Millions of Republican activists in every state in the country are asking themselves, what can we do now?

All of our political lives we put our faith in our elections.

When we lost, we analyzed our mistakes and sought lessons for how next time to run a better campaign. When we won, we aspired to work with our former opponents for the betterment of the country. On both sides.

It’s what we’ve done in America for the past one hundred and sixty years.

Today it sounds quaint, but our differences ended at the nation’s shores. That quarantine around foreign policy and national security disputes dissolved during the Clinton years when deep divides over trade agreements and China split our country – not along party lines, but into globalists and what the global elites derisively termed the “nativists.”

Those “nativists” – the left-behinds of the Rust Belt, and those “old-fashioned” Americans derided by Obama for “clinging to their Bibles and their guns,” became the Deplorables that defeated Hillary Clinton and elected Donald Trump.

For four years, we watched with glowing expectation as our president actually fulfilled campaign promises. We watched as he stood up to Communist China, as he stripped away job-killing regulations, and as he faced down the global elites in the media and politics.

He spoke for us, not at us; and we were enthralled. We thought it could never end.

We watched Donald Trump’s popularity grow by leaps and bounds, while his opponent emerged from his basement to pathetic little gatherings of a few hundred people honking car horns.

Then came Trump’s massive election night victory, erased in the early morning hours and days to come by a flood of votes that seemed to have come out of nowhere.

I’ll wager that 75 million of us have followed pretty closely the drama of the past two months, so there’s no need to recount the claims and counterclaims of election fraud.

The Democrats can say what they want, and pound it into us with the sledgehammers of the national media and Big Tech: they still have failed to convince us that we are wrong.

It’s like that famous scene in the first Star Wars movie when Obiwan Kenobi waves his hand before the eyes of the Empire soldiers. The Democrats keep telling us, those are not the votes we are looking for. But unlike the Empire soldiers, we are not duped.

What we have seen over the past two months goes way beyond dismay or disbelief. What we have witnessed is the utter collapse of the foundational institutions of our republic.

The national GOP, to its credit, saw it coming. Starting early last year, they spent tens of millions of dollars to wage legal battles against Democrat party efforts to change the way our elections were conducted.

If you look at their list of “victories,” you would think the GOP had succeeded in courts across this country in preserving free and fair elections.

But you would be wrong.

They merely succeeded in defeating the outliers of the Democrat scheme, the outrageous bits they used to distract us, such as extending the vote for days and even weeks after Election Day. They didn’t care about that.

The GOP leadership failed to block – or missed entirely - the very real and illegal efforts by Democrat state officials, state courts, governors and non-profits to generalize mail-in ballots, hold ballot-harvesting “events” in public parks, and remove or weaken signature verification.

So well before the election, the GOP failed us. And the courts failed us.

The Republican-led state legislatures also failed us, by nonchalantly observing this multi-pronged attack by the Democrats to remove all the fail-safe mechanisms protecting voter integrity.

Many of us who watched the post-election testimony of Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, Colonel Philip Waldron, Jovan Pulitzer and others before state legislative committees in Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania and elsewhere were heartened at what appeared to be the sympathetic response of Republican legislators.

Instead, we should have been appalled -- because they should have known all this beforehand. They should have fixed these problems, restored the fail-safes and reasserted their constitutional authority while there was still time.

So well before the election and afterwards, the state legislatures failed us.

The sycophantic media didn’t fail us because they abandoned their duty to inform the public a generation ago when they became the communications arm of the Democrat party. Still, it shocked and dismayed many of us to watch Fox News join the Fake News media cabal on Election Night.

Justice, judges and their courts failed us after the elections on at least 62 occasions, never allowing a single evidentiary hearing with the cross-examination of witnesses who had provided sworn affidavits of election fraud they personally had observed in eight states.

Think of that. The media tells us there was “zero evidence” of election fraud, and now Nancy Pelosi and her Ministry of Truth wants to make acceptance of that lie a prerequisite to serving in Congress, while Big Tech is banning even ordinary citizens from their First Amendment rights for even questioning it.

We the People who pay taxes so others can cower in their basements in fear, We the Deplorables who still believe in truth, have stood back and observed as every institution of our democratic Republic has shriveled and apparently died.

Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and the national media are trying to govern as a one-party state.

What fail-safes, if any, do we have left?

This is the anguished cry I hear from all across America. Are there enough Republican politicians with guts and imagination to keep us from tearing each other apart?

Image via Chira Heally,  Pinterest

NY Times best-selling author Kenneth R. Timmerman is the author of Deception: The Making of the YouTube Video Hillary and Obama blamed for Benghazi, and 10 other works of non-fiction. The Election Heist, a fictional account of the 2020 election published in August, is his fourth published novel.