"Public opinion in the country is everything" - Abraham Lincoln.

In 1887, eminent thinker Wallace F. Campbell, writing in The North American Review, introduced the often-used term of today: The Court of Public Opinion.

As cataloged by the Library of Congress, Campbell wrote:

"It is commonly supposed that courts, juries, and counsel constitute the proper tribunal ordained by the people for the trial of alleged criminals. It has remained for the author of the "Court of Public Opinion" to assume that such is not the case, and that the machinery of justice exists merely for the purpose of automatically registering the prejudiced decision of a self-constituted tribunal ... a trial court whose judgment is infallible, and from whose decision no appeal lies, is a very unsafe tribunal for the people of this country to adopt."

Campbell may well have had the wisdom to envision what could happen 136 years later - and be talking about President Biden's and the Left's relentless campaign to send former president Trump to jail. Attorney General Merrick Garland and his aggressive prosecutor Jack Smith are expending all federal resources to build a case that, under the right circumstances of a biased jury and a sympathetic bench, could result in a judgment that might appear infallible, as Campbell said. But the eminent thinker warns that such an outcome would be hard for voters to embrace.

Indeed, the proceedings in the classified documents case are well underway. Judge Cannon has already set a trial date of May 2024, just six months before the next U.S. presidential election. Some conservatives complained that such a date is too dangerous for President Trump. What if he is found guilty of at least one charge? Democrats could not contain their glee. Running against a "criminal" would be the surest way to return President Biden to a second term.

But the Democrats could be miscalculating big time.

In roughly the past fifty years, the term “continuity of government” has been used with increased frequency describing how the United States of America, a constitutional republican system of government, contains internal mechanisms to protect the executive branch in the event of crisis, attack or disruption of leadership by adversaries.

The term ‘continuity of government‘ became much more common in the aftermath of 9-11-01 and the thunder shock of an al-Qaeda inspired terrorist attack in New York and Washington DC.

Within the very brief discussion period that led up to the 10-26-01 Patriot Act [pdf here], literally a structural reform of the entire domestic terrorist apparatus that created the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA), a bill only debated for a few weeks, the baseline was the enhanced ‘continuity of government‘ in the event of an emergency.

As we have exhaustively outlined on these pages, the outcome of the Patriot Act was to create a system where every American was now viewed by our federal government through the prism of the citizen being a potential terrorist threat.  The federal government aligned all of our institutions and systems accordingly.

DHS was created to monitor American behavior, the TSA was created to scan American travelers, and the FBI was enhanced with resources to conduct surveillance despite our Fourth Amendment protections within our Constitution.  Instead of the U.S. Govt protecting U.S. citizens from foreign threats, the Patriot Act changed the mission of government to protect itself from potential citizen threats.

In essence, We the People became the suspects, and all of the constitutional viewpoints within the FBI and Dept of Justice were modified to create monitoring systems.

Who is the emperor?  The cabal that is prepared to do anything, no matter how unconstitutional, no matter how evil, to destroy Donald Trump.  That would be Merrick Garland, Christopher Wray, and Jack Smith.  Of course, this trio of thugs has many cohorts willing to do its dirty work.

What kind of dirty work?  The kind that has made judges, the mainstream media, and most members of Congress fear being canceled.  The left's method of coercion is well known.  Cross us, and your career is over.  Read Alan Dershowitz's book, Get Trump.  The elites who believe they are uniquely entitled to run the country will cancel you, harass you, ruin you by any means necessary.  They will go after anyone who dares to deviate from their party line.

American culture has become a cesspool of abject cowardice.  And by design, now that the elites — our stable of Ivy League legacy grads who grew up knowing they would run the world without having to really know anything — are in charge.  We are living in a dystopia of their making.  It's all about leverage; everyone has some kind of leverage on everyone else, so people do what they are told.

That is how Jeffrey Epstein got away with his obscene abuse of young girls trafficked for the pleasure of his rich pals for decades.  Think Sound of Freedom and the fact that the U.S. is the number-one consumer of child porn and abuse.  Why does the left fear this film?  Hmmm.

Modern warfare has evolved into what is now termed Fifth Generation Warfare (5GW).

Even the leftist wonks at Wikipedia have summarized the evolution of warfare fairly well, in re-stating the generations of warfare concepts developed by military analysts and historians including William S. Lind, Terry Terriff, and Robert Steele:

• First-generation warfare refers to ancient and post-classical battles fought with massed manpower, using phalanx, line, and column tactics with uniformed soldiers governed by the state. This generation came to an end around the mid-nineteenth century due to rapid improvements in the range, accuracy, and rate-of-fire of many weapon systems.

• Second-generation warfare refers to industrial warfare, evolving after the invention of the rifled musket and breech-loading weapons and continuing through the development of the machine gun and indirect fire. This generation predates the widespread effective use of motorised vehicles in battle and combined arms. The term second generation warfare was created by the U.S. military in 1989.

