I am a man born in the former British-Indian capital who currently resides, researches, and works in the United Kingdom, and am agnostic about the royals. That is to say, I don’t care who lives and who quits. But that is beyond the point.

The constitutional and parliamentary monarchy is an institution in United Kingdom’s DNA, a balance of power historically developed since the Magna Carta to the industrial revolution, and it gives back a lot more to the state than it takes.

The reason for Harry and Meghan’s departure is pure liberal-individualist narcissism. And both are equally responsible for that. Duty, stoicism, propriety, and patriotism are supposed to be the four cornerstones of nobility.

Unfortunately, Harry has too much of Princess Diana in him, from compulsively breaking orthodoxy and tradition, to extreme and fatalistic narcissism. As Emma Freire recently wrote, with him it is all noblesse, with zero oblige.

We were four minutes in to the Dem debate in Des Moines last night (1/14), somewhere on the outskirts of Mideast foreign policy, when the boredom began to take hold. ‘They couldn’t find some of Iowa’s world-renowned meth to spice this stage up at bit’, I muttered, as I cracked open another beer and wondered who in his or her right mind would subject themselves to watching this.

The Democrat frontrunners remain, in order, a doddering septuagenarian who can’t reliably remember what state he’s in, a hectoring schoolmarm, a 78-year-old Communist who has never accomplished anything in 30 years in Congress, and a weird, hairy child from South Bend whose eyebrow waxing gets more meticulous with each passing debate.

That, of course, is Mayor Pete who, when asked about damage caused to local farms and factories due to seasonal flooding in Iowa, pivoted to discussing ‘fire tornados’ in Australia. He blamed both on climate change.

Who is Q? What is Q? And, perhaps most importantly, why is Q?  Q and the ever-growing worldwide movement it’s inspired have been the objects of fascination, mockery and hatred, but of surprisingly little serious analysis.

In recent weeks, the tempo of Trump’s spotlighting of Q has accelerated, with the President retweeting Q followers twenty times in one day. Trump has featured Q fans in his ads and deployed one of Q’s signature phrases (“These people are sick”) at his rallies. The President’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, has also retweeted Q followers.

If you’re unfamiliar with Q or only know it through the media’s attacks, I’d like to provide a brief introduction to this extraordinary phenomenon. I’ve followed Q since the first drop, and I’ve grown increasingly impressed by the accuracy, breadth and depth of Q’s messages.

I’ve compiled a list of Q’s most famous catch phrases and tried to put them into context.  Here they are.

How imbecilic are those Republicans trying to make a name for themselves by opposing the unconstitutional Schiff/Pelosi articles of impeachment?

Susan Collins, Rob Portman, probably the self-serving Mitt Romney, are each trying to be the biggest monkey wrenches in an already ridiculous endeavor to remove President Trump from office.  [With a 53-seat majority, it will take 3 of them to torpedo Josh Hawley’s (R-MO) Motion to Dismiss.]

Each of them should just admit they are Democrats at heart and switch parties. How else to explain their betrayal of their own party?

If they do not realize by now that the impeachment over a boring phone conversation with the president of Ukraine is as big a hoax as the Russia-collusion story from the outset, they are too dim to have any political power in the Republican Party.

"Perhaps nothing so accurately characterizes dysfunctional families as denial. The denial forces members to keep believing the myths and vital lies in spite of the facts, or to keep expecting that the same behaviors will have different outcomes." 

—John Bradshaw

As everyone knows, there are thousands of books, memoirs, and fiction, about dysfunctional families.  To paraphrase Tolstoy, happy families are generally the same, but unhappy families are each unhappy in their own way.

But to peruse the plethora of such books, it might be truer that unhappy families are unhappy in much the same ways, their differences a matter of degrees.  Young children know only what they know, how their own family functions.  Memoirs like Educated and The Glass Castle, for example, are shocking to those fortunate enough to have had loving, peaceful, and essentially normal childhoods if there is such a thing.

