I‘ve been at this punditry thing for some time.  I sit in my humble home office, and I read, and then I read some more.  I keep a curated list of about fifty or so conservative news sites, and they aggregate the latest headlines into a single app in my browser.  I choose not to read the corporate or leftist press because it has become aptly titled #fakenews.  It is nothing more than disseminated propaganda, and unfortunately, at least half the conservative press is as well.  The day after the 2022 midterm elections, it is astonishing how Conservative, Inc. all sang the same preferred narrative straight out of Disney’s “The Mandalorian” regarding Ron DeSantis… “This is the way.”

I have covered it elsewhere, but there is a lot to like about Ron DeSantis, save for where he gets his money and his refusal to extend a hand to the man who helped make him. In December 2018, Ron DeSantis and his wife made a video touting their MAGA street cred, which bordered on sycophancy.  It looks a lot like the ridiculous campaign videos of Georgia governor Brian Kemp, who happily rode in on the coattails of Donald Trump and Make America Great Again while playing footsy under the table with corporate America. Both of these men enjoyed comfortable re-election bids, and all that was demanded of them was to shift their allegiance to the corporate donor class.

I fully believe that Donald Trump won the 2020 election and that America was robbed of a second term of putting America first.  It’s easily understood how it happened; they injected upward of one hundred million ballots, forty-four million unsolicited, into the ether under the auspices of COVID and then stuffed the ballot box in select swing markets to put Joe Biden in office.  They took four hundred million dollars from Mark Zuckerberg to fund it.  It wasn’t all that different from the current FTX debacle, where politicians laundered money through an offshore cryptocurrency exchange and back to themselves into domestic political PACs for the 2022 midterms. We really need to get the corporate money out of politics.

Lower taxes, trade policies favorable to the American labor class, and a commitment to withdrawing her sons and daughters from foreign conflict are intolerable to the corporate class.  One Trump mega-donor Ken Griffin has openly stated his interest in moving beyond Donald Trump to reconnect the Republican Party with the corporate donor class that funded Trump’s ouster. This is a power move by the donor class.  They flexed their dollars to show the plebs who really runs this show.

To describe the administration of Donald Trump as tumultuous would be an understatement.  We were all pummeled into pools of bloody submission by unending contrived scandals and an apoplectic press cycle. These were not Donald Trump’s creation, though he has borne the brunt of the blame. These scandals were the creation of a permanent, unelected, and unaccountable Washington regime that cannot tolerate challenges to its bought authority.  As we have discovered over the last six or more years, the Deep State is very real.

Since their inception, clandestine organizations like the Central Intelligence Agency have been perfecting the art of color revolutions and regime changes abroad.  During the administration of Donald Trump, they turned their tradecraft inward, and the people of the United States have been subject to unending crises, so that they might blame the state of the world on mean tweets.  Mean tweets didn’t bake up a global pandemic in Wuhan, China.  Mean tweets didn’t organize violent leftists to burn down America utilizing Marxist race riots with impunity.  Mean tweets didn’t wiretap the campaign and administration of the President of the United States and then fabricate a Russian collusion narrative to depose the duly elected POTUS.

After being pummeled into submission, a good bloc of the American public feels weary and ready to accept the terms of their torturers.  It’s easier to swallow if they are made to believe it was their idea, and they arrived at their conclusions by reason and not abuse.  If we can harness the performance without the man, it is a win-win, right?  Make no mistake, it is not the man but the performance they cannot tolerate.  We’re on a globalist path, and resistance to its implementation will not be tolerated. To date, Donald Trump is the only elected official to oppose it.  This is the crux of our dilemma.

In a recent DailyWire short between conservative pundits Allie Beth Stuckey and Michael Knowles, Knowles is asked if Donald Trump will become the Republican Party presidential nominee in 2024.  Knowles responds with his adoration of Trump but his resignation that the Deep State will never permit Donald Trump to hold office again.  This raises the question posed to Ben Franklin at the Constitutional Convention of 1787: do we still have a republic?

Brian Parsons is a paleoconservative columnist in Idaho, a proud husband and father, and saved by Grace.  You can follow him at WithdrawConsent.org or find his columns at the American Thinker, in the Idaho State Journal, or in other regional publications.  Email | Gab

Image: Jean-Antoine Houdon