Declarations Of War Part 3: The Trumpets Have Sounded

Perhaps you thought I was being hyperbolic in Part 1 and Part 2 of this little series. Perhaps you indulged in the common reaction to such plaints: "Well, he has to dramatize it to make it interesting." (Alternately, "Well, what do you expect me to do about it?", but that's a subject for later in this screed.)

Gentle Reader, I don't "dramatize." I take a quasi-Will Rogers attitude toward developments: I just report the facts, according to my assessment of their significance. And we have a new "fact" this fine morning that makes all the rest glow as if they'd been nuked.

Which, if my assessments are appropriate, we might as well be.

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The Mississippi Republican primary for United States Senator, despite fervent attempts by the GOP Establishment to get us to "move on," remains one of the hottest subjects in current political discourse. The reason is simple: Chris McDaniel has not "gone quietly." He's determined to prove that Thad Cochran's margin of victory was provided by voters who were legally denied the privilege of voting in that primary. And he's made a damned good start, which has evoked an astonishing counterstroke:

Update—– Lindsay Krout, a volunteer working in Mississippi, was barred from reviewing voter rolls in Lafayette County Mississippi Friday morning.

Lindsay said when she went to the Lafayette County courthouse this morning and was forced to wait for an hour. Then the county clerk told her the Secretary of State’s office said the county had to redact the Social Security number and addresses from the voter rolls. The clerk said it will take until Wednesday to redact the information. And, the county will charge McDaniel supporters for the extra work.

Mississippi law states that the clerk must allow public viewing of the election documentation....

Lindsay said McDaniel supporters in Lowndes County and Lauderdale County faced similar pushback from the local officials. The clerks also said they would have to schedule the time so county officials could be present.

There are reports that Governor Phil Bryant wants to certify the election on Monday.

UPDATE: McDaniel supporters are facing the same pushback in Stone County.

UPDATE: The McDaniel supporters say they are facing a similar situation in Marshall County, Quitman County and Coahoma County

UPDATE: Lindsay writes, “Add Forrest County and Smith County to the list.”

It cannot get any more blatant, Gentle Reader. The Establishment -- both sides thereof -- has determined that nothing shall be permitted to deny it the outcome it demands. To that end, it will flout the election laws to the extent required, including keeping all election-related documentation secret until it's too late for the McDaniel crew to do anything about it.

Nationwide, Boards of Elections are top-heavy with Democrat partisans. That should come as no surprise. Remember Stalin's observation: "It doesn't matter who votes; it only matters who counts the votes." This is in perfect diabolic harmony with the Left's Secretary of State Project. If there's any mild surprise to be had here, it's that the Republican Establishment has secured the Left's cooperation in this instance...but given other recent developments, that might not surprise you either.

The Bipartisan Establishment will have Thad Cochran or a Democrat as United States Senator from Mississippi, and no one else.

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So what are we to do about it? A good question, especially given that America's state and local police forces have been militarized against the citizenry:

The number of raids conducted by SWAT-like police units has grown accordingly. In the 1970s, there were just a few hundred a year; by the early 1980s, there were some 3,000 a year. In 2005 (the last year for which Dr. Kraska collected data), there were approximately 50,000 raids. Some federal agencies also now have their own SWAT teams, including NASA and the Department of the Interior.

Americans have long been wary of using the military for domestic policing. Concerns about potential abuse date back to the creation of the Constitution, when the founders worried about standing armies and the intimidation of the people at large by an overzealous executive, who might choose to follow the unhappy precedents set by Europe's emperors and monarchs....

In my own research, I have collected over 50 examples in which innocent people were killed in raids to enforce warrants for crimes that are either nonviolent or consensual (that is, crimes such as drug use or gambling, in which all parties participate voluntarily). These victims were bystanders, or the police later found no evidence of the crime for which the victim was being investigated. They include Katherine Johnston, a 92-year-old woman killed by an Atlanta narcotics team acting on a bad tip from an informant in 2006; Alberto Sepulveda, an 11-year-old accidentally shot by a California SWAT officer during a 2000 drug raid; and Eurie Stamps, killed in a 2011 raid on his home in Framingham, Mass., when an officer says his gun mistakenly discharged. Mr. Stamps wasn't a suspect in the investigation.

