We didn’t know it then, but on Election Night, November 8, 2020, America entered a Twilight Zone every bit as eerie and unanticipated as anything dreamed up by Rod Serling decades earlier.  It began with time standing still in the middle of the Election Night vote count, followed by a flood of outlandish vote totals being relayed to us, especially from Democrat strongholds in 7 swing states.  Then there was the alacrity with which network analysts declared Biden the winner, especially, the Fox News early projection of a Biden win in Arizona.  

Among Trump partisans and Republicans generally, there was shock and mounting disbelief.  Had the triumphant incumbent, fresh off years of creating a vibrant economy, establishing the conditions for a significant peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors, erasing the brutal Caliphate, standing up to and quelling both the insatiable dragon of Communist China and Putin’s snarling Russian bear, shutting down the fiery Iranian mullahcracy, and creating American energy independence—had Trump somehow lost to the enfeebled, untrusted political cipher, Scranton Joe?  

Despite the 2020 election’s irregularities, which were legion, the next two months, leading up to the January 6 Capitol Hill debacle, were a study in media manipulation.  Virtually every organ and institution of public information joined hands to create a bum’s rush of legitimacy for Scranton Joe’s historic victory.  Not only was there an unprecedented (and unbelievable) turn out of voters, with Trump receiving 8 million more votes than any preceding sitting president, while the bumbling, lackluster, boring, invisible Biden, with no hint at any time in his political career of an excited public following, bested Trump by an additional 7 million votes.  This was an electoral miracle that rivaled Moses parting the Red Sea and Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead.

In fact, as evidence of major election irregularities and corruption began to surface in the form of hundreds of eyewitness reports and sworn affidavits, analyses by credentialed statisticians and computer experts, the sworn testimony (on penalty of perjury) of poll watchers and election workers, and even shocking videotape of poll workers in Democrat strongholds double and triple counting mysterious suitcases of unverified ballots, the press and our new masters in Big Tech, grew ever shriller and more derogatory of Trump and the claims of his legal team that there was something foul afoot on election night. 

But the courts remained the three monkeys of denial:  See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. The "catch 22" machine was used to prevent court review of the growing mountain of charges and evidence.  When warnings of impending election fraud and manipulation had been raised prior to the vote, they were dismissed as being speculative.  When they were raised and demonstrated after the vote, they were dismissed for being after the fact and too late.  The American people were being treated to a legal system that could have been devised by Franz Kafka; a literal nightmare of injustice. 

The Twilight Zone script was now in full control.  Despite mountains of evidence of irregularities, corruption, and inexplicable anomalies, the FBI, the Justice Department, attorneys general at every level, the US Postal Inspection Service, and most every official and agency charged with safeguarding national election integrity demurred or tried to shut down any investigation and to shut up and intimidate any whistleblowers.    

Every attempt was made to create irreversible "facts on the ground."  They rolled out an "Office of the President Elect" for Biden and Kamala to appear in fake stage sets sporting that escutcheon to convince America that they had effectively already been installed, irreversibly, as our leaders, although the election had not yet even been certified or affirmed, as required, by the Congress.  This all created a condition of unreality and deep distrust in a large portion of the American public.  As used to be said regarding Bill Clinton:  "Are you going to believe him or your lying eyes?"  

Then came January 6th.  President Trump had called for a mass rally in Washington, D.C. to show support for him and for a fairly arrived at election outcome.  It is unquestioned that well in advance he repeatedly offered up to 10,000 National Guard troops and other support for the DC and Capitol Police to manage the expected crowds and to guarantee a peaceful and orderly day of election certification by the Congress.  It is equally unquestioned that Speaker Pelosi, who had complete authority and the responsibility for safeguarding the Congress and its deliberations, refused President Trump's proffer of support.  The stage was set; what could possibly go wrong?

When the day arrived, a fraction of the crowd, egged on by "persons unknown," on videotape, with no connection to the Trump rally organizers, directed attendees to march to the Capitol and then to enter the grounds and building through police lines.  Curiously, again on videotape, there are several instances of police removing barricades and inviting the crowd onto the grounds and into the Capitol.  A tiny fraction of this crowd wrestled with police and smashed the glass in several doors and windows.  Everyone else sauntered peacefully through the hallowed halls like reverent tourists, even for the most part staying within the velvet rope lines in place to direct visitors (this all on videotape).  The resulting disruption lasted two or three hours.  Two unarmed women civilians died:  Ashli Babbitt, needlessly shot by a plainclothes capitol police officer, and another woman who appears to have died later as the result of a police beatdown in one of the Capitol tunnels.  That's it. 

Now, the creators of America's Twilight Zone revved up their alternate reality narratives to blanket the landscape with the awful myth of a destructive insurrectionary riot at the US Capitol.  Speaker Pelosi and the Democrat spinmeisters had a tool with which to beat to death the Trump movement and anyone who opposed them or contradicted their version of electoral reality.  At this point, a supposedly terrified Speaker, in an empty city, called out the National Guard, twenty-five thousand strong, and ringed the Capitol with welded steel fences.  Not since the Civil War, with Johnny Reb almost within shouting distance, nor during the Whiskey Rebellion, when wild-eyed moonshiners might have threatened life and limb, had DC seen such melodrama. 

Americans have for a year sat peacefully at home and watched and listened to the unfounded ranting of Democrat politicians and their echo chamber in the mass and social media, accuse normal, moderate to conservative citizens of thought crimes and insurrectionary behavior because they do not share the current extreme Democrat political agenda.  

Our nation has become a sickening avatar of the perished Soviet Union, where Orwell's Ministry of Truth was the mother of all lies.  Our media, our Pravda (meaning Truth in Russian) of America sets the party line and propagates it throughout the information channels of our nation.  We are governed by a barely functioning cipher in the presidency, who each day vandalizes our precious heritage and undermines the proud bulwark for freedom that America has become for the world.  The Democrat party of Truman, Kennedy, Stevenson, and Jackson is dead, murdered by treasonous political hacks and ignorant Communists masquerading as politicians and leaders. 

In the Soviet Union, itself a Twilight Zone of unreality, nothing real was permitted.  Speaking truth got you sentenced to the Gulag.  In pained humor, Soviet citizens described their rotten, fake economy this way:  We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.  Thus, every sector of their nation had been hollowed out by decades of lies, until it collapsed.  Creative and destructive forces on the globe have been balanced now for a century because the United States has been powerful. We are not pure and unblemished, but warts and all, we have been the last best hope of humanity on earth.  

If we allow the false reality of the Twilight Zone to rule us, we will be living in the twilight of America:  The end of the American Era may be here if the American people do not take their fate and the fate of freedom and respect for individual liberty and dignity back into their own hands.

Patricia Henry is the pen name of a denizen of deep blue America.

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