottawa and at border crossings in Ontario and Alberta, Canada’s ruling elite has given up. They cannot continue the fiction any longer.

To illustrate how ridiculous Canada’s public life is, the findings by the RCMP and government were entirely driven by a government-funded Non-Governmental Organization, the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, or CAHN.

The group was used in a perfect illustration of the Iron Triangle of government and bureaucratic action. The government funds an anti-hate group, which immediately identifies opposition to the government, labels it as hate, feeds it to the federal police which proceeds to investigate.

Sound familiar, Americans?

Donald Trump, in furor, stormed out of a New York courtroom for a while in the defamation suit brought by author and dating/boyfriend/sex-advice columnist E. Jean Carroll.

It was just settled against Trump for $83.3 million! The Carroll suit was largely subsidized by Reid Hoffman the billionaire capitalist, and mega-donor to the Democratic Party and leftwing causes.

The subtext of Trump’s rage, aside from the outrageous monetary size of the defamation ruling, is that he was facing—and angered—a leftwing claimant, a quite hostile leftwing judge, and a leftwing New York jury.

The civil suit serves as a mere preview of four additional leftwing criminal prosecutions, leftwing judges, and leftwing juries to come—all on charges that would never had been filed if Trump either had not run for president or been a liberal progressive.

Yet here we are.

The awarding of nearly $90 million to the second-rate advice columnist E. Jean Carroll will doubtless be remembered for generations as the greatest miscarriage of justice in contemporary American history.

Jean Carroll’s case was not just ludicrous on the face of it, but between the judge, the “experts” who testified, and the mechanisms by which the case even came to be, it’s impossible for any ordinary person in the West to see this as anything more than the continuation of a series of hoaxes perpetrated on former President Donald J. Trump with the desire to keep him from re-entering the Oval Office in January 2025.

The story itself beggars belief.

TEXAS:  Understood. We will now be installing more border razor wire than ever.

Less than a day after the Supreme Court ruled that federal Border Patrol agents had the legal authority to cut through state-installed razor wire along the border, Texas National Guard soldiers were in Eagle Pass installing more razor wire as the fallout between state and federal governments escalated.

“National Guard soldiers laid out more fencing and concertina wire despite the rain that swept through the region Tuesday, according to video.  Texas National Guard soldiers are setting up more razor wire here in Eagle Pass to repel illegal crossings.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court allowed the Biden administration to remove this wire but Texas is still blocking Border Patrol from processing migrants in this area. pic.twitter.com/edptUKNobz

— Camilo Montoya-Galvez (@camiloreports) January 23, 2024”

With the shriek of elderly beldames leaping on the piano stool after spying a mouse in their ­petticoats, the Western liberal ­intelligentsia has finally ­spotted the likely result of this November’s U.S. presidential elections.

In the editorial conferences of fine old U.S. and UK publications, the leader writers are having hysterics. In the cocktail parties of Davos, I am told, the global wokerati have been trembling so violently that you could hear the ice tinkling in their negronis.

Instead of hyperventilating and clutching our pearls, we need to look dispassionately at what happened in his last ­presidency as a guide to the future. My thoughts, of course, go first to Ukraine.

It is the paramount struggle of our time, and we are still not doing enough to help that heroic nation. In the past two years Ukrainians have been laying down their lives, and bearing unimaginable hardship, in the cause of freedom — not just their own freedom, but the principles of freedom and democracy around the world.

Here’s why I believe Trump will help the Ukrainians win.