It is just past mid-March, about ten weeks into a new U.S. Congress and eight weeks into America's forty-sixth presidential administration. Washington is now controlled by a ruling power monopoly owned by iron-willed Democrats, who dominate both legislative houses and a bizarre head-scratcher of a presidency.

In this period, Americans have witnessed a mostly peaceful demonstration on Capitol grounds declared as "violent" by pols and pundits who, contrariwise, termed last summer's violent urban upheavals as "mostly peaceful." In an unprecedented dual bit of history-making, a (1) former president received his (2) second impeachment under a fatuous accusation of "incitement" — this, despite ardent suspicions that the Capitol invasion may have been preconceived and conducted by violent actors unsympathetic to the Trump campaign, and sprung before the president had finished speaking.

Determined to consolidate power and close all gaps, Democrats have since begun launching a bewildering fire-hose spray of legislation and executive orders seemingly expressing every point in the radical leftists' wish list.

It's revenge politics at its ugliest, with media censorship and cancel culture on steroids, and with federal law enforcement now staging SWAT raids on the domiciles of arbitrarily selected critics of the new uncivil order, freedoms and rights be damned. MAGA supporters are being erased as Orwellian unpersons.

America's patriots are depressed, bewildered. How did we get here?

I am no less chagrined than the next observer. In a post shortly after the election, I noted the inescapable contrast between the Trump and Biden campaigns, the first outclassing the second with insuperable energy, optimism, and audience size. Trump supporters went to bed on Election Night, content with the president's dominant lead, only to awaken to the stupefying realization the next day that the lead had abruptly and mysteriously vanished in the night. Then began fervid reports of manifold irregularities. Friendly legal teams sought redress in courts, only to be arbitrarily swatted away over "standing" and "procedural technicalities." Finally, the Electoral College's automatons mechanically stamped their imprimatur, followed by uncritical acceptance in Congress.

In the two months between November 3 and January 6, it seemed to many, including myself, that corrective actions would smoke out the glaring inconsistencies, internal contradictions, and procedural irregularities of the voting and ballot counting processes. But it became unwaveringly apparent: the "fix" was in and any objector was subject to cancellation and being flatly dismissed as a fevered "conspiracy theorist."

Okay, call me a conspiracy theorist. In that article, I noted that Democrats have long made an industry of cheating in elections. Serial successes without consequence would simply embolden the cheaters until their brazenness would ultimately be checked. I termed it "political organized crime." This should be their moment of reckoning, I suggested. Once the cat was out of the bag, it would be game over for them.

Except this wasn't the moment. With their objectives fulfilled, the Democrat pols, with their media and Big Tech confederates, can now relax their efforts at concealment; they no longer need to hide their escapade. "Yes, we did it and we'll do it again. It's to save Democracy," proclaimed an unapologetic confessional published by Time Magazine.

"Donald Trump and his supporters have been checkmated and it was for the good of the nation, and for theirs as well," asserts the narrative. The founders' notion of democratic governance through the consent of the governed, however well-intentioned, has proven naïve, archaic, and unsuited to the modern age. The American experiment has failed, evidence being the people's inability to make sound voting decisions, exemplified by their readiness to elect reprobates like Mr. Trump.

"Rule, therefore, can only be entrusted to the wise philosophers and technical experts responsibly occupying the nation's centers of erudition and power," goes the pitch. "This is our road to Utopia. Learn it and accept it."

Where do we go from here?

I offer a passage from Scripture. From Chapter 8 of St. John's Gospel,

... you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

This is admittedly from a different context but it has relevance in any conflict between truth and deliberate falsity. And today's is such a confrontation, with our patriotic notions of truth and justice assailed by the deceitful confection shoved onto us by the Democrats' army of ballot manipulators.

Call this gaslighting effect "battered patriot syndrome." It's a problem for us.

The first steps in solving a problem are to admit there is a problem and to define it, both in nature and magnitude. We need real objective, verifiable truth, not the flexible, slippery truth of the postmodernist demagogues of moral relativism. There's been a crime committed, a big one, and by agents who have violated the commandments against theft and against bearing false witness, doing it with impunity, and with the attitude that their roles and actions are done at a level of righteousness higher than the "quaint, archaic and now-irrelevant moral standards" under which we patriots were reared.

Frequent AT contributor Jay Valentine, a professional sleuth of fraudulent enterprises, has authored a series of penetrating articles on the nature and scope of this scam. In a recent piece, he identifies it as a "sovereign crime of industrial-scale vote fraud."

Valentine and other investigators are in pursuit of that real, objective, verifiable truth. The truths they extract will become the swords and spears in the patriots' arsenal.

This seeming political mafia has constructed its edifice on falsehood, deception, and internal contradictions; it is now heir to the consequent imperative to labor feverishly in keeping it all patched, taped together, and oiled. Regardless of unalloyed cooperation with mendacious news media, censorious social media, and the strong-arm SWATs of the federal securitate, its inevitable ruptures and internal conflicts will become increasingly conspicuous. This is the fate of all leftist fabrications. The optics are wretched.

The U.S. Capitol is now a restricted federal area, with guards and security fences. What was the People's House has become occupied territory, what I now term the "American Kremlin."

America now waits for its newest president to be — er — presidential. His impression of a semi-coherent sock puppet is unsettling. Here is what may be a clumsy green-screen simulation of a faked press encounter. One can only wonder whether his first State of the Union Address will be a digital creation in the severely-controlled Capitol space, perhaps a CGI holographic analog of Max Headroom.

Opportunity knocks for us. Trump-haters waged a four-year war to sully a duly elected president with an engineered "Russian collusion" hoax and other fictions, in order to brand that presidency as "illegitimate." It's payback time. Now they must defend their verifiably illegitimate presidency against a fusillade of certifiable facts. This may be lost on "truth over facts" Joe Biden, who seems confused by the subtlety, but the truth may one day even set him free.

Patriots have the unsurpassed American model for success. The radical left only has a system of deceit and corruption that ruins everything it touches, and invariably fails.

The advantage is ours. Our weapons are the implements of truth. Expertly applied, they will precipitate the crumbling of the left's phony fool's-gold edifice onto its feet of clay.

Image: House of sand by Phil Hearing on Unsplash, edited by Andrea Widburg.