By Dr. Kevin Barrett
The biggest loser of the 2020 presidential election was neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden. Whatever the Electoral College, the courts, Congress, state legislatures or the all-powerful media may say about the results, the real loser was your constitutional freedoms under the rule of law.
The election itself both created and reflected an unprecedented level of distrust in our institutions. A Nov. 16 Vox poll showed that three-quarters of likely Republican voters believe fraud marred the election and question the media’s claim that Biden won. About 70% of Republicans don’t want Trump to concede.
As for Democrats, 60% want to abolish the Electoral College, as opposed to fewer than 20% of Republicans. Barack Obama wants to give statehood to Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico, adding four more Democratic votes to the Senate. Other Democratic proposals include allotting senators according to population, which would effectively empower coastal elites in New York and California while disenfranchising the heartland.
Many Trump supporters will never accept the legitimacy of a prospective Biden presidency, any more than Biden supporters would accept the legitimacy of another Trump term—or the first one, for that matter. It is difficult to see how such a radically polarized nation can continue to live together under one constitutional roof.
To make matters worse, that constitutional roof is leaky and rotten. If the heart of the Constitution is the Bill of Rights, we are suffering from advanced coronary disease; the ongoing rollback of our constitutional liberties is a national emergency.
Today, our federal government says it has the right to kill any or all of us, arbitrarily, for any reason it wants, at home or abroad in complete secrecy, without any form of due process or judicial review. That is what Justice Department attorney Bradley Hinshelwood argued in U.S. Appeals Court on Nov. 16. Hinshelwood isn’t making empty threats. The federal government has put many U.S. citizens on its kill list, murdering several, including children of the ostensible targets.
The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments state that no individual may be “deprived of life, liberty, or property without the due process of law.” Yet today, the feds believe they can kill any of us, any time, for any reason or no reason. It’s apparently necessary for “national security.” Doesn’t that make you feel . . . secure?
The First Amendment isn’t doing much better. Today’s public square, social media, is increasingly subject to ever-more draconian censorship. Even the president of the United States cannot post his thoughts on Twitter without triggering warning labels telling us “this claim is disputed.” Other less powerful Americans are routinely censored, harassed, de-platformed, banned, demonetized, prevented from processing payments, and otherwise silenced, simply for exercising their First Amendment right to express their views. Will obligatory Mark of the Beast™ microchips soon prevent dissidents from buying and selling—anything?
The Second Amendment is also being rolled back. A chorus of left-leaning voices, including the late retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, shortly before his death, have been demanding its outright repeal. Will gun rights survive a Biden administration?
The Fourth Amendment, for its part, is a dead letter. “Unreasonable searches and seizures”—spying on Americans without judicially reviewed probable cause—are the order of the day. The National Security Agency can flip a switch and turn your cell phone into a roving bug. And the government’s corporate partners are tracking your every keystroke in order to anticipate and subliminally control your behavior.
Is America on the brink of a Covid-triggered “Great Reset” that will eliminate our constitutionally based republic? The New York Times says the phrase “Great Reset” is just a “baseless conspiracy theory.” But the World Economic Forum (WEF) is openly advocating it. And though many of WEF’s vague proposals sound reasonable—focusing on ecological sustainability and income redistribution—building a road to the coming eco-friendly socialist paradise might require bulldozing our last remaining individual liberties.
“The virus doesn’t respect national borders,” advocates of the Great Reset tell us, “so we need to ‘build back better’ without them.” That sounds like a recipe for one-world governance. Will the battered and tattered American Bill of Rights have a place in the coming borderless world?
Those who don’t want to join the new borderless order may need to build better borders. From a metaphorical “wall” around the physical integrity of the individual (no mandatory vaccinations) to actual physical walls around regions that wish to retain the notion of sovereignty for individuals, families, and local communities, we may witness a succession of secessions from the “Globocop” one-world penitentiary. Perhaps the Deplorable Flyover States of America (DFSA) will secede from the Coastal Elite States of America (CESA). That way Trump and Biden could both be president.
We certainly have been cursed to live in interesting times.
Kevin Barrett, Ph.D., is an Arabist-Islamologist scholar and one of America’s best-known critics of the War on Terror. From 1991 through 2006, Dr. Barrett taught at colleges and universities in San Francisco, Paris, and Wisconsin. In 2006, however, he was attacked by Republican state legislators who called for him to be fired from his job at the University of Wisconsin-Madison due to his political opinions. Since 2007, Dr. Barrett has been informally blacklisted from teaching in American colleges and universities. He currently works as a nonprofit organizer, public speaker, author, and talk radio host. He lives in rural western Wisconsin.