While dysfunctional homes can produce and have produced successful children who, as gradually exposed to the homes of other families and the outside world, saved themselves by sheer will and talent.  But most children of dysfunctional families are forever damaged, condemned to a life of misery and distorted reality.  They remain resistant to the facts of life that govern the world around them.  They are perpetually angry and unhappy.

Remember “politics stops at the water’s edge”?

In the Trump era, that patriotic phrase isn’t only dead, it’s decomposed.

And ironically so, since the latest manifestation of this decomposition is over the termination of Qassem Soleimani, the terror mastermind who was, on analysis, even more dangerous to the United States and the world than Osama bin Laden and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, monumentally evil as they were.

Neither bin Laden nor al-Baghdadi ever had remotely the power at their disposals—even when the latter controlled his caliphate—that Soleimani did as the military leader of by far the greatest state sponsor of terrorism. They weren’t even close to the man who was head of Iran’s Quds force and the second most powerful person in that country of 80-plus million, with all its attendant weaponry and technology and ties to China and Russia.

[Note by JW:  TTP is pleased to follow the advice of Joe Katzman and Skye in requesting Yasuhiko Kimura’s Forum post as a TTP article.  As Joe comments: “This is, by far, the best and most consequential thing you [Yasuhiko] have ever posted here. TTPers need to read this over a couple of times, and consider how absolutely pervasive its implications are. It destroys the standard conservative notion of politics, and replaces it with a truthful construct that is of actual use in navigating modern politics.]

Looking at the human nature and the political games the humans play, we can observe the following:

Human beings are status-seeking beings. Ergo, most humans seek to achieve as high a social status as possible.

In order to achieve and maintain the highest social status possible for themselves, most humans would willingly sacrifice personal comfort, happiness, enjoyment—that is, they would willingly endure suffering.

Correlatively, human beings are power-seeking beings. Power is centripetal. Power tends to become concentric and concentrated. Ergo, power holders seek to concentrate power unto themselves.

Power holders seek to attract and then keep subordinates not on the basis of competency but on the basis of (blind) loyalty in order to maintain and concentrate power.  They do this by promulgating nonsense rather than reason.  Here is why.

[Note by JW:  This is an astounding essay strongly recommended by TTPers Joe Katzman and Yasuhiko Kimura.  It is definitely worth your reflecting deeply upon it.]

It’s 100 years now since the Russian Revolution. The Soviet Union. Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Leninism. It’s been 100 years already, but you realize how present the whole thing remains when you look at the press these days.

I’m not very interested in Lenin, the man; but I’m very interested in Leninism. Lenin is very dead (if not yet buried, I wonder what Putin is waiting for); but Leninism is quite alive. And the Western press has just realized that China, the second power in the world, in place to become the first in a few years, is a Leninist state.

The West is scared because Leninism is effective. Yes, sure, the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991; but lasting 74 years is no mean feat. And at any rate, the very establishment of the Soviet Union was a superhuman feat. It was something amazing, and amazed was the whole intelligentsia of the Western world for many decades.

Marxism completely captured the intellectual classes of the whole world for over a century. In China it’s still the official orthodoxy, taught in schools. In the West it’s still with us, if in the morphed form of Cultural Marxism.  Which is why now we have gay marriage and black transexuals running for office.

The rhetoric about the so-called “War on Terror” has led us down the wrong path for 20 years. Terrorism is a tactic. We are not at war with terror.

Similarly, our fight is not against radical or extreme Islam. When it comes to the Middle East, particularly Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, it is imperative that we understand the true nature of the threat.

We are fighting Islamic Fascism—the political idea in which state actors or nonstate actors are using Islam to rule people through the use of violence. This is not about Islam itself, but rather about belligerents hijacking the religion for their own political purposes.

The ongoing war in Afghanistan has shown that we can’t win with just guns and money; we have to win the war of ideas. To permanently defeat the Islamic Fascists, we must first delegitimize their ideology.

The only way to do this is by ensuring the success of two areas being governed in the exact opposite manner, the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria and the proposed Nineveh Plains Province.

Many wise pundits and political commentators keep saying Nancy Pelosi didn't want to do this impeachment... that she's smarter than this, that she was forced into it by the ridiculous, ignorant women who call themselves the Squad.

