The Stasi's — AKA the FBI's — raid on Mar-a-Lago isn't the Democrats' last attempt to foreclose Donald Trump's presidential run.  The Mar-a-Lago raid was merely a salient in an ongoing war. Even if the establishment finds a way of barring Trump from running, the door then opens for DeSantis.  You can bet that the establishment loathes DeSantis as much as it does Trump.  Perhaps more so, in that DeSantis's success in Florida starkly contrasts Democrats' failures in blue states and across Biden's America.  Democrats and their allies would simply unleash their wrath on the governor.

The war, started by the establishment, ramped up when Trump arrived on the political scene in late 2015.  Trump's nascent America First movement was, quite correctly, perceived as what's fashionably termed an existential threat.  It's been a hot cold war ever since, and it promises to grow hotter and nastier in the coming days.

Democrats and their allies are in their desperate hour.  Theirs isn't an ascendant movement, but a faltering one.  Resorts to strong-arm tactics, illegality, and conniving are indications.  Ascendant movements enjoy broadening popular support.  Majorities form around them and create mandates.  Democrats enjoy no such backing.

With each passing day, Biden's and Democrats' failures become more apparent and painful to average Americans.  The economy is shaky; inflation and energy costs will resume rising.  Crime spikes in big cities.  Woke and sexual indoctrination of schoolkids is meeting with growing backlashes.  Democrats' police state gambits repel people who'd otherwise take a pass on politics.  Their sheer incompetence, serial failures, and tyrannical overreach are undercutting their authority.  So Democrats and the establishment are afraid and anxious.

Looming ahead is the fall of the establishment's thousand-year Reich.  Desperation will drive establishment factions to more and, perhaps, even greater acts of illegally and shows of force — or worse.  After all, the ends justify the means.

Andy Ngo reports that the deceptively named "Inflation Reduction Act" authorizes 87,000 IRS hires, who will carry guns and "use deadly force, if necessary."  The IRS is being transformed into an armed intimidation racket.

An IRS armed to the teeth is yet another sign that the establishment is stumbling.  Biden's regime has spent an estimated $5–6 trillion in less than two years.  There appears no end to the profligacy — which primarily benefits the establishment and allied factions.  This militant IRS will be tasked with squeezing every penny it can out of all Americans, not just the rich.  Guns at the ready underscore the point.

If the 2024 elections aren't sufficiently rigged, and Trump wins, he'll make his four years in office about slamming shut the gates of hell on liberty's foes.  If the elections are sufficiently rigged, and Trump loses, then we sail into uncharted waters.  Heaven help us.

But let's hope that Trump wins — or DeSantis if Trump is unable.  Regardless, shutting those gates will be a prodigious task, and won't happen quickly, and will be fiercely opposed by the establishment, which includes quisling GOP elements.  Don't expect Mitch McConnell, John Cornyn, and John Thune to take to the ramparts to fight for an historic overhaul of the national government and a thorough re-federalization.

Trump or DeSantis or whoever else may arise embodies the establishment's greater nemesis: us.  A growing majority — whites, Hispanics, Asians, and, hopefully more blacks — want their country back.  Us working- and middle-class Americans are the backbone of the nation.

Us, who reject great resets, build back betters, and elites, whose conceits drive them to act as our overlords.  Whether it was the Russia Collusion Hoax, the Ukraine Hoax, the Great Mar-a-Lago Panty Raid, or the daily smearing that Trump endured as president — all target us.  Trump hate is hate for the vast middle.  We cling to our guns and bibles — Obama.  We're deplorables — Hillary.  We're white supremacists — including any black or Hispanic who dares leave the Democrat plantation — declared reflexively by just about every progressive.

The war being waged is for all the marbles.  Harvard law degrees, M.D.s, Ph.D.s, and Wharton MBAs weren't obtained by progressives to allow common folk to have any say in the nation's welfare and future.  Seats on corporate boards entitle.  Tech firms, amalgamated, are All-Powerful Oz.  The Constitution?  Window-dressing.  Federalism?  What's that?  The Bill of Rights?  To be defined by tenured leftist academics.  In fact, elites, in their crimped minds, assume the right to dictate all aspects of our lives — and we'd damn well better like it.

If we don't, slap-downs follow. We're deemed deniers and slandered as insurrectionists and tarred as racists.  We're worker bees here to tend the hive.  Shut up and take what comes our way and smile.  If not, the elite will impose penalties.  Communist China's social credit system is the hoped-for import.  It's a creepy, comprehensive, technology-driven system of oppression.  Progressives love it...as many perversely love Mao, Lenin, and Stalin.  The imperative is defeating these lovers of tyranny before they fully weaponize technology to crush us.

A now mostly obscure early 20th-century critic of big government, Albert Jay Nock, made this simple but powerful observation: "In proportion as you give the state power to do things for you, you give it power to do things to you."

After a hundred-plus years of progressivism and its absorption of socialist, fascist, and communist elements, we face a hostile government doing far more to us than for us.  It's a hydra-headed beast that must be slain before it devours us.

What Americans are learning — and will painfully learn as the days unfold — is that big government isn't, finally, compassionate, fair, or equitable.  It cannot be redeemed.  It must be reduced — dramatically so.  It cannot just be restrained.  Doing so will ensure that a future generation of power-hungry cutthroats will again seek to impose their wills.

Big government is voracious, eating up a nation's prosperity, trampling rights to achieve misbegotten ends, and always intruding into every corner of people's lives, reducing people to forms of servitude.  And always, regardless the ruse, regardless the reflexive "for the people" pap, elites bend big government to serve their interests.  Today, corruption isn't just rife in Washington, but throughout major institutions.  Corporations, nonprofits, schools, media, unions, health care — corruption permeates the society on a scale unmatched.

Prepare for the days ahead.  Arm yourselves with knowledge and arguments.  Be apostles of liberty, spreading the word to all who listen.  Speak truth to power — smartly and civilly, but speak up.  Join with like-minded Americans in your communities to build bulwarks against coming assaults.  Stand unflinchingly shoulder-to-shoulder with Trump, DeSantis, and other patriots to bring about the demise of tyranny on our shores.

J. Robert Smith can be found regularly at Gab @JRobertSmith.  He also blogs at Flyover.

Image via Public Domain Pictures.