Like baboons showing their rears to zoogoers, the election of President Trump caused the rotting institutions of America to reveal their least attractive features. The press has engaged in nonstop lying without remorse. The premier educational institutions have revealed their Marxist colors and disdain for the sifting and winnowing of ideas that once were their reason to be. The FBI, Department of Justice, and the courts have tipped their partisanship, and to their dishonor, the ethical grounding that once made them worthy of respect.

Not for the first time  Conrad Black  has accurately summarized the “nightmare campaign of outright idiocy” we’ve faced since Trump’s election. 

It’s nice to know that he believes I am not the only one considering the country has gone mad. He says “a very large number of us” share that view. And he goes on to show us why.

Among his targets are the lying press and the violent crime rate in New York City and Chicago as the mayors of those cities reduce police budgets and attack law enforcement. The absurdity of #NeverTrumper Mitt Romney marching with BLM, whose leader threatens to burn down the country if it doesn’t get its way. Black tags Joe Biden “a waxwork dummy hiding in this basement” who considers BLM,  which has revealed itself “as a white-hating Marxist urban terrorist organization,” as a  “valuable political ally.” The left’s  continued effort to prolong the economic shutdown of the country as the fatalities from the Wuhan virus have declined “by nearly 90 percent” and increased testing shows large numbers of those who contracted it had none or minimal symptoms. (A wag online notes it is such a frightful malady most of us never knew we had it until tests showed we did.)

He accurately describes the Democratic political campaign: 

With less than four months before the election, this is the campaign: a constant media carpet-bombing of defamatory lies about the president on behalf of a comatose candidate, propagation of unfounded hysteria over a fading pandemic, self-induced and redundant economic depression, open borders to admit and give free medical care to the unskilled peasantry of the world, and national self-abasement before militant African Americans demanding minority rule and the renunciation and degradation of those who founded the United States and led it to a pinnacle of influence in the world unequaled in all history. And this ludicrous, almost unimaginable, mockery of a quest for the world’s highest office is, in the perversity of these times, apparently leading in the polls.

It is impossible and it will blow up.

I know that many of our readers are dispirited by all this insanity, and it does seem never ending. The conduct of people like the mayors of NYC, Chicago, Minneapolis, Portland, and Seattle, add to our growing feeling of national chaos.  For a lot of political organizations, the Constitution and its promise of anti-discrimination, protections for property, and liberty seem to have no meaning. To pick just one example of this lunacy -- and there certainly are many -- look at the city of Seattle:

Last month, the City of Seattle’s Office of Civil Rights sent an email inviting “white City employees” to attend a training session on “Interrupting Internalized Racial Superiority and Whiteness,” a program designed to help white workers examine their “complicity in the system of white supremacy” and “interrupt racism in ways that are accountable to Black, Indigenous and People of Color.” Hoping to learn more, I submitted a public records request for all documentation related to the training. The results are disturbing.

At the beginning of the session, the trainers explain that white people have internalized a sense of racial superiority, which has made them unable to access their “humanity” and caused “harm and violence” to people of color. The trainers claim that “individualism,” “perfectionism,” “intellectualization,” and “objectivity” are all vestiges of this internalized racial oppression and must be abandoned in favor of social-justice principles. In conceptual terms, the city frames the discussion around the idea that black Americans are reducible to the essential quality of “blackness” and white Americans are reducible to the essential quality of “whiteness”—that is, the new metaphysics of good and evil.

Adding to our great unease was the report this week on Fox News, about the latest “White Knight” prosecutor, John Durham (whom we believed would investigate the sabotage of Trump’s campaign and presidency as to which there is plenty of documented evidence already on the public record). Fox notes news that Durham will punt it until after the election” if he cannot finish his work in the next few weeks.”

I think Julie Kelly speaks for many of us when she says we are enraged by the possibility that this account is accurate:

It appears Trump, like his supporters, are fed up with the delays and inaction.