These same pundits claim that the Squad is now running the Democrat party.  But this does not make any sense, since Pelosi admitted a week or so ago, when asked why she was rushing impeachment, that the Democrats had been at this for twenty-two months!

Of course they have, for even longer than that.  As several Democrats have admitted, the plan to impeach began while Trump was still a candidate.  The plan is Nancy’s and still is.

Rep. Alexandria O-C (D-NY) (aka Alexandria Occasional-Cortex, herein abbreviated “O-C” may have anticipated a long and prosperous career in Congress, but if the Democrats in New York’s state legislature have their way, the freshman Member may be out of a job as soon as 2022.

According to pollster Frank Luntz, New York is likely to lose a seat in Congress after the 2020 census and Democrats in the state legislature will have to redraw the state’s Congressional districts as a result.

Although there are plenty of places to cut, New York Dems are reportedly eyeing O-C’s Bronx district for elimination because she’s been out of sync with state-level Democrats who control the process.  They really, really don’t like her.

From the first years of a century already one-fifth completed, we’ve been told that a new, “ascendant America” — more nonwhite, more culturally liberal, more feminist — was going to dominate our politics for years to come.

But President Trump’s victory in 2016 has made a mockery of the predictions. He wasn’t ascendant America’s choice.

Demographics, it turns out, don’t automatically turn into destiny. Ascendant groups’ triumphalism can coalesce those with opposite values into unaccustomed unity and enthusiasm. Ascendant leaders, not cautioned by sympathetic media, can concoct extreme policies (Green New Deal, anyone?) unsellable to most voters.

The year 2019 might go down in history as the funniest 365 days in American politics. “Get-Trump” videos work as a pretty good stand-in for funny cat videos: Always taking themselves too seriously, overreacting to stimuli, and exhibiting a hilarious lack of self-awareness.

So, in order to spread some New Year cheer, I have compiled a shortlist of my favorite videos of get-Trumpers and their hilarious hijinks. Let’s get right to the list:

12) If we don’t impeach, he might win the election.

How do the get-Trumpers respond to the argument that the American people can decide for themselves in 2020 whether to get rid of Trump? The ironically-named “Democrats” say, “Yes, and that’s the problem!” No, really. I’m not making this up. U.S. Representative Al Green (D-Texas) was asked, “Are you afraid this talk will help the president’s re-election?” Green responded, “I’m concerned that if we don’t impeach this president, he will get re-elected.”

It is popular on the NeverTrump Right and everyone on the Left to claim that President Trump has “failed” as we head into an election year. But his supposed failures are instructive.  Like Fake News, they are Fake Failures.

Take the wall.  After three years of mockery insisting Trump has not built his wall, he nonetheless has attempted almost every imaginable method to do it. And now the invective over the last few months has begun to alter.

If Trump between 2017 and 2019 was mocked as an obsessive Ahab pathetically and in vain chasing his Great White Wall, he now is being redefined as a dangerous xenophobe, whose American version of the Maginot Line may soon become dangerously reified.

The same ambiguity is true of many of Trump’s other “failures.”

2024? What? Don’t we have the 2020 presidential election to deal with first? Has the fat lady already sung?

Yes, maybe she has.

Just look at the booming economy with lowest-ever unemployment, the utter failure of the Mueller Russia investigation (with severe punishments for the investigators themselves possibly ahead), the embarrassing, ludicrously partisan impeachment – plus Trump’s extraordinarily well-organized, high-tech 2020 campaign under the management of Brad Parscale and Jared Kushner that even the devoutly liberal Axios couldn’t help but admire.

So, on to 2024.

Republicans dismiss Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s refusal to transmit the impeachment articles to the Senate as a weak stunt. They do so at the peril of both the Constitution and President Trump. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell may be a master tactician, but Mrs. Pelosi is no slouch.

It’s now been more than a week since the House impeached Mr. Trump, and Mrs. Pelosi has yet to name impeachment managers or formally send over the paperwork. Democrats claim they are delaying in the name of “fairness,” withholding the articles until Mr. McConnell agrees to new witnesses and evidence in a Senate trial.

