Do you know who controls the nuclear launch codes? It was the President once but nobody trusts it to Pedo Joe – so who? Joe/Ho don’t control the executive branch of government. They don’t even let the Ho out to cut ribbons on bridges.

It’s a serious question and it speaks to your question. If we don’t know who is running things, what sort of government is it?

Dead /now/?

Come on.

This is downstream of the Democrat convention in 1860.

They had three candidates, split the vote, and lost to a guy with 40% of the popular vote.

So they decided, ‘democratically’, to take their ball and go home. Major strategic mistake.

War is not the exception, peace is the exception. To exit a nation and have a peace treaty after, you need to have a negotiated exit.

Dems did not want to negotiate an exit, or to resign themselves to playing obstructionist games in congress.

So, they tried to force an exit, created the state of war, and lost.

Then they tried to kill Lincoln and some others. Lincoln was maybe the one dude who could mediate the various factions.

He was replaced by Andrew Johnson, who pissed off the Radical Republicans.

Thus Reconstruction.

Which pissed off the Democrats. ‘Waah, waah, waah, unfair’. The Democrats made a moral argument against Reconstruction, which some Republicans listened to, and acted on, as well as on their own sense that pushing things too hard would screw over their own republican goals. The Democrats also carried out a campaign of terrorism and election fraud.

Democrat power in the Federal congress, later, and quite a few Democrat presidential ‘victories’ were deeply and fundamentally a result of Democrat political fraud, and political terrorism in the South. The people who would have voted Republican were suppressed.

Wilson and FDR at a minimum were tyrants who built on that base level of Democrat support for fraud and terrorism. FDR in particular created and weaponized federal offices, and was able to use them to curate Republican politicians, and cause the second major shift in the institutional culture of the Republican Party. (First major shift, post ACW, was the shift away from Radical Republicanism. Partly this was the fault of the Mugwumps, and partly the fever pitch of the Radical Republicans was too intense to sustain for many decades.)

The key to what happened later had to do with black voters abandoning the GOP, because of Republican politicians taking them for granted, and ceasing to do anything to buy black votes. FDR, who could very well have terrorized the blacks if they had refused, picked up a lot of nominal support from black voters. This provided an excuse for claiming ‘the parties switched places’, which was the path the Democrats took advantage of to abandon Segregation, which was starting to lose political viability.

Their post Segregation path was 1) a consent decree forbidding Republicans from litigating elections stolen by Democrats 2) abuse of the DoJ ‘Civil Rights’ organization to litigate on behalf of the Democratic Party on election disputes.

The 2020 cycle was in no way shape or form a new pattern of behavior.

To suppose that 2020 alone was fraud, that no other elections before were fraud, and that no other electoral disputes were improperly addressed by a corrupt judiciary is absurd.

Obama never behaved as if he had thought that a majority of whites had voted for him, which was what the official records claimed.

The 2016 cycle made it clear that political polling at a minimum had serious problems of methodology.

2020? Polling organizations are mostly coopted, and aligned to fraud schemes.

The minimum hypothesis is that Obama frauded his way in, and from bitterness with HRC, did not fraud extra on her behalf, and her own fraud was accidentally not enough.

The likely hypothesis is that 1992, and 1996 were also fraud.

It looks a lot like the 2000, 2004, 2008, and 2012 GOP primaries were fixed by a ‘Bush’ or ‘GOPe’ faction that collaborates with the Democrats, and fears losing influence inside the GOP much more than they fear what the Democrats will do with the GOPe assistance and cooperation. The defining detail that confirms this hypothesis was Laura Bush’s comment about children trafficked over the border, when she opposed Trump instead of opposing the horrors of shipping a bunch of children across a desert. That was her husband making a choice about what he asked his proxy to do. That choice showed that the Bushes were never on the side of human decency, freedom, or justice.

That the Republic is only now dead, and not eighty years ago, and not one hundred fifty years ago is a risible falsehood.

The situation is absolutely horrible, yes. However, we have thought that the republic existed during other historical periods, with similar behaviors.

The issues now are threefold. One, the opposition’s information control is breaking down. Pre cellphone cameras, it probably would have been possible to hide Fauci’s failures to mask, and Birx’s failures to mask, and perhaps Fauci and Birx would still be in power, instead of having to retire over the scandal of their bullshit. Two, the opposition is out of their mind, because they religiously believe in a thoery of human behavior, that theory is incorrect, and they are sure that a little more intimidation will make people fall in line for being abused. They try to escalate, stupidly and blindly, because they mispredict the thought and feeling of the other people that they are trying to manipulate. Third, most of us have ‘rats’ in our heads, because we don’t practice a pure enough form of our religions, and syncratize it with practice of the opposition’s ‘theory causes reality’ religion. We treat theoretical models, similar to left theory of behavior, as being things that we ‘know’. We actually know very few things, and will be saner and happier if we pay attention to that, and catch where we jump to conclusions.

Fundamentally, ‘is the republic dead now’ is a problem that involves the innermost hearts of almost everyone in the US. At the most we have information about our own hearts. One of the mistakes that gets made is ‘other people not acting on what I care about, republic must be dead’. Another is mistaking aggregate type information as being a) honest b) necessarily descriptive of that many individuals. (We basically have no information about nationwide collections of individuals that is not potentially a lie.)

The most reliable estimating is off of our own experiences, and what we saw directly in other people in actual real life. And this is very very vulnerable to clusters and ‘choice’ of sample. I certainly cannot be sure that I am not a ‘spiders Georg’ where this stuff is concerned.

There are at least a half dozen inferences that subtle details of this demonstrate. That Biden is an Obama proxy. That the venom against Trump is partly HRC’s personal bitterness. That the Democrats are still angry about losing the ACW. That the Democrats are still mad about being excluded from congress after the ACW. That January Sixth was a crime by Pelosi, if it was a crime by anyone. That the ‘firey mostly peaceful’ activism of the 2010s and 2020s is basically the same MO as the ‘white supremacist’ terrorism of the 1920s and 1930s.

To me, ‘the Republic is dead /now/’ is a risible falsehood. ‘America is gone now’ seems to me as blind and foolish as ‘we should study whether this could be the end times’. I) Same awful answers to a horrible situation that were viable in earlier historical times. IE, ‘we cannot make elections or government nice everywhere in America, but there is room to reach a working agreement in local government here, or to maybe move elsewhere’. II) Like a thief in the night. A Christian is supposed to bring the same force to bear in resistance to worldly pressure before the end times, that they are supposed to during the end times. Thinking that it is important to discover if the end times are now is basically a concession that one understands that one has not be fighting the fights for Christ that one should have been fighting. Rather then trying to skill up in the theology of Revelation, it might be better to find the places where you are making concessions, and work on being more stubborn.

In conclusion, maybe this really is the world satanic regime of the end times, and our physical struggles will not result directly in physical victory. But we cannot yet /know/ that, and even if we did the mission objective is the moral victory of waging the losing physical fight. If you really believe that you can know that you have lost all elements of the fight, you have leftist theory in your mind, and you need to get rid of it. If your hand offendeth, cut it off, if your eye, pluck it, et cetera. Metaphorically cut out the portions of your midn that lead you into these sins, because the cost of cutting them out is less than the cost of metaphorical damnation. Here damnation is used as a metaphor for being a little bit too far to the left.

Be the guy who doesn’t salute Hitler, or does not clap for Stalin. Applaud not for the idiots and screw ups on the left doing anything. They are incompetent. The worst that they can do is kill you, and death is a far better thing than living knowing that you stupidly and unnecessarily applauded leftard incompetence.