It was in the musical Camelot (the movie) when King Pellinore (Lionel Jefferies) advises Arthur (Richard Harris) that the “uglier the truth, the truer the friend who tells you.”

Now, with mere weeks to go before the year changes, we have to confront an ugly truth. 2020 is just prelude to crises and conflicts to come.  When they end, we cannot say.  The 2020s may prove a troubled decade.  I don’t pretend to have a crystal ball.  But there are matters we can be sure of.  One need only survey the scene -- the wreckage, really -- of 2020 to understand that America faces the gravest risks to its existence as a free and united country in 160 years.

From the vantage point of 2019, had we been told what to expect in 2020, we would have dismissed it all as fiction. 

Yet, here we are at the end of 2020, and the year’s facts put fiction to shame: A viral contagion exported from mainland China that amounts to an act of aggression.  Draconian state shutdowns that have violated our rights and devastated businesses and jobs.  The destruction and ransacking of blue cities, at the provocation of leftist groups and with the tacit blessings of Democrats.  The propaganda machine known as the mainstream media in hyperdrive to support a visibly declining Joe Biden -- Biden, whose resumé is a testament to low character and corruption.  Censorship -- coordinated speech suppression – across social media, in order to impose a narrative to aid Biden’s and Democrats’ election prospects.  The machinations of the Deep State to depose a duly elected president and, possibly, thwart his reelection.  And the capstone event: historic elections fraud that’s near stealing the presidency from the rightful winner, Donald J. Trump.  The latter, particularly, is a stunning subversion of Americans’ constitutional right to select their leader. 

It’s the last event that should finally blow the lid off the national pressure cooker.  As the evidence is assembled from battleground states, and that evidence is ordered and rendered in clearer perspective, the magnitude of the evil – the utter betrayal of our Constitution – will be grasped by more Americans, more profoundly.  Not all, mind you, but a growing number.  If this attack on free and fair elections stands, it’s the stuff of war, whatever the form.  Or, at minimum, it’s fodder for open-ended civil strife.   

As American Thinker contributor Scott S. Powell wrote last Saturday:

The American people cannot allow fraudulent election results or even the appearance of such to stand.  It undermines the Constitution and demoralizes the citizenry.  When people lose confidence in the integrity of elections, their respect for government is eroded and their willingness to comply with the laws it legislates is undermined.       

If the presidential elections fraud succeeds, 74 million citizens will have their votes nullified.  What would this act of disenfranchisement be other than war by other means?  Such historic elections theft amounts to a coup d’état.  Rigged software and avalanches of phony ballots have replaced bullets as the means of waylaying the people’s will.  The rule of law and the democratic process are left strewn along roadsides, victims of war. 

There are only two possible results to the current crisis.  Both are incendiary.  Biden’s handlers brazen out their crimes, because GOP legislatures and the U.S. Supreme Court have failed to rectify the offenses.  Or Republican legislators do their duty, and/or the Court’s five originalist justices uphold the Constitution, thereby giving the presidency to the rightful winner, Donald J. Trump.

A Trump victory may eventually have a happy ending.  But in righting this most grievous wrong, the road ahead will be rough.  The Civil War ended with the Union holding and slavery abolished.  But the price paid getting there was stiff, and it took a century to dissipate hard feelings and end Democrat-sanctioned apartheid in the South. We really are two peoples living in one nation.  The divisions are stark.  These disputed elections will drive us further apart.              

The criminal enterprise spearheaded by Democrats will resume warfare not only on a victorious president, but on us.  This criminal coalition will seethe in rage that their evil designs were thwarted -- but by their logic, only temporarily.  The prize for this unholy alliance remains the same: seize power for their gain and to rule over us.  Give these rogues credit: their power-lust makes them relentless.  Meaning, we need to defeat them so thoroughly that reengaging the fight is kamikaze crazy.    

Mob violence, which would resume, isn’t a “tantrum,” as some dainty conservatives have characterized it.  That trivializes billions of dollars in property destruction and violence against innocents, including police, who are becoming scarcer in Democrat-run cities. You can bet that the mongrels of war will be loosed with a vengeance. 

What of the Deep State?  At the very least, bad players at the CIA and FBI, principally, would stay on offense, hoping to stave off Trump’s resolute initiatives to thoroughly clean out these viper’s nests.

Democrats will hold a slim majority in the U.S. House.  Pelosi, those harpies Tlaib, Omar, Pressley, and Ocasio-Cortez, Adam Schiff, the Democrats’ chief psychotic, and a slew of other power-grubbers would make endless mischief for the president.

COVID -- vaccine included -- will continue as an all-purpose excuse for blue state shutdowns.  With Trump installed at the White House, Democrat governors would hope that continuing to subtract blue states from the national economic mix depresses the economy overall.     

On the other hand, if Biden’s handlers steal the election, Trump’s America won’t riot.  We’re a civil, law-abiding people.  We may exercise too much patience for our own good, as a matter of fact.  Protest, we must, and routinely. 

From the instant Joe Biden finishes the oath of office, he becomes the pretender president for tens of millions of patriots.  Grassroots political opposition grows like weeds.  What comes out of a grassroots movement will depend on the injuries inflicted by the cabal the pretender president fronts.       

President Trump won’t pass his days on the links at Mar-a-Lago.  He’d remain the leader of half of America, who are unreconciled to the republic’s subversion.  That also makes the president a target for Democrats and the left.  Trump’s tax returns would be plundered, and attempts made to criminalize him and his family. 

As thelibertyloft.com points out: “No, they [the mainstream media] want to eliminate any remembrance of him [Trump], his pro-American policy, and anyone that may stand in their way.” 

Targeting Trump for persecution targets all honest, patriotic Americans.  Democrats weaponized the law years ago.  They’d have no trouble using it as a terror weapon once the White House is secured. 

But what, then, do patriots do if Trump is so attacked?  What of the injuries to our lives, liberties, and pursuits of happiness that would surely emerge from a Biden administration?  Where, in the days ahead, is the breaking point, the point of no return in this unfolding conflict?  When will a critical mass of Americans reach their pain thresholds?  When will patriots say enough is enough?              

J. Robert Smith can be found on Twitter @JRobertSmith1and Parler @JRobertSmith.  He also blogs at Flyover.