Republicans are ridiculing the tactic, pointing out that Mrs. Pelosi has no authority to dictate the form of a Senate trial and no leverage over Mr. McConnell.

Both points are true but irrelevant. Republicans err in thinking Mrs. Pelosi’s goal is to craft a Senate trial to her liking—and even in presuming Mrs. Pelosi wants a trial at all.

The Wall Street Journal sends a daily email to subscribers with highlights from the news. Today’s (12/26) email begins:

“Stocks and bonds are staging an extraordinary run. They are on track for their biggest simultaneous gains in more than two decades. The S&P 500 has soared 28.6% this year, while a bond rally has pushed the yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note down by three quarters of a percentage point. Yields move inversely to prices.

Behind this year’s gains: An improving economic outlook, progress on trade and the Fed’s interest-rate cuts.  The progress on trade includes, most recently, China’s announcement that it will lower tariffs on more than 800 product categories.”

And that’s just for openers for good news for all Americans.

We hear a great deal these days about the “deep state,” especially as it applies to the Trump Administration. The president’s supporters use the term to describe the entrenched federal bureaucracy and what they believe to be its efforts to derail the president’s policies.

Until recently, the president’s critics have dismissed the idea of a deep state as a crazy right-wing conspiracy.  But, in fact, the deep state is a particularly virulent form of the “administrative state,” which has been described by such scholars as John Marini, Ronald Prestritto, and Paul Moreno as a perversion of constitutional self-government.

It is a “fourth branch of government” that fits nowhere within the scheme of the Constitution as understood by its authors. It is enabled by Congress’s unconstitutional delegation of its legislative powers to the executive, leading to the creation of the pestilent “alphabet agencies” that plague American life.

[Note by JW:  This is absolutely one of VDH’s best.  Here is the money quote.  Consider sending the quote to everyone you know.

 “If and when fascism comes to America, it will not arrive with jackboots, stiff arms, and military uniforms. The attempt to suppress political opposition in anti-constitutional fashion, to regiment the economy by denying constitutionally protected freedoms, and the efforts to change the Constitution to reflect political utility, will come under the auspices of ‘equality,’ ‘fairness, ‘saving the planet, and ‘social justice—as a way to combat ‘climate change,’ ‘racism,’ ‘homophobia,’ and ‘sexism’.”  ---Victor Davis Hanson

Be sure and read and absorb this masterful VDH essay entire. – JW]

Last Thursday (12/19), the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, Mark Galli, wrote an editorial calling for the impeachment of President Donald Trump.

In my view, this editorial only serves to confirm one of the sadder realizations of my life: that religious conviction guarantees neither moral clarity nor common sense.

The gist of the editorial -- and of most religious and conservative opposition to President Trump -- is that any good the president has done is dwarfed by his character defects.

This is an amoral view that says more about Galli than it does about the president. He and the people who share his opinion are making the following statement: No matter how much good this president does, it is less important than his character flaws.

Why is this wrong?

It is said there are two things you should never watch being made: sausage and government budgets.

Now we can add impeachment to the list of stomach-turning sights to avoid.

The arcane rules, phony cordiality and debates over the second sentence in paragraph G of Point Six were bad enough, but the nausea meter hit the roof when Nancy Pelosi took the microphone. Wearing a funereal black dress, she stood next to a cardboard American flag and recited the Pledge of Allegiance.

I would have counted her more honest if she had pledged her allegiance to a Democrat donkey.

In a series of tweets this morning (12/19), legal eagle and talk show host Mark Levin gave some pointers to Senator McConnell on how to handle Speaker Pelosi’s refusal to send the articles of impeachment over to the Senate.

Levin said:

“Nancy Pelosi was apparently advised by leftwing Harvard law professor Lawrence Tribe to delay sending the impeachment to the Senate.  So she’s unilaterally sitting on the impeachment. This is another brazen unconstitutional act.

