Conservative activists gathered in Denver this weekend for the 2023 Western Conservative Summit as the mainstream media breathlessly reported the indictments of DJT. There are two crisis-level issues I hope got their attention:

First, the threat of war with China over Taiwan is now so real that Biden is preparing plans to evacuate Americans from Taiwan. The Pentagon has war-gamed this conflict repeatedly, and the outcome is a disaster for the US.

The single most important takeaway from the linked report is that the Pentagon thinks the coming Taiwan War will be a replay of WWII techniques, featuring a Chinese direct frontal assault across the Taiwan strait, for a classical World War II-style amphibious landing into the face of Taiwanese land defenses. Meanwhile, the US sails across the western Pacific into the face of Chinese anti-ship missiles. The Pentagon seems incapable of grasping that the Chinese could use electromagnetic pulse (EMP) strikes, sever undersea cables, jam communications, drone swarming, etc.

One of the most alarming revelations of this past year has been that a single rifleman can disable an electrical substation. Taiwan surely leads the planet in the number of Chinese spies per capita, with the US close behind. These spies, armed with the ubiquitous AR-15, can perform mop-up for whatever parts of the grid survive the EMP strike.

Image: China launches its third aircraft carrier. YouTube screengrab.

A US war with China over Taiwan may forever break America’s military power and political dominance. The Pentagon sees it, the media see it, the citizenry sees it, and the Taiwanese see it. That means it is time to move toward a diplomatic solution.

The Chinese are wont to promote a “rules-based” regime, perceiving that phrase tickles the American ear. Since the Chinese want to look good around the planet in the interest of garnering further third-world customers for their “belt and road” operation, construing a “rules-based” regime to imply a constitution and an agreed international tribunal for enforcement is a starting point.

Second, we must address a new locus of power. Aristotle opens his treatise on metaphysics with the observation, “All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness, they are loved for themselves.”

This is the human tropism to truth. Just as flowers follow the sun so humans are drawn to truth.

Psychiatrist William Glasser, M.D., in his treatise Reality Therapy, writes that “all (psychiatric) patients have a common characteristic: they all deny the reality of the world around them.”

If a person were drawn to delusion rather than to truth, what would be the origin of that love of delusion? Per Aristotle and Glasser, the origin of that love of delusion could not be sane human nature. Therefore, it’s unnerving to see the woke worship of delusion, accumulating hoax after hoax, eagerly pursuing the denial of reality.

The recent flap in Utah over sexual references in the Bible reveals yet another woke hoax and offers an excellent teachable moment. Sex and sexual desire come in two flavors: (1) holy, and (2) perverted. The references to sexual desire found in the Bible are to holy sex—sex as designed by the Holy One for the procreation of mankind, which is sex performed inside marriage and in anticipation of or at least open to procreation. Any sex or sexual desire not of the holy variety is of the perverse variety, and the Bible condemns it. Woke sex is perverted sex.

In the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, we read:

…when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. (Emphasis added).

Here we find a decreed duty of righteous government, not a perverse one. One must carefully consider the critical distinction between a rebellion and an adjustment of locus. A rebellion is a revolt against the law; an adjustment of locus is a change of the locus of political power.

Given our current situation, in which the deep state has weaponized the law as an instrument of politics and deployed the power of the Justice Department against the leader of the political opposition, it may be challenging to adjust the locus without even a tincture of violent rebellion, but challenges are the flavor of life.

Our current circumstance is precisely what Samuel P. Huntington described in his book Who Are We?: The Challenges to America's National Identity. He noted that “American national identity peaked politically with the rallying of Americans to the country and its cause in World War II,” (p. 141), followed by the national identity’s deconstruction beginning in the late 1960s. He concludes, “These efforts by a nation’s leaders to deconstruct the nation they governed were, quite possibly, without precedent in human history.” (p. 143.)

This is where we are today: deep into the advanced identity deconstruction of the American nation. The conservative activists at this weekend’s Western Conservative Summit no doubt tasked themselves with finding a way to restore the American locus of power to what it rightfully was before the deconstruction began.