• Third-generation warfare focuses on using late modern technology-derived tactics of leveraging speed, stealth, and surprise to bypass the enemy’s lines and collapse their forces from the rear. Essentially, this was the end of linear warfare on a tactical level, with units seeking not simply to meet each other face-to-face but to outmaneuver each other to gain the greatest advantage. Armoured units, military aircraft, and airborne forces began to play an increasingly critical role in operations, with the development of strategies such as Blitzkrieg and deep operation.

• Fourth-generation warfare as presented by Lind et al. is characterized by a post-modern return to decentralized forms of warfare, blurring of the lines between war and politics, combatants, and civilians due to states’ loss of their near-monopoly on combat forces, returning to modes of conflict common in pre-modern times. Guerrilla groups, private military contractors, and paramilitary organisations play a prominent role in fourth-generation warfare.

• Fifth-generation warfare is conducted primarily through non-kinetic military action, such as social engineering, misinformation, and cyberattacks, along with emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and fully autonomous systems.

To my way of thinking, Fifth Generation warfare centers around Information and  denial of information. That could include: intelligence, counterintelligence, propaganda, civil affairs, psychological warfare, C4CI, lawfare, targeted harassment, and war as an extension of politics, i.e. political dirty tricks or outright political warfare.

Thousands of Americans were severely punished for bravely resisting the Covid psyop.

If you were one of those people who always diligently wore an ineffective mask, got the experimental vaccine and boosters, or performatively practiced social distancing, you really owe an apology to those who stood up for civil liberties during Covid and must commit to being smarter and braver in the future. 

The Covid years mark what was arguably the greatest encroachment on personal freedom and bodily autonomy in the history of our country. The government decimated the American economy by forcibly closing businesses. It enacted unethical and anti-science mask mandates and government employee vaccine mandates, even though the Covid shots do not prevent people from spreading or contracting the virus. 

Many counties and cities made life for the unvaccinated as uncomfortable as possible, with some prohibiting them from dining in restaurants and going to the gym or entertainment venues. Meanwhile, private businesses and schools had their own social distancing, vaccine, and mask requirements, with even many churches bending the knee. 

It was at least somewhat reasonable to wear a mask or social distance at the very beginning of Covid because there were so many unknowns about the virus. Yet the insanity lasted for years, well after it was clear the response to the virus was causing more harm than good and studies showed the lockdowns were futile, cloth masks were not effective, and the vaccine was causing serious injuries.  

Abraham Lincoln at the height of the Civil War was asked if he thought the Lord was on his side. Lincoln responded, "My concern is not whether God is on our side, but whether we are on God's side."

God’s blessing of America, like many things God does, is a partnership arrangement.

For those who love our country and all for which it stands, when called to pledge our allegiance – we stand, we remove our hats, we silence our conversation. We place our hands over our hearts and we promise yet again our loyalty – as we should – to the essential intangible qualities of a free land entrusted to our care by God Almighty.

Regardless of the polarizing strains of identity politics that some promote, the vast majority of Americans still hold to the reality that we are "One Nation Under God," and that, as our Declaration of Independence states, we are "...endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable Rights... among them, Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." 

A minute or two with the headlines of any newspaper, or the first two minutes of any news channel, are enough to tell us that we need something beyond ourselves to help us. Whatever we are doing on our own, is doing little, if anything to stem the tide of cultural divisiveness, racial disharmony, pervasive political corruption and unceasing violence. We need something beyond ourselves – to help us, to save us – to bless us.

Lots to complain about, and my friends are doing a lot of that.  This article brings the complaint to a point. The author argues persuasively about the reason Republican's won't prevail in the ESG debate.  We agree on many issues; however, I would only disagree on the outcome, because it is still in process.  ESG has a principle; it's wrong, it's destructive, but they sure believe in it.  Republicans today lack the unifying principle on which our party was formed.

I would condense this reason into "the Republican party lacks the unifying principle and the understanding of the principle."

For instance, the Christian Right are all about abortion, the Never Trumps are about Never Trump, the MAGA guys are into Only Trump.  The big-gov R's are into using government to enrich themselves and their shareholders.  They all lack the principle.  The left unifies under an evil banner, and the right eats its young.

Rural America is vital to the survival of this nation.  It matters not only for the food and natural resources it produces, but as a source of inspiration, and indeed the best hope for the recovery of our constitutional republic.

The 2020 presidential election results map clearly shows that a conservative stronghold exists in most rural parts of the country, especially in the South, Midwest, and many Rocky Mountain states.  Rural America is not the hinterland of New York City or coastal California.  And yet mainstream media have largely ignored the vision and insights of rural communities for decades. 

How the Founders envisioned the future of America still matters.  Many of the leading Founders believed in a rooted lifestyle based on land ownership and saw the republic as a mosaic of individual families pursuing happiness as moral, capable, and independent-minded citizens.  Owning land was once a dream that most Americans sought to achieve, and the driving force behind it was the need to be independent from the control of others.  Jefferson, Washington, Adams, and Madison, farmers all, and all currently vilified, would have been appalled at the degree to which Americans have now forsaken the cardinal lesson of rural life: the need to be self-sufficient.  From the voices of Big Tech, large corporations, wayward governments, and the modern consumer culture, Americans are told what to think, buy, and believe. 

But it wasn't always this way. What happened?