Here’s what Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans must do in response: 

[This is the full text of the President’s to Pelosi issued yesterday, 12/17.  The italics are ours for emphasis. –JW]

THE WHITE HOUSE Washington December 17, 2019

The Honorable Nancy Pelosi Speaker of the House of Representatives Washington, D.C. 20515

Dear Madam Speaker:

I write to express my strongest and most powerful protest against the partisan impeachment crusade being pursued by the Democrats in the House of Representatives. This impeachment represents an unprecedented and unconstitutional abuse of power by Democrat Lawmakers, unequaled in nearly two and a half centuries of American legislative history.

The Articles of Impeachment introduced by the House Judiciary Committee are not recognizable under any standard of Constitutional theory, interpretation, or jurisprudence. They include no crimes, no misdemeanors, and no offenses whatsoever. You have cheapened the importance of the very ugly word, impeachment!

 By proceeding with your invalid impeachment, you are violating your oaths of office, you are breaking your allegiance to the Constitution, and you are declaring open war on American Democracy.

The decision by the Supreme Court last Friday (12/13) to review the lower court rulings involving congressional and prosecution subpoenas directed toward President Trump undercuts the second article of impeachment that passed the House Judiciary Committee along party lines last week.

That second article of impeachment charges President Trump with “obstruction of Congress” for refusing to comply with the congressional subpoenas in the absence of a final court order.

In so charging him, the House Judiciary Committee has arrogated to itself the power to decide the validity of subpoenas, and the power to determine whether claims of executive privilege must be recognized, both authorities that properly belong with the judicial branch of our government, not the legislative branch.

Therefore, the Supreme Court decision to review these three cases, in which lower courts ruled against President Trump, provides support for his constitutional arguments in the investigation.

Donald Trump certainly is mercurial at times. He can be uncouth.

But then again, no president in modern memory has been on the receiving end of such overwhelmingly negative media coverage and a three-year effort to abort his presidency, beginning the day after his election.

Do we remember the effort to subvert the Electoral College to prevent Trump from assuming office?

The first impeachment try during his initial week in office?

Attempts to remove Trump using the ossified Logan Act or the emoluments clause of the Constitution?

The idea of declaring Trump unhinged, subject to removal by invoking the 25th Amendment?

The Left media spent yesterday (12/11) furiously spinning their interpretation of what the DOJ's I.G. Report had to say: that Horowitz's report proved there was no bias behind the abuse of the FISA court warrants the FBI secured by lying outright and omitting all exculpatory material.

Of course, not one of those left-media types bothered to read the nearly 500-page document. They relied on the leftist-media headlines extracted from the summary of the project.

Why Horowitz insisted he found no "testimonial nor documentary evidence of bias" is a mystery.  Was he trolling the Democrats, who are consumed with impeachment madness, or was he relying on the obvious fact that no one copped to being part of the attempted coup?  Who knows?

It is more entertaining to think he was trolling the Left, knowing leftists would buy that one statement and not bother to read the results of his nineteen-month investigation.  Here’s why that could be.

Barr was motivated to make the public statements, he said, by the misreporting and confusion surrounding Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report issued on Dec. 9. It found serious government surveillance abuses but no evidence of political bias on the part of the offending FBI officials and agents.

Below are 24 points Barr felt the need to make after the release of the Horowitz report. (All of the information is attributed to Barr.)  See how he destroys the Obama FBI.  It is devastating.

Whether seen through the “5,000 years of history” narrative (which ignores scientific archaeological perspective that dates Chinese civilization to 3,500 years ago) or the professor who was suspended for dismissing China’s “four great inventions,” the demand to acknowledge “cultural superiority” is pervasive and substantial at all levels of Chinese society.

Against this backdrop, Xi Jinping’s announcement of “The Chinese Dream of the Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation” made the West realize that China had its mind set on walking a exceptional, nationalist path – one “with Chinese characteristics” — all along.

What is troubling is that China’s nationalism is ethnic-based and built upon both a thoroughly racist cultural superiority and a narrative of victimhood.  This is why Beijing consistently acts as if the feelings of the Chinese people are the only ones that matter – no one else’s in the world does.

Location of the FISA Court: the third floor of the E. Barrett Prettyman Courthouse in Washington

The Justice Department’s inspector general has concluded that, although officials of the FBI, the Justice Department, and the CIA made copious “mistakes” in their four requests to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to spy on Donald Trump’s campaign and presidency, those officials did nothing that warrants punishment.