Quoth Charles C. W. Cooke:

Historians looking back at this period in America’s development will consider it to be profoundly odd that at the exact moment when violent crime hit a 50-year low, the nation’s police departments began to gear up as if the country were expecting invasion — and, on occasion, to behave as if one were underway. The ACLU reported recently that SWAT teams in the United States conduct around 45,000 raids each year, only 7 percent of which have anything whatsoever to do with the hostage situations with which those teams were assembled to contend. Paramilitary operations, the ACLU concluded, are “happening in about 124 homes every day — or more likely every night” — and four in five of those are performed in order that authorities might “search homes, usually for drugs.” Such raids routinely involve “armored personnel carriers,” “military equipment like battering rams,” and “flashbang grenades.”

Were the military being used in such a manner, we would be rightly outraged. Why not here? Certainly this is not a legal matter. The principle of posse comitatus draws a valuable distinction between the national armed forces and parochial law enforcement, and one that all free people should greatly cherish. Still, it seems plain that the potential threat posed by a domestic standing army is not entirely blunted just because its units are controlled locally. To add the prefix “para” to a problem is not to make it go away, nor do legal distinctions change the nature of power. Over the past two decades, the federal government has happily sent weapons of war to local law enforcement, with nary a squeak from anyone involved with either political party. Are we comfortable with this?

Cooke, one of the current stars in the Right's commentary firmament, looks for justifications for such horrors from the Right...and finds only dross:

The Right’s silence on the issue is vexing indeed, the admirable attempts of a few libertarians notwithstanding. Here, conservatives seem to be conflicted between their rightful predilection for law and order — an instinct that is based upon an accurate comprehension of human nature and an acknowledgment of the existence of evil — and a well-developed and wholly sensible fear of state power, predicated upon precisely the same thing. As of now, the former is rather dramatically winning out, leading conservatives to indulge — or at least tacitly to permit — excuses that they typically reject elsewhere. Much as the teachers’ unions invariably attempt to justify their “anything goes” contracts by pointing to the ends that they ostensibly serve (“Well you do want schools for the children or don’t you? Sign here”), the increasingly muscular behavior of local police departments is often shrugged off as a by-product of the need to fight crime. This, if left unchecked, is a recipe for precisely the sort of carte blanche that conservatives claim to fear.

In a nation where "laws" (and "regulations" enforced as "laws") have proliferated so voluminously that even the most astute legal specialists cannot know them adequately, does "law and order" constitute a sufficient justification for a fully militarized police system?
An effectively nationalized police system?
Armed and armored by the Department of Defense?
Equipped with tools of surveillance beyond Orwell's imagination?
Whose myrmidons are indemnified for any acts of wrongdoing no matter how dramatic?

If so, how do these United States differ in principle from North Korea?

Don't all rush to answer at once, now.

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If there is no immediate and overwhelming reaction against all the above, the Republic will have ceased to exist.

I didn't want to say that. I want to believe that the country can still be saved. I've struggled to believe it, against an accumulating tide of adverse evidence. But the Establishment's blatant moves to derail the McDaniel campaign's election validation efforts, coupled to accelerating efforts to suppress opinion the Establishment finds uncongenial, signal that the short strokes are being struck. If we tolerate a police system in place equivalent to a million-man domestic military, poised to act against "troublemakers" and guaranteed against legal repercussions for any and all consequences, no slightest chance of recovery will remain to us. It will be time to "go Galt."

Here's the procedure:

• Make yourself as mobile as possible.
• If you're an employee, become a "contractor."
• Try to arrange to be paid in a medium other than dollars.
• Get your minor children out of the government's schools at once.
• Convert your assets to the most stable and portable forms available to you.
• Remove all pointers to you or your family from any media available to the State.

Consider seriously whether you're ready to try the last alternative to this madness. And pray.