The president lashed out Thursday in a series of tweets blasting the “totally corrupt” Obama administration and the inept overseers of justice. “This crime was taking place even before my election, everyone knows it, and yet all are frozen stiff with fear,” Trump raged. “No Republican Senate Judiciary response, NO ‘JUSTICE,’ NO FBI, NO NOTHING. Major horror show REPORTS on Comey & McCabe, guilty as hell, nothing happens. Catch Obama & Biden cold, nothing.”

Hard to argue with that. Ironically, Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) last week expressed the same frustration with Durham’s probe. The former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, now led by Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), whined on Twitter that it would be “SAD SAD” if there were no indictments related to the scandal until after the election.[snip]

Trump has every right to be enraged that four years after Barack Obama’s top henchmen concocted and executed the biggest political scandal of all time, not one person has been held criminally responsible while trials against his associates drag on.

Further, the president been betrayed by the leadership of his own party. It was a matter of nanoseconds after Democrats took control of the House before they leveraged every ounce of their new power to savage Trump and Republicans. Republicans, on the other hand, have sat “frozen stiff” while wielding powerful gavels and making empty promises. (I wrote a partial list of the Senate GOP’s failures here.)

Something could change in the next week or so but for now, between Trump’s tweets and Fox News reporting on a possible delay until November, it looks more and more like justice for Trump—and the country -- will be denied.

With Democratic sanctioning of the mayhem in the streets and the latest indication that these saboteurs will not face the music before the election -- or maybe never if Trump loses -- it’s no wonder that people are arming themselves in defense. 

The NSSF works with gun distributors, ranges and retailers across the country. they also conduct research on who’s buying firearms. Oliva told WAVE 3 News NSSF research shows about 40 percent of Americans who’ve purchased guns in 2020 were first-time buyers.

“People are seriously taking stock of how they’re going to be able to provide for the safety of their own families," Oliva said. "So they’re buying firearms to make sure they can protect themselves and protect their families.”

As more people attempt to buy firearms, gun retailers are performing more background checks.

According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s National Instant Background Check System, firearm background checks soared over 3 million in March and May of 2020. According to the data, the last time the FBI recorded 3 million checks was December of 2015.

Anderson told WAVE 3 News he doesn’t see the demand slowing in the coming months, especially considering a presidential election is around the corner. He said as long as demand is there, he will fight to upkeep the supply.

“The wholesalers don’t even have what I need to get in here to fill the shelves," Anderson said. "That’s what’s scary. And people are still coming in still wanting to buy guns.”

It seems only prudent in the absence of the rule of law for people to look after their own safety.  After all, they, unlike the politicians who condone the thuggery, do not have government paid-security at their disposal.

Adding to the feeling of madness for those of us watching this collapse of our orderly society is the repeated mantra that Joe Biden is far ahead in the polls. Unless voters are dopier than I believe they actually are, I think this is more wishful thinking on the left. Conrad Black says society will wake up and banish the “arsonists,” and recent evidence is that he’s right. The left has so revealed its true aims that voters are waking up.

Democracy Institute’s new poll shows Trump surpassing Basement Joe in the Electoral College 309 to 229, indicating he’s “on course to win the crucial swing states including Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania , and Wisconsin where he outpolls Vice President Biden by 48 percent to 44 percent.”

This is in line with the prediction of Professor Helmut Norpoth of Stony Brook College.

“The Primary Model gives Trump a 91 percent chance of winning in November,” Norpoth said. "This model gets it right for 25 of the 27 elections since 1912, when primaries were introduced."

As Mediaite noted, the two elections the model failed to predict were the 1960 election of John F. Kennedy and the 2000 election of George W. Bush.

Norpoth's model examines the results of presidential primaries as the strongest indicator as to the outcome in the general election, not the polls that dominate the political discussion. According to Norpoth, Biden is in a much weaker position than Trump because of his poor showing in the first two primary races.

Before making the stunning comeback in the South Carolina primary and carrying the following races, Biden came in fourth place in Iowa with just 15.8 percent of the vote and came in fifth place in New Hampshire with just 8.4 percent. Norpoth stressed that enthusiasm is key.