In so concluding, Inspector General Michael Horowitz rejected the charge that those “mistakes,” including silence about the known falsehood of the supporting evidence and the omission of exculpatory evidence, had been intentional, and hence a fraud on the court.

Horowitz’s retreat into what we must now call the Comey-Clinton Crouch—detail the misdeeds, relabel them, and decline to do anything about them—means that the deep state has closed ranks.

Hence, any remedy must come from above, and must inflict rough Roman justice.

With her announcement that Democrats will move forward and vote on articles of impeachment, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) may have signed a political death warrant for dozens of moderate Democrats elected in Trump districts.

Pelosi is speaker today because in 2018 Democrats were able to convince voters in 31 House districts Donald Trump carried two years before to defect and vote for them. Democrats need these voters to stay in their column in 2020 if they are to hold onto the House and win back the White House.

But in key swing states, large majorities of these 2018 defectors now say they plan to back Trump again in 2020, as the New York Times reported.  Now, Pelosi is adding to their woes by forcing them to vote to recommend the removal of a president that voters in their districts say they plan to reelect.

Are voters really going cast ballots to give Trump four more years and also to reelect the Democrat House members who tried to take that decision out of their hands by impeaching him?

The Democrats’ Ukrainian impeachment gambit is backfiring on Joe Biden.

The American public often is reminded, usually by Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and their loyalists in the American news media, that Obama’s eight-year reign was “scandal-free.” Of course, that is nowhere near the truth.

From the “Fast and Furious” gun-running scam and IRS targeting of Tea Party activists to the egregious Benghazi terror attack cover-up two months before the 2012 election, the Obama Administration was among the most corrupt in U.S. history. And they have laughed all the way to Martha’s Vineyard and the Democrat presidential debate stage.

So truth-seekers should be gratified that on one day—Monday, December 9, 2019—the spin and subterfuge that the Obama White House successfully employed to hide their rampant malfeasance started to collapse under the full weight of its deceit and hubris.

Here’s what happened.

The guy in the middle says he’s a woman

This is to introduce to you the term Transjacking – transgender males entering and dominating women's sports at all levels, taking away opportunities that women have fought years to win.  It’s the latest effort by the Left in its war on women.

This Friday (12/06), the top four NCAA Division III women’s soccer teams face off in the national semifinals. One of the final four teams’ goalkeepers, Isa Berardo, is a male transgender playing as a female for Pomona-Pitzer Colleges.

Not surprisingly, the male goalie has dominated the field against opposing female players, giving his team a chance to win the national championship thanks to his physical advantages in a key position.

This is increasingly happening throughout women’s sports, at all levels from elementary school through professional competitions.

It needs to be called Transjacking, and it’s creating not equality, but inequality. Here are just a few of the many ways women and girls are losing to their impersonators.

Peter Strzok - Poster Boy for the Arrogance of Deep State Corruption

One symptom of a society in crisis is the unreliability or even corruption of its own auditors.

After all, when the watchmen have lost moral authority to watch, who can be believed or trusted? Or, as the Roman satirist Juvenal famously put it, “Who will guard the guardians?”

After FBI Director James Comey was fired, he leaked his own memos of private and confidential conversations with the president. Whether Mr. Comey would go to jail hinged on how the FBI would categorize his memos post facto — as merely “confidential,” or as “secret” or “top secret.”

Two of the adjudicators were Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, Comey friends and FBI subordinates. The FBI eventually ruled that the leaking of the memos was not felonious.  Which is why they exemplify, as do so many others, the Deep State Corruption tearing our country apart.

I’m told that I’m not supposed to feel like this — or, at least, that if I do feel like this, I’m not supposed to say so in public. People worked on that campaign, you see. People tried really hard. But that, I’m afraid, is a load of old nonsense.

Harris was running for the presidency, which is another way of saying that she was running to acquire power. I did not want her to have that power. It is true that some people tried their best to help her gain that power. They’re probably upset today. But they’ll get over it. She’s not that special.

On the contrary: She’s a would-be tyrant whose primary contribution to American life thus far:

How oily can you get?

Everyone knows by now that the Russia collusion hoax was all about covering up the crimes that higher-ups in the FBI, CIA, and DOJ committed to derail the Trump candidacy and then presidency.

Robert Mueller never really investigated Trump; he knew from day one he had not colluded with any Russians to rig the election.  He knew that the Clintons and the DNC, with the willing cooperation of the alphabet agencies, all of which it seems willingly submitted to personal political agendas over national security, were guilty of inventing the deception.

Mueller's job was to find ways to obscure their coup attempt and absolve them of their treasonous crimes.  That is why the phonied-up dossier was barely mentioned in his report even though there would have been no sham investigation of Trump without it.

What scared Schiff's witness, the oily Lt. Col. Vindman, when listening in on the President's conversation with Zelensky, was the words "investigation" and "Burisma" in the same sentence – because he knows exactly who and how many swamp-dwellers have been getting illegitimately rich via Burisma.

And get ready for learning that Nancy Pelosi’s son is just as deep in Ukraine corruption as Joe Biden’s.

Regardless of who wins in 2020, the mega-issue that drove the 2016 elections will grip the country more intensely than ever.

Between 2016 and 2020, we have been pressed as never before to bow to the ruling class’s ever-escalating demands for conformity to its whims—such as to pretend that we join them in accepting that men can be women, and women can be men, on pain of dire social and economic consequences.

Not even the monsters depicted in Darkness At Noon, in Nineteen Eighty-Four or in Animal Farm, never mind Stalin’s Soviet Union or Mao’s China, or Hitler’s Germany, ever demanded such subrational submission.

Superficially, the ruling class’s “resistance” since 2016 has focused on Trump. Our temptation to focus on fights regarding Trump has obscured the fact that their objection is to us.

The instant after the 2020 elections, whatever happens, there will be no excuse for not paying due attention to the real question: What will become of us? What can we, what must we, do for ourselves?

Beijing’s efforts to expand its power in Central Asia by investment and cooperation with the governments in the region are currently being undercut by the reactions of Central Asian populations to China’s repression of their co-ethnics and fellow Muslims in Xinjiang.

Many members of the Central Asian nationalities currently living in Xinjiang have ancestors who escaped there after the Soviets crushed the Basmachi movement (Turkestan Liberation Organization) in the 1920s and 1930s.

But over the past several months, they have been fleeing western China in increasing numbers and, upon arrival to their ancestral homelands, telling their co-ethnics about the concentration camps that the Chinese authorities have confined them to in the hopes of “re-educating” them away from Islam and national traditions and toward Beijing’s preferred values.

The massive scale of this flight was highlighted in a recent report issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Kazakhstan.

Prior to last week, for days Adam Schiff had concocted a pretty effective fix.

He conducted secret impeachment inquiries in the House basement. Schiff kept quiet about his rigged rules. He orchestrated selective media leaks from the opening statements of favorable witnesses and then more or less threatened with ethical violations any Republican member who copied his tactics and leaked their own often effective cross-examinations.

The result was that the public heard only from Schiff about Schiff’s damning slam-dunk hearings. A drip-by-drip melting of both Trump’s polls and resistance to impeachment followed.

Schiff emerged for brief soundbites, bit his lip, and for a minute or two regretted the tragedy of having to hear damaging testimony about his own president.

But then Schiff’s Hubris finally lured in Nemesis. So quo vadis?  Where do the Dems go marching to now?

Next year’s Tokyo Summer Olympics may spell the swift death of the transgender movement as a dominant politically-correct touchstone.

Biological men, self-identifying as women, are poised to make a clean sweep of the Women’s Olympics, triggering a very public debate on this third-rail subject. That firestorm, pitting pro-women feminists against extreme pro-transgender progressives, will begin July 24th, just as the Presidential sweepstakes moves into its sprint to the finish line.

It could, in fact, deconstruct the entire progressive coalition. Currently, that umbrella of competing needs appears to be held together by duct tape and baling wire.