“The terrain of presidential contests is littered with nominees who saw a poll lead in the spring turn to dust in the fall,” Norpoth told Mediaite. “The list is long and discouraging for early frontrunners. Beginning with Thomas Dewey in 1948, it spans such notables as Richard Nixon in 1960, Jimmy Carter in 1980, Michael Dukakis in 1988, George H.W. Bush in 1992, and John Kerry in 2004, to cite just the most spectacular cases."

Democratic congresswoman Elissa Slotkin seems to agree that Trump is a strong pull in her home state, Michigan. She thinks the polls are inaccurate:

When I started to run and I had to hire a pollster, I interviewed a bunch of different folks and I decided to do what we do sometimes at the Pentagon, which is to take a ‘bad cop’ approach to the interview… It was five or six folks that I interviewed, and I said, ‘You got something wrong. You screwed up in 2016. What did you get wrong? And how are you going to fix it?”

Only one pollster, Slotkin says, admitted that he got it wrong. That was the person -- Al Quinlan of GQR, a large Washington-based firm -- she hired.

“He told me that they fundamentally undercounted the Trump vote; that the Trump voter is not a voter in every single election, that they come out for Trump, so they’re hard to count,” she explains. “On a survey, if someone says, ‘I’m not sure I’m going to vote,’ you don’t usually continue the conversation. And some of them didn’t have any desire to be on those poll calls; they didn’t have the 20 minutes to talk to somebody. They didn’t want to do it. And so, they were fundamentally undercounted.”

Slotkin, ever the intel analyst -- identifying trends, compiling a report, presenting a conclusion -- tells me, with a high degree of confidence, “I believe that same thing is happening right now.”  [emphasis in original]

She’s not the only Democrat to caution about the present polls. 

Democrat strategists Ariek Wierson and Bradley Honan also have their doubts about the present polls:

Summertime polls are not predictions of November results

Polls conducted over the summer can be unreflective of the general election's outcome. Recall that in July 1988, then-Vice President George H. W. Bush was trailing Michael Dukakis by 17 points and went on to win the election by eight points that November. 

In early September, President Harry Truman was down about 13 points against Thomas Dewey, a race Truman would go on to win.

And four years ago, polling in June 2016 showed Hillary Clinton ahead of Donald Trump by 12 points, a similar lead to what Biden enjoys today. 

What's the takeaway? Polls are nothing more than a snapshot in time -- they are neither a forecast, much less a prediction.

Strong economic marks for Trump

More than any issue voters choose a president on the state of the economy -- and this is the one place where Trump remains strong. According to a Gallup poll, about half of the country approves of his handling of the economy.

The New York Times/Siena College poll also shows that in battleground states, Trump's economic approval number is 56% -- hardly an argument for showing him the door.

Biden is lackluster 

Democratic pundits love to fill the airwaves with praise for Biden who has been running a campaign that is mostly about letting Trump be Trump and not getting in the way of things like his botched US Covid-19 response, refusal to wear a mask in public and his threats against those protesting systemic racism. 

The other way to read that is that the Biden camp seems to have settled on the 2020 election being a referendum on Trump -- Biden simply doesn't need to promote or advocate for his agenda for change. The Lincoln Project -- a coalition of Never Trump GOP consultants -- is running a far more effective campaign to sway public opinion against Trump than the Biden camp at this point. 

Based on Biden's current performance and how he nearly lost the Democratic primary and especially given his poor debate performances.

Biden isn't a strong enough candidate to win by himself -- he still needs a big assist from a flailing Donald Trump.

For Democrats there is a lot at stake these days -- but counting Trump out is a mistake. Democrats need to be ready for the Trump machine to pull out all stops to stay in power. From voter suppression to an October surprise, anything is possible -- and this race is a long way from over.

My advice for those of us distraught at what is happening is this: Do not  be dispirited but do not  be overconfident either. With colleges and professional teams cancelling this fall’s season, it might be a good idea to volunteer to work on the Trump campaign if you, as do I, see the Marxist takeover of the Democratic party spearheaded by the man Black describes as a “waxwork dummy” a significant threat to you, your family